Monday, August 08, 2011

Seminary rallies to defend nun over her book

Nearly two decades ago, a Roman Catholic nun from New York City drew an overflow crowd at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, where she was honored for challenging images of God as exclusively male, authoritarian and aloof from human suffering.

As she received the 1993 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, Elizabeth Johnson said an exclusively male concept of God is “idolatry” and forces women “to subtract themselves from their bodily, sexual selves.”

Now, as a 2008 book she wrote comes under fire from bishops in her own church, virtually the entire faculty at the Presbyterian seminary, including the seminary president, are rallying to Johnson's side by making an unusually forceful statement in a dispute that involves another religious group.

Their action follows a March report by the Committee on Doctrine for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said Johnson's book contains “misrepresentations, ambiguities and errors” in discussing the nature of God.

Twenty professors at the Presbyterian seminary have sent an open letter of support to Johnson, saying they were “deeply saddened” by the bishops' actions.

“We realize, of course, that a Protestant seminary can have no formal standing to speak about relations between a Roman Catholic theologian and her church,” said the May 22 letter, which was publicized by a seminary news release last week.

The professors — from various Protestant denominations — pledged to be an “informal community of resistance” for Johnson and said they shared her goal of combining academics with service in the church.

“We do not see in your work the sorts of inattention or disrespect to the Christian teaching that the bishops perceived,” said the letter, whose signers included seminary President Michael Jinkins.

The bishops' conference declined to comment on the seminary letter, spokesman Don Clemmer said. Louisville Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz said he supported the work of the doctrine committee but declined additional comment.

Johnson, 69, is a professor of theology at Fordham University, a Catholic school in New York City. She is a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, Brentwood, N.Y.

 Her 1993 Grawemeyer Award honored her book “She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse.” The Presbyterian seminary has used her writings as class texts for at least two decades.

The bishops' critique focuses on Johnson's 2008 book “Quest for the Living God.”

In it, she continued to challenge the traditional use of male images to represent God and said the concept of a “distant lordly lawgiver” reinforces authoritarian rule in the church and elsewhere.

She wrote that traditional names for God are metaphors that cannot convey divine mystery, but the bishops' report said it is “possible to make statements about God that are true” even if incomplete.

Johnson said there are biblical roots for using such feminine images for God as “mother” and “Holy Wisdom.”

The doctrine committee said the basic fault of Johnson's book is it “does not take the faith of the church as its starting point.”

“Instead, the author employs standards from outside the faith to criticize and to revise in a radical fashion the conception of God revealed in Scripture and taught by the Magisterium (church teaching authority),” the committee said.

The bishops also say that Johnson went too far in trying to find a new way of understanding how an all-powerful, loving God could have allowed suffering on the scale of the Holocaust.

She cites other theologians as presenting a God who not only suffers in the person of Jesus, but whose very divine nature is changed and wounded by human suffering — something the bishops said “undermines God's transcendence,” or eternal existence apart from creation.

The bishops did not seek any punitive measures, such as calling for Johnson's removal from the Fordham faculty.

But they cited the relative popularity of her book among lay readers as a reason to declare officially that it doesn't represent church doctrine.

Amy Plantinga Pauw, a theology professor at the Presbyterian seminary, called Johnson a “prophet for Protestants” and not just Catholics. Pauw said virtually all professors signed the letter, other than those away on such things as sabbaticals.

Pauw said it was the first formal statement she could recall by the faculty on behalf of an embattled professor at another seminary.

She said members did give informal support in the 1990s to professors under fire for their feminist views, including Molly Marshall, who resigned under pressure from Louisville's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Carmel McEnroy, a nun who was fired from St. Meinrad School of Theology in Southern Indiana.

Johnson declined to be interviewed for this story. 

But she said in a statement that the bishops' report “radically misinterprets” her writings and said the bishops didn't speak to her before issuing it.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, chairman of the doctrine committee, said in a statement that Johnson herself could have initiated such dialogue by seeking an “imprimatur,” signifying bishops' approval of her writing.

The faculty letter reflects a new development since the ecumenical era of Protestant-Catholic cooperation took its first big steps in the 1960s, said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Catholic priest, senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center and author of three books on the Catholic hierarchy.

“Before the beginning of the age of ecumenism, theologians just threw stones at each other and at the leaders of other churches,” Reese said. 

“In the period of ecumenical good feeling, you only threw stones at people within your own church. Maybe we're getting to a new stage where we see various groups in different churches who see that they have a lot in common with each other, even more than they have in common with some of their leaders.”

Leaders of the Catholic Theological Society of America — a scholars' association — criticized the bishops' lack of dialogue with Johnson.

They said the report reflects “a very narrow understanding of the theological task,” rather than encouraging theologians to express tradition in language that speaks to contemporary culture.