Eyre Lines

The last week of the Open and Relational Theology reading group engages some of the work of Karen Baker-Fletcher, who is a womanist theologian. That means that she is a black feminist theologian, approaching theology from the point of view of one who is triply disadvantaged, though being female and black, and thus in addition (her society being constructed the way it is) from a low social status.

She is also American.

This means, from my point of view, that she is quadruply removed from my experience; I am a white male, of middle class origins, and I’ve from the UK. My immediate impulse is to shut up and see where her particular experience leads her to go, because I cannot adequately place myself in her position, and if I can’t do that, I may be unable to engage any of her points adequately. Certainly, it has on occasion seemed to me that those who talk of intersectionality (being multiply disadvantaged, which tends to lead to problems which are over and above those faced by anyone who is singly disadvantaged) have a tendency to tell me that I can’t understand where they are coming from, and should thus remain silent.

The thing is, in original academic formation I’m a scientist (specifically a physicist), and in thinking about physics it is irrelevant what my colour, sex, nationality or SES may happen to be. I tend to carry that attitude over to any other area of interest; having got my degree, I then turned to Law, and aside the specific areas of discrimination law and matrimonial law, the law is ideally colour-blind, takes no account of gender and is equally accessible to lord and peasant alike. Anything else is a specific defect to be addressed, of course (none of those ideals are actually the case in practice, and from what I read, are somewhat less the case in practice in the States than they are at home), but that doesn’t go to the root of how the law should actually work.

This attitude is not infrequently criticised as being the “view from nowhere”. I prefer to think of it as being an universal viewpoint, one which is informed by specific viewpoints but does not adopt any of them to the exclusion of others.

That said, another long term passion of mine has been politics, and I spent something like 30 years heavily engaged in politics at a local level, a significant proportion of that as an elected representative and, for one year, mayor of my town. In politics it is not really possible to have a “view from nowhere”; everyone is situated in some way, and their political standpoints are going to reflect that. To a great extent, success in politics involves recognising the positions of various groupings and forming a coalition of their views in order to get elected. Also, a good elected representative is just that, a representative of his or her constituency, and although a modest number may have actually voted for them, their responsibility is then to represent all the persons in that constituency. The representative needs to listen to all constituents… Even then, though, the resulting policies are not for a particular group (one would hope), they are for all.

Moving on to theology, I confess that I want to move as quickly as possible to universality, particularly as I come from mysticism, and I see nothing particularly specific about the mystical experience (talking about which is far more a matter of casting doubt on all the specifics you may come up with). But I recognise there the genius of the Hebrews in insisting on particularity – the Jews as “the chosen people” are perhaps the primary example of that, and they insist, for instance, that saving one person is to save the world entire (the corollary of which, obviously, is that you can’t save the world entire without saving one or more specific individuals). Equally, you can’t construct a theology without the individual experiences of people interacting with God, particularly if doing relational theology.

Moving on to Christian theology, we don’t have, at least not in the beginning, an account of the generalised unity of man with God (as a fully fledged mystic might write), we have a set of accounts of a specific man who was one with God (and doubly or perhaps triply specific, in being into the bargain a Jew who was a man rather than a woman), accounts taken from a set of specific viewpoints (one of those, I would argue, is that of a mystic, so as not to ignore that point of view). Attempts to harmonise those were very early taken to be heretical, in the form of Marcion (and to a lesser extent Tatian).

So I should look at Karen Barker-Fletcher’s writing with interest as being just such a particular approach; not from my particular position (but not the less valuable for that) and definitely not less valuable for not being an universalised viewpoint.