Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (review)

488 BOOK REVIEWS requires that it be moved by the One who creates it with that orientation. Yet such a movement is the precondition for freedom of choice, which must then ascertain which means are expedient to reach that end, and often errs in its deliberations. Yet without the actual willing of "the universal good" (246), there could be no rational choice at all. All this shows how Aquinas's understanding of freedom is inextricably linked with a metaphysics of creation: rather than fastening on choosing as the paradigm offreedom, as modem "lib~ ertarians" presume, everything turns on the orientation of our created natures, which as created need to be moved to act. This scheme offers a viable and coherent alternative to the presumed "vital act" of later scholastics, introducing a metaphysics that allows the "cause of being" to "rule the will" (248) without constraining it. "Divine concourse" will not be pictured as though creator and creature were rowing in tandem, but as the very empowering of a free agent to act. The final chapter introduces a corollary to the philosophical therapy of the preceding one: the efficacy of the creator as transcendent agent, here explicated characteristically as "the theorem of divine transcendence" (259), which, "precisely because it is a theorem, ... adds to one's store of knowledge ... not a new fact but a new way of intelligibility relating a set of facts already affirmed as true" (261). In fact, all of the theorems are in place to assert this one, since God as cause of being "is above and beyond the created orders of necessity and contingence" (262). All that is required is to note that sin is a surd in the system; the reach of free creatures is to be able to deny their very destiny by acting in such a way as to cut that very action out of the finality that makes an action part of God's plan. The care with which Michael Stebbins has exposed Lonergan's method and its results hardly frees them from contestation, but at least makes his sometimes cryptic remarks accessible to all those who have the stamina to explore these issues, and so leaves both philosophers and theologians without excuse for attending to so demanding a synthesis. University ofNotre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana DAVID 8. BURRELL,C.S.C. Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet. By ELISABETH SCHUSSLER FIORENZA. New York: Continuum, 1994. Pp. 262. $22.95 (cloth). In this book, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza engages five "hotly debated issues" in feminist christology, using the critical feminist liberation methodology she has developed, and working from within the hermeneutical spacean ekklesia ofwo/men-she has constructed. After describing her method and purpose in chapter one, Schussler Fiorenza addresses the following critical BOOK REVIEWS 489 issues: (1) the theological relevance of Jesus' maleness; (2) anti-Judaism (the shadow-side of asserting Jesus' liberating uniqueness); (3) the theology of the cross; (4) the usefulness of early Christian Wisdom (Sophia) discourses; and (5) mariology and the feminine naming of the Divine. Each chapter opens with summations, analyses, and assessments of the work of other--chiefly feminist-theologians and concludes with her own proposed reconstruction of the question. Extensive new biblical research appears in the chapter devoted to weighing the value of the Wisdom tradition for feminist christologies. Schussler Fiorenza sets out "to uncover the hidden frames of meaning that determine malestream as well as feminist christological discourses" (3), to assess their deleterious effects on the lives of "women in the global village," to de-stabilize their apparently common-sense articulations, and then to promote multiple, non-exclusive christological images that will make possible a different church and a different world-different because radically democratic. Her chief target is not "patriarchy" but "kyriarchy," viz., a pyramidal system of power relations. Gender dualism is not the only source of oppression, she argues, because there are sociopolitical differences among women. Some women belong to the ruling elite, while others live at the bottom of the kyriarchal pyramid; we are divided by differences of class, race, religion, age, sexual orientation, health, etc. ("Wo/men" is coined to keep this point before the reader.) The real divisions are...