FEMINISM and BEYOND

Chapter One:

What Is Theological Reflection?

What is theological reflection?  What is happening in our worlds today?  What do we think about the “gods” of our childhood?  How does this relate to any of the forms of feminism which sprouted up in the last decades of the twentieth century?  Exploring these  questions in a dialectic of world views may shed light on what is happening in these times of cultural earthquakes and the explosion of new ways of viewing our universe.

Plato was perhaps the first to use the word “theology” to indicate thoughts or meaning-statements about the gods.  For Plato in the fourth century BCE the gods were the pantheon handed down in tradition to explain  natural events and historical or human events. These had been described in Greek mythology at least from the time of Homer in the tenth century BCE.  By the time of Plato, the stories of the gods were unreal to the educated persons with whom he interacted.  This was an age in which their world view was recognized as naive and a new world view was forming.

In many ways, this transition characterizes the experience of many cultures and persons today.  The stories and the myths, the configurations of their world views, are shifting mightily.  Persons are disillusioned.  Their worlds fall apart.  In some cases they search for new arrangements of meaning.  New languages, new stories, even new religions, or religions new to them, provide a new way of thinking about their lives.  They convert from Catholicism to Buddhism, or from a Baptist tradition to Islam, or from secularism to Judaism.  A structure new to them gives new community, new meaning, and new hope.  This is happening, not only to individuals, but also to small and large communities, to whole churches or temples, and even to regional or national groups.

Where does feminism fit into these transitions?  What do we mean by feminism?  Is feminism related to theological reflection?  For the moment, I will define feminism in the words of Mary Ann Zimmer:

Feminism is a complex movement with many branches and streams.1  Most feminists, though, would agree with the definition of the feminist project as it is laid out by bell hooks.  Feminism, hooks asserts, can best be defined as “the struggle to end sexist oppression.”2

The struggle of women  to end sexist oppression is an integral and ongoing part of these world shaking transitions.  Even those women who oppose feminism as they know it are involved in the struggle for justice.  Women in India who gather together and embrace the trees so they cannot be cut down and destroy their environment are part of this struggle. Women in Albania who walk in protest raising loaves of bread to indicate their needs  are part of this struggle.  Women in Central America who work to build a three room school for  their children’s education may not know the word feminism, but they know the struggle.

Feminism is related by choice or by default to theological reflection.

In North America many Christian women move from traditional Christianity with its patriarchal structures, first to a reaction against these structures, and then to a search for the earth goddess  and then to the goddess within.  In the cultural and political movements of Guatemala, El Salvador, and other Central American nations, women grow through their reflections on the Bible and through their recognition of oppression to a new sense of themselves as persons, as women.  They become leaders.  They learn to work in solidarity.  They name a God who calls them from oppression to an exodus into human dignity.

With the help of others, Buddhist nuns with much difficulty escape the oppressions of the restrictions in Tibet and escape to India.  Supported by Indians, Buddhists, and North Americans, they are seeking education and the environment in which to practice their traditional faiths.  Korean women are recognizing how they have been used as economic slaves and are clamoring for dignity as they reclaim  the support of their  indigenous religious beliefs.  Caribbean women in the islands as well as in south Florida are rediscovering qualities of their voodoo and African roo