Grieving, Brooding, and Transforming

Abstract

Cheryl Bridges Johns argues that hermeneutics alone cannot save us from inadequate and harmful ways of reading Scripture. She calls for a return to the basic questions regarding the nature of the subjecthood and otherness of the Bible. She offers a view of the Bible as living subject whose existence is grounded in the economic life of God. As such, the Bible serves as a sanctified, Spirit-filled vessel in service of restoring creation. A Spirit-filled feminist approach to the Bible as Spirit-Word includes the processes of grieving, brooding, and transformation. First, the reader moves through a hermeneutics of suspicion, through a hermeneutics of remembrance into a deeper, darker, and more profound place. The grieving Spirit of Shekinah is found here. However, a Spirit-filled feminist hermeneutic does not abandon women to grief. Rather, it moves us into the purposes of God toward justice and the healing of creation. The movement from grief to transformation often goes the way of ‘brooding’ over the brokenness and gestating newness. The final movement of Spirit-filled feminist hermeneutics is the movement of transformation. The Bible performed carries with it the power to transform and to bring about the reconstruction of life.