Chapter 7 - CONCLUSIONS: AMENDMENTS TO LIBERATION HERMENEUTICS

Summary

The ekklēsia of women as the new model of church can only be sustained if we overcome the structural patriarchal dualisms between Jewish and Christian women, laywomen and nun-women, homemakers and career women, between active and contemplative, between Protestant and Roman Catholic women, between married and single women, between spiritual and physical mothers, between heterosexual and lesbian women, between church and the world, the sacral and the secular…Solidarity in the struggle with poor women, Third-World women, lesbian women, welfare mothers, or older and disabled women spells out our primary spiritual commitment and accountability.

At the end of her groundbreaking work, In Memory of Her, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza articulated a very attractive conception of an “ekklēsia of women,” as an historical reconstruction and as an unrealized future. She has also advocated this concept as a theoretical space for feminist scholarship:

Within the logic of radical equality one can theorize the ekklēsia of women as a site of feminist struggles for transforming societal and religious institutions. Such a theoretical frame can displace the feminist alterity-construct woman as the theoretical space from which to struggle and replace it with the democratic construct of the ekklēsia of women, which is at once an historical and an imagined reality, already partially realized but still to be struggled for. Historically and politically the image of the ekklēsia of women, in the sense of the democratic assembly or the congress of women is an oxymoron, a combination of contradictory terms for the purpose of articulating a feminist political alterity.