1. WEEK 6 SANCTIFICATION AND JUSTIFICATION Serene Jones

2. Critical Theory  Analytical tools that serve to recognize new territories in our old and familiar neighborhoods.  It leads to a deeper and ever expansive understanding of our social context, God and ourselves.  In Lutheran ‘lingo’, this is the critical edge of the Law.

3. Critical Theology  Theology is not just a critique of the world, society and culture. It is also a critique of itself and the church.  Doctrines are lived, imaginative landscapes, which persons of faith inhabit and within which their Christian identity is shaped.  Though there are essential truths in faith, feminist theologians do not trust that we rightly grasp them given our finitude and sin (our inscription in cultural and social codes)

4. 4 Principles in Feminist Theology  Creation’s diversity (different perspectives)  Human finitude (limited perspectives)  Power of sin (distorted perspectives)  Grace (liberated perspective)

5. Justification  The old script of one’s identity is revealed as a prison, a place of sin.  To be crucified is to be undone: a process of deconstruction.  Upon this identity is placed a new center of graced identity marked not by nature but by a divine relationship in which God’s forgiveness authorizes a new agency.

6. Sin  Luther’s and Calvin’s description of sin, following Paul’s universalism, is tainted by a patriarchal and male understanding of the human predicament: self-containment, incurvatus in se.  There is an overabundance of self that needs criticism. Too much self.  Yet historically the experience of women is the opposite: the fluidity and lack of containment imposed by patriarchal society.  In women’s experience, there is too little self.

7. Jones’ Proposal  The biblical story of God’s judgment and mercy should be told in reverse: starting with sanctification and its rhetoric of ‘building up’  First comes God’s empowerment and liberation of women, rather than smashing the little confidence that they have.  Sanctification, understood as an envelope of grace, provides a containing space, an envelope of identity that fragmented women can inhabit.

8.  Justification is thus a second moment, a new identity that we can put on as a gift of Christ.  We are allowed and empowered to play (perform) with a new de-centered, fluid identity.