Theology’s New Turn
A survey of contemporary movements
The
words had a vaguely alien sound: postcolonial, mujerista, queer,
eco-theological. But as I sat on our theology department’s hiring
committee and read applicants’ dossiers, it was clear that the thinking
behind these labels is shaping the work of many who are finishing
doctoral studies in theology today and are moving into the schools.
Disciplines once considered marginal now dominate the academy.
When I began my own theological studies
after the Second Vatican Council, Catholic theology was moving out of
the seminaries and into the universities and graduate schools. The
church’s traditional emphasis on neo-Scholasticism, a method once
described by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as “far removed from the real
world,” had already given way to the work of theologians whose work had
so enriched the council. Among them were Karl Rahner, S.J., Edward
Schillebeeckx, O.P., Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Küng, Karl Barth and
especially the French ressourcement theologians Yves Congar,
O.P., Henri de Lubac, S.J., Jean Daniélou, S.J., and Marie-Dominique
Chenu, O.P., who sought to recover the formative biblical, patristic and
liturgical sources of the Catholic tradition.
If these theologies were different from the
abstract, nonhistorical arguments of the neo-Scholastics, they were
still largely European works, universal in conception, focused on the
church and its tradition as understood in the West. But already the
theological horizon was changing. Influenced by the postmodernist ethos,
theology was becoming increasingly pluralistic, contextual and
postcolonial. With the postconciliar ferment in Latin America, the new
practitioners of the theology of liberation were already emphasizing a
radically contextual theology, rooted in the social realidad of their often oppressive societies and based on praxis.
Postcolonial Theory
The postmodern ethos also found
expression in the work of the postcolonial theorists. Concerned about
the negative impact of Western colonialism on literature, history,
politics, cultures and their peoples, they seek to “decolonize” or
“deconstruct” Western ways of knowing as well as the restrictive
identities constructed on mutually exclusive “binaries,” male/female,
white/black, first world/third world, heterosexual/homosexual and so on.
But postcolonial theory is not easy to grasp. It employs an abstract,
postmodern language and a lexicon of bewildering terms. Its
practitioners speak of difference, agency, whiteness, hybridity,
homogenization, recoding, social location, heteronormativity and
hegemony, and they employ strategies like deconstruction, dispossessing
of the self and border crossings. They have moved beyond the identity
politics of the 1980s and early ‘90s to a focus on culture, which for
them involves more than geography, politics, religion and ethnicity.
They see it as a complex web of relationships shaped by race, class,
gender and sexuality that influences our thinking and results in
privilege and marginalization.
Thus postcolonial theorists challenge
Western, universalist ways of thinking that ignore social location, the
effects of colonialism and its new form of globalizing capitalism, which
displaces women, people of color and others who are different, creating
modern diasporas. Their method is deconstruction, not to destroy but to
reveal the exclusionary character of imperialism and privilege and the
constructed character of much that is considered normative, making room
for the disadvantaged other.
Many of them are determinedly secular,
ignoring the power religion still holds for people in the Southern
Hemisphere, although, as Susan Abraham ironically observes, their work
reflects a “neocolonial” secular culture in its efforts to eliminate the
religious. As postcolonial theory became increasingly popular in the
academy, its methods soon began moving into the church. Two areas of
theological concern particularly influenced by postcolonial theory are
feminist studies and queer studies.
Feminist Studies
While biblical scholarship was long
dominated by the universalist approach of the historical-critical
method, in the 1980s a new feminist hermeneutic emerged, developed to
uncover the suppressed presence of women in New Testament texts. At the
same time, others began to elaborate a feminist spirituality, raising
consciousness by sharing personal stories, particularly about their
experience of disempowerment, and taking women’s embodied existence
seriously, including aspects of female sexuality often ignored by
religion, for example childbirth and menstruation. They also emphasize
the goodness of the material and the bodily, including nonhuman nature,
and thus ecology—what is often called eco-feminism.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s,
postcolonial theorists, many of them women of color, began to challenge
these early feminists. They noted the liberal and secular framework of
their work, that it was largely a Western phenomenon. It assumed a
universalist posture, embracing all women, not recognizing the
privileged position the theologians enjoyed by reason of their
whiteness. Early efforts included womanist and mujerista theologies, for
black and Hispanic women respectively. A second generation of
postcolonial critics, among them Kwok Pui-lan, Tina Beattie, Gale Yee
and Musa Dube, highlighted new concerns like hybridity,
deterritorialization, hyphenated or multiple identities and the
relations between race, colonialism and patriarchy. They saw the
biblical story of Rahab the prostitute, for example, in the second
chapter of the Book of Joshua, as a story of the sexual and territorial
dispossession of native women.
More radical secular feminists argue that
not just gender but our understanding of nature itself is socially
constructed. Concerned to reject the claim that anatomy is destiny, they
end up failing to acknowledge the significance of the body, denying any
real meaning to nature. These feminists, including some Christians,
show a resistance to theology more characteristic of the Enlightenment,
even to the extent of silencing the voices of women of faith.
Not all feminists are allergic to theology.
Tina Beattie argues that the feminist theological body is neither the
disembodied body of the gender theorists nor the essentialized body of
some Catholic feminists. Rather it is a sacramental body whose true
meaning, notwithstanding its questioning of the patriarchal and clerical
dynamics of exclusion and control, is to be found through its
incorporation into the Christian story in prayer, worship and daily
life. She cites, though in a critical way, Pope John Paul II’s theology
of the bodily self as gift precisely in our creation as male and female.
Queer Studies
Another movement, queer
studies—which developed in the early 1990s out of feminist studies, with
its argument that gender and sexual identities are socially
constructed—sought to deconstruct conventional notions of
“heteronormativity.” Reclaiming the term queer as a term for
studies on homosexuality is deliberately provocative, and some of its
practitioners are clearly hostile to Christianity. But many are
practicing Catholics who are also homosexual. They represent a community
that in spite of a number of positive statements from the U.S.
bishops—“Always Our Children,” for example (1997)—are often marginalized
in the church. Their language is frequently off-putting, speaking of
“queering theology” or even “queering Christ.” They see homosexuality as
a socially constructed category of exclusion. Their intention is
neither to attack the church nor to reject all sexual norms but to make
room for those whose gendered and sexual identities make them “other” by
finding resources within the tradition that may have been overlooked.
Theologians working in this area, like
Carter Heyward, Robert Gros and Gary David Comstock, seek to reconfigure
the valuing of Christian relationality beyond reproductive difference,
stressing the inability to set limits to the church’s inclusivity by
setting boundaries that may be based on privileged notions of
normativity. And they stress that human relationality reflects the
relationality of our triune God. Graham Ward seeks to move to a broader
understanding of relationality by reflecting on the “displacement” of
the risen body of Jesus into the church, which in the process becomes
multigendered—not just male and female, but embracing many expressions
of being sexual. This is exemplified in the now ubiquitous use of the
initials L.G.B.T.: lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
Thus Graham Ward argues that being male or
female exceeds its anatomical reference; the malleability of the body
opens up to a broader, eschatological sociality that signifies
partnership, covenant, fellowship and helpmates. For him, same-sex
relationships reveal a love that goes beyond biological reproduction on
the way to the redemption represented by the coming of the kingdom. Thus
he envisions the church as an erotic community: “Our desire for God is
constituted by God’s desire for us such that redemption, which is our
being transformed into the image of God, is an economy of desire.”
Eco-theology
Other theologians are focusing
their concerns on the life of our fragile planet. Elizabeth Johnson,
C.S.J., asks what has happened to our belief that the natural world is
God’s creation, which means that God is its beginning, its continuing
existence and its goal. Without God’s intentionality, creation would
cease to exist, for God not only sustains it at every moment but in some
mysterious way brings it to completion in the divine life.
Sister Johnson argues that Greek dualistic
thinking led to the medieval distinction between the natural and the
supernatural, with the result that nature was excluded from the realm of
grace. The modern era transformed the biblical mandate from “dominion”
over nature (Gen 1:26) to domination. Nature was to be used, not cared
for; and as Europeans began to colonize other lands, they assumed the
right to dominate their darker-skinned, indigenous peoples. Sister
Johnson goes on to uncover the Spirit’s life-giving presence in the
natural world, in a creation groaning like a woman in childbirth,
longing to be set free (Rom 8:18-25). And she reminds us of Pope John
Paul II’s words, “respect for life and for the dignity of the human
person extends also to the rest of creation, which is called to join
humanity in praising God.” So dominion is not quite right; we are a
community with creation, a complex, mutually dependent network of living
beings, an ecosystem reflecting the glory of God.
Besides their concern for the protection of
the planet, some eco-theologians have taken on the cause of animal
welfare, appealing to the example of Mahatma Gandhi and Albert
Schweitzer. Gandhi’s principle of ahimsa, nonviolence, embraced
the animal kingdom as well as the human. Gandhi’s principle influenced
Schweitzer, the Protestant theologian who spent most of his life tending
the sick in Africa. From his youth Schweitzer had shown concern for
animals. Later he wrote, “There slowly grew up in me an unshakeable
conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on
another living creature unless there is some unavoidable need for it.”
This conviction grew into reverence for all living things, from the
amoeba to the human, and led him eventually, like Gandhi, to embrace
vegetarianism.
A New Conversation
As the Catholic Church begins to
function more and more as a world church, there will be new tensions
between the postcolonial churches of the global South and those of the
West, the periphery and the center, and with those who feel their
inclusion is less than full. The church needs to embrace all God’s
children, women and men, gay and straight, the gifted, the wounded and
hurting, and those on the margins.
There are signs that a new, broader and much
needed conversation has begun under Pope Francis. He has spoken several
times of the jurisdictional status of episcopal conferences. He
mentioned this again in his apostolic exhortation “The Joy of the
Gospel,” saying that their status, including genuine doctrinal
authority, has not been sufficiently elaborated and citing at several
points the concerns of the bishops of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Also unprecedented was the survey on contraception, same-sex unions,
cohabitation, marriage and divorce sent by Rome to all the bishops of
the world in preparation for the Synod of Bishops on the Family this
October.
In July the International Theological
Commission released a study, “The Sensus Fidei in the Life of the
Church.” Reflecting on the “sense of the faith” both of the individual
believer and of the whole church, the study called attention to “the
role played by the laity with regard to the development of the moral
teaching of the Church,” commenting that the “magisterium needs means by
which to consult the faithful” (Nos. 73-74). Even more remarkable, it
responded affirmatively to the question of whether separated Christians
should be understood as participating in and contributing to the sensus fidelium in some manner (No. 86), suggesting that the Catholic Church might learn something from other churches.
How is the sensus fidei formed? The
study recognizes that it cannot be reduced to an expression of popular
opinion. The study points to active participation in the liturgical and
sacramental life of the church as fundamental, in addition to listening
to the word of God, openness to reason and adherence to the magisterium.
A deeper appreciation for the sensus fidei means that the church is becoming a true communion, not a structure of the teachers and the taught (No. 4).
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