Locating Prayerful Submission for Feminist Ecumenism: Holy Saturday or Incarnate Life?

Feminist Ecumenism

Griffith (1997: 204) aims to avoid stereotypical and dismissive descriptions of non- or anti-feminist evangelical women because such descriptions ‘betray a rude gap’ in what she believes is ‘a central feminist task: focusing with thorough mindfulness on women previously ignored or hidden from view, including – perhaps especially – those who challenge prior assumptions within feminist thought or who patently reject feminist tenets altogether’. By focusing on this task, Griffith (1997: 204) raises her readers’ awareness of the ‘internal challenges and debates over whom feminism can speak for’, which have ‘perpetually tested the limits of feminist solidarity and inclusion’. Underlying Griffith’s descriptive ethnographic work are meta-feminist concerns: What does it mean to be feminist (Bruland, 1989; Chong, 2008; Gallagher, 2004b)? Who ought to be included in feminist discourse (Cochran, 2005; Ingersoll, 2003; Gallagher, 2004a)? What boundaries ought the feminist community draw around a faithful interpretation of their central concerns (Bammert, 2010; Chong, 2006; Pohli, 1983)?

Griffith highlights the complexity of these questions by drawing attention to the paradoxical relationship of power and submission within evangelical women’s narratives. In God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission, her ethnographic subjects are the women who participate in Women’s Aglow Fellowship International – an interdenominational parachurch organization involved in the charismatic renewal movement. Griffith argues that recognizing the nuances of evangelical women’s lives allows for the possibility of counting them as friends in the pursuit of women’s well-being. The goal, she explains, is ‘not to turn evangelical women into feminists (or feminists into anonymous or crypto-Christians) but rather to realize what is shared by these distinctive yet overlapping female cultures’ (1997: 208; see also Sloane, 2012; Avishai et al., 2013).

One commonality between these cultures is the recognition by those on both ends of the spectrum that freedom must be contained within limits. Griffith (1997: 211) shows that although Aglow women draw boundaries around their actions differently than feminists, both groups recognize the importance of bounded freedom for the well-being of women. For feminists, the limits in question are chiefly those of justice. People should not do whatever they wish, but should act in accord with their responsibilities to preserve and respect all persons’ dignity and well-being. For anti-feminists, the limits of freedom are found, more particularly, in patriarchal orderings of family, church, and society. Such bounded freedom is presented as liberating, since it protects evangelical women from the confusion, unhappiness, and sinfulness that would occur if they were to forsake the God-given limits of their place in society and the home. For instance, Griffith (1997: 173) describes an evangelical perspective offered to women in unhappy marriages (see also Piper and Grudem, 2006; Aune, 2006; Bartkowski, 2001):

Their lives seem isolated and they fail at their wifely roles because they wish for their husbands to be, in Dorothy’s words, “someone different.” To be healed, they must repent of their error and realize the “deception” behind it, taking full responsibility for their unhappiness and accepting their husbands without expecting them to change. Giving up all hopes or expectations of marital satisfaction and simply accepting the duties bestowed by their supposedly God-given role of wife as helpmeet, these women describe the pleasant surprise of discovering greater happiness that is the reward for this sacrificial obedience, some finding their husbands to be “the man I had always longed for”.

Clearly, this is not a message feminists would find empowering for women or conducive to their well-being. While feminists may agree with Aglow members that people in healthy relationships should not try to change each other, feminists would also suggest both that it is healthy to communicate one’s expectations for a satisfying partnership and that it is one’s responsibility to carefully consider the actions one might need to take on one’s own behalf in order to maintain one’s integrity and honour others’ agency. This case illustrates that, without downplaying monumental differences in the ways feminists and the women of Aglow variously define the limits of freedom, it is nonetheless true that for both, true liberty occurs within boundaries for right action. Furthermore, Griffith (1997: 168) argues that Aglow hierarchies are ‘not so rigid as to prevent innovation or even reversal; in fact, there is a high degree of plasticity on every level of the organization’. While Griffith may be overstating the case here, she nonetheless shows that Aglow women recognize the need for women to participate in the negotiation of the limits within which they will develop their power for self-determination. Both feminists and evangelicals may agree that the paradoxical interplay between freedom and submission is at least twofold. In order for true freedom to occur, limits must be recognized. However, those within the boundaries of freedom may negotiate their placement and activity to some degree.

Another central commonality between feminist and evangelicals, for Griffith, is that both have a concern for women’s well-being at their core. Griffith herself became more attuned to this feature of Aglow women’s narratives as her ethnographic research developed over time. Her original theme of female submission, ‘though still significant, receded somewhat in importance as motifs more often evoked in women’s narratives – intimacy, healing and transformation, for instance – moved to the centre’ (1997: 5; see also Pan, 2013). In the core chapters of her book, Griffith highlights Aglow women’s pursuit of their own well-being. In particular, she focuses on Aglow women’s practices of prayer (1997: 213): ‘Aglow prayer narratives hinge on moments when the possibility for a new identity are conceived, and it is in surrendering to such possibilities that new selves may be born’. Griffith (1997: 79) acknowledges that ‘the ritual sense that these women share, forged in a symbolic world that allows them to redefine themselves as healed, delivered, and set free, produces and reinforces power relationships in crucial ways’. At the same time, she (1997: 79) believes that ‘this sense also opens up possibilities for new worlds to be imagined and lived and thus may open the way for vital transformations of another, more concrete, and potentially more radical, order’. Thus, Aglow women have this in common with feminists as well: imagining new possibilities and personal transformations that might facilitate women’s well-being. While these similarities should not be over-emphasized, they do provide commonalities that might be used to forge a feminist ecumenism that takes account of evangelical women’s experiences.

Sarah Coakley (2012), like Griffith, turns her attention to prayer practices as a site for exploring appropriate powers and submissions in forging a Christian way of life that will support and advance women’s well-being. Generally speaking, Coakley’s theological project is to draw upon the resources of Gregory of Nyssa and pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, among others, to make an ‘apophatic turn’ within feminist Christian thought by advancing a kenotic form of Christianity. Within this project, Coakley argues that the repression of ‘vulnerability’ in feminist Christianity is detrimental to it. For her, vulnerability, submission, and feminist subversion go hand in hand. That is so because in Jesus’ humanity, ‘weakness, passivity, or vulnerability (all traditionally demerits for the “male”, but manifestly present in Jesus’ passion)’, are presented as normative for humans or even revelatory of the divine (Coakley, 2012: 25; originally published in Hampson, 1996). As such, Coakley’s project is heavily influenced by her understanding of the kenotic character of Jesus’ cross. Her work is also partially influenced by her brief fieldwork on charismatics in a university town in the North of England. Partially in light of her engagement with charismatics, Coakley (2014: 322) concludes that ‘we cannot get this vision of powers and submissions right by political or theological manipulation or fiat; we can only get it right by right primary submission to the Spirit, with all the purgative costliness that involves’. She ultimately recommends a profusion of metaphors for God, nuanced theological and philosophical understandings of creedal Trinitarianism, and contemplative prayer. I will focus on the latter, which involves ‘purgative kneeling before the blankness of the darkness which nonetheless dazzles’ (Coakley, 2014: 325). In prayerful submission before the divine, Coakley (2014: 326) believes that Christian feminists can learn how to rightly call God ‘Father’ – the ultimate source of tenderness and joy. In fact, Christian feminists must call God ‘Father’, because they alone can ‘do the kneeling work that ultimately slays patriarchy at its root’ (Coakley, 2014: 327). In this way, Coakley links a posture of vulnerability and submission with both Christian feminism and evangelical God-talk.

What if, she (2002: 32) asks, ‘true divine “empowerment” occurs most unimpededly in the context of a special form of human “vulnerability”?’ This special form of vulnerability may be experienced in the waiting of contemplative prayer, which ‘marks one’s willed engagement in the pattern of cross and resurrection’ (Coakley, 2002: 35). By repeating this pattern, the one who prays is perpetually placed within Holy Saturday – submitting to death and awaiting the display of divine power. The methods used in contemplative prayer can vary; it may ‘use a repeated phrase to ward off distractions, or be wholly silent; it may be simple Quaker attentiveness, or take a charismatic expression (such as the use of quiet rhythmic “tongues”)’ (Coakley, 2002: 35). In any case, the one who prays exhibits a posture of vulnerability and submission: self-purgative kneeling while making space for the divine presence and power. Coakley admits that such a posture is open to abuses. Since there is ‘so much self-deception, and so much bewilderment and uncertainty’ in contemplative prayer, she (2002: 38) suggests that it ‘might only be able to be adequately evaluated by its results’.

For Coakley, contemplative prayer of this kind repeats the sort of kenosis Jesus powerfully exhibited on the cross and in the tomb. Kenosis is, as Coakley (2002: 31) defines it, ‘a choosing never to have “worldly” forms of power’. Bullying is offered as an example of a form of power that Jesus never took up. She (2002: 38) explains the relationship between Christ’s kenosis and contemplative prayer: ‘What Christ on this view instantiates is the very “mind” that we ourselves enact, or enter into, in prayer: the unique intersection of vulnerable, “non-grasping” humanity and authentic divine power, itself “made perfect in weakness”’. Contemplative prayer is a kenotic practice insofar as it is a denial of a certain type of self, one which Jesus never instantiated in the first place but of which others may need to purge themselves to enact the mind of Christ. Notice, however, that cruciform kenosis is not simply the denial of a particular set of characteristics like fear, revenge, bullying, or grasping of power-over. The liturgical location of the practice is theologically significant because it patterns the Christian life symbolically and concretely. Cruciform kenotic prayer is a repetition of Good Friday’s death and Holy Saturday’s empty waiting, with the hope of resurrection Sunday.

Coakley’s view has generated a lively discussion among scholars. The conversation began in the 1990s between Daphne Hampson (1988, Hampson, 1990) and Coakley (1996). It has been extended into the present by Aristotle Papanikolaou (2003), Michelle Gonzalez (2004), Carolyn Chau (2012), Anna Mercedes (2011), and Jennifer Newsome Martin (2015). In many of these continued discussions, even authors generally sympathetic to Coakley’s view nonetheless suggest modifications to her portrayal of kenotic submission. Take, for example, Chau’s (2012) response to Papanikolaou’s (2003) extension of Coakley’s view (1996). Papanikolaou contends that kenosis is present in the healing process of trauma victims as they empty themselves of fear and submit themselves to a therapeutic relationship. It is a ‘giving over of oneself for the sake of self’ (Papanikolaou, 2003: 56). In response, Chau (2012: 10) recalls Hampson as an early interlocutor with Coakley:

While Papanikolaou analyses the movements of healing in terms of self-giving, it could be argued by Hampson that the abused person who seeks healing does so precisely because she chooses to “resist” and to claim herself as a self. To advise the abused person to “give herself away,” Hampson may say, would not have brought her to begin the path of healing through therapy: she had no self to give! Her healing is, rather, a result of her choice to become “mature,” “responsible,” “autonomous” and her courage to define herself rather than allow her abuser to define who she is.

The criticism here is that Papanikolaou’s extension of Coakley’s view is misplaced because what happens in therapy is not self-emptying but self-building. Chau (2012: 11) ultimately finds this critique unsatisfactory because it does not hold out the possibility that the divine could allow the traumatized person, even in a state of emptiness, to give of herself in a kenotic relationship. In brief, Chau repeats Coakley’s view that divine empowerment is made perfect in human weakness. Nonetheless, Chau seems ultimately to conclude that the apophatic inflection of kenosis is out of place in a discussion of healing. She (2012: 15) attempts to refine Papanikolaou’s view by offering ‘forgiveness’ as a way of understanding therapeutic kenosis, because it ‘resonates less as negation and more as donation’. By denying the apophatic inflection of healing, Chau takes a different path than Coakley even as she is sympathetic to Coakley’s view.

The conversation about submission surveyed thus far reveals that, in multiple modes of thought, feminists are forging an ecumenism that attempts – at the least – to attend to evangelical women’s voices (Griffith), and – at the most – to include some insights of evangelicals within feminist theologies (Coakley). More particularly, some are turning their attention to kenotic submission as a potentially feminist theological commitment and practice (e.g. Hampson, Papanikolaou, Chau). Both Griffith and Coakley consider charismatic women’s submission to the Spirit in prayer, attempting to find commonalities with feminist thought in order to widen and nuance the field. However, the conversation surrounding the theological location and inflection of prayerful submission is far from settled.

To navigate such complex terrain, both feminist and womanist (Grant, 1989; Douglas, 1994; Mitchem, 1998; Cannon, 1988, Cannon, 1995; Townes, 1994; Terrell, 1998; Coleman, 2008; Cannon et al., 2011) perspectives ought to be considered. As Coakley herself notes, womanists have been bold in facing issues of submission head-on. When Coakley speaks of kenotic submission in contemplative prayer as creating space for the divine by participating in the pattern of cross and resurrection, however, her view is at odds with a prevalent womanist understanding of the cross and its implications for black women’s lives. In the next section, I will briefly discuss Delores Williams’ atonement theory. I will argue that submission understood within the theological locus of Holy Saturday is out of sync with Williams’ focus on living an active life of healing and justice through resistance. If ‘submission’ is to gain currency in a feminist ecumenism that keeps faith with both evangelical women and womanist perspectives like that of Williams, it ought to be an incarnational rather than an apophatically cruciform type of submission. In what follows, I seek to advance the conversation by broadening its ecumenical partners and thereby suggesting a different theological placement of ‘submission’ within Christian life and prayer.

Incarnational Submission

Williams surveys a number of historical theories of atonement, including ransom, satisfaction, substitution, and moral theories. She argues against each of these theories, but retains a common strategy of those who proffered them, namely, rendering Christianity accessible to a particular audience by using the language and sociopolitical thought of their time. Williams reflects on the cross within the context of black women’s experience of surrogacy roles in the pre- and post-civil war periods. Black women have a history of substituting for white people by, for instance, working their fields, taking care of their children, cleaning their homes and being used for sexual gratification. Williams (2006: 11) uses and critiques liberation and feminist thought to construct ‘a Christian understanding of redemption that speaks meaningfully to black women, given their historic experience with surrogacy’. For her, Jesus’ purpose was not to die a self-sacrificial death in order to ransom humanity from the devil, satisfy God’s wrath, substitute for humanity’s sin, or reveal divine love through suffering. None of these interpretations of the cross is good news for black women, who would thereby be glorified in their surrogacy roles rather than delivered from them. In Williams’ (2006: 11) account, the cross is the gory suffering of a human being who ran afoul of those with political power. The cross is a sign of human sinfulness; it ‘represents historical evil trying to defeat good’. The cross retains theological importance for Williams as a reminder of human sinfulness, and an opportunity for solidarity with sufferers.

Karen Baker-Fletcher highlights Williams’ understanding of redemption as a refusal to glorify the cross. Given the history of lynchings in the United States, African-Americans, in particular, associate suffering with hanging on a tree. She (1997: 78; see also Cone, 2011) implores her readers to remember, ‘While humankind in patriarchal cultures has defiled trees and people alike by making trees tools for executing freedom fighters and the dispossessed, trees are in truth symbols of life. Moreover, the lives of those lynched or crucified on trees are also sacred. Those who have struggled for justice are like a tree of life, which gives hope to the dispossessed’. Oppressed people identify with the crucified Jesus as a co-sufferer even as they actively oppose injustice (see Williams, 2013: 108).

For Williams (2006: 11), the gospel is primarily about living and living well in community with others: ‘the spirit of God in Jesus came to show humans life – to show redemption through a perfect ministerial vision of righting relationships’. Jesus does not become the victor over sin and death through the cross. Instead, Williams (2006: 12) explains,

Jesus conquers the sin of temptation in the wilderness (Mt 4:1-11) by resistance – by resisting the temptation to value the material over the spiritual (“Man shall not live by bread alone”); by resisting death (not attempting suicide; “if you are the son of God, throw yourself down”); by resisting the greedy urge of monopolistic ownership (“He showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me’). Jesus therefore conquered sin in life, not in death.

There are definite similarities between Coakley’s understanding of kenosis and Williams’ description of resisting temptations here. By refusing inappropriate priorities, death, and greed, Jesus never took up sinful forms of power. However, by emphasizing life and not death, resistance and not waiting, Williams takes a different theological approach than Coakley, who highlights the passion narrative as the theological location of submission in prayer. Williams (2013: 205–206) strives, rather, to promote a culture of resistance, survival, and increasing quality of life.

Although a departure from the lines of thought currently being pursued in this conversation, I would like to introduce Friedrich Schleiermacher as a valuable partner in the discussion. Schleiermacher’s famous emphasis on creation’s absolute dependence upon the divine may be used to reconstruct Christian ‘submission’ in a way that further resonates across the theological spectrum, including diverse evangelical, feminist, and womanist perspectives. Many would agree with Schleiermacher that creatures are wholly dependent on the divine for their existence, preservation, and enjoyment of life. Further, many would agree that submitting to the divine is an appropriate practical implication of the doctrine of creation and redemption.

Paying special attention to feminist concerns, however, Anna Mercedes (2011: 37) highlights a legitimate criticism of focusing on creation’s absolute dependence upon the divine. This emphasis seems to hold out ‘a cosmic contrast between power and vulnerability’. Indeed, both absolute dependence upon the divine in general, and Coakley’s ‘portrayal of contemplative space-making’ in particular, still call to mind, Mercedes (2011: 36) explains, ‘an old-fashioned heterosexual coupling between a male (God) and a female (humanity): the submissive one makes space to willingly receive the potency of her divine lover. Consensual and nonviolent, yes – but not a transformation of gender norms’.

One response to this critique might be similar to Coakley’s (2002: 32) early reply to Hampson on the same issue: submission to the divine is a problem for feminist thought only if it retains gender stereotypes. However, these stereotypes are, in part, what feminists seek to abolish. If the divine is not associated with the male and masculine, then in the relation of absolute dependence of humanity to the divine there is no danger of reinforcing sex-stereotypes. This response is logically compelling. Unfortunately, however, the present condition of human life is still very much marked by sexism, where the divine is, in fact, associated with the male and masculinity. Whatever is the case logically, emphasizing the relation of absolute dependence on the divine in the current context does evoke and reinforce patriarchy, including the sex-stereotypes and gender prescriptions patriarchy involves.

A beneficial way forward – which both retains prayerful submission to the divine and avoids reinforcing sex-stereotypes – is to focus attention away from submission to the divine per se and to focus attention instead on submission to the divine love and wisdom in creating the world with its web of interrelations (see Schleiermacher, 1996: 18–54). This is, in fact, a much more accurate understanding of Schleiermacher’s notion of absolute dependence as well. For him, there is no submitting to the divine in general, but only absolute dependence upon the divine causality in love and wisdom. That is, the divine should not be considered apart from the world in relation to Christ. Schleiermacher’s (2004) 1801 sermon, ‘The Power of Prayer in Relation to Outward Circumstances’, offers resources for constructing an incarnational form of submission that takes its cues not from the God-world relation writ large but – more directly related to Christian life – from the person of Christ. By introducing Schleiermacher’s work here, I aim to connect a particular understanding of ‘submission’ with a correlating prayer practice that could advance the ecumenical conversation among evangelicals, feminists, and womanists. I will use Schleiermacher and womanists’ emphases on both dependence and interdependence to construct ‘incarnational submission’. Coupled with Schleiermacher’s notion of ‘prayer without ceasing’, I will anticipate how a feminist ecumenism that keeps faith with womanist voices could be forged. This constitutes a break with Coakley’s apophatic approach, but also serious support for the project of feminist ecumenism of which Coakley’s work is a part.

In ‘The Power of Prayer’, Schleiermacher considers Mt. 26.36–46, where Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemane before his arrest. Schleiermacher takes Christ’s prayer here as a model for developing a properly Christian practice of prayer. As he (2004: 38) defines it,

To join the thought of God with every thought of any importance that occurs to us; in all our admiration of external nature, to regard it as the work of His wisdom; to take counsel with God about all our plans, that we may be able to carry them out in His name; and even in our most mirthful hours to remember His all-seeing eye; this is the prayer without ceasing to which we are called.

‘Prayer without ceasing’ is not to be identified with petitionary prayer and an attendant belief in the effectiveness of such prayer to change outward circumstances (but see Yong, 2012: 52–53). ² Such a belief would set ‘limits to the reasonableness of our wishes, and even to the humility of our hearts!’ (Schleiermacher, 2004: 39). Using Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane and its results as a paradigm case, Schleiermacher (2004: 39) concludes that any apparent granting of petitions requested in prayer cannot be attributed to the divine’s pleasure with the petitioner, the petitioner’s need of special help, or the nature of that which was requested. If any petition seems to be answered, what was requested was simply already part of the divinely ordained interdependent web of creation rather than being the result of divine intervention.

The purpose of prayer, Schleiermacher explains, is not to change the course of events, but to

lift us up out of the helplessness into which we are brought by fear and passion, and bring us to the consciousness and full use of our powers that so we may be able in all circumstances to conduct ourselves as it becomes those who remember that they are living and acting under the eye and the protection of the Most High (2004: 44).

Prayer is meant to empower the Christian to live as one in right relation to the divine – the unchangeable, ineffable, Only Wise, and Kind One. When the divine love and wisdom are rightly understood, then in prayer,

We are occupied with something else than our feelings; with the question, What will be required of me should this or that befall? What kind of powers shall I employ? What kind of stand shall I make against it? What acts of thoughtlessness must I avoid? And if we find that it always depends on those same qualities which we have often exercised and studied over; that the whole of what we may be able to accomplish consists of single acts which we have often before performed with good results; then the soul that had shrunk in fear comes back to the consciousness of its powers; then we feel ourselves strong enough to walk in the way that God has traced out for us, strong enough to comfort those who are sad on our account and more disheartened than ourselves; and if the hour comes when the evil does befall, we can say, with a mind composed and at peace, Let us rise and go to meet it (Schleiermacher, 2004: 46).

This passage is reminiscent of Williams’ emphases on overcoming sin in life rather than in death, actively living well, and resisting injustice until the end. It also side-steps the problem Mercedes raises about reinforcing sex-stereotypes in submission to the divine, since Schleiermacher denies the contrast between divine power and human weakness. Human weakness is not required for divine power to be made manifest; likewise, human power does not negate divine activity. Schleiermacher explains that when such a contrast is at the centre of Christian prayer, it tends to be used manipulatively:

For why is it, after all, that our prayer takes the form of entreaty? When we desire something that we ourselves cannot accomplish, and at the same time remember God; then it occurs to us first of all the thought of His almighty power in contrast to our weakness, and we would like to try to make that power favourable to us. That is prayer as dictated by the weak human heart. But there lies at the bottom of this a defective idea of God (2004: 49).

Schleiermacher (2004: 50) continues: ‘He who is chiefly aroused to the thought of God by a sense of dependence certainly does not think really of Him at all, and the true Christian spirit is utterly wanting in him’. Of course, Schleiermacher wholeheartedly maintains the absolute dependence of all things in creation on the divine love and wisdom. What he is insisting on here is that right prayer is not motivated by a desire to use divine power to fill a gap created by a mismatch between human weakness and desires. Likewise, the relation of the divine to the world is not an interventionist one. Instead of a contrast between divine power and human vulnerability and the notion that the divine intermittently acts in the world, Schleiermacher understands true prayer as:

A heart-stirring thought of the Creator, when our eye rests on His works, out of the quiet delight which we take in his creation; a thought of the Ruler of the world, checking our false estimates, amidst our talk of the fortunes and undertakings of men; a sense of Him whose image becomes manifest in us when we feel ourselves overflowing with love and good-will, amidst the social enjoyment of those noble human feelings; a glad sense of His love when we are enjoying His gifts; when we succeed in some good work, a thankful sense of His support; when we meditate on his commandments, the great hope that He wishes to raise us to His own likeness; this is true prayer (2004: 50–51).

True prayer is the constant remembrance, sense, and trust of the divine in relation to all matters of importance in life. It is, therefore, decidedly present amidst day-to-day activities. Prayer without ceasing occurs while delighting in creation, conversing about business, enjoying others’ company, appreciating divinely given gifts, walking, working, loving, and contemplating. It is cognizant of ongoing divine creation, sovereignty, presence, love, support, and goodwill in everyday life. This kind of prayer is embodied and particular.

Prayer without ceasing shares with Coakley’s view an emphasis on non-grasping humility and submission to the divine activity. In contrast to apophatic submission, however, submission constructed in relation to prayer without ceasing is theologically located not in a repetition of the passion narrative, but in the bodily particularities of a life well-lived within contexts variously characterized by challenges, tragedies and delights. It is consonant with the work of Emilie Townes (2006: 2; see also Althaus-Reid, 2000), who suggests that there is a need for theologians to become ‘very particular about the particular’. This is ‘incarnational submission’: living and living well in relation to others through attunement to the divine activity in all things, and submission to divinely ordained dependence and interdependence. Incarnational submission is rather different than space-making or self-purgation. In incarnational submission, one submits not to the divine ‘blankness’, but to the divine love and wisdom in creating the web of interrelations in which creatures live.

Incarnational submission is therefore in keeping with womanist theologies that aim to avoid repeating oppressive patterns of self-negation and passivity, and emphasize instead the interdependence of creation. Traci West’s (2006: 127) description of liturgical practices that highlight the interdependence of creation bring the conversation about incarnational submission to a point:

Christians need worship rituals that destabilize rituals of white dominance and confront its entangled religious and political veneer. Especially for predominantly white faith communities, liturgical acknowledgment of dependence upon both God and upon other people could lead to an awakening, instigating a cognizance of the rituals of white dominance in the broader community in which they also participate.

By emphasizing submission to the divinely created web of existence within which humans live and move – which includes dependence upon other persons for both joy and justice – liturgical practices could be developed that disrupt both classism and racism (West, 2006: 139–40). In this way, ‘incarnational submission’ could expand feminist ecumenism so that it takes into account women from different socio-economic classes and racial experiences.

Before concluding, I want to return to the commonalities between evangelical women, feminists, and womanists that can be discerned within Griffith’s account of Aglow women, namely, their focus on the need for boundaries of freedom and their pursuit of women’s well-being. These commonalities are repeated in incarnational submission’s focus on creaturely dependence and interdependence. Women may enjoy well-being by submitting to the divine love and wisdom in relation to creation, and their interdependence within the created order. Furthermore, incarnational submission has the potential to shift an evangelical focus from hierarchical boundaries created by patriarchal society to a focus on limitations set by divine love and wisdom in the creation and redemption of a complex interplay of various creaturely beings and activities. By recognizing the complexity of creaturely limitations through interdependent life, incarnational submission could become a common frame of reference within which evangelicals, feminists, and womanists might begin to imagine women’s well-being together.

Focusing on prayer without ceasing and incarnational submission rather than on entering a holy death and holding open a negative space for divine power in contemplative prayer might allow feminist ecumenism to expand to include evangelicals who recognize the need for bounded freedom, along with womanists who know very well the need to pursue survival and an increasing quality of life. While some form of contemplative prayer could certainly be beneficially used in concert with prayer without ceasing, an incarnational, rather than cruciform, type of submission could broaden and nuance feminist and womanist thought while potentially extending its influence.

Submission, while important for inculcating humility before the divine activity of love and wisdom, ought to be conceived not as apophatically cruciform but as concretely carnal or incarnational. Schleiermacher’s 1801 sermon on the power of prayer outlines a form of incarnational submission that might be adopted by women across the theological spectrum, thereby advancing the conversation begun by Coakley and Hampson. Incarnational submission is marked by delight in creation, enjoyment of relationships, and a glad sense of the divine presence while accepting each person’s small part within the interdependent web of existence. The interconnected web within which humanity lives forms the boundaries of freedom for evangelical, feminist, and womanist Christians, within which women’s well-being may be sought after. Importantly, Christians who have practised prayer without ceasing might be able to confront the injustice perpetrated against themselves and others with trust that there is a way where there seems to be no way (Coleman, 2008).