The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response

Chapter 3: ‘‘A World Split Open’’?

3 ‘‘A World Split Open’’? Experience and Feminist Theologies K R I S T I N E A . C U L P If a woman told the truth about her life, ‘‘the world would split open,’’ the poet Muriel Rukeyser observed.1 This was gospel for the earliest feminist theologians. Mary Daly gave this now classic explanation , ‘‘In hearing and naming ourselves out of the depths, women are naming toward God.’’2 Or, to paraphrase the playwright Ntozake Shange, as feminist theologians working in the late 1970s and ’80s sometimes did, women found God in themselves and ‘‘loved her fiercely.’’3 When women told what they had undergone, what had sustained them, oppressed them, and set them free, how they had endured and survived, what they told opened rifts in what had been taken for granted.4 In those fissures, from those rifts, emerged new understandings of selves, world, and God.5 The clarion call of ‘‘women’s experience’’ was not as simple as it sometimes seemed. Its clear demand at times belied the complex negotiations it assumed. As used in early feminist theologies, ‘‘women’s experience’’ usually signified not only what women had undergone but also acts of ‘‘naming’’ or interpretation. Through these acts, often I am grateful to Barbara E. Wall, O.P., and Kevin Hart for organizing the Experience of God conference and allowing me the latitude to revisit not only central assumptions in feminist theologies, but also, as it were, Lourdes. I am indebted to the conference participants and to Kay Bessler Northcutt and William Schweiker for conversations and comments that have greatly enriched this essay. 47 referred to as processes of consciousness-raising, women engaged various gender, political, and cultural critiques to help render meaning from the immediacies of their lives.6 Thus, ‘‘women’s experience’’ in early feminist theologies often assumed the retrieval and reconstruction of what women had undergone in relation to critical constructs of gender, liberation, and oppression, among other things. In addition, whether as immediate or as reconstructed, it was a social account of experience. That is, ‘‘experience’’ entailed an interaction with the stuff of persons, history, cultures, and the like, and not merely a private, essentially passive, sensory reception or apprehension .7 Finally, feminist theologians didn’t merely interpret experience and theorize about the conditions of women’s lives; they felt compelled to ‘‘use’’ it, to make something of it. These theologians found in experience both source and authority for telling truths that could alter basic understandings of reality (that is, that ‘‘split worlds’’), reconstrue personal and social existence (‘‘name toward selves, world, and God’’), and reorder affections and values (‘‘love fiercely’’ the God who was disclosed in a woman’s life). Those days of heady, ready confidence in the gospel of women’s experience are gone. Diverse theologies—among them womanist and mujerista, African, Asian, Latin American, lesbian, and working class women’s theologies—rightly exposed early feminist theologies as themselves being based primarily in the experiences of white, privileged , albeit radicalized, women.8 Later generations of feminist theologians came to distrust appeals to women’s experience as masking the messy, contending, shifting differences among actual women and as insufficiently attentive to grids of meaning and power that produce gendered, sexed, racialized, and class-based experiences. Additionally , they questioned the adequacy of appeals to the ‘‘evidence’’ of experience as the basis for theology.9 Such decentering and epistemic challenges have, in the last fifteen years or so, made feminist theologians skittish of invoking experience at all, let alone of making claims about the experience of God. We recognized blindness, naivete, and overambition in feminist theological projects, and moved to correct these problems. (Although, as I have already alluded, the first generation of white U.S. feminist theologians , certainly Rosemary Radford Ruether, Letty Russell, and Beverly Harrison among others, worked with a more nuanced construal of ‘‘women’s experience’’ than they are usually given credit for—but that is a matter for another essay.)10 We filled the space 48 The Experience of God opened by questions about experience with productive work on metaphor , discourse, interpretation, practices, strategies, power, and difference as well as with a rich diversity of theological vantage points and proposals. This skittishness also resulted from a relative remove from the struggles for liberation and life that so informed the first generation of U.S. feminist theologians.11 Distanced from the fiercest...