Reimagining with Christian Doctrines

Responding to Global Gender Injustices

Grace Ji-Sun Kim, J. Daggers, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, J. Daggers

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137382986
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This collection demonstrates a constructive potential in reimagining with doctrines, which unlocks them from centuries of patriarchal constraint. It opens the way for glimpsing divine action in the economy of salvation, while human struggles for justice are placed within a wider arena when discrete theological resources are deployed in this way.

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Alternatives to Globalization Addressing People and Earth: A Feminist Theological Reflection on Women, Economy, and Creation

Pamela K. Brubaker

Abstract: This chapter reimagines ways of doing theology and the doctrine of creation in light of global gender injustice, which is linked to the structural violence of neoliberal economic globalization, climate change, and other forms of ecological devastation. It presents a contextual, ecumenical, transformative theological reflection on women, economy, and creation based on the AGAPE (Alternatives to Globalization Addressing People and Earth) process of the World Council of Churches and its Programme on Women and Globalization. The contributions of feminist theology and economics to this work are highlighted. A reimagined doctrine of creation, grounded in a critical retrieval of the concept of oikonomia, gives a sense of urgency to the call for radical transformation of structures and cultures of domination and destruction.

Kim, Grace Ji-Sun and Jenny Daggers. Reimagining with Christian Doctrines: Responding to Global Gender Injustices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137382986.0006.

“We are women ignored by the state, the municipality, abused physically, emotionally, yet we are strong women and hope we will not be forgotten by you,” said the small community of displaced women who lived in San Pablo, Colombia, with their children, to our Solidarity Mission.¹ (Some of these women were single mothers; the husbands of others had stayed on their land in hopes of tilling it. Around half of the roughly 3 million registered Internally Displaced Persons in Colombia are children and youth below the age of 20.) In March 2009, I traveled with a small Christian Peacemaker Team delegation to San Pablo, where 30 of the approximately 80 extrajudicial killings in the region had occurred in the previous few months.² OFP (Popular Organization of Women) had requested our presence, since an international delegation would indicate that this had not gone unnoticed. Colombia is a country in the forefront of displacement and struggles over land and resources, extrajudicial killings, and significant U.S. military involvement to ensure access to natural resources, markets, and geopolitical interests. Though formally demobilized in 2006, new paramilitary formations continued the practice of land grabbing, given the profit to be made as palm oil production is being greatly expanded to serve as a bio-fuel. This community, like many other distinct communities around the globe, is a victim of the structural violence of neoliberal economic globalization, climate change and other forms of ecological devastation.

The hope of these women that “we will not be forgotten by you” not only touches our hearts but also calls for critical examination of our transnational feminist practices of solidarity. An adequate analysis of global gender injustices requires that we recognize that it is the intersections of the systemic networks of class, race, (hetero) sexuality, and nation that position us as women. These categories are relational ones of power and domination that, according to Chandra Mohanty, are conceptualized as “multiple, fluid structures of domination which intersect to locate women differently at particular historical conjectures.”³ Maxine Molyneaux posits that there are strategic gender interests that may align women who are otherwise divided by economic class interests, in order that they might participate in struggles for reproductive rights and in ending violence against women. These are strategic gender interests, which women have as a sex class against male domination. However, women develop practical gender interests because of the sexual division of labor, which assigns them responsibility for what some feminists call caring labor or social reproduction, the work that sustains the physical and psychological well-being of children, partners, and other relatives. These interests connect a woman’s understanding of her own interests to those of her family, and they align them with their family’s economic class interests.⁴

It is critical that the multiple “logics of domination” are recognized in our analysis and response to global gender injustices.⁵ At this particular historical juncture, women like me—a U.S., middle class, white/Anglo woman—must recognize our own complicity, as well as that of our communities, in the domination and oppression of other communities of women, men, and children. Our feminist theologies and ethics need to open our eyes and ears to these cries for life, to encourage us to be involved in communities of solidarity and resistance, to practice “an ethic of life” to make the world “more livable.”⁶ This chapter approaches this task through an examination of the AGAPE (Alternatives to Globalization Addressing People and Earth) process of the World Council of Churches, and its Programme on Women and Globalization, highlighting the contributions of feminist theology and economics to this work. I am a Christian feminist theo-ethicist, whose research and advocacy for the past quarter-century has been an analysis of and response to women and economic globalization. During the past decade, I participated in several consultations of the AGAPE process and the associated Programme on Women and Globalization. In this chapter, I offer a contextual, ecumenical, transformative theological reflection on women, economy, and creation based on the AGAPE process. It reflects a reimagining of the ways we do theology and of the doctrine of creation, which encompasses anthropology, economy, and ecology. Langdon Gilkey declared in Maker of Heaven and Earth that the notion that God is the Creator of all things is the fundamental basis of other beliefs of the Christian faith.⁷ Thus how the doctrine of creation is imagined has implications for other doctrines. This reflection is a process of “doing theology,” an approach shared by feminist, women’s,⁸ and other liberation theologies. Virginia Fabella and Sun Ai Lee Park delineated three criteria for this approach in their “Introduction” to We Dare to Dream: Doing Theology as Asian Women:

First, the work must be contextualized, that is, it starts with an aspect of our Asian experience and is rooted in our Asian reality. It necessarily includes a critical examination of the context, not a mere description. Second, it must be theological, with references to our faith tradition, and not simply be a historical, sociological or analytical study of the Asian context and peoples. And third, it must be from the perspective of women that shows an awareness of the subordinate and oftentimes degrading situation of women and reveals a commitment to work toward its transformation.⁹

The AGAPE process and the work of the Programme on Women and Globalization include these three aspects of doing theology, although the AGAPE process includes both women and men committed to alternatives to neoliberal globalization. It is a collaborative and consultative way of working that includes theologians, ethicists, economists, activists—among others. In my judgment, such an approach to doing theology is crucial to feminist transnational practices of solidarity.

The WCC, global (gender) injustice, and transnational feminist networks

Founded in 1948, The World Council of Churches (WCC) is a fellowship of churches seeking unity, a common witness, and Christian service. It currently includes 349 churches, denominations, and church fellowships (Protestant, Orthodox, and Pentecostal) in more than 110 countries and territories throughout the world, representing over 560 million Christians.¹⁰ Women’s participation in church and society was on the WCC agenda from its founding, typically framed as the need for co-operation between women and men.¹¹ By the 1970s, its work focused more specifically on global gender justice. A consultation on “Sexism in the 1970s: Discrimination against Women” brought feminist theologies into the life and work of the WCC. Its findings and recommendations were brought to the 1975 WCC Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, which declared sexism, racism, and economic structures as structures of injustice which must be changed. The WCC declared “The Ecumenical Decade of the Churches in Solidarity with Women” (1988–1998), as a response to the unfinished agenda of the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985). The council urged churches “to eliminate teachings and practices which discriminate against women as a Christian response to the forward-looking strategies adopted by the UN Conference in Nairobi in 1985.” The decade culminated with an “Ecumenical Decade Festival: Visions beyond 1998” in Harare, Zimbabwe. Plenary sessions included an unprecedented hearing on violence against women within churches. Participants sent a letter to the upcoming WCC Assembly that proclaimed: “[W]e are committed to God’s mission of a world where all God`s people can live fully, care for and share the resources of the world equitably, dwell in harmony with creation and affirm one another in the image of God.” This eloquently reflects a reimaging with the doctrine of creation, which moves away from an interpretation which stressed human domination over nature and male domination/female subordination. The letter identified areas of concern that participants wanted the Assembly to address; among these requests were that the Assembly announce “to the world that violence against women is a sin” and work for “the creation of just economic systems and just structures in church and society so that women and men together may know the blessings of justice.”¹² At the Eighth Assembly which followed, the WCC initiated a process called AGAPE (Alternative Globalization Addressing People and Earth) in response to cries from churches in the global south to address the suffering caused by neoliberal globalization (globalized free-market capitalism). Regional consultations culminated in the AGAPE Background Document and the AGAPE Call to Love and Action, which were presented at the 2006 WCC General Assembly.¹³ These articulated a theological rationale based on the central concern for social justice in Jewish and Christian scriptures and presented elements of a life-giving economy: just trade and finance; debt cancellation and reparations, support for and development of alternatives based on co-operation. The Assembly initiated a follow-up program on poverty, wealth, and ecology to clarify the connections between wealth creation, impoverishment, and ecological devastation.

The Women and Globalization Programme (PWG) was established in 2002 “to bring women’s perspectives to WCC work on economic globalization and to build a global network of churchwomen, in solidarity with feminist economists and activists, who are actively engaged in a critical and transformative debate on economic globalization.” Athena Peralta, an economist who staffed the PWG, drew on the work of two consultations to produce a document, A Caring Economy: A Feminist Contribution to Alternatives to Globalization Addressing People and Earth. She notes that the theological affirmation of “God’s preferential option for the poor” has guided the efforts of churches and the ecumenical community “to respond to the challenges posed by economic globalization.” She identifies two distinct perspectives that feminist theologians and social scientists have added: 1) “they have qualified the understanding of ‘the poor’ by pointing out that it is women who are at the bottom of the pile, bearing the brunt of the costs of . . . policies associated with economic globalization;” and 2) they “lifted up the ethic of care based on ‘women’s relational sense of self.’ ” She adds that “political engagement for transformation is a natural corollary to the ethic of care.” Furthermore, “women often describe the life-giving earth as mother...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Alternatives to Globalization Addressing People and Earth: A Feminist Theological Reflection on Women, Economy, and Creation
• 2  In a Trinitarian Embrace: Reflections from a Local Eucharistic Community in a Global World
• 3  Chains Fall Off: The Resurrection of the Body and Our Healing from Shame
• 4  Black and Blue: Uncovering the Ecclesial Cover-up of Black Womens Bodies through a Womanist Reimagining of the Doctrine of the Incarnation
• 5  U.S. Latina Feminist Paradigm: Model of an Inclusive Twenty-first Century Ecclesiology
• 6  The Bondage of the Eye/I? A Transnational Feminist Wager for Reimagining the Doctrine of Sin
• Responding to Global Gender Injustice: Concluding Thoughts
• Index