Religion is deeply implicated in contemporary U.S. public life, as demonstrated in the increasing analysis of faith in any given presidential, congressional, or judicial candidate's political viewpoints; in ongoing presidential executive orders that approve government support and funding for faith-based initiatives; and in the continued lobbying by religious groups about a variety of moral and social justice issues such as euthanasia and immigration, to name a sample of recent flashpoint issues. What role do religious claims play in U.S. public life? How does Christian theology help clarify that role? What is the particular contribution of Christian feminist theology to understanding and rethinking that role?
Scholarly studies examining the role and influence of religion in U.S. public life are more frequently emerging from feminist perspectives, especially in the disciplines of ethics and theology.2
For two recent studies, see Lisa Sowle Cahill, Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, Change (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005) and Mary Doak, Reclaiming Narrative for Public Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).
Public theology is often considered a subfield of Christian social ethics and focuses mainly on the contributions of religion to issues of pressing public significance. In this essay, I treat public theology as a kind of critical and constructive theological reflection on U.S. public life itself.
This essay represents one part of my larger study, a book-length manuscript in-process, that examines gender, religion, and politics in the U.S. context through the lens of public theology, i.e., theological reflection on the interrelationships of religion and U.S. public life. To study one aspect of these interrelationships, this essay aims to construct a feminist public theology, i.e., a feminist theological understanding of U.S. public life and of political engagement, by exploring one predominant strand of U.S. public theology based on its theological anthropology (or theological understanding of the human person-in-community); by opening up the possibility of redefining U.S. public theology and its associated vision, practices, and virtues of public life from a feminist theological perspective; and by outlining some implications of a feminist public theology for doing contemporary theology. In this essay, I propose that the theological concept of the ekklesia of wo/men4
A detailed analysis of this term, and the inserted slash that helps capture more explicitly its original intended meaning, appears on pp. 445–447 of this essay.
As Sandra Schneiders observes, feminist theology “engages in a critique of patriarchy as an essentially dysfunctional system, embraces an alternative vision for humanity and the earth, and actively seeks to bring this vision to realization.” Schneiders, Beyond Patching: Faith and Feminism in the Catholic Church (New York: Paulist Press, 1991) 15. My essay follows this common feminist methodology to criticize patriarchal aspects of society, to reclaim alternate sources for theological reflection, and to actively construct an alternative vision—in this case, of public life.
Defining U.S. Public Theology
Public theology in the U.S. context participates in a long Christian intellectual tradition of theological reflection that addresses and seeks to clarify the relationships between church and world,6
J. Bryan Hehir outlines this heritage of public theology in “Forum: Public Theology in Contemporary America,” Religion and American Culture 10 (2000) 20–27.
Martin E. Marty, The Public Church: Mainline-Evangelical-Catholic (New York: Crossroad, 1981) 3. Although The Public Church focuses mainly on the role of Jewish and Christian traditions in U.S. public life, Marty's analysis forms a major basis of most twentieth- and twenty-first century Christian theological reflection on religion in the U.S. public order. Public theology represents one of the fastest growing bodies of contemporary theological scholarship; thus, its literature cannot be extensively reviewed within the limits of this essay. My analysis engages a few representative thinkers and texts in this subdiscipline of theology in the U.S. context, and thus addresses a small but significant portion of the actual output on public theology.
Martin E. Marty delineates several types of relations between religion and the U.S. public order as encouraged by civil religion, pluralism, legal frameworks of both disestablishment and free exercise, politicians and the media, voluntary associations, and conversation. Marty, “Introduction: Eight Approaches toward Understanding Public Religion and Politics in America,” in Religion, Politics, and the American Experience: Reflections on Religion and American Public Life (ed. Edith L. Blumhofer; Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002) 1–15. Public theologies are at times placed into opposing camps, as in the contrast made between Catholic and Protestant public theologies (also called revisionist and post-liberal theologies). See William C. Placher, “Revisionist and Post-liberal Theologies and the Public Character of Theology,” Thomist 49 (1985) 392–416; Victor Anderson, “The Search for Public Theology in the United States,” in Preaching as a Theological Task (ed. Thomas G. Long and Edward Farley; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996) 19–31; and, more recently, Kristin E. Heyer, “How Does Theology Go Public? Rethinking the Debate between David Tracy and George Lindbeck,” Political Theology 5 (2004) 307–27. Public theologies are also classified according to modes, i.e., a defensive traditionalist mode, a moral order mode, and a critical modern mode; see Gaspar Martinez, Confronting the Mystery of God: Political, Liberation, and Public Theologies (New York: Continuum, 2001) 170–71.
Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray is the most noted representative of public philosophy in light of natural law. Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960). Some of Murray's most noted writings are collected in Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John Courtney Murray (ed. J. Leon Hooper; Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994); and Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993). See also David Hollenbach, S.J., ed., “Theology and Philosophyin Public: A Symposium on John Courtney Murray's Unfinished Agenda,” Theological Studies 40 (1979) 700–15; and David Hollenbach, S.J., “Public Theology in America: Some Questions for Catholicism after John Courtney Murray,” Theological Studies 37 (1976) 290–303.
Civil religion—usually based on distinctive, nonreligious symbols that are imbued with a religious aura—creates a people with a sense of mutual moral rights and obligations to each other and to a nation. However, it can lead to idolatry; civil religion post-September 11 in the U.S. can consecrate certain nations, religions, and social groups. See Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) 168–186; The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury, 1975); and “Public Philosophy and Public Theology in America Today,” in Civil Religion and Political Theology (ed. Leroy S. Rouner; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987)79–97. For the critique of civil religion as idolatry, see Michael J. Himes and Kenneth R. Himes, O.F.M., Fullness of Faith: The Public Significance of Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1993)21. Nevertheless, civil religion challenges the claim that the modern “public square” is “naked,” stripped, or empty of religious symbols (i.e., symbols that function religiously) as a result of the increasing secularization of society; see Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984).
Martinez, Confronting the Mystery of God, 65–68, 217; see chapter 2 for an in-depth analysis of Metz's theological writings. On the impact of political theologies in the U.S. context, see Mary Doak, “Religion in Public: Dangerous Narratives and Practical Reasoning,” in Religion in a Pluralistic Age, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Philosophical Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2001) 119–30. For a more detailed analysis of the scriptural, theological, doctrinal, and liturgical bases of political theology, see The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). For a careful distinction between civil religion and political theology, see Max L. Stackhouse, “Civil Religion, Political Theology, and Public Theology: What's the Difference?” Political Theology 5 (2004) 275–93.
See Mark A. Noll in “Forum: Public Theology in Contemporary America,” Religion and American Culture 10 (2000) 8–12.
In my view, what unifies these theological projects is highlighted by the term “public” in public theology. As historian and theologian W. Clark Gilpin has observed, public theologyis properly considered “public” because ofits “convocative capability,” that is, its imperative to conjoin disparate groups (which mainly include church, academy, and society) into an “ultimate public.”13
W. Clark Gilpin, A Preface to Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 167–68. Gilpin highlights church, academy, and society as the three major publics to be addressed and interconnected in public theology (ibid. 160–72). He draws this classification from David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981) 3–31.
On individualism, see Robert Bellah, “Public Philosophy and Public Theology in America Today”; and Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (updated edition with a new introduction; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). For an analysis of more contemporary concerns with individualism and its result in social anomie and withdrawal, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). On identity politics and its potential to further fracture and fragment common life, see Benjamin Valentin, Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity, and Difference (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2002), esp. xiii–xiv, 67–80, 101–6.
If public theology centers on an imperative to convoke or make a public, to create a more comprehensive community among multiple groups, then what kind of ultimate or consummate public is envisioned in public theology? What kinds of practices and virtues of political engagement reflect and realize that vision of public life? The following analysis makes explicit this often times implicit theological dimension of public theology in the U.S. context, namely, its understanding of common life. To this end, I explore one predominant strand of U.S. public theology with particular attention to its theological anthropology (i.e., its theological understanding of the human person-in-political community), its practices for engaging in that community, and its virtues for participating in that community.
In most public theologies the public is identified not with the state but with civil society, with a shared space of political inquiry and debate in a pluralistic democratic society. For example, the “public church,” according to Marty, helps cultivate a public within the U.S. political order, which he regards as a democratic assembly of rational civic discourse in which all citizens collectively deliberate and make decisions about their common life.15
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (2d ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), as referenced in Richard J. Bernstein, “The Meaning of Public Life,” in Religion and American Public Life: Interpretations and Explorations (ed. Robin Lovin; New York: Paulist Press, 1986) 29–52, esp. 36–40. William Dean lays out the “republican” character of civic life in “Forum: Public Theology in Contemporary America,” Religion and American Culture 10 (2000) 1–8. David O'Brien associates this kind of civic debate with what he calls “republican Catholicism”; O'Brien, Public Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996) 33.
Gary Simpson analyzes the integral role of communicative reason, as theorized by Jürgen Habermas, in our now common understanding of civil society as a shared public space of deliberative inquiry, argument, and action in democratic societies. Critical Social Theory: Prophetic Reason, Civil Society, and Christian Imagination (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2001), esp. 131–34, for a clear and insightful summary of the contribution of Habermas to a deliberative model of democracy, as opposed to other political models of democracy.
Margaret Farley, “The Church in the Public Forum: Scandal or Prophetic Witness?” CTSA Proceedings of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Convention 55 (2000) 87–101, at 87–88; see also Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Public Philosophy (ed. R. Bruce Douglass and David Hollenbach; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
David Tracy considers the “public realm” a “shared rational space” that is enabled by “a shared concept of reason.”18
Tracy, “Theology, Critical Social Theory, and the Public Realm,” in Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology (ed. Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza; New York: Crossroad, 1992) 19–42, at 19; see also 23, 41.
Tracy, “Particular Classics, Public Religion, and the American Tradition,” in Lovin, Religion and American Public Life, 115–31, esp. 121–22.
Ibid., 118–19, see also 121–23.
Ibid., 118–20.
See Tracy, The Analogical Imagination 99–154; “Particular Classics” 119–20, 123–25, and “Afterword: Theology, Public Discourse, and the American Tradition,” in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life (ed. Michael J. Lacey; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 193–203, esp. 196–99.
According to Tracy, religious classics address widely shared human questions or “limit-questions” that all reasonable and reflective persons ask about human life. Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 91–118; also “Afterword,” in Lacey, Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, 196–97.
Tracy, “Particular Classics,” 123, and “Afterword,” 199–200. Reasoned argument directs a hermeneutic of suspicion at all “classical” answers to common human questions, and thus warrants a community of inquiry to interpret and debate them. Ibid.125; and The Analogical Imagination,66–70.
Public theology advances a discursive vision of political community that depends not only on practices of reasoned argument but also on a dialogical notion of the person. As Francis Fiorenza contends, Christians are prepared to engage in public discourse not only because they are socialized in political life with rhetorical norms and procedures of rational civic debate, as described by Tracy. Rather, the church itself already constitutes a community of shared inquiry and debate, what Fiorenza calls “a community of interpretation,” that deliberates morality, justice, and the good life from Christian perspectives.25
Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Church as a Community of Interpretation: Political Theology between Discourse Ethics and Hermeneutical Reconstruction,” in Browning and Fiorenza, Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, 66–91, esp. 85.
Inquiry and debate in the church, according to Fiorenza, are consonant with dialogical practices of democratic debate in U.S. public life. Reasoned argument is also a centerpiece of some theologies of the human person within public theology, such that becoming more fully human takes place by participating in public/political debate rather than by withdrawing from it. Forming persons with virtues for public life and for its civic debate is central to the public theology of Ronald Thiemann. Public theology for Thiemann involves an “experiment in constructing a pluralistic society from the many particular communities that constitute our national identity.”26
Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996) 172.
Thiemann, “Public Theology: The Moral Dimension of Religion in a Pluralistic Society,” Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik 42 (1998) 176–90. See also Thiemann, “Public Religion: Bane or Blessing for Democracy?” in Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith: Religious Accommodation in Pluralist Democracies (ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000) 73–89.
One goal of public theology is to “identify the particular places where Christian convictions intersect with the practices that characterize contemporary public life,” which in this case involves moral formation. See Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville: Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991) 21–22.
Alasdair MacIntyre defines tradition as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument.” MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) 207, quoted in Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology, 134–35.
See Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology, 29–43, regarding churches as “schools of public virtue.”
Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 133–36.
For a discussion of such civic virtues, see Thiemann, Religion in Public Life, 85–90, 113–14, 135–41.
Religious traditions resonate with political practices (Fiorenza) and virtues (Thiemann) required for engaging in public life, so long as public life is construed discursively. Jeffrey Stout proposes a similar argument about the impact of civic political traditions on shaping persons with virtues for public life.34
Jeffrey L. Stout, Democracy and Tradition: Religion, Ethics, and Public Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
In sum, these predominating figures in U.S. public theology advance a discursive vision of public life that rests on practices of rational argument, especially its attendant rhetorical norms and virtues, in order to cultivate conversation; conversation can in turn lead to a community, a public, based on a shared practice of debate and a growing consensus about issues within that debate. A discursive vision of public life does not reduce to political procedures for rational discourse; rather, it shapes morally principled political and, as it turns out, religious agents. As we have seen, participationin a tradition—whether a religious tradition for Thiemann or a political tradition for Stout—acts like a stepping stone to becoming a good citizen.
On my reading, a discursive vision of public life and its associated practices and virtues of deliberative debate stake out a legitimate place for religion in U.S. public life; it also enables the insights of particular religions to shape these debates and perhaps our very conceptions of public life. Rather than consider religion an interloper in political life or a sectarian stumbling block to civic debate,35
Religious claims are often considered a significant stumbling block to public debate because they express private, confessional convictions in absolutist (i.e., nonnegotiable) terms, not often intelligible to a broader audience beyond a confessing community. Religious claims imply a confessional language, which may safeguard the integrity of religious claims, but may also exclude rather than appeal to a broader audience. See Robin Lovin, “Social Contract or a Public Covenant?” in Religion and American Public Life, 132–45. Moreover, religious (i.e., confessional) speech may not allow for further conversation because religious claims are stated absolutely, not persuasively. Thus, religious speech is often regarded as a “conversation stopper.” Richard Rorty, “Religion as Conversation Stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 2000) 168–74.
Some Common and Emerging Criticisms of Public Theology
Critics tend to lament the absence of theology from public theology. Public theology is often said to undermine or undercut rather than support theological reflection, especially when religious claims are translated into a more widely available civic discourse.36
A common form of this criticism is that public theology translates Christian theological symbols, claims, and language into more accessible terms, thereby compromising their theological integrity and possibly reducing theology to politics. See William Lindsey, “Public Theology as Civil Discourse: What Are We Talking About?” Horizons 19 (1992) 44–69; Michael J. Baxter, “The Non-Catholic Character of the ‘Public Church,’ ” Modern Theology 11 (April 1995) 243–58; and William T. Cavanaugh, “Is Public Theology Really Public? Some Problems with Civil Society,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 21 (2001) 105–23.
Philip Ziegler contends that theological reflection about God, especially about divine identityand agency, is largely absent from public theologies; see “God and Some Recent Public Theologies,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 4 (2002) 137–55.
We can think with our public theologians to show that this common allegation—of an a-theology or absence of theology in public theology—is somewhat misguided. As already demonstrated, Tracy suggests that public theology discusses and disputes the “effects” of religious traditions, for example, the classic texts produced by a religious tradition. These classic texts do contain rather specific (and at times conflicting)theological claims about the meaning, purpose, and flourishing of human life. Similarly, Kathryn Tanner contends that public theology examines and evaluates the socially and politically significant “conclusions” of religious claims for human dignity and flourishing.38
Kathryn Tanner, “Public Theology and the Character of Public Debate,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1996) 79–101, esp. 87–91, 94–96.
Emerging criticisms of public theology, as I understand them, focus on its political idealism about equal access to public life and discourse and its moral perfectionism about adequate formation for public life and discourse. In regard to its political idealism, feminist theologians point out that public theologians tend to assume full political participation in public life and its practices of rational civic discourse, and thus do not deal adequately with the possibilities and actualities of exclusion from public life, i.e., from political voice, access, representation, and power to effect change. Feminist theologians identify and challenge existing ideologies within a deliberative model of democracy, ideologies that shape and promote an alienating, at times exclusionary, public life. As feminist theologian and political theorist Rebecca Chopp explains, a so-called “narrative identity” shapes our “fundamental assumptions” about who constitutes and contributes to U.S. political life, and in so doing provides “a means of social and public cohesion” that trades on exclusion rather than full participation. 39
Rebecca S. Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone's Black Theology and Black Power (ed. Dwight N. Hopkins; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999) 150–64, at 152.
Chopp, “A Feminist Perspective: Christianity, Democracy, and Feminist Theology,” in Christianity and Democracy in a Global Context (ed. John Witte, Jr.; Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993) 111–29, at 126.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1992) ch. 4. Patriarchy is an analytical concept that helps feminist theology to examine and problematize the social construction of women's and some men's marginal, subordinate status. It does not suggest a social system of universal male dominance, but rather refers to the multiplicative interconnections between gender, race, class, and culture that legitimate and justify a complex system of hierarchical relations, as well as ultimately idealize an elite, white, male, Western paradigm of personhood. It refers to a multi-layered, complex system of dominance, which Schüssler Fiorenza renames kyriarchy (rule of the master or lord), in order to avoid any misinterpretation of patriarchy (rule of the father) that accounts only for women's struggles with sexism and with hierarchical gender dualism. Kyriarchy helps highlight “the multiplicative interstructuring of the pyramidal hierarchical structures of ruling which affect women in different social locations differently” (ibid., 115). Kyriarchy stresses what feminists theorists and theologians intend by the more commonly used term patriarchy—that men and women are relatively advantaged and marginalized in different socio-historical contexts through related and mutually reinforcing interconnections between gender, race, class, culture, religion, sexual identity, and other markers of social identity (Ibid., 123).
Schüssler Fiorenza, Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ekklesia-logy of Liberation (New York: Crossroad, 1993) 332–52, 353–72. I will further analyze this point in the next section. Schüssler Fiorenza's concept of the ekklesia of wo/men helps to disclose that classical and contemporary democracy put up substantial roadblocks to political voice, access, and representation, in part due to patriarchal norms of political subjectivity. See also the article by Letty M. Russell in this issue regarding “othering” in U.S. politics.
Such patriarchal constructions of political subjectivity, along with other forms of alienation and exclusion from public life, carry grave political and theological consequences regarding our very humanity. As womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland observes, disempowered citizens who cannot and do not play participatory roles in political life cannot realize their full humanity, either personally or socially. Moreover, the denial of full political participation damages and perhaps undermines the common good, the totality of conditions that enable greater human fulfillment and flourishing.43
Modern (and postmodern) society can be alienated from classical and Christian notions of the common good. According to M. Shawn Copeland, modern public/political life operates contractually and aims for mutual advantage rather than interdependent relations that are oriented to mutual fulfillment, it tends to emphasize legislation as a basis for socio-political life rather than the cultivation of moral character and virtue, and it prioritizes individual self-interest rather than relational obligations. “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” in Catholic Social Thought and the New World Order (ed. Oliver F. Williams and John W. Houck; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993) 309–23, esp. 309–16, 322–23.
“Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: Gaudium et Spes, 7 December 1965,” in Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents (ed. Austin Flannery, O.P.; Northport, N.Y.: Costello Publishing Co., 1996) 163–282, esp. pars. 24–25, 46. Fragmentation in and from public life infringes on full human dignity in all dimensions of life—personal, socio-political, and even religious; a disenfranchised citizen cannot actualize his or her God-given dignity and cannot effectively promote wider human well-being (Gaudium et Spes, pars. 73–75).
In regard to its moral perfectionism, feminist theologians raise questions about the ability of political and religious institutions to shape persons with conversational or dialogical virtues for public engagement via argument, as suggested by our public theologians. The Catholic Church in contemporary U.S. public life may not enjoy a wide hearing as a moral and socio-political critic of U.S. society. Since 2001, the Catholic Church damaged its public credibility during the priest pedophilia and sexual abuse scandals that had their epicenter in the Archdiocese of Boston. Also, there is a growing tension between the Catholic Church's public advocacy and its governance of everyday pastoral life. The increasing control of pastoral and academic theological discourse (through litmus tests for ascertaining religious orthodoxy, the frequent silencing of theologians, and more recently the requirement that professors at Catholic colleges who teach Catholic theology receive a mandatum from their local bishop)may undermine the vitality and credibility of the Catholic Church's public discourse.45
Margaret Farley, “The Church in the Public Forum,” 94–98.
Mary E. Hines, “Ecclesiology for a Public Church,” CTSA Proceedings of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Convention 55 (2000) 23–46, at 25–26, 40. If the goal of a discursive vision of public life is to build community through argument, interpretation, and eventual consensus, then the Catholic Church's own structures and processes should (but often do not) reflect an ability to achieve a (con)sensus fidei, or a general agreement among “the body of the faithful,” which includes both the magisterium and the laity (ibid., 38–39). For a further theological explication of the sensus fidelium, see Richard R. Gaillardetz, By What Authority? A Primer on Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Sense of the Faithful (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2003).
Bishop Michael J. Sheridan, “A Pastoral Letter to the Catholic Faithful of the Diocese of Colorado Springs on the Duties of Catholic Politicians and Voters,” May 1, 2004; available at http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/interestg/cath050104ltr.html. Bishop Sheridan argued that Catholic candidates and voters who support abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage should be excluded from communion until they alter their views and receive the sacrament of reconciliation. Bishop Sheridan's argument appeared to be backed by an official Vatican statement that some moral issues (abortion, euthanasia) are beyond debate while social justice issues (war, death penalty) should generate broad debate in the Catholic Church. See the confidential letter of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Bishop Wilton Gregory, “Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion,” June/July 2004, esp. par. 3 (available at http://www.priestsforlife.org/magisterium/bishops/04-07ratzingerommunion.htm).
Farley, “The Church in the Public Forum,” esp. 90, 94–95.
To summarize these criticisms, public theology may take for granted both access to public discourse and the inculcation of practices and virtues for public life in the face of an actual and long-standing lack of access to public life as well as political power and, potentially, a deeply troubling lack of adequate formation for public/political engagement. How can feminist theology help address these common and emerging criticisms and thereby further advance the theological project of public theology? Taking the feminist theological category of the ekklesia of wo/men as a starting point, I propose and argue for a feminist reconceptualization of U.S. public life and its associated practices as well as its virtues of public engagement. To articulate a new feminist approach to public theology on the theological grounds of the ekklesia of wo/men, I will utilize feminist theology to wrestle with and respond to the criticism that U.S. public theology is not sufficiently theological, as well as begin to critically reconstruct its vision, practices, and virtues of public life to reflect theological values of justice, equality, and full participation.
Reclaiming Ekklesia, Constructing A Feminist Public Theology
Since the early 1980s, feminist New Testament scholar and theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has introduced and elaborated on a central theological concept, the ekklesia of wo/men.49
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983); Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1984); “The Will to Choose or to Reject,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (ed. Letty M. Russell; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985) 126–36; But She Said; and Discipleship of Equals.
Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 128; see also 5, 118. Other scholars recover a public/political dimension of being church by connecting ekklesia (or assembly) with the assembly of the Israelites on Mt. Sinai, and not with Greco-Roman political theory. See Gerhard Lohfink, Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theology of the People of God (trans. Linda M. Maloney; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1999), as cited in Cavanaugh, “Is Public Theology Really Public?” 117.
Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 115–22.
Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 343–51; see also Sharing Her Word (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 112–21.
Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 315–33;see also Discipleship of Equals, 213–31. This is not simply a contrast between a communal model of the church and an institutional model of church, but rather an early and ongoing competition between different understandings of authority.
Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 128.
On my reading, the ekklesia of wo/men helps to criticize patriarchal aspects of religious and political life for marginalizing women and some men from discipleshipand citizenship. It also advances a constructive alternative vision of religious and political life for women and for all people. When combined with wo/men, ekklesia offers a radically inclusive, egalitarian, and participatory vision of religious and political life. It illuminates and celebrates women's theological right to be the church55
Ibid., 127, and “For Women in Men's World,” in The Power of Naming (ed. Schüssler Fiorenza;Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996) 3–13, at 9–10.
Schüssler Fiorenza, “For Women in Men's World,” 10.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Sharing Her Word, 131–36.
In contemporary U.S. feminist theology, the ekklesia of wo/men carries multiple theological meanings, but is most often marshaled to support feminist biblical interpretation58
Interpreting biblical texts involves the criticism of Christian texts that were generated in (and that still continue to justify) a patriarchal religious and political order, as well as the (re)construction of Christian texts to better account for women's significant contributions to Christian history and theology. In more recent feminist hermeneutics, feminist biblical interpretation consists of at least five steps (Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 52–76).
Scholarly and ritual resources about women-church include Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women-Church (San Francisco:Harper & Row, 1985);idem, “Women Church: An American Catholic Feminist Movement,” in What's Left? (ed. Mary Jo Weaver; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) 46–64; Marjorie Procter-Smith, “Feminist Ritual Strategies,” in Toward a New Heaven and a New Earth (ed. Fernando F. Segovia; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2003) 498–515; Women at Worship(ed. Marjorie Procter-Smith and Janet Walton; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993);and Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (ed. Teresa Berger; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001). For a critical response to some aspects of the women-church movement, see Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 125–28.
For example, Mary E. Hines, “Community for Liberation: Church,” in Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective (ed. Catherine Mowry LaCugna; New York: Harper-Collins, 1993) 161–84; Mary E. Hunt, “Feminist Catholic Theology and Practice: From Kyriarchy to Discipleship of Equals,” in Segovia, Toward a New Heaven and a New Earth, 459–72.
Schüssler Fiorenza is regarded by some theologians as a public intellectual, but her theological categories have yet to be analyzed for their political meanings; my essay contributes to such an analysis. See Ronald F. Thiemann, “Faith and the Public Intellectual,” in Walk in the Ways of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (ed. Shelly Matthews, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, and Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2003) 88–105.
When redefined from a feminist perspective that is grounded in the ekklesia of wo/men, public theology can reshape our vision of political community; it can also further specify some practices and civic virtues that actively contribute to realizing that vision. What vision of the public/political order does the ekklesia of wo/men suggest? Which practices and public virtues will instantiate that vision of the political order? It serves, as Schüssler Fiorenza contends, as an alternative space to a predominantly patriarchal political order, a space that “is at once an historical and an imagined reality, already partially realized but stillto be struggled for.”62
Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 130.
As an end, the ekklesia of wo/men—which stands as a theological shorthand for a just, egalitarian, and fully participatory political community—provides a theological source of eschatological hope for imagining and seeking to realize an alternative political life. It exemplifies, as stated in the above quote, an eschatological tension between the “already” and the “not yet”—an ideal political vision that is already underway but not yet fully realized or actualized politically.63
Ibid., 5–6, 130. Elizabeth Castelli has shown that this “already” and “not yet” quality of the ekklesia of wo/men resonates with feminist utopian theory. “The Ekklesia of Wo/men and/as Utopian Space,” in On the Cutting Edge (ed. Jane Schaberg, Alice Bach, and Esther Fuchs; New York: Continuum, 2004) 36–52. But this “already” and “not yet” quality—this idealized but not fully actualized vision of just, participatory, egalitarian political life—places the ekklesia of wo/men in the context of Christian eschatology. My argument is that the ekklesia of wo/men resonates with Christian eschatology, and that Christian eschatology can play a vital but not escapist, romantic role in more progressive theologies of public/political engagement. The ekklesia of wo/men does express a political realism regarding an inability of human beings to fully actualize an ideal political order, but it nevertheless does not lead to despair about this inability. Rather, as I further constructively develop this concept in this essay, the ekklesia of wo/men can propel struggles and political practices to realize, if only in part, an alternative ideal future vision of the political order.
Serene Jones argues that feminist theology is fundamentally eschatological because it consists of an imaginative and lived kind of religious reflection and action that is oriented to an alternative possible future for human life beyond patriarchy. Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000) 1–10, 51–55. Letty Russell first proposed that feminist theology follow a methodology that thinks “from the other end,” i.e., from an eschatological telos of the world; see Liberating Eschatology: Essays in Honor of Letty M. Russell (ed. Margaret A. Farley and Serene Jones; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1999).
Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 130.
Ibid.
Mediating structures stand or sit in between everyday persons and often impersonal political institutions, providing all sorts of metaphysical and social goods for shaping human life and meeting human needs; Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977). My argument in this paragraph regarding the ekklesia of wo/men as a mediating structure parallels what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham claims about the Black church in African American women's movements in the early twentieth century U.S.; see Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) 7–13.
The predominant figuresin contemporary U.S. public theology examinedin this essay foster a discursive vision of public life and an associated set of rhetorical practices of rational argument for engaging in civic debate. Likewise, actualizing the ekklesia of wo/men for Schüssler Fiorenza takes place in political life through the creation of “a feminist political alterity”68
Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 130.
Ibid., 118, 130–32; see also Discipleship of Equals, 348–52, 368–72.
Ibid., 118.
Ibid., 131–132. She later redefines a rhetorics of liberation as conscientization, a term drawn from Brazilian educator Paulo Freire which means raising awareness regarding oppression, in this case political and religious forms of patriarchy/kyriarchy. She continues to explore feminist strategies of biblical interpretation as a primary means to foster such awareness and other rhetorical practices;Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001) 93–98, 151–61.
The rhetorical public space and practices associated with the ekklesia of wo/men differ markedly from a discursive vision of public life and its rhetorical practices that predominate in our still largely patriarchal U.S. public life. In the ekklesia of wo/men, the point of a diversity of voices engaged in debate is both to challenge a prevailing patriarchal political status quo that stands against such diversity, debate, solidarity, and liberation, and to enable the reshaping of political norms and practices for the purpose of achieving solidarity and perhaps liberation. A feminist public theology seeks not to incorporate some marginalized women and men into an existing patriarchal body politic but to contest and change that body politic itself. In other words, a feminist rhetorical space and its practices accent solidarity and socio-political change rather than consensus. As we have seen, a discursive vision of public life with its rhetorical practices of reasoned argument is oriented to consensus; by contrast, a feminist public theology links its rhetorical space and practices of debate to solidarity, to building community among women's and men's struggles for political liberation and for broader political change. Seeking consensus may reinforce an oppressive political status quo;72
Michael Baxter argues that U.S. public theology insufficiently criticizes the existing political order which often backs exclusionary, dehumanizing, and hegemonic forms of public life, and thereby provides, perhaps unwittingly, theological justifications of the state, or worse of empire. See Baxter, “Notes on Catholic Americanism and Catholic Radicalism: Toward a Counter-Tradition of Catholic Social Ethics,” in American Catholic Traditions: Resources for Renewal (ed. Sandra Yocum Mize and William L. Portier; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1997) 53–71, and “‘Blowing the Dynamite of the Church’: Catholic Radicalism from a Catholic Radicalist Perspective,” in The Church as Counterculture (ed. Michael L. Budde and Robert W. Brimlow; Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2000) 195–212.
Extending the ekklesia of wo/men as explained by Schüssler Fiorenza, I propose that a feminist public theology goes beyond redefining an existing discursive vision of public life and its rhetorical practices of public debate. It also enriches our understanding of civic virtues. Recall that for our public theologians explored earlier in this essay, religious and civic traditions socialize persons with certain dialogical virtues for public engagement, virtues such as intelligibility, integrity, freedom, equality, tolerance, mutual respect and reciprocity, risk, vulnerability. However, some public theologians go on to point out that democratic and religious traditions edge towards virtues for re-envisioning and reshaping public life itself. For example, Thiemann argues that religious traditions contain alternate views of the good society that can contest and transform our prevailing notions of freedom, equality, and tolerance.73
Thiemann, Religion in Public Life, 86–90.
Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology, 43.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways, 179. Given that my constructive proposal for a feminist public theology emphasizes eschatology, the virtue of hope—an intrahistorical but realistic hope—also figures prominently.
In sum, a feminist public theology defined as ekklesial work sheds new light on a theological vision of public life and practices as well as virtues of public engagement. This essay has attended to the insights of a feminist approach for rethinking U.S. public theology on its existing terms, especially its discursive vision of public life and its rhetorical practices and virtues of public engagement. A feminist public theology both reinforces and contests long-standing rhetorical practices and virtues of public engagement in U.S. public theology. It describes an alternative vision of public life against which to critically judge our existing patriarchal political life; it also prescribes rhetorical practices and public virtues for reconstructing our contemporary political life in order to bring about that vision. In other words, it consists of a guiding theological vision that imagines a more just, participatory political community, and that redefines rhetorical practices and virtues so as to begin to realize, if only in part, such a community. In my larger study of gender, religion and politics in the U.S. context, I propose that a feminist approach to public theology—which I am articulating as ekklesial work—can go beyond redefining a discursive vision of public life, its rhetorical practices of rational argument, and its civic virtues for engaging in democratic conversation: the notion of ekklesial work can open up theological space to illumine many practices of socio-political engagement, many examples of being and building up a just, reconciled socio-political order.76
My larger study distinguishes among (without overly reifying) what I am calling rhetorical, symbolic, and prophetic modes or practices of public engagement. My research has led me to attend to rhetorical, symbolic, and prophetic practices of public engagement that counter an oppressive political order and that simultaneously make space for an alternative and more transformative political community to take shape. In my view, rhetorical practices stress gaining a voice in public life, but also point toward ways of using voice to resist and re-imagine our current forms of public life. Symbolic practices entail rethinking and reconstructing theological symbols for their sociopolitical significance, i.e., their ability to challenge and perhaps change our conceptions of public life. Prophetic practices involve protest for the purpose of laying claim to public life in order to denounce it, as well as to announce a possible alternative political order. To clarify, these practices do not reconstitute political community as such, but disrupt, destabilize, and otherwise intervene in prevailing forms of political life in order to make space—perhaps an eschatological space—for the inbreaking of an alternative public life/political order which is more just and flourishing. On my reading, these practices are reflected in major figures of twentieth century U.S. Catholic social thought (e.g., Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Phillip Berrigan) as well as in contemporary feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies. As these figures are not usually considered in the discipline of U.S. public theology, my notion of ekklesial work holds the theological potential to widen the scope of what counts as public theology as well as to lend support to other modes of political engagement.
A feminist public theology can also significantly contribute to a better understanding of the roles and purposes of religion in U.S. public life. Redefining public theology as ekklesial work sharpens our focus on a central theological task of U.S. public theologies: to make (or create and sustain) a public, i.e., to apply religious resources so as to negotiate and eventually reconcile often disparate communities into an overarching community of multiple communities. Ekklesial work, with its emphasis on imagining and seeking to create such a political community, draws further attention to the significance of the term “public” in public theology. It illuminates the kind of political community imagined in public theologies, as well as their associated practices and virtues for sustaining that political community. Thus, ekklesial work breaks new ground in U.S. public theology, because it has less to do with introducing religious claims into a multi-religious public square in a broadly intelligible way and more to do with the contributions of religion to making and re-making our conceptions of the public and of a more just, participatory political order. Thus, the ekklesia of wo/men can help theologians to rethink on theological grounds a shared but often unmentioned task among public theologies, i.e., to (re)envision and (re)make a public, a political community.
Let me stay on this point about providing a theologicalbasis for public theology. A feminist approach allows us to take a fresh look at a central task among public theologies, namely to make a public, to build up and to be a reconciled body of multiple communities in the socio-political order. My notion of ekklesial work clarifies and deepens this task of public theology to create a more just, egalitarian, and participatory public life, and, in so doing, provides a substantive theological vision of that kind of public life. In giving a theological account of one major task of public theology, my notion of ekklesial work elaborates one possible response to dispel a common criticism about the absence of theology in public theology. Moreover, an emphasis on eschatology in describing that theological vision of public life brings to the foreground that our U.S. public life is not yet fully just, egalitarian, or participatory. The ekklesia of wo/men points to an ideal eschatological telos for public life and suggests a means, a set of practices of socio-political engagement, for bringing about that end in the present rather than postponing it to some otherworldly posthistorical future. Placing public theology in an eschatological context encourages rather than discourages public engagement; as the council fathers at Vatican II claim, “Far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectation of a new earth should spur us on, for it is here that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come.”77
Gaudium et Spes, par. 39.
An emphasis on a this-worldly or realized eschatology counters a twofold feminist theological critique of Christian hope as repressive and as a denial of human finitude. An other-worldly hope in an absolute future, i.e., in an afterlife, can postpone a pragmatic hope in actually changing our real historical future. Moreover, hope in an ultimate afterlife, modeled on the personal death and resurrection of Jesus, may downplay our very earthly lives and may obscure the responsibilities and obligations that we owe one another and the earth. See Margaret Farley, “Feminism and Hope,” in Full of Hope: Critical Social Perspectives on Theology (ed. Magdala Thompson; New York: Paulist Press, 2003) 20–40, esp. 25–27.
Finally, redefining U.S. public theology from a feminist theological perspective helps enhance the project of public theology in at least three ways. Ekklesial work reveals a long untapped political dimension of feminist theology, thus highlighting its potential contribution to public theology. Also, it redefines what I see as a central task of public theology—to convoke a public, a political community—in theological terms, by providing a substantive theological and eschatological vision (i.e., the ekklesia of wo/men) of such a public. Finally, ekklesial work provides a conceptual theological site for gaining a better understanding of critical and constructive religio-political engagement in U.S. public life, both its practices and its virtues.
Implications: The Locus of Theology, the Vocation of the Theologian
This essay has considered the ekklesia of wo/men to illuminate some contributions of feminist theology to public theology. What I am calling ekklesial work has revealed a new way of doing public theology that is attuned to a theological vision of U.S. public life and a new understanding of rhetorical practices and virtues for engaging in as well as transforming that life. I want to conclude with some reflections on the implications of a feminist public theology for doing theology itself. Ekklesial work, as elaborated in this essay, advances a main task of public theology– to convoke or make a political community, a task that impacts the locus of contemporary theology and the vocation of contemporary theologians.
Ekklesial work offers a new perspective on a central convocative task of public theology, whichin turn expresses anew thelocus or site of theologicalreflection. As I argued in this essay, when the term “public” takes center stage in defining public theology, public theology entails the active work of creating a just community of different and at times disparate communities that identify and shape our identities and our society. Community is both given and made; we become more fully human in the midst of multiple communities and in actively seeking to transform those communities. Thus, public theology challenges a prevailing understanding of church and world as two discrete and distinct spheres of life, and instead considers them as rightly autonomous but mutually critical and interrelated. In this communal context, ekklesial work refers primarily to a theology that is located in between multiple groups for the purpose of weaving those groups together into a more just, more comprehensive tapestry of common life. Ekklesial work, which characterizes my feminist approach to public theology and its convocative task, highlights the mediatorial role that theologians increasingly play in bridging multiple groups defined by church, academy, and society, and also by race, class, gender, culture, religion, sexuality, and other markers of identity. Thus, the locus of theological reflection inspired by my notion of ekklesial work is more than simply situated between church and world; it is found in and among multiple communities of belonging that are already ingredient in and that deeply intersect church and society.
Ekklesial work, or the practice of community-buildingin a feminist public theology, also suggests some signature features of the theologian's vocation, features that are perhaps best elucidated by an emerging feminist theological notion of interstitiality, of being in–between. The concept of interstitiality attends to both multiple communities of belonging that co-constitute our identities and our society and the act of sculpting a meaningful sense of self-unity among those communities.79
See Rita Nakashima Brock, “Interstitial Integrity: Reflections Toward an Asian American Woman's Theology,”in Introduction to Christian Theology: Contemporary North American Perspectives (ed. Roger A. Badham; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998) 183–96.
Most contemporary U.S. theologians identify with a particular kind of theological reflection—for example, Black theology, Latino/a theology, feminist theology, or womanist theology. This is not to indicate or replicate an identity politics within theology, but rather to emphasize the communities with whom a theologian speaks and acts. What I am suggesting here is that ekklesial work prompts theologians to identify not one but many communities of accountability within which we live, move, and have our being, theologically and otherwise.
Public theology in the U.S. context is often associated with major figures, such as Protestant theologians Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray, and the theologians explored in this essay. Contemporary theologians lament the loss of such singular charismatic figures in the U.S. public arena, especially in light of the recent death of liberal Protestant preacher William Sloane Coffin, Jr. However, Martin Marty urges caution about such laments: “But the world, the nation, and its religious agencies have moved on, and one cannot recreate the circumstances that made them credible and offered them a hearing. The better question, since issues as large as theirs are with us now, is: How do we, as a nation and in religious sectors, summon energies, inspiration, resources, will, and potential constituencies so new sets and types of leaders with new tactics and messages can emerge?”81
Martin E. Marty, “Remembering William Sloane Coffin,” Sightings, April 17, 2006; see also Marty, “Under Many Influences,” Sightings, February 14, 2005. (Sightings is an online weekly column related to issues of religion and public life that is published by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.) Charles E. Curran also turns away from such laments about a lack of theological giants and turns toward a new generation of theologians and theological methods; Curran, “Where Have All the Dominant Theologians Gone?” National Catholic Reporter 41 (February 4, 2005) 16.
As Mary Hines notes, the public role of the church often defaults to bishops and other “official ordained spokespersons,” which directly contrasts with the role of the laity in public life articulated by Vatican II. See Hines, “Ecclesiology for a Public Church,” 36–39.
