Fiorenza's Hermeneutical Authority

Schussler Fiorenza approaches the biblical text with a "hermeneutics of suspicion rather than with a hermeneutics of consent and affirmation." According to her feminist theory, "all texts are products of an androcentric patriarchal culture and history." Males not only wrote them but also have dominated their interpretation. Consequently, one must engage in a two-tier demythologization and "reclaim the Bible and early Christian history as women's beginnings and power." Because the text is the word of men, it is not authoritative and "cannot claim to be the revelatory Word of God." The Bible itself must be liberated from its "perpetuation and legitimization of such patriarchal oppression and forgetfulness of, silence about, or eradication of the memory of women's suffering."

Rather than appeal to a "canon within the canon"...Schussler Fiorenza calls for a "canon outside the canon." She proposes "that the revelatory canon for theological evaluation of biblical androcentric traditions and their subsequent interpretations cannot be derived from the Bible itself but can only be formulated in and through women's struggle for liberation from all patriarchal oppression." The New Testament is not the archetype--an ideal, unchanging, timeless pattern--but a prototype, an original, to be sure, but "critically open to the possibility of its own transformation." The text itself is no longer the interpretive authority; rather, the "personally and politically reflected experience of oppression and liberation must become the criterion of appropriateness for biblical interpretation and evaluation of biblical authority claims." The Bible "no longer functions as authoritative but as a resource for women's struggle for liberation."

In sum, "a feminist paradigm of critical interpretation is not based on a faithful adherence to biblical texts or obedient submission to biblical authority but on solidarity with women of the past and present whose life and struggles are touched by the role of the Bible in Western culture." Women's experience in their contemporary struggle against racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression is the standard by which to approach and interpret Scripture. Thus only those portions of Scripture "that transcend critically their patriarchal frameworks and allow for a vision of Christian women as historical and theological subjects and actors" are worthy to be considered divine revelation and truth.

from David Kling, The Bible in History (New York: Oxford, 2004), 302-303.

Feminist Hermeneutics

Fiorenza makes it clear that the point of departure is not the bible as normative authority. Rather, women’s experience and their struggle for liberation becomes the locus of authority. The canon is not the Bible but the struggle. The Bible becomes a prototype, or what she calls a formative root model, from which examples and insights are taken that explain one’s struggle to find one’s place and to find solidarity with those women that are recounted in the biblical religion. Fiorenza stresses with power and pointedness the fact that all interpretation of the Bible has come from an advocacy point of view, whether that advocacy happens to be patriarchal or feminist or, I might add, black, Asian, Reformed, Wesleyan, liberal or evangelical. Fiorenza wants to argue in reconstructing her feminist hermeneutic that everyone has an advocacy position in the interpretation of the Bible. She wants to make clear what hers is and challenges all others to do the same.

David M. Scholer, “Feminist Hermeneutics and Evangelical Biblical Interpretation,” Evangelical Review of Theology 1 (January 1991): 309.