Magnus Zetterholm

A feminist Paul? A hermeneutical experiment of combining recent Pauline studies with feminist perspectives

This study is motivated by the observation that the last three decades of significant transformations in the fields of Pauline studies, feminist theologies on Paul, and theologies dealing with the Shoah, have had almost no impact outside the boundaries of their respective disciplines. Ehrensperger suggests that relating insights from these fields would lead to fruitful interactions and new insights for each field and prove especially important for an understanding of Paul from a radically new perspective. In the first main part of her book, Ehrensperger describes the changing perspectives of relevance for her study. The most important concerns hermeneutics and the shift from ‘hegemony to diversity’. As a result of the reformation, people were confronted with differing versions of truth. The Enlightenment’s ambition to free people from church domination could be seen as an attempt to deal with this post-reformation trauma. However, by replacing church domination with a likewise dominating concept of rationality, the Enlightenment actually created a new totalitarian system which claimed to be the only path to truth, thus eliminating other ways of thinking. After World-War II, different post-modern approaches emerged, severely criticizing the traditional Western discourse and resulting in a more complex understanding of interpretation, leading to the present situation which is characterized by diversity and a highly problematized concept of truth. This general development paved the way for the emergence of different perspectives also in theology and religious studies. As scholars became more aware of the underlying presuppositions behind