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Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is not only a key issue in feminist theology but also the area in which it has to give account for itself in the face of past experience for the dangers involved when an advocacy stance is used as a point of departure. It is the place where differences in approach between feminist theologians surface. The three theologians cited above, all work within the biblical framework, albeit in different ways. Like other liberation theologians they question the sole efficacy of the historical critical method. They would probably hold that while the latter method has claimed objectivity, the results of its scholarship has been largely in the service of white middle-class males. As mentioned above, feminist theology starts from position of advocacy. It makes use of the critical tools of analysis, but remains sceptical of the ideological framework in which these tools have been used in the past.

Ruether, Fiorenza and Russell would all accept patriarchy as the social context of scripture. Ruether finds that within biblical faith there are resources by which biblical texts themselves can be criticized. This prophetic-liberating tradition is incompatible with patriarchal ideology, which then loses its normative character; in fact it becomes idolatrous and blasphemous. “It is idolatrous to make males more ‘like God’ than females. It is blasphemous to use the image and name of the Holy to justify patriarchal domination and law. Feminist readings of the Bible can discern a norm within Biblical faith by which the Biblical texts themselves can be criticised. To the extent to which Biblical texts reflect this normative principle, they are regarded as authoritative.”(20) She points out that no theology, regardless of its claim that the Bible is a work of inspiration, ever considers all parts of it as equally authoritative. Feminist theology finds what is normative in the rediscovery of the prophetic context and content of biblical faith itself. This prophetic liberating principle claimed by Ruether as hermeneutic for feminist theology is not new. The fact that it is claimed for women is.

Fiorenza has probably devoted more time and painstaking scholarship in search of a feminist critical hermeneutic than any other feminist theologian. In her monumental work In memory of her, she says that “Regardless of how androcentric texts may erase women from historiography, they do not prove the absence of women from the center of patriarchal history and biblical revelation. Therefore, feminists cannot afford to disown androcentric biblical texts and patriarchal history as their own revelatory texts and history.”(21) Yet women must remember that these androcentric texts are not necessarily a trustworthy account of human history, culture and religion. Fiorenza suggests that a feminist critical hermeneutics must move from androcentric texts to their social-historical contexts. Then it can claim the contemporary community of women struggling for liberation as its “locus of revelation”, and it can also reclaim its foresisters as victims and subjects participating in patriarchal culture. Such a feminist reconstruction of the historical world of Christianity needs a feminist hermeneutic described as one which shares in the critical methods and impulses of historical scholarship on the one hand and in the theological goals of liberation theologies on the other hand.(22)

Russell agrees with Ruether that the Bible “has a critical or liberating tradition embodied in its ‘prophetic-messianic’ message of continuing selfcritique . . . As a feminist I look to the horizon of expectation of the Bible as the source of my own expectation of justice and liberation”.(23) She finds her interpretative key in the witness of scripture of God’s promise (for the mending of creation) on its way to fulfilment. All that denies the intention of God for the liberation of our groaning creation in all its parts is not viewed as authoritative. This hermeneutic is developed around the theme of partnership – God’s partnership at work in the biblical story and in our lives, and partnership between women and men, who develop new ways of relating to the world and to one another.(24)

The dilemma or paradox of feminist theology, or rather of those feminist theologians who use the Bible as the source book of their theology, is pointed out by Mary Ann Tolbert: “. . . one must struggle against God as enemy assisted by God as helper, or one must defeat the Bible as patriarchal authority by using the Bible as liberator.”(25)