International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 9 Number 4 October 2007

Reviews

Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent

Theology. London: SCM Press, 2004, 186pp. £16.99.

This book continues Marcella Althaus-Reid’s project of widening the parameters of

feminist and liberationist theologies to include questions of female sexuality and
same-sex relations, as a critical perspective from which to challenge dominant global
economic and political systems. She argues that liberation theology has failed to
address issues of sexuality and that it has lost its cutting edge in its capacity
to challenge established values and power relations, and that postcolonial and
‘queer’ theologies provide the perspective for a more transgressive and challenging
critique. She uses the phrase ‘Indecent Theology’ to refer to what she describes
as ‘a feminist Latin American theology which is political, postcolonial and
Queer’ (Acknowledgements).
There is a certain energy and verve in Althaus-Reid’s approach, as she sprints
across a wide range of liberationist, feminist, Marxist and postcolonial theories in
order to perform her task of ‘indecenting theology’ by bringing questions of sexuality
and poverty to the forefront of theological debate. The underlying issues she
addresses are important, concerned as they are with the ways in which compulsory
heterosexism remains the dominant theological paradigm, and has contributed to a
long history of misogyny and sexual oppression in the Christian tradition. Yet this is
a deeply frustrating book, and it left me with a sense of dismay about the lack of
critical rigour in the work of some feminist theologians.
For a start, most of the chapters have been published elsewhere, so that the book
reads like a series of disconnected essays which lack a coherent structure and are
quite repetitive. But it is also a book which fails to meet the minimum standards
which one is entitled to expect from academic theology, and its flamboyant rhetoric
and flashy style cannot mask the inadequacy of its scholarship.
There has been much debate about the tension between theoretical and
experiential perspectives in feminist theology, based on the recognition that a highly
theoretical approach can result in intellectual elitism and abstraction from the
daily concerns of women’s lives, while a more experiential approach can fail to
offer sufficient intellectual engagement with theoretical debates and theological
perspectives. Althaus-Reid makes sweeping gestures in the direction of both theory
and experience, but the result is a sorry muddle of confused scholarship and over-
generalizations about both sexuality and poverty.
Althaus-Reid is clearly influenced by the rhetorical style of Luce Irigaray, but to
play with language as Irigaray does requires considerable skills of analysis and
© The author 2007. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
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470 Reviews

interpretation, not to mention a flair for irony and parody. Without these literary
skills, what might be intended as a creative deconstruction of the master narratives of
Western theology becomes instead a series of often unconnected denunciations and
polemical assertions, such as the claim that
God has sex with young Mary without a meaningful relationship, and Jesus is
conceived by male and not female desire. That sexual immaturity attributed to
the Big God called ‘the father’ is extended to the construction of a Christ unable
to understand or develop human sexuality in the context of a loving community
of equals. (p. 85)
There are Irigarayan overtones to this, particularly if one reads the last chapter of
Irigaray’s Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, but while Irigaray is parodic and
poetic, Althaus-Reid is almost incoherent. No Christian theologian has ever claimed
that God had sex with Mary, and this rhetorical jibe needs considerably more
elaboration and development if it is to strike its target with any accuracy. There are
many such careless assertions in the book, so that it is often highly misleading in its
theological claims.
Although she makes passing reference to a wide range of theorists, nowhere
does Althaus-Reid engage closely enough with her sources. For example, she cites
René Girard, whose work has had a considerable influence on recent theological
reflections on sacrifice, violence and the social order, and who also features
prominently in some of Irigaray’s writings. Central to Girard’s thesis is the argument
that the story of Christ interrupts the sacrificial foundations of the social order and
opens the way to a new community of peace based not on mimetic violence but on
the mimesis of forgiving and reconciling love. Althaus-Reid misses the point when
she writes, ‘There is a thesis from the French anthropologist René Girard that every
civilization is built upon a “founding sacrifice”, which in our case Girard relates to
Jesus’ crucifixion’ (p. 26). I could cite many other examples of this cavalier attitude
to complex scholarly arguments.
There is also a kind of faux Marxist critique which runs through the book, which
at times amounts to little more than meaningless jargon. Consider, for example, the
following quotation:
the task of feminist postcolonial hermeneutics is similar to the objectives of an
Indecent Theology of interpretation by subverting, or making indecent, that
ideological sacralization of a sexual economic oppressive construct which kills
women and makes them into the fetish of a disconnected ontology and an
exploitative form of production. (p. 87)
It is hard to see who this kind of language is directed at. It is far too convoluted to
appeal to a general readership, and it is far too sloppy and unfocused to appeal to an
academic readership. At the very least, one might wish that the publisher had
employed a more ruthless copy-editor to tidy up the almost impenetrable prose.
The credibility of feminist theology is undermined by work such as this.
Feminist theologians still struggle for academic respectability, and those of us who
© The author 2007
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007
Reviews 471

teach courses in feminism know how readily our critics latch on to any perceived
weaknesses and failings. We should not let our sense of loyalty to the feminist cause
cloud our academic judgement, and we must be willing to speak out when ill-
informed polemics are smuggled into the academy under the cloak of feminism. That
is why, after much reflection, I decided to write this review, having initially thought
that perhaps it was better just to ignore the book altogether. I would be deeply
concerned if I thought work such as this was being used for the purposes of
theological education or indeed for feminist consciousness-raising. It is simply an
anti-Christian diatribe, and a poorly-written one at that.

Tina Beattie
Roehampton University

Brian Hebblethwaite and Douglas Hedley, eds., The Human Person in

God’s World: Studies to Commemorate the Austin Farrer Centenary.
London: SCM Press, 2006, vii + 150pp. £60.00 hb.; £19.99 pb.

The year 1904 was a good one for theologians. Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Yves
Congar, John Courtney Murray, Michael Ramsey, G.C. Berkouwer and doubtless
others were all born this year – as was Austin Farrer. Just over a century after his birth
– and almost forty years since his sudden and premature death in 1968 (20 days after
Karl Barth) – Farrer remains a fascinating and elusive figure. Despite his universally
acknowledged brilliance, he has never been regarded as a truly major voice – even in
Anglican circles – and so remains on the margins of contemporary discussions
in philosophy, theology, biblical studies, literary theory and Anglican spirituality.
Perhaps this relative obscurity is due to his principled refusal to be a ‘professional’
scholar and consequent decision to divide his intellectual energies amongst many
academic fields, whilst remaining engaged in full-time pastoral and administrative
work at a series of Oxford colleges. But he has also never really faded away, and there
are signs that his diverse, sophisticated and idiosyncratic corpus may yet find a new
generation of readers. In some recent retrospective surveys of twentieth-century
British theology, Farrer casts a surprisingly large and interesting shadow against the
background of his more pedestrian – and more conventionally prominent – peers.
Thus, when the editors of this volume marking the centenary of his birth boldly say that
Farrer ‘is regarded by many people as the greatest Anglican theologian of the twentieth
century’ (p. vii), they may have some new justification for their claim.
Comprised of lectures delivered at the international Farrer centenary conference
held at Oriel College, Oxford, in September 2004, this slim collection contains five
primary chapters preceded by a substantial introduction by Basil Mitchell, and ends
with a commemoration sermon preached by Richard Harries (Bishop of Oxford from
1987 to 2006). The theme of the conference is also the title of the book: ‘The Human
Person in God’s World’. This theme was chosen to link what many scholars regard
as Farrer’s most important contributions to contemporary philosophical theology,
© The author 2007
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007