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Rosemary Radford Ruether's THE PERSONAL IS THE THEOLOGICAL: ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER’S PRACTICAL THEOLOGY AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE Dissertation Submitted to The College of Arts and Sciences of the UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theology By Phyllis Howser Scholp UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON Dayton, Ohio December 2017 THE PERSONAL IS THE THEOLOGICAL: ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER’S PRACTICAL THEOLOGY AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE Name: Scholp, Phyllis Howser APPROVED BY: ____________________________________ Sandra A. Yocum, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor ____________________________________ Jana M. Bennett, Ph.D. Faculty Reader ____________________________________ Kelly S. Johnson, Ph.D. Faculty Reader ____________________________________ William L. Portier, Ph.D. Faculty Reader ____________________________________ Mel Piehl, Ph.D. External Faculty Reader ii ABSTRACT THE PERSONAL IS THE THEOLOGICAL: ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER’S PRACTICAL THEOLOGY AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE Name: Scholp, Phyllis Howser University of Dayton Advisor: Dr. Sandra A.Yocum Rosemary Radford Ruether is one of the most well-known and influential Christian feminist theologians, having emerged in the early 1970s as a leader in Catholic feminist theology. Ruether produced the first systematic theology based on women’s experience, that is, a feminist treatment of the Christian symbols, in her classic, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, published in 1983. To label Ruether strictly as a feminist theologian, however, is to risk overlooking the broad scope of her interests and her work. This dissertation argues that while Ruether is one of the most widely read feminist theologians and a deservedly recognized pioneer in the field, she is far more than a feminist theologian. It is the contention here that Ruether’s feminism emerges out of her much broader interests and experiences. That is, feminism did not, and still does not, come first in either priority or sequence for Ruether. The broader concern for her out of which she writes in a wide variety of areas is liberation from “a world system of oppression.” Thus, this dissertation presents Ruether as a liberation theologian. This dissertation argues that iii Ruether has developed her theologies – liberation theology, feminist theology, her Christology, and her ecclesiology – from her personal encounters, her own life’s experiences; thus for Ruether, the personal becomes the theological. Her passion for justice and human rights and her lifelong involvement in varieties of social activism that resulted from that passion, led her to develop a wide-ranging theology of liberation. In her social involvements and her writings, she has sought to probe a world system of oppression, divided by race, class, gender, ecological abuse, and imperialism. In each of these diverse areas, she has sought to probe the justifying ideologies and to imagine how to create a liberated world beyond. This is what ties all her thought and writings together. Three of the areas of her work are presented in this dissertation: Christian anti- Semitism, ecofeminism and the ecological crisis, and reform of the Catholic Church. This dissertation ends with a brief discussion of how, in spite of her criticism of the Catholic Church, Ruether continues to self-identify as Catholic. iv Dedicated to Rosemary Radford Ruether for her Christian witness, her scholarship, and her passion for justice and liberation of the oppressed v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii DEDICATION .....................................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 ROSEMARY RUETHER’S THEOLOGICAL PILGRIMAGE: AN OVERVIEW ..............................................................................................10 Early Beginnings of Ruether’s Intellectual Development .........................10 Interest in Ancient History, Classical Antiquity, and Christian Roots ......14 Influence of Civil Rights Movement and Vatican II .................................16 Ruether’s Emerging Feminist Thought ......................................................22 Ruether’s Expanding Feminist Thought ....................................................25 Anti-Semitism /Israeli-Palestinian Crisis ...................................................26 Ecology and Ecofeminism .........................................................................29 CHAPTER 2 RUETHER’S FEMINIST THEOLOGYAS LIBERATION THEOLOGY ..............................................................................................32 Early Feminist Movements ........................................................................32 Second Wave Feminism ............................................................................38 Feminism Moves into Religious Circles ....................................................41 Rosemary Ruether as Feminist ..................................................................53 CHAPTER 3 RUETHER AND JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS ...........................63 Anti-Judaism in the Early Church and the New Testament .......................70 Negation of the Jews in the Church Fathers ..............................................75 The Social Incorporation of the Jewish Myth into Christendom ...............81 Christian Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust ..............................................85 The Key Issue: Christology .......................................................................86 The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict .................................................................89 The Roots of Jewish Zionism ....................................................................91 The Rise of Arab Nationalism ...................................................................92 vi CHAPTER 4 WORLD SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION AND THE DESTRUCTION OF EARTH’S ECOSYSTEM ..................................................................100 Overview of Ruether’s Thought and Writings on Ecofeminism .............102 Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing ....................111 Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions ...............129 CHAPTER 5 RUETHER’S CATHOLICISM: CRITIQUING, CHALLENGING, STAYING ................................................................................................143 Critiquing and Challenging ......................................................................145 Remaining Catholic in Spite of the Institutional Church .........................170 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................176 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................182 vii INTRODUCTION Rosemary Radford Ruether has been for several decades one of the most well- known and influential Christian feminist theologians, having emerged in the early 1970s as a leader in Catholic feminist theology. As Michael Novak observed early in her career, “Her vision is complex and rich. She sets before us an image of a society we ought to struggle to achieve, a society in which we may live out the ancient promise that ‘In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’ (Galatians 3:28).”1 To label Ruether strictly as a feminist theologian, however, is to risk overlooking the broad scope of her interests and her work. This dissertation intends to show that while Ruether is one of the most widely read feminist theologians and a deservedly recognized pioneer in the field, she is far more than a feminist theologian. It is the contention here that Ruether’s feminism emerges out of her much broader interests and experiences and concerns; that is, feminism did not, and still does not, come first in either priority or sequence for Ruether. In truth, her feminist theology is grounded in her civil rights work in the Mississippi Delta in the mid-1960s and in the Latin American tradition of liberation theology to which she was introduced in the early 1970s. Her early experiences in the civil rights movement and then in living in a predominately Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C. when she taught at Howard University were very 1 Michael Novak, “The Women’s Experience and Perspective,” in American Religious Values and the Future of America, ed. Roger van Allen (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 134. 1 formative in grounding her understanding of feminist theology as situated in the analysis of an interconnection among class, race, and gender. Following her experience with the civil rights movement in the South, it was from her passion for justice and human rights that her liberationist vision developed. Through the years, her liberationist vision drove her writings in an ever widening variety of areas. Ruether has said that the working assumption of much of her work has been that liberation theology is multidimensional and needs to be looked at across a wide range of diverse contexts.2 The broader concern out of which Ruether writes in a wide variety of areas is liberation from what she calls “a world system of oppression.” Her feminist theology is the consequence of her broader view of the ethical and social implications of the Christian gospel, and this worldview is especially rooted in her
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