A Survey On Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s Feminist Biblical Interpretive Approaches

Feminist biblical hermeneutics is the product of fusing feminist literary theories and Christian biblical criticism. As an important component of contemporary biblical hermeneutics, it shares in various critical methods and principles, nonetheless, based mainly on feminist perspective, interpretation and criticism of the biblical texts. This essay selects Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, one of the most famous feminist biblical scholars, and takes her construction of four-fold interpretive and criticism strategy as the research object, analyzing how she emphasizes social history and literary criticism as methodologies, how she shapes a unique biblical hermeneutic strategy and an open-ended interpretive system, how she reconstructs the history and struggles of the early Christian women, how she redefines the cultural value and social orientation of women, seeking the revolution of them which is based on and derived from liberation theology and promoting the deep development of feminist theology.As the leading figure of feminist biblical studies, Fiorenza has published a lot in her life. Mainly based on her most influential masterpiece, In Memory of Her:A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, this essay explores how she explicitly puts forward deconstruction and reconstruction as the two methods of reading the Bible and takes them as the basic interpretive procedures and puts forward in a creative way four systematic principles in biblical interpretation, namely suspension, remembrance, proclamation and creative actualization. She utilizes them in the practical criticism of biblical texts, devoted to recover and reconstruct the historical and social status of early Christian women.To be specific, this essay elaborates Fiorenza’s methodology of feminist biblical hermeneutics in four chapters in detail. The first chapter is the introduction, overviewing mainly introduces Fiorenza’s masterpieces, the research status of her. The second chapter introduce the genetic relationship between feminist biblical hermeneutics and feminist literary theories and feminist theology, along with its three developmental stages. The third chapter is the detailed elaboration of her four-fold interpretive criticism strategy, expounding her dual approach of deconstruction and reconstruction. The fourth chapter selects her masterpiece, In Memory of Her as the object of investigating her interpretive methods of biblical critical practice, doing deep elaboration and analysis combining relevant New Testament texts. The fifth chapter is the conclusion, collating and summarizing the evaluation of Fiorenza’s feminist biblical interpretive methods from the western academic world, summing up her academic contribution and reflecting on what significance and revelation her methodology has for Sino-biblical academic research.