Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion

1. Introduction: Mending a Broken Lineage

1 1 INTRODUCTION Mending a Broken Lineage Emily A. Holmes Writing and the Theological Tradition In this collection, twelve constructive theologians investigate the conditions under which women enter a written theological tradition. How have women historically justified their writing practices? What constraints , both internal and external, shape their capacity to write theology ? While much work has been done by feminists in recovering the lives and voices of women from the history of Christianity—and even more constructive and creative progress has been made in the areas of feminist, womanist, mujerista, Asian, and postcolonial theologies— these essays take a step back to ask about the conditions of our writing . What allows and what inhibits women’s writing practices? And, moreover, what does it mean for women to enter a written theological tradition that has been based in part on their exclusion? Through historical accounts, theoretical analyses, and contemporary constructions, the essays in this volume take up these questions. Writing has been a topic of special interest in philosophical and literary studies since the 1960s.1 Jacques Derrida in particular has analyzed how speech is privileged over writing in the great books of the Western tradition, paradoxically in the form of written texts.2 As Derrida explains, metaphysical pairs that structure Western 2 / Women, Writing, Theology thought—presence and absence, good and evil, spirit and matter, mind and body—form oppositions in which the first term is valued over and above the second. Speech and writing is one such pair, as is male and female.3 Speech is valued for its purported ability to convey directly the intentions of the speaker through one’s immediate presence to the listener. Writing, in contrast, has been seen as secondary, derivative, and merely technical, only necessary because of the writer’s absence from the reader.4 Speech is thought to be more reliable in conveying truth (a speaker can always be asked for immediate clarification); writing operates at a distance and risks misinterpretation. Furthermore , speech can be restricted to an elite circle of listeners, whereas writing can potentially be read by anyone. Yet what makes writing seemingly derivative and secondary to speech is also what makes it liberating. Writing cannot restrict its own readership: it can be read by anyone, and it can be “misread.” It is open to unending interpretation by generations of readers, and so, in a sense, writing is never finished. A reader does not know what a text “means” until it is read in its entirety; but final meaning is always deferred as texts are read and reread in the context of other writings. In the Christian tradition, both logocentrism (the privileging of speech) and writing (the subversion of logocentrism through text) are evident in the complex signification of the central category “Word.” The Word or Logos at once refers to a person, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ (who is present to Christians in experience, sacrament, and word), and the written text of Scripture (which witnesses to the Word through writing) and the proclamation of the Word through preaching. David Tracy notes how Christian emphasis on “God’s self-presencing in Word as it is rendered in writing” has contributed to hierarchically paired categories of Western metaphysics: “spirit and letter, ideality and materiality, soul and body, reason and feeling, male and female.”5 Because the Word is primarily a person, witnessed in writing (Scripture ), the same “Word” suggests “both close proximity and distance, presence and absence, similarity and difference, participation and interruption .”6 These pairs are united in the Christian genre of gospel, where Word is both disclosed and proclaimed in writing. Mending a Broken Lineage / 3 While much of the Christian tradition participates in the logocentrism described by Derrida—privileging the immediacy of the presence of God (in revelation, proclaimed word, and sacrament) over the distance and différance of writing—it does so in complex fashion. The role of Scripture, and therefore writing, in mediating revelation means that, in Tracy’s words, “presence is never full, simple, or whole.”7 Writing introduces narrative, distance, difference, alterity, and materiality into the interpretation of the Word, and it opens up the Word to the history of interpretation by readers from multiple perspectives. According to Tracy, “Understood as writing, Scripture exposes all pretensions to full self-presence and corrects the fatal repressions and hierarchizations that have plagued much of Western thought and existence.”8 The complete story of...