Toward a Counter-History of Christianity: Theologies and Critical Analytics from Rosemary Radford Ruether

Invocation

It is a daunting task to revisit the intellectual legacy of Rosemary Radford Ruether (1936–2022), a scholar whose body of work is so vast as to be unwieldy. With more than four dozen distinct monographs and 500 articles and essays to consider, how is one to appraise the influence of an intellectual corpus of this size and scale? Here, as I write, I conjure the memory and spirit of Rosemary, my mentor of more than 20 years, offering a personal and intellectual reflection on how her work and mentorship has influenced my own scholarship on the history of religion in Mexico. I also argue for the urgent and persistent relevance of Ruether’s thought for diverse disciplines at the beginning of the twenty-first century, especially for scholars outside of the immediate field of feminist theology, or theology more generally.

Following Ruether, I show how theological categories can be honed as theoretical analytics for historical critique, especially for thinking about colonialism and empire. There is essential work that theology and theologians can do in interrogating the past, especially the Roman Catholic past and its imbrication with extractive global processes. Theology, in its finest form, is fundamentally a critical and analytical project, as Ruether incisively demonstrates. I then move to consider Ruether’s expansive articulation of sacrament and sacramentality, a lens through which scholars of religion can better approximate and interpret the religious experience and practice of women, and Catholic laywomen in particular. I apply these lenses to consider the history of Catholicism in Mexico, my field of reference.

I write as a historian by trade, situated in a history department at a secular, public university: the University of California. Most contemporary, secular historians have scant use for the work of theologians, whose perceived motivations, imagined attachments, and perplexing abstractions are often regarded with skepticism or even suspicion. Here, I intend to confront some of this ambivalence, perhaps for a new generation of historians who strive toward a decolonial mode of inquiry. The theologies I elaborate on here are at least temporarily untethered (even freed) from the confessional apparatus (that is, de-correlated with a declaration of—or adherence to—faith): we might think of them as de-ecclesial theologies. ² To be clear, by this I do not mean “secularized” (with all its fraught, white, Western, sanitized, and ultimately exsanguinated implications). Many scholars, before and after Ruether, have engaged theology to criticize empire—beginning with the Spanish Dominican “defender of the Indians” Bartolomé de las Casas in the sixteenth century; through Latin American Liberation Theologians Ignacio Ellacurría, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Enrique Dussel, and Leonardo Boff in the twentieth century; and most recently many contributors to a recent volume on Decolonial Christianities. ³

Of her myriad books, I refer to three in particular: Sexism and God-Talk, by far her most cited work; Women-Church, and America, Amerikkka, the latter of which she was germinating when I was studying under her at the Graduate Theological Union (or GTU), in Berkeley, CA). ⁴ I do not mean to suggest that these are the most important or influential of Ruether’s works. Rather, they help open a discussion of the ideas I center here: theology as critical analytic; anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist interrogations of the past (that is, of history); and expansive sacramentality as it pertains to women’s experience.

Intellectual Lifelines: Autobiographical Entanglements

I trained under two of the great feminist theologians of the twentieth century, New Testament scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (my M. Div. thesis co-chair at Harvard Divinity School) and Rosemary Radford Ruether (my PhD dissertation co-chair at the GTU). Regrettably, and for reasons worthy of future interrogation and correction, to date I have found (or fashioned) few occasions to reflect on how these two formidable thinkers have shaped my way of seeing and interpreting the world. I first confronted Rosemary’s work as a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School reading Sexism and God-Talk, a lucid work of frank and candid genius. Bit by bit, limb by limb, Ruether discovers and dismantles the sexist throughline of the Christian tradition. Sexism was not an afterthought but the scaffolding of the church: the architecture of the tradition. I was at the time a Roman Catholic woman who imagined an unlikely future for herself as an ordained priest, and I found Ruether’s work revelatory. Harvey Cox (my M. Div. thesis co-chair) called it Ruether’s “suma.” She takes the religion, its formal theologies, its “god talk,” to the mat, as it were: wrestling like God with Job, without ever destroying or annihilating it completely. It is a work that stands the test of time, a critique that holds. Sexism and God-Talk was published the same year (1983) as Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. In a review published in Religious Studies, German theologian Ursula King weighs the texts against each other—finding Schüssler Fiorenza’s to be the more “foundational work”: a comparative appraisal I am sure neither scholar appreciated. However, King succeeds in identifying the “critical principle of feminist theology” that centers both works, signaling “a paradigm shift in theology as traditionally understood and practiced.” ⁵

Concluding my studies with Schüssler Fiorenza, I arrived at the Graduate Theological Union in the fall of 1999, with toddler and spouse in tow, to that “holy hill” as it is known by residents of Berkeley. I was recruited there in a single phone call by then dean Margaret Miles. Miles had herself only recently arrived from Harvard, and I knew of her and respected her deeply. It was Margaret who nearly single-handedly raised the funding for bringing Ruether—at Garrett Evangelical at the time—to the GTU in 2000. I took up studies with her almost immediately. She was the only feminist theologian on faculty at the time. Ruether found the GTU, a consortium of Catholic and Protestant seminaries with a shared library, to be forward thinking in some regards, and perplexingly retrograde in others. ⁶

Ruether was one of the seven major, twentieth-century theological thinkers who GTU students were required to study in preparation for the requisite general theology examination. She was the only woman on the required list, included along with Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Gustavo Gutiérrez among others. Over the course of a year, I prepared for and passed the exams, although upon completion I was warned by my then advisor that my feminist critique of German Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg was unacceptable and inappropriate in the context of a comprehensive examination. It was at that juncture that I asked Ruether if she would chair my studies, along with William B. Taylor, historian of Mexico at University of California, Berkeley.

Around that same time, scarcely a year into her tenure at the GTU, the male theologians that directed the theology area for the consortium lobbied to have Ruether removed from the list of seven theological figures required for the general examination. This was at one of their monthly area meetings, at which Ruether was present, and they argued publicly that now that she was on the faculty that she was somehow ineligible for the distinction. They ultimately failed in the effort, but Ruether recognized it for what it was: a thinly veiled sexist attack on their new colleague, a woman whose work was more recognized and distinguished than their own. As was her way, she shared the experience honestly and candidly with graduate students and her larger community of support, although to my memory, she nursed no hurt. Here I learned something deep. Ruether did not allow the attack to slow her down, to hinder her in her singular focus on the pursuit of justice through intellectual labor. She was so certain of her intellectual and earthly purpose that she was unencumbered (I cannot think how else to describe it). Indeed, Ruether consistently deflected attention and questions that framed her scholarship as an ego-driven enterprise. ⁷ She was critical of a new generation of scholars for whom personal advancement seemed (to her) to be at the center of their agenda. In contemplating the loss of her passing, I will miss most her frank and fierce clear-sightedness.

If Ruether herself did not dwell on the theology exam incident, the insult and intended injury were acknowledged by her female colleagues. At the opening convocation, the following fall (this must have been around 2002), Rebecca Parker, then dean of the Starr King School for Ministry, was invited to play a ceremonial march on her cello at the opening procession. Instead, she played a dirge, as the male theology faculty shuffled awkwardly into the ceremony. It leaked to many of us that Parker had played the sorrowful lament in recognition for the disrespectful mistreatment Ruether had received. But she also had done so for Dean Margaret Miles, whose powerful vision for the GTU was being undermined and blocked by the male seminary deans at the time. This is how I recall these events some two decades later.

As the GTU director of my doctoral studies, Ruether was profoundly supportive—even where my work, especially my foray into popular or lived religion, seemed to diverge from her field of expertise or interest. When I proposed to her that we co-teach a graduate seminar entirely in Spanish centered on the work of the sixteenth-century Dominican theologian Bartolomé de las Casas, she was resistant at first. Ruether initially regarded Las Casas, as many still do, as an apologist for colonialism: political philosopher Alberto Moreiras calls Las Casas the “utopian thinker of the Christian state,” asserting that he “wanted to avoid the destruction of the imperial territories and their native inhabitants for the sake of a more perfect territorialization.” ⁸ Moreira is not wrong. Yet I read Las Casas’s Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies as the first systematic critique of modern colonialism. But after re-reading Brief Account, beginning to end, Ruether agreed to co-teach the class. I know we both derived significant meaning from teaching that class together. Ruether was especially surprised (and pleased) that several Dominican novitiates and priests had enrolled to read the work of their forefather in the original language. I describe the experience of teaching this class and its difficult lessons in an essay in Rosemary’s honor. ⁹

As a faculty mentor, Ruether was in some ways unassuming in presence and presentation, but she was intellectually fierce. She was supportive of the graduate students who gravitated to her, but she was not sentimental and certainly not soft. At times, like every teacher, she was impatient with our predictable blind spots and reductionism. She forgave us much. Yet, I do recall instances when her one-sentence, razor-sharp corrections to a line of faulty reasoning caught myself and others off guard. It is one of the great graces of my life that, after leaving the GTU, Ruether taught for a time at the Claremont School of Theology (after moving to the Pilgrim Place retirement community in nearby Claremont, California), just as I arrived as a junior faculty member at UC Riverside, a mere 40 miles away. We were neighbors within driving distance for more than a decade. I am grateful for the time my three children spent with Rosemary and her husband Herc, paddling in the Pilgrim Place swimming pool. During those visits, Rosemary advised and supported me as I navigated some of the more difficult challenges I faced early in my academic career.

Searching out Counter-Histories of Christianity

For almost 20 years, I have been engaged in writing what I have recently come to think of as counter-histories of Christianity. These are alternative histories that center the beliefs and practices of lay Catholics, especially those from regions that were historically subject to European empire. Catholic practice in these communities was forged in the face of centuries of Christian imperialism. Catholic counter-histories are histories of resistance both within and in opposition to the church: rival histories that counter official and dominant narratives perpetuated by the magisterium. Counter-histories are sometimes creative retrievals, useful, and usable histories that can be put at the service of living communities as they seek to define their present. If there is an overarching concern that anchors my work it has been to ascertain and describe how subject people have worked upon the imposed Christian religion, a religion distorted by ecclesial power, to make of it a useable faith. With Ruether’s passing, I can now see more clearly than ever how in this effort I was joining Ruether in her lifelong endeavor.

The stories and perspectives that I write about have typically been disregarded as marginal, if not antithetical, to the tradition, roughly handled by church theologians and historians alike. In Biography of a Mexican Crucifix, ¹⁰ which was based on the dissertation I wrote under the direction of Ruether, Taylor, and the Jesuit theologian Eduardo C. Fernández, I follow a rural community in the central Mexican state of Morelos as they narrate their past and construct their shared identity in relation to a sculpted image of the crucified Christ that is more than 400 years old. The Indigenous-descended community regarded the Cristo as a living and agentic entity, and this is how he appears in my telling. I listened to how contemporary practitioners, women and men, understood the lines of historical descent to which they trace the origins of their Christian faith: not to the invading Spanish missionaries, but rather primarily to their Indigenous ancestors. Surely this can be understood as a form of counter-history, or even as the “sacred art of counter-conquest,” as I have elsewhere written. ¹¹

French philosopher Michel Foucault introduced the idea of counter-history in his lectures “Society Must be Defended.” Foucault’s historical archaeologies, his analytic excavations of histories of knowledge, are counter-histories because they “assume a contrapuntal relationship to traditional histories.” ¹² For Foucault, counter-histories break “with the historical order undergirding the very distinction between epochs and events, and thus the possibility of origins—discursive or otherwise—in history.” ¹³ Within this framework, the search for historical origins is no longer operational in the struggle for collective values. ¹⁴ This is where my working notion of Catholic counter-histories diverges from Foucault (and converges with Ruether). My recent book, The Church of the Dead, is positioned precisely as a search for alternative and usable stories of historical origin. ¹⁵ Here I confront the catastrophe of European colonialism even as I show how surviving pueblos de indios (as they were termed under Spanish rule) strategized their future survival in and through the church.

Ruether was fundamentally, even foremost, an historical thinker: justly preoccupied with the past. Most of her works were historical in scope and orientation. ¹⁶ She was by training a classicist and an expert in patristics, but the category of history was even more important for her than “tradition,” a concept closely related to patriarchal ecclesia. That she had not received formal training as a theologian is probably what freed her to make some of her most powerful and innovative criticism of the tradition. Ruether worried about history; she worried that the women theologians of our generation suffered from presentism and would miss or overlook the long struggles of our foremothers—the women who throughout the history of Christianity fought to animate and institutionalize gospel principles of justice. In Sexism and God-Talk, she explained the fundamental need “to situate oneself meaningfully in history.” ¹⁷ She searched for and highlighted the long trajectories of justice-making forged by women in the church. Even as she criticized the patriarchal ecclesia, Ruether pointed to its antidote: women church, a concept to which I will return.

Ruether’s historical emphasis is clearly articulated in a critical review published in the Scottish Journal of Theology in 1990. ¹⁸ Even here, in this short treatise, Ruether is sharply lucid. While she agrees with the author’s critique of “the patriarchal character of Christian theology,” Ruether debates Hampson’s thesis that the rise of feminist religious thought exposes Christianity as being irretrievable for women: Christianity, Hampson concludes, is “both immoral and untrue.” ¹⁹ Ruether’s critique hinges on the historical nature of Christianity: Christianity is historical, meaning that it is not a fixed tradition, but rather built on “bold re-evaluation of past scripture.” ²⁰ Rosemary explains, Christianity is

a living community in history, which does not just have a past, but a present and future. Like any living community, it has pasts that it remembers, that are foundational for its identity. But, just as a living person continually re-evaluates and even revises what it remembers in response to new demands and new perceptions of meaning, so the church, as a historical community, continually re-evaluates how it reads its past memories and even revises that which it remembers. ²¹

At its origins, Ruether suggests, Christianity emerged not from fixedness and sedimentation but rather from a process of constant reinterpretation. In the final analysis, this historical dynamism means that Christianity and feminism are not fundamentally irreconcilable. It is precisely in documenting this historical dynamism that we can understand Ruether as laying the framework for feminist church history. I see the Mexican church, the church of counter-history that I describe in my work, as participating precisely in these sorts of dynamic historical processes. This work of counter-conquest is not marginal to the faith of millions, but rather constitutive of Catholic ecclesiology globally.

The Lever of Criticism: Theology as Critical Analytic

In Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether defends her ongoing engagement with—her grounding within—the Christian tradition given its deeply ambivalent history: “One cannot wield the lever of criticism,” she writes, “without a place to stand”—the epigraph that opens this essay. For Ruether the place to stand is not “tradition” but rather history, as described above. For example, a ground to stand on would be the historical labor of women in the church for 2000 years. The lever of criticism is grounded against the fulcrum of history. But history is also the object of the lever of criticism. This is nowhere more evident than in Ruether’s critical interrogation of colonial theologies in America, Amerikkka, Ruether’s corpus shares with Las Casas a potent anti-colonial and anti-imperialist strand. America, Amerikkka presents a critical interrogation of US imperialism from the European origins of the myth of American chosenness to Manifest Destiny and finally to the political linkage between neo-liberalism and Christian fundamentalism in the present moment. Ruether explores how theologically informed colonial ideologies led to the wars of extermination that devastated US indigenous populations over the course of more than two centuries. ²² In the first chapter, she contextualizes American imperialism within other colonial ideologies that derive their energy from theological underpinnings. Drawing on the class we co-taught, Ruether introduces Las Casas as a critic of empire: highlighting his opposition to the Spanish appropriation of Indigenous lands and to compulsory labor systems.

Here the relationship between the theological and the historical is clearly manifest: “First, there must be explicit theological critique of those ideological themes that have been exploited by the theology of ‘America’ as elect nation, chosen by God to dominate and redeem the world.” ²³ Theological critique is leveraged against theological ideologies of domination. I was similarly inspired when writing Church of the Dead, my most theological writing to date. In it, I try to make legible the complex theologies at work in maintaining colonial structures by honing theological terms into critical analytics for the purpose of interrogating history. I term this “theological forensics” in that it excavates the many religious ideas that were fomented and circulated in the colonial cataclysm. For example, the idea of the body of Christ, the corpus mysticum, emerges in historical documents from the sixteenth century in relation to the demographic cataclysm of Indigenous death. I explore how the colonial corpus mysticum became living, enfleshed, and incarnate, both sustaining the colonial project and rebelling against it. The Mexican corpus mysticum was grounded in the vernacular theologies and affects of the violent death world of the colonial cataclysm. ²⁴

Sacramentality and Women’s Experience

Here I now turn attention to the idea of sacramentality in Ruether’s work, closely related to her critique of patriarchal clerical authority. I have referred to an “expansive” understanding of sacrament. By this, I mean that, within Ruether’s feminist theology, sacraments superabound the limits of patriarchal ecclesia—they must belong to all of us: “The liberation of the Church from clericalism also means reclaiming the sacraments as expressions of the redemptive life of the Church that the people are empowered to administer collectively.” ²⁵ Her argument is that the power for administration of sacraments should be collectively held, not individually specialized in the person of the cleric. This is particularly urgent with respect to the Eucharist, the central sacramental rite of the church. In Women Church, Ruether elaborates:

Since the actual sacramental actions of the Eucharist are rather simple . . . rather it is a matter of elevating this simple symbolic act of blessing and giving food and drink into the symbol of the power to control divine or redeeming life, a power that the clergy claim to possess in a way that is beyond the access of lay or merely “natural” human beings. ²⁶

It is important to remember that Ruether was also a liturgist. Her book Women Church is not just an academic argument but includes dozens of feminist liturgies. I am grateful that I was able to attend some of Ruether’s Women Church liturgies both at the GTU and later in Claremont.

Expansive ways of thinking about sacramentality, and about Eucharist specifically, have helped me recognize the religious leadership of laywomen not just as ritual leadership but also as sacramental and even Eucharistic. Because of Ruether’s work, I have been better able to recognize the sacramental labor of laywomen in Mexico. I have looked at the role of women as liturgical leaders, interviewing the mayordomas who organize collective pilgrimages or who coordinate care for local images of saints. I have attended recitations of the rosary in the humble homes of devotees to the Señor de Chalma and other local cristos that were, in essence, lay-led Eucharists. I can still remember the mayordoma kneeling before her altar in the pueblo of Tepoztlan. Behind her were several rows of roughhewn pews that she had erected on her property, creating a sort of house church, or domestic oratory. As night fell, she guided three dozen devotees through 2 hours of prayer, and then concluded with the sharing of traditional pan dulce and warm atole.

Consider another sacramental occasion, in a different country. In her home chapel in the Guatemala highlands, an Indigenous Maya woman celebrates her pueblo’s patron saint. An altar crowded with religious images and rich adornments, warm candlelight, and thick clouds of redolent incense physically incarnate the sacred. She prepares to welcome the larger pueblo community to a liturgy she has created and will lead in honor of the saint. Through her ritual actions she tends to the sacred, encountered first through its penetration and animation of the material world. Despite its colonial origins, the Christian sacred in many Latin American communities is not remote but proximate, not intangible but materially manifest, and the corresponding lived faith of many Latin American Catholics is familiar and tender, intimate, and affectionate. Devotion to saints, long interpreted within the narrow frame of propitiation, may be one of the most common and most effective means by which women believers navigate structures of ecclesial and sacerdotal power.

Not only are these ceremonies Eucharistic, but the laywomen’s roles can also properly be understood as sacerdotal. Home altars connect to and simultaneously rival the official Eucharist table of the church sanctuary. If the male priest tends to the eucharistic altar, so too do laywomen attend to and broker the presence of Christ through domestic and neighborhood altars and domestic chapels throughout Latin America. Lived religion is a mode of study that affords access to the sorts of intimate devotions that may anchor women’s experience of the sacred, bringing these rituals to the center of interpretation. That is, women’s devotional practices must no longer be regarded as deviant or marginal to the tradition but rather as constitutive of Catholic sacramental practice.

Conclusion

Ruether’s brilliant mind was precisely both lever and fulcrum—wielded in a reckoning with Catholic history in all its ambivalent complexity and difficulty. We are not afraid of history, Pope Francis said, as he moved to open the archives of Pius XII so that historians and Catholic believers alike could confront his crimes. ²⁷ In her truthful reckoning, Ruether was never afraid to confront the past, and its hold on us in the present.

The last time I saw Rosemary was during COVID-19. I heard on the radio that California had finally lifted restrictions on nursing home visits for the first time since the pandemic outbreak. I drove to Claremont, offered my vaccination card as pass, and found her and Herc together in their small but sunlit quarters in the skilled nursing facility at Pilgrims Place. We held hands, embraced, and wept together.

With Rosemary gone, I am looking for a place to stand to wield the lever of criticism. I will stand on her shoulders.