Christian Doctrines for Global Gender Justice

Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Jenny Daggers, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Jenny Daggers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137462220
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book develops creative imagining of traditional doctrines. Chapters show the effectiveness of Latina/mujerista, evangélica, womanist, Asian American, and white feminist imaginings in the furthering of global gender justice.

Chapter 1

Surveying the Landscape of Doctrinal Imagining

Jenny Daggers and Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Imagining in Theological and Political/Cultural Context

Christian doctrines and global gender justice rarely appear together in the same sentence. The inception of authorized Christian doctrine was hotly contested in the early centuries of Christianity, while the Reformation saw both Protestant reformulation as Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines and an elevation of Scripture over and above doctrine as a source of theology. With radical feminist, womanist, and postcolonial critique, received doctrinal traditions have been subject to a healthy hermeneutic of suspicion: the power relations inherent in the imposition of doctrines by authorized ecclesial authorities have come under scrutiny. As will become clear, the project taken forward in this volume is premised on the conviction that Christian doctrines and global gender justice can indeed appear in the same sentence; in stronger terms, Christian doctrines will necessarily be misunderstood if this connection is broken.

With regard to global gender justice, we write in troubling times. In Syria and Iraq, the hope so recently expressed in the upbeat metaphor of an Arab Spring is currently overshadowed by a grim reality of brutal violence toward civilians, targeting children and women as much as male fighters, while the longstanding Palestinian-Israeli conflict is concurrently inflamed. In Nigeria, young women have been abducted from their place of education to a form of sexual slavery. In these places beset by violence, it is awful to contemplate the day-to-day realities in the lives of children and women, as well as male civilians. In the regimes envisioned by those who fight, the prescribed subordinate position allocated to women is grim.

The social and economic destabilization caused by global climate disruption bears most heavily on the poorest peoples of the world, and particularly on the poorest women—those who benefit least from the economic and technological practices that accelerate this disruption. In Asia, human trafficking of young poverty-stricken girls is increasing, particularly in Southeast Asia. Many young girls are sold by family members to traffickers who then take them to other countries to be sold into brothels, prostitution rings, or the garment industry or as domestic workers. The demand for young girls is created by structural issues of globalization, colonization, neocolonialism, and militarization.1 The family members’ pressure to sell their girls is in response to increasing poverty as they are driven away from their lands, and so they lack a source of income due to these global economic and structural forces. Many of these young girls will never make enough money either to send back to their families or to return home. This is a contravention of human rights and an inhumane act of violence committed against young girls; the numbers are on the rise. Trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery.

In the United Kingdom, recent revelations in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, about the systematic grooming of young white girls for sexual abuse—affecting an estimated 1,400 young women over a period of 16 years, with the complicity of police and social services2—show that the privileges of whiteness are inflected by class and gender. It has subsequently become clear that this is but one instance of a long-standing wider culture of institutional cover-up of child abuse, particularly of the most vulnerable children.3 In the Rotherham case, the men who perpetrated the abuse were of Asian heritage, while the vulnerable young white British women they targeted were not socially privileged. In this case, the ethnic background of the perpetrators was an additional factor in the reluctance of the authorities to investigate, due to a fear of inflaming community relations; though the majority of girls affected were below the age of sexual consent, they were deemed to have “chosen” their abusers as partners. These women struggle with the legacy of their prolonged experiences of abuse, exacerbated by the effective sanctioning of systematic exploitation by the statutory authorities.

In Ukraine, violent destabilization of the new nation-state poised between Russia and Western Europe raises the specter of a renewed Cold War between East and West, focused on Eastern Europe. In the United States, recent unrest in the city of Ferguson following the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman highlights the increasing militarization of the police force; the incident makes clear that the aims of the civil rights movement are far from being fully realized.

Added to these political destabilizations is the self-inflicted economic collapse of 2008, which began in the United States, with the consequent austerity policies in Western nations and their wider reverberations. The comfortable stability enjoyed by the privileged in the postcolonial and post–World War II world now appears to be under serious threat, except for the superrich minority. For the poor of the world, unreported in the daily news media, routine austerity, insecurity, and violence continue to mark the pattern of daily life.

For those Latina/mujerista, evangélica, womanist, Asian American, white feminist, and other constructive women theologians who add their prayers for the world to the intercessions of their faith communities week by week, seeking to discern ways of just response, these global issues press on our creative imaginings as we grapple with our received doctrines. Shaped by our past traditions as we in turn imagine their current and future form, we glimpse a Christian gospel of love and justice that has always been among “us”—the current gatherings of Christians throughout the history of our faith—even while Western Christendom and other iterations of Christian faith have as often exacerbated the violence and injustice of the world. This band of constructive theologians keeps company with those who have caught a love of justice throughout Christian history and then used it as the key for understanding their faith. White feminist theology is both enriched and diminished by dialogue with theologies of women of color.4 Further, constructive theologies including the imaginings of Latina/mujerista, evangélica, womanist, and Asian American women deserve attention from all theologians, men as well as women.

From Reimagining with Doctrines as “Subfield” to Inward and Outward Movements in Feminist Theology

The essays collected in this book comprise a sister volume to Reimagining with Christian Doctrines.5 The rationale for this second collection is that there is scope for extending the doctrines engaged in Reimagining. Like theology itself, such a project can never be fully realized; there is always room for new imaginings. For readers who encounter this volume before reading Reimagining, it will be useful to reiterate a substantial point discussed in the introduction to this earlier volume. Our project began with Serene Jones’s reference to a “subfield” of feminist theology that engages with received doctrines.6 These sister volumes develop this subfield.

This way of describing feminist engagement with doctrine ensures that the broad field of feminist theology is respected. The core concern of feminist theology is the struggle for gender justice in the colonizing and heteropatriarchal Christian traditions of church and theology.7 Feminist theologians in the current century concentrate on constructive work, as critique is already well articulated.8 Whereas work in Jones’s “subfield” reconstructs by engaging received doctrines, in the broad field of feminist theology, there is a strong impetus for creative reconstructions that are unbound by received doctrine.9

Once this point is made—that the subfield does not restrict the scope of the field—in light of essays in these sister volumes, it will be helpful to name in different terms the relation of this venture with the broad field of constructive feminist theology. Instead of “field” and “subfield,” we can speak of outward and inward directions of feminist theology: on the one hand, an outward constructive impetus away from the core of regulatory orthodox doctrine in favor of its own unimpeded creative constructions; on the other, an inward trajectory in response to the “pull” exerted by doctrine, through insisting on the orthodoxy of creative imagining with doctrine. The heartbeat of feminist theology is this double outward and inward impetus in relation to received doctrinal traditions.

Contemporary Resonance of the Inward Movement of Feminist Imagining with Doctrine

Reviewing white feminist theology and other constructive theologies of women—such as those of Latina/mujerista, evangélica, womanist, and Asian American theologians—in 2015, it is pertinent to bring into view the changed landscape of Christian affiliation within contemporary world Christianity in contrast to the global context in which both “second-wave” and early postcolonial feminist theology arose.10 Formative Christian influence had shaped those women who cared enough about Christianity to voice twentieth-century feminist critique of church and theology with a view to imagining feminist-compatible and postcolonial versions of Christianity. In our contemporary moment in the twenty-first century, “detraditionalization”11 in the West and postcolonial critique in and from the continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is shrinking the orbit of formative Christian influence within long-established Western Christian denominations in all their diverse global forms. Thus, for different reasons in differing global contexts, the churches that have grappled with reconstructing their gender relations in response to feminist and other women’s critique are simultaneously losing their social influence. As post-Christian feminist thealogian12 Carol Christ has commented, this decline in liberal forms of Christianity means “the home for feminist reimagining is being emptied.”13

The important point here is that while there was a sizeable constituency of women of Christian subjectivity who shaped the creative outward impetus of twentieth-century feminist theology, there are two constituencies among contemporary Christian women who might find more pertinent the inward impetus represented in this book and its sister volume. The first is the remnant of women and “women-oriented men”14 within the long-established denominations who are either ordained or receptive to the ordination of women. A refreshed inward movement will be a valuable resource to Christian congregations that are renewing their received denominational traditions, whether in the Western world or through indigenous leadership in the postcolonial churches. Critique of the colonial Christ opens a way to postcolonial imaginings with doctrine that are able to connect with these long-established traditions of converting Christianity from its colonizing and heteropatriarchal forms.

Ordained ministers in Protestant denominations and women involved in lay leadership are well represented among the authors who contribute to these volumes: as women are increasingly welcomed into diverse leadership and partnership roles within the churches, the time is ripe for renewal of the inward impetus of feminist theology. Protestant denominational affiliations of contributors to this book are themselves a testament to developments within reformed traditions of European heritage. Loida Martell-Otero is ordained within the American Baptist Churches, coeditor Grace Ji-Sun Kim is an ordained minister within the Presbyterian Church (USA),15 and Linda E. Thomas is ordained within the United Methodist Church. There is also a strong strand of white Lutheran theological imagining in this collection. As a minister within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland who currently holds a post in the Norwegian Lutheran Church, Sigridur Gudmarsdottir writes from the national church of Iceland—though in a context of growing ecumenical and interreligious diversity. Amy Carr is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), formed by an amalgamation of three major Lutheran denominations in the late 1980s. Hilda P. Koster is a member of the Protestantse Kerk Nederland, which unites the reformed churches: the Netherlands Reformed Church and the Lutheran Church of the Netherlands. Working in the United States, she is currently a member of the ELCA. Jenny Daggers is a lay member of the established (Anglican) Church of England, which has a parallel historical place in English national life.

These are exciting times for Christian theology as the balance tips away from the white Christian heritage of European Christendom toward the growing churches of the postcolonial world. While the Western denom...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Mary McClintock Fulkerson
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Cover
• 1. Surveying the Landscape of Doctrinal Imagining
• 2. Who Do You Say That I Am?: From Incomprehensible Ousia to Active Presencia: An Evangélica Reimagining of the Doctrine of God
• 3. The Green Cross: The Green Tree and the Oppression of Nature
• 4. Ecological Evil, Evolution, and the Wisdom of God: Reimagining Redemption for Ecofeminist Religious Practice in an Age of Global Ecocide
• 5. The Holy Spirit and Black Women: A Womanist Perspective
• 6. An Asian American Theology of Hope: Foreign Women and the Reign of God
• 7. Mary: Liberated and Liberator
• 8. Motherhood and the (In)vulnerability of the Imago Dei: Being Human in the Mystical-Political Cloud of Impossibility
• 9. Divine Grace and the Question of Free Will: A Feminist “Stumbling Block”?
• 10. Reimagining Creation as Creative Activity: Possibilities for Women’s Empowerment through Aesthetic Agency
• Epilogue
• Notes on Contributors