Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics

Description

This volume is a critical and constructive analysis of the sexually differentiated self in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatic. It secures in his Christocentric pattern of human agency an untapped resource for unsettling and reimagining the heteropatriarchal structure of human fellowship at the heart of his theological anthropology. Moving through Barth's doctrines of revelation, creation, theological anthropology, and special ethics, Faye Bodley-Dangelo locates the human agent in his broader project aimed at re-habilitating the subject of modern protestant theology. She argues the human actor comes into view as the recipient of Christ's redemptive activity, which redirects it out of self-aggrandizing isolation and into relationships of dependency, responsiveness, and ethical responsibility to multiple sites of divine and creaturely alterity. The book debates that Barth's model of human agency cannot on its own terms sustain his version of female subordination nor his repudiation of same-sex relationships. Rather, it contains ethically-oriented, critical and reflective mechanisms that resist the sexist heterosexist dimension of his theological anthropology and lend themselves to an anti-essentialist performative account of gender. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Tracking ordered binaries Tracking the human agent Scope and outline of the argument Chapter 1 Rehabilitating The Agent Of Theological Discourse Introduction Bad epistemic habits of the modern subject The humbled and hopeful doer of theology Mary and Elizabeth as model agents Conclusion Chapter 2 Playing The Neighbor In An “Order Of Praise” Introduction The neighbor within the “orders of creation” The neighbor within an “order of praise” The Good Samaritan as a model neighbor The Jewish Samaritan and the völkisch church Conclusion Chapter 3 Reorienting The Agent In The Doctrine Of Creation Introduction Myth, maternity, and sexual difference in contemporaneous scholarship Christ concealed in the first article Myth-critique and matriarchal repression in Genesis 1 Sexual difference and divine likeness in Genesis 1 Conclusion Chapter 4 Playing Adam And Silencing Eve Introduction Freedom, masculinity, and Genesis 2 Adam as a model agent Constraining Eve Re-animating Eve Conclusion Chapter 5 Reorienting The Agent Of A Theological Anthropology Introduction A christocentric method The love of God The love of neighbor The sexually differentiated neighbor Conclusion Chapter 6 An Ethic For The Sexually Differentiated Self Introduction The agent in a divine command ethic Ethical guidelines for securing sexual difference Ethical guidelines for ordering the sexual relationship Conclusion Conclusion Disentangling the agent from a sexist order Disentangling the agent from a heteronormative framework Interrogating gender norms Bibliography Index