A Third Way: Explicating the Post in Post-Christian Feminism

Much feminist debate in religion concerns the place of text in religious discourses, the weight and authority that should be given to those texts and the relationship between text and lived experience.2 The question of whose lived experience is represented in the debates and in the texts has recently become the focus of womanist/feminist theorizing in Australian religious feminist circles. Both Anne Pattel-Gray and Elaine Wainwright have insisted that a valorizing politics of difference must inform feminist theory in the theological/religious domain, specifically in relation to hegemonic religious texts. They have argued that biblical readings can be exclusivist by either hiding multiple subjectivities or silencing the very possibility of giving voice to the oppressed. This paper considers this problematic - associated with textual interpretation and lived experience, beginning with the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.