Challenges and Opportunities in Feminist Theology and Biblical Studies in Europe

When I agreed to participate in this challenging panel at the 2008 Society of Biblical Literature meeting, I was excited that the two chairs, Dora Mbuwayesango and Susanne Scholz, one from Zimbabwe, one German, had come up with a dialogical introduction. Their paper nourishes our imagination. It makes clear that a dialogue among feminist biblical scholars across contexts and continents is possible—and begins right now.

Feminist Theology/Biblical Studies in Europe

A Tour d'Horizon

Let me, in a first step, give you a very rough and short survey of what I see going on in Europe for feminist theology and feminist biblical studies. My insights come mainly from my being part, even a founding member twenty-three years ago, of the European Society of Women in Theological Research (ESWTR) with about six hundred women scholars from more than twenty-five European countries as members and with international meetings in a two-year rhythm.

In the northwestern countries of Europe, like Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and England, there are many women scholars doing Christian feminist theology and exegesis, and some of them hold positions at universities. An asymmetrical development has occurred in Germany and the Netherlands, however: in the Netherlands, within Roman Catholic departments of theology, feminist theology has been heavily reduced during the past five years or so; in Germany, one chair of feminist theology/women studies in theology disappeared completely, the other one, which I hold, is combined with a classical exegetical chair. At the two still existing seminaries of the Protestant Church, on the contrary, two chairs of feminist theology were newly established. Renate Jost, a feminist biblical scholar in Old Testament, holds one of them.

In Eastern European countries like Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the countries of the so-called Balticum, few women scholars exclusively do feminist theology. Institutional structures, for example within Catholic departments of theology in Poland, seem too rigid to let women in. In southeastern European countries like Romania, Bulgaria, and the countries of former Yugoslavia and Greece, there are different local Orthodox Christian Churches, all of which emphasize women's traditional roles in churches. I know of only one feminist biblical scholar in that region, Eleni Kasselouri-Hatzilivadi, a New Testament scholar in Greece, who is actually working at a so-called academy, an educational institution of the Greek Orthodox Church.¹ In southwestern Europe, such as Italy and especially Spain, an interesting and inspiring development has taken place: a number of young women are pushing forward feminist theology, forming networks in their contexts, establishing master programs with a feminist focus, and then trying to network across the ocean to Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. In summary, we experience joys and frustrations, disappointments and hopes at the same time, and we have a significant presence of the global south!

An Unsolved Problem: Languages of Empire

A network like ESWTR helps feminist scholars exchange information and encourage one another; however, it faces specific difficulties, such as its non-professional structure, an all-volunteer board, and language barriers. Europe has nearly as many languages as countries, and we have big discussions on how to do conferences in a way that does justice to this fact: is it better, for example, to have one common language or a plurality of several accepted languages? And if a plurality is the best option, then which ones are the best to use? For northwestern Europeans like me, English is the first foreign language we learn at school, and in general, there is no problem for us to talk in English. After the fall of the iron curtain in 1989, we discovered that women from Eastern Europe—many of whom were able to attend international congresses for the first time—all knew Russian, they had a common language but they refused to speak it, as they hated this language of the Soviet Empire; nor did most Western Europeans speak it. In the past five years or so, the Spanish group has worked hard to get Spanish into the set of acknowledged conference languages of the ESWTR...