The last week of\nthe Open and Relational Theology reading group engages some of the work of\nKaren Baker-Fletcher, who is a womanist theologian. That means that she is a\nblack feminist theologian, approaching theology from the point of view of one\nwho is triply disadvantaged, though being female and black, and thus in\naddition (her society being constructed the way it is) from a low social\nstatus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She is also\nAmerican.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This means, from\nmy point of view, that she is quadruply removed from my experience; I am a\nwhite male, of middle class origins, and I\u2019ve from the UK. My immediate impulse\nis to shut up and see where her particular experience leads her to go, because\nI cannot adequately place myself in her position, and if I can\u2019t do that, I may\nbe unable to engage any of her points adequately. Certainly, it has on occasion\nseemed to me that those who talk of intersectionality (being multiply\ndisadvantaged, which tends to lead to problems which are over and above those\nfaced by anyone who is singly disadvantaged) have a tendency to tell me that I\ncan\u2019t understand where they are coming from, and should thus remain silent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The thing is, in\noriginal academic formation I\u2019m a scientist (specifically a physicist), and in\nthinking about physics it is irrelevant what my colour, sex, nationality or SES\nmay happen to be. I tend to carry that attitude over to any other area of\ninterest; having got my degree, I then turned to Law, and aside the specific\nareas of discrimination law and matrimonial law, the law is ideally\ncolour-blind, takes no account of gender and is equally accessible to lord and\npeasant alike. Anything else is a specific defect to be addressed, of course\n(none of those ideals are actually the case in practice, and from what I read,\nare somewhat less the case in practice in the States than they are at home),\nbut that doesn\u2019t go to the root of how the law should actually work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This attitude is\nnot infrequently criticised as being the \u201cview from nowhere\u201d. I prefer to think\nof it as being an universal viewpoint, one which is informed by specific\nviewpoints but does not adopt any of them to the exclusion of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That said,\nanother long term passion of mine has been politics, and I spent something like\n30 years heavily engaged in politics at a local level, a significant proportion\nof that as an elected representative and, for one year, mayor of my town. In\npolitics it is not really possible to have a \u201cview from nowhere\u201d; everyone is\nsituated in some way, and their political standpoints are going to reflect\nthat. To a great extent, success in politics involves recognising the positions\nof various groupings and forming a coalition of their views in order to get\nelected. Also, a good elected representative is just that, a representative\n<\/em><\/strong>of his or her constituency, and although a modest number may have\nactually voted for them, their responsibility is then to represent all<\/em><\/strong>\nthe persons in that constituency. The representative needs to listen to all\nconstituents… Even then, though, the resulting policies are not for a\nparticular group (one would hope), they are for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 the Jews as \u201cthe chosen people\u201d 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\u2019t save the world entire without saving one or more specific individuals). Equally, you can\u2019t construct a theology without the individual experiences of people interacting with God, particularly if doing relational theology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moving on to\nChristian theology, we don\u2019t have, at least not in the beginning, an account of\nthe generalised unity of man with God (as a fully fledged mystic might write),\nwe have a set of accounts of a specific man who was one with God (and doubly or\nperhaps triply specific, in being into the bargain a Jew who was a man rather\nthan a woman), accounts taken from a set of specific viewpoints (one of those,\nI would argue, is that of a mystic, so as not to ignore that point of view).\nAttempts to harmonise those were very early taken to be heretical, in the form\nof Marcion (and to a lesser extent Tatian). <\/p>\n\n\n\n So I should look\nat Karen Barker-Fletcher\u2019s writing with interest as being just such a\nparticular approach; not from my particular position (but not the less valuable\nfor that) and definitely not less valuable for not being an universalised\nviewpoint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1517,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions\/1517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}