Search Results

This chapter begins with Reinhold Niebuhr's claim that human experience is both bound and free (human boundedness and human self‐transcendence), and goes on to examine the broader ethical implications of this claim for feminist theologians and others. Though Niebuhr is drawn on as the primary resource for this position, the alternative offered is not simply Niebuhr dressed up in feminist vocabulary or feminism disguised by Niebuhrian concepts. Niebuhr's “hermeneutic of suspicion” creates a greater ambivalence about the moral status of the natural world and human communities than is necessary in a realist position. Instead, the alternative, a feminist Christian realism, accounts both for feminist criticisms of Niebuhr and for feminism's positive contributions to a realist ethic.

Because Reinhold Niebuhr has been so widely criticized by feminist theologians, a critical retrieval must first examine the extensive charges against him. To this end, this chapter outlines feminist criticisms of Niebuhr and develops a framework for a feminist reappropriation of Niebuhr that takes into account these criticisms. It is suggested that feminist criticisms of Niebuhr's understanding of gender roles do not fundamentally challenge Niebuhr's model of the free and bound self (human self‐transcendence and boundedness). Indeed, these criticisms actually exemplify the need to recognize the moral significance of both our given bodily reality and our human freedom partially to transcend and transform that givenness. Niebuhr's understanding of human moral experience provides a framework for that recognition.

This final chapter points toward an alternative position that critically retrieves the realisms of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sharon Welch, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and finds a middle way between the idealistic realism about moral grounding found in Ruether and some early feminists, and the radically relative political realism of Welch and some other postmodern feminists. This alternative joins an appeal to human self‐transcendence and divine transcendence with an affirmation of human boundedness and divine presence. At the same time, it takes seriously, Ruether's turn to creation and Welch's turn to community. In this alternative model – a feminist Christian realism – the author hopes to maintain both substantive grounding for moral claims and critical judgment of them.

An examination is made of Rosemary Radford Ruether's naturalist moral realism, whose naturalist, ecofeminist ethic locates both God (divine presence) and human norms in natural processes, particularly in evolution. Transcendence of immediate context and experience is possible through conscious participation in natural evolutionary development into the future. Ruether's moral realism is evident in her confidence that humans can know the good by looking to nature, including human nature, and this same confidence makes her an idealist about the potential to eliminate domination by creating new selves, theologies, and social structures. Moreover, Ruether's description of normative human nature focuses on boundedness to nature and the self's unique faculty of consciousness as an expression of nature; it does not include the human capacity for radical transcendence of or freedom over nature and consciousness. Thus, it is argued, Ruether offers grounding for moral norms in her naturalist moral realism, but she lacks a mechanism to judge those norms and to account for the resilience of human sin and the potential of human creativity to transmute nature.