Feminist Theology

This book is a critical guide to the scholarly exploration of feminist theology. It describes the main features of this modern theological development and examines its major concerns and questions. It presents comprehensive and critical analyses of the essential matters of Christian doctrine written by contributors knowledgeable in feminist theology. The book presents a challenge for future scholarship, since it critically engages with the assumptions of feminist theology, and seeks to open ways for women after feminism to enter into the vocation of theology.

What is the relationship between feminist theology and classical Christian theology? Is feminist theology "Christian," and if so, in what respect and to what extent? This study seeks to analyze and evaluate the relation of feminist "reconstructions" to traditional Christian teaching. Greene-McCreight uses the extent to which the biblical depiction of God is allowed to guide theological hermeneutics as a test of orthodoxy. She looks at the writings of a wide range of contemporary feminist theologians, discusses their doctrinal patterns, and demonstrates how the Bible is used in undergirding their theological reconstructions.

The book provides an original and important narrative on the significance of canon in the Christian tradition. Standard accounts of canon reduce canon to scripture and treat scripture as a criterion of truth. Scripture is then related in positive or negative ways to tradition, reason, and experience. Such projects involve a misreading of the meaning and content of canon--they locate the canonical heritage of the church within epistemology--and Abraham charts the fatal consequences of this move, from the Fathers to modern feminist theology. In the process he shows that the central epistemological concerns of the Enlightenment have Christian origins and echoes. He also shows that the crucial developments of theology from the Reformation onwards involve extraordinary efforts to fix the foundations of faith. This trajectory is now exhausted theologically and spiritually. Hence, the door is opened for a recovery of the full canonical heritage of the early church and for fresh work on the epistemology of theology.

The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the first full-length feminist theology of the Holocaust, argues that the patriarchal bias of post-Holocaust theology becomes fully apparent only when women's experiences and priorities are brought into historical light. Building upon the published testimonies of four women imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau - Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - it considers women's distinct experiences of the holy in relation to God's perceived presence and absence in the camps.God's face, says Melissa Raphael, was not hidden in Auschwitz, but intimately revealed in the female face turned towards the other as a refractive image of God, especially in the moral protest made visible through material and spiritual care for the assaulted other.