Review of Elisabeth Fiorenza's In Memory of Her

Cornel West, Review of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. Religious Studies Review, 11 (1) (1985), 1-5. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's In Memory of Her is a ground-breaking work. For the first time, we have a powerful defense of new theological emancipatory models of hermeneutics, critical method, and historical reconstruction and an application of these models in one book. This intentional traversing of academic disciplines—theology, ethics, church history, and biblical studies—for the pursuit of knowledge and empowerment of women represents a coming of age for liberation theology. In this essay, I shall focus solely on Schüssler Fiorenza's hermeneutical and methodological formulations, without losing sight of her broader concerns. Any major challenge to prevailing paradigms in scholarship must build upon the profound and persuasive insights generated by mainstream scholars yet call into question their uncritically accepted presuppositions, prejudgments and prejudices which deter new breakthroughs. Schüssler Fiorenza adopts this strategy with great effectiveness. She begins by accepting the starting point of biblical historical criticism: the acknowledgement of biblical texts as neither verbally inspired revelation nor doctrinal stipulations but rather historical responses within the context of religious communities over time and space. Following the feminist claim that such contexts are patriarchal and androcentric, Schüssler Fiorenza demystifies mainstream biblical scholarship by revealing its captivity to androcentrism—its relative silence on and marginalization of women's lives in the past and present—and by disclosing the oppositional Christian women's culture concealed by traditional church his-story.