Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

65 страница из 123

The feminist theologians have made this central to their Christology. Both Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Elizabeth Johnson draw heavily on the feminine personification of Wisdom within the Jewish tradition. For Schüssler Fiorenza, the initial reflections on Jesus were all sophialogy, which got submerged by patriarchy. Indeed Schüssler Fiorenza writes:

When one moves from Jewish Wisdom literature to early Christian writing the figure of Divine Wisdom seems to disappear. Yet a symptomatic reading, which attends to traces and tensions inscribed in the text, can show that a submerged theology of Wisdom, or sophialogy, permeates all of Christian Scriptures.²²

For Schüssler Fiorenza, we are recovering a tradition, which can destabilize contemporary more masculine Christologies. This is “one but not the only early Christian discourse that might open up unfulfilled possibilities for feminist liberation theology.”²³ Schüssler Fiorenza writes:

A rediscovery of Wisdom traditions does not invite us to repeat the language of early Jewish-Christian Wisdom theology. Rather it compels us to continue the struggle with conventional masculine language for G*d and the exclusivist authoritarian functions and implications of such language. Feminist theology must rearticulate the symbols, images, and names of Divine Sophia in the context of our own experiences and theological struggles in such a way that the ossified and absolutized masculine language about G*d and Christ is radically questioned and undermined and the Western cultural sex/gender system is radically deconstructed.²⁴