Thinking the Trinity as Resource for Feminist Theology Today?

Abstract

Thinking the Trinity as Resource for Feminist Theology Today? Hannah Bacon Introduction—the challenge of imagining God in feminist theology The Christian feminist imagination continuously stands in need of healthy and hopeful ways of thinking about God. To do justice to all bodies and to honor all flesh, feminist thinking about the Christian God needs first and foremost to be a “generous” kind of theology, a theology which does not seek to contain or confine God and which does not consequently limit women or men to static, predefined, designated symbolic, material, or social spaces. Thinking about God must be generous in its imaginings so that it allows for the fluidities, multiplicities, ambiguities, complexities, and diversities of women and men's embodiments to be theologically theorized, valued, and embraced. This article proposes that thinking God as Trinity provides an important resource for feminist theology on this basis. Crucially, it questions the value of (mainly Western) feminist theology's often exclusive focus on the language question (“how do we speak rightly about God?”). God‐talk, it is argued, does not connote the full extent of the problem surrounding the Trinity and, to this extent, can never be the sum of the solution. Although related to God‐talk, God‐thought requires further attention within the feminist community, and in this article, I debate what such a focus might contribute to the Christian feminist imagination. I begin by asking “where has God gone in feminist theology?,” noting a distinct lack of sustained scholarship on this doctrine in feminist thought. Responding to two probable reasons for the paucity of feminist scholarship—the abstract nature of Trinitarian theology and the sexist nature of Trinitarian language—I propose that we use Christology as a lens through which to think God as Trinity. This unites oikonomia with theologia, confirming that the mystery of salvation is revealed in the incarnation and the sending of the Spirit is inseparable from the mystery of God. Rather than following common practice within contemporary Trinitarianism of constructing a social model of the Trinity which relies on speculative knowledge about the immanent life of God, uniting oikonomia with theologia situates the starting point of Trinitarian reflection in the material revelation of God in the economy of salvation, in particular, I suggest, with the incarnation of God in the body of Jesus. Through a process of reading “back” from the incarnation to the Trinity—a move which I maintain is justified on the grounds that there is no God outside the God revealed in the history of salvation—I propose that the triune God cannot be God without the flesh. The ramifications of such imaginings for feminist theology are subsequently addressed. Thinking God as Trinity, I argue, provides a theological resource for thinking about intersectionality and for affirming the fluidities and ambiguities of identity. It also establishes self‐giving as a primary feature of God's identity. Although daring to embrace within a feminist context, self‐giving as modeled here becomes a potentially subversive feature of Christian praxis, prophetically calling into repentance the colonizing and homogenizing agendas of phallocentrism. Thinking God as Trinity thus, I conclude, provides an invaluable resource for affirming the diversities and complexities of identity and for locating the value of all bodies within the vast, fleshy, and abundant life of God. Where has God gone in feminist theology? Abstraction and sexism in the Trinity The doctrine of God is not a common area of discussion within the contemporary theological arena, especially within contemporary feminist thought. Rather surprisingly, there has been relatively little feminist scholarship dedicated to a sustained discussion of the Trinity. Although, of course, there are texts which do provide such a treatment—Catherine LaCugna's God For Us, Elisabeth Johnson's She Who Is, Karen Baker‐Fletcher's Dancing with God, for example—full‐length feminist discussions of this doctrine are not commonplace. Given the expansive, global, and multifaceted nature of feminist theologies today, this raises questions about the doctrine's relevance for women across a number of divergent geographic, social, economic, and material contexts. Certainly, we are led to ask why the space attributed to this doctrine seems minimal when compared to that of other areas such as...