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Failure of Communication or A Case of Uncomprehending Feminism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1997
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1 Albrecht, Gloria, The Character of our Communities: Toward an Ethic of Liberation for the Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995)Google Scholar, See also Albrecht's article, ‘Myself and Other Characters: A Feminist Liberationist Critique of Hauerwas' Ethics of Christian Character’, Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, 1992, pp. 97–114Google Scholar, which appears in slightly revised form in Chapters One and Two of The Character of Our Communities.
2 The Character of Our Communities, p. 25.
3 Maclntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Many who criticize Maclntyre's work fail to understand that he is not suggesting that Thomism provides a better epistemology then the encyclopaedist or genealogist, but rather Thomism rightly displaces epistemology.
4 Maclntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1988), pp. 372–375.Google Scholar
5 Maclntyre, , Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 175.Google Scholar
6 Albrecht, , The Character of our Communities, p. 98.Google Scholar
7 Ibid., p. 99.I simply do not know what to make of this construal of my position. I note that Albrecht never quotes a text that substantiates this claim, but rather argues this is what I have to saygiven my use of the ‘myth’ of the tower of Babel. In her defense, I probably made a mistake in The Peaceable Kingdom when I used Reinhold Niebuhr's account of pride and sensuality as forms of sin. I availed myself of Niebuhr because I found his account of sensuality particularly powerful. However, in using Niebuhr I may well have suggested that I was underwriting Niebuhr's view that sin is the result of ‘a universal fear of finitude’. Such a fear may exist, but it is not the ‘cause’ of sin, since sin does not have a cause. What must be remembered is that sin is, theologically, a logically primitive notion.
8 For example, in The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)Google Scholar I argued that the very appeal to narrative is a reality-making claim that reveals the contingent character of existence. For God's creatures the question is never does God exist, but do we. Since we gratuitously exist, we can never ‘prove’ God's existence. Narrative is a correlative of the contingent character of our existence. That is why we can only tell a story about creation and sin. For sin does not exist by necessity but, given the goodness of God's creation, is a surd.
9 Another way to put the matter is this: Albrecht and I represent quite different intellectual cultures. One of the striking characteristics of current theological education in North America is that theologians are now more shaped by their graduate school identification than by their theological traditions—thus the alleged conflict between Chicago and Yale. The kind of challenges to Christian practice and speech represented by Nietzsche and Feuerbach, the status of Barth's response to those challenges, how that response helps us recover Aquinas' display of how God is the necessary and sufficient condition for any claims we can make about existence that have been the animating center of my work are not evident in Albrecht's book. That such matters have always been my main concern may come as a surprise not only to her, but to many who think of me primarily as someone who has been part of the recovery of the virtues and narrative for Christian reflection. Much more needs to be said about such matters, particularly why such considerations of these issues forced me to make ecclesiology the center of my work. But for the present I believe I have said enough to indicate something of the different intellectual worlds Albrechl and I inhabit.
10 I cannot refrain, however, from complaining about Albrecht's rather tiresome habit of suggesting that I must have ‘in mind’ certain positions for which there is simply no basis in what I have written. For example, in her book she suggests that I try to find a position between ‘my fellow pacifists’ Yoder and McClendon concerning the Church's social witness. Such a characterization not only sets up a false alternative between Yoder and McClendon, but she can cite no text that suggests I so understand myself (pp. 52–53). She later says (when I use the term Christian) I must ‘have in mind … white middle and upper-class, with some power and possessions, who fear the other who reveals to them their limits of power and knowledge’ (p. 115). I have no idea how she knows this. Of course, she can accuse me of ideological false consciousness but she certainly does not develop the kind of analysis to make that kind of claim stick. She even argues that even though there are ‘significant differences’ between John Blyand Sam Keen and myself, I, like them, am writing a theology consonant with the men's movement (pp. 130–137). Such a reading, to put it in the kindest terms, is simply incorrect.
11 For a defense of this claim, see Reno, R. R., ‘Feminist Theology as Modern Project’, Pro Ecclesia, 5, 4 (Fall, 1996), pp. 405–426Google Scholar. Reno quite rightly argues that Kant wrote the text reproduced by many feminists in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Reno characterizes modern theology as the attempt to eliminate the intrinsic authority of the received tradition in order to gain critical independence. A basic distinction is thus presumed between outward form (historical faith as symbol and metaphor) and inner essence (true religion as mystery and experience). From the beginning of my work, long before feminist theology was on the scene, I assumed that distinction was the source of our difficulties for both philosophical and theological reasons. For a critique independent of but quite similar to Reno's, see Woodhead, Linda, ‘spiritualising the Sacred: A Critique of Feminist Theology’, Modem Theology, 13, 2 (April 1997).Google Scholar
12 It may be that Albrecht's book was written before Mary McClintock Fulkerson's, Changing the Subject: Women's Discourses and Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995)Google Scholar had appeared, but I certainly think her argument would have benefited from Fulkerson's book. By referring to Fulkerson I am not trying to play one feminist off against another, but rather to point out that it is not simply a matter of being for or against women. Fulkerson is no less a feminist for denying ‘women's experience’ as a unified thing. Albrecht often accuses me of using abstractions, but her ritualistic invocation of ‘race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation’ (The Character of Our Communities, 26, 65, 92, 93) is anything but concrete. It never seems to occur to her to question her own ‘knowledge’.
15 I was recently asked by a friend why I do not write more about the ‘poor’. It is a good question. The quick answer is I do not know how to do so in a way that is serious. I do not believe it wise to write about the ‘poor’ or the oppressed in the abstract. I have written about the mentally handicapped because I know them. Surely they are among those who are the most ‘silenced’. Yet even putting the matter that way comes close to entering the shoddy game of ‘my oppressed group is more oppressed than your oppressed group’. It is my view that the most profound book written on these matters is Gustavo Gutierrez's Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993)Google Scholar. As Fred Herzog observed, Las Casas is not the center of this book, but the people Las Casas served are. The great achievement of Gutierrez is to have written the biography of the poor in a non-heroic form. The Spanish wanted gold. We want expanding economies, of course, to create wealth to make the lot of the poor better. As a result, we lack the resources (eucharistic resources, it turns out on the reading of Gutierrez) to remember or to be with the poor — or even more, to imagine what it would mean for us (that is, those of us who write articles like this) to be poor.
14 I find Albrecht's general stance toward the Christian tradition puzzling. She seems to assume that ‘Christianity’ names a monolithic ‘thing’ that is unavoidably oppressive. Of course, I am aware that she thinks I am equally guilty of assuming a far too coherent and favorable account of Christianity. But how can I, as one committed to non-violence, think that? Yet as one so committed I also think I have to give an account for those Christians who have felt the necessity of the use of violence in defense of the neighbor. That means Christian tradition names an ongoing argument not an ‘oppressive thereness’ or, alternatively, ‘an “oppressiveness” which is simply “there”’. Professor Kathy Rudy once objected to my characterization of my views about nonviolence as being a minority voice in the church. She observed thai most Christians have been nonviolent through most of Christian history because they were women and thus assumed to be excluded from warfare. That they did not ‘choose’ to be nonviolent, according to Rudy, makes little difference, since most of our most significant forms of witness are not what we ‘choose’. This is but a nice reminder that we never need to be defensive about the unfaithfulness of the Church once we understand that it is God that matters.
15 See, for example, the chapter ‘The Politics of Sex: Marriage as a Subversive Act’, in my After Christendom? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), pp. 113–132Google Scholar. I try to work out how such a view might make a difference for Christians thinking about gay relationships in ‘Gay Friendship: A Thought Experiment in Roman Catholic Moral Theology’, Irish Theological Review (forthcoming).
16 See his Transformed Judgment: Toward a Trinitarian Account ofthe Moral Life (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1990)Google Scholar.
17 Samuel Wells has, I think, quite acutely characterized the way I do theology as a ‘performance’ in his How the Church Performs Jesus' Story: Improvising on the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Ph.D Thesis: University of Durham, 1995)Google Scholar. Wells is one of those wonderful readers who understands me better than I understand myself. For those interested in the issues surrounding the particular/universal alternatives, I can do no better than to direct attention to Emmanuel Katongole's dissertation, Particularity and Moral Rationality: Questioning the Relation between Religion and Ethics Reference to the work of Stanley Hauerwas (Ph.D Thesis: University of Louvain, 1996)Google Scholar. Though I am often characterized as representing the ‘particular’, my best advice is to avoid thinking we must in the abstract choose between being ‘particularistic’ or ‘universalistic’ in the abstract.
18 I should also be quite interested in Albrecht's views aboutjudaism. In a footnote in her book, she criticizes my use of the ‘Jewish myth’ of the tower of Babel to assert a universal truthfulness for my description of the Christian ethical wisdom (p. 173). I have already responded to her construal of my ‘universalism’, but what I find intriguing about this characterization is her assumption that the tower of Babel is ‘Jewish myth’. Do Jews describe it as ‘myth’? From whence comes the language of ‘myth’ that it should be qualified by ‘Jewish’? My own reading of the tower of Babel was unapologetically Christian because I read Babel through Pentecost. I would certainly never try to tell Jews how they should read that story.
19 For Albrecht to wonder how I can praise Catholicism's disciplining practices without mentioning just war is simply a cheap shot. She knows very well I have discussed these issues at length — see, for example, ‘Epilogue: A Pacifist Response to the Bishops’, in Ramsey, Paul, Speak Up For Just War or Pacifism (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1988), pp. 149–182Google Scholar. Though the Bishops to whom I refer in my title are Methodist, I use the occasion to discuss the Roman Catholic Bishops' statement on nuclear weapons. I call attention to this essay because in it I was particularly concerned with the ecclesial issues surrounding the ethics of war.
20 I am indebted to Dr James Fodor, Kelly Johnson, and Laura Yordy for helping me think through this response.