Expanding the Concepts and the Field: Feminist Liberation Theology and Beyond

As one of the organizers of Catharina Halkes's birthday celebration, I was grateful and proud that Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza honored this "festive symposium" by delivering the keynote lecture. To our surprise, she made "celebration," and especially the political importance of feminist birthday celebrations, the central theme of her lecture. Both her presence and her speech made me all the more aware that this event, this celebratory symposium, was indeed more than "just" a birthday celebration.

The audience welcomed Schüssler Fiorenza's speech with great enthusiasm. In a way, she put her finger on a sore spot that had not yet attracted public notice: the threat of "kyriachal robbery." Given that so few of Halkes's former male university colleagues were present that day and that we had trouble convincing the university to support the symposium financially—because, they said, it was not a strictly academic affair—her lecture was a timely diagnosis of an attempt at a "kyriarchal robbery of women's intellectual traditions." Schüssler Fiorenza is correct, however, that this was only an attempt. Given the number of wo/men present, the kyriarchal powers only partially succeeded in dismissing the power of Halkes's intellectual and leading status. The threat is a serious one, though. More serious, I believe, than matricide is the commercial sellout or intergenerational communication to which Schüssler Fiorenza also refers. Although I do see problems in intergenerational feminist theological relations, my approach here is somewhat different.

In the present situation at Dutch universities, with ongoing budget cutbacks, constant vigilance and resistance are needed to keep feminist theology and gender studies in the curriculum (even though some men in academia are genuinely supportive). But the threats are subtler and related to feminists' often-insecure institutional teaching and research positions. Women, let alone feminists, are still a minority in the (Dutch) academy, especially in the fields of theology, philosophy, and religious studies. Great effort is required to maintain at least the status quo, let alone improvement in our position. Recently, funding for the famous Catharina Halkes Chair had to be renewed, and although we managed to "save" the chair, its funding was halved. Internal support notwithstanding, the "higher," less transparent levels of academic politics are ultimately where decisions are made and where kyriarchal robbery and intellectual trivialization continue to occur. Indeed, public feminist birthday celebrations are important: they recall and foster this part of our struggle. But they also confront administrators with the limits of their own power. They cannot prevent the Dutch "Women and Faith Movement" from appropriating and acknowledging both Halkes and Schüssler Fiorenza as great women theologians and leaders.¹

In her powerful plea for feminist birthday celebrations Schüssler Fiorenza points to other concerns, related to more feminist theological struggles, visions, and most of all, to the future of feminist theology. Her anxiety is focused on an envisioned lack of knowledge of feminist theological history and the importance that knowledge of this history has for the future of the "feminist religious and intellectual past." Hers is a vision not only of a history of ideas but also of the women who shaped this intellectual history—they are the reason for celebration. On these points, she was most critical of feminist studies in religion and worried about the future of feminist theology and the generational differences in "doing" and "naming" feminist scholarship.

I recognize the institutional problems she mentioned and share her criticism of the disciplinary mechanisms of the academy, the preference for "great men" and disciplinary segregation. However, I worry that her analysis and diagnoses of the next generation are perhaps too simple or too exclusively focused on one—normative—feminist theological model (in aims and name) to offer concrete means for continued feminist change within academia. Let me offer, from the perspective of the Dutch context, some further thoughts on these points in order to develop a more nuanced view of this multifaceted intergenerational problematic than Schüssler Fiorenza was able to present in her short piece.

With Schüssler Fiorenza and Halkes, I emphasize...