Editorial

This issue of Feminist Theology engages deeply and richly with the scriptures of the Judaeo-Christian traditions and the interpretive traditions that surround them. These spring up as vividly human writings, which hurl themselves into the narrative of contemporary human life. There are divergent and even discordant voices. The Bible is riven with power structures, not just patriarchy, which is the most evident, but structures of ethnicity and class. Many voices are silenced by the processes of redaction and compilation which bury them under layers of editorial sediment, from which they emerge like living fossils or ghostly retrieved recordings. Many of these are the voices of women.

So the writers of these articles grapple with violence, genocide, misogyny, depression, as well as prophecy, leadership and ministry, both in scripture and in lived experience.

While an issue focusing on the Bible could sound stultifying, this issue is full of challenge. The churches, in particular, have done no service to this startling set of writings by reducing it to ten verse ‘lessons’ on a rota (the lectionary) in traditional forms of worship. Congregations almost never hear the full diversity of scripture, or engage with its continuous, or more shocking narratives.

Dvora Lederman-Daniely carries out a patient piece of excavation to uncover one of the hidden voices. Miriam, sister to Moses and Aaron, and active in the Exodus from Egypt, is called a prophet (or prophetess, Exod. 15.20). But where Moses’ prophetic call and power are clearly documented, there is almost no record of Miriam acting in this role.

The point Lederman-Daniely makes is that the reader of scripture should not expect to find Miriam’s story on the surface of the narrative, because the hegemonic text belongs to supporters of Moses’ new regime, in which he emerges from among the three siblings as the single autocratic leader. Miriam’s attempt to regain shared power on her own and Aaron’s behalf is punished with leprosy (Num. 12), thus effectively excluding her from the community altogether.

Lederman-Daniely sees this not only in terms of Miriam’s exclusion by those who control the narrative, but also as a reflection of other cultures in which leprosy is the punishment for a woman, specifically, who intrudes into male initiation into spiritual power.

By tracing female symbolism and spirituality, the author uncovers elements of Miriam’s story, which lie embedded or hidden in the text, and concludes that, ‘Miriam was a prophetess, chosen by God and a messenger like Moses, who rightfully claimed recognition as a leader of the people, and as equally entitled to shape the life of faith of the Hebrew nation’.

Jennifer Anne Cox also draws on the example of Miriam’s prophetic role in a discussion of female prophecy in the New Testament. One of the roles permitted to women in the Early Church as described in the Acts and Epistles was that of prophet (or prophetess). This was partly due to the precedence of female prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures, and partly because prophecy is seen as a spontaneous gift, which is more closely associated with an emotional than a rational response.

Cox is arguing from the instances of female prophecy, that full ordained ministry, including teaching, should be open to women as well as men. Rather than offering yet another interpretation of the New Testament texts on women and teaching, Cox seeks to break down the sharp distinction between prophecy and teaching, which she does not see as so clear a delineation in the scriptural texts. While they are distinct gifts, they are interlinked in their method and function within the church.

She notes that prophecy is often closely linked to the interpretation of scripture to meet the needs of a specific contemporary need. Like teaching, it is a role that can instruct the community about its identity or behaviour.

Cox argues that there is a continuous thread from female prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures running into the Early Church. Anna is the first person to be designated a prophet in the New Testament (Lk. 2.36), and Cox also argues that Elizabeth and Mary fit the description. None of these are Christian prophets, in the sense of proclaiming the risen Jesus, but they interpret the coming of Jesus in the light of existing scriptures (Lk. 1.39–55).

Cox shows that the Magnificat draws on earlier prophetic utterances by Miriam, Deborah, Judith and specifically Hannah. Mary’s words, as well as those of the earlier women, have themselves become scripture.

There is a double bind in the use of women’s prophesying to deny women the authoritative role of teaching. Prophecy is described as a second class role because it is allowed to women. Through association with women, it becomes allied to emotion rather than reason, and loses the authoritative function that it undoubtedly has in scripture. Cox writes:

we cannot assume that women in the early Church held secondary positions, which must always have been subordinate to the roles which men played. As the significance of prophecy is downplayed by interpreters of the New Testament the role of women within the Church is also downplayed.

This is the double bind that has restricted women’s independent and authoritative participation from time immemorial, and it is good to see it named and refuted. By her interpretation of the prophetic role in scripture, Cox argues that women must be allowed to teach, and take on the pastoral functions of ordained pastoral ministry in the churches of our own time.

Another New Testament figure who crosses not only gender boundaries, this time, but boundaries of ethnicity and culture, is the Samaritan woman with whom Jesus has a conversation in John 4. Her life is transformed, and she becomes an evangelist or apostle to her own people. This is described by Jesus as an example of the ample harvest that is already beginning to be gathered in (Jn 4.35–38).

Joy Jones-Carmack takes her story as a paradigm for leadership and mission. Viewing the passage through the lens of relational demography, she explores the transformational effect of the conversation with Jesus on the Samaritan woman. Relational demography recognizes the structures of power within an encounter such as this, between a dominant culture and a counter-culture.

There are two contexts: the culture in which Jesus and the woman have the conversation, and the culture in which John the evangelist tells and interprets the story. We are also reading the account from our own context, and Jones-Carmack is going to draw conclusions from the relationship between those contexts.

The context of the story itself is, of course, one of boundaries, between Jew and Samaritan, between orthodox Jewish man and woman, and the boundary between the woman and her own people, occasioned by her lifestyle. There are further dynamics in the going and coming of the disciples.

Jones-Carmack finds evidence of genuine benefit in gender and ethnic diversity in a variety of settings, including the church and the workplace. She argues that such diversity should be celebrated and utilized in the development of human relationships, and particularly in Christian leadership and mission. The current discourse about diversity is not being put into action. She argues that women and minorities should be recognized in the narrative, and that recognition should transform the present context.

The next group of articles moves into direct encounter with human inequality and suffering in the context of our own times.

Prachi Patil brings the Bible, specifically the two love commandments of Jesus, into dialogue with caste and gender in an Indian context. Like others in this issue, who write about Jesus, she is concerned with his human interactions with people, rather than the divine nature. She calls this, the ‘Dalitness of Jesus’, following Arvind Nirmal and her article uses Dalit theology, which, she says, ‘seeks to counter the dominant Brahminical discourse of Indian Christian Theology’.

Early missionaries to India concentrated on the high caste Brahmins, as an entry to the conversion of the rest of society. They not only ignored the Dalit untouchables, but even encouraged discrimination, mistakenly seeing caste as a cultural issue, and therefore not to be transformed by Christian conversion.

The first love commandment, to ‘Love the Lord your God’ is challenged by Dalit feminist theology in terms of the nature and identity of the God who is to be loved. Even the Dalitness of Jesus is partial. When he likens the Syro-Phoenician woman to a dog (Mk 7.24–30), ill-treating her for being a Gentile and a woman, he is the one in need of liberation.

The second commandment is also problematic, in a society where there are strict limits on who is allowed to be ‘my neighbour’. Of course, the parable of the Good Samaritan turns this round. Not, who is my neighbour, but who am I going to be a neighbour to. The oppressed person is no longer the victim in the story, needing a neighbour, but can be transformed into the Samaritan, the hated outsider, who has agency, and becomes the neighbour.

And the transformation is necessary for both high and low caste: ‘It is only when the high-castes take the initiative to transcend the borders of caste through recognition of Dalits as their neighbours that they can attain their humanity’ writes Patil.

Human oppression and suffering challenge our notion of God. But the most extreme suffering questions the very presence of God. Any genocide is horrifying. There have been many such in recent history, abysses of horror. Perhaps the archetype of genocide in living memory has been the Holocaust, particularly of Jews, in the Second World War. Words like transformation, even of God, seem hopelessly optimistic in the face of such unremitting pain.

Luke Devine turns to the concept of Shekhinah in a way of asking the question about the presence of God in the Shoah, or specifically in Auschwitz. The article is long, because Devine begins by exploring what he calls a ‘plethora’ of Shekhinah images. Although this is a feminine noun and female concept, there are still surprisingly masculine and patriarchal elements. For this reason, he surmises, Melissa Raphael argued that Shekhinah was present but concealed in Auschwitz.

Devine then turns to Shekhinah as a shelter or protection, and follows the concept through the maze of debates and traditions. Shekhinah is the strength of hand that protects Israel, or, in Raphael’s feminist revision, the mother who protects her child, even when the child is tainted with corruption.

The question then has to be, how that protection was not available when six million people died. Answers have variously been that God was hidden, or even absent, not acting to release, or even protect the people. Shekhinah is seen as a counterpart to God (the Holy One, blessed be He), pleading with him for her suffering children, and sharing their suffering. ‘The Shoah was the culmination of Shekhinah’s existence in exile and suffering with the Jewish people’, writes Devine.

Behind all these articles, the steady heartbeat of oppression lies in the unremitting patriarchy of most of scripture. The hegemonic text, told and written, compiled and redacted, and passing into canon, belongs to the regime, which is normally uncompromisingly male (and defined within a specific structure of ethnicity and class). Ryan Kuja faces the misogyny which has its roots in those patriarchal structures, at its most violent, in the story of the rape of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19.

Kuja approaches the story through a literary feminist re-reading, which brings it into conversation with violence against women today. The article begins by recalling contemporary instances of violent rape and murder: Anene Booysen, gang raped at the age of 17 in South Africa; Jyoti Singh Pandey, raped by six men on a bus in New Delhi. In both cases the rape was so violent that the women were disembowelled and died later of their injuries.

Their stories are told alongside that of the concubine, who had died ‘on the steps of the home of an acquaintance, bloodied and beaten, having spent the entire night being ruthlessly raped by a gang of men’. Kuja finds that the brazen misogyny of the three stories, though separated by geographical and cultural distance and across millennia, is nearly indistinguishable.

Her thoroughgoing analysis of the text, its intricate power structures, the silences as well as the words, leads to a call to action. She writes: ‘we must also allow their memory to invite us into the present, where the reality of misogyny now resides’.

The final article returns to the intensely personal world of depression and creativity. Debra Phillips describes her own journey through a period of depression, through an interpretation of the assertion in John 14 that God’s house has many rooms, in a series of paintings, as well as in words.

Phillips found that her ‘artist-self’ became her voice at a time when she was otherwise silent, through grief and depression. She uses the method of narrative inquiry to engage with the self she was, as a researcher and participant in the same process, against the background of institutional and dominant discourses. Through this, she seeks to uncover ways in which experiences can become transformative.

There are four paintings, all of rooms or dwelling places, at different stages in depression and the emergence from depression. Another self appears in the narrative, her ‘flaneur-Self’, which interrupts the depression narrative, without Phillips herself being aware. The flaneur-Self begins to prepare a future, unimaginable to Phillips herself at the time.

This she interprets in the light of Jesus’ promise to go ahead and prepare a place. This, for her, is a turning point, but not unambiguous. She writes:

This moment is the beginning of the resolution of Spirit and Self. However a tension existed between letting go of an old narrative and taking up a new narrative. The old narrative made me miserable but it was familiar. A narrative of the imagined future required courage.

Throughout the narrative, Phillips is exploring the relationship between depression and creativity, a well-trodden path in psychological and sociological scholarship. For her, the relationship is transformative. She describes it as, ‘the process of coming into being’.

Through this issue of Feminist Theology, we are brought into close contact with the sacred writings of one particular set of traditions. They are the writings that I have lived with all my life, as a child and teenager in church and then as a minister, preacher and teacher. I faced my own struggles with the issues surrounding women’s leadership in the churches. I have been driven to despair by the patriarchy and misogyny that reaches out through scripture like a dead hand on women’s lives, including my own. And yet, by battling through the structures of violence and dominance, I too have heard, often faintly and disturbingly, the voices of women, or female characters, whose stories resonate with my own, and who bring me hope.