What's Right with the Trinity? Conversations in Feminist Theology – By Hannah Bacon

WHAT'S RIGHT WITH THE TRINITY? CONVERSATIONS IN FEMINIST THEOLOGY . By Hannah Bacon . Burlington, VT : Ashgate Publishing Company , 2009 . Pp. 232 . $99.95 . This book seeks to shift feminist work on the Trinity from focusing on divine names to Trinitarian relationships. It begins by surveying feminist critiques of Trinitarian language and five Trinitarian theologies. Next, an examination of Schleiermacher and Barth's thought argues that theology must recognize “the priority of God in revelation” and experience as the “starting point of all theology.” The development of feminist understandings of women's experience is then traced, along with Irigaray's notion that women need to develop a language of “speaking to” in order to articulate their experience, which necessitates developing their own notion of God. The binary and essentialist aspects of Irigaray's rhetoric are criticized in the name of difference and a broader notion of women's experience. The Trinity is invoked as a doctrine of God that welcomes and affirms difference and mutuality, self-love and being in relationship. Because divine transcendence means that humanity is both similar to and not similar to God, Trinitarian understandings of God can affirm women's subjectivity and undermine phallocentric accounts of difference without reducing God to a projection of human values. The doctrine of the Trinity thus emerges a key resource for feminist theologies. This is an important contribution to feminist and Trinitarian theologies, useful for upper level seminary courses, graduate students, and theologians working in these areas. Every seminary library should have it

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