The Influence and Impact of Bernadette Brooten Not Only on LGBTIQ+ People in Germany

Abstract

The Influence and Impact of Bernadette Brooten Not Only on LGBTIQ+ People in Germany Angela Standhartinger (bio) As we all know, Bernadette Brooten is an impressively polyglot person. She knows Norwegian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, French, and of course German. Actually, she is the best non-native German speaker I have ever met in my life. In preparation for this contribution, I solved the riddle of Brooten's facility: she started her career with a maxima cum laude BA in German from the University of Portland, Oregon, including one year of study in Salzburg in Austria. Immediately after, she studied theology for another two years at Tübingen in Germany before entering the PhD program at Harvard, which included a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.1 At Tübingen she became involved in the critical discussion, at that time, of the recently closed Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church and its failure, among other reforms, to begin ordaining women as priests. So her famous rediscovery of the female apostle Junia was published in the volume Women Priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration, edited by Leonard and Arlene Swidler.2 The following year, the Junia article was published in one of the premiere German publications on feminist theology, the book Frauenbefreiung (women's emancipation), edited by Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel.3 With Moltmann-Wendel and Hans Küng, Brooten developed a research project, "Women and Christianity," part of which resulted in her famous paper "Early Christian Women and Their [End Page 183] Cultural Context: Issues of Method in Historical Reconstruction."4 The German Volkswagen Foundation funded the Women and Christianity project, under the category "unconventional ideas," with 732,000 DM. From 1982 to 1984 Brooten held an academic research position at the University of Tübingen to publish in the area of "Sexualität, Ehe und Alternativen zur Ehe in den ersten vier Jarhunderten christlicher Geschichte" (sexuality, marriage, and alternatives to marriage in the first four Christian centuries). However, when she decided to focus on "Frauen, Macht und Sexualität: Röm 1,26 im Kontext" (women, power, and sexuality: Rom 1:26 in context), Hans Küng, the only chair holder in the group, saw this as a fundamental thematic change of topic. Because of this academic freedom dispute, Bernadette Brooten left Tübingen and moved to Harvard and later to Brandeis. Yet she had already initiated two political movements in Germany. One movement was the discussion of anti-Jewish patterns in Christian feminist theology. Brooten's engagement in this debate was triggered by the 1981 issue of Concilium, the international journal dedicated to critical Catholicism and perhaps the first mainline journal in Germany to publish on feminist theology.5 That same year, Brooten responded to the initial volume her paper "Jüdinnen zur Zeit Jesus" (Jewish women at the time of Jesus).6 She openly criticized the anti-Jewish stereotyping involved in constructing a feminist Jesus through a contrast with the (other) alleged patriarchal Jewish teachers and the accompanying tendentious selections of Jewish sources, in order to rescue early Christianity from patriarchy. The next year she republished most of the Concilium articles in her coedited book Women in a Men's Church, in which she included her own article and two from Jewish feminists Naomi R. Goldenberg and Judith Plaskow as well as one from Jacquelyn Grant entitled "Black Theology and Black Women."7 In so doing, [End Page 184] Brooten wrote in the foreword, she hoped to initiate a dialogue between Jewish and Christian feminists in Germany—a goal the book accomplished.8 While the German debate on anti-Judaism in feminist theology reached its high point in 1986–87, Brooten's 1981 article is still remembered as the starting point.9 One typical apologetic argument of that time was that Jesus rescued women from the patriarchal arbitrariness of Jewish men through his general prohibition of divorce. Brooten countered with extensive source work in "Konnten Frauen im Alten Judentum die Scheidung betreiben? Überlegungen zu Mk 10,11–12 and 1 Kor 7,10–11" (Did Jewish women divorce themselves from their husbands? Considerations on Mark 10:11–12 and 1 Cor 7:10–11).10...