“Communicate Life”: Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel Imagines Biblical Models for Women

The Need for Moltmann-Wendel’s Approach

As a female theologian who spends a lot of time teaching in the church as well as in the classroom, I have been exposed to a great number of popular books devoted to portraying the “Women of the Bible.” The insight that has ostensibly precipitated the writing of these books, stated in various ways in their assorted prefaces, is that the women of the Bible did more and are more interesting than we are apt to think. The claim commonly made is not that these women are altogether different than who we expect them to be, but that they have significantly higher levels of gumption, smarts, or ingenuity than we have hitherto realized. The authors of these books, in my view, often manage to reinforce the same old, damaging stereotypes (though sometimes in slightly more colorful ways!). A main goal of most of them is to reassure women that, though persons of their gender do not get as much “air time” in Scripture as the men, they certainly do, after all, have a pretty important place we need acknowledge. ⁷ Some authors do go out of their way to claim the women they are presenting challenge the status quo (consider, for example, Bad Girls of the Bible and What We Can Learn from Them, by Liz Curtis Higgs). ⁸ A few take the risk of “painting outside the lines” of kyriarchal interpretations—paying a high price for their transgressions. ⁹

Feminist scholars, working in the academy, have perhaps had greater opportunity to push beyond the boundaries of traditional interpretations. At times, however, they have inadvertently left behind those faithful but often disillusioned women in the Church who do not know how to make the move from recognizing the patriarchal character of the biblical stories to finding new, life-giving ways of reading them. ¹⁰ While the suggestion of Letty Russell, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and others that a “hermeneutics of suspicion” be applied to garner a fresher reading of the stories that incorporates details not previously noticed, the limit of this approach for many laywomen (and laymen) is that they do not have enough training in exegetical methods to “read between the lines” of the texts effectively. ¹¹ Further, when a hermeneutics of suspicion is employed by laity, it is done so primarily for the purpose of retrieving “hidden nuggets” present in or suggested by the text. ¹² But what happens next, when it is discovered there is nothing left to retrieve from the lines (or between the lines or in the missing lines) of these stories? It is especially at this juncture that lay readers may need support and assistance in reading imaginatively beyond the perimeters of the text itself.

Phyllis Trible’s insight that difficult passages about women should not be read prescriptively, but rather as “texts of terror,” has also been useful to women (and men) who struggle to understand the sense in which certain biblical stories are “authoritative.” ¹³ Jephtha’s murder of his daughter ¹⁴ or the rape and cutting up of the concubine ¹⁵ evoke horror. Trible well argues that God’s Word is known in our reaction that “this should not be!” But the texts that most threaten us may well be those we would not think of as obviously terrorizing. The story of Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet while Martha serves dinner, for example, ¹⁶ is often told in such a way that women are left with the uneasy feeling they have two unsatisfactory options: they can be either servants who are worrywarts or learners who shirk their share of the work.

Moltmann-Wendel builds on the work of Schüssler Fiorenza, Trible, and others while attending to some of the “gaps” that need be filled in if women are to imagine biblical women, and themselves, more wholly. When there is nothing more that can be retrieved from between the lines of the text, she draws, for example, from life-giving art work that opens readers’ minds to forgotten possibilities related to biblical women’s lives. When women wrestling with the stories are having trouble breaking Mary and Martha out of the indelible molds in which they have been placed, Moltmann-Wendel is able to make a crack, and new ideas pour in. She does all this, again, in ways that are accessible to those who know nothing of the technical apparatus of biblical interpretation, but who do seek more whole biblical models for women that will inspire more joy-full lives.

Having framed the context in which I believe Moltmann-Wendel makes a unique and important contribution, I move now to reflecting on the aforementioned strands of Moltmann-Wendel’s life-embracing approach to developing models of biblical women that can be used “by everyone.” They are, again: her use of imagination; her commitment to engaging the stories “whole” (almost sacramentally), refusing to separate out the biblical stories from her “theofantasies” about the women in the stories; and her concrete, embodied suggestions for how we, with these women, can transform the world by living “tenderly.”

Moltmann-Wendel’s Hermeneutical Use of Imagination

Moltmann-Wendel is helpfully clear about the fact that “reading the Bible … as a book of liberation” might be useful toward reclaiming the joy of life, but is not enough. We cannot “quickly obviate the difficulties” patriarchy has imposed on the text and on our interpretations of it. “If we are to regain the access we have lost,” she explains, “the spontaneity of which we have been deprived, we must learn once again to think, feel, and act in terms of a total sense of living.” ¹⁷ How do we do this? By employing imagination, Moltmann-Wendel suggests. She goes on to list several approaches to thinking imaginatively about the women around Jesus, including: using art and culture to reclaim traditions the Church has lost track of or minimized; considering the “biographies” of biblical women in their own right, “without any references to Jesus;” rejecting “those passages in Scripture that are hostile to women;” “interpreting the Bible as a whole;” and “retelling history with new narrative forms.” ¹⁸

When we think imaginatively about biblical women, Moltmann-Wendel argues, we experience God “as a liberating force,” and we see that “the Bible discloses countless new possibilities.” ¹⁹ It is interesting to me that Moltmann-Wendel understands the Bible to “disclose countless new possibilities,” given that she does not think it is sufficient, in and of itself, to function as a vehicle through which women (and men) can find life in all its fullness. It seems that she is recommending that we read the Bible by way of our experience of God, and that it is precisely our experience of God that “authorizes” (in a sense) the considerable use of imagination as we work with the biblical stories. This is, of course, a kind of chicken-and-egg phenomenon, since it is also our imaginative readings that feed life-enhancing experiences of God.

As has been pointed out by theologians including Hans Urs von Balthasaar, David Bentley Hart, and Catherine Keller, “imagination” has too often been eschewed by theologians and needs to be reclaimed in ways that are productive. There are real risks that come with imagining what God is up to in the world, theologians in the Reformed tradition have especially noted. ²⁰ There is the danger, even the likelihood, that what we imagine will be merely our own self-projections, and that what we imagine will then lead to the creation of idols, rather than reverence for God and God’s creation.

Moltmann-Wendel’s approach guards against this problem by insisting we ground our imaginings about the women in the stories of the biblical text without being confined by them. She also clearly holds to the conviction that the Holy Spirit is at work, not only in and through the biblical texts but also in the play the stories have beyond the limits of the words that participate in them. “Can we—against all reason—dare a shared revival in the name of this Spirit?,” she asks. “Can we remove the age-old mistrust of women when they do not just speak in a balanced way, rationally and in a male language?” ²¹ What we are imagining, Moltmann-Wendel thinks, is not only “what works for us,” but how we believe what we have received from God is intended by God to work. Again, the starting point here is the conviction that these stories are somehow consistent with experiences of God that are life giving, and we’re trying to figure out, exactly, how. Insisting “we need dreams and fantasies, we need to find images and conceptions which help towards our healing,” Moltmann-Wendel encourages us to “sharpen our senses” and “learn to detect what happened between the women and Jesus.” ²²

Sharpen our senses? Learn to detect what happened? Share a revival in the Spirit, risking imbalance? This fully embodied, Spirit-sensitive approach might well raise the eyebrows of biblical scholars who prefer to develop their interpretations by way of more ordered historical-critical methods. It might also concern theologians who are concerned that “dreams and fantasies” might more readily lead to the creation of idols than to deeper understanding of who God is, and who God has created us to be. With these concerns in mind, it would perhaps be fruitful to reflect further on exactly how Moltmann-Wendel’s recommendation that we dream and fantasize in ways that bring healing synchronizes with her clear commitment to engaging carefully and critically the content of the biblical stories.

Catherine Keller’s distinction between “remembering” and “reconstruing” ²³ might be useful in understanding what Moltmann-Wendel is accomplishing here when she invites us to imagine beyond the words of the text. To “remember” something, Keller explains, is to try to recall historically accurate details. To “reconstrue” something, on the other hand, is also to make it one’s own: to remember it in such a way that—even if the details are not perfectly accurate—the story becomes more true than it otherwise would have been if it were only historically accurate, with no attention given to the subjects of the story. Moltmann-Wendel shows us what it looks like not only to “remember,” in more thorough ways, the women in Scripture. She facilitates our “reconstrual” of what we have known of these women’s stories, and our relationship to them. She imagines what their lives were like, and what she reconstrues in this imagining becomes so real for us that it changes who we are and brings us beauty, joy, and wholeness. As she herself models what it looks like to re-imagine Mary, Martha, Mary Magdalene, and other biblical women, Moltmann-Wendel invites us not only to interpret what we have always known differently, but to figure out how our participation in these stories helps us actually become who we really are.

Even as Moltmann-Wendel gives biblical readers more options for reconstruing stories about women, she guards against idolatrous readings by ever-orienting these readings in relationship to a God who is bigger than even our wildest imaginings. We have seen that she identifies reconstruals of the biblical stories as the work of the Spirit. Along the same lines, she also seems to ground her method of moving out from the text, drawing from resources beyond it, in the idea that the Word of God cannot be contained even by the words of Scripture. Here, Moltmann-Wendel seems implicitly to honor, in her approach, a christological principle that has been endorsed by Protestant theologians –and particularly by Reformed theologians—since the sixteenth century: the so-called extra calvinisticum. The extra calvinisticum is the idea, articulated by John Calvin, that while the Word is fully incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word is not exhaustively contained in this historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, the logos is eternally ubiquitous.

What this means for Protestant hermeneutics, it seems to me—and what Moltmann-Wendel so well reflects, in her approach—is that we have lost sight of the character of God’s embodied existence whenever we treat the Word written as though it is exhaustive. The written Word is, insofar as it participates in the one Word who is Jesus Christ, in some indirect sense both “fully human and fully divine.” But this does not mean it exhausts the logos, who is experienced also beyond the words of the text itself. Moltmann-Wendel demonstrates how we might deeply engage the stories of biblical women even as we look—imaginatively—beyond the texts for where and how the living, ubiquitous, dynamic Word is at work. Moltmann-Wendel is here offering, in my view, a Reformed and feminist theology of Scripture—an approach that guards as much against making an idol of the biblical stories and depictions of women as it does against creating idolatrous images of women that are founded only in our own imaginative projections.

Moltmann-Wendel’s Narrative Readings

Because she thinks imaginatively about and beyond the biblical stories about the women around Jesus, Moltmann-Wendel’s readings are distinctively uninterested in either confusing or separating out from our interpretations that which is theofantasy ²⁴ from that which is empirically verifiable “fact.” As the Council of Chalcedon instructs in relationship to the person of Christ, Moltmann-Wendel refuses to “confuse” what might be considered the various “natures” of the text and its interpretation: there are faulty (patriarchally distorted) readings; there are historical facts we have lost that need retrieving; there are new possibilities we are imagining. She also refuses to “separate” or “divide” “critical ways” of understanding the Bible from ways that are “existential and corporeal.” ²⁵ What is most important to Moltmann-Wendel is that, for example, the empirical research on medieval depictions of Mary Magdalene and her musings about what Mary’s physical relationship with Jesus might have been like come together in ways that help us relate to Mary, a whole person (one hypostasis) who promotes wholeness in us not only by her example, but also by our imagined association with her; not only by way of modeling, but also by way of friendship. Again, at the core of her commitment to employing rigorous research and sensory intuitions for the purpose of participating in the joy of life is Moltmann-Wendel’s amazed conviction that God has become body and is body. ²⁶

The anti-Nestorian hermeneutical principle evident in Moltmann-Wendel’s reflections on the Marys and Martha clearly becomes for her also a feminist hermeneutical principle that frees women to read even when they cannot neatly separate out old interpretations from new; elements of who these women were that they are suspicious of from other elements they are able to trust. Interpreters are free to let these biblical women be human and whole beings and to see them in this way. They can enter into even a kind of “friendship” ²⁷ with them, engaging them as actual, organic models rather than as partially embodied syntheses of some destructive, and other hope-full, interpretations and insights.

Consider Moltmann-Wendel’s imaginative recovery of Martha, who does do the washing up but who also—and brazenly—challenges Jesus’ decision to wait a few days before coming to check on Lazarus. Medieval depictions of her slaying a dragon ²⁸ and raising people from the dead ²⁹ help readers of her story imagine her strength as a spiritual leader. Because what is mythic and what is actual is not parsed out—because Martha is considered and presented as an actual, integrated person who must have had some kind of history and strengths and weaknesses—women standing in need of life’s joy can experience Martha rather than simply analyzing and contemplating her contribution to women from afar.

Moltmann-Wendel’s Promotion of “Tenderness”

Moltmann-Wendel insists “to believe with all the senses does not mean going off into a world alien to theology.” ³⁰ She reminds us, again, of what lies at the heart of the Christian faith: the “scandalous” and “still inconvenient” belief that God has become body.

In Jesus, she points out, God is a body who at times grows angry and impatient. “He is full of compassion.” “He needs a cushion in the boat to sleep on.” ³¹ He feels forsaken on the cross. ³² Jesus touches people’s bodies, healing them with his own spit. He embraces Mary Magdalene, kissing her on the mouth. Moltmann-Wendel easily and yet scandalously draws from the Gospel of Mark and elsewhere to present Jesus as a “tender” person who himself needs, and asks for, tenderness.

In Rediscovering Friendship, Moltmann-Wendel continues to develop the theology of tenderness that had become more explicit in I Am My Body by constructing a theology of Mary Magdalene, “a special friend” of Jesus. In this theology, she argues, tenderness “finds its place as communication through the senses in a culture of church and society which isolates people and is remote from the senses.” ³³ Consistent with the character of her imaginative hermeneutical approach, Moltmann-Wendel readily concedes that her constructed theology of Mary Magdalene “is a new day-dream” that “is not the whole of the biblical Magdalene.” And then she pushes on, asking, “How can she rise again, this friend of Jesus, who makes us God’s friends, the apostle of all apostles, who proclaims anew the newness and immediacy of God?” ³⁴ In the last third of the book, Moltmann-Wendel goes on to reflect on what it would look like, in the context of the life of the Church, to experience closeness (as Mary Magdalene, in relation to Jesus, modeled closeness). What would it look like, she asks, to think less in terms of “family” metaphors and more in terms of “otherness” (as Mary Magdalene—not Jesus’ mother—represents “the other” with whom he was in intimate relationship)? ³⁵ What would it look like to eat a roll with all one’s senses, understanding this act in relation to the “embodied God”? ³⁶ Touching, Moltmann-Wendel insists, “makes us experience our bodies again and finally to accept them.” ³⁷ It also reignites our commitment to justice; our connections to the bodies of others.

The implications of Moltmann-Wendel’s work on Mary Magdalene and a theology of tenderness seem especially salient in these days when the internet church is gaining in popularity. ³⁸ It is now not only possible to partake of a virtual eucharistic feast online, it is becoming a common practice. Pastors are being led to engage this matter theologically, offering their parishioners guidance. As early as February of 2010, for example, the Rev. Dr. Scott Black Johnston—pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan—responded to the growing numbers of parishioners who are heading to the internet by preaching a sermon titled “Can My Avatar Take Communion?” ³⁹

Reflecting on this online phenomenon by drawing from my own experiences as a theologian who spends a lot of time teaching in the Church, I find that many churchgoers are appalled at the thought of virtual communion, but also that they can’t quite explain why they are appalled, theologically. In a church where people have been conditioned to think it is spiritually appropriate to deprive themselves of the sensual, in a church where the Eucharistic elements have too often been reduced to tasteless wafers and watered-down grape juice, it is no wonder that people of faith can find no compelling reason to partake physically rather than virtually. Insert into the discussion, at this point, Moltmann-Wendel’s Mary Magdalene. Reflect on her relationship to Jesus, this God-in-flesh. Enter into the kind of God-talk she inspires, and it becomes clear why we cannot truly commune by way of avatar. We cannot commune without bodies, because bodies are what we are. We can commune as bodies, because God has entered into body with us to show us, and receive from us, tenderness. Moltmann-Wendel, in her construction of a theology of Mary Magdalene, invites us both to experience God, and to experience who we are, as those beloved of God.

Conclusion: En-joying Life

I began this article by positing that Moltmann-Wendel’s “norming norm” is “the joy of life” founded in “the experience of God.” I suggested that one of her most significant contributions is that she invites women and men into this joy by crafting a useable, holistic hermeneutic. We are free to explore the texts about biblical women rigorously, but are not limited to the black-and-white words in the text in thinking through who these women are who surround Jesus. Because Moltmann-Wendel encourages us to meet these women “with all our senses,” we engage with them as whole beings rather than as specimens to be studied (dissected, retrieved, discarded, or rebuilt). Moltmann-Wendel gives us ways, rather, to develop relationships with these women who not only model what it looks like to experience God joy-fully, but who also join hands with us in our own experiences of the Spirit.

At the center of Moltmann-Wendel’s embodied, sensual, life-giving explorations is, again, the astounding claim that God is body. “Theogusty” ⁴⁰ takes seriously the embodiment of God, opening the senses to the divine “earthings” ⁴¹ that are all around us, in this world. One of the most enlightening dimensions of Moltmann-Wendel’s project is, in my view, that she matter-of-factly claims bodies, friendship, and tenderness not only as important concerns of feminist theologians, but also as inseparable from the central claim of the Christian faith itself. There is a sense in which she is calling for the revival of an idea she believes has always formed Christian traditions, but which we have often been too fearful to claim at full strength: the truth that the Word became flesh, and therefore flesh—and the corresponding wholeness of life—has to matter supremely. Moltmann-Wendel shows us how the women around Jesus lived this, encouraging us to lean forward and touch them so that we might come to experience wholeness for ourselves.