Fall 2019 · Vol. 48 No. 2 · pp. 199–201
Book Review
The Challenge Is in the Naming: A Theological Journey
Lydia Neufeld Harder. Winnipeg, MB: CMU Press, 2018. 371 pages.
This collection of essays from the previous three decades of Lydia Neufeld Harder’s work is significant for the way in which it charts the theologian’s contributions as a Mennonite feminist scholar, pastor, and teacher. In addition to a variety of ministry roles, Harder formerly directed the Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre (where she remains a Senior Fellow) and taught as an adjunct faculty member at Conrad Grebel University College and Toronto School of Theology. The Foreword by Kimberly Penner and Susanne Guenther Loewen reminds readers of the ground-breaking nature of Harder’s early “dual citizenship” in both feminist and Mennonite theological circles.
After initial exploration of her vocational journey, the first several chapters of the volume name the context, method, ethical orientation, and theological lens shaping Harder’s work. Feminist critique and reconstruction redefine biblical authority, the hermeneutic community, mutuality in ministry and discipleship, and the limits and possibilities of theological language. A hermeneutic of suspicion joined with a call for hermeneutical imagination leads Harder to reject polarities, seeking instead to hold apparent dichotomies in productive tension: feminist and Mennonite, church and academy, power and vulnerability, freedom and obedience, sacred and secular, outsider and insider, individual voice and the necessity of dialog, faith as content and experience. Dialectics and dialog characterize this posture, including the repeated assertion that one’s choice of conversation partners is an ethical issue due to the ways in which power relations influence theological conversations, biblical interpretation, and communal practices. {200}
The second half of the book develops a more focused naming of themes important to Harder’s work: power and vulnerability, dialog, revelation and biblical authority, hermeneutics, and ecclesiology (church and “world,” biblical interpretive practices, communal discernment). Here the dialectical and dialogical posture pushes notions of concrete relationship and relationality to the fore. For example, a relational understanding of revelation as God’s self-disclosure frames her discussion of biblical authority, and she asserts the necessarily relational context for discernment of truth while simultaneously recognizing communal discernment as practiced often reflects abuse of power through political maneuvering and silencing dissident voices.
Feminist methodology—evident as expected in the author’s critical scrutiny of biblical and ecclesiological authority, theological language, power dynamics, and epistemology—also produces the most striking feature of this collection. The centrality of experience and context, present in the individual essays, is made more prominent by narrative framing of the selections in each chapter, recontextualizing the writings in the larger whole of a life’s journey. The writings themselves vary significantly. As “a theological journey,” the collection is not strictly chronological and includes quite an array—from student papers to sermons and poetry to polished academic pieces. Readers may find the juxtaposition somewhat jarring, but this is precisely Harder’s point—that the theological journey spans one’s life and engages the whole of life (or should). The narrative introductions to chapters and essays (narratives written specifically for this book) underscore the centrality of the author’s experience (and women’s experience more broadly) as an important locus of theological reflection.
The collection has much to offer—in scholarly and pastoral theological insights, certainly, but also in modeling that “set” theological pieces emerge from and speak to a context, like so many way stations along a journey. Naming titles the collection and frames each chapter (“Vocation: Naming the Journey,” “Hermeneutical Community: Naming the Context,” and so on) but the importance and limits of language is a theme shooting through most essays in the volume. For Harder, theology brings experience to speech, yet the challenge is precisely language adequate to the task. How to name the beauty, complexity, and mystery as well as the ambiguity, tension, and even discomfort of our journey with God, among God’s people, in God’s world? With remarkable vulnerability, the essays and their narrative framing work to communicate Harder’s experience and understanding as well as the theologian’s own pain, frustration, and failing. This—all of it—shapes a holistic theological reflection in which wrestling is central to the witness. Harder’s hybrid identity is perhaps most evident here, in her insistence on theology as a dialog of real life that weds critical feminist attention {201} to women’s everyday experience and Mennonite emphasis on concrete, lived, discipleship.
