The Power of the Word, Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire

REVIEW 2

The Power of the Word, Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza in her book The Power of the Word explores how the power of empire has shaped and affected Christian scriptures and how it still shapes our self understanding. It is an invitation to re-visit our ‘own tongues’ how far it is anti-empire and nurturing a language of social democracy of equality and fraternity. By analyzing Roman Empire as the context and the social location of Christian scriptures and seeing the contemporary forms of empire, she proposes a critical feminist postcolonial hermeneutics of the scriptures and thereby tries to valorize the global possibilities of resistances. 

She locates this book within the framework of feminist political theory which includes three specific modes, as it was proposed by the political theorist Nancy Fraser, viz: historical redistribution, ideological deconstruction and theological constructive re-presentation. Through these modules of reading she indented to   de-kiriachialise or de-imperialize or de-colonize both the inscriptions of the biblical discourses and our concept of Divine itself. Her whole task here is to invite us to have a counter imperial imagination of the ‘text’ and the ‘self’.

The book is divided into seven chapters. In the first chapter she tries to articulate a theoretical space for mapping a critical transnational feminist biblical interpretation. She argues that the biblical concept of ekklesia, as a counter biblical imagination of radical democracy that even provides the equal space for the agency of wo/men, is capable enough to challenge myriad of dominations against wo/men and foster their struggles for survival and transformation (p.35). In the second chapter, by re-imagining the ekklesia of wo/men as the hermeneutical ‘imagined community’ she understands the biblical authority as a resource for creativity, courage and solidarity. She explains it further by stating that “it [the critical biblical reading that constitute ekklesia as an ‘imagined community’ of wo/men] does not understand scripture as tablets of stone but rather as nourishing bread” (P. 67). She contends that by deconstructing the all encompassing kyriaichal rhetorics and politics of domination and subordination, the wo/men are able to generate new possibilities for engaging in emancipatory practices of biblical meaning making and political resistance to imperial globalization (p.67). In the third chapter where she explicates the ekklesia as the decolonizing space  and an active process of struggle moving toward greater equality, freedom, and responsibility by which wo/men re-imagine and challenge the multiple forms of empire,   she declares her thesis emphatically: “All wo/men silenced and marginalized by kyriarchal-hierarchic structures of domination are crucial in this ekklesial process of struggle for a radical democratization that is inspired by an eschatological vision of a society and world free of exploitation, domination and evil (p. 109).

In the fourth essay in which she discusses the issue of empire and its rhetoric of subordination, she convincingly argues that the biblical texts are shaped by the rhetoric of empire and thus it must be ‘detoxified’ in a process of de-colonializing interpretation. By analyzing the inscription of empire in the book of revelation, she tends to propose an intersectional kyriarchal analysis that can decode the complex power of domination inscribed in biblical texts. This idea is explained in detail in the fifth chapter. According to Fiorenza, the ‘detoxifying’ process of interpretation challenges us to become the*-ethically sophisticated readers by reflecting our own socio-political locations and functions in global structures of empire. In the sixth chapter where she deals with the feminist critique of androcentric G*d language, proposes new modules for decolonizing Divine and G*d talk. She suggests that “only a the*logical strategy that approaches classic discourses about G*d with a mobile method of deconstruction and proliferation, of symbolic critique and amplification, of construction and imagination is able to develop a decolonizing and liberating feminist way of engaging and transforming G*d language” (234) .  In the final chapter she discloses the relevance of her critical feminist hermeneutical method in the biblical studies. According to Fiorenza, “the task of biblical studies is to research both the inscriptions of empire, on the one hand, and to trace alternative radical democratic visions in biblical language and texts that functions as ‘scripture’ in Christianity and western culture, on the other” (p. 265). The critical feminist hermeneutical strategies aim at the re-reading of the dominations inscribed on the ‘scripture’ and the wo/men body. 

The whole programme of this book can be summed up as follows: (1) The need to go beyond the androcentric language in the G*d talk (Theological discourse), (2) To promote the practice of living as the citizens of ekklesia- where all exercise their agency in a democratic space of equality in order to combat the rhetoric of empire, and (3) To promote the postcolonial feminist critical biblical studies in order to de-inscribe empire from the scripture and wo/men body. What is interesting in this approach is that Fiorenza’s villain- the Empire is prominent here and sometimes the Villain takes the position of the hero in the narrative!  

reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj (LSTC)