Recapturing the Sacred
Holy Texts, Authority and Feminist Hermeneutics
(tentative description)
From a critical feminist point of view, the authority of established ‘holy texts’ like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Koran forms a major problem. At the one hand, the authority of these texts is deeply intertwined with a hierarchical and gendered exertion of power, and with practices of exclusion, 's rights, aspirations and voices in churches and societies. On the other hand, these 'holy texts' seem to incorporate a capicity to evoke the desire and to install the power to contest and resist this exclusion, arginalisation and silencing of women’s rights, aspirations and voices in churches and societies. On the other hand, these ‘holy texts’ seem to incorporate a capacity to evoke the desire and to install the power to contest and resist this exclusion, demonstrated by the reiterated appeal to these texts to underpin this resistance as well as by the religious discourse and performance they gave rise to by women of different times, cultures and situations in their struggle for liberation and quality of life.
A task of great importance therefore is to explore if and how this ‘incentive potential’ is related to the authority and the holiness of these texts. To discuss this relation, this exposition focuses on a variety of interpretative strategies that have been developed in feminist theological hermeneutics during the past three decades. The thesis of this exposition is that the authority and holiness of religious texts not only have been contested and undermined by these interpretative strategies, but that they also have been changed by these strategies. As a consequence these concepts need to be redefined in the light of the project of feminist theological effort to recapture the sacred.
