Renita Weems - Battered Love (Overtures to Biblical Theology)

The Land

by Walter Brueggemann

God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality

by Phyllis Trible

Texts of Terror

by Phyllis Trible

The Suffering of God

by Terence E. Fretheim

The Old Testament of the Old Testament

by R. W. L. Moberly

Ministny in the New Testament

by David L. Bartlett

Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses

by Dennis T. Olson

Prayer in the Hebrew Bible

by Samuel E. Balentine

A Theology of the Cross

by Charles B. Cousar

The Collapse of Histony

by Leo G. Perdue

Prayer in the New Testament

by Oscar Cullmann

From Creation to New Creation

by Bernhard W. Anderson

Canon and Theology

by Rolf Rendtorff

The Land Is Mine

by Norman C. Habel

Battered Love

by Renita C. Weems

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN, McPheeters Professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

JOHN R. DONAHUE, S. J., Professor of New Testament. Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, California

SHARYN DOWD, Professor of New Testament, Lexington Theological Seminary, Lexington, Kentucky

CHRISTOPHER R. SEITZ, Associate Professor of Old Testament, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut

RENITA J. WEEMS

In memory of my grandmothers, Mary Brown Weems (1906-1947) and Lou Willie Clark Baker (1910-1949)

-headragged generals, they were

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CHAPTER

In one of the early volumes of Overtures to Biblical Theology, and one of its finest and most enduring, Phyllis Trible anticipated much of the subsequent conversation about the Bible and critical feminist thought. In God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality she introduced important methodological questions and possibilities while insisting, against much feminism that found the Bible hopelessly patriarchal, that it is the concreteness of the text and its specific rhetoric that must concern us.

It is a long way from Phyllis Trible in 1978 to Renita Weems in 1995. A great deal has happened concerning method in scripture study, and a great deal has happened as well in the development of critical feminism. We now are much more self-conscious about the connections between speech, power, and social reality. It is likely, moreover, that neither Trible nor Weems would like to be held too closely to the work of the other. Nonetheless, for all their differences of perspective and methodology, the two authors share an agenda and much more. I am glad that Overtures has been one arena for the development of this important discussion.

It was Trible who invited serious and sustained reflection on metaphor as a primary mode of biblical articulation. Indeed, Cynthia Ozick in Memory and Metaphor, has suggested more recently that metaphor belongs characteristically and defini- tionally to Jewish modes of discourse. Trible's most influential and perhaps most successful study in her groundbreaking work concerned the "womb-like" compassion (rhm) of Yahweh. For many reasons, critical biblical feminism has turned to the problematic and distinctive elements of Yahweh as voice in metaphor. And so Renita Weems, at a far reach from Trible, has explored the capacity of sexist metaphors and images to authorize and legitimate sexist human power. Weems does not hold so intensely and determinedly to the specificity of the text as does Trible, but she is willing to consider the political spin-offs that such trenchant textual voices produce in public practice.

The other venturesome aspect of Weems's work that moves beyond the text itself is her consideration of the problematic of Israel's God, a problematic evidenced in but not contained by rhetoric. Weems's work both moves from Trible's and ventures well beyond it in seeing that the plurivocity of the text is intrinsic to Israel's God-speech. The core critical finding of feminism makes clear that there is no monodimensional voicing of God in the text of ancient Israel, and so most conventional modes of theological articulation are oddly incommensurate with and inadequate to the textual witness itself. Thus, Weems shows that feminist questions are not simply about the problem of "theological masculinity." More profoundly, they concern the entire prospect of theological reflection in anything like our habitual modes.

Weems is here breaking new ground and advancing the argument in important ways. While daring in some of her insights, Weems is in the mainstream of an irreversible move that lodges interpretation in the midst of power. The irreversible quality of her insights concerns the growing, relentless awareness that we shall never again be "innocent." At the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Patrick Moynihan, then a member of the administration, commented on the mood of the country in light of that death. Said Moynihan, "We shall laugh again, but we shall never be young again." The current interpretive developments, of which Weems is an important part, make clear that we shall never be young-or innocent-again in our reading. The trade-off, however, may be that we shall laugh! Perhaps we shall not only laugh again, but perhaps for the first time laugh the Easter laugh, a laugh about newness wrought by this strange God who breaks all our expectations and makes all things new. This will be a laugh of power recognized, of speech emancipated, and of faith made genuinely unencumbered. That, of course, is a great deal to expect from "reading." But as Weems knows, and Trible before her, "reading"-informed, attentive, sustained, passionate, increasingly "odd"-is the way our Jewish forebears have come always again to recognition, emancipation, and unencumberment. Weems here does a great deal to move us past "youngness" and on toward a new laugh that we have never before dared.

-Walter Brueggemann

When I began my curious obsession with the topic of sexual violence as a poetic portrayal of divine retribution, I had frequently to defend my interest in the topic against skeptics who claimed, "It's only a metaphor." Now, ten years later, the climate has changed. Audiences are keen to learn about the influence of sex and violence on the cultural imagination. And even though I suspected then that sexual violence in poetic texts deserved further scrutiny, I cannot say that I had any clue where the topic would ultimately lead. I have grown, as has my understanding of sex and violence. This volume contains a profoundly different understanding from what began ten years ago when in Princeton Theological Seminary's library I fortuitously stumbled upon an article entitled "Of Rape and judgment," published in a 1985 issue of Daughters of Sarah. The article on sexual violence in the scriptures catapulted me on this journey, and I wish to thank the author (whom I have never actually met), Gracia Faye Ellwood, for writing such a fine piece.