I've been mulling over the duscussion that took place in my Hermeneutics Class yesterday and wondering why I came awayfeeling a little uneasy. We had been looking at some pieces of Liberation Theology and critiquing them, bring a hermeneutic of suspicion to the hermeneutic of liberation if you like.
One of the pieces looked at the text of Mark 5: 21-43, and asked whether this text was not primarily about women. The consensus of the group mainly white middle class middle aged men was that it was not, and that although women were a part of it that issues of what it meant to be unclean were as central to the text as the nameless women!
I do not and cannot agree with this, from a historical perspective the namelessness of these women stands out as a critisism of the patriachal society to which they belonged. Jarius was named, his daughter had no name, the woman in the crowd also remained and remains nameless. Their namelessness serves to highlight their voicelessness. That Jesus spoke to and touched both of these women challenges issues gender as much as it challenges their unclean state in the eyes of the law.
To critisise Liberation Theologies we must first examin our own position and our own power. I believe that the Bible unfolds God's plan for the release of the captives for us in many ways, that it is a living and active text and we ignore it at our peril. But we can and must ask questions of the traditional readings and interpretations. Liberation Theology does not have all of the answers sewn up neatly; the interlocutors for liberation theologies and biblical hermeneutics of liberation are not, as in dominant Western theologies, the educated nonbelievers or Schleiermacher’s cultured critics of religion, but the poor, the “non-persons,” the exploited, especially those who are excluded in terms of class, gender, and race or culture. Liberation Theology does pose difficult questions to the powerful and the comfortable, and we must hear them!
