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Document Details :

Title: Lijden, verzet & hoop
Subtitle: Negatieve contrastervaringen van vrouwen en de christologie
Author(s): MCMANUS, Kathleen
Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie
Volume: 49    Issue: 1   Date: 2009   
Pages: 18-43
DOI: 10.2143/TVT.49.1.3203458

Abstract :
The enduring reality of suffering is uniquely focused in our day in the concrete, particular suffering of women. The global suffering of women in poverty, and the spiritual suffering of women in the Church together pose critical challenges for Christology in the 21st century. Understood and articulated through the lens of an eco-feminist epistemology, these two broad forms of women’s suffering will be engaged dialectically against the informing backdrop of the theology of Edward Schillebeeckx. In particular, women’s experience of negative contrast will be examined in relation to Schillebeeckx’s reflection on Jesus’ own experience of negative contrast in the rejection of his person and message that culminated in the crucifixion. At the heart of Jesus’ contrast experience was a mysticism of resistance rooted in the positive ground of his own trusting intimacy and identification with God. The divine relationship that defined his person found expression in his community-engendering practices of table-fellowship, healing, forgiveness of sin, and in his proclamation of the reign of God in terms of inclusive relationships of justice and love. Arguably, Jesus’ identification of the Reign of God in and through relationships is experientially embodied in women’s ways of being in the world. In particular, communities of women who suffer poverty and oppression in global cultures are marked by a relational solidarity that itself constitutes a mysticism of resistance harboring its own seeds of resurrection. Women of the First World who suffer spiritual oppression in relation to the institutional Church have something to learn from our sisters in poverty. At the same time, we have something to offer them when we claim our voices in a transformed praxis-Christology that sheds new light on what it means to be Christ in the world. This both entails and requires a re-configured Christology in living praxis. One of the major challenges suffering poses to Christology in the 21st century is skepticism regarding the unique universality of Christ for salvation. Nowhere is this challenge more compelling than in the theological reflection of women employing an eco-feminist phenomenology in intercultural contexts. This essay will engage the multiple starting points of global eco-feminisms and a first world ‘feminist mystical theology’ in relation to Schillebeeckx’s insistence on Jesus’ constitutive relation to the coming of God’s rule. The category of negative contrast experience will be engaged in relation to what Beverly Lanzetta has called the via feminina in an effort to seek out the feminine Body of Christ hidden in the tradition so that it may be enfleshed in the present.

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