What's Right with the Trinity? (In Feminist Theology)

WHAT’S RIGHT WITH THE TRINITY? CONVERSATIONS IN FEMINIST THEOLOGY.  By Hannah Bacon. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009.  Pp. x + 225.  $99.95.

            From a feminist perspective, Hannah Bacon has taken the minority approach by focusing on what is right with orthodox trinitarian theology. Bacon recognizes that to feminize or neutralize the traditional Biblical names of the Persons of God, as many theologians have attempted, would not necessarily alter the personal or cultural understandings of the Trinity anyway. Instead of pushing directly against the formidable history of Christian development, Bacon accepts the orthodox language of trinitarian theology in so far as it can be appropriated to a feminist methodology of thinking about God within “women’s experience” (7-9). In Chapter One, Bacon performs a thorough review of a wide range of feminist perspectives on trinitarian language, concluding that the best proposal to date, though limited, has been Elizabeth Johnson’s Spirit-Sophia, Mother-Sophia, and Jesus-Sophia, since it potentially equalizes the masculine and feminine characteristics of the Godhead without abandoning Christian tradition (51). In Chapter Two, Bacon focuses on “trinitarian logic” through a “round-table discussion” between Augustine, Gregory of Nazianzus, Karl Rahner, John Zizioulas, and Jürgen Moltmann, concluding that feminists should especially take from these trinitarian explications the ideas of inclusion and communion (84). Chapter Three sets up Bacon’s feminist “orthodox-contextual” theological methodology by looking at Shleiermacher’s anthropocentricism and Barth’s supernaturalism as complimentary extremes. Here Bacon calls herself a “critical realist” affirming the objective reality of God’s Revelation but denying the possibility of human transcendence over individual context. This section exposes a lack of appreciation for the Tridentine definition of sacrament. Since Revelation, for Bacon, is always filtered through the mediation of personal interpretation, no possibility of distinctly efficacious signs is entertained. For Bacon, “sacrament” is cosmic particularity undefined. Chapter Four, then, seeks to understand this amorphous sense of “sacrament” within women’s experience. However, since there is neither an essential definition of women’s experience, nor an ontologically or epistemologically privileged female perspective, Bacon proposes the conciliating notion of “positionality,” which considers the dynamic cultural and historical place of woman together with her concrete embodiment. Among many female “positions,” the Christian feminist community holds the privileged perspective that is of significance to theology. At a general level, this community finds unity in its commitment to “liberation, justice and right relationship” (144, 148). The divergent particularities of women within this group are coalesced by openness to dialogue and awareness of a common resistance. Bacon shows a profound awareness of human uniqueness here, as she represents different female viewpoints well. Chapter Five unpacks Luce Irigaray’s concept of parler-femme, “speaking (as) woman,” as a starting point for understanding the assumed phallocentrism (woman seen as an incomplete man) of traditional theology. Bacon adopts Irigaray’s subversion of phallocentrism through mimesis, but expands her rhetoric beyond a binary view of human identity as male or female. Instead, human difference is seen as many rather than as two, and the shear multiplicity of common identities proliferates the cultural ‘mirrors’ against which female subjects can speak their experience. Having established her method, in Chapter Six, Bacon asks how thinking of God as Trinity “might strategically mimic the values underpinning the use of women’s experience” (173). Piously, Bacon avoids collapsing God into female subjectivity, instead, difference, subjectivity, and relationship emerge as orthodox characteristics of the Trinity that can affirm and support the feminist praxis. “God is not a giant phallus who functions to confirm the subjectivity of the male and the otherness of woman as ‘lack’, but a God who identifies with the particularities (and complexities) of embodiment, who affirms the female body as good and as sacramental; a God who models difference alongside subjectivity and who, therefore, affirms female desire without seeking to appropriate or extinguish this for the sake of securing God’s own identity and the identity of the male” (195). In this book, Bacon’s contributions to trinitarian theology are minimal (she candidly states that she did not set out to reinterpret Revelation). The primary value of this study lies in its analysis of feminism, from which Bacon has rebuilt some important bridges back to orthodox theology. Bacon excels at giving a fair representation of contrary opinions on her subject, and at taking a compromising, often paradoxical, view that admirably mediates across extremes. Her style is clear and fluid, yet thoroughly academic. This book is highly recommended to any students of Christian feminism or theological anthropology. The text contains an impressive bibliography and index.

Cole Viscichini
Franciscan University of Steubenville