Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Chap. 8: Pauline Theology and the Politics of Meaning)

Whether and how to construct or articulate a biblical or even just a Christian Testament Theology 1 has been controverted for quite some time2. The emergence of a diversity of methods in textual, historical, literary,psychological, or ideological criticism a diversity which is now generally accepted, at least in the North American academy has challenged traditional theological inquiry, but it has not yet fashioned a new, commonly accepted understanding of biblical theology. After the demise of the word-study approach, the existential demythologization hermeneutics, and the salvation-history paradigm, the nature and rhetoric of biblical theology continue to be questioned. Traditionally, interpreters have separated hermeneutically the historical-critical approach as descriptive from the theological approach as normative.Since they have understood biblical theology as the re-statement of key doctrinal concepts; e.g., "God 3 acting in history'' or the "divinity of Christ," they have sought to locate these concepts in the text and to use biblical texts as proof-texts for dogmatic beliefs.

Biblical Theology as a Theological Rhetoric of Inquiry

With the arrival of form- and redaction-critical methods, scholars increasingly have attempted to synthesize individual biblical writings in theological terms Whole volumes for example, on "the theology of Paul" or "the theology of Q" have been published. More recently scholars have used narrative criticism to derive biblical theology from the textual articulation of the characters or the perspective of the narrator, whereas reader-response critics have located theological meaning in the interaction between reader and text. Social world studies in turn have taken over basic insights from the sociology of knowledge and assumed that the social arrangements portrayed by the text and the symbolic arrangements inscribed in it are correlated. Norman Petersen, for instance, distinguishes between symbolic universe and theology. Whereas the symbolic universe is the world of the text "as it is viewed;' according to him, theology is the systematic reflection on that universe. The social roles in the "world as it is viewed" are correlated with the social roles in society4.

Traditionally, theology has been understood as the explication of dogmatictenets and the elaboration of the symbols of Christian faith. It also has been conceptualized as "faith seeking understanding:' On this latter definition theology has a hermeneutical purpose and goal. However, I want to propose here a third approach to the conceptualization of theology. Theology in the original sense of the Greek word ( theo-legein) means either speaking about God or "God speaking:' Theolegein is a rhetoricalactivity5 The subject in the traditional understanding of theology is "faith;' whereas in the rhetorical understanding of theology it is the interpreter.

If theology is defined as the speaking activity of God and understood as the "Word of G*d;' then the meaning of theology approaches that of prophecy. Theology and prophecy become almost equivalent. Whereas the understanding of theology as God speaking or as divine revelation obfuscates the human mediation 1of the biblical word, prophecy clearly signifies that mediation by maintaining that God speaks through the mouth of the prophet. In light of biblical criticism, there fore, biblical writings as canonical Scriptures are strictly speaking not theology but prophecy. Whereas divine revelation calls for obedience, prophecy calls for critical theological reflection 6 or for the discernment of the Spirit, since biblical writers know well that not all spirits are "from God7

If biblical writings are the prophetically mediated words of and about God rather than a codification of the direct words of God, of God speaking right to us, then theology must be understood primarily in the sense of speaking about God. Consequently, the task of a biblical theology becomes to critically explore all human speaking about God. Doing theology calls for critical deliberation and accountability. In my view, therefore, theology is best understood not as a system but as a rhetorical practice that does not conceive of language merely as signification and transmission, but rather as a form of action and power that affects actual people and situations8.

As a consequence of such a redefinition of theology, the sub discipline of biblical theology must be reconceptualized in rhetorical terms. If, however, theological language is best understood in the classical sense of rhetoric as speech that constructs and shapes reality, rather than reflecting it, then an ethics of interpretation is called for9.

Its task is to critically analyze and evaluate both how biblical scholars in general and biblical authors in particular speak about the divine. Biblical theology therefore must not be relegated to being just a confessional religious undertaking that is restricted to members of biblical communities. Rather, it must be understood also as a social-political and cultural public responsibility insofar as the Bible has shaped and still shapes the cultural-political self-understanding of the West.

In a very perceptive article A. K. M. Adam has explored the impact of modernity on the self-understanding of biblical studies, an impact that has led to the diagnosis of biblical theology as moribund and, in many cases, to its demise. Adam argues that biblical scholars must abandon the modern attempt "to construct a biblical theology on a historical foundation10.

Yet Adam is careful to stress that this does not mean the passing away of historical analysis. Instead of constructing biblical theology on historical foundations and modem rationality,

Adam proposes that a biblical theology will have to do with theology, with theological topics and concerns. Not the religion of Israel; not the religion of the first Christians; with theology as we know it and as we care about it (including topics like Creation, the Trinity, soteriology, ecclesiology, and so on) which are usually excluded from biblical theology on the ground that they reflect the theologian's interest, rather than an interest which inheres to the text11.

What makes biblical theology theological according to this view is a traditional understanding of theology as dogmatic systematics. Proper "theological terms" are traditional dogmatic categories. Although Adam believes that the margins are a promising place to search for a biblical theology, he overlooks an important difference between the understanding of theology done in the margins and that practiced in the center that is significant for the understanding of biblical theology.

As Blount12 and Segovia13 have pointed out, two fundamental differences distinguish the perspective of the margins from that of the Eurocentric center of biblical studies. The first is that the center stresses Christology and the question of religious salvation (soteriology), whereas the margins are concerned with social inequity and injustice. The second is that, whereas the center underscores the conceptual and formal issues of biblical texts as documents of the past and advocates their spiritual, purely religious, individualistic appropriation, the margins emphasize the interpersonal interaction between readers and text as well as the significance of social religious location for biblical readings for today.

It is therefore instructive to note that Adam defines the difference in the understanding of biblical theology as one between center and margin, one that reflects the theologian's interest, rather than an interest that inheres in the text. Hence the difference between margin and center that Adam announces is not the difference he actually inscribes as constitutive for biblical theology. Rather, he falls back on the old difference that has plagued the discussion of biblical theology in modernity, which is the difference between dogmatic and historical biblical studies. How then would Adam conceptualize the heart of biblical theology differently if he were to observe the difference between center and margins diagnosed by Blount and Segovia?

In order to negotiate the Scylla of a purely rational-historical understanding of biblical theology and the Charybdis of dogmatic definition, I suggest, one needs to reconceptualize biblical theology as a critical theoretical rhetoric. With liberation theologians I argue that the central theological question today is not the modern question of whether God exists but the ethical question of what kind of G*d religious communities and their Scriptures proclaim. Is it a G*d legitimating exploitation injustice, and oppression, or is it a G*d inspiring liberation and well-being?

To that end one needs to develop a multifaceted theological analysis and engender a critical hermeneutical process that is able to investigate the rhetoric of a text or traditionl4 in terms of an ethics of liberation. One has to do so in order to be able to adjudicate how biblical writings that claim to be the word of G*d actually speak about the divine. Such a critical mapping and evaluation of biblical texts and their God-rhetoric’s can explore their theological values and visions, as long as it does not presuppose that the Bible is the unmediated word of God. Rather, it must understand that God's speaking is mediated in and through human, mostly elite male, language andtext15

If theology in general has the task to engage in a critical delineation, reflection, and evaluation of the "rhetoric of God16 "or on how Scriptures, traditions, and believers speak about their God; and how their practices of theo-legein shape their self-understanding, worldviews, and social-political relations; then biblical theology in particular has the task of critically mapping and reflecting on how the Scriptures speak of the divine. In chapter 4 I have identified and elaborated seven rhetorical strategies and hermeneutical methods-a hermeneutics of experience, of systemic analysis, of suspicion, of evaluation, of remembrance, of imagination, and of transformation-as crucial for such a critical biblical theological approach. These methodological strategies are critical hermeneutical tools that must be deployed on every level of textual investigation and interpretation.

Biblical Theology as a Politics of Meaning

In the past decades liberation theologians and critical theorists have brought to public consciousness that all discourses depend on their sociohistorical location 17 and represent political interests. This focus on a critical emancipatory politics of interpretation, I have argued, is able to decenter the master-discourses of both apologetic theological and objectivist so-called scientific biblical scholarship as well as biblical writers such as Paul. It can demystify ideologies of domination and subordination inscribed in biblical texts and scholarship and work to unravel the western logic of identity that has served to legitimate structures of domination, that is, of kyriarchy, understood as the rule of the lord/master/father/husband.

Therefore, one must inquire not only as to how the Scriptures construct theological meaning and speak about the living G*d, but also as to how biblical interpreters construct the theology of biblical writings. Do they speak about an all powerful monarch who demands obedience and submission or about a G*d fostering justice, love, and well-being (salvation)? Such a process of critical theo-ethical reflection is not concerned with (re)producing the theology of a biblical book or Writer once and for all. Instead, it is interested in an ongoing critical-constructive process of "doing" theology as a critical rhetorics of liberation18

However, even those who have attempted to seriously engage an ethic and rhetoric of theological interpretation have tended to construe such an exploration in either scientific-objectivist, individualist-privatized, or dogmatic confessional rather than in systemic sociopolitical terms. In so doing they have tended, for instance, to re-inscribe and legitimate the master-voice of Paul as that of hegemonic scientific biblical scholarship. Such biblical-theological discourses that remain either unconscious of their rhetorical functions or abstracted from their political context are in danger of re-inscribing the malestream discourses of value-free scientism and/or apologetic theological fundamentalism against-which-they-argue.

Only a focus on a critical emancipatory politics of meaning, I submit, is able to decanter the master-discourses of apologetic-dogmatic and objectivist "scientific" conceptualizations of biblical theology that encompass both the scholarly discourses on the Bible as well as those of biblical writers themselves, such as Paul. A biblical' theology that is conceptualized as a rhetoric of divine justice and well-being, I argue, is able to demystify ideologies of domination and subordination inscribed in biblical texts and scholarship. It also is able to unravel the western logic of identity that has served to legitimate structures of domination-that is, of patriarchy for much too long.

The Hegemonic Politics of Meaning

The difference this understanding of biblical theology would make comes to the fore when one engages a rhetoric of inquiry for examining the politics of hegemonic biblical theology. Constitutive elements of such a rhetoric and politics of inquiry are: ( 1) the politics of otherness and its tendencies of marginalization and vilification; (2) the politics and logics of identity; and (3) the politics of identification and of inspiration.

The Politics of "Othering"

The hegemonic politics of theological interpretation engenders a politics and rhetorics of "othering" that establishes identity either by declaring the difference of the other as the same or by vilifying and idealizing difference as otherness19It justifies relationships of ruling20 by obfuscating structures of domination and subordination as "naturalized" differences. Hence this politics of otherness can be changed only when it is understood not as a universal transcultural binary structure but as a historical political practice.

Such a theological politics of othering and vilification permeates all our scholarly discourses as well as the discourses of Paul himself21. Its relentless othering engenders the strategies of marginalization and silencing inscribed in the biblical text and in contemporary scholarship. For instance, my own work has sought to theorize a paradigm shift in the discourses of the discipline in terms of critical feminist emancipatory studies and has consistently argued that a critical feminist interpretation re-inscribes the marginalizing and excluding tendencies of the grammatically androcentric text if it focuses just on the study of wo/men in the Bible. Nevertheless, just as other critical feminist work, so my own is persistently misread as speaking about wo/men in early Christianity, because for many feminism and wo/man is still one and the same.

Hence the hegemonic politics of interpretation continues to relegate the contributions of feminist biblical studies to the marginal topic "wo/men;' on the one hand, and authoritative theory to the domain of "great men," on the other. It thereby continues the politics of othering already inscribed in the Pauline letters. Not just religious studies but all modern theories of political and moral life are shot through with ideologies of sexism, colonialism, and racism, the systems and discourses of marginalization, vilification, and dehumanization. This politics of othering is indebted to the classic antidemocratic discourses of Plato and Aristotle as well as those of modern democratic philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel, which position the "civic public" and the "impartial and universal point of view of normative reason" as opposite to the private realm that encompasses the family as the domain of wo/men, "the body, affectivity and desire22."

Ancient and modern western philosophies have developed this "politics and rhetorics of otherness23"in the attempt to legitimate that not all members of the polis but only certain men can claim the rights of citizen, participate in democratic government, or deliberate in public. In its classical form this politics of otherness is rooted in the practices of the androsocial Greek polis, its political-philosophical subtext is democracy, and its social formation is patriarchy or, better, kyriarchy, the governing dominance or supremacy of elite propertied men. The exclusion from democratic government of freeborn propertied wo/men, poor wo/men, slave wo/men, as well as barbarian wo/men required ideological justifications. It needed to be argued why only freeborn propertied Greek male heads of households could be full citizens if, as the Sophists maintained, all are equal by nature24.

The articulation of dualisms such as human-animal, male-female, slave-free, native-alien, and the assertion of the "natural" inferiority of freeborn women as well as slave wo/men are ideological constructs that reproduce the politics of otherness In the various historical mutations of western capitalist patriarchy. They were reproduced in the discourses of political philosophy at the emergence of modern democracy, which advocated the Enlightenment construction of the "Man of Reason25 and in colonialist rationalizations of racism. This western political and philosophical rhetorics of otherness marks the oppressive relations of domination and exclusion in systemic patri-kyriarchy. However, it must be recognized that this politics of interpretation does not elaborate generic man but rather the imperial Sovereign-Father or ill black idiom, the Boss-Man, as the universal subject. Its totalizing discourse of male-female dualism masks the complex interstructuring of systems of exploitation and dehumanization in the kyriarchal domination of western societies and religions.

The western "politics of identity and rhetorics of othering " establishes identity" either by comparison to the other as an inferior "same" or by emphasizing and stereotyping difference as the otherness of the other26. Such differences are established as "relationships of ruling27 "in which structures of domination and subordination are mystified as "naturalized" differences. This politics of otherness has found its way into the canon of Christian Scriptures and permeates theological discourse on the whole as well as biblical writings and their contemporary theological
interpretations.

It is no accident, therefore, that the majority of scholars have constructed Paul's arguments as "normative" over and against Paul's so-called Gnostic, libertine, or Jewish legalistic "opponents." Exegetical discourses continue to understand the Pauline writings either theologically as documents of intra-Christian struggles between orthodoxy and heresy or they read them sociologically as records of opposing sectarian groups that are defined in contrast to the orthodox church. In both instances,-scholars understand canonical voices as right and true but vilify their submerged alternative arguments as false and heretical.

In other words, the scholarly discourses on Pauls theology construct a senes of dualistic religious, cultural, and political oppositions such as orthodoxy-heresy, apostle-community, honor-shame, mission-propaganda, and theology of the crosslibertine enthusiasm, rather than underscoring that they are theological arguments over meaning and interpretation. This series of dualisms privileges the first terms of the oppositions by reserving them either for Paul, orthodoxy, or Christianity on the whole, and constructs the second terms as negative "other" by attributing them either to the opponents, to Hellenistic propagandists, to Jewish legalists, or to other outsider groups. Such interpretive dualistic oppositions muddle and play down the linking and connecting terms (such as "audience;' "community;' "gospel") by subsuming them under either pole of the opposition rather than seeing in them a possibility for overcoming the argumentative dualism constructed by Paul.

The most telling dualistic construct is that of gender, which is already inscribed in the Pauline letters insofar as Paul understands himself as the "father" of the Corinthian community who is to present the community "as a pure bride to her one husband;' Christ (2 Cor 11:2-3). This gendering of the community has negative overtones since it is connected with a reference to the seduction of Eve. Such a symbolic construct of gender dualism at once coheres in and undermines the other oppositions insofar as it casts all speaking subjects (Paul, the opponents, contemporary interpreters, and so on) as masculine and construes their audience (the Corinthian community, Judaism, or contemporary readers, etc.) m feminine terms as passive, immature, and gullible.

The Politics of Identity

The politics of othering, with its series of dualisms that mystify and occlude relations of domination, bespeaks the logic and politics of identity. The logic of identity"consists in an unrelenting urge to think things together, in a unity;' to formulate "an essence that brings concrete particulars into unity28
I would suggest that this drive to coherence, unity, and identity is the motivating methodological and ideological force in Pauline studies. It is expressed in the positivistic ethos of "scientific" exegesis as well as in the essentializing tendencies of Pauline theology.

In the modern scientific paradigm of theological interpretation, scholarship expresses the impartial, objective, abstract point of view of reason that stands apart from any interests and desires. This requires the construction of the impartial and universal moral reasoner abstracted from any historical context or political commitment. Feminist and postmodern theorists have unmasked this drive to coherent reading elaborating the master-voice of the text, its university, and symbolic totality as the western "logic and politics of identity29."

Disinterested and dispassionate scholarship is believed to enable biblical critics to enter the minds and worlds of Paul's texts, to step out of their own time, and to study Pauline history or literature on its own terms, unencumbered by contemporary experiences, values, and interests. By asserting that a given interpretation of a Pauline text represents the only objective and "true" reading, "scientific" exegesis claims to comprehend the definitive meaning intended by the author or inscribed in the text. In privileging and legitimating one particular interpretation over other possible readings, it not only closes the text's multivalent meanings but also rules out alternative multiple readings as illegitimate.

Insofar as "scientific" interpretation insists on "the logic of identity" as establishing an unequivocal single truth, it has to reason why only its own interpretation of the text is the true and "correct" interpretation. If and when, however, scholars admit that exegetical commentary is not free from rhetorical argument and sociopolitical religious interests, they immediately assert that such argument and interest must be restricted to showing why and how competing interpretations have misread the Pauline text. In order to produce such unity of meaning as historical fact, social scientific studies30 intensify these essentializing reifications and mystifications of the text by mapping Paul's rhetorical arguments and symbolic universes onto positivistic-functionalist sociological or anthropological models of interpretation.

The posture of scientific objectivism hides the extent to which the concept of objective science is itself a theoretical construct that serves a hegemonic politics of meaning31.This rhetoric of disinterested science and presupposition-free exegesis silences reflection on the political interests and functions of biblical texts and scholarship. Its claim to public scientific status suppresses the rhetorical character of Paul's texts and their interpretations while obscuring the power relations that constitute and shape Paul's own rhetoric and that of his modern interpreters.

The drive to coherence, unity, and identity also is the motivating ideological force in the construction of a Pauline theology. In its search for a "canon within the canon" or the "unity" of Scripture, biblical theological interpretation enacts this "logic of identity" that eliminates both the irreducible difference of Paul's arguments to those of other early Christians and the difference between Paul and his contemporary interpreter. This drive also comes to the fore in the attempts of Pauline scholarship to rearrange the extant text and to splinter it into discrete rhetorical fragments in such a way that the symbolic coherence of Paul's theological arguments scholars have reconstructed it-is safeguarded.

It is at work in the attempts ofscholars to declare texts such as 1Thess.2:14-16; 1Cor.11:2-16; and 14: 34-36; or Rom. 13: 1-7 as later interpolations because they do not cohere with their own reading of Paul's theology. Still other scholars rearrange the extant text and reconstruct the rhetorical situation of the diverse fragments of Paul's Corinthian or Philippian correspondence in a way that safeguards the symbolic coherence of Paul's theological argument for "radical obedience32.

Such a "logic of identity" with its drive to univocality energizes, for instance J. Christian Beker's reconstructive model of coherence and contingency in Pauline theology. After discussing the essentializing tendencies in the reconstruction of Paul's theology, he concludes:

[Paul's] ability to focus in the midst of the early churches' variety of theological expressions on the one central core of "Christ crucified and risen" together with his ability to allow that focus to light up and interact with every conceivable variety and particularity of human existence is a feat which-with perhaps the exception of Luther-no other apostle or theologian in the church has achieved33

Although Beker is concerned with the fluidity of Paul's hermeneutic interactions, he nevertheless asserts that Paul articulated the "abiding truth" of the gospel and thereby gave to the church "the beginnings of a doctrinal 'orthodox' structure34." Although Baker’s coherence-contingency hermeneutical model intends to be a via media between the "extremes of sociological analysis" which he calls the sociological captivity of Paul-and the dogmatist imposition of a specific center on Paul's thought, he himself does not avoid speaking about such an essentialized core.

As Paul Achtemeier has observed, the concepts of core or center in biblical theology "are not easily jettisoned for the sake of convenience in meeting the objections of one's critics35." In order to differentiate and evaluate the postulated circular relationship between coherence and contingency or to know what Paul himself believed to be peripheral to the coherent core of his theology, Achtemeier argues, one needs to be able to locate and articulate the center, essence, or core of the coherence of Paul's thought. Although Beker names as the site of the interaction between coherence and contingency the Holy Spirit and speaks of a "pneumatic democracy;' his concern with safeguarding the theological master-voice of Paul forces him again and again to resort to the logic of identity that must speak of a center, core, or essence. At stake in such an essentializing logics and rhetorics of identity is not just the theological authority of the master-voice of Paul but also the "orthodoxy'' of the church.

The Politics of Identification

Such an essentializing politics of inspiration, I suggest, also re-inscribes malestream relations of privilege and orthodox relations of exclusion by inviting readerly identification with Paul and his arguments. Such an identification with Paul's theological rhetoric-for instance, that of his fatherly authority-allows ecclesial and academic "fathers" to claim Paul's authority for themselves. Moreover, by stressing an unbridgeable gulf between the past and the present, between Paul and himself, the exegete occludes the fact that Paul's meanings are present only in and through the words of interpreters. Thereby he-and it is still mostly a he-surreptitiously claims Paul's theological authority for his own interpretation. Such a rhetoric of identification achieves its aim by both claiming scientific authority for its own interpretations and by disqualifying the others as biased, ideological, or as reading their own interests into the text.

Moreover, the rhetoric of radical differences between past and present complements the rhetoric of identification insofar as it serves to construct sameness between paul and "his" communities36. It does so either by identifying Paul's discourses with those of the communities to whom he writes and thereby.suppressing and eradicating the historical voices and multiplex visions that differ from Paul's. Or insofar as historical- critical studies see Pauline texts and their arguments-that is, the rhetorical situation construed by Paul-as identical with the actual historical-rhetorical situation, they not only obscure the difference between Paul's theological rhetoric and that of his contemporary interpreters but also between that of the early Christian communities Paul's text may misrepresent or silence.

For scholars who argue within the doctrinal and theological historical paradigm of interpretation, even more is at stake. By identifying their own interpretation with the meaning intended by Paul, as well as by invoking the inspiration and the authority of revelation, scholars can then claim divine authority for their own interpretation. Hence the politics of identification with Paul and that of inspiration are two sides of the same coin. The famous debate between Bultmann and Barth on Sachkritik (subject matter criticism) speaks to this problem37.

Bultmann criticized Barth for having seen the necessity of Sachkritik but nevertheless having stopped with philological historical criticism because of the dogma of inspiration that Bultmann believed underwrote Barth's work. This dogma of inspiration does not help to clarify "die Sache" (the subject matter). The spirit of the Bible consists of many different spirits, and the Spirit of Christ does not speak directly to us in any text. Hence the text of the Bible is only the indirect but not the direct word of God. Nobody, not even Paul, is able to express completely the subject matter of the gospel. Because the revelation given in Scripture is always veiled and the word of God is always obscured, exegetical critique must always be Sachkritik.

In Bultmann's view Sachkritik can never be radical enough, since its task is to discern the heterogeneous spirits at the roots (Latin radix) in order to find behind the words of Scripture God's Word, which is the Sache of the gospel. However, I would suggest that Bultmann himself does not go far enough in his radical Sachkritik insofar as he also begs the question by maintaining that Sachkritik is able tu identify Jesus Christ, the Word of G*d himself, as the central subject matter of the kerygma, the only important matter in life and death, and the ultimate criterion of all human existence. Barth's response to Bultmann that the Word of God must be discerned in, through, and against "the voices of those other spirits" in turn begs the question how this can be done. Both Bultmann and Barth remain beholden to the dogmatic rhetoric of inspiration, although Bultmann shifts his accentuation from the Spirit to Christ. His christological bottleneck of biblical hermeneutics cancels the radical potentialof Sachkritik and plays into the hands of a politics of identification.

The politics of identification, however, works not only on a theological but also on a historical level. Insofar as scholars tend to understand Paul as having the authority of the gospel to compel, control, and censure the persons or communities to whom he writes, they tend to read Paul's letters as authoritative rather than as argumentative interventions in the theological discourses of his audience. They thereby fail to understand that "Pauline Christianity" is a misnomer for the early Christian communities to whom Paul writes. These communities existed independently of Paul although we know about them only in and through the letters of Paul.

The failure to see early Christian communities in their own right is compounded by the inclination of scholars to rend early Christianity from early Judaism and to draw inflexible boundaries between inside and outside, or to postulate a deep historical gulf between Mediterranean culture and ours. In so doing, scholars disregard that the self-understanding of religious communities is intertwined with their cultural-religious environment. They also overlook that historical and theological understanding is only possible if and when one can assume some kind of common language and shared symbolic universe.

In his article on "History and Rhetoric:' Paul Ricoeur has underscored this aspect of historical understanding. He argues that historical interpretation is a "historical activity" that has a "complex relation to the people of the past who themselves 'made history."' Historical interpretation and historiography are possible not only because of a single "tempo-spatial framework" but also because of a single field of praxis, evidenced by the historian's dependence on the "making of real historical actors" for his own "history making." Before presenting themselves as master craftsmen of stories made out of the past, historians must first stand as heirs of the past. ... Before even forming the idea of re-presenting the past, we are in debt to the men and women of the past who contributed to making us what we are. Before we can represent the past we must live as beings affected by the past38.

Although Ricoeur speaks of the men and wo/men of the past, he does not critically reflect on his gendered assumption that interpreters and historians are "master craftsmen" who can present the past because they stand in the same "tempo-spatial frame" and "field of praxis:' This analysis sheds light on why at least since Robbin Scroggs's article on "Paul and the Eschatological Woman," which appeared in 197239,Pauline scholars have been so persistent in their "defense of Paul against his feminist critics."

For example, although he details the atrocities of the history of Pauline texts such as Romans 13, 1 Thessalonians 2, or especially 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, even a liberationist scholar like Neil Elliott argues that these texts are later additions to the genuine Pauline letters. His desire to liberate Paul from his post-Pauline domestications and to read his theology as liberating compels him to jettison feminist objections to such a reading and to insist that "heard rightly, Paul's message could not be more appropriate for some of us, Christians in the first world, who [if we are honest] find ourselves in the place of the Corinthian elite40."

The tacit context of such malestream defenses of Paul because of their unconscious, taken-for-granted identification with Paul rather than, let's say, with the Corinthian women prophets, as Antoinette Clark Wire suggests41, is a politics and rhetorics of interpretation that surmises that the actual rhetorical situation of the Pauline letters and its historical power relations are identical to and correspond with the rhetorical situation Paul inscribed in his correspondence42.

In other words, such a politics of interpretation presupposes both the "scientific" theoretical understanding of texts either as windows or as mirrors and the essentializing tendencies of orthodox theology. By mystifying and occluding the rhetoricity of Pauline language and text, it is able to privilege the "masculine" hegemonic voice inscribed in kyriarchal Pauline or other ancient source-texts rather than -to-particularize and relativize this voice by reconstructing a varied assembly of voices and arguments43.

In short, all three strategies of the hegemonic politics of meaning seek to reinscribe the kyriarchal politics of subordination that is inscribed in past and present biblical discourses by valorizing the voice of the canonical Paul. In contrast,the critical emancipatory politics of meaning for which I have argued in this book would be able to displace the hegemonic politics of meaning and to replace it with a radical democratic politics of emancipation.

Biblical Theology as the Rhetoric of Ekklesia

To undercut the hegemonic politics of meaning one must conceptualize not only early Christian communities but also contemporary reading practices as sites of communicative persuasion, emancipatory struggles, and theological visions that are are shared by all the participants. Such a re-conceptualization of ekklesia as a pluriform congregation of fully responsible "adult" voices who have equal standing becomes possible, I suggest, only if one deconstructs the gender identification between paul and his interpreters that underwrites the authority claims of bibhcal scholars. This would require that one replace the politics of theological identification with a radical democratic politics of ekklesia that can comprehend the disputes in the early Christian ekklesia in terms of parresia the free speech of citizens-rather than cast them in terms of confessional internecine altercations or imperial market competition44.

My own work has sought to develop such a reconstructive historical politics of interpretation that valorizes difference, plurivocity, argument'. persuasion, and the democratic participation of all those excluded from or subordinated by theological discourses. In her dissertation, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge has exammed the rhetoric of obedience in the letters attributed to Paul and in particular has focused on the rhetoric of Philippians and Ephesians. By distinguishing between the inscribed rhetorical and the possible historical situation, her work is able to trace in these letters the struggle between a rhetoric of ekklesia and one of kyriarchal submission in both Philippians and Ephesians, the authors use the language of obedience to respond to alternative languages and symbolic universes within early Christian communities. Evidence of these visions survives in the early Christian traditions that Paul and the Pauline author employ in their arguments45.

Biblical theology that understands itself as a politics of ekklesia attempts to trace and revalorize the early Christian egalitarian traditions. At the same time it seeks to displace the politics and rhetorics of subordination and otherness that is inscribed in the "Pauline" correspondence with a politics and rhetorics of equality and responsibility. It conceives of early Christian writings as taking sides in the emancipator struggles of antiquity and conceptualizes early Christian community as a radical democratic assembly (ekklesia) of differing theological voices and sociorhetorical practices.

Such a radical egalitarian politics of ekklesia requires the articulation of a theology of divine politeuma as its theological grounds and theoretical frame for which it can draw on biblical resources. Christian Testament writings such as Philippians or 1 Peter express the self-understanding of the early Christians as foreigners and resident aliens whose citizenship is elsewhere. For instance, in Phil. 3:20 Paul asserts in dualistic terms that Christian "citizenship" or "commonwealth" (politeuma) is "in heaven and it is from there that we are expecting a savior." As Carolyn Osiek points out:

This is the second time in the letter that Paul draws upon the language of the city-state (see 1:27) to imply that all Christians, male and female, have the responsibility of full participation in the commonwealth in which they belong most appropriately. This is the basis for any vision of a discipleship of equals in the Pauline churches. In a world of social inequalities, Christians are to live in the consciousness of their heavenly equal citizenship here and now46.

The "politeuma in heaven" has usually been understood in dualistic terms as "pie in the sky" or as otherworldly spiritualized reality that has nothing to do with the reality and politics of the earthly politeuma. However, if one understands heaven not as opposite to earth but as the site of G*d's justice and well-being that is traditionally called "salvation:' then one can conceptualize the divine politeuma as the theological location from where a radical critique of oppressive "earthly" structures becomes possible47.

Such a theoretization of the "politeuma in heaven" would allow for the placing of biblical theology as the rhetoric of the ekklesia under the radical horizon of God's alternative world48, which I have called here cosmopolis.Such a hermeneutical theological horizon can acknowledge the kyriarchal deformations of the biblical text. It does not need to justify or explain away such kyriarchal scriptural formations but can sustain a hermeneutics of suspicion with respect to all biblical texts and theological traditions. It can theologically explore the contradictions and conflicts inscribed in biblical texts and their interpretations.

Such differences and contradictions in the rhetoric of early Christian sources point to sociopolitical conflicts and religiocultural tensions between "egalitarian" movements-be they Hellenistic, Jewish or early Christian-and their dominant kyriarchal sociopolitical-religious contexts. These differing and contradictory sociorhetorical formations also point to sociopolitical conflicts within early Christian communities that understood themselves as a "pneumatic democracy:' Such rhetorical tensions can be traced between those who advocate the ethos of ekklesia both as a "basileia discipleship of equals" and as "a community of freedom in the Spirit" on the one hand, and those that advocate the kyriarchal leadership of elite male power and the kyriarchal institutionalization of the ekklesia on the other hand.

The kyriocentric arguments of a politics and rhetorics of submission seek to reintroduce into the ekklesia the dualistic split between the public and private spheres, between those who speak and those who are silent, between women and men,
between slaves and free, between Jews and Greeks, between humans and nature. For instance, they insist on relegating (elite) married women to the private sphere, on restricting their activity to proper "feminine" behavior, and on limiting women to leadership over other women. These arguments for the "ethics and politics of submission" not only place restrictions on women's leadership in the ekklesia but also promote acceptance of slave women's sufferings and advocate the adaptation of the whole Christian community to hegemonic kyriarchal structures of superordination and subordination49.

In contrast, the politics of ekklesia enables readers to displace both the "scientific" paradigm, which reconstructs early Christianity in terms of sectarian conflict and exclusions, and the doctrinal paradigm, which defines it in terms of orthodoxyheresy. It can do so by recontextualizing early Christian debates within Greco-Roman and Jewish radical democratic discourses and by ceasing to articulate an unbridgeable gulf between past and present.

In such a new contextualization Pauline writings can be read as public arguments that seek to persuade and convince "citizens" who share common cultural worlds and religious visions of equality and freedom. Rather than to map the rhetorical situation of Paul in terms of the logic of identity and politics of otherness, a rhetorical radical democratic politics of meaning can understand Pauline discourses and their suppressed alternative voices as two sides of one and the same rhetorical "coin:' Hence such a politics of meaning is able to reconceptualize the Pauline text as the site of rhetorical-political struggle and an arena of competing cultural-religious practices.

Such a biblical theology defined as the politics of ekklesia no longer needs to privilege the authorial master-voice of Paul or that of any other canonical writer, but can position its own inquiry on the side of the historical victims whose subjugated knowledge’s have left traces in the canonical text. However, such a conflictive egalitarian politics of interpretation would be misapprehended if its re-visioning of early Christian life were read in dualistic terms either as linear development or as rapid and uncontested decline from ekklesia as the discipleship of equals to ekklesia as the kyriarchal household of God.

Instead, this model seeks to conceptualize the struggles of "Pauline" Christianity as a pluriform movement of wo/men engaged in an ongoing theological debate over equality, freedom, dignity, and full "citizenship" in the ekklesia. If such a historical theological reconstruction of the debates in the pneumatic ekklesia is interfaced with an intercultural and interreligious reconstructive historical model of reading, one can show that such emancipatory rhetorical practices and sociopolitical religious struggles for freedom50

and for the right of "citizenship" are not restricted to early Christianity but began long before the Christian movements emerged on the scene, and are still going on today. They have continued throughout western history, although a kyriarchal politics of interpretation has failed to write this ongoing history of struggle. The recognition of the rhetoricity rather than the authority of biblical discourses would allow scholars to position their research within this ongoing history of such struggles and their politics of interpretation.

To sum up my argument: If scholars would understand biblical theology as public deliberative discourse of the ekklesia, then they could re-vision it as both a critical reflection on the religious-communal and social-political practices encoded in Scripture and as a critical rhetoric of inquiry that is able to explore the rhetorical function of biblical texts and contemporary interpretations. The task of biblical theology would then not only be descriptive-analytic utilizing all the critical methods of exegetical, historical, and literary scholarship but also hermeneutic, ideology critical, evaluative, and theological ones.

Such an approach to biblical theology as a rhetoric of inquiry would then not only open up the rhetorical practices of the Bible to the critical scrutiny of other academic disciplines but also enable students to participate in an intellectual community of critical discourse. The professional education of both ministerial and doctoral students in biblical studies would need to be rethought in light of this. Students would need to acquire not only philological, textual, and historical skills but also adeptness at critical theological reflection and ideological assessment. Finally, questions of ideology critique raised especially by feminist biblical scholars, liberation theologians, Third World or postcolonial critics, cultural studies, and other interpretive approaches that are presently peripheral to the exegetical enterprise could become central for such a biblical theology. In short, the-ramifications of theotrical. reconceptualization of the method and task of biblical theology would be far-reaching and compelling not only for theological education but also for public discourses involving the Bible.

As I have argued throughout this book, unlike a hermeneutic-aesthetic inquiry that strives for textual understanding, appreciation, application, and consent, a critical feminist rhetorics is concerned not just with exploring, the conditions and possibilities of understanding and with tracing kyriocentric texts and traditions but also with the problem of how one can critically assess and, if need be, dismantle their power of persuasion. It also searches for those liberating visions inscribed in biblical texts that have not yet been historically realized. To that end it constructs a critical theoretical framework that can move toward the articulation of a critical rhetoric of inquiry. Finally, biblical theology as a critical rhetoric of inquiry calls for a redefinition of the notion of truth in the emancipatory terms of Wisdom-Sophia.

Examining ancient Greek legal, philosophical, and literary texts on torture, the feminist scholar Page duBois has argued that classical Greek philosophy has developed a "logic of identity" that elaborates truth as something hidden, to be excavated or extracted by the torture of slaves. "This logic demands a closed circle, an other, an outside, and creates such an other. And in the case of the Greek city, the democracy itself used torture to establish this boundary, to mark the line between slave and free, and to locate truth outside51."

Consequently, western philosophy on the whole understands truth as something that is not known, but buried, secreted in the earth, in the body, in the woman, in the slave, in the totally "other": something that must be extricated through torture or sexual violence. In a similar fashion, biblical revelation has been understood in traditional theology as an uncovering of a hidden mystery that is located in the unknown and in the beyond. It is directly known only to a select few, and it can be extracted only through arduous labor or stringent asceticism. The "canon within the canon" approach, for instance, seeks to uncover, to distill, or to abstract a universal truth or authoritative norm from the multilayered meanings of biblical texts and the often contradictory writings collected in the canon.

According to Page duBois, this kyriarchal understanding of"truth " in the "logic of identity" is articulated in reaction to the "logic of democracy." Whereas the logic of identity relies on strategies of "othering" and subordination, the logic of democracy is determined by the notion of equal power among members of a society. Such a logic of democracy requires a radical redistribution of wealth as well as the elimination of social and political hierarchies. For some ancient thinkers, according to duBois, even slavery itself was eventually called into question.

Such a recontextualization of biblical theology in the paradigm of radical democracy produces a different notion of theological truth. It does not understand the truth of the sacred or of the Bible as a metaphysical given buried in the "other" but seeks to comprehend the truth of the divine politeuma in and through the interactive deliberation of a multiple, polyvalent assembly of voices in the ekklesia. Truth is not, as in the logic of identity, a process of discovering the hidden or forcing into the open a divine that is buried. Rather, truth is a historical process of public deliberation for the creation of radical democratic equality for every wo/man in the global village. The truth of biblical theology is produced in radical democratic struggles and debates between equals as an alternative discourse to torture and inquisition. In such a radical logic of democracy, the truth or the sacred is best understood as a moment in an. interpretive political process, a progressive extension of rights and equality to all residents of our expanding world community. The truth of the ekklesia is multivoiced and cosmopolitan. A conception of "truth" in this sense comes close to the biblical notion of "doing the truth;” a truth that "will set you free.''

By deconstructing the biblical rhetorics and politics of subordination, a critical feminist rhetoric of ekklesia is able to generate new possibilities for the communicative construction of religious identities and emancipatory practices. To
that end a critical biblical theology that is positioned in the radical democratic space of ecclesial interrogates religious texts, traditions, and institutional practices for religious visions that foster equality, justice, and the logic of the ekklesia, rather than that of kyriarchal domination. Yet only when biblical theology radically throws into question the kyriarchal discourses of exclusion inscribed in the Bible and biblical traditions, I submit, will it be able to identify the radical democratic discourses inscribed in Scripture.

A critical hermeneutical integration of notions of liberty, equality, and democracy with the radical egalitarian religious vision of ekklesia, I argue, can engender critical biblical-theological discourses of possibility for a different understanding of human well-being. The task of biblical theological studies is to articulate and envision the divine politeuma as a radical democratic Wisdom-Spirit-center of global dimensions.

In Place of a Conclusion

To reformulate biblical theology as a critical rhetoric and politics of meaning that is positioned in the public square of ekklesia would allow biblical studies to articulate a biblical rhetoric and spiritual vision that could critically address public political discourses and individual questions seeking for a world of justice and well-being. Such a critical biblical theology could do the work of Divine Wisdom52.

"Wisdom-Sophia has sent out her women servants to call from the highest places in the town, 'Come eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.' Leave immaturity and live and walk in the way of Wisdom-Sophia" (Prov. 9:3-6).
Instead of concluding, I continue to turn and to move, beginning at the end, circling back to the beginning. Like the tides of the ocean divine wisdom-Sophia. always moves and returns, but with a difference. If biblical studies moves and changes in the direction of the divine politeuma, it might glimpse a vision of her all embracing justice and enveloping well-being. As Karen Baker-Fletcher has seen her ceaseless motion:

When I watch the wind tease and urge into dance the waves of the ocean, when I feel the moon's pull on the waters and on the cycles of my own body, I often think of the deep powerful waters of the ocean dancing with the spirit of God. Creation is born out of a loving, creative dance between Spirit and the elements of the cosmos. We humans are Adam (which means "earth creature" in Hebrew), dependent on all the elements of water, earth, air, sun. Our own nativity and the birth of our children's children is dependent on this power oflife53. If the Scriptures were likened to the "deep powerful waters of the ocean dancing with the Spirit of God:' biblical theology could then be understood as articulating and participating in "the creative dance between the Spirit and the elements" of the biblical traditions. In the critical deliberations of such an emancipatory-rhetorical paradigm of interpretation, biblical discourses could become Divine Wisdom Sophia's power for life again.

footnotes:

l In its embryonic form this chapter was prepared for the Consultation on a Political Interpretation of Paul chaired by Richard Horsley and presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1996.

2 See Boers, What Is New Testament Theology?

3 In this way I seek to indicate the brokenness, ambiguity, and indeterminacy of human God.

4 Petersen, Rediscovering Paul, 29-30.

5 In her discussion of the SBL Pauline Theology Group's work, Jouette M. Bassler "Paul's Theology: Whence and Whither?" in Pauline Theology, vol. 2 1 and 2 Corinthians, ed. David M. Hay [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991], 3-17), points out that no agreement exists as to what is meant by theology and that the term is given a whole range of connotations. Rather than to understand theology in terms of system, core, or coherence, Bassler defines theology as "activity:' See also Steven J. Kraftschick, "Seeking a More Fluid Model: A Response to Jouette M. Bassler;' Pauline Theology, 18-34.

6 Compare also the definition of theology by Victor Furnish," Paul the Theologian:' in The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul and John in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. Robert T. Fortna and Beverly Gaven ta (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990 ), 25. According to him, theology is a "critical reflection on the beliefs, rites, and social structures in which an experience of ultimate reality has found expression." My own definition
is more specific.

7 For the exploration of early Christian prophecy, see my The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment,2d ed. 133-56, and my article "The Words of Prophecy: Reading the Apocalypse Theologically," to appear in Jahrbuch far biblische Theologie, 1999. . ,, .

8 See fane P. Tompkins, "The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response, m Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins, 201-32.

9 See my article, "The Ethics of Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship. SBL Presidential Address;' JBL 107, 1 (1988): 3-17, reprinted here as chapter I.

10 Adam, "Biblical Theology and the Problem of Modernity," 1.

11.Ibid., 12.

12 Blount, Cultural Interpretation, 1-23 and 175-94.

13 Segovia, "Introduction: Pedagogical Discourses and Practices in Biblical Criticism:' 1-28.

14 For a fuller development of a rhetorical approach, see my book Revelation: Vision of a Just World. This approach seems to gain ground in more recent research on Revelation. Compare, e.g.., Robert M. Royalty, Jr., "The Rhetoric of Revelation;' in SBL 1997 Seminar Papers (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 596-617; Pete Antonysamy Abir, The Cosmic Conflict of the Church: An Exegetico-Theological Study of Revelation 12, 7-12 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), 250-309.

15 Terence E. Fretheim, "Is the Biblical Portrayal of God Always Trustworthy?" in The Bible as Word of God in a Postmodern Age, ed. Terence E. Fretheim and Karlfried Frohlich (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998),97-112.

16. See my forthcoming article "G• d-The Many Named": Without Place and Proper Name," in Herman Haering, ed., Geloof in God.

17 See the collection of essays collected by Segovia and Tolbert, eds., Reading from This Place.

18 See my books But She Said; Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet; and Sharing Her Word for the elaboration of this approach

19 Cf. Bartky, Femininity and Domination.

20 For this expression, see Dorothy E. Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power.

21 For instance, one needs only to read the invectives of Paul against those with whom he disagrees in Galatians or Philippians.

22 Iris Marion Young, "Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of the Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory:' in Feminism as Critique, ed. Benhabib and Cornell, 59. Kathleen Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (New York: Routledge, 1993).

23 For the development of the "political philosophy of otherness" as legitimizing patriarchal societal structures of domination in antiquity, cf. Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 15-98; Spelman, Inessential Woman, 19-56; and especially duBois, Centaurs and Amazons.

24 DuBois, Centaurs and Amazons.

25 Lloyd, The Man of Reason.

26 Cf. Bartky, Femininity and Domination.

27 For this expression, see Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power.

28 Young, "Impartiality," 61.

29 For discussion and literature on the "politics of otherness," see Schussler Fiorenza, "The Politics of Otherness:' in The Future of Liberation Theology, ed. Ellis and Maduro, 311-25.

30 See, e.g., Elliott, "Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament"; Schmeller, Brechungen, 16-49; Craffert, "Towards an Interdisciplinary Definition."

31 Harding and Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality; Antony and Witt, eds., A Mind of One's Own

32 Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Community and Authority: The Rhetoric of Obedience in the Pauline Tradition. HTS (Harrisburg, Penn. Trinity Press International, 1998).

33 Union Seminary Quarterly (1978): 150. See also J. Christian Beker, "The Method of Recasting Pauline Theology: The Coherence-Contingency Theme as Interpretive Model;' in SBL 1986 Seminar Papers, ed. Kent H. Richards (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 597.

34 Ibid., 599.

35 Paul J. Achtemeier, "Finding the Way to Paul's Theology;• in Pauline Theology, vol. 1: Thessalonians, Philippians, Galatians, Philemon, ed. Jouette M. Bassler (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 25-36, at 29.

36 For an exploration of sameness and difference in Pauline interpretation, see the intriguing work of Elizabeth Castelli, Imitating Paul, which uses Michel Foucault's theoretical framework for its analysis.

37 For the whole argument, see Bernd Jaspert, "Sachkritik und Widerstand: Das Beispiel Rudolf Bultmanns;' Theologische Literaturzeitung llS (1990): 161-82.

38 Paul Ricoeur, "History and Rhetoric:' Diogenes 168 (1994): 23.

39 Reprinted in Robin scroggs, The Text and the Times: New Testament Essays for Today (Minneapolis:Fortress Press, 1993), 69-95.

40 Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1994), 229; see also notes on 282-87 for his critical discussion of Antoinette Clark Wire's work.

41 Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets.

42 Cf. Castelli, "Interpretations of Power in 1 Corinthians."

43 Cf., e.g., my article "Missionaries, Coworkers, and Apostles."

44 See Dieter Georgi, Theocracy in Paul's Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), for this expression.

45 Briggs Kittredge, Community and Authority, 178.

46 Carolyn Osiek, "Philippians;' in Searching the ed. Schuller scriptures frorenza, 2:246.

47 Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 169, suggests a similar but different argument when he argues: "The engagement of the religious citizen with a democratic regime is perhaps best captured under the notion of 'pilgrim citizenship.' Recognizing the penultimate character of the public realm, believers will not seek their final resting place in this sphere of power and persuasion.'' I would add that the "heavenly" politeuma of believers must be revisioned as a sphere of democratic power and persuasion if religious utopia should fulfill its critical function. "

48 In his lectures on the political theology of Paul, the Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes has argued that the "people of G*d" are to be envisioned as a historical community free of domination. The explosive power of the political theology of Israel consists in the fact that in it the people replace the king as the representative of G* d. However, in the horizon of Jewish thought, the institutions of domination of people by people cannot and may not represent the Messiah. The messianic must not legitimate the political order but can only relativize and ultimately replace it. See Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), 178-80.

49 For the fuller development of such an emancipatory reconstructive argument, see my article "A Discipleship of Equals: Ekklesial Democracy and Patriarchy in Biblical Perspective:• in A Democratic Catholic Church, ed. Eugene C. Bianch and Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Crossroad, 1992).

50 Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, claims to be the first such emancipatory history of freedom. It seems not accidental that his historical reconstruction of the struggles for freedom in antiquity recognizes women's crucial participation and contribution to these struggles.

51 Page duBois, Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World (New York: Routledge, 1991).

52 See my book Sharing Her Word and the perceptive discussion of my proposal of a Wisdom theoalogy by Martin Hailer, Theologie als Weisheit: Sapientiale Konzeptionen in der Fundamentaltheologiedes 20. fahrhunderts (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997).

53 Karen Baker-Fletcher, Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 27.