Browsing by Subject "Soteriology"

The New Testament book known as the epistle to the Hebrews contains little obvious reference to Jesus' resurrection. Modern interpreters generally account for this relative silence by noting that the author's soteriological and christological concerns have led him to emphasize Jesus' death and exaltation while ignoring, spiritualizing, or even denying his resurrection. In particular, the writer's metaphorical appeal to the Yom Kippur sacrifice, with its dual emphasis on the slaughter of the victim and the presentation of the victim's blood by the high priest, allows him to explain the salvific significance of Jesus' death and exaltation. The crucifixion can be likened to the slaughter of the victim, while Jesus' exaltation in heaven can be likened to the high priest entering the holy of holies. In this way the cross can be understood as an atoning sacrifice. Such a model leaves little room for positive or distinct reflection on the soteriological or christological significance of the resurrection.

This study argues that the soteriology and high-priestly Christology the author develops depend upon Jesus' bodily resurrection and ascension into heaven. The work begins with a survey of positions on Jesus' resurrection in Hebrews. I then present a case for the presence and role of Jesus' bodily resurrection in the text. First, I demonstrate that the writer's argument in Heb 1-2 for the elevation of Jesus above the angelic spirits assumes that Jesus has his humanity--his blood and flesh--with him in heaven. Second, I show that in Heb 5-7 the writer identifies Jesus' resurrection to an indestructible life as the point when Jesus became a high priest. Third, I explain how this thesis makes coherent the author's consistent claims in Heb 8-10 that Jesus presented his offering to God in heaven. I conclude that Jesus' crucifixion is neither the place nor the moment of atonement for the author of Hebrews. Rather, in keeping with the equation in the Levitical sacrificial system of the presentation of blood to God with the presentation of life, Jesus obtained atonement where and when the writer says--when he presented himself in his ever-living, resurrected humanity before God in heaven. Jesus' bodily resurrection is, therefore, the hinge around which the high-priestly Christology and soteriology of Hebrews turns.

This is a book about life-in-death work, what the Christian tradition has often called salvation or atonement. How does the life, arrest, trial, conviction, execution, and release from state-supervision of Jesus Christ enact the salvation of the cosmos. How does that one carceral life-in-death link up with life in the face of prison death today? I have sought to answer these questions by taking my body in and out of prison as a prison chaplain while conversing with other prison chaplains, theologian Karl Barth, and the biblical witness to Jesus Christ. In the tradition of theological ethnography, this work brings together theological and biblical reflection with data from a two-year, collaborative ethnography on current and former prison chaplains. This is the first nation-wide study of prison chaplaincy based on an interview protocol rather than a survey, and it provides a wealth of narratives on the complexities of prison chaplaincy, an understudied profession. Karl Barth serves as a conversation partner throughout because he enters the witness box as one who knows and writes the incarcerated Christ, has been arrested and convicted himself, and practiced prison chaplaincy as a volunteer chaplain at Basel Prison from 1954-1964.As a practical soteriology, this work describes how prison chaplains follow the arc of Jesus’ life and work. Chaplains follow Jesus’ incarnation in their ministry of presence, embodying the way that Jesus’ prophetic work threatens social divisions and death-dealing authorities. They receive the same death-threats that Jesus received and bear the impact of prisons in their bodies, being made sin for the sake of salvation. They stand with Jesus and others in carceral death, and they participate in Jesus’ resurrected life-after-death, sometimes while still in prison and sometimes having been freed from it. The architecture of this book follows that story line – the arc of Jesus’ incarnation, prophetic ministry, arrest, death, and resurrection – what Christians confess to be the arc of salvation. That salvific scaffolding is then filled up with the narratives of chaplains – historically, from within this study, and from my own professional experiences. The words of chaplains become the eyewitness accounts to life-in-death work, i.e., to the texture of salvation.

This dissertation lays the groundwork for a reevaluation of early Protestant understandings of salvation in the sixteenth century by tracing the emergence of the confessional formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith from the perspective of the history of biblical interpretation. In the Introduction, the author argues that the diversity of first-generation evangelical and Protestant teaching on justification has been widely underestimated. Through a close comparison of first- and second-generation confessional statements in the Reformation period, the author seeks to establish that consensus on this issue developed slowly over the course over a period of roughly thirty years, from the adoption of a common rhetoric of dissent aimed at critiquing the regnant Catholic orthopraxy of salvation in the 1520's and 1530's, to the emergence of a common theological culture in the 1540's and beyond. With the emergence of this new theological culture, an increasingly precise set of definitions were employed, not only to explicate the new Protestant gospel more fully, but also to highlight areas of divergence with traditional Catholic teaching.

With this groundwork in place, the author then examines the development of several key concepts in the emergence of the confessional doctrine of justification through the lens of biblical interpretation. Focusing on two highly contested chapters in Paul's epistle to the Romans, the author demonstrates that early evangelical and Protestant biblical exegesis varied widely in its aims, motivations, and in its appropriation of patristic and medieval interpretations. Chapter 1 consists of a survey of pre-Reformation exegesis of the first half of Rom 2, and the author demonstrates that this text had traditionally been interpreted as pointing to an eschatological final judgment in which the Christian would be declared righteous (i.e., "justified") in accord with, but not directly on the basis of, a life of good deeds. In Chapter 2, the author demonstrates that early evangelical exegetes broke away from this consensus, but did so slowly. Several early Protestant interpreters continued, throughout the 1520's and 1530's, to view this text within a traditional frame of interpretation supplied by Origen and Augustine, and only with Philipp Melanchthon's development of a rhetorical-critical approach to the text were Protestants able to overcome the traditional reading and so neutralize the first half of Rom 2 as a barrier to the emerging doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 all deal with the reception history of what is arguably the central text in the Reformation debates concerning justification by faith, Rom 3. Chapter 3 turns once more to patristic and medieval interpretation, and here it is argued that that two major strands of interpretation dominated pre-Reformation exegesis. A "minority view" contrasted justification with works of the ceremonial law, arguing that Paul's assertion of justification "apart from works of the law" was aimed at highlighting the insufficiency of the Jewish ceremonial law in contrast with the sacraments of the Catholic church. In contrast with this view, the "majority view" (arising again from Origen and Augustine) argued that the contrast was properly viewed as one between justification and works of the moral law, thus throwing into sharp relief the problem of justification in relation to good works. This tradition generally followed Augustine in drawing a contrast between works of the law performed prior to, and following upon, the initiation of justification as a life-long process of transformation by grace, but at the same time insisted that this process ultimately issued in the believer fulfilling the demands of the moral law. In Chapter 4, I turn to Luther's early exegesis of Rom 3, as seen in his lectures from 1515. In contrast with Luther's own description of his "Reformation breakthrough" later in life, I argue that Luther did not arrive at his new understanding of justification in a flash of inspiration inspired by Augustine; rather, his early treatment of Romans is unimpeachably Catholic and unmistakably Augustinian, although there are indications even in this early work that Luther is not entirely satisfied with Augustine's view. In Chapter 5, I consider the ways in which Luther's followers develop his critique of the Augustinian reading of justification in the first generation of the Reformation. Throughout this period, it was unclear whether Protestant exegesis of Paul would resolve itself into a repristinization of patristic theology, inspired in large part by Augustine, or whether it would develop into something genuinely new. The key turning point, I argue, came in the early 1530's with Melanchthon's rejection of Augustine's transformative model of justification, and his adoption in its place of a strictly forensic construal of Paul's key terms. Many of Melanchthon's fellow reformers continued to operate within an Augustinian framework, however as Melanchthon's terms passed into wider acceptance in Protestant exegesis, it became increasingly apparent that the Protestant reading of Paul could not ultimately be reconciled with patristic accounts of justification.

First Peter uses the metaphor of new birth as a way to communicate what happens when someone becomes Christian. While I am not the first to suggest that in this extended new birth metaphor Christ is presented as the nascent Christian’s mother, I aim in this dissertation to both renew the argument for this conclusion and to explore further how this metaphor impacts the soteriology and Christology of the letter. The chief methodology employed is to examine a broad range of references to mothers (both “real” and metaphorical) in texts popular around the time of First Peter.

The introduction orients the reader to the metaphor theory that undergirds the remainder of the dissertation, provides an overview of basic Einleitungsfragen concerning to First Peter, and summarizes the contributions of previous scholarship to this question. The first chapter examines two aspects of the text of First Peter. Firstly, it treats basic philological and intertextual questions concerning every verse that mentions new birth directly, or mentions something closely associated with birth, such as blood, seed, or milk, also situating these verses in their immediate literary context. Secondly, it considers the broader ecosystem of metaphors that co-exist in First Peter, especially soteriological and Christological metaphors.

In the second chapter, I turn to medical literature concerning human reproduction, from the Hippocratic corpus to Soranus. The third chapter treats Greco-Roman texts featuring mothers from outside the corpus of medical writings. The fourth chapter begins by repeating the study of the previous two chapters with Jewish texts. I then treat the use of parental metaphors in Paul, whose writings I take to have been a source for First Peter. Paul uses maternal imagery for apostolic work, and I show that Peter has a general tendency to take Paul’s apostolic language and use it to describe Christ. Finally in chapter four, I read First Peter comparatively with other early Christian writing roughly contemporary with First Peter that uses birth imagery. The fifth chapter continues the strategy of comparative reading, turning to much later Christian texts that employ maternal imagery for Christ in more explicit and developed ways.

Starting with chapter two, in each chapter I explore how the material treated so far can enrich a reading of First Peter. In the synthetic conclusion, I draw these threads together, gathered under four headings. Firstly, the maternal metaphor presents Christ and the Christian as being in a close, intimate relationship, in which Christ plays both a protective and a disciplinary role. Secondly, recognizing the maternal metaphor helps to give a more nuanced account of what it means to say that Christians are brought to resemble Christ. Children were seen as resembling their mothers, but various texts put different emphases on “nature versus nurture” in terms of how this resemblance is wrought. This allows readers to understand their resemblance to Christ as more or less inchoate. Thirdly, various ways in which motherhood was viewed as a form of suffering that led to honor or health allow the maternal metaphor to communicate how Christ passed through suffering to heavenly glory. Finally, the infantilization of the readers and promise of resemblance to Christ that are part of the new birth metaphor help make sense of Peter’s ethics.

Christology and soteriology in First Peter are ultimately at the service of the letter’s paraenetic aims. The maternal metaphor is but one thread in an expansive Christological / soteriological tapestry. Paying more attention to this thread, though, has surprisingly rich pay-off for interpreting the letter.

One of the most significant problems facing the doctrine of salvation is that it's been tied to a word foreign to its very nature: self-improvement. The dissertation articulates an idea of change that is inherent to the idea of salvation that resists and that fortifies us against the idea of improvement rooted in patriarchal commitments. It is an attempt to critically analyze the doctrine of salvation by asking the most pressing question facing it at this moment: is salvation good for women? It’s a constructive re-thinking of what the doctrine means in light of women’s bodies and the fundamental problem of improvement and self-improvement. Within 20th century protestant American contexts, the doctrine of salvation has often been structured in ways that equate self-improvement with salvation. Furthermore, the expectation for this salvific “work” plays out differently across different kinds of bodies, aligning itself with oppressive hierarchies. This kind of improvement is different from both the change initially experienced in salvation and improvements made as the believer enters into the communal reality of being a Christian. The idea of self-improvement as a salvific act presupposes an isolated self that will be cleaned up. This self becomes the white masculine. I argue in this project that the performance of redeemed masculinity (a saved man) is articulated by means of ideas of self-improvement and in turn ideas of self-improvement articulate a redeemed femininity (a saved woman) calibrated to masculinist longings for control and power. Evangelical theology articulates ideas of masculinity within a doctrine of salvation as the outworking of the effects of salvation, or being saved. That is, Christians demonstrate faithfulness by approximating, perpetuating and defending a particular vision of masculinity that depends upon self-improvement. This conflation of self-improvement with the work of salvation depends on the existing (and continuing) inadequacy of the believer. This refracts through existing hierarchies of oppression such that those who are oppressed require more improvement. Thus, the doctrine of salvation has become unrecognizably entangled with social mechanisms that validate and perpetuate cultural hierarchies of oppression.

As a theological quandary, the questions theologians have struggled over are threefold: 1. Who enacts self-improvement, God or the human, or some combination of both? 2. What does an improved Christian look like and who must see the performative embodiment of this improvement? 3. What defines the content that people should approximate in their improvement? The problem emerges at the place of the surface for women, in terms of the formation of a loss of optic control whereby men are positioned as the fundamental observer/approver of the faithful self. If regimes of improvement constitute agency (Foucault), and if such regimes have been seized by women, especially women of color for emancipatory possibilities, then what are we to make of the idea of improvement for doing political, social, economic, and theological work? My project explores the problems and possibilities of salvation and improvement in their theological and related registers. The dissertation ultimately pivots on the question: can the doctrine of salvation itself be saved from its entanglement with self-improvement or its patriarchal commitments?

The practical outworking of a doctrine of salvation enmeshed with self-improvement affects people differently. The way women are taught to imagine faithfulness forms them in obedience to a masculine gaze and masculinist forms of self-evaluation. That is, Christian obedience has been articulated from the site of men who determine the content of women’s obedience and position themselves as the evaluators of it. In this instantiation of masculine-determined obedience, women’s faithfulness is understood in reference to male desires. The dissertation suspects that not only do these practices of improvement get translated as the work of salvation (i.e., faithfulness), but that they are internalized into the subject’s own identity. Thus, women’s obedience is equated with a certain kind of gender performativity that is coded theologically. Further, because this obedience-as-improvement registers as a salvific operation, women not only willingly participate within it on occasion, but often perpetuate it amongst themselves (e.g., mothers teaching daughters). The entanglement of this kind of improvement with Christianity’s notions of salvation and the biblical exhortation to “work out of your salvation” (Phil. 2:12) severely complicates notions of agency for those participating within it. This proves especially problematic for feminist, queer and black thought.

When biology becomes theology in this way (faithfulness is determined by gender performance), it over-determines all humans into racially gendered categories that define faithfulness according to these categories. That is, faithfulness takes on the tone of improving oneself into one particular kind of man or woman, an ideal. Theologically, the question of the ideal human is often answered Christologically, interpreting Jesus Christ as Savior and ideal man. Rosemary Radford Ruether has analyzed the way sexism infiltrated Christology and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza extended this analysis to include how Christology used and legitimized other forms of oppression. How has this entanglement with an oppressive ideal affected women’s bodies, how they understand their faith and how they practice faithfulness? Further, how do Schüssler Fiorenza and Radford Ruether’s analyses of Christology and oppression play across other registers of subject identity (e.g., race, sex, orientation, etc.)?

Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology enters this conversation by giving unprecedented attention to the role of self-improvement within the doctrine of salvation. These representations also reveal the content of who should improve and how and establish who will be evaluating this improvement. It connects this alignment to women’s experience of their body. Ultimately, the dissertation contributes to the budding field of theology of bodies, utilizing feminist and womanist scholarship to develop ideas of faithfulness and identity not rooted in self-improvement.The purpose of this dissertation is to expose how self-improvement became entangled with Christian notions of salvation, such that faithfulness looks like self-improvement calibrated to masculine visions of the human. The dissertation looks toward the constructive turn for conceiving of a doctrine of salvation not entrenched in self-improvement, but it is also conscientious of “saving” the doctrine via the same problematic technology of improvement.

Description of Methodology and MaterialsThe dissertation is primarily a textual analysis with some elements of historical archival research. Largely following the methodology of systematic theology, this dissertation engages a variety of texts analyzing their theory, historical location, the author’s biography, and how the text engages or reflects its cultural setting. The dissertation pays special attention to the subject location of the theologians it engages as a performance of its methodological argument that patriarchy attempts to present certain texts as objective or universal truths. By situating theological texts within the author’s broader socio-political existence, the dissertation attempts to undermine this patriarchal tendency. Beyond this, the dissertation largely functions as a theory driven analysis of the cultural manifestation of patriarchy and offers explorations of its practical manifestations.

The materials used are all texts and include feminist, queer, theological, womanist, philosophical, and exegetical. Non-theological philosophy informs much of the theoretical analysis of patriarchy and how it functions culturally. These texts are incorporated into the standing theological framework and then analyzed for how these systems became incorporated within theology and theological doctrine.

Conclusions DrawnThe dissertation finds that patriarchy has infiltrated the Christian doctrine of salvation such that it requires self-improvement calibrated to patriarchal interests. It terms the product of this infiltration patriarchal soteriology. Patriarchy has accomplished this by conflating two things: conversion with approximation and Christ with the masculine ideal. When Christians confuse conversion with approximation, then both their freedom and theological orientation shift away from Christian values. While conversion signals the possibility of transformation and change, approximation (as described in this dissertation) indicates work toward change as a requirement. Approximation indicates lack that must be corrected and functions as a mechanism that communicates the work must always continue. This continuous work simultaneously reinforces the subject’s continued inadequacy. Approximation also indicates a goal to which Christians attempt to move toward. While this sounds reminiscent of the Christian value to be like Christ, approximation is predicated on inadequacy that must be corrected rather than the relational freedom proclaimed in Christianity. In this sense, approximation establishes a hierarchical system where Christians can be evaluated on the extent of their lack. Within the patriarchal system, this lack gets read through many registers including race, gender, ableism, intellectualism, etc. The dissertation narrows this analysis of patriarchy’s ordering of bodies to consider how this emerges in race and gender. The second conflation describes the content of what Christians are approximating under patriarchal soteriology.

By conflating Christ with the masculine ideal, patriarchy establishes a theological foundation for its arrangement of bodies and teaches Christians that confirmation to this system is an act of faithfulness. Christ as a masculine idea equates Christ’s masculine qualities with holiness. Thus, patriarchy depicts Christ as a young, white, strong, male. This is the shift of biology becoming theology and it informs how certain bodies should improve in order to become more holy. When the masculine ideal is actually what Christians are approximating, however, what is actually happening is the patriarchal ordering of bodies (e.g., women submit to men, men lead, whiteness rules, etc.). Both of these conflations provide a theological justification for patriarchy’s existence and perpetuation.

Against patriarchy’s infiltration into the Christian imagination, the dissertation conceives of three strategies theology can use: anti-patriarchal christology, fugitive theology, and interrelationality. Anti-patriarchal christology uses a lens informed by patriarchy as a system to analyze biblical texts. It operates on the assumption that God is invested in deconstructing systems of oppression (like patriarchy) and as such Christ demonstrates clear actions to this end. Fugitive theology invites reinterpretation, expansion, imagination into the work of theology in order to resist patriarchy’s ever-expanding colonial grasp. Lastly, interrelationality emphasizes the commonality between all creatures, thereby challenging the legitimacy of an ideal figure or the sovereign self.

To this end, Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology contributes to the emerging fields of theology of bodies, theology of entanglement and critical whiteness studies. It deconstructs Christianity’s entanglement with patriarchy and offers a constructive turn for how Christians can imagine a doctrine of salvation that does not reproduce patriarchal oppression.

One of the most significant problems facing the doctrine of salvation is that it's been tied to a word foreign to its very nature: self-improvement. The dissertation articulates an idea of change that is inherent to the idea of salvation that resists and that fortifies us against the idea of improvement rooted in patriarchal commitments. It is an attempt to critically analyze the doctrine of salvation by asking the most pressing question facing it at this moment: is salvation good for women? It’s a constructive re-thinking of what the doctrine means in light of women’s bodies and the fundamental problem of improvement and self-improvement. Within 20th century protestant American contexts, the doctrine of salvation has often been structured in ways that equate self-improvement with salvation. Furthermore, the expectation for this salvific “work” plays out differently across different kinds of bodies, aligning itself with oppressive hierarchies. This kind of improvement is different from both the change initially experienced in salvation and improvements made as the believer enters into the communal reality of being a Christian. The idea of self-improvement as a salvific act presupposes an isolated self that will be cleaned up. This self becomes the white masculine. I argue in this project that the performance of redeemed masculinity (a saved man) is articulated by means of ideas of self-improvement and in turn ideas of self-improvement articulate a redeemed femininity (a saved woman) calibrated to masculinist longings for control and power. Evangelical theology articulates ideas of masculinity within a doctrine of salvation as the outworking of the effects of salvation, or being saved. That is, Christians demonstrate faithfulness by approximating, perpetuating and defending a particular vision of masculinity that depends upon self-improvement. This conflation of self-improvement with the work of salvation depends on the existing (and continuing) inadequacy of the believer. This refracts through existing hierarchies of oppression such that those who are oppressed require more improvement. Thus, the doctrine of salvation has become unrecognizably entangled with social mechanisms that validate and perpetuate cultural hierarchies of oppression.

As a theological quandary, the questions theologians have struggled over are threefold: 1. Who enacts self-improvement, God or the human, or some combination of both? 2. What does an improved Christian look like and who must see the performative embodiment of this improvement? 3. What defines the content that people should approximate in their improvement? The problem emerges at the place of the surface for women, in terms of the formation of a loss of optic control whereby men are positioned as the fundamental observer/approver of the faithful self. If regimes of improvement constitute agency (Foucault), and if such regimes have been seized by women, especially women of color for emancipatory possibilities, then what are we to make of the idea of improvement for doing political, social, economic, and theological work? My project explores the problems and possibilities of salvation and improvement in their theological and related registers. The dissertation ultimately pivots on the question: can the doctrine of salvation itself be saved from its entanglement with self-improvement or its patriarchal commitments?

The practical outworking of a doctrine of salvation enmeshed with self-improvement affects people differently. The way women are taught to imagine faithfulness forms them in obedience to a masculine gaze and masculinist forms of self-evaluation. That is, Christian obedience has been articulated from the site of men who determine the content of women’s obedience and position themselves as the evaluators of it. In this instantiation of masculine-determined obedience, women’s faithfulness is understood in reference to male desires. The dissertation suspects that not only do these practices of improvement get translated as the work of salvation (i.e., faithfulness), but that they are internalized into the subject’s own identity. Thus, women’s obedience is equated with a certain kind of gender performativity that is coded theologically. Further, because this obedience-as-improvement registers as a salvific operation, women not only willingly participate within it on occasion, but often perpetuate it amongst themselves (e.g., mothers teaching daughters). The entanglement of this kind of improvement with Christianity’s notions of salvation and the biblical exhortation to “work out of your salvation” (Phil. 2:12) severely complicates notions of agency for those participating within it. This proves especially problematic for feminist, queer and black thought.

When biology becomes theology in this way (faithfulness is determined by gender performance), it over-determines all humans into racially gendered categories that define faithfulness according to these categories. That is, faithfulness takes on the tone of improving oneself into one particular kind of man or woman, an ideal. Theologically, the question of the ideal human is often answered Christologically, interpreting Jesus Christ as Savior and ideal man. Rosemary Radford Ruether has analyzed the way sexism infiltrated Christology and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza extended this analysis to include how Christology used and legitimized other forms of oppression. How has this entanglement with an oppressive ideal affected women’s bodies, how they understand their faith and how they practice faithfulness? Further, how do Schüssler Fiorenza and Radford Ruether’s analyses of Christology and oppression play across other registers of subject identity (e.g., race, sex, orientation, etc.)?

Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology enters this conversation by giving unprecedented attention to the role of self-improvement within the doctrine of salvation. These representations also reveal the content of who should improve and how and establish who will be evaluating this improvement. It connects this alignment to women’s experience of their body. Ultimately, the dissertation contributes to the budding field of theology of bodies, utilizing feminist and womanist scholarship to develop ideas of faithfulness and identity not rooted in self-improvement.The purpose of this dissertation is to expose how self-improvement became entangled with Christian notions of salvation, such that faithfulness looks like self-improvement calibrated to masculine visions of the human. The dissertation looks toward the constructive turn for conceiving of a doctrine of salvation not entrenched in self-improvement, but it is also conscientious of “saving” the doctrine via the same problematic technology of improvement.

Description of Methodology and MaterialsThe dissertation is primarily a textual analysis with some elements of historical archival research. Largely following the methodology of systematic theology, this dissertation engages a variety of texts analyzing their theory, historical location, the author’s biography, and how the text engages or reflects its cultural setting. The dissertation pays special attention to the subject location of the theologians it engages as a performance of its methodological argument that patriarchy attempts to present certain texts as objective or universal truths. By situating theological texts within the author’s broader socio-political existence, the dissertation attempts to undermine this patriarchal tendency. Beyond this, the dissertation largely functions as a theory driven analysis of the cultural manifestation of patriarchy and offers explorations of its practical manifestations.

The materials used are all texts and include feminist, queer, theological, womanist, philosophical, and exegetical. Non-theological philosophy informs much of the theoretical analysis of patriarchy and how it functions culturally. These texts are incorporated into the standing theological framework and then analyzed for how these systems became incorporated within theology and theological doctrine.

Conclusions DrawnThe dissertation finds that patriarchy has infiltrated the Christian doctrine of salvation such that it requires self-improvement calibrated to patriarchal interests. It terms the product of this infiltration patriarchal soteriology. Patriarchy has accomplished this by conflating two things: conversion with approximation and Christ with the masculine ideal. When Christians confuse conversion with approximation, then both their freedom and theological orientation shift away from Christian values. While conversion signals the possibility of transformation and change, approximation (as described in this dissertation) indicates work toward change as a requirement. Approximation indicates lack that must be corrected and functions as a mechanism that communicates the work must always continue. This continuous work simultaneously reinforces the subject’s continued inadequacy. Approximation also indicates a goal to which Christians attempt to move toward. While this sounds reminiscent of the Christian value to be like Christ, approximation is predicated on inadequacy that must be corrected rather than the relational freedom proclaimed in Christianity. In this sense, approximation establishes a hierarchical system where Christians can be evaluated on the extent of their lack. Within the patriarchal system, this lack gets read through many registers including race, gender, ableism, intellectualism, etc. The dissertation narrows this analysis of patriarchy’s ordering of bodies to consider how this emerges in race and gender. The second conflation describes the content of what Christians are approximating under patriarchal soteriology.

By conflating Christ with the masculine ideal, patriarchy establishes a theological foundation for its arrangement of bodies and teaches Christians that confirmation to this system is an act of faithfulness. Christ as a masculine idea equates Christ’s masculine qualities with holiness. Thus, patriarchy depicts Christ as a young, white, strong, male. This is the shift of biology becoming theology and it informs how certain bodies should improve in order to become more holy. When the masculine ideal is actually what Christians are approximating, however, what is actually happening is the patriarchal ordering of bodies (e.g., women submit to men, men lead, whiteness rules, etc.). Both of these conflations provide a theological justification for patriarchy’s existence and perpetuation.

Against patriarchy’s infiltration into the Christian imagination, the dissertation conceives of three strategies theology can use: anti-patriarchal christology, fugitive theology, and interrelationality. Anti-patriarchal christology uses a lens informed by patriarchy as a system to analyze biblical texts. It operates on the assumption that God is invested in deconstructing systems of oppression (like patriarchy) and as such Christ demonstrates clear actions to this end. Fugitive theology invites reinterpretation, expansion, imagination into the work of theology in order to resist patriarchy’s ever-expanding colonial grasp. Lastly, interrelationality emphasizes the commonality between all creatures, thereby challenging the legitimacy of an ideal figure or the sovereign self.

To this end, Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology contributes to the emerging fields of theology of bodies, theology of entanglement and critical whiteness studies. It deconstructs Christianity’s entanglement with patriarchy and offers a constructive turn for how Christians can imagine a doctrine of salvation that does not reproduce patriarchal oppression.