Religious leftists are often met with the question, "So if you're out there, why aren't you doing anything?"
Strictly in the spirit of answering that question, of raising awareness of the fact that religious people can have intrinsic reasons for being progressive, I will be offering profiles of various religious figures of the left, as I did more implicitly with my summary of
Sharon Welch.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is a Roman Catholic feminist theologian. Her most famous book is Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions is a shorter, more recent book that is an excellent introduction to her thought. More on the flip.
A number of influences come together in Ruether's unique theological synthesis, which offers some valuable lessons for progressives generally. She was raised as a Roman Catholic in a household that was religiously pluralistic. Both at home and in her parochial schools, she had strong models of womens' religious leadership. She majored in Classics as an undergraduate and pursued Patristics in her graduate work. Perhaps most importantly, she was radicalized by the Civil Rights' movement and subsequently by Third World religious movements. These strands come together into a coherent worldview that is committed to justice, insists on women's equality and leadership, and has a dialogical model of truth that is rooted in historical change.
Ruether contrasts two models of the relation of religion and society: the sacred canopy and prophetic critique. According to the model of the sacred canopy, God sits at the apex of a pyramidal hierarchy and legitimates a monarchical order, with rulers over subjects, men over women, and humans over the remaining natural world. In the post-Cold War economic context, the free market takes the place of a traditional God. As Harvey Cox demonstrated in a 1999 Atlantic Monthly article, much thought about the market closely replicates traditional theological structures. But this "Free Market" God legitimates its own forms of injustice, as the profit motive overrides other ethical concerns. In contrast, according to the model of prophetic critique, God inspires protest against injustice and destabilizes unjust forms of relation. It is in its preservation of this prophetic model of religion that she locates the primary value of the Bible, though she is well aware of how the Bible is so often co-opted to serve the "sacred canopy" approach. Furthermore, in Ruether's thought the prophetic tradition is the primary context for understanding Jesus's ministry - she is closest to Luke here, who, of the Gospel writers, emphasizes Jesus's relations to the prophetic tradition most emphatically. Jesus as a representative of the prophetic tradition both warrants continued faithfulness to the Christian tradition and mandates internal criticism of patterns of injustice that emerge within the Church.
Ruether's understanding of religion in general brings together a prophetic norm with a classically liberal theological perspective. According to the Speeches on Religion by the founder of liberal theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher, religion is neither fundamentally a metaphysical system nor primarily a moral code: it is the fruit of contemplation which for Schleiermacher can result in a theistic or atheistic explanation of the results of that contemplation with validity. In line with Schleiermacher's emphasis on individual contemplation, Ruether notes how individuals intuit "the whole" (a notion that relates to German romantic notions of "intuiting the infinite") and bring this vision to a community (a step found in biblical prophecy but not in liberal theology). The community then builds on the insights of the original vision (Islam is a particularly clear example of this dynamic). These intuitions, however, always occur within a specific historical and cultural moment, so that the visions are partial visions of a greater whole. This understanding of partial apprehension of a holistic truth is crucial to what Ruether has to offer a progressive notion of religion.
In her most radical assault on dogmatism, Ruether forces people to take direct responsibility for their contemplative activity. Her reader in feminist theology, Womanguides, consists of a series of excerpts of religious thought from Ancient Mesopotamia to the present on themes such as gender imagery for God, creation, gender relations among people, evil, redemption, conversion, and community. She then offers a series of questions that leave it up to the reader to assess the competing visions and either adjudicate between them or synthesize them. Where she differs from the popular form of American religious syncretism is that she does not let religion rest with "personal beliefs." Rather, life in community, in shared tasks, struggles, prayer, and reflection is fundamental to her sense of religion. "Live and let live," though an important starting point for a tolerant society, does little to challenge an unjust status quo.
By acknowledging that every apprehension of a holistic truth comes from a perspective, she recognizes that every truth claim is partial and provisional. This notion of partial recognition of a holistic truth allows her to push the notion of "prophetic critique" forward a huge step to an insistence on "mutual critique." The quest for truth is neither dogmatic nor methodical, but dialogical. Thus, when considering the biblical legacy of valuing history over nature in light of current ecological devastation, she points to Canaanite fertility religions as a corrective to the anthropocentrism of Israelite religion. Neither religion is false - both have something of value to be retrieved. Ruether is not exactly idiosyncratic here. Every day, I walk by a Catholic church in San Francisco's Mission District with a mural containing an image of an open book. On one page is a quote from Isaiah; on the facing page, a quote from the Popol Vuh, the Scripture of the Mayans. Ruether furthermore extends this principle of "mutual critique" to secular/religious relations. She offers a ringing defense of liberalism as established in the Enlightenment as a crucial corrective to dogmatism and intolerance.
Ruether's basic theological method is to tackle a current ethical problem, such as sexism or environmental degradation, with a large scale historical investigation of the religious ideologies that both legitimate and resist the source of the problem. In part, this method is a matter of taking responsibility for one's own history and its effects in today's world. Ruether initially focused on the shape of Western history not because it is "better" than Islamic or East Asian history, but because it is the history that has shaped her and her community. More recently, she has been engaged in Christian-Buddhist dialogue and, in response to globalization, has begun to pay increased attention to the spectrum of World Religions. But this method also is closely related to the Catholic theological principle that the church, as an ongoing historical community, rather than the Bible, is the primary source of authority. Ruether's emphasis is on the laity, rather than the apostolic succession of bishops, as the mainstay of "the church." (This move is absolutely crucial to the coherence of her thought, but I now realize that, as a non-Catholic, I haven't thought much about how she makes it.)
Ruether's dialogical approach, one component of a more intricate synthesis, relates closely to another central principle of her work, for which she is better known: the critique of dualism. In contrast to dialogue, in which one acknowledges the partial knowledge and moral ambiguity of both oneself and one's partner, univocal understandings of truth harden into oppositions, in which one possesses goodness and truth relegates evil and falsehood to one's opponent. This point is made repeatedly in regards to religion on this site - and is true, partially. (Unfortunately, "secular" thinkers sometimes resort to the same sense of absolute opposition between "reality-based" and "faith-based" thinking, rather than taking the provisional nature of scientific knowledge as a reminder of the partial vision of truth each of us possesses.) Ruether's early investigation of Christian anti-Semitism, Faith and Fratricide, offered a devastating account of how the structure of Christian theology depended on various dualisms - such as letter versus spirit, or law versus grace - that legitimated a Christian superiority complex that laid the groundwork for Hitler's Final Solution.
Ruether's critique of dualism not only relates to her dialogical understanding of truth, but also to a retrieval of embodiment and the material world as the locus of the divine. In contrast to notions of a person split into a body and a soul, or Cartesian mind/body dualism, Ruether advocates an organic understanding of the person, a psycho-somatic entity that comes into being through birth and passes away at death. In her early work, she analyzed how the Church Fathers linked the flight to the soul with misogynistic denials of women and sexuality, and how this marked a break from the earlier biblical tradition of establishing justice on earth as the primary means of coming to know God. In her magnum opus, Sexism and God-talk, she rethinks major categories of Christian thought in light of anthropological research that shows a consistent tendency of cultures to link women with the body and nature and to set men and minds over the other terms. Her task is to retrieve the categories in such a way that women's embodied lives can flourish in a just world. Ruether emphasizes that the task of establishing justice is one that every generation leaves unfinished, and one that each generation takes up with a fresh set of challenges. I have found her many books to be a great tool in helping take up that work.