American Catholic Bishops Censure Fordham Scholar Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson

Fordham University professor Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson is one of a generation of feminist and male religious scholars who acknowledge that the writers of the Bible circumscribed women’s roles as part of their own cultural biases.

In 2007 Sister Johnson wrote Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God.  The reviews of her book were excellent and it remains #1071 at Amazon almost four years after publication.

“It is rare that one finds a book that will appeal to all sorts of audiences, but Quest for the Living God is one. Professional theologians, undergraduate students and literate people of faith will enjoy all that this engaging work has to offer.” — America Magazine

“With her characteristic generosity, Johnson surveys a range of new theological currents in the doctrine of God, showing the context in which each idea arose, the theological reasoning behind it, and its implications for spiritual and practical life. Included are chapters on transcendental, political, liberation, feminist, black, Hispanic, interreligious, and ecological theologies, followed by a chapter of trinitarian reflections. Suggestions for further reading conclude each chapter.” — Amy Plantinga Pauw, Christian Century, May 6, 2008

“As Elizabeth Johnson notes, Karl Rahner had an abiding concern that much of Christian theology presented God ‘unworthy of belief.’ Here Johnson has given us a God truly worthy of our belief, fidelity, and love. Every word breathes with the author’s own deep love of God, the church, and the world. Combining her usual theological sophistication with the practical wisdom that comes from a life-long commitment to the life of faith, this is theology as it should be.” — Roberto S. Goizueta, Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College, and past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America

“In this wonderful, lucid, and challenging book, Elizabeth Johnson not only maps the frontiers of theology but critiques, synthesizes, and appropriates a range of insights to help us fruitfully and humbly expand our grasp of the Loving Mystery who is God.” — M. Shawn Copeland, Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College, and past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America

The NYTimes writes that American bishops are now on the offensive against Sister Johnson, accusing her of violating church doctrine. Scholars on both left and write agree that the bishops, who already refuse to discuss issues around ordaining women are signaling that there will also be no discussion of pronouns in prayers, the study of male and female aspects of God and other ‘progressive ideas’ about God. 

“What the bishops have done is to reject 50 years of contemporary theology,” said Terrence W. Tilley, chairman of the theology department at Fordham, where many faculty members have rallied to the sister’s defense. “Sister Johnson has been attempting to push Catholic thinking along new paths. And the bishops have now made it clear — this is something they stand against.”

Recently the board of the Catholic Theological Society of America said the bishops’ criticism represented a misreading of her work and reflected ‘a very narrow understanding’ of contributions theologians make to the church.

Conservatives in the church are thrilled to be done with these radical beliefs. God is male (a fact believed by the majority of American women); the Creator is a masculine force and — perhaps once and for all — we can agree that men are more Godlike than women.

Reading the Catholic Theological Society of America response to the American bishops, we see the reflection of American society in total. Attempts are being made in every sector of our society to roll back the last 50 years, with the clear objective of putting women back in their places.

The proper place for women is at home raising children and servicing her community, living under the tutelage of a husband, who is in charge of the family unit.

Update on Wed, April 20, 2011 by Anne

Our friend Cyranos has submitted this reaction to the Bishops’ report. I know that his views reflect those of many AOC Christian readers on the subject of religion and religious hierarchy.

Concerning the Bishop’s paper, what is below is my review of their review of “Quest for the Living God…”, offered simply as information.  I’ve annotated my comments with page/paragraph numbers relative to the downloadable PDF of the document for ease of reference.

5/1  They attempt to divorce themselves of the fact that having taught the political murder of Jesus as part of a divine plan they have effectively slandered God by intimating that HE, God Almighty, would be guilty of accessory before the fact in said political murder. (NOT the God I see, I assure you!)

6/2  In this paragraph they confirm their belief the full definition and understanding of God should be reserved to other than the secular, in other words, those who seek to live by the thought of God should be compelled to understand that God only in the same form as they who constrain the thought of God to a tradition of history.  In short, they’re defending their rice bowl, as the Chinese might say.

6/3 _ 9/2  Here they defend their thought well, it is a rational and solid defense, and a valid safeguard against the deliberate introduction of an irrational contradiction as a flawed precursor to a later argument of logic.  I would agree with them in challenging the idea of saying since God is incomprehensible (in the sense of an all encompassing knowledge of a being so many orders of magnitude above the scale of our existence)  it would then follow to say such an entity is also unknowable (in the sense of saying any degree comprehension of that entity is beyond human capacity).  Such is a contradiction of logic: if it is held the reality we inhabit is a wholly enclosed subset of the reality of God then those parts of God that equally inhabit the subset defined to the human would be resident at the level of that subset and perceivable to rational thought. 

In the most part I would support their thought in this section, for if one says any possible name for God is a metaphor drawn exclusively from the subset of the human condition and experience then one has locked and limited any enlargement of perception to the limits of the human subset from whence the metaphor is drawn, regardless if that enlargement might occur by the efforts of the human or to the will of God making available a larger understanding proportionate to the maturity of those it might be offered to.  When one begins to reach beyond the obvious there is a great deal of power in a name, consider how few can actually grasp the mathematical concepts of infinity, or eternity.

10/2 _11/2  In this section they speak of the emotional interactions of God with that subset defined as Human. Make of this what you will, the arguments on this point have been a distraction to the understanding of God/Human for as long as the thought has been around, I’ll not open that quagmire here.

12/1_13/3  This section is weak indeed, it is a defense based on dogma and nothing more.  This section is where the Bishops attempt to use tradition to defend itself, and it really does not work.  The proof of this being tradition is that they could have defended these points far better by invoking her own argument in favor of any of the (rumored) nine billion possible names of God being nothing more than metaphor, and since she argues that all metaphors set equal then any human trait stereotyped to gender is nothing more than the human attempting to apply a definition derived from the human subset to their metaphor for God, a voluntary human limitation applied to what she argues is beyond their comprehension anyway.  It is indeed the good old boy thing hard at work, but Anne, don’t celebrate that because the proof of the good old boy thing equally exposes the inherent weakness in the other argument as well.

14/1_ 16/2  IMO This section is proof the bull was eating quite well, judging by what was left in the road to be observed after the fact, it is purely assertions of tradition often in conflict with elements earlier presented, in short, once again they defend their rice bowl of the Christian tradition based on that tradition, a totally circular argument.

16/3_end  Again, refer to the bull.  Circular assertions and contradictions, their patent form of the irrational evolved to confuse those inclined to believe rather than seek, nothing I’ll comment on here.  It deserves a major work of rebuttal, or my current choice to refuse to dignify it by saying anything.

In essence, these Bishops are doing nothing more than saying “no, this isn’t Catholicism, and they have that right.  It isn’t.  Is it a good work?  I’ve not read the book, from their arguments against it I’d say I wouldn’t gain much by reading it, sounds to me like things I covered 30 years ago when I established my own understanding, such as it is, of God and his relationship with we his creation, we who are indeed subsets of himself set independent for the cause of mutual survival.

Anne, when you engage with this form of Christianity there is one scripture they cannot turn back, and it is the words of Jesus himself.  Ask them if they’ve ever considered the distinct possibility that when Jesus said “where ever two or three are gathered in my name there shall I be also…” he was giving the UPPER limit on a congregation, not the lower… it is totally consistent with everything else He taught, and if there was one thing certain to have been clear to Jesus just by observing the world he lived in it was the detrimental and degrading effect of politics, most especially the politics among theologians, on those genuinely seeking to understand God.

Yours truly,
Cyranos

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