In this chapter, I will trace the emergence and development of feminist theology in Christianity. I start by asking what counts as feminism, what counts as feminist theology, and what social and cultural conditions allow it to emerge. Feminist theology is not just women doing theology, for women have done theology that does not question the masculinist paradigms of theology. Nor is feminist theology simply the affirmation of 'feminine' themes in theology. What has been called 'feminine' in Western thought has been constructed to complement the construction of masculinity. Thus, the adding of feminine to masculine themes in theology mostly enforces the dominant gender paradigm.

Feminism is a critical stance that challenges the patriarchal gender paradigm that associates males with human characteristics defined as superior and dominant (rationality, power) and females with those defined as inferior and auxiliary (intuition, passivity). Most feminists reconstruct the gender paradigm in order to include women in full and equal humanity. A few feminists reverse it, making females morally superior and males prone to evil, revalorising traditional male and female traits. Very few feminists have been consistently female-dominant in their views; more often there has been a mix of egalitarian and feminine superiority themes. I take the egalitarian impulse of feminism to be the normative stance, but recognise the reversal patterns as part of the difficulty of imagining a new paradigm of gender relations which is not based on hierarchy of values.

The word 'dogmatic' may seem an odd choice for the title of this consideration of feminist theology. It could fairly be argued that feminists have themselves not been particularly favourable towards things dogmatic, sharing with the wider ethos of Western thought a modern suspicion of that which is handed down from some other place than here, and which does not bear thinking about but is only to be taken as read. Not only have feminists participated happily in the shredding of previously reputable dogmas with the use of critical reason, but many of their writings also reveal a hesitancy about being dogmatic in turn, an apology for what might appear to be so, even a self-effacement from making what might be taken as dogmatic claims. Nevertheless there is an important sense in which feminist theology undertaken by Christian women has been and continues to be dogmatic. It is to investigate the senses in which this is so that this chapter is written.

INTRODUCTION

The Holy Spirit, it is often noted, has been much neglected in Western theology and, when given serious theological consideration, usually subordinated to the Father and the Son, a kind of Cinderella of the Trinity. Alwyn Marriage comments: 'There is little doubt that our doctrine of the Holy Spirit is one of the least developed areas in mainstream Christianity.' Elizabeth Johnson notes the variety of metaphors employed by contemporary theologians to express this neglect of the Spirit: the Spirit is imaged as 'faceless' (Walter Kasper), 'shadowy' (John Macquarrie), 'ghostly' (Georgia Harkness), or 'anonymous', the 'poor relation' in the Trinity (Norman Pittenger), the 'unknown' or 'half-known' God (Yves Congar); in Johnson's own phrase, the Spirit is the 'forgotten God'.

Multiple reasons may be adduced for this Western neglect of pneumatology: the comparative paucity of scriptural reflection on the Spirit, coupled with the mysterious nature of the scriptural images and narratives which do exist; the pattern of classical theology which proceeded from consideration of the Father to the Son and only ‘in third place’ to the Spirit so that treatment of the Spirit often received short shrift; the privatisation of the Spirit’s activity to the sanctification of the individual in post-Reformation Protestantism, mirrored by the displacement of the Spirit’s functions onto the pope, the Blessed Sacrament, or the Virgin Mary in post-Tridentine Catholicism; and, most significant for our reflections, the association of the Spirit in the Bible with female imagery and experience so that the Spirit became marginalised and repressed just as women themselves did.

INTRODUCTION

Women's involvement in the church and its worship is neither a new nor an uncontroversial phenomenon. Paul exhorted women to keep their heads covered when praying or prophesying (1 Corinthians 11 1-16), and the author of the first letter to Timothy went even further by commanding that women should 'learn in silence and be completely submissive' (1 Timothy 2). But in her groundbreaking book In Memory of Her, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza argued that women were active leaders in the early church - indeed, the New Testament evidences their involvement by its very prohibitions. And the work of scholars such as Karen Jo Torjesen and Teresa Berger has added to the evidence for women's place in any consideration of church, worship, ritual, and sacrament. Yet the standard histories of church, liturgy, and sacrament take little if any notice of women's roles and contributions.

THE EMERGENCE OF POST-TRADITIONAL THEALOGY

The word thealogy comes from the Greek words thea or Goddess and logos or meaning. It describes the activity of reflection on the meaning of Goddess, in contrast to theology, from theos and logos, which is reflection on the meaning of God. The adjective 'post' in the title of this chapter is somewhat problematic. If taken to imply that feminist thealogies designated as 'post-traditional' have developed in reaction to the limitations of Christian and Jewish theologies, it would be correct. However, if thought to mean that such thealogies do not look to the past, it would be wrong. Indeed, many 'post-traditional' feminist thealogies might be called 'pre-traditional' in that they claim to be rooted in a past far more ancient than the sacred histories of Christianity and Judaism. Whereas the times of Abraham and Moses were less than 4,000 years ago, post-traditional Goddess feminists locate their origins in the mists of time, in the Upper Palaeolithic, about 30,000 years ago. On the other hand, because Christianity outlawed the explicit practice of all pre-Christian religions (with the edicts of Theodosius, called 'the Great', at the end of the fourth century ce), 'post'-traditional thealogies cannot claim a direct inheritance of pre-Jewish or pre-Christian religious symbols, rituals, or ideas. I have used the word 'post-traditional' rather than 'post-Christian' in this chapter, because the practitioners of 'post-traditional' religion include both Christians and Jews. A number of the most influential proponents of feminist 'post-traditional thealogy', including Starhawk (Miriam Simos), Naomi Goldenberg, Margot Alder, Miriam Robbins Dexter, Gloria Orenstein, Asphodel Long, and Melissa Raphael are from Jewish backgrounds.

Gertrude of Helfta opens her book of God's loving-kindness by addressing her God -Wisdom, Omnipotence, Goodness. In addressing the triune God, Gertrude places her book in a well-established Christian tradition. But this is more than a formulaic opening - reflection upon the doctrine of the Trinity has inspired some of the richest writings on love, gift, and grace, a significant part of it written by women, to be found in Christian literature. The doctrine of the Trinity, while by consent a difficult topic on which to preach, informs Christian liturgy and provides the basic frame for the ancient creeds - 'I believe in God, the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.' It has a central place in the Christian doctrine of God classically conceived. The Christian doctrine of God holds in tension two convictions seemingly at odds - that God is One, and that there is diversity in the Godhead. A motive for its formulationwas the Christian insistence that their faith was monotheistic, even while praying to one God and to Jesus as the Lord.

Feminist theology has become a global movement as women with different histories and cultures challenge patriarchal teachings and practices of the church and articulate their faith and understanding of God. Feminist theology is no more defined by the interests of middle-class European and American women and by Eurocentric frameworks and mind-set. Its scope has been much broadened to encompass the theological voices of women from the ThirdWorld and from minority communities in the United States. These newer theological partners have created new names for their theological movements, utilised new resources as theological data, challenged established norms of interpretation, and raised significant questions about the production of theological knowledge.

This chapter considers the ways in which feminist theology has been challenged by the emerging awareness of cultural diversity among women, and has creatively forged new insights in the midst of intercultural critique, dialogue, and partnership. Culture is defined by Mercy Amba Oduyoye of Ghana as ‘a people’s world-view, way of life, values, philosophy of life, the psychology that governs behaviour, their sociology and social arrangements, all that they have carved and cultured out of their environment to differentiate their style of life from other peoples’.

Reflection on the relationship between humans and the natural world is an issue of acute concern for most feminists, not just feminist theologians. Interpretations of this relationship range from more conservative conservation approaches to more politically radical ecology frameworks. Emerging from within this debate we can identify forms of spirituality that are centred on the earth, often loosely based round the notion of ecology. While not necessarily articulated as a systematic theology in the traditional sense of the word, those feminist theologians who write about the world as creation do so in the context of this ecofeminist framework. I therefore intend to begin this chapter with a brief review of ecofeminism in general, before moving to a discussion of particular theological interpretations.

THE RISE OF ECOFEMINISM

Ecofeminism is sometimes known as the ‘third wave’ of feminism, following the liberal-based emancipation movements of the nineteenth century and the more culturally conscious movement of the 1970s. Ecofeminism understood in this way is often associated with the politics of radical ecology. In this case there is a close parallel drawn between the structural oppression of both women and nature through the project of modernity. It was in 1974 that the French writer Fran¸coise d’Eubonne called on women to lead a practical ecological revolution through ecofeminisme. Ecofeminism in this sense becomes the means sought for the liberation of both women and nature.

'In what sense feminist theology is a biblical hermeneutics will be the central focus of the piece.' The Editor's notes for contributors to this volume of essays provided this coup de grâce of a final sentence. To get the words 'feminist', 'theology', 'biblical', and 'hermeneutics' into one sentence raises a breath-taking number of problems of definition and appropriation for writer and reader alike. And when even apparently the most straightforward of these terms, that of 'biblical', opens as many questions as it closes, where can we possibly insert the can-opener to liberate what has become, for many women, a particularly poisonous can of worms? Even if we decide that canonical norms will be satisfactory for our purposes, are we dealing with the text(s) familiar to most Protestant readers, those with Old (or Former, or First) Testament texts based on the Hebrew canon taken over by Martin Luther and the other reformers? Or shall we base our analysis on the longer canon favoured by the Roman Catholic tradition, which incorporates the writings called apocryphal, or deutero-canonical by those who would not grant them a place in the authoritative list? And does it matter? Do these technical issues affect the ways that feminists can read, challenge, appropriate, hate, or be nourished by the texts that our institutions have sanctioned in some way? Or alternatively, do we move on, refusing even a minimalist level of authority for these patriarchally countenanced materials, and opt for a deliberate lack of answers, in an approach which affirms Alicia Ostriker's call for a hermeneutics of indeterminacy, insisting on the multilayered, contradictory indeterminacy of meaning in texts, and prefers to offer a range of readings of particular texts rather than the development of some kind of theoretical meta-narrative.

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND WOMEN

Can feminist theology take the shape of philosophy of religion without contradiction? Philosophy of religion as practised by privileged Anglo- Americans has posed epistemological and ethical problems for women which, in turn, have led to proposals for a feminist philosophy of religion. Before consideration of the latter let us gain background on the opening question.

Women have been excluded by Western philosophy since its earliest days in Ancient Greece. Genevieve Lloyd has argued that the history of philosophy begins by imagining female powers as what have to be excluded by thinkers seeking to be rational. For Lloyd, ‘femaleness [is] symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind – the dark powers of the earth goddesses, immersion in unknown forces associated with mysterious female powers’. Today it is a great concern for women, and at least some men, who seek recognition as philosophers of religion, that reason has been defined by the symbolic, if not the actual exclusion of femaleness. To address the problem of gender exclusion, this essay will set the scene for an alternative sketch of rationality.

Admirers of Mary Wollstonecraft are often reluctant to see her as a religious thinker. This should not surprise us. The reiterated “appeals to God and virtue,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are “a dead letter to feminists now,” a leading feminist critic tells us, and if by dead letter is meant a failed communication, then it is certainly true that of all aspects of Wollstonecraft's thought it is her religious faith that has failed to speak to modern interpreters. Most studies do no more than gesture toward it, and then usually dismiss it as ideological baggage foisted on her by her times, with no positive implications for her views on women. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is generally located in a tradition of Enlightenment humanism that is assumed to have been at least indifferent to religion, if not actively hostile to it.

Virginia Woolf, in 1929, described Mary Wollstonecraft's remarkable “form of immortality” through the memorable conceit that “she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.” A strong sense of unfinished business hovers about Wollstonecraft's legacy – the effects of a life cut short and a political agenda not yet met, but also of something less straightforward, emanating from the combined – but disjunctive – force of her life and work as well as yoked with the seductive fiction that revolution and romance have some natural and dangerously volatile affinity. For “even now,” at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Woolf's perception of an embodied, social and affective presence – “alive . . . among the living” – captures what has proved most enduring but also most troubling about Wollstonecraft's reception, the aura of unreconciled emotion that hovers around her shifting reputation. Wollstonecraft remains an ambiguous symbol both of feminism and of femininity, her significance disputed most strongly by the diverse western feminisms of the last quarter of the twentieth century which have made her and her feminist peers living and legible in her own time and in theirs. Their disagreements have been productive as well as divisive; it is to the credit of Wollstonecraft's interpreters that she remains a restive presence, who cannot be easily framed or honorably laid to rest as the distinguished foremother of modern feminism.

The republican milieu

When she set up her school in Newington Green in 1784, Wollstonecraft joined a circle rich in adversarial political experience. As religious Dissenters, they were opposed to the established Church of England. Dissenters could not take the oaths necessary to secure offices under the Crown or even to take degrees at English Universities. Politically they debated the terms of the Whig triumph of 1688 when parliament had seemingly affirmed its paramount power by dismissing James II and calling a Protestant monarch, William of Orange, to the throne. “Real,” or “true,” Whigs complained that Parliament, instead of extending its power and becoming more representative of the people, had used the influence of the throne to establish a monopoly of power in the hands of great landowners. James Burgh, whose widow was Wollstonecraft's personal friend, had compiled a damning dossier on the oligarchy of “borough-mongers,” its manipulation of elections, its system of patronage and nepotism. Republican ideas, from a tradition including Greece, Rome, and Renaissance Italy as well as the seventeenth-century English Commonwealth, were frequently used to attack courtly corruption and democratic arguments were voiced, especially after the American Revolution. Many saw a remedy for corruption in extending parliamentary representation to newly populous towns and widening the franchise to make bribery and intimidation less common. However radical their ideas, few ventured to actually propose dismantling rather than reforming a constitution that purported to balance monarchical, republican, and democratic principles and had brought peace and prosperity to Britain.

In the early months of 2001 the Royal Shakespeare Company brought together productions of all eight of Shakespeare's Lancastrian history plays (with a rehearsed reading of Edward III thrown in for good measure). This ambitious endeavour, to which I shall return at the end of this chapter, long planned as the Millennium Project of a large and permanent theatre company, offering the plays in a variety of styles and periods, involving four directors and around 100 actors, and depending absolutely for its existence on subsidy, public and private, national and international, may usefully stand as the final milestone on the journey that Shakespeare theatre production has taken through the century with which this chapter is concerned. Many of its assumptions and characteristics are part of what we now take for granted in the performance of Shakespeare's plays; the evolutionary process that produced it is the subject of this chapter.

Stratford and London before the First World War

On 10 January 1900 Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s notorious production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Oberon played (and sung) by Julia Neilson, and the rabbits of the wood near Athens played, inexorably (and, so far as theatre history records, unsung) by themselves, opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London.

In a searching essay on the principles of acting, the French actor François-Joseph Talma writes that the tragic actor must preserve the characters imagined by the playwright 'in their grand proportions, but at the same time he must subject their elevated language to natural accents and true expression; and it is this union of grandeur without pomp, and nature without triviality - this union of the ideal and the true, which is so difficult to attain in tragedy'. Although Talma is writing of French classical tragedy, his understanding of acting as the representation of the grand through the embodiment of the natural articulates well the basic dynamic of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. We might add that in tragedy we see the general through the lens of individual experience and the symbolic through that of the personal, a series of perspectives perhaps more effectively realised by Shakespeare than by any other tragic playwright. But to fulfil the task set by Shakespeare is no easy undertaking.