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Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation
By Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
Boston, Beacon, 1984. 182 pp. $17.95.

This collection of essays by one of the leading Feminist exegetes provides a sustained challenge to the ways in which we have traditionally thought about exegesis. The essays deal with the hermeneutical theory appropriate to feminist exegesis. With the exception of the brief discussion of the household code, they do not engage in the actual task of exegesis. Anyone who wishes to see how the practice follows from this theory should read the exegetical half of Schüssler Fiorenza's In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. These essays do a much better job than that book does in explaining the method behind the practice.

The heart of Schüssler Fiorenza's argument is that a feminist hermeneutic cannot be content with the traditional patterns of interpretation because the biblical text must be evaluated in terms of the emerging experience of women struggling for their own freedom and identity. Whatever positive models for women and their faith may be found in the Bible, they are still shaped by the androcentric text and social context in which they are set. Even positive biblical models can be

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co-opted by contemporary churches to integrate Christian women into "world views" and church structures that perpetuate hierarchy and patriarchal domination. Consequently, Schüssler Fiorenza is critical of women theologians who construct an apologetic in defense of the Bible by appropriating some principle within it (for example, the prophetic critic of oppression) as a "canon" to insist on the liberating possibilities of the Bible.

It is at this point, she argues, that feminist hermeneutics must part company even with liberation theology. The latter can indeed find a well-established "option for the poor" as a principle of biblical faith and can claim obedience to biblical revelation for its projects of social justice. However liberating certain images or certain new social practices (such as the inclusion of women as coequal disciples around Jesus and in the Pauline mission) may have been, the Bible does not contain any such foundational principle for women. They can only discover God's grace and presence in their experience of the struggle for liberation.

Naturally, such an argument poses a number of questions about the canonical authority of Scripture for the churches. Schüssler Fiorenza does not think that "woman church" can be bound by a canon which was itself an arbitrary rejection of many witnesses to the life and faith of the earliest Christians. One must preserve the integrity of all the witnesses to our past. Nor, she argues, should we treat the Bible as some sort of timeless archetype that laid down the patterns by which all subsequent Christian life and faith are measured and evaluated. Instead, she calls for re-visioning the Bible as-prototype." It suggests to us patterns which may be the building blocks for new forms of life and faith in the context of the present experience and needs of the Christian community.

If the reactions to Schüssler Fiorenza's earlier book are any indication, many theologians will be enraged by these proposals. It is difficult (and she might say a symptom of the malaise of doctrinal neoorthodoxy) to see how the required revision will do justice to the churches; need for a canonical scripture as "critical voice" once our experience becomes the norm for evaluating Scripture. However one responds, no one who is seriously concerned with the questions of hermeneutics in our time can afford to neglect this book.

Pheme Perkins
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts