Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints

Commonweal, Oct 23, 1998 by Robert P. Imbelli

Following a talented theologian in the skillful exercise of her craft generates genuine excitement. And Johnson is skilled, both in the architectonic sweep of her work and in her careful attention to detail. The book delights as much for its intellectual play of ideas as for its sensuous, if at times repetitive, rhetorical display. It weds passion, piety, and conceptual clarity in a way that has become recognizably "Johnsonian."

The work is Catholic in method: beginning with a first part that "frames the question" and probes the contemporary context, it proceeds to a second part that consults the "living tradition," biblical and patristic, conciliar and papal, before attempting its own systematic synthesis in part three. Professedly "feminist" in perspective and sensibility, Johnson has also clearly apprenticed in the school of Rahner whose influence is pervasive.

The work is also Catholic, corporate and communal, in vision and discernment. The following quote may serve to recapitulate that vision: "In the world of grace as in nature, everyone depends on everyone else, and the courage, witness, and love of one person affects the whole body, as indeed does everyone's apathy and sin." Rooted in the distinctively Catholic symbol of the Communion of Saints, Johnson aims to amplify the symbol's scope, extending it in ways that are explicitly egalitarian, ecumenical, and even ecological. Doing so, she draws inspiration from the moving conclusion of George Eliot's Middlemarch: "...and that things are not so ill with you and with me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Feminist insights and scholarship help propel this expansion toward greater inclusivity and equality. Recovering the memory of victims of oppression, rectifying the distortions of the narrative of women's leadership in the early Christian communities, and rediscovering the subversive tenor of the virgin martyrs' refusal of patriarchal domination, together serve to promote in the present "the coming into being of suppressed selves, newly energized with the fire of the Spirit to bless, to work for justice, to follow Christ by forging new paths of discipleship."

An unanticipated outcome of Johnson's research was to identify two patterns of relating to those acknowledged as holy ones in the memory and practice of the community. She calls the first the "companionship of friends" paradigm and finds it to be an egalitarian approach to the remembered cloud of witnesses who serve the community as inspiration and encouragement on its own journey of faith. The second paradigm, which gradually displaces the earlier one, she terms the "patrons/petitioners" paradigm, whose thrust is hierarchical and patriarchal. In the former, recovered by Vatican II, emphasis lies on the equal baptismal dignity of the entire people of God and the universal call to holiness. In the latter, the unique, often thaumaturgical power of those elevated to sainthood relegates the petitioner/client to a subservient and dependent posture. Though Johnson admits that "boundaries are not absolute" here (and even in her preferred model she finds place for "paradigmatic figures"), she holds that the patterns disclose real attitudes and options with significantly different consequences. And she insists that only the companionship-of-friends pattern is capable of renewing and releasing the power latent in the Communion of Saints symbol.

For what is ultimately at stake and spiritually required today is, in the words of Simone Well, "the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness," whose manner may be its leavening fidelity in ordinary life and whose heroism may lie in its patient waiting for God even in the darkness of God's absence. In the new situation posed by postmodernity, "religious attention," Johnson suggests, "shifts away from miraculous deeds that defy the laws of nature to deeds of friendship and prophecy that defy the weight of systemic power and privilege." Friends of God and prophets: neighbors and nourishers, resisters and survivors, distilling Wisdom from the daily.

However hesitantly and humbly, however analogically and poetically, no theologian can fail, finally, to weave a doctrine of God. Johnson's inclusive communion of holy ones live and move and have their being in the Mystery of God whose Name is "Holy Wisdom," life-giving "Spirit-Sophia." The very title of her book comes from the Old Testament Book of Wisdom which confesses that "in every generation Wisdom passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets." It is the character of God as Spirit-Sophia which braids this new book on the Communion of Saints so tightly to the perspective upon God spun out at length in She Who Is.

But this also raises critical questions. Is the biblical foundation for this perspective, relying so heavily upon the Wisdom literature, sufficiently broad and deep? Does a Wisdom reflection, tied so closely to a theology of creation, offer the resources required to do justice to the full biblical witness regarding human sinfulness (attributed not merely to pitiable foolishness, but to demonic malice), and regarding the transformative newness, the sheer grace and cost of redemption? Finally, and most pressingly, despite Johnson's endeavor to establish a trinitarian pattern in her approach to God, does the doctrine of the Trinity truly receive its due?