AAR: Reimagining with Christian Doctrines

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AAR, Cynthia Rigby, Eboni Marshall Turman, grace ji-sun kim, Jenny Daggers, Joy McDougall, palgrave macmillan, Pamela Brubaker, Reimagining with Christian Doctrines, Serene Jones, Theresa Yugar, Wendy Farley

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My fourth book, Reimagining with Christian Doctrines: Responding to Global Gender Injustices (Palgrave) co-edited with Jenny Daggers will be published February 2014.

This collection of essays from a diverse group of respected feminist theologians “reimagines” the doctrines of creation, Trinity, resurrection, incarnation, church, and sin in creative and always embodied ways. In particular, they seek to hear and to respond to the cries of the suffering and voiceless of the world. It is my hope that others who read this book will be equally inspired to be as honest and sensitive as its authors, and also dare to constructively re-imagine new ways of doing theology, that we may truly embody God’s vision for justice in the world.

Foreword: Wendy Farley

Contributors:

Pamela Brubaker, Cynthia Rigby, Eboni Marshall Turman, Theresa Yugar, Joy Ann McDougall, Jenny Daggers & Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Some of the contributors will be on the book panel at the American Academy of Religion annual conference (November 23-26 in Baltimore, MD). “Wildcard Session“.

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Wildcard Sessions

Theme: Reimagining with Christian Doctrines; Responding to Global Gender Injustices

Serene Jones, Union Theological Seminary, Presiding

Sunday – 5:00 PM-6:30 PM

Room Assignments Available Only to Members. Login here and then click the Program Book link at the top of the page to return.

AAR Panelists

In The Oxford Handbook in Feminist Theology (2012), Serene Jones names creative imagining of traditional doctrines as a ‘subfield’. The Handbook makes an exemplary presentation of feminist theology as global praxis; the subfield receives no further attention. Yet the subfield persists. The proposed panel seeks to investigate its effectiveness in the furthering of global gender justice. As contributors to Horizons in Feminist Theology (1997), Jones placed traditional doctrine as enduring ‘rock’ over against the restless poststructuralist ‘hard place’, with its greater responsiveness to women’s diverse lived experiences, while Chopp invited feminist theology to counter Enlightenment resistance to theological doctrine. While First World preoccupations are prominent in Horizons, Handbook’s document of contemporary global gender injustices is in tune with postcolonial critique. Are imaginative reformulations of doctrine consequently the preserve of First World feminist theologians? What is the transnational reach of these ‘enduring’ revisions?

Joy McDougall, Emory University

Re-imagining the Condition of Sin as the Bondage of the Eye/I: A Transnational Wager

This paper tests the transnational traction of a feminist re-imagining of the condition of sin as the “bondage of the eye/I” to address global gender injustice. I ask whether re-imagining the classic Protestant understanding of “the bondage of the will” in terms of occluded vision and imprisoned gender identities can address the specific forms of scarcity (educational, nutritional, health care, and economic) that disproportionally affect women’s livelihoods and agency in the global south. Rather than inscribing a colonial gaze on such gender injustices, my aim is to travel with my feminist proposal into a different cultural and ethnic context, that of South Korea, and engage it with the homologous account of the condition of sin and of the freedom of the Christian that has been formulated by Korean feminist and minjung theologians, e.g. the categories of han and hanpuri.

Jenny Daggers, Liverpool Hope University

In a Trinitarian Embrace: Reflections from a Local Eucharistic Community in a Global World

This paper examines trinitarian liturgical language in awareness of postcolonial world Christianity and contemporary multireligious societies after Christendom. Its focal point is the Eucharistic liturgy shared by a gathered Anglican congregation in Manchester, UK. In this local place, descendants of those who built this nineteenth century church mingle with fellow-Christians drawn from across the globalizing world; links are formed with Christian communities across twenty-first century world Christianity. Eucharistic sharing – people together with priest, received tradition with new elements – draws us into God’s trinitarian embrace. Weekly Eucharistic gathering grounds involvement in social justice issues, and the building of interfaith connections. The trinity as invoked in the lived religion of eucharistic community enfolds those gathered Christians in their weekly coming in; the trinitarian language of Christian particularity upholds them in their going out to work in solidarity and friendship with neighbours of other faiths, or none.

Eboni Marshall Turman, Duke University

Black and Blue: A Womanist Assessment of Moral Injury in the Doctrine of the Incarnation

In rebellion against black liberation theology’s privileging of the cross, this paper identifies Jesus, the enfleshment of God in Christ, as ontic and epistemological center of black women’s faith. It engages the Doctrine of the Incarnation as conceived in the Chalcedonian Definition as starting point for exploring the body as perpetual theological problem. A theoethical dilemma posed by the particularity of the black woman’s body has similarly compromised gender relationality in the black church’s re-production of sexual-gender injustice behind the veil of race. A gendered body politics is revealed that curiously mimics the racialized oppression the black church sought to escape in its formation at the interstices of abolition and enslavement. The paper asserts the Doctrine of the Incarnation as a womanist mediating ethic that identifies black women as homoousious with Jesus Christ as to his humanity; thus, calling for a recognition of the redemptive possibilities of black women’s bodies in subaltern sacred spaces.

Cynthia Rigby, Austin Theological Seminary

Bodies, Whole

This paper will re-imagine the Christian doctrine of the bodily resurrection, both of Jesus Christ and of all embodied creatures. Appropriations of the doctrine used to promote the ideas that God is male (following the assumption that Jesus Christ is “eternally male” in his resurrected body) or that God will ultimately overpower the natural with the supernatural will be named and rejected. It will be argued, in contrast to such oppressive understandings, that the idea of bodily resurrection upholds and ensures the value of all bodies, made whole. Through the bodily resurrection of Christ we see again that the God-made-flesh includes this world, and these bodies, in God’s very life. To confess the resurrection of the body is to remember the value of all bodies even now – today. To hope for bodily resurrection is to take a stand against gender injustice, insisting on healing for every body.