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3 Feminist Interpretation and New Testament Studies In reconstructing the past, exegetes and theologians construct the world. What we live in is not an objectified reality but an intellectual universe that we create socially and imaginatively. Our ideas, values, social institutions, belief-systems, and theological convictions together produce a sense of life and reality, a perception of the way things are. To anyone living in a total cultural and ideological matrix, this matrix appears reality-like and objective. But reality is something we construe in the context of the social conditions in which we live. The reconstruction of history and the interpretation of texts depend to a large extent on our sense of our historical selves and our perception of our contemporary world, and vice versa. Oppressed people do not have a written history. They remain invisible in the reality-construction of those in power. The feminist movement as an agent for cultural and societal change has not only engendered Women’s Studies as an academic discipline as well as a wide range of feminist theory in all areas of scholarship, but it has also influenced women in the churches and in theology. Most importantly, it has shattered our unreflected assumption that the universe is androcentric-male centered. For the Western understanding and linguistic expression of reality, male existence has become the paradigm of human existence and humanity. As Simone de Beauvoir has elucidated, man is the historical subject, the absolute; woman is the “other” defined in relationship to man. Our linguistic and scientific structures define women as secondary to men and therefore as not significant in the making of human culture, religion, and history. This androcentric perception of being human in the world has determined the reality constructions and scholarly interpretations not only of men but also of women. In such an androcentric worldview women are historically and culturally marginal. Feminist scholars have challenged this widely accepted and almost “common sense” androcentric perception of reality and history in order to arrive at a more adequately human scholarly interpretation and construction of the world. 59 60 Changing Horizons Feminist theologians have developed different approaches to the interpretation of religion in general and of the Bible in particular. This panel presents a variety of such approaches and methods. I myself have sought to develop feminist theology as a critical theology of liberation that shares the critical impulses of historical-critical scholarship, on the one hand, and the theological goals of liberation theologies on the other hand. It challenges not only the androcentric reality construction in language but seeks to move from androcentric texts to patriarchal-historical contexts. Whereas androcentrism characterizes a “mind-set,” patriarchy represents a sociocultural system in which a few men have power over other men, women, children, slaves, and colonized people. Feminist theology as a critical theology of liberation, therefore, seeks to develop not only a textual-biblical hermeneutics but also a historical-biblical hermeneutics of liberation. Fundamentally, it challenges textual interpretations and historical reconstructions, especially in the following areas. Scholarly Pre-Understandings and Frameworks Feminist theology as a critical theology of liberation challenges the scholarly pretense of value-neutrality and objectivity as well as its androcentric perspectives and theoretical frameworks. The basic methodological insight of liberation theologies is the recognition that all theological interpretation and historical scholarship is engaged for or against marginal and oppressed people. Intellectual neutrality is not possible in a historical world of oppression. Feminist theology shares this perspective of liberation theology insofar as it challenges the assumption of women’s cultural marginality and religious subordination. Feminist theologians therefore have challenged their colleagues to reflect critically also on their own unconscious assumptions and institutional interests within the academy or the church. All interpreters and theologians of the Bible must stand publicly accountable for the hermeneutical presuppositions and “political functions” of their own scholarship. It is methodologically mandatory that all scholars explicitly discuss their own presuppositions, allegiances, and functions, and especially those who in critique of feminist theology resort to the value-neutrality of historical-critical scholarship. Since we always interpret the Bible from a position within history, scholarly detachment and objectivist historicism is unmasked as a unconscious “fiction” or a “false consciousness.” Scholarly objections to the intellectual engagement of feminist theology and historiography overlook the fact that interpretations and reconstructions of the past are always already defined by contemporary questions and horizons . The interest in assessment and legitimization as well as in the opening [3...

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