God's Daughters Have Always Prophesied:
The Past, Present, and Future of Feminist Theologies-Part 2
by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

(Second in a two-part series)

Ed. note: This is the second part of a presentation Dr. Mollenkott gave at the EEWC biennial conference in Chicago in July, 2000. She organized her speech around three questions from Linda Williams' article built around the conference theme: "Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: You Shall Be My Witnesses" (EEWC Update, Winter, 1999-2000). In the first part of this series, Dr. Mollenkott discussed the first question, "Who are these daughters who prophesy?" She pointed out such biblical examples as Miriam, representing women in public leadership roles; Debra, a model of social activism; Huldah, representing women in the ministry and education; and Isaiah's wife, representing women called to homemaking and motherhood. Here she takes up the remaining two questions as she continues on the theme of prophesying daughters in the modern world. She begins by discussing, "What are the daughters to prophesy?"

Two major points 

The Executive Secretary of Ecumenical Theological Education of the World Council of Churches, Ofelia Ortega, brings together contemporary feminist prophecy and theology when she explains that their content is mainly two-fold. 

First, feminist theological prophets insist that it is the people who have been marginalized and excluded from theologizing-the nonclergy, blacks, Hispanics, aboriginals, young children, people with disabilities, women, lesbians, gays, and transgendered people of all sorts-these are the ones who should be encouraged to make their theological contributions in these latter days. As Joel said and Peter reiterated in our theme passage, God's Spirit has been poured out on all flesh. Therefore, the church cannot have clear vision without the help of all flesh. 

And secondly, feminist prophetic theology stresses that God is in solidarity with the poor and those who suffer: and that emphasis calls for personal, ecclesial, and social transformation of the most radical sort. No longer can any one perspective assume itself to be universal; no longer can praxis be divided from theory. Not that there have never been people who called themselves feminists who have failed to "walk the talk"; but one look at traditional theology's racist, sexist, and violent thought patterns is enough to convince us that feminism has radicalized theology by calling it back toward its biblical roots.¹

Contemporary Miriams

Contemporary Miriams are prophesying Jubilee (the forgiveness of Third-World debt) and are striving for gender-equity in corporate structures and in government. They have a long row to hoe: eighty-five percent of elected office holders in the United States are still male, and white males still hold 95% of the senior management positions. Miriam-prophets are also protesting the globalization that has allowed transnational corporations to operate outside most legal constraints so that the three richest men in the world now are worth more than the 48 poorest countries.²

Contemporary Deborahs 

Meanwhile, contemporary Deborahs are seeking to overturn the death penalty, reform the prison system, end racial profiling, provide competent representation for poor people, and break through the glass ceiling. Although since the 1960s, 45% of U.S. attorneys have been women, currently only 16% of law school professors are women, and only 8 % of federal judges are women.³ Therefore, much work remains! 

Contemporary Huldahs 

Contemporary Huldahs have completely revolutionized biblical studies by practicing a hermeneutics of suspicion, emphasizing social location of the interpreter, asking whose power is profiting from which interpretation, and recognizing the presence of the divine in the struggles of people everywhere who have been defined as "other." Roman Catholic Huldahs like Elisabeth Shüssler Fiorenza, Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth A. Johnson, and Joan Chittister have led the way in this revolution, proving once again that the Holy Spirit has a sense of humor-for if the Vatican had permitted the ordination of women to the priesthood, some of these Huldahs might have devoted their lives to parish ministries rather than to transforming biblical studies. And the latter transformation will eventually subvert the Vatican's position. (I love it!)

Contemporary "wives of Isaiah" 

Contemporary "wives of Isaiah" are prophesying in favor of reproductive freedom so that the children who are born will be loved and wanted instead of abused or deposited in trash bins. In 1999 alone, 439 anti-choice measures were introduced into legislatures in the United States. And 86% of U.S. counties have no legal abortion providers. Concerns that a change in the composition of the Supreme Court under a new president could seriously impact a woman's right to make her own decision about abortion were expressed often during the 2000 presidential campaign. If today's wives of Isaiah do not stay alert, reproductive freedom will be lost.⁴ Right here in America, one out of every four preschool children is living in poverty; and parking-lot attendants make more money than child-care providers; nurses earn less than tree-trimmers, school teachers are paid less than clerks in liquor stores.⁵ So the contemporary "wives of Isaiah" face many challenges on the road to achieving domestic justice and fundamental fairness in the lives of women and their children.

God's prophesying daughters in any age 

In these and in all other fields of endeavor, what the contemporary daughters are prophesying amounts to working out the implications and practices of the fact that God's Spirit has been poured out on all flesh. To marginalize anybody for any reason is to marginalize an incarnation of God's Spirit: this is the ultimate message of the daughters who are prophesying in our own place and time. We cannot love God whom we have not seen if we do not love our sisters and brothers whom we have seen: that is what God's daughters have always prophesied, and will continue to prophesy until God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

What does it mean to be a witness? 

Turning to Linda Williams' third question-What does it mean to be a witness?-we do well to apply some common sense about standard definitions of the word witness. 

In order to be a witness, an individual must have some personal first-hand knowledge of evidence or proof. A witness bears witness to what she herself has witnessed! I remember my relief as a much younger person when I realized that what my church called "witnessing"-collaring people to tell them they were going to hell unless they accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior-that sort of witnessing was not only rude, it was not witnessing, since it was not based on my first-hand life experience of who God is and how She interacts with Her creation. Since that realization dawned on me, I have tried increasingly to stick to what has been taught to me through my own studies, with the verification of my own life experiences. 

I remember the response to my presentation at the Norfolk conference where I talked about learning to "let go" when my partner of 16 years had suddenly moved out of our home. To me the most surprising response was that of women who were amazed that I could talk about it in public without feeling ashamed. 

Their response told me several things: first, that many of us still feel solely responsible for our relationships, as androcentric society taught us we are and should be. Second, that by God's grace I had at long last learned not to take responsibility for something I did not choose and could not change. And third, that the only way we women could hope to overcome our self-shaming androcentric socialization is to tell one another how the Good News is working itself out within our lives. If we tell our stories we will not have to reinvent the wheel but can gain hope and insight from one another's journeys. 

As God's feminist daughters who prophesy and witness, we share an incarnational theology that regards nothing as profane but sees everything and everyone as sustained by grace and therefore "capable of revelation."⁶ So we must act in solidarity with those who struggle to free themselves from the "crucifying power"⁷ of the current social order. Our social order has to a large degree been set up by separated egos who do not understand creation as an interconnected web of reality. But creation is inter-connected, in fact holographic, with God fully present at every point, "above all, through all, and in us all" as Ephesians 4:6 puts it. So what we do to others we are doing to ourselves and to God's Self.

Universal mutuality 

And it is not enough for us to insist on equity for women as well as men, girls as well as boys, and also for all the intersexual and transsexual and otherwise transgendered people who are to varying degrees a combination of male and female. No, even total human justice would not be sufficient if it based itself on ungrateful and unthinking exploitation of our physical environment, that which swims or flies or stalks, as well as that which grows where it's planted. The God who is "above all, and through all, and in all" expects nothing less than universal mutuality from the flesh on which She has poured out Her Spirit. 

Liberating biblical insights. 

My own hope for the future of feminist theology is that we daughters who prophesy and witness will engage the Christian tradition on an ever-deepening level, rather than merely walking away from it. As Elizabeth A. Johnson demonstrated in her stunning book, She Who Is, subtitled The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourses, it is possible to prophesy and witness concerning an incarnational, passionate, Sophia-God without speaking a word of heresy against either the Bible or the finest, most liberating tradition and insights of Christianity.⁸ And, as a recent Baptist study resource demonstrates, to accept and affirm people of all sexual orientations is not to abandon Scripture, but to engage in rightly dividing the Word of Truth.⁹ We older feminists have already discovered that "more light" continuously breaks forth from Scripture as we study it with new questions in mind, and in that faith we can continue to open up deeper and deeper veins of liberating biblical insights in the future. 

Let me give one more illustration of the kind of deeper engagement with Christian tradition that I'm recommending. Brigitte Kahl, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York, has approached the Book of Galatians in order to strip away androcentric, even phallocentric, interpretations that depict Galatians 3:28 as a "feminist proof-text" that is unrelated to the rest of the book. Kahl also strips away the anti-Semitism that denies Paul's Jewish self-understanding and therefore obscures what Paul is saying in Galatians: that in Christ uncircumcised Jewish males can remain uncircumcised and still be Jewish and still be followers of Jesus, because "in Christ difference [itself] has become different." As Kahl convincingly demonstrates, "The whole of Galatians is about reversing and re-evaluating identities." Not only does Paul proclaim that Jew and Greek are one, slave and free are one, male and female are one in Gal. 3:28; in 4:19 he acts on that oneness by calling himself a mother in labor; and the freedom Paul defends is according to Gal. 5:13 the freedom of one slave lovingly serving another slave! In 4:21 Jews are "presented with an 'Arabian' grandmother, Hagar." In Gal. 3, non-Jews are transmuted into Jews. Paul, who clearly considers himself a Jew and never calls himself a Jewish Christian, asks non-Jewish Galatians to become as he is (4:12). In our society, where "Otherness, being different, is automatically thought of in terms of being wrong, marginal, and inferior," Paul's message to the Galatians is urgently needed: that identities and hierarchies can "float" and not be "fixed." Pluriformity is OK; there can be oneness in Christ without denying difference. Kahl concludes, "The hierarchy between dominant and dominated is transformed into community."¹⁰

Reaching across disciplines 

Obviously, Brigitte Kahl is a contemporary Huldah, but I have cited her work as an example of the ever-deepening engagement with Christian texts and contexts that I believe we daughters are called toward performing in the future. I hope we will also increasingly work in teams that reach across disciplines. There has been a great deal of interdisciplinary talk in higher education for decades already, but it is still difficult to achieve in practice because of the way academic institutions are structured and the way academic funding grants are given out. Anne Fausto-Sterling, who teaches biology and medicine at Brown University, gives some idea of the kind of interdisciplinary work I'm talking about. In her new book, Sexing the Body, subtitled Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, Fausto-Sterling says that in order to grasp the extent to which the body is a "biosociocultural system," we will have to study gender simultaneously from the perspectives of history, language, literature, the arts, education, the media, politics, psychology, religion, science and medicine, society, law, and the workplace.¹¹ And since no one person can possibly have in-depth expertise in all those fields, the prophetic witness calls for teams of people working in community effort.

Sharing our lives 

But above all, the prophesying daughters from here on out must continue to witness to one another about our lives, which are our greatest resource. It is at the center of ourselves and our experience in community that we meet and interact with the Holy One in whom we live and move and have our being. There are times when "The Hand of God will. . . bring a disaster that functions like a giant broom, sweeping away all distractions and obstructions in the path of our greatest good."¹² Having been through that "sweeping broom" experience, I can witness that it was no fun while it was happening but that it strengthened my faith immeasurably and that the experience has now evolved into Good News both for me and for others. 

I have learned that instead of viewing our psychological weaknesses as shameful, as pathological dysfunctions, we can help one another view them as opportunities for spiritual growth and transformation.¹³ And not just of ourselves: when we work through divorce or codependency or excess timidity, or any other troublesome personal issue, we help not only ourselves, and not only others close to us; we have brought the whole interconnected web of reality a little closer to clarity and freedom.14 That's why it is important to focus on our own healing: the personal is political, and on a cosmic scale. The personal healing affects the planet precisely because all of us creatures live together in God and She in us. We all carry the eternal Sophia-Christ within us, and for that reason nothing loving in our lives is ever lost. Knowledge will vanish away, hope will no longer be needed, but Love is Eternal. So, if and when we put quality into our living of each moment, opening ourselves to Sophia-Christ ("yet not my ego, but Christ living in me"), then the apparent significance or scope of what we seem to accomplish doesn't matter any more. God Herself is living in and through us. The universe is selving itself in us. Love is living us, Eternal Love working itself out through our lives. What earthly achievement could be more important than that? 

When the disciples got curious about when God would restore power to Israel, Jesus responded in a way that can be applied to our individual lives and deaths, and also to the earthly results of our prophesying and witnessing. Jesus said, "It's not up to you to know the times or dates that Abba God has decided. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; then you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth." Daughters of God, our lives are our Jerusalem, and as we bear witness to the divine Spirit poured out upon the flesh of our experiences, we will be prophesying healing love to the Judeas and Samarias that immediately surround us, and the effects of that witness will ripple outward in ways we may never realize, even unto the ends of the earth. Thanks be to God, and Blessed be!

Notes 

¹ "Theological Education," Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), pp. 282-283. 

² Mary Hunt, "Spiritually Just," WATER 13, # 2 (Summer, 20000), p.1. 

³ These and previous facts are fully documented in my forthcoming book, Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach, forthcoming from the Pilgrim Press, Spring, 2001. 

⁴ Cynthia L. Cooper, "Abortion: Take Back the Right," Ms. X (June-July 2000), 17-21. 

⁵ See endnote 3. 

⁶ Tina Beattie, "Global Sisterhood or Wicked Stepsisters: Why Don't Girls with God-Mothers Get Invited to the Ball?" in Is There a Future for Feminist Theology? ed. Deborah F. Sawyer and Diane M. Collier (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), p. 125. 

⁷ Ibid. 

⁸ New York: Crossroad, 1993. 

9 Produced and distributed by the Alliance of Baptists, 1328 16th St, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Phone: (202) 745-7609. ($22.50 plus $2.50 p & h.) E-mail: . 

¹⁰ See Brigitte Kahl, "Gender Trouble in Galatia? Paul and the Rethinking of Difference," in Is There a Future for Feminist Theology, pp. 57-73, passim.. 

¹¹ (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 376. 

¹² Jacqueline Small and Mary Yovino, Rising to the Call: A Handbook for Evolving Souls (Marina Del Rey, CA: DeVorss & Co., 1997), p. 17. 

¹³ Ibid., p. 23. 14 Ibid., p. 27. 

© Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, 2000

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Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is a prolific author, educator, speaker, and a founding member of EEWC.