After the Locusts: Letters from a Landscape of Faith
by Denise M Ackermann
(David Philip & W B Eerdmans)
Feminist theology is one of the most important developments in Christian thinking in the last 100 years. Together with liberation theologies, it has literally shifted the intellectual playing fields: from a top-down, highly abstract way of ‘thinking about God’ to an approach that starts from the grassroots and poses questions about how one lives and experiences faith in context. It has, moreover, sought to embody faith and, given the real problem of patriarchy, sexism and violence against women, not surprisingly seeks to address the theological problem of suffering. Most of all, feminist theology draws deeply on experience and makes the connection – often overlooked in post-Enlightenment theology – between theology and spirituality.
Denise Ackermann is one of the foremost South African feminist theologians. An Anglican who has taught at UNISA, Stellenbosch and Western Cape Universities, she is a scholar who has also delved deeply into her own experiences of suffering, of being a woman, being a South African and being white. She recognizes that she has been both a beneficiary of apartheid and a victim of oppression as a woman. This dual experience has led her to side with those who are oppressed and write theology that is committed to human liberation. In a series of essays, written very effectively and cleverly as letters to friends and family, she examines how experience relates to theology, how the church as institution is often ambivalent about those on the margins and how prayer and spirituality may serve a liberating purpose.
Given her feminist starting-point, Ackermann begins by seeking to understand the philosophical and psychological notion of identity and difference, social as well as personal. Drawing here, as elsewhere, on her own autobiography, she develops a sense of identity as person-in-relationship that mirrors the dynamic of faith and sets the foundation for her understanding of theology. For her theology is “sustained reflection about what we worry about, what we believe and what we do about what we believe”, reflection on “the daily struggle to live and act as a person of faith”. Since so much of life is suffering, this means that the problem of suffering is central to all theological reflection.
From this base, Ackermann meditates upon embodiment, AIDS and the challenge to develop a notion of salvation that is not limited to personal bliss in an afterlife, but starts in the real here and now and is rooted in the integral liberation of the person and community. On suffering she seeks to avoid the double pitfalls of existential despair and naïve religious optimism, preferring rather the great Jewish tradition of lament. Solidarity and compassion are also themes that invite a way of coping with – but never denying – suffering. She also retrieves the importance and place of spirituality and prayer, while once again stressing that spiritual escapism is neither helpful nor even part of orthodox Christian tradition.
One may come to this book with certain expectations or apprehensions about its feminist approach. Here too, Ackermann presents a very clear case for a certain brand of feminist theology that should not (one hopes!) feed into the prejudices of conservative Christians. She is clear and matter-of-fact about the ill-treatment of women in church and society; she stresses that feminist theology is a form of liberation theology that rightly challenges such oppression; that much of ‘traditional’ theology needs to question its hitherto unexamined masculine biases; and that positively such questioning can only help strengthen people’s faith and deepen their spiritual experience. Although she tackles questions of inclusive language and the non-ordination of women in certain churches (a brief but devastatingly simple demolition, in what amounts to less than a page), these are not her focus. Her central concern is living a faith rooted in justice in a cynical, complex world.
Ackermann’s book also exemplifies that other great mark of much feminist theology, the willingness to take literary risks with academe. Though she provides ample references and draws on a staggering amount and variety of theological thought, she presents it all simply and in the form of autobiographical letters. This is truly ‘scholarship of risk’, to play on the title of a work by American feminist theologian Sharon Welch. And it’s a risk that works, that pays off marvelously. For the result is serious theology written with great skill and passion, in such a way that – unlikely so many academic and theological treatises – we are drawn into the book and moved, as much as we are challenged. It is popular but profound. The result is probably one of the best South African theologies since Albert Nolan’s hugely successful Jesus Before Christianity.