Category: Women of Wisdom

It has been an interesting year of reading for me. Without setting out to do so I've read several first rate books by women scholars in several theological categories. Sarah Coakley's God, Sexuality and the Self is the first of a multi-volume systematic theology that moves away from intellectualised theology on the classic models, and tries to do something fresh and different. She is deeply committed to theologyas a contemplative activity, and that isn't a contradiction in terms. Prayer may indeed take the form of theological learning and intellectual listening, but it does so in a disposition of humility, reticence and a recognition that for all our study and accumulated scholarship, our findings are provisional and imperfect, because God is beyond the range of our cognitive control.

Then there is Kate Sonderegger's astonishingly lucid and compelling account of the unity of God, in the first volume of her systematic theology the title an unadorned description, The Doctrine of God. In contrast to the Trinity-fest of recent decades, and the elevation of God as a social being of Triune love, Sonderegger insists with considerable forthrightness that the starting point and primary truth is the unity of God. The classic terminology is explored, commended and affirmed; omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, the perfections and attributes of God are unabashedly placed in a theological structure that refuses to privilege either Trinity or Christology over the central unequivocal truth that, from start to finish, God is one. How this one God has choosen to reveal Godself does indeed lead to very early and continuing trinitarian and christological constructive theology; but these doctrines arise out of, and are decisively shaped by, the prior truth that God is one. Reading this book, as one who has read much of Moltmann, Boff, Gunton, Lacugna as well as Letham, Levering and a shelf of others, and who has for years been inclined to a social view of the Trinity, I found myself experiencing the theological equivalent of a dressing room team talk in which I was being asked to cast off complacency and rethink my game! And she is not wrong.

I'm just finsishing Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things. She's done it again. A collection of essays that are discursive, moving with ease from literature to culture, from Calvinism to Shakespeare, observing with laser clarity the restless illness of the contemporary church, and urging a return to the great traditions of Christian theology, not least in the Reformed vein. Any one of these essays would serve as an example of why it is important to have an archimedean point on which sound theological reflection can gain leverage. For her it is Calvinism though not uncritically, with some Barth though with quite significant reservations, but generally and firmly Reformed which while not perfect, is a theological tradition unashamed of confessing and defending its faith. There is a short paragraph of precise diagnosis, for example, where she pinpoints one of the near fatal preoccupations of contemporary Christians – "relevance". The test of relevance is narrow, short termed, anthropocentric and theologically myopic and amnesiac at the same time. 

This poem about God, prayer, and us, was written by Renita Weems in 1980, when as a young woman she needed to find a way of relating to God that was her own. Not inherited reverence, not borrowed piety, not well rehearsed habits, not words worn with familiarity – but the determination to be a young black woman whose voice has its own integrity, and whose sense of God resists the reductive pressures of conformity to 'the done thing'. It is reproduced in her autobiography, Listening For God. A MInister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). Professor Weems is a biblical scholar, an ordained African Methodist minister, an outspoken critic of systems and social attitudes of discrimination and exclusion, and a woman whose spirituality combines hunger for righteousness, impatience with injustice, and a relationship with God in which love and trust enable prayer to be a robust debate about the things that matter. Her blog is over here.

(Listening for God, page 35)

"Nothing but the best, and the best is none too good for God's poor. What a delightful thing it is to be boldly profligate, to ignore the price of coffee and to go on serving good coffee and the finest bread to the long line of destitute who come to us."

This is Dorothy Day at her subversive best, living the values of the Kingdom. I find it interesting that her spiritual life was nurtured by the Greek New Testament, which she wore out with use and for which she wrote her own translation. I suppose that careful weighing and measuring of text eventually weaves words and ideas into the very texture of a person's thought; in the process of translating Greek into English, language itself translates into spirituality which in turn translates into actions with New Testament precedent. No wonder the Sermon on the Mount was for her a manifesto of life lived in radical contra-distinction to any culture conservatively protective of its economic status quo. In such a culture, like our own, Jesus is not so much a personal saviour to be claimed, as a friend of sinners to be talked about and enfleshed in acts of redemptive hospitable love.

"The coat hanging in your closet on a winter day belongs to someone who is freezing without it; give it away."

Recent years, the way to do that is hand it in to a charity shop, or put it in a plastic bag to be uplifted on the doorstep. Either way, the personal gesture that is the gift is short-circuited.

Does that matter?

Almost certainly not, provided the coat gets into the right hands, onto the right back.

The above line is from the biography of Dorthy Day, Love is the Measure".

One of her other one liners, repeated ad gloriam,"Our rule of life is the works of mercy."

No wonder they want to make her a saint. And no wonder she dismisses such nonsense with the warning, "I won't let them dismiss me as easily as that".

Wish I'd met her.

Wasn't going to post today. But just picked up the notice that Kay Carmichael, social reformer and teacher, died on Boxing Day. I often talk here about those who have shaped my thinking, my attitudes, my moral values, my theology. I was taught Social Administration in the 1970's by two socially attuned and radically compassionate human beings – Professor Bob Holman and Dr Kay Carmichael. Together they reconfigured the way I think about social justice, human wellbeing and social welfare, the nature, causes and responses to poverty, the cruciality of civic responsibility, and the dignity of each human being. In doing so, Kay Carmichael also changed the way i think about the Gospel, the mission of the Church and the God who sides with the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised.

I want to say more about Kay Carmichael in a later post. For now, I simply want to express appreciation and gratitude for the life of a fine teacher, who embodied the passion for social justice she instilled in her students. And more than its personal impact on me, acknowledge also the differences she has made in the wider public sphere, where she looked for ways to enact the great Hebrew call to prophetic living, "to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God."