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) 

Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World

REVIEW 1

Apocalypse Now and Then:  A Feminist Guide to the End of the World

Catherine Keller

Boston: Beacon Press, 1996   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Catherine Keller in her book, Apocalypse Now and Then: A feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) deals with the effects of the Christian prophecy of the Apocalypse on western history and thought. Through innovative readings of the theology and philosophy, feminist and postmodern/ poststructuralist/ postcolonial theory, fiction and poetry, western history and current politics, Catherine Keller shows how the concept of the Apocalypse has affected the way the western tradition have thought about text, time, place, community and gender. Apocalypse Now and Then reveals the apocalyptic links of moments and events as diverse as colonialism, urbanization, 19th century American feminism and the current environmental crisis. Throughout the book, she constructs an imaginative ‘counter-apocalypse’ that includes prophetic passion for justice.

Catherine defines apocalypse as an embodied habit. It is in us and around us, constituting a “multi-dimensional, culture pervading spectrum of ideological assumptions, group identities, subjective responses and historical habits” (P. xi). According to Catherine, apocalypse does not lie outside of our subjectivities.  For her, apocalypse is a disclosure of an opening.  Apocalypse did not originally denote cataclysm or end. The Greek word apokalypsis means to unveil, to disclose, and to reveal. In this book, she particularly speaks of an apocalypse pattern operating in/ as western history. So she tries to re-read ‘John’s apocalypse’ / the book of Revelation as a ‘pre-text’ that influenced immensely the genealogy of the western history and culture. She invites the readers of the book to a kind of discursive hermeneutical engagement with this apocalyptic script in order to have a renewed vision of their own social, sexual, ethnic locations or con-texts.

What would make this book a “feminist” guide? For Catherine, the feminist construction of gender is a “configural zone,” intersecting with other zones- like time, place, community and spirit that refract through the lens of apocalypse. Apocalypse, she says, provides a kind of kaleidoscope for cultural self-consideration. (Kaleidoscope provides us a kind of multiple/ refracted view of a subject.) Catherine wanted to make this work as a theological enquiry, because; “theology may help us to locate ourselves within the mythic history of apocalypse and to seek its present meaning” (P. xiii).

Dis/ closing “The End”

Why reopen the Book of Revelation? Catherine argues that it is the most influential text of ‘disclosure’ (“coming again”) at the same time it is the ultimate western text of ‘closure’ (“The End”). She discusses two kinds of method of reading the Book of Revelation in western Christianity: retro apocalypse and crypto apocalypse. Retro apocalypse means understanding the text speaking to the immediate present.  She opines that it is a ‘conservative-literalist reading’, for which the interpretative mediation between the con-texts is not required (P.7). On the other hand, Crypto apocalypse is much more mysterious and psychological in content. Catherine joins with the group, who consider the Book of Revelation as a “master script of the hidden transcript” that initiates re-imagining the end of all kinds of dominations.

She advocates for a “counter-apocalypse” that methodologically exceeds the limitations of anti-apocalypse which ‘closes the texture of apocalypse’ and the neo-apocalypse that limits the text to a “contemporary solidarity.”  The counter-apocalypse tries to “situate ourselves in a fluid relation to the text, and itself alarmingly mobile between multiple contexts” (P.20). She says, “Dis/closure signifies a broken consciousness-that to unlock the time and space of apocalypse is to look another way, to reveal the truth told by suffering and to delight the contemporary healing opening” (P. 20). She prefers the word apocalypse rather than eschatology; because unlike eschatology-a ‘systematic encounter’ with “the truth,” apocalypse allows “a relational truth telling” programme in which we relate the text with the multiple locations. For Catherine, the focus of this book is to re-locate feminist theology with cosmology by which she is intended to discuss the “healing of kosmos, in its full etymological meaning of an aesthetic, social, and natural order of relations that is the endless “end” of counter-apocalypse” (P. 31).

Text: Seeing Voices

 She attempts to re-read the Book of Revelation as a ‘pre-text’ of contemporary apocalypse. Locating the text in its pluriformity of meaning (Intertextuality) and tracing back its history (ies) of readings (hermeneutical trajectories), she argues that “the Book of Revelation is a habit-forming text” (P. 277). Then, she moves on to “hear” the multiple voices or readings of this book in history. She points out that for the liberationist/ subaltern readings, Revelation belongs to an entire genre of resistance to dominations/ colonizations. As an apocalyptic text, the Book of Revelation ‘ends up’ in the dis/closure of a ‘New Jerusalem’-the pluralist polity of ‘nations’/ ‘nationalities,’ and invites its hermeneutic partners to a process of dis/closure of ‘new selves’. Both the text and the self are, hence apocalyptical, because; their meanings are not ‘fixed’ or ‘pre-determined’ but plurivocal /polyphonic and interactive. 

Time: Temporizing Tales

Time/ his-(s)tory is political in western tradition. Catherine opines that we need to ‘temporalize tales.’ Apocalypse as a ‘tale’ or as a ‘narrative,’ needs to be temporalized or con-textualized. She argues that it was Augustine and Joachim who consciously linked the apocalyptic ‘narrative’ with the western his-(s)tory (p. 101). She contents that there were enough reasons in the period of modernity for the historical convention of reading the modern sense of historical progress as a secularization of the Christian myth of apocalypse.  As the critics of enlightenment have demonstrated, she says, it was founded on a ‘universalized notion of the white male Euro centrism and connected thus to the notion of colonialism (P. 117). Catherine cites Joseph Camilleri, an Australian political philosopher: “underlying the history of the expanding, conquering, ‘sovereign’ state is the notion of continuity yet ‘progress’ across time, of history unfolding…as the ordering of time and space, as mastery of people and nature”(P. 118).

Against the rationalization of human life and to reduce it to the constraints of absolute time and space as it is proposed by the notions of modernity, the counter-apocalypse tries to temporalize time/ history/ narratives/ tales.  Catherine contents that “from the crucible of the social movements-feminist, liberative, ecological, anti-racist-emerge slowly the contours of a new temporality“(P. 123). Time is nothing but relation and thus temporality is the realization of relationality. To temporalize is to relativize selfhood and difference to each other. She quotes Rebecca Chopp: ‘It is at once as ‘cosmic time’, the temporality of relatedness, the ceaseless rhythms of natural time, not progress towards an end, not cause from an origin, but an endless flow of connectedness and as “kairotic time” (P. 136).  Dis/ closing time, according to Catherine, therefore directs attention at once to the sustaining and the transforming sequences of our lives (P. 136). 

Place: De/ Colon/izing Spaces

Catherine argues that the western privilege of universal meta narratives neglected the particularities of native spatiotemporalities (P.147). The western understanding of eschatology grounded in the concept of universal spatiality. Modern cartography composes a unified text of space, homogenized for the sake of conquest and trade. For the colonial ideology the unveiling of apocalypse means discovery or conquering the other. While discussing the idea of Christian expansionism in the modern project of Christian mission, she tells the story of ‘Colon’ who changed his name to “Christopher” (Christ-carrier) which means the patron of sailors (P. 161) in order to find rationale for his conquest. Colonialism now permeates into the micro spaces and even into the human bodies (Bio-Politics –Michel Foucault). Catherine comments that, for western epistemology Nature marks the place of every ‘other’ (P. 165).

As a counter-apocalypse on place she highlights the idea of the search for a “vital space” in the struggles of the ‘displaced people’ in Latin America, proposed by the liberation Theologian Vitor Westhelle (P. 168-173). Vitor problematizes the question of dis/placement in the context of (neo) colonialism.  Catherine quotes Vitor: “In such local struggles (for land and livelihood)–each subject to systemic, global effects of colonialism-the temporal “not yet” of liberation eschatology already begins to takes place” (P. 170). Joining with Vitor, she claims that “In the experience of total displacement, creatio ex nihilo is the only affirmation of hope for the displaced” (P. 172). The collective struggles of the dis/placed are catalysts for the reconstruction of time as well as physical and social space.

Spirit: Counter- Apocalyptic In Conclusion

She suggests that counter-apocalypse entails a sublation of eschatology into pneumatology, into the “dis/closive play of hope as a shifting luminocity at the edge of the present” (P. 276). By this she means an insurgent hope that continually arises in the midst of defeats and disappointments. For Keller, such insurgent hope must root its vision of the future in a renewed cosmology of inter-relationality- a deep matrix of relations, always precedes and follows our acts of self-constitution, exceeding “cultural-linguistic” boundaries, animating “nature” and as such, ourselves (P. 302).

 By defining apocalypse as a kaleidoscope, through which the cultural self is to be configured, Catherine brings out its feminist/theological content. Apocalypse, unlike eschatology that erases its creative/ aesthetical content, is an embodied habit in which we find ‘our selves.’ According to Catherine, the ‘new textualities’ of selves that we read out from the apocalyptic text is not ‘unified’ or ‘essentialist’ or ‘oppositional’ but ‘interactive,’ ‘interrelated’ and ‘plurivocal.’ Apocalypse, hence, is temporal, but revelational.  Vitor Westhelle draws out its dynamism: “apocalypse/ eschatology is proximity-adjacency to the recognized exteriority.”  If Catherine’s apocalypse is an open ended experience, why couldn’t this paper defer its ending by asking a question?  Catherine, where does your apocalypse attend the question of ‘being deferent’ in the total project of relations of relations?