Men, Spirituality, and Gender-Specific Biblical Hermeneutics (Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia) 9789042939165, 9789042939172, 9042939168

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Men, Spirituality, and Gender-specific Biblical Hermeneutics

Armin M. Kummer

PEETERS

MEN, SPIRITUALITY, AND GENDER-SPECIFIC BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS

ANNUA NUNTIA LOVANIENSIA

LXXVIII

Armin M. Kummer

Men, Spirituality, and Gender-specific Biblical Hermeneutics

PEETERS LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT

2019

Cover illustration: Barlach, Ernst (1870-1938): Monks Reading. 1932. Bronze, h. 23 1/2 in. (59.7 cm). signed l.r. “E. Barlach 1932”. Samuel P. Avery Fund (1938.1166). Chicago (IL), Art Institute of Chicago. © 2019. The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY/ Scala, Florence A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means without written permission from the publisher © Uitgeverij Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium) ISBN 978-90-429-3916-5 eISBN 978-90-429-3917-2 D/2019/0602/45

Contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter One Men, Masculinities, and Spirituality 1. Mythopoetic Writing on Masculinity and Men’s Spirituality . . 2. Empirical and Practical-theological Literature on Masculinity and Men’s Spirituality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Lessons about Men, Masculinities, and Men’s Spirituality . . . .

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Chapter Two In Search of Men-specific Biblical Hermeneutics 1. Why Are You Reading? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. What Are You Reading? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter Three Deconstructing David: Men-specific Exegesis in Practice 1. David the Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 2. David the Monster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 3. David the Lover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 4. Lessons from Men-specific Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Introduction Feminism has awakened broad social and academic interest in questions of gender. Gender-specific perspectives have been introduced into many academic disciplines, including theology and religious studies. Feminist pastoral theology, feminist systematic theology and feminist exegesis are areas of research that have attracted broad interest and its results have been fed back into the discourse and practice of the Christian faith community. Despite this heightened awareness of gender, much less attention has been paid so far to men-specific perspectives. Denying men’s perspectives and experiences their specificity amounts to identifying them with general wisdom or common sense. In postpatriarchal discourse, such generalization can no longer be upheld. Not only would it maintain an unjustifiable notion of a discursive dominance of men over women, it would also erroneously homogenize the plurality of men’s perspectives. Situated at the intersection of practical theology and biblical studies, this book aims to examine gender-specific perspectives on spirituality, church, and scripture and ask what hermeneutical approaches to biblical texts are most useful in the context of the pastoral care of men. I am using the term pastoral care loosely for the broadest range of activities offered by the church – and usually involving a pastor – to its members (cura animarum generalis). In German, some writers distinguish between Männerseelsorge, which could be understood more narrowly as pastoral counselling for men (and thus as cura animarum specialis 1), and (kirchliche) Männerarbeit,2 which connotes a broader spectrum of church-based activities for and with men. I will subsume both notions under the term pastoral care. I will start at the practical level. Church-based pastoral work with men is shaped by texts. As I will show, a certain genre of men’s literature has played a foundational role since the 1980s. Robert Bly, Stephen

1  For a discussion of these terms, see Martin Nicol, Grundwissen Praktische Theologie: Ein Arbeitsbuch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000), 100f. 2  See for example Paul-Gerhard Hoerschelmann, “Kirchliche Männerarbeit,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 21 (Berlin and New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 659-668.

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INTRODUCTION

Biddulph, Richard Rohr, and Anselm Grün are popular writers, grounding their talk about masculinity, manhood and men’s spirituality in myth, poetry and Jungian psychoanalysis, which is why this genre is often referred to as the mythopoetic movement. It is important to critically confront these texts, as they keep exercising significant influence in church-based activities with men across Christian denominations. I will submit these texts to a close and critical reading in order to identify what these authors write regarding the meaning of manhood, the apparent problems of men today, and their proposed solutions to these problems. In a next step, I will complement and contrast the findings of the mythopoetic authors with findings from sociology and practical theology. This will help me to refine my understanding of contemporary masculinities, men’s pathologies and spiritual needs, and how the church can constructively integrate such insights into its practical ministry. It will serve to clarify the link between men’s spirituality, church, and pastoral care, and provide me with the essential elements of genderspecific pastoral care for men. Having established an understanding of men’s spirituality and how the church can support it, in Chapter Two, I will turn to biblical hermeneutics. Biblical hermeneutics is a large and contentious discipline. The key question of this book is which hermeneutical approaches to biblical texts are the most useful in such pastoral contexts. I will first ask why men or men’s groups should read biblical texts at all. In the following three sections, I will propose a men-specific biblical hermeneutics based on the specific nature of biblical texts, namely their ideological, future-oriented, and transformative properties. I will show how this proposal addresses the spiritual needs of men I had identified in Chapter One. The guiding questions at the end of each section make it possible to operationalize this proposal in a men’s group or in individual pastoral counseling. In Chapter Three, I will turn from theory to practical exegesis, and test my findings against concrete exercises of gender-specific readings of biblical texts. In the light of the criteria I have developed, it will emerge that some approaches are more valuable for men-specific biblical interpretation than others. Men-specific exegesis is still a fairly small field of research. I will choose a small sample of exegetical texts for a critical and comparative review of their presuppositions, methods, and results, keeping in mind the concrete needs of contemporary men. Most men-specific exegesis is focused on the scriptural depiction of a single character. In

INTRODUCTION

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order to have a good thematic common denominator for comparing different pieces of exegesis, I will examine three texts dealing with King David. The objective here is to see whether and how existing works of men-specific biblical exegesis incorporate the elements and questions of the reading strategies that I have developed in Chapter Two with a view to addressing men’s spiritual needs in the context of church-based Männerarbeit and pastoral care. In my conclusion, I will summarize and synthesize what I have found out about men, their spiritual and practical needs, gender-sensitive church ministry and pastoral care, and the reading of biblical text in such a context. I will show how my interdisciplinary approach may have yielded insights that each of the different disciplines in isolation would have missed. Finally, I will reflect on how my insights can be applied in practice.

Chapter One

Men, Masculinities, and Spirituality I. Mythopoetic Writing on Masculinity and Men’s Spirituality The 1990s saw the emergence of a whole new literary genre targeted at men. Books about manhood and masculinity, triggered by feminist discourse and policy change, appeared to be aimed at addressing a male identity crisis. These texts often take as a point of departure Carl Gustaf Jung’s speculative theory of universal archetypes,1 Joseph Campbell’s writings about mythology2 and Mircea Eliade’s history-of-religion work on initiation.3 The most popular and influential text of this genre remains Robert Bly’s 1990 Iron John.4 Due to the this genre’s frequent recourse to mythology, fairy tales and poetry, but also because Robert Bly previously had acquired a reputation as poet, this genre came to be known as mythopoetic. The genre also includes a number of other U. S. writers, namely Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, Sam Keen and John Lee,5 but it has been argued that these “draw so heavily upon Bly’s ideas, that they may be seen as mere elaborations of the paradigm spoken by Bly.”6 Therefore, it will suffice to focus in Bly’s Iron John as the foundational text of the mythopoetic paradigm. 1  See Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., Bolligen Series 20 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). 2  Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949); Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God (New York, NY: The Viking Press, 1964). 3  Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (Dallas, TX: New York: Spring Publications, 1998). 4  Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men, 2nd ed. (Shaftesbury: Addison-Wesley, 1991). 5  Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1990); Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (New York NY: Bantam, 1991); John Lee, At My Father’s Wedding: Reclaiming Our True Masculinity (New York, NY: Bantam, 1991). 6  Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling, “The Jung and the Restless: The Mythopoetic Men’s Movement,” The Southern Communication Journal 59, no. 2 (1994): 99.

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A discussion of men and masculinity in the context of Christian spirituality cannot ignore the mythopoetic paradigm. Christian writers on masculinity from across the denominational spectrum have at least partially adopted mythopoeic ideas and concepts, including Jesuits, Anglicans and conservative evangelicals.7 Even some of the authors I will discuss in the second section of this chapter find it necessary to explain their criticism of the mythopoetic paradigm.8 Bly’s text has spawned numerous other texts. I will specifically look at Steve Biddulph’s Manhood, Richard Rohr’s various articles, lectures, and books summarized in From Wild Man to Wise Man, and Anselm Grün’s Kämpfen und lieben.9 The choice of these texts is not random. Some of these texts, notably the titles of Biddulph, Bly, and Rohr, are recommended reading of many Germanophone church-based initiatives addressing men’s spirituality. Anselm Grün, while receiving less endorsement in such circles, is Germany’s most successful contemporary writer on spiritual matters and, therefore, certainly representative of popular spirituality. All these authors can be shown to be genealogically related to Bly and sometimes to each other. Grün, for example, draws on both Bly and Rohr. In order to give a consistent structure to our close reading of these texts, I will submit each text to the same set of questions. Firstly, I will ask how the authors construct masculinity, or in plain English: what makes a man? Secondly, I will investigate what each author considers to be the problems of contemporary men. Thirdly, I will explore the solutions to these problems each author is suggesting. Finally, a critical reading will serve to identify problematic aspects in each of the authors’ arguments. 7  See for example Patrick M. Arnold, Wildmen, Warriors, and Kings: Masculine Spirituality and the Bible (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1991); Joseph A. Tetlow, The Most Postmodern Prayer: American Jesuit Identity and the Examen of Conscience 1920-1990, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 26 (St. Louis, MO: American Assistancy Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 1994); Mark Pryce, Finding a Voice: Men, Women and the Community of the Church (London: SCM, 1997); Gordon MacDonald, When Men Think Private Thoughts Exploring the Issues That Captivate the Minds of Men (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1996), 63. 8  R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 206-211; David Kuratle and Christoph Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge: Impulse für eine gendersensible Beratungspraxis (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2015), 94-95. 9  Steve Biddulph, Manhood: An Action Plan for Changing Men’s Lives (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Hawthorn, 1998); Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2005); Anselm Grün, Kämpfen und lieben: Wie Männer zu sich selbst finden (Münsterschwarzach: Vier Türme, 2003).

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1. Mythical Manhood As I have explained, the most influential popular book on masculinity is Robert Bly’s 1990 Iron John. The British novelist Martin Amis has summarized its content as follows: Well, guys – there’s a new book about men and masculinity that’s going to straighten out all the problems we’ve been having with our male identity. It says we should spend much more time together and exult in our hairiness and sliminess and zaniness. It says we should leave the women at home and go camping and take all our clothes off and rough-house in the woods. It says we should hang out more with older men. It’s called Iron John.10

I have chosen this demotic summary of Bly’s work, because the tortuous and obscurantist presentation of Bly’s text stubbornly resists any attempt to give a more analytical outline. In the absence of a structured argument in the text itself, summaries of Bly’s book can only be approximate. It is therefore more useful to start by asking what Bly is doing in his text. Bly offers a colorful collage, cut and pasted from poetry, fairy tales, myths, ethnographic observations, socio-political commentary, plus the odd personal anecdote, with the ambition to construct an image of authentic manhood with timeless, universal validity. An eight-step selfhelp program towards authentic manhood is part of the package. The structure to this collage is given by Bly’s retelling of a Grimm fairytale about “Iron John.” Alongside his idiosyncratic translation of the Grimm tale, Bly offers a running commentary over 259 pages. This commentary consists of a free flow of wide-ranging associations. The sheer quantity of his eclectic associations serves to establish the appearance of universal validity. While rarely resorting to direct exhortative phrases, his way of presenting the tale of “Iron John” as the universal “allegory of male maturation”11 posits it as normative for all men at all times and in all places. Among the witnesses Bly calls upon, one finds – without the slightest hint of irony – rather large entities such as “ancient Greek life,” “the Aztecs,” “Eskimo life,” “the Hopis,” “the Buthanese,” “the Hindus,” “the Celtic tradition,” “the Gnostics,” “the Swedes,” “the Japanese,” “women,” “the Tibetans,” etc. Similarly, but not unexpectedly, entire academic professions – biologists and geneticists – are invoked to  Martin Amis, “Return of the Male,” London Review of Books 13, no. 23 (1991): 3-5.  Ibid.

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bear witness to the validity of Bly’s insights. To add a scholarly touch, the book includes endnotes with vague bibliographic references. Except for works of poetry, page numbers are mostly missing. Constructing Masculinity Bly first and foremost equates masculinity with wildness and spontaneity. His ideal man is marked by “intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will.”12 He should be fierce and endure injuries. He is willing to take risks, even courts danger, and is fascinated with hunting. Male body hair stands for sexual energy, animal hotbloodedness, excess, and intuition. Bly’s men seek wilderness and extravagance, activity and the father’s blessing. Within every man there is a potential warrior, a lover, and “other wild animals,”13 yet in order to recover these, men need to submit themselves to “cunning, heated, imaginative, reckless austerities” and “elaborate and excruciating initiations.”14 Defining the Problem In Bly’s view, modern Western (by which he means U. S. American) civilization has domesticated and emasculated the originally wild man inside. Bly elaborates a number of problems modern men are struggling with. He frequently returns to the theme of remote and absent fathers and the resulting deprivation of the father’s love, attention and companionship. The relationship with the father is damaged as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Boys are growing up separated from their fathers; they cannot see their fathers work and so, unlike their luckier cousins in more primitive societies, cannot make good connections with “adult male energy.”15 Instead, modern men are overexposed to their mothers. Mothers convey negative views of the father, and there is always a danger of “psychic incest” between mother and son.16 The contemporary young man also has a disturbed relationship to older men, who have lied to him, and to old men in authority, who have betrayed the young idealists. With peers, he experiences only competitive

 Bly, Iron John, 22.  Ibid., 223. 14  Ibid., 180. 15  Ibid., 22. 16  Ibid., 185. 12 13

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relationships rather than “soul union.”17 Therefore, male mentorship becomes difficult to sustain and no initiation into manhood is available. As a result, contemporary men are passive and naïve – especially about women –, emotionally numb, failing to notice their own suffering, and beholden to an “unknown God of duty.”18 Plagued by shame and a sense of worthlessness, they have lost their “knowledge of warriorhood” and have thus left their “soul houses” undefended.19 Bly takes a few swipes at contemporary industrial society and capitalism, the Vietnam War and U. S. politics, but these do not amount to anything near a coherent socio-political perspective. They are furthermore drowned out by the reiterant call to radical introspection and interiority. It may be this emphasis on interiority that may have made this otherwise thoroughly atheistic text, with quite a few barbs against organized religion and the Christian tradition,20 so influential with more spiritual writers. Prescribing a Solution Bly’s book offers an eight-chapter self-help path of male initiation. First, the man has to descend to find the Wild Man jailed deep in his own psyche, free him by stealing the key from under his mother’s pillow, and make a clean break with his parents. Next, the young man has to join his wild, hairy mentor in the forest to seek initiation and learn to appreciate a childhood wound as a gift. Then he needs to experience humiliation during a “time of ashes.” Next, the man has to find a new father and build up the inner king within himself who tells him what he wants to do. In the fifth step, the young man needs to become a lover. Although Bly talks a lot about the feminine here, love is not meant to be directed at human women but towards one’s own soul, for which the man must find or build a walled garden, a space of privacy or secrecy. Next he has to fight, distinguish and chose in order to revive the inner warriors that protect his inner house. Consequently, he needs to enter some ritual space and “modulate out of the warrior mode,”21 receiving a wound that turns into a second, compassionate heart. Now he can enter adulthood and into partnership with the feminine principle. In Bly’s own summary:  Bly, Iron John, 33.  Ibid., 130. 19  Ibid., 153 and 149. 20  E.g. ibid., 6, 8, 26. 21  Ibid., 191. 17 18

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The Wild Man can only come to full life inside when the man has gone through the serious disciplines suggested by taking the first wound, doing kitchen and ashes work, creating a garden, bringing wild flowers to the Holy Woman, experiencing the warrior, riding the red, the white, and the black horses, learning to create art and receiving the second heart.22

Leaving all symbolism aside, one might want to ask what Bly is saying that real men really need to do in order to get “initiated”? While his text is written in testosterone-soaked images and language, his answer may sound rather bookish: Eventually a man needs to throw off all indoctrination and begin to discover for himself what the father is and what masculinity is. For that task, ancient stories are a good help, because they are free of modern psychological prejudices, because they have endured the scrutiny of generations of women and men, and because they give both the light and dark sides of manhood, the admirable and the dangerous.23

Read ancient stories? Yes, because “Mythology is important,” but “people in the West lost their ability to think mythologically around the year 1000.”24 Bly ends his martial discussion of the Warrior, full of swords and knives, battles and invasions, on a surprisingly pacific note: One major task of contemporary men is to reimagine, now that the images of eternal warrior and outward warrior no longer provide the model, the value of the warrior in relationships, in literary studies, in thought, in emotion.25

Thanks to the intentional ambiguities of Bly’s symbolic universe, the reader will never be sure whether the book’s message is correctly summarized by Amis as an encouragement to actual naked rough-housing in the woods, or simply in a recommendation to read and reimagine The Odyssey in the lone comfort of one’s armchair. It is presumably this ambiguity, the indeterminate multivalence of its images and claims, that made Iron John such a popular text among insecure men of various temperaments and inclinations.

 Bly, Iron John, 225.  Ibid., 25. 24  Ibid., 43 and 107. 25  Ibid., 179. 22 23

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Critical Voices Jack Zipes, a U. S. scholar of German literature, helpfully summarizes many strands of criticisms that could be leveled against Bly: Bly’s interpretation of Wilhelm Grimm’s Iron Hans is a folklorist’s nightmare. In fact, his mythopoetic projections and dilettante references to myth and folklore obscure the origins and significance of Iron Hans, while his eclectic reconstruction of putative initiation rituals has more to do with his yearning for a male mentor or his desire to become a male guru than with providing a rigorous analysis of the problems facing men in contemporary America. Certainly, it does not provide a viable means for discerning and dealing with them. To say the least, there is something pompous and self-serving in Bly’s stylized self-reflection of the mythical Iron John that indicates, despite Bly’s constant protestations to the contrary, that he, too, is part of the backlash against the women’s movement.26

In his historico-literary analysis, Zipes takes issue with Bly’s claim that Iron John represents a primeval, pre-Christian and pre-Greek myth, “ten or twenty thousand years old.”27 This claim of old age is used by Bly to suggest universal normativity. Instead, Zipes traces the Iron Hans tale to an aristocratic literary tradition of the European Middle Ages. Zipe also points out that the depiction of Iron John as a mentor figure is a 19th century redaction by the Grimms, while in the traditional forms of the tale, the wild man was “a demonic figure, whom the young man flees.”28 Zipes also highlights some weaknesses in Bly’s translation of the tale. While Bly puts a lot of emphasis on receiving a wound, this notion is never present in Grimm’s text, which uses the verb schmerzen (to ache). Based on this and a similar example, Zipe argues that Bly “stretches words into metaphors without even clarifying what liberties he is taking with the German text.”29 Zipes shows at the narrative level, how both Grimm’s Iron Hans and Bly’s Iron John “celebrate violence and killing as the means to establish male identity” and thus “rationalize the militaristic tendencies of American culture.”30 He points to the reactionary essentialism that underlies 26  Jack Zipes, “Spreading Myths about Fairy Tales: A Critical Commentary on Robert Bly’s Iron John,” New German Critique, no. 55 (1992): 8. 27  Bly, Iron John, 5; see also 208. 28  Zipes, “Spreading Myths about Fairy Tales,” 12. 29  Ibid., 13. 30  Ibid., 16.

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Bly’s notions of gender and ideological message, and concludes with words that may well be read as a broader indictment of mythopoetic thinking about masculinity: Bly seeks to homogenize man through the use of archetypes developed by Jung and Campbell, whose theories about myths and collective unconscious overlook the specificities of real types of human beings, blur the dynamic interaction between sociogenetic and psychogenetic forces in the civilizing process, and encourage nostalgic longings for atavistic models of the past that never existed in the first place.31

Elizabeth and Jay Mechling, U. S. scholars of speech communication and American studies respectively, highlight the dualism, anti-modernism, and essentialism that mark Bly’s work.32 They analyze his use of the binary oppositions in which he clusters his metaphors, such as young/ old, dark/light, deep/shallow, caged/free, which, they claim, resonate particularly well with an American male audience.33 They argue that Bly’s mythopoetic emphasis on premodern narratives comes at a time when postmodernism turned cynical about les grands récits. The Mechlings also examine the socio-historical context of Bly’s book and situate it in the status anxieties of white middle-class males, who have suffered a “status revolution” in the 1970s and 1980s. Bly offers his readers more than just an escape from the shaky ground of postmodern cynicism toward narratives. He offers them antimodernism as a new faith, a faith grounded in time and, it turns out, in biology, for the Jungian foundation of the mythopoetic men’s movement lands squarely on the side of essentialism in the debate with social constructionism.34

British psychologist Ian Parker submits Bly’s text to discourse analysis. In contrast to Freud, who described an insecure self struggling with and adjusting to a hostile outside world, Bly “returns to romantic images of the self as something which is true and pure, and which must assert itself in a world that is confusing and uncertain.”35 Such images of the selfspring from German romanticism and are marked by their ideological affinity with political authoritarianism. Parker also highlights orientalism, racism and gender essentialism as political marks of Bly’s text. In 31

 Zipes, “Spreading Myths about Fairy Tales,” 18.  Mechling and Mechling, “The Jung and the Restless.” 33  Ibid., 105. 34  Ibid., 106. 35  Ian Parker, “Masculinity and Cultural Change: Wild Men,” Culture & Psychology 1, no. 4 (1995): 460. 32

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his view, the text, organized around three psychoanalytical themes – separation, distortion, and castration – “carries with it some authoritarian prescriptions for male subjectivity,”36 whereas the “political logic of Iron John is to fuel masculinist protests at feminism and what they feel to be the power of women over men.”37 Finally, the feminist poet Sharon Doubiago takes particular issue with Bly’s emphasis on the need for the male to cut himself off from his mother, or, as she calls it, “psychic matricide.”38 Bly’s vilification of the mother-son relationship, she writes, has been a core tenet of all patriarchies, the “sickest of all patriarchal perversions” and the “opposite of what comes naturally.”39 Rather than allowing fathers to crucify their sons, whose labeling as “soft” is “the oldest shaming trick on the book,” used expertly by the military, Doubiago urges readers to recognize that the natural model for the adult male is the mother’s son.40 Politically, Doubiago considers Bly an ideological apologist of the 1991 U. S. invasion of Iraq.41 2. Practical Manhood Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph’s Manhood stands in a paradoxical dialectic with Bly’s work. He admits in his 1998 preface, that he […] had intended to write a book explaining the wonderful but obscure writings of Robert Bly – the poet who “started” (as much as anyone) today’s Men’s Movement. Manhood was to be a kind of “Blyfor-Beginners.” People now tell me they want “less Bly, more Biddulph.” But the roots of the book lie in this deep compost, and I want to honor that, while also going into new terrain.42

Referring to Bly’s book as “deep compost” may be as ambiguous a compliment as his wish to “explain” him. Turning Iron John into a practical action plan can be seen as a deconstructive endeavor, almost irrespectively of whether it is done with a conscious sense of irony or not. Yet this endeavor turns out to be a double-edged sword: On the 36

 Parker, “Masculinity and Cultural Change,” 471.  Ibid., 472. 38  Sharon Doubiago, “‘Enemy of the Mother’: A Feminist Response to the Men’s Movement,” Ms 2, no. 5 (1992): 84. 39  Ibid. 40  Ibid., 85. 41  Ibid., 82. 42  Biddulph, Manhood, ix. 37

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one hand, the remnants of Bly do not add much value to Biddulph’s practical advice on manhood. Most of Biddulph’s observations and recommendations are so commonsensical that they do not need to be validated by mythopoetic speculation. Yet at the same time, Biddulph’s continuous references to Bly’s work ends up lending credence to the latter. Defining the Problem Biddulph does not dedicate any space to ontological questions about the essence of manhood. Instead, Biddulph opens his book with a blunt statement of men’s problem: “Most men don’t have a life. Instead, we just learned to pretend. Much of what men do is an outer show, kept up for protection.”43 He then spells out men’s three “enemies” as loneliness, compulsive competition, and lifelong emotional timidity. He backs up this description of the sorry state of the male gender with statistics about life expectancy, relationship failure, learning problems, incarceration, and suicide, all of which show a dramatically more dire situation for men then for women. However, Biddulph does resist the double temptation to develop the victimhood theme for men or to put the blame on others. His pragmatism appears to shrug off such questions in order to discuss what the individual man can do to improve his own lot. With a view to the Feminist discourse on men, he points out that “feminism assumed that men were having a good time! […] Men may be “on top” but they are hardly “winners.” Biddulph suggests that it was more realistic to consider both men and women as “trapped in a system which damaged them both.”44 Biddulph is not a sociologist. He does not offer any deeper analysis of the systemic dimension. Rather, in Bly’s footsteps, he blames industrialization for the evils that have befallen men. In industrial societies, he argues, boys “are horrendously under-fathered and are not given the processes or the mentor figures to help them grow into mature men. With no deep training in masculinity, boys’ bodies get bigger, but they don’t have the inner changes to match.”45 For this, he makes the bold anthropological claim that this separation of boys from their fathers was unique in human history.  Biddulph, Manhood, 1.  Ibid., 23f. 45  Ibid., 3. 43

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Prescribing a Solution In his self-help action plan for men, Biddulph offers advice on “seven steps to manhood,” to which he each dedicates one chapter, namely “‘Fixing it’ with your father,” “Finding sacredness in your sexuality,” “Meeting your partner on equal terms,” “Engaging actively with your kids,” “Learning to have real male friends”; “Finding your heart in your work,” and “Freeing your wild spirit.”46 It is interesting to see differences in style and content in the various chapters. As a practicing family therapist, Biddulph is comfortable and eminently practical when dealing with interpersonal relationships, be it with one’s father, one’s spouse, one’s children or one’s friends. Biddulph steers clear from Bly’s vilification of mothers. His chapter on work, in which he unmasks the tie as “a slave collar” and warns men of the “mortgage trap,” may be radical, but it is entirely grounded in real-life observations. There seem to be two areas, however, where Biddulph appears to be leaving the familiar turf of commonsensical psychology and employing mythopoetic language instead: The one is sex (the chapter is called “Sex and spirit”), and the other is spirituality (called “The wild spirit of man”). Yet while he introduces his discussion of sex with some rather unsubstantiated metaphorical claims –”Our penises should be winged steeds on which to fly to heaven. Instead they get used to nail us to the ground”47) – his practical advice on pleasure, masturbation, pornography, and sexual abuse remains well within the bounds of common sense. The same cannot be said about his discussion of spirituality, where he appears to be thoroughly out of his depth. For a start, Biddulph finds it hard to even define his topic: Spirituality simply means the direct experience of something special in life and living. Religion, by which we mean organized group activity and ritual, is an attempt to hold on to that feeling and to make it last. […] For a man today, the brand of religion one chooses to pursue is not so important. The differences between religions are only differences of style and technique. […] In a sense, any spiritual path will do. To not have a spiritual practice in one’s life, however, is a serious mistake.48

 Biddulph, Manhood, 15-17.  Ibid., 57. 48  Ibid., 192. 46 47

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It is in this chapter that Biddulph’s otherwise commonsensical style of practical-advice rhetoric gives way to Bly’s tropes and esoteric language: the importance of initiation, the wound, bonding and unbonding, finding a mentor, the time of ashes, grief that makes us whole, and, of course, meeting the Wild Man. In this chapter, Biddulph serves a compressed version of Iron John, yet he implicitly admits defeat in his ambition to “explain Bly” when he leaves entire sections over to quotes from Bly and other mythopoetic writers. Biddulph concedes that the “Wild Man is not easy to explain, although most men can in some way relate to the concept.”49 In summary, Biddulph’s book shows that quite a number of useful things can be written about contemporary men, their problems and possible solutions, without reverting to the anti-modern, dualist essentialism of the mythopoetic paradigm. 3. Spiritual Manhood Hardly any list of works on men’s spirituality would be complete without the works of the Franciscan Richard Rohr. Initially a product of the charismatic renewal within U. S. Roman Catholicism, Rohr has promoted urban communal living among families and founded the New Jerusalem community in Cincinnati, Ohio. The community attracted attention through its emphasis on lay leadership, notably by women, and social activism. His friendships with both Jim Wallis and Thomas Merton illustrate Rohr’s ambition to bring together social activism and the spiritual life. It would be wrong, however, to call Rohr a writer. Most of his books are born out of transcripts of speeches he has given around the world. While rich in thought-provoking impulses, Rohr does not present his thinking in a systematic way.50 The following discussion is an attempt to structure his views along the questions I have also examined in the works of the other authors. In his early speeches, Rohr rather uncritically took over elements from the mythopoetic genre, notably from Bly, Campbell and Eliade. Over the years, his writings have developed towards a more “mainstream” liberal Roman Catholic spirituality.

 Biddulph, Manhood, 214.  See Andreas Ebert, “Vor-Rede zur deutschen Ausgabe,” in Der Wilde Mann: Geistliche Reden zur Männerbefreiung, ed. Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert (Munich: Claudius, 1986), 7-24. 49

50

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Constructing Masculinity For Rohr, masculinity is a pedagogical tool. Men and women may pursue ultimately the same spiritual goals, but along the way they care about different things.51 In his most recent and most academic contribution, Rohr states that men and women […] do have quite different entrance points and “fascination points,” but we nevertheless end up with much the same, because the goal is identical – union and even divine union. At that point, neither male nor female energy is steering the ship, but we are guided by One who is neither male nor female, but “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).52

Rohr steers away from biological determinism when he reverts to the notion of masculine and feminine energies, both of which may be present to different degrees in a single individual. Yet in his discussion of male sexuality, he affirms his belief that “biology is also destiny” and encourages the reader to “look at our male genitalia as a metaphor for manhood.” Masculine sexuality is about “carrying and planting seeds,” while feminine sexuality is about “receiving, protecting and nurturing what is planted.”53 This nature-versus-nurture binary, with the definition of masculinity as life-giving initiative is present throughout Rohr’s work. For him, the male penis also serves as a metaphor for reaching out to give mutual pleasure and delight. Rohr extends his bio-metaphorical reflections beyond the penis when he explains that masculine energy is not only phallic but also scrotal. He warns that “your strong phallus must always remember that it carries a soft sac of tenderness right beneath. The hard man without softness is dangerous.”54 Rohr’s genital meditation turns into theology when he equates masculine energy with the energy of God the creator. However, he gives his equation of divine and human fatherhood a non-sexual twist that leaves room for celibacy: This desire to be a source of creation is a man’s deepest identification with God the Father. It expresses itself in the desire for some form of fatherhood, whether it be to have children in the usual physical sense or to have spiritual children in the sense of fostering growth and maturity in others, or just to tend the crops of the earth and suffering humanity.55  Rohr and Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man, 7.  Richard Rohr, “Men and Spirituality,” in The Bloomsbury Guide to Christian Spirituality, ed. Peter Tyler and Richard Woods (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 339. 53  Rohr and Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man, 120. 54  Ibid., 122. 55  Ibid., 123. 51

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More recently, Rohr has expressed his male-female binary as the “agentic character of most males” compared to the “relational preference of most women.”56 As a result, he argues, men “will and must be challenged in the world of doing. Women, on the other hand, will and must be challenged in the way of relating.”57 In Rohr’s construal of masculinity, he also postulates the archetypical binary of the young boy (puer) and the old man (senex) as present in every man’s soul. These archetypes stand for complementary gifts and need to be “reconciled and integrated.”58 For further psychological elements that need to be integrated, Rohr draws on a number of “soul images” that serve as unconscious guides. He defends his use of Jungian psychology with reference to his retreat work and prison chaplaincy. Archetypes for him are trans-personal images that facilitate growth, change and awareness.59 Rohr’s four archetypal images of men are all related to power. The first image is the King, which includes father images, authority, order, law, direction, grounding, centeredness, fertility, and creativity. It refers to healthy autonomy and clear boundaries. The second image is that of the Warrior, which stands for courage, persistence, stamina, and devotion to a cause. The warrior image is about the maintenance of appropriate boundaries, focus, clarity, and allegiance. The third image is that of the Magician or Trickster, referring to critical awareness, consciousness, growth and transformation. Finally, the fourth image is that of the Lover, a person that delights in what is good, true, and beautiful. Rohr explains that there is no correct pattern or superior archetype. The challenge is to let “the four parts of our soul regulate and balance one another.”60 Defining the Problem Rohr believes that most contemporary men possess no internal motivation. Their choices are driven by the external motivators money, sex and power. They are in the grasp of groupthink and other forms of social control that are opposed to individual consciousness and personal conscience. The traditional masculine enterprise of creating and producing 56

 Rohr, “Men and Spirituality,” 342.  Ibid., 345. 58  Rohr and Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man, 137ff. 59  Ibid., 147-149. 60  Ibid., 156. 57

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has been replaced with making money as primary goal in life. In Rohr’s view, the contemporary willingness to dedicate life to the production of items of no social benefit has led to men’s emotional stunting. Relational and social skills have withered because men live their lives at odds with their phallic energy, the masculine drive towards intercourse, and the begetting of life. Rohr’s men suffer from father hunger: Men need someone to affirm them and approve of what they are doing. The father’s absence leaves a huge, aching hole. This “hunger” leads men to become soldiers who would do anything for the approval of some father figure. For Rohr, the “father wound,” which is caused by a lack of attention, acknowledgement, and affirmation, and leads to a poor sense of one’s own center and boundaries, and to a mind that is disconnected from one’s body and emotions, is where men have the greatest need for therapy. And yet this is where Rohr strikes an optimistic note: Father hunger and father wound can “create holy desire and holy longing” for the perfect love of the Heavenly Father.61 Rohr follows Bly’s notion that the industrial revolution has led to an increasing alienation between fathers and sons. He also repeats Bly’s allegations that boys perceive the father through the eyes of the mother and thus learn the masculine through the filter of the feminine. This lack of male role models makes them uncomfortable in their role as men and especially awkward in how they deal with feelings. Rohr also points out that fathers often don’t model spirituality for children but leave this to women. He deplores that most people’s images of God are misshaped by the experience of their parents.62 Prescribing a Solution For Rohr, the solution has many synonymous names: liberation, conversion, repentance, transformation, salvation, and enlightenment. Yet whenever his prose veers towards the mythopoetical, his favorite concept remains initiation. Rohr considers men’s liberation more difficult than women’s liberation: Women know they are oppressed, while men are unaware of their predicament. The liberating way out for them is to look elsewhere for

 Rohr and Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man, 65ff.  Ibid., 93.

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one’s payoffs and energy, to look for “an utterly new frame of reference outside this system.”63 When it comes to practical advice regarding the healing of the father wound, Rohr recommends to develop an adult and forgiving relationship with one’s father, to “nurture our boy within” and to reform destructive patriarchal structures in society.64 At the relational level, Rohr recommends the formation of healthy communities: Jesus forms a healthy community of men as a living alternative to the dysfunctional ways that men usually organize themselves. The church was supposed to be that alternative society, It was intended to be God’s “new world order.” But if you cannot find that Jesus energy in your church or parish, gather with a group of honest brothers who can protect you from and affirm you in something other than passivity and negativity. You cannot do it alone.65

In much of his more abstract discussions of initiation, Rohr stays faithful to his mythopoetic fellow travelers, and describes it as a journey with a universal pattern: Historically, the program was clear. The boy had to be separated from protective feminine energy, led into ritual space where newness and maleness could be experienced as holy; the boy had to be ritually wounded and tested, and there experience bonding with other men and loyalty to tribal values, and then have something to give back. The pattern is so widely documented that one is amazed that we have let go of it so easily.66

Rohr explains that initiation will prepare the young man to deal with life in “other ways than logic, managing, controlling and problem solving.”67 It prepares him for the confrontation with the Spirit. Initiation is the way to enlightenment. Enlightenment is not so much knowing as unknowing, a “second and chosen naïveté.”68 At the same time, initiation is always “a training in dying”69: All we can really do is to keep our ego out of the way (usually symbolized by the killing of the dragon in mythology) and ask that we will recognize the secret doorway that God opens out of complex  Rohr and Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man, 27.  Ibid., 77f. 65  Ibid., 91. 66  Ibid., 31f. 67  Ibid., 32. 68  Ibid., 35. 69  Ibid. 63

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consciousness. The door is usually some form of suffering – physical, relational, emotional, intellectual, structural – for almost all of the enlightened and saved people I have ever met.70

This last paragraph also points to the importance of grief in the context of what Rohr considers authentic men’s work. Spiritual Life Differently from other mythopoetic authors, Rohr provides some outline of how he envisages men’s spiritual life to look like. Rohr defines spirituality as “having a source of energy within which is a motivating and directing force for living.”71 He ultimately considers the spiritually whole person to be androgynous, integrating both the masculine and feminine dimensions within. For Rohr, masculinity serves as a pedagogical tool, a particular way of looking at the world. Masculine spirituality “would emphasize movement over stillness, action over theory, service to the world over religious discussions, speaking the truth over social niceties and doing justice instead of any self-serving ‘charity’.”72 Rohr’s spiritual life requires a good balance between contemplation and confrontation. Rohr argues that at spiritual retreats, participants may get inspired, but not converted. Real change is caused by confrontation. The real meaning of pilgrimage is to leave the comfort zone of the home. Confronting the realities of life, especially among the poor and the suffering, provides the learning that deserves contemplation.73 Alongside his mythopoetic fellows, Rohr also emphasizes the need for a mentor, a man who protects, values and instructs a younger man. Eastern religions provide models for such mentorships, where the apprentice appropriates the energy of the teacher through observation and personal identification. This corresponds to the way Jesus formed his disciples – through relationships and presence.74 Rohr explicitly disavows the goal of male church attendance, drawing a sharp distinction between belonging systems and belief systems (by which he refers to the church and organized religion) on the one hand

 Rohr and Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man, 36.  Ibid., 88. 72  Ibid., 10. 73  Ibid., 113ff. 74  Ibid., 133. 70 71

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and transformational systems (by which he refers to his own brand of “authentic spirituality”) on the other.75 Critical Observations Rohr has found intriguing ways to fill some of the mythopoetic themes like initiation and way-of-the-hero with content from the Christian spiritual tradition. He also subscribes to a spirituality that ultimately transcends gender. Rohr maintains a binary of essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity, yet does not see these two as mutually exclusive determinants of an individual’s personal identity. Granting these achievements, three critical observations can be made. One disturbing feature of Rohr’s rhetoric is his frequent construction of unidentified alterities. Keeping the subject in the first person plural further muddles this othering. For example, when writing about the apostle Paul as teacher and initiator, Rohr laments that […] we have tended not to understand him. We prefer the clear moral mandates and the dogmatic clarity that we often need only in the first half of life. We do not want the terrifying journeys, moral ambiguity, process wisdom or the essential but highly misunderstandable truths that Paul usually gives us.76

Elsewhere, the same faux self-criticism is directed at the Western value system: Compared with the Indian way of life, ours is terribly shortsighted. When we get a job or enter a profession, it is our own material good we are seeking, or at best the good of our immediate nuclear family. We are not finding our “soul” or discovering the meaning of the larger world.77

In all these instances, the audience understands that “we” is doing something wrong. Yet it is also quite clear from the context, that in spite of the first person pronoun, Rohr himself does not really count himself among the “we.” So the reader is left wondering who “we” is. Certainly, this othering-without-naming-the-other is a rhetorical ploy to draw boundaries and make Rohr’s own, alternative position seem more attractive. But such obscurantism often leaves the argument unsatisfactorily incomplete. 75

 Rohr, “Men and Spirituality,” 340.  Rohr and Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man, 53. 77  Ibid., 102-103. 76

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Compared to Bly, Rohr’s work is free from slurs against mothers, feminists, or any other women. His androgynous ideal of the spiritually whole person, his Jungian quest for the integration of complementary energies as a precondition of individuation, and the Mertonian pursuit of the “true self,” to whom gender is merely accidental, all suggest a fairly irenic or post-patriarchal approach to the politics of gender. Yet history shows that even seemingly egalitarian notions of gender complementarity are not neutral. Complementarity presupposes essentialist binaries, which tend towards a dualism that sooner or later privileges one pole over the other. Thus even a discourse of complementarity can bear the seeds of hierarchy and hegemony. A binary of agentic males and nurturing women can lend itself all too easily to the relegation of women to the private sphere, to the home, or to the margins of society. Any essentialist gender discourse that is not alert to power dynamics and social conflict can easily become complicit in oppression. If “biology is also destiny,”78 it is important to get the biology right. One of the most problematic aspects of Rohr’s construction of masculinity is his pseudo-biological talk about the life-giving and seed-bearing qualities of the male, inspired by his meditation of the male genitalia. Rohr’s pre-scientific understanding of procreation has a long and problematic pedigree in the Church tradition, namely in Thomist thinking, although it reaches back even further into Greek and Roman antiquity. Louvain moral theologian Louis Janssens explains: To clarify the process of human procreation, many philosophers (Aristotle, Plutarch, Seneca, etc.) and Fathers (Athenagoras, Augustine, etc.) drew a parallel with the sower who spreads the seed on the field and then waits till the harvest is gathered before sowing again. The seed already contains the plant in germ and the field, receiving it, must only supply the proper environment for the development of the plant. In the same way, the male sperm was considered as a seed (hence the expression: male seed, semen virile), in which a potential human life is present. The womb was a field in which the seed had to be received (hence: conception) in order to have the conditions necessary for its development. Thomas shares that view. He writes that the male seed contains a human life in potentiality […] and he adds that for that reason Aristotle asserted that there is something divine in the male seed […]. Therefore the emission of seed must be reserved to the necessity of procreation […]. This also explains why, according to Thomas, the sinfulness of masturbation consists in wasting male seed and that for the degree of gravity it comes immediately  Rohr and Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man, 120.

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after murder. “The unjustified emission of seed conflicts with the good of nature which intends the maintenance of the human race; therefore, after murder destroying a human nature actually existing, this sin comes in the second place, since it prevents the production of a human nature.” This also explains why medieval tradition was not concerned with female masturbation.[…] Today this view is completely obsolete. Science has proved that only in a zygote or through the fusion of a male and female gamete can potential life be present.79

Holding on to metaphorical language that has been shown to have so significantly misled Roman Catholic moral theology and sexual ethics is highly problematic and shows at least a lack of familiarity with both scientific insights and recent progress in moral theology. This misconstrual of the creation of human life is not only a matter of getting the biological facts about sexual procreation wrong. Feminist writers have identified exactly this gender misallocation as a key ingredient of much patriarchal and misogynist discourse and practice in the Jewish and Christian traditions. While in many primitive cultures fertility is linked with female symbols and divinities, it has been argued that priestly theology in the Hebrew Scriptures was a successful attempt to break the connection between women, fertility, and reproduction. Patrilineal reproduction became associated with manhood, while the female body, via menstrual and post-partum blood, was associated with impurity and death, leading to the exclusion of women from the cult. “[T]here is no doubt that this theology also served to legitimate the priesthood as a kinship of men.”80 From this perspective, any denial of women’s equal role in the generation of potential life by a Roman Catholic priest must appear not only uninformed, but as a perpetuation of a long ideological tradition to defend the exclusive privileges of a male clerical caste. 4. Psychic Manhood The Benedictine Anselm Grün is one of the most prolific German writers on spirituality. He has published more than 200 titles and has been translated into more than 35 languages. With more than 16 million books sold, Süddeutsche Zeitung considers him the most successful 79  Louis Janssens, “Norms and Priorities in a Love Ethics,” Louvain Studies 6 (1977): 235-236. 80  Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart, Introducing Body Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 56.

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Christian author worldwide.81 Within his large oeuvre, he has dedicated one work to questions of masculinity. Grün’s starting point is male insecurity when faced with self-confident women inspired by feminist discourse. Grün promises to show a way towards authentic masculinity through the example of biblical men. Grün’s approach is more psychotherapeutic than mythopoetic. Instead of presenting the reader with generalities about masculinity, he enumerates a large list of psychosocial pathologies. Yet despite the great variety of pathologies, they can all be healed with the same cure. Instead of an arduous “way of the hero” or ritual initiation, Grün’s men must above all confront and integrate their “shadows” or weaknesses.82 Constructing Masculinity The construction of any ideal standard of masculinity is not Grün’s main focus. His therapeutic outlook rather leads him to identify weaknesses and pathologies, which need to be successfully confronted and integrated. However, careful reading of his text reveals that Grün is operating with a set of attributes he associates with masculinity. Central to Grün’s image of manhood are notions of action, agency, creativity, and initiative. Grün’s men are always ready to roll up their sleeves and sort things out. This activism can take the form of aggressiveness, a term Grün appears to be using with positive connotations. In the context of social activism, which doesn’t come to the fore very often, Grün appears to treat aggressiveness and creativity as almost synonymous.83 Both are subsumed in his frequent references to “male energy.” Grün’s men are drawn towards conflict and fighting. Indeed, men live in the permanent tension between the binary of Kämpfen und Lieben (fighting and loving), and need to find a fine balance between the two. The authentic man has managed to integrate warrior qualities into his loving, and love into his fighting. The “shadow” counterparts of this positive binary are the images of “Macho und Softie,”84 from which men have to steer clear. For Grün, fatherhood is integral part of becoming a man, which is where we also find Rohr’s notions of the seed bearer and of phallic 81  See Sebastian Beck, “Benediktinermönch Anselm Grün: Der Mann fürs Einfache,” Süddeutsche.De, March 24, 2010, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/benediktiner moench-anselm-gruen-der-mann-fuers- einfache-1.20379. 82  See, e.g., Grün, Kämpfen und lieben, 13. 83  See ibid., 10-11. 84  Ibid., 7-13.

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energy. There is not much discussion of women, but sometimes they are used as a foil, for example connoting more passive virtues such as understanding, sympathy and humility. Very much in Bly’s tradition and in contrast to recent Vatican teachings that glorify motherhood as in the 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia or John Paul II’s 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, Grün’s references to mothers and motherhood are usually made with dangerous and negative connotations.85 Defining the Problem For Grün, the problem with contemporary men is a deep identity crisis. Men are torn between the equally misguided models of the macho and the softie, though Grün appears to consider the latter a more prevalent problem than the former.86 In addition to this specifically postpatriarchal problem, Grün’s men are also still haunted by all the standard ills of the mythopoetic tradition, expressed in solemn German compound nouns like Vaterlosigkeit, Vaterwunde and Mutterbindung. To these, Grün adds many other, more specific issues that appear to come straight out of men’s therapeutic self-help groups, like sense of shame, refusal to take responsibility, acceptance of one’s sexuality and sexual identity, etc. Prescribing a Solution Grün wants his readers to encounter 18 biblical male characters and refers in this context to Jung’s theories about archetypes, which are meant to bring one in touch with one’s inherent potentials and make one focus on one’s center (“eigene Mitte”).87 Grün suggests that studying biblical characters -he never refers to texts- allows contemporary men to develop a masculine spirituality that corresponds to the archetypes represented by these men, and thus to find their individual ways towards Selbstwerdung (self-realization, or, in Jungian terms, individuation). Grün also claims that the biblical figures will allow the male reader to locate himself on his developmental journey, at least somewhere between the poles of Kämpfen and Lieben. Finding a balance between these poles appears to be a much more comfortable  Grün, Kämpfen und lieben, 35-36, 40f.  Ibid., 10. 87  Ibid., 12. 85

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endeavor than the whole arduous journey of the hero88 or the eight steps of Iron John. Grün believes that his biblical characters will encourage the reader to confront their own truth. They are not ideals, but they have experienced error and failure. They encourage contemporary men not to be perfect, but to risk living. Men should not try to hide their weaknesses, but learn from them. For Grün, the biblical figures tell men that they need to get in touch with masculine energy, with aggression, sexuality, discipline, and passions. They encourage contemporary men to fight, which will enable them to love. Critical Reflections Instead of performing historical-critical exegesis of the biblical texts, Grün takes the biblical characters as occasions to freely associate brief thoughts about a broad range of topics and themes. Reflecting on Abraham, for example, Grün offers remarks on the need to separate from the parents, the need to leave behind sentiments of the past, the need to leave behind the “visible,” which for him refers to success, possessions and reputation, the need for an encounter with one’s own shadow, male impotence and male companionship, men’s refusal to take responsibility for wife and children, the timeless tendency towards killing one’s own son, blindness caused by religion, the need to change one’s image of women and of God, and finally the benefits of walking and running.89 Such free associations obviously lack any particular sense of coherence or interconnectedness, but the very breadth of them may allow readers to find some thoughts that are relevant to their own lives. A short excerpt of his discussion of Moses may illustrate Grün’s style and method: Moses is a picture for all of us. We are all ultimately abandoned children, sons and daughters of the Pharaoh, sons and daughters of the sun. But we grow up in a foreign land, exposed to the rigors and dangers of life. The myth of the exposed child who has an extraordinary talent and who is ultimately of divine origin, is widespread: starting with Romulus and Remus via Oedipus, Krishna, Perseus, Siegfried, Buddha, Heracles and Gilgamesh all the way to Jesus, who as a child had to flee to Egypt. The myth shows that we are all exposed divine

 See Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Grün, Kämpfen und lieben, 25-32.

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children. But once we come into contact with the divine child within us, only then we discover our real talent and our mission, which God entrusted to us.90

We can observe a few typical elements here: The biblical character is always an image of ourselves. The universal and trans-temporal validity of the image is affirmed by reference to myths and folklore of different cultures. In this world of images, critical thinking is suspended. A critical reader, for instance, might wonder how “pharaoh,” “sun” and “divine” could all be interpreted as images for one and the same thing. Similarly, one could wonder why the temporary exile of Jesus and his parents in Egypt could mean that he was exposed? Yet this is not a place for critical analysis, what matters for Grün is getting in touch with images that resonate with some parts of the reader’s soul. In the final relative clause, Grün adds a little theistic element. This reference to God, however, appears with such abruptness, that the reader cannot help feeling that Grün could just as well have left it out for the sentence to make sense. Grün’s Hermeneutics As Grün is dealing with biblical characters, by implication he needs to interpret biblical texts. This allows us to ask about his hermeneutics. How does he treat biblical narrative, as myth or as history? Sometimes – e.g. in the cases of Jesus, Moses, or Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac – he claims we are dealing with archetypes and provides a list of other myths that contain this archetype. At other times he argues he is correlating concrete men with a personal history to archetypes.91 When he describes today’s Jews and Arabs as the descendants of Isaak and Ismael, he obviously places them in the domain of history, not myth. Here, his approach differs from Jung and Drewermann. Despite his regular references to Jung, it seems that he is using the term “archetype” not in its Jungian but some idiosyncratic sense. When Grün writes that “for me, fatherless Isaak represents the archetype of the orphaned” or that again, “for me, Abraham embodies the archetypical image of the pilgrim,” he is implicitly admitting that we are not dealing with timeless, universal archetypes, but simply with the subjective associations or projections of one individual author.92 Instead of using the Jungian term  Grün, Kämpfen und lieben, 61 (own translation).  Ibid., 184-185. 92  See ibid., 38 and 31 respectively. 90 91

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archetype, it would be more honest if Grün said “I project particular experiences and phenomena of my world into the world of the text.” Thus he would make explicit that indeed he is not performing exegesis – something Grün, at least in this book, never claims – but eisegesis: It is less about the unpacking of a meaning that has been put into a text by some author long ago, but rather about the generation of meaning from an ancient text for the reader today. Self-conscious eisegesis has become generally accepted in postmodern biblical hermeneutics as a reader-response focused reading. It has been criticized, however, when it claims to be exegesis.93 It is interesting to ask how the reader could benefit from Grün’s hermeneutical approach. One could argue that it allows contemporaries to find “their” issues in the biblical text. In general therapeutic terms, readers receive the comfort that they are not alone with their problems. Others share them, even across the centuries. For members of a particular faith community, finding their own problems in normative scriptures provides reassurance that the community shares narratives, language, and symbols to address and communicate about these problems. This can help individuals to integrate more deeply into the community and draw upon its spiritual resources. At the same time, eisegesis, if pushed too far, risks de-legitimizing normative scriptures. If readers get a sense that the interpretation of the text becomes entirely arbitrary, doubts will arise about its practical normativity. The interpreter must therefore be transparent about one’s hermeneutical approach. Readers might accept Grün’s subjective “für mich” as authoritative, because they associate it with the fact that he is a Benedictine monk and ordained priest (authority derived from a tradition), because he is considered to have expert knowledge (the dustcover of the book mentions his academic studies of theology, philosophy and business administration), and because readers may have heard of him in the media (authority based on charismatic or celebrity appeal). Grün builds his hermeneutical authority on three sources of legitimacy: traditional, rational and charismatic authority. A sociologically proficient reader will recognize Max Weber’s three types of legitimate authority.94 In the text,

93  See for example Gerhard Lohfink and Rudolf Pesch, Tiefenpsychologie und keine Exegese: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Eugen Drewermann (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1987). 94  Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, ed. Johannes Winckelmann, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 122-176.

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Grün casts himself often in the role of retreat leader, therapist, and pastoral counselor95 – deriving authority from tradition, office, and charisma. Legitimizing his authority in these fashions allows Grün to pay less attention to more scholarly criteria of authority, namely the wellstructured, inter-subjective argument and empirical evidence. Therapy or Theology? The all-determining notion of Grün’s work is therapy. What matters in a text is its role in the therapeutic process – which, by implication, every reader seems to have agreed to be undergoing. Grün does not mention God very often in his work, and when he does, it is a peripheral aspect, as we have seen above in the quoted section on Moses. Talking about God – theo-logy in its strict sense – becomes subordinated to the therapeutic discourse. In an autobiographical piece, Grün admits as much about his theological thinking: Any dogmatic statement is also meant to be therapeutic.96 Grün quotes Jung as saying that God is the greatest archetypical image. Consequently, whenever he mentions God, he leaves the reader wondering whether he is really talking about a personal God, a Buberian Thou,97 or just about an image of one’s own self. In his texts, one finds a recurrent parallelism: whenever Grün mentions God, he offers a parallel that allows an a-theistic reading of the same statement. When Jacob wrestles with God, Grün explains that Jacob encounters his own shadow. “Christus in uns” is the same as our self.98 It is easy to be critical of Grün, his style and his content. Yet none of this diminishes his popular appeal. His radical simplifications and his reduction of theology to therapy appear to meet tremendous popular demand.99

95  E.g. Grün, Kämpfen und lieben, 12: “Seit 12 Jahren begleite ich Priester und Ordensleute, Männer und Frauen im Münsterschwarzacher Recollectio-Haus.” 96  Anselm Grün, “Wegstationen meiner theologischen Sprache,” in Theologie und Sprache bei Anselm Grün, ed. Thomas Philipp, Jörg Schwaratzki, and François-Xavier Amherdt (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2014), 32. 97  Martin Buber, Ich und Du, 16th ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999). 98  Grün, Kämpfen und lieben, 42. 99  See e.g. Alan Posener, “Wie Anselm Grün & Co die Theologie verniedlichen,” Die Welt, June 8, 2010, http://www.welt.de/7959442. [accessed May 30, 2016]

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5. Conclusion So far, this chapter has allowed me to take stock of a particular genre of men’s self-help literature, most of it from the 1990s, and all of it indebted to Robert Bly’s Iron John. Each of the texts reviewed above has its own emphasis and message, yet Bly’s mythopoetic speculation forms a common denominator for all four authors. The notions of the wild man, the wound, the absent father, and the importance of initiation are all taken from Bly. I have discussed the above authors with a common set of questions in mind, and I can now try to compare the results. First I asked what kind of masculinity the texts are constructing. The masculinities offered in all these works share conventional features, including physical strength and energy, fierceness and wildness. Each author pays homage to the “warrior,” even if they differ about which concrete attributes or practices this involves. Arguably, Grün goes the farthest in his celebration of aggressiveness, which Rohr expresses more moderately as agency. While all authors pay tribute to the Jungian idea that it is important for men to integrate the opposite “anima,” attributes of toughness and combativeness are presented as more originally male than an interest in cooking or the arts. The authors show more diversity in their analysis of what causes the malaise for contemporary men. Bly and Grün describe men’s predicament as an identity crisis that is directly related to the rise of feminism. Biddulph locates men’s problems – loneliness, compulsive competition, and lifelong emotional timidity – within a destructive self-image they have brought upon themselves. Rohr sees men’s problems as rooted in false external motivators – money, sex and power – that are ingrained in the dominant ideologies of contemporary U. S. society, rather than in a loss of relative power vis-a-vis women. For Bly and Grün the nature of the problem is a matter of gender conflict, while for Biddulph and Rohr it is a matter of social ills, which are quite independent of sexual binaries. All agree that contemporary men suffer from absent fathers and thus miss an opportunity to get “initiated” into their own manhood. Contemporary men, according to Rohr, have lost a sense of purpose in their lives and thus ultimately suffer from a spiritual deficiency. The prescribed solutions or therapies differ: Bly offers his eight-step initiation program, but remains ambivalent as to whether his readers actually need to leave their armchairs. Getting in touch with archetypical images by reading poetry, myth and folklore appears to cover most of the interior spiritual journey he is prescribing. In a similar vein, Grün’s

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therapy consists in the encounter with biblical figures that move the reader towards his own spiritual center. Selbstwerdung occurs within the self, and the reader’s journey is an interior one. On the other extreme, we have Biddulph. His action plan calls for initiative and interaction: reconciliation with the father, good and active parenting, mutually gratifying sex, healthy friendships, and meaningful work all require proactive, transformative behaviors that bring the individual in touch with others. Rohr occupies a middle position. For him, initiation is a metaphor for spiritual growth, but it contains a strong relational element. His vision of the spiritual life is expressed and nurtured in community life and social activism. One of the problematic aspects identified in Bly’s text is his narrative celebration of violence and killing as a source of male identity. The reactionary essentialism underlying Bly’s notions of gender and his broader ideological message did not by accident chime with a belligerent right-wing conservatism in the U. S., that culminated in the two invasions of Iraq. Bly’s anti-modernism and romanticism were shown to be linked to authoritarianism and orientalism. Zipes quite correctly criticizes Bly’s use of Jung and Campbell, whose theories about myths, archetypes, and the collective unconscious fail to take account of the socio-historical specificities of real men and encourage nostalgic longings for a fabricated past. This criticism must of course be extended to all the other writers to the extent to which they follow Bly’s archetypical speculations. Similarly, the critique of Bly’s recurrent vilifications of motherhood must also be leveled against Grün. My discussion of Rohr highlighted the inappropriateness and offensiveness of his description of men as seed-bearers, a false and misleading image that has also been adopted by Grün. I have also shown that Rohr’s seemingly irenic notion of gender complementarity is prone to abuse. Finally, my critical reading of Grün’s work exposed the arbitrariness of his interpretation of biblical texts, and the limitations of his therapeutical hermeneutics in terms of both theology and advice for practical living. In conclusion, I would suggest to retain Biddulph’s six areas where men should seek practical improvements in their lives. From Rohr, I would like to retain the insight that although human spirituality transcends gender, biological sex and socially-experienced gender might provide entrance points for the spiritual journey. Gender, I would agree with Rohr, may be an issue at the beginning of one’s spiritual path, but certainly not at its end.

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II. Empirical and Practical-theological Literature on Masculinity and Men’s Spirituality 1. Introduction In the previous section, I have shown how the mythopoetic authors distill their views on masculinity from a concoction of myths, fairytales, poetry, and the odd ethnographic anecdote. None of these writers provide detailed reflections on how they arrive at knowledge about their subject. In the present section, I will turn to more scholarly and empirical research into the subject of masculinity and men’s spirituality. The Australian sociologist Raywen Connell100 must be credited with having framed the scholarly discourse about men and masculinities since her milestone publication in 1995. Connell defines masculinities as “configurations of practice” within the social conflict inherent in the patriarchal gender order.101 I will give a concise overview of Connell’s theory and highlight the major achievements of her work. I will then offer my critical assessment of some aspects of Connell’s work. I will show the tension in Connell’s work between modern and postmodern sensibilities and highlight some methodological weaknesses in her theorizing. Connell’s influence can be traced in the recent works of Reiner Knieling, David Kuratle and Christoph Morgenthaler.102 With these three authors I will turn the focus of my analysis more narrowly on scholarly discussions of men’s spirituality in the contemporary Germanspeaking church context. Knieling is concerned with the general relationship between men and church. He highlights, based on empirical studies and personal experience, the contemporary distance between the life worlds of men and the world of the church. In terms of advocacy, Knieling formulates a reform package, based on his notion of “symmetric correlation,” for the church to bridge this distance. Kuratle and Morgenthaler, finally, focus on one specific relationship between men and church, namely gender-sensitive pastoral care. In their proposal, Kuratle and Morgenthaler provide not only an outline of the theological

100  Connell, Masculinities; R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829-859. 101  Connell, Masculinities, 44. 102  Reiner Knieling, Männer und Kirche: Konflikte, Missverständnisse, Annäherungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge.

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and practical parameters of Männerseelsorge, but also formulate what I would consider a state-of-the-art definition of masculinity. 2. Men and Society Within sociology, R.W. Connell’s 1995 Masculinities remains one of the most influential books on the subject to date. Wedgwood gives an overview of its worldwide impact.103 Connell’s work also serves as a reference point within both men-specific biblical exegesis104 and the narrow niche of practical-theological thinking about church-based Männerarbeit and Männerseelsorge in Germanophone academia.105 Connell’s Main Claims and Achievements Connell’s work serves two major purposes. In the scholarly field, it aims to constitute a science of masculinity. In the field of socio-political advocacy, it seeks to find a way in which critical masses of men can be enlisted in the project of feminism. The scholarly and the advocacy elements of her106 work cannot always be clearly separated. In her attempt to constitute a science of masculinity, Connell addresses the shortcomings of previous projects to do so. The psychoanalytical project failed because it neglected the sociological dimension. The sociological project’s focus on “sex roles” throughout most of the 20th century accepted gender simply as a functional differentiation of society but was oblivious to inherent issues of power and social dynamics. The third line of scholarship, namely attempts in history and ethnography to research 103

 Nikki Wedgwood, “Connell’s Theory of Masculinity: Its Origins and Influences on the Study of Gender,” Journal of Gender Studies 18, no. 4 (2009): 329. 104  Susan E. Haddox, “Masculinity Studies of the Hebrew Bible: The First Two Decades,” Currents in Biblical Research 14, no. 2 (2016): 178. 105  Knieling, Männer und Kirche, 58; Reiner Knieling and Andreas Ruffing, Männerbeziehungen: Männerspezifische Bibelauslegung II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 87; Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 46; Michael Meuser, “Modernisierte Männlichkeit? Kontinuitäten, Herausforderung und Wandel männlicher Lebenslagen,” in Mannsbilder: Kritische Männerforschung und theologische Frauenforschung im Gespräch, ed. Marie-Theres Wacker and Stefanie Rieger-Goertz (Berlin and Münster: Lit, 2006), 27; Hans Prömper, “Vom vergessenen Geschlecht zur Männerbildung: Männer in der kirchlichen Erwachsenenbildung,” in Mannsbilder: Kritische Männerforschung und theologische Frauenforschung im Gespräch, 256. 106  On her website (http://www.raewynconnell.net/p/about-raewyn_20.html, Connell describes herself as a transsexual woman. In this paper, I am therefore using feminine pronouns throughout, even if the research and publications may date from a time before this transition.

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masculinity diachronically or across cultures, were doomed due to the lack of a stable subject. These failures have left sociology without a unifying paradigm, but with common themes such as situational construction, economic and institutional context, the difference between masculinities, and change dynamics. With a view to power issues, masculinity has been discussed as associated with an oppressive system: patriarchy. Connell concludes that the real object of study must be gender relations, within which different masculinities can be dissected. Thus, Connell defines masculinity as “simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practice through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture.”107 Gender, for Connell, “is a way in which social practice is ordered […] Gender exists precisely to the extent that biology does not determine the social.”108 Connell sees gender ordering practice in three kinds of social relations – political or “power relations,” economic or “production relations,” and affective relations she refers to as “cathexis.”109 “Gender projects” are processes of configuring practice through time.110 At the individual level, such configurations of practice are called personality, character or identity, all of which are unstable or fluid because multiple discourses, including class and race, intersect. Depending on such intersections, individual masculinities can be hegemonic, complicit, subordinate, or marginalized. “Hegemonic masculinity,” the term most famously associated with Connell, “can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.”111 In other words, hegemonic masculinity is malleable over time, but always in the service of defending that set of gender relations identified as patriarchy. Gender is both a product and an “onto-formative” producer of history, and thus of social agency.112 In Connell’s Marx-inspired view of history, any social order marked by significant inequalities inexorably generates social conflict. The contemporary gender order therefore shows  Connell, Masculinities, 71.  Ibid., 71-72. 109  Ibid., 74. 110  Ibid., 72. 111  Ibid., 77. 112  Ibid., 81. 107 108

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crisis tendencies. The crisis currently manifests itself at the level of power relations in the historic collapse of the legitimacy of patriarchal power and a global movement for the emancipation of women. At the level of production relations, the changes are manifest in the postwar growth in married women’s employment in rich countries, and the even vaster incorporation of women’s labor into the money economy in poor countries. At the level of affective relations, Connell refers to “the stabilization of lesbian and gay sexuality as a public alternative within the heterosexual order.”113 In her discussion of history and politics, Connell outlines four political responses to the crisis in gender relations. The mythopoetic men’s movement seeks self-improvement in “masculinity therapy,” men who benefit from patriarchy without defending it militantly. They seek to adapt patriarchal structures in order to accommodate women, but they do so at the private level of interpersonal relations rather than at the public level of politics. To their right, Connell identifies a second, more militant movement that operates at the political level to defend hegemonic masculinity. She labels this movement as “the gun lobby.” Connell expresses disappointment with the third movement, “gay liberation.” Although she considers it the main alternative to hegemonic masculinity in recent Western history, the gay community failed to turn into a homogenous source of radical gender politics, because “the receptive pleasures of the anus,” forbidden by hegemonic masculinity, fell short of constituting a political project.114 With some ambiguity, Connell introduces the fourth, most radical option – transsexual “exit politics,” by which straight men who oppose patriarchy try to leave behind the worlds of hegemonic and complicit masculinity. Connell admits that it is “difficult to see exit politics as the broad path to the future for heterosexual men. But it is also difficult to see any future without it. More than any other contemporary form of masculinity politics it represents the potential for change across the gender order as a whole.”115 Despite rather critical concerns about this option in the text, we know that Connell finally chose to take this radical path.

 Connell, Masculinities, 85.  Ibid., 219. 115  Ibid., 224. 113

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Critical Assessment It has been noted that Connell’s thinking is marked by a tension between modern and postmodern sensibilities, leading to “a certain inconsistency or even incoherence.”116 Two of Connell’s important presuppositions, one of them modern, the other thoroughly postmodern, invite critical scrutiny. Connell locates her analysis of masculinities within a model of social conflict. This model looks very much like a projection of Marxist class conflict onto the gender order, where men dominate women. While Connell may weaken the (biological) binary by allowing some men (notably gay men) to fight alongside feminists against the trans-historical forces of patriarchy, this struggle remains a fairly dualist affair. Connell’s masculinities are always projects within historically located gender orders that create social conflict. Such broad-brush picture of the human condition, with its borrowings from Marx, might be redolent of Lyotard’s grands récits, the totalizing meta-narratives typical of the ideological Enlightenment-projects of European modernity.117 Connell shows a similar debt to another author of modern narratives, Freud, in her frequent recourse to Oedipus. Given Connell’s personal and scholarly commitments to political advocacy, the lure of modernism may have been irresistible. The meta-narratives of modernism have proven to be far more effective to mobilize political mass movements than post-modern micronarratives based on fluid identities and epistemological humility. Connell’s contribution to highlight the power dimension in the construction and performance of masculinities must be acknowledged. My criticism is that she does so within a dualist, reductionist, and finally deterministic master narrative of gender struggle. Her disappointment with homosexual men and her lived practice and argued advocacy of the sex-change option reveals just how little room such social determinism leaves for plural, fluid and performative gender identities.118 I will also argue at the end of this critique that masculinities are not necessarily constructed for 116  Chris Beasley, “Problematizing Contemporary Men/Masculinities Theorizing: The Contribution of Raewyn Connell and Conceptual‐terminological Tensions Today,” British Journal of Sociology 63, no. 4 (2012): 747. 117  See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theory and History of Literature 10 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv. 118  The notions of fluidity and performativity have been given prominence by Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1990).

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the exclusive purpose of maintaining patriarchy, but may be motivated by different, no less sinister political and economic interests quite unrelated to the gender order. Connell shows much more post-modern sensibility when she seeks to replace “sex role theory” with her notion of masculinities as “configurations of practice.” Her emphasis on practice is compatible with more postmodern notions of fluid and performative identities,119 and focuses on individual experience and micro-narratives and “sensitivity to differences.”120 Theoretically, practice may indeed be what matters most in sociology. Yet, despite its theoretical justification, it also makes the subject matter more elusive. At the methodological level, we need to ask how data on practice can be collected, analyzed and interpreted. Within the social sciences, participant observation has been the traditional method to collect data on practices.121 In the empirical part of her book, Connell chose a different path. In lightly structured, tape-recorded interviews Connell solicited life histories from four groups of Australian men – members of a radical environmental movement, members of gay and bisexual networks, young working-class men without regular jobs, and men in technical middle-class occupations. Reflexivity refers to the problem of “self-fulfilling prophesies” in social research. A researcher needs to address explicitly the problem of how one’s own social and historical biases influence the conduct and hence the outcome, the danger of producing the facts that the researcher believes to observe.122 In interviewing, reflexivity refers to the issue of how the process of interviewing and the person of the interviewer can influence the result.123 Connell shows no explicit awareness of reflexivity in her work, and thus appears to maintain a semblance of scientific neutrality, a modern notion thoroughly discredited among postmodern, including more recent feminist scholars.124 119  On the notion of practice, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 120  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxv. 121  See Mary Clark Moschella, “Ethnography,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 233. 122  See Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Robert K. Merton, “The SelfFulfilling Prophecy,” Antioch Review 8, no. 2 (1948): 193-210. 123  See Kim Etherington, “Ethical Research in Reflexive Relationships,” Qualitative Inquiry 13, no. 5 (2007): 599-616. 124  E.g. Susan R. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

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But even leaving this missing awareness of reflexivity aside, my critique is that recording life histories is not a valid way to arrive at reliable data about practice. What one gets in a taped life history is a personal narrative, where any underlying practice is carefully filtered, structured and interpreted by selective memory, by language, and by attempts to create a coherent narrative identity. And the recorded narrative is only the raw material, which will be further processed by the researcher. The reader will finally learn from Connell’s interpretive retelling of other men’s life stories primarily about Connell herself. Connell even psychoanalyzes her interviewees in absentia, e.g. when diagnosing pre-and post-Oedipal identifications.125 The reader has no inter-subjective way to seek validation of Connell’s theorizing. As a result, it remains unclear how the four “empirical” chapters inform the theoretical and “political” parts of the book. Connell fails to make explicit the interpretative process and epistemological direction of her theorizing – whether theory is generated from experience by induction, or whether life histories are merely classified and judged against a preconceived theory by deduction. I admit the difficulty, if not impossibility, of objectively capturing “practice.” But despite its own limitations and potential for biased distortions, participant observation (or other forms of observation) might have been a more adequate method to generate or test theories about masculinity as practice. Life histories do not capture practice; at best they capture narrative about practice. If masculinities as practices are difficult to capture, one should show some willingness to redefine the subject so that it becomes more manageable for the researcher and yields better results. Contrary to Connell, I believe that there is justification for examining masculinities at the level of ideological discourse. For Connell, this may be too close to “sex role theory.” The problem with role theory for Connell was “the blurring of behavior and norm, the homogenizing effect of the role concept, and its difficulties in accounting for power.”126 All three concerns can be addressed. I would start with her second point. Arguably Connell’s greatest achievement was to establish the plural in “masculinities.” Once the plurality of roles or norms has been established, the homogenizing effect is much reduced. There is not a single norm of masculinity, but  E.g. Connell, Masculinities, 122.  Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 831.

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competing ones. I would consider this a fair description of contemporary Western European society. Coming back to the first point, Connell explains that the “distinction between behavior and expectation is basic to the role metaphor. But the male sex role literature fails to document them separately, and takes one as evidence of the other.”127 Theorizing the relationship between norm and behavior falls into the domain of ethics. A useful approach here is Foucault’s concept of the subject’s moral self-constitution, “the explicit shaping of one’s subjectivity by deliberately ‘‘subjecting’’ oneself to a specific code and specific moral practices.”128 Foucault captures all three elements relevant to Connell’s observation – socially operant norms (codes), the possibility of choice (plurality), and a moral subject, positioning itself through practice in relation to these codes. This triangular construct, presupposing practice and plurality, provides an adequate model that allows the researcher to focus on the codes without losing sight of practices. Connell’s third point urges us not to be oblivious of the power dimension. Indeed, any examination of ideological codes of masculinity would be futile without due attention to power issues. Connell recognized in 2005 that her original formulations relied on “a too-simple model of the social relations surrounding hegemonic masculinities.”129 I would indeed argue in favor of a more multidimensional understanding of power dynamics. There may be many different powers and different socioeconomic interests behind different masculinity codes other than the selfinterested defenders of patriarchy. In recent history, ideological masculinities motivated not only the submission of women, but also – to take a case of truly embodied practice – the pointless self-sacrifice of millions of young men in military adventures. In Western Europe, such militarized masculinity is currently no longer dominant, but masculinity codes are ceaselessly produced and reproduced in public discourse and the media. In today’s pacified, affluent societies and nominally classless polities,130 ideological constructs of gender predominantly serve to influence productive and consumptive choices. Productive choices are  Connell, Masculinities, 26.  Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological Mediation of Morality: A Postphenomenological Analysis,” Human Studies 31 (2008): 20; See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Vintage, 1990), 25-32. 129  Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 846. 130  Party politics structured along class interests is rapidly disappearing in Western Europe. 127 128

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decisions about how much of one’s body, time, and attention individuals dedicate to work. Consumptive choices are primarily choices about what to spend money on. The need for the latter feeds back into productive choices: what kind of work and how much of it am I willing to perform to fund my consumptive choices? These ideological gender codes are constructed and performed in movies and talk shows, in sports events and pop concerts, in children’s books and videogames. The facts that the resulting masculinities are heterogeneous rather than uniform, and that the interests behind them are pluriform rather than monolithic, make them no less power-ful. Conclusion Connell’s main contributions to the scholarly study of masculinity are the introduction of the plural, and an awareness of power dynamics. A major weaknesses is the use of a totalizing, dualistic, and deterministic model of social struggle and gender order that fails to account for the choices available to individual men and women. Connell makes a strong case for the importance of studying practices, but does not address the methodical problems associated with any attempts to capture valid and reliable data on practices. As an alternative to Connell’s approach, attention to the construction and performative embodiment of masculinity codes is a valuable object of knowledge. Through various forms of discourse analysis, it might also be a much more accessible object of analysis than Connell’s “configurations of practice.” At the political or advocacy level, resistance to such codes can be organized at the cognitive-discursive level as ideology criticism. 3. Men and Church Connell’s scholarly influence can be traced in recent works in the domain of practical theology. I will focus here on scholarly discussions of men’s spirituality in the church context of contemporary Germany. The practical theologian Reiner Knieling is concerned with the general relationship between men and church. His central subject is the mismatch between men and church, or, in his own words, between Männerwelten and Kirchenwelten, and how the gap between these worlds could be bridged.131 While men may have dominated the church as an  See Knieling, Männer und Kirche.

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organization for centuries, this does not mean that the interests and attitudes, the worldviews and lifestyles of men have found reflection in theology and church praxis. Knieling argues in favor of a strengthening and mainstreaming of what in Germany is known as Kirchliche Männerarbeit, i.e. church ministry targeted specifically at men.132 Learning about Men Knieling builds his argument on a number of large-scale empirical studies about men’s attitudes. From the 2007 publication Was Männern Sinn gibt,133 Knieling distills three dimensions of male meaning-making and the five Leitmotive struggle, relationship, adventure and learning, creativity, and autonomy. The 2009 report Männer in Bewegung,134 following up on a first study in 1999, documents changing attitudes, notably related to gender, over time. Family, friends, and free time have gained in importance relative to work. The importance of faith in coping with personal crises has increased significantly; church affinity has grown despite a constant level of critical attitudes towards the church. Men’s main criticism of the church is that it limits individual freedom. Knieling theorizes that gender-specific emphasis on autonomy may explain why many men perceive the church as an organization where values are set rather than debated. Men also tend to highlight the discrepancy between moral preaching and ethical doing, and criticize that the church allows too little room for questions and doubt.135 The sociologically more detailed study Männer: Rolle vorwärts, Rolle Rückwärts documents the variety of contextually determined attitude clusters among men.136 Although Knieling does not pay further attention to this aspect, a point of particular interest for the present project is that within the context of broader sociological theorizing over masculinity, this study provides solid empirical proof for the co-existence of various attitude clusters, which could be taken as a proxy for a plurality of

132

 Hoerschelmann, “Kirchliche Männerarbeit.”  Martin Engelbrecht and Martin Rosowski, Was Männern Sinn gibt: Leben zwischen Welt und Gegenwelt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007). 134  Rainer Volz and Paul M. Zulehner, Männer in Bewegung: Zehn Jahre Männerentwicklung in Deutschland (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009). 135  See Knieling, Männer und Kirche, 27. 136  Carsten Wippermann, Marc Calmbach, and Katja Wippermann, Männer: Rolle vorwärts, Rolle rückwärts. Identitäten und Verhalten von traditionellen, modernen und postmodernen Männern (Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich, 2009). 133

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masculinities. Ten clusters emerge at the intersections of value orientation and social class.137 Based on these empirical studies, Knieling arrives at his central hypothesis that Kirchenwelten and Männerwelten only rarely overlap. He examines the various fields of church ministry – worship and sermon, pastoral care, adult education and Männerarbeit, and finds a consistent lack of attention to men-specific perspectives, especially regarding issues like work, family, and personal autonomy. Knieling hypothesizes that on the demand side, most services are predominantly attended by elderly people and teenage candidates for confirmation. Thus, among those attending church, there is little demand for engagement with the issues that are of interest to professional adults between ages 20 and 65. On the supply side, Knieling feels that many pastors are theologically underequipped to theologize over such issues. Traditional forms of service, which do not provide opportunities for church members to introduce “their” issues, aggravate this situation. The situation is better in pastoral care, where increasing attention is paid to gender issues. Knieling deplores that no men-specific textbook on pastoral care exists, but this desideratum has been satisfied in 2015 with Kuratle and Morgenthaler’s Männerseelsorge, discussed in the following section. Knieling notes that men may be particularly hesitant to seek pastoral care actively, and the church therefore needs to offer pastoral care in contexts other than just crisis intervention. Currently, Männerarbeit in the form of men’s groups or father-child weekends is the only established format that offers men a gender-specific space to get engaged in church life. Such homo-social groups or events serve as a communicative door-opener that allows men to share life experiences rather than being pressed into prefabricated molds, Here, they can listen and be listened to outside the functional imperatives of their work lives. Knieling argues that men who are willing to explore church and faith do not just want to listen and receive, but rather contribute their own competences, life experiences and religious attitudes.138 Knieling finds that until now, the praxis of church life has been insufficiently men-specific. Knieling quotes the Austrian theologian and author Markus Hofer as a Roman Catholic perspective explaining the seeming paradox that a men-dominated church is not a men-specific church: No man thinks that he has particular power in the Church only because the priest is a man. Men also do not necessarily feel that the  Wippermann, Calmbach, and Wippermann, Männer.  Knieling, Männer und Kirche, 54.

137 138

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priest up there is one of them. We live in a church of clergymen, but not in a man’s church. Of course, all the important positions are occupied by priests, by celibate men, but it is fatal to believe that they are typical men. Men are rather the blind spot of the Church, and hardly anyone spends much time thinking about them.139

Knieling does not provide a detailed comparison how this situation translates into the Lutheran, the Orthodox, or various Protestant free churches or into the situation in other countries. But, with references to Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu, Knieling argues that it may be the very identification of “man as male” with “man as human being” that has created this persistent blindness for everything that may be genderspecific about men.140 A Church that Welcomes Men Knieling argues that men-specific perspectives need to be neither explicitly pro- nor anti-feminist. Rather, he hopes that a focus on empirical observations will allow some unbiased reflection on men’s experience. Attention to male experience will enrich theology and church praxis. A more dialogical form of discourse could reduce the appearance of the church as an agent of heteronomous rule setting in the public sphere and thus reduce the dangers of both fundamentalism and arbitrariness. Knieling insists that this discourse must not shy away from shaping church teaching on ethics and dogmatics, and refers to this dialogical vision by way of a terminological combination borrowed from Paul Tillich and Paul Watzlawick as symmetrische Korrelation. Correlation refers to the theological link between church teaching and men’s concrete life experience. Symmetry refers to a respectful dialogue, on a level playing field, between Männerwelten (men’s worlds) and Kirchenwelten (the worlds of the church).141 Knieling applies symmetric correlation to a number of themes that have emerged from the empirical studies as relevant for men: performance and success, family and (broken) relationships, power and influence, and finally spirituality. He aims to show how each of these themes offers opportunities for mutually beneficial dialogue between church and Männerwelt. From a critical perspective, it appears that his Kirchenwelt  Knieling, Männer und Kirche, 55-56 (own translation).  Ibid., 57-61. 141  See ibid., 75-79. 139

140

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has more to gain from this dialogue than ordinary men. This raises the question of the ultimate purpose of Knieling’s symmetric correlation. At times, symmetric correlation for its own sake appears to be of little practical consequence. In one example Knieling identifies male affinity to creation-based spirituality. He concedes that mainstream Protestantism has neglected the access to the divine via creation and explains how this had been an important aspect for the Bekennende Kirche in its distancing from the Deutsche Christen during the Nazi regime in Germany.142 He then lists a few quotes of Luther, Johann Arndt and, at greater length, Paul Gerhard, to document fragments of creational spirituality in (Protestant) church tradition. What is missing, and Knieling clearly admits this, is an explicit church position on creational ethics. Shouldn’t the church ask critical questions about how men’s apparent affinity to creational spirituality (manifest, for example, in the building of tree houses and outdoor games143) squares with an apparent, gender-specific love of fast cars? Likewise, in his discussion of performance and success, Knieling appears to put more emphasis on the need for the church to accommodate popular attitudes rather than on the need to challenge them.144 One might wonder whether it is enough that the church accommodates societally-dominant experiences and attitudes, or whether men would expect the church to offer critique and countercultural guidance. Knieling’s ecclesiological model seems to be one of a strukturkonservative Volkskirche, and he fails to raise the critical question whether this is the kind of church contemporary men want or need. Maybe Knieling secretly hopes that over time dialogue with the Männerwelt leads the church towards more critical positions, but it remains unclear how the dialogue will directly benefit men who engage in it. In his discussion of spirituality, Knieling admits that the dialogue may be less of mutual interest but rather a way for church and theology to open itself to the world, an opportunity for, to use a Roman Catholic term, aggiornamento. He does not expect that increased openness for dialogue and learning by clergy will persuade significant numbers of men to get engaged in church life. It is the pastors who will benefit most from learning about men’s perspectives.145 Quite differently from the therapeutic purposes of Kuratle and Morgenthaler’s Männerseelsorge, Knieling’s symmetric correlation is not so  See Knieling, Männer und Kirche, 116-120.  Ibid., 117. 144  See ibid., 91-96. 145  See ibid., 125. 142 143

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much meant as an exhortation of the church to address male pathologies at the individual or structural level, but primarily as a call for internal church reform to address contemporary shortcomings in the Kirchenwelt. Knieling’s conceptualization of symmetric correlation is therefore not entirely convincing as a form of respectful dialogue. Putting the emphasis on respect is certainly laudable, but his dialogue appears to be in some cases a unidirectional import of notions and values from society into the church. This church seems to forego any critical-prophetic role in society. Likewise, Knieling’s recourse to correlation seems to be oblivious to postmodern critiques of the original correlation concept and to proposals of alternative, mutually-critical and multi-correlational forms of dialogue.146 In his book’s section on practical implementation, Knieling argues in favor of discovering biblical texts as men’s stories, Männerarbeit, a liturgy compatible with men, and the development of men-specific academic theology. In his discussion of ecclesial Männerarbeit, Knieling underlines its ability to transcend and thereby weaken boundaries of social class. He is optimistic about the prospects for constructive dialogue between traditional and (post-) modern attitudes within the safety of Männerarbeit, and suggests as specific challenges the development of Jungenarbeit, and of men-specific approaches to the experience of violence, sexuality and care of relatives.147 Knieling offers a number of suggestions how the liturgy could be redesigned in a more inclusive fashion.148 When he bemoans an excessively deficit-oriented worldview or too positive depictions of family life,149 it is not always clear whether Knieling is using his own personal preferences as a proxy for men’s gender-specific needs. Finally, he deplores the huge gap between academic theology and ecclesial Männerarbeit, especially when compared to how feminist insights have made important inroads into church practice. Biblical exegesis should develop men-specific perspectives, but so should church history, 146  See for example David Tracy, “The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived: Catholic Theological Method, Modernity and Postmodernity,” Theological Studies 50 (1989): 548-570; David Tracy, “A Correlational Model of Practical Theology Revisited,” in Religion, Diversity and Conflict, ed. Edward Foley (Berlin and Münster: Lit, 2011), 49-64; Didier Pollefeyt, “Difference Matters: A Hermeneutic-Communicative Concept of Didactics in a European Multi-Religious Context,” Journal of Religious Education 56, no. 1 (2008): 13; Lieven Boeve, “Beyond Correlation Strategies: Teaching Religion in a De-Traditionalised and Pluralised Context,” in Hermeneutics and Religious Education, ed. H. Lombaerts and D. Pollefeyt, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 233-254. 147  See Knieling, Männer und Kirche, 147-166. 148  See ibid., 167-176. 149  See ibid., 171.

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systematics and practical theology. He puts particular emphasis on empirical research that is needed to inform pastoral theology and psychology, concepts of church development and reform, and religious education.150 4. Men and Pastoral Care David Kuratle and Christoph Morgenthaler’s 2015 textbook Männerseelsorge goes a long way to address the need to bridge the gap between men and church. The authors argue that despite the existence since 1970s of a “men’s liberation” movement as reaction to second wave feminism and the emergence in the late 1980s of academic Männerforschung (men’s studies), the impulses of the men’s movement and men’s studies have hardly had any impact on practical theology, nor more specifically on poimenics, the academic science of pastoral care And while some pastoral work with men in the form of Männerarbeit was largely revamped, often in ecumenical cooperation, no men-specific perspectives were developed for pastoral care. The authors give a number of hypotheses why men-specific concerns were not taken up in poimenics. In contrast to feminism, the “men’s movement” never coalesced into a coherent or numerically significant socio-political movement. Secondly, as discussed in the previous section, men were significantly less present in church than women and, according to surveys, identify themselves as less religious or spiritual than women. Thirdly, the authors argue that because men tend to externalize psychosocial problems in ways that make them less likely to seek psychotherapy, they likewise tend to be disinclined to seek pastoral care. Finally, the authors note that there has been little theoretical reflection on the fact that in Protestant churches men have become the minority among pastoral care-givers. The authors formulate the aims of Männerseelsorge as follows: We understand pastoral care as a cooperative, co-evolving activity, an eye-to-eye relationship, a joint project, a journey where everybody is a fellow-traveller. We also propose a men-specific form of pastoral care that does justice to men in their specificities. It takes into account the question of gender justice and shows sensitivity to what matters to men, and what they often shield themselves from, because they consider it too sensitive.151  See Knieling, Männer und Kirche, 177-182.  Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 12 (our translation).

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I would argue that this definition of männersensible Seelsorge may be seen as an attempt to integrate three theoretical perspectives. From feminism it inherits the sensitivity and advocacy for gender justice, which implies a critique of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinities. From men’s studies, and in a critical way possibly even from men’s movements and the mythopoetic tradition, a concern for what could be “menspecific.” This quest of the men-specific can steer clear of essentialism when it focuses on the empirical specifics individual men experience in their social and cultural context. And finally, some impulse of queer theory might be at play as far as the goal of this kind of pastoral care is to help men to open up to sensitive issues, understandings (including self-understandings) and performative acts that transcend cultural stereotypes and social expectations. In their practical experience, the authors have found that the language of pastoral care is dominated by metaphors and images that fail to resonate with men. They are aware that such a finding may in itself be linked to the very stereotypes they seek to transcend, which is why they emphasize a heightened sensitivity for language when dealing with issues of gender.152 Sources of Männerseelsorge The authors explain the four sources that feed into their conception of Männerseelsorge. The first is the Seelsorgebewegung of the 1970s and 1980s. In the Anglo-saxon world, this corresponds to the “therapeutic paradigm for pastoral counseling,”153 marked by a departure from a doctrinal orientation and the “psychologizing of pastoral care.”154 The second source is feminist pastoral care, which aimed to deconstruct traditional concepts of care and made pastoral care sensitive to issues of gender. The third source is the academic field of gender studies and its societal reception and reflection in debates over gender mainstreaming. This entails the acceptance of gender as an analytical category, a more widespread questioning of normative and essentialist notions of gender roles, and a socio-political commitment to recognition and equal rights for diverse people of both genders. It is reflected in more gender-sensitive  See Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 15-16.  Sally A. Brown, “Hermeneutical Theory,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, 118. 154  Barbara J. McClure, “Pastoral Care,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, 272. 152 153

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conceptions of psychotherapy, which recognizes that gendered socialization results in different languages in which men interpret and express their experience. Gender-sensitive psychology has identified contemporary men’s central pathology as “the dilemma of male socialisation”: Having to be a man, and yet not really being able to, since a man’s concrete life always shamefully falls behind the demands of masculinity. […] So against lots of resistance, an externalizing style of problem solving needs to be overcome by therapeutic talk and a new language has to be practices for their problems, emotions and desires, a language that goes beyond the socially constructed forms of masculinity.155

Thus the deconstruction of Männlichkeitsideologien becomes the focal point of gender-sensitive counseling, while these same ideologies of masculinity constitute major impediments for men’s entry into therapy and for the therapeutic process itself. The fourth source of church-based Männerseelsorge is the hermeneutical framework of Christian theology, rooted in the Christian scriptural traditions and faith community. Christian theology today cannot ignore the insights from feminist theology, that the biblical and ecclesial traditions have been strongly shaped by patriarchal patterns of understanding and acting. Feminist pastoral care therefore had to be suspicious of established theological knowledge and had to question, deconstruct and reconstruct its theological basis. The same is true for Männerseelsorge, which must therefore adopt much of the feminist critique and suspicion, while setting its own accents. In contrast to the mythopoetic writers and to Knieling, for Kuratle and Morgenthaler the systemic perspective, which includes just and healthy forms of relating between men and women, is ultimately more important than the men-specific focus. Relational human flourishing based on gender-justice is the primary therapeutic concern, and its translation into a strategy for men only a secondary step. The authors reject as problematic the notions of polarity and complementarity, which have traditionally been legitimized with certain interpretations of the creation narratives. Instead, the authors expect Christian eschatology to provide impulses for liberated relations between human beings with different sexual identities. Finally, the authors argue that the theological foundations of Männerseelsorge must confront the question of the man Jesus and his significance for gender-sensitive pastoral care.156  Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 30 (our translation).  See ibid., 33.

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Defining Masculinity A particular understanding of gender and masculinity underlies Kuratle and Morgenthaler’s vision of Männerseelsorge: Masculinity is a socialized personality variant. It is formed, first in the family, then in the peer group, later in education and afterwards in work, leisure and family, right into old age. It is shaped by material and cultural influences, by significant people, models, myths, everyday experiences, critical life events, and much more. Men, on the other hand, become men by making something from what they are made of. Masculinity is therefore also an individual development process, and with age it becomes a self-directed project, in which men can also change the preconditions of that what made them. They can design and vary their ‘fabricated masculinity’ in a thousand shades, each one in his own way. But even this does not happen independently of cultural patterns and models.157

The authors emphasize that masculine identity is not only shaped in early development, but over the life cycle, especially at critical transitions. Kuratle and Morgenthaler have achieved a magisterial synthesis of the state-of-the art of theorizing gender. The most important aspect of their definition is its openness to change and its disavowal of determinism and essentialisms. Their definition leaves room for molecular and biological factors (“what we are made of”), for sociology, psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. While recognizing the important role of society and culture, gender is seen as contingent, performative, and plural, and emphasis is put on individual agency. Masculinity is a project of selfdevelopment, and Männerseelsorge means to accompany and strengthen men as they pursue this project.158 By defining masculinity as an individual’s project, it becomes a matter of ethics, notably in the Foucaultian sense of the subject’s moral self-constitution, “the explicit shaping of one’s subjectivity by deliberately ‘subjecting’ oneself to a specific code and specific moral practices.”159 The authors summarize that different ideas about developing into masculinity depend on perspectives and theories. Notions of masculinity can occur along a spectrum between the polarity of traditional and

 Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 88-89 (our translation).  Ibid., 91. 159  Verbeek, “Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological Mediation of Morality,” 20; see also Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, 25-32. 157 158

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modern. They are, however, strongly determined by socio-economic context and age. Conceptualizing Männerseelsorge The authors emphasize the importance of the reference texts the pastoral care of men is based on. They spell out where they differ from Bly, Rohr et. al.: Männerseelsorge directs men towards an unknown future rather than back to some archetypical past. Männerseelsorge seeks to transform men rather than reduce them to their mythical essence; Männerseelsorge is a social rather than an individualist project; the center is Christ, not some warrior, knight, or wild man, in which men can find themselves; Männerseelsorge directs men towards acceptance of their brokenness rather than to seek integrated wholeness; Männerseelsorge is mindful of men’s historical contextuality rather than their pre-historical origins; Männerseelsorge invites men into partnerships with other men and women rather than turning them into lonesome heroes. The authors recognize that men have to struggle with gender. As a social construct, gender condenses expectations, images and norms, while undergoing historical development. Men sense the discrepancies between their own self and the concepts of masculinity in their environment. These discrepancies lead to cognitive, emotional, and somatic tensions, often experienced as stress and conflict. But creative reinvention of one’s masculinity can also be an opportunity. The authors, as I have shown, are guided by a dynamic concept of masculinity and aim to help men in their “management of self in role” which constitutes an “infinite search.”160 They write: Men are not just men. They are at the same time old, poor, educated, sick, gay, or the opposite, or something else altogether, and they need to integrate all of this, reconcile it with one’s own self-experience, weigh and balance it. Identity is negotiated situationally as well. Who I am as a man has to do with who I am, with whom else I am supposed to be a man, and how masculinity is staged, contested, withdrawn or puffed up in concrete encounters. Masculinity emerges in cooperation, and often also in competition. Today what is generally assumed also applies to male identity: identity in late modernity is and remains a project, it always requires new acts of ‘identity work’, the interminable, open-ended search for a life form that I am personally responsible for and that I have agreed with myself.161  Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 97.  Ibid., 98-99 (our translation).

160 161

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The authors consider meaning-making a central aspect of men’s identity work. They draw heavily on Engelbrecht and Rosowski162 when they describe men’s meaning-making. Men love to construct narrative identities, drawing on cosmological, anthropological and ethical knowledge repositories.163 Religiosity plays a lesser role for men. In many men’s views, the church is caught between its countercultural message and its complicity in the structures and conditions of this heteronomous world. They fear that their own meaning-making would be censored by institutional religion. Männerseelsorge wants to help men to interpret their own life and provide a hermeneutics for their being-in-the-world. The authors admit that there are challenges for their concept of gender-sensitive Männerseelsorge: “Traditional” men are more likely to seek pastoral counseling than “modern” men, so counselors must be aware that their objective of egalitarian gender relations does not coincide with the life goals of their likeliest clients. “Modern” men stay away from pastoral counseling because they feel that the church is stuck in the conventional and traditional.164 Finally, the authors locate their model of Männerseelsorge in the tension between the two poles marked by Peter Bichsel’s “Recht, ein anderer zu sein” (the right to be a different person) and Dorothee Sölle’s “Recht, ein anderer zu werden.”(the right to become a different person)165 These two notions are difficult to render with precision in English. The former expression refers to difference and non-conformity, the latter one to personal transformation and metanoia. In pastoral care, the former requires empathy with the care seeker, while the latter means challenging him. This polarity of empathy and challenge stands in the core tradition of Reformation theology – the human person as simul iustus et peccator: God accepts and justifies man as he is, and yet, this is not the end of the story. The right and the challenge to change and to be transformed is meant to shape the life of the Christian in eschatological perspective.166

 Engelbrecht and Rosowski, Was Männern Sinn gibt.  See also Chapter Two, “Why Are You Reading?” 164  See Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 106. 165  See Peter Bichsel, “Das Recht, ein Anderer zu werden: Dorothee Sölle und Peter Bichsel im Gespräch,” in Über Gott und die Welt: Schriften zur Religion, ed. Andreas Mauz, 6th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 189-224; and Dorothee Sölle, Das Recht ein anderer zu werden: Theologische Texte (Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971). 166  Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 107-110. 162 163

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Implementing Männerseelsorge With a view to the future, the authors explain what they expect menspecific pastoral care to achieve. Their proposed model is not meant to make men suitable for pastoral care, but to make pastoral care suitable for men, so that men can discover its benefits for themselves. It is key to identify motivations in men and relate them to relevant forms of care – for example the motivation to be a good father and to experience meaning and enjoyment in relationships with a partner (family and marriage counseling), the motivation to live autonomously and without the constraints of physical suffering (hospital chaplaincy), the motivation to escape from a life marked by violence (prison chaplaincy). The authors maintain that their concern is less whether pastoral care effects specific changes in men’s lives but rather the opening up of space for men, where they can be accepted as ein Anderer and where they acquire a taste of becoming ein Anderer.167 The unifying principle of Männerseelsorge is a sharpened perspective on men. As such, it is compatible with a range of different approaches to pastoral care. Person-centered and systemic solution-oriented perspectives are particularly useful.168 The main form of practical implementation will be the professional accompaniment of men through transitions, crises, and difficulties. Various forms of self-help (e.g., men’s groups) are a second type of Männerseelsorge. Because men tend to be underdiagnosed and under-treated, and too little is known about their religiosity, it is important for churches to offer preventive measures: men’s groups, meeting places, psycho-educative initiatives, and gender-sensitive forms of spirituality. They need to address the rational part of a person. They need to accept that men may be sitting on the fence and let them sit there. They must recognize that men may seek impulses – without coercion – to open up and reveal themselves.169 So far, most offers had not been suited to their target group. Männerseelsorge is not about “reforming” men or to convey a new self-understanding that negates the original one. Instead, images of masculinity should be analyzed for their positive content so that the inherent resources can be made useable. Preventive pastoral care is not exclusively focused on mental health, but offers holistic support to men with regards to physical and mental health, their social relations, and their spirituality. It can be targeted at  See Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 232.  See ibid., 233. 169  See ibid., 235. 167 168

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men in dealing with gender-specific challenges and can be extended to couples and families. It often involves counselling during the process of divorce and in places where men find themselves involuntarily – in prison or in hospital. It is important to start pastoral care already at the level of youth ministry, although so far, pastoral care of boys has not been a specific topic in practical theology. Finally, it is important in gender-sensitive pastoral care to address structural, societal and political aspects.170 5. Conclusion The mythopoetic authors I discussed in the first subchapter derive their descriptive and normative talk about masculinity from a condensation of myths, fairytales and poetry. None of these writers provides a sound methodology of how they arrive at their knowledge. In contrast, in this subchapter I turned towards more scholarly and methodically more rigorous discussions of masculinity. Empirical research methods play a much more important role for the latter authors. The first author I turned to was Raewyn Connell. She may be credited with the most influential attempt to establish research into men and masculinities within the social sciences. Her own approach is meant to address the shortcomings of previous efforts in psychology, sociology, history, and ethnography. Her most important contribution to the debate was the firm rejection of biological essentialism by the pluralism she highlighted in the title of her book – Masculinities. As a politically engaged sociologist, Connell defined masculinities within a framework of social conflict. Among the shortcomings of Connell’s model we identified the use of a totalizing, dualistic and largely deterministic model of social struggle and gender order. I acknowledged the theoretical legitimacy of defining masculinities as “configurations of practices,” but highlighted the methodical problems to make this definition operative in research, advocacy, and policy. From Connell’s discussion of men in society I narrowed my focus to men in the church. Reiner Knieling’s own arguments build on empirical studies that already pre-suppose Connell’s plurality of masculinities. Knieling describes and laments the wide gap between men and church, and seeks practical ways how the church could bridge them. Knieling is less concerned with what men should do than how the church should  See Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 236-237.

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change. He offers a comprehensive reform package to make the church more relevant to men. His key objective, however, seems to be less the therapy of men than the reform and modernization of the church. As part of the church’s reorientation towards men, Knieling outlines men-specific biblical exegesis, to which we will turn in Chapter Three. Another area where he challenges the church to become more relevant to men is pastoral care. David Kuratle and Christoph Morgenthaler’s book aims at doing exactly that. They confirm that men are neglected in pastoral care, and offer their model of gender-sensitive Männerseelsorge. Kuratle and Morgenthaler explain compellingly why men should take an active and critical interest in masculinities. Socially constructed codes of masculinity can have a double impact: In the first place, they are at the root of many psychological and social pathologies. In the second place, they prevent men from seeking a cure. Therefore, there is huge liberating and therapeutic potential in “undoing gender,”171 in deconstructing normative gender stereotypes. This primarily therapeutic project shares political objectives with the feminist project. Both are committed to liberation, justice, and human flourishing. Both aim at overcoming gender stereotypes and dismantling patriarchy. In church practice, Männerseelsorge will be a mixture of “doing gender” in order to reach men, and “undoing gender” in order to heal men from disordered affections and affective disorders. Kuratle and Morgenthaler have intelligently built on insights from the social-sciences debate inaugurated by Connell. Their useful definition of masculinity as a lifelong project retains much of Connell’s concerns, especially a disavowal of any essentialism, but makes it more operative by replacing Connell’s social determinism of class conflict with individual voluntarism. Biology, historical situatedness, social location, material endowment and quotidian life experience all play important roles, but ultimately, masculinity is the open, performative, and transformative ethical self-project of the individual person. The fluidity and performativity of Kuratle and Morgenthaler’s masculinities rest on a sound theological basis. “Das Recht, ein anderer zu sein und zu werden” informs both their anthropology when talking about men, and their pastoral approach when talking to men.

 Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 48.

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III. Lessons about Men, Masculinities, and Men’s Spirituality I have shown that Bly’s mythopoetic paradigm does not provide a valid therapeutic solution for the pathologies of contemporary men. In its angry, backward-looking defensiveness and dualist essentialism, it appears to aggravate rather than solve the problems of contemporary men. Defending male privileges, legitimized by myths and fairytales, contributes little to the liberation of men or to human flourishing. Men won’t solve their social, psychological and ultimately spiritual problems by trying to deny or reverse the collapse of an unjust gender order. Biddulph, Rohr, and Kuratle and Morgenthaler all agree that men have brought their problems upon themselves. Most male pathologies are rooted in the “dilemma of male socialisation” – “having to be a man, and yet not really being able to, since a man’s concrete life always shamefully falls behind the demands of masculinity.”172 If such misguided demands or normative codes of masculinity are at the root of the problem, “undoing gender” becomes a key element of the liberating and therapeutic agenda for men. Rather than getting in touch with masculine archetypes as suggested by Bly and Grün, normative gender stereotypes need to be deconstructed. All authors, with the exception of Bly and Connell, would agree that spirituality is part of the solution. Biddulph intuits that it is important, but he has difficulty explaining what it is. For Grün, it is about Jungian Selbstwerdung. For Rohr, spirituality is about finding meaning and purpose beyond sex, money and power. Spirituality “connects us with the Core and the Centre, and not just the circumference, with the essence and not just the accidents.”173 For Rohr, “spirituality is not just the gateway to the temple, it is learning how to live in the temple itself.”174 What role, then, does gender play in spirituality? Kuratle and Morgenthaler emphasize the importance of “doing gender” as a gate to “undoing gender” in pastoral care.175 Gendered discourse, they show in their case studies, is often needed to join men where they are. “Joining” is a key concept borrowed from systemic psychotherapy.176 Similarly, Rohr argues that although gender is accidental rather than essential, “the  Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 30.  Rohr, “Men and Spirituality,” 344. 174  Ibid. 175  Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 74. 176  Ibid., 55. 172

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symbols, the stories, the images, the rituals, the metaphors that get us to enter the temple, are usually different for men and for women.”177 He speaks of gendered “entrance points” and “fascination points.”178 Genderspecific spirituality, I would therefore conclude, is never an end in itself. Gender-specific spirituality is merely a viable form of discourse to invite, introduce, and, if you will, initiate men into a spirituality that ultimately transcends gender. For Rohr, the venue of such programme should be “healthy communities.”179 He is skeptical whether “organized religion” is good at “doing gender,”180 and Knieling would agree that there is plenty of room for improvement. Still, the church has traditionally been accepted as a purveyor of spirituality and can be expected to remain so for many people, even if any single institutional church may no longer enjoy a discursive monopoly over spirituality. Kuratle and Morgenthaler demonstrate in detail how gender-sensitive pastoral care can become a liberating and transformative force in men’s concrete lives. Knieling’s analysis of the other aspects of contemporary church practice reveals a lack of gender-sensitivity. The church could do a lot more to create men-specific opportunities for joining. His reform proposals could help to make the church a place where men can explore and develop authentic forms of spirituality. Biddulph’s commonsensical list of men’s issues could also serve as a guide towards the topics and life situations where the church might want to join men in their daily lives. These above lessons, drawn from this chapter’s review of different genres of texts, show that a logical link can be established between men, masculinities, spirituality, pastoral care and church: Contemporary men suffer from pathologies that are often rooted in what they perceive as the demands of masculinity. A liberating spiritual therapy therefore entails the deconstruction or “undoing” of gender. Yet in order to engage men effectively in such therapy, it often requires gendered access points. Pastoral care and church practice more broadly need to become more gender-sensitive and gender-specific in order to offer such access points for men.

177

 Rohr, “Men and Spirituality,” 344.  Ibid., 339. 179  See page 20. 180  Rohr, “Men and Spirituality,” 342. 178

Chapter Two

In Search of Men-specific Biblical Hermeneutics Churches remain venues where spiritual quests may be pursued. Here, men-specific pastoral care may be administered either in the privacy of pastoral counselling and spiritual direction, or in the “healthy community” of a church-based men’s group. Which hermeneutical approaches to biblical texts are the most useful in such pastoral contexts is a crucial question. But it may be worthwhile to first ask why men or men’s groups should read texts at all. From there, I will develop a men-specific hermeneutical approach based on the specific nature of biblical texts, namely their ideological, future-oriented, and transformative properties. I. Why Are You Reading? A strong general argument can be made for the use of narrative in pastoral practice.1 In order to make a men-specific case, we need to return to the core of Männerseelsorge, which might be captured in the term “Identitätsarbeit”2 (identity work). Kuratle and Morgenthaler describe their therapeutic programme as a transformative project, where men redefine their identity in a conscious affirmation of otherness and discrepancy from the demands of extraneous masculinity codes.3 It translates the “Recht, ein Anderer zu sein und zu werden” into a positive life project.4 Narrative approaches can be powerful tools for such liberating and therapeutic identity work. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy has  See R. Ruard Ganzevoort, “Narrative Approaches,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, 214-223; and Heinz Streib, “Heilsames Erzählen: Pastoraltheologische und pastoralpsychologische Perspektiven zur Begründung und Gestaltung der Seelsorge,” Wege zum Menschen 48 (1996): 339-359. 2  Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 99. 3  See ibid., 94-99. 4  See ibid., 107-110. 1

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been credited as the most important influence in what is often called the “narrative turn” in the human and social sciences.5 With their focus on “local, particular, and in certain senses subjective understandings,” narrative approaches have been embraced by the humanities and social sciences as a post-modern alternative to the epistemological approaches of rationalist positivism.6 Ricoeur’s insight that human action can be understood as a text revolves around the notion of “narrative identity,” where, as Ganzevoort explains, identity can be understood as a narrative structure, that is the person’s reflective interpretation of himself/herself. Identity thus is not some essential quality that needs to be uncovered, but the story one tells about oneself for a particular audience.7

Connell’s use of life histories in her research on masculinities is an application of the narrative approach in sociology.8 Psychologists and psychotherapists have adapted narrative approaches to the needs of their disciplines.9 Finally, there is an obvious affinity of narrative approaches with theology, given the importance of the biblical narrative tradition for the Christian faith community. Bieringer and Pollefeyt highlight the importance of the bible for “young people in their search for spiritual identity” and elaborate on the need to “invite young people to bridge the gap between the text and their lives, between living as individuals and as members of a community.”10 At the other end of the age spectrum, Ganzevoort argues “that the aim of pastoral care for the elderly is to support them in connecting their life story with the stories of the religious tradition.”11 If narrative approaches that use biblical texts in therapeutic identity work are helpful for both the young and the old, I would assume that 5  See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen MacLaughlin, vol. III, 3 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and id., Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); for a brief survey of Ricoeur’s work, see Heinz Streib, “The Religious Educator as Story-Teller: Suggestions from Paul Ricoeur’s Work,” Religious Education 93, no. 3 (1998): 314-331. 6  See Ganzevoort, “Narrative Approaches,” 215. 7  Ibid., 216. 8  See page 32. 9  Ganzevoort, “Narrative Approaches,” 217; James M. Day, “Speaking of Belief: Language, Performance, and Narrative in the Psychology of Religion,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 3, no. 4 (1993): 213-229. 10  Pollefeyt and Bieringer, “The Role of the Bible in Religious Education Reconsidered: Risks and Challenges in Teaching the Bible,” 136. 11  R. Ruard Ganzevoort, “Minding the Wisdom of Ages: Narrative Approaches in Pastoral Care for the Elderly,” Practical Theology 3, no. 3 (2010): 339.

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they also work for men of the ages between. Indeed, Johan Verstraeten shows how the great texts of the various spiritual traditions can address the psychological, spiritual and ethical problems that are a consequence of the modern workplace, arguably the situation in which most men between their mid-twenties and mid-sixties find themselves. Verstraeten identifies these workplace-related pathologies as disconnection and fragmentation, self-alienation, and the consequent vulnerability to external psychological manipulation.12 Human beings in the modern workplace who fail to integrate their differentiated roles disconnect from a cohesive identity and suffer a fragmentation of conscience. “When people stick to their differentiated professional role morality, when they try to do things right, they often fail to do the right thing.”13 Verstraeten describes how the absence of a narrative configuration of life is related to an “alienation from the deeper self” which leads to workaholism and makes individuals susceptible to human resource policies that “manipulate their desires, fears and imagination.”14 Biblical texts, according to Verstraeten, can be liberating as they allow people to “acquire sufficient authentic autonomy to escape from the process of manipulation of the soul.”15 As they “generate semantic innovation because of their metaphorical language” biblical and other poetical texts create “a new world of meaning” and change one’s perception of life and world.16 These texts also have a therapeutic effect on the fragmented self: As a result of the imaginary world constituted by literary and religious texts, the fragmented, post-modern subject once more sees the possibility of stepping out of its fragmentation and, with the help of imagination, configuring itself as a narrative unity that is more than the succession of now moments. Religious texts such as the Bible can even lead to a radical reconfiguration or metanoia.17

12  See Johan Verstraeten, “Responsible Leadership beyond Managerial Rationality,” in Leadership and Business Ethics, ed. Gabriel Flynn, Issues in Business Ethics 25 (New York, NY: Springer, 2008), 134-138. 13  Ibid., 134. 14  Ibid., 135f. 15  Ibid., 138. 16  Ibid., 139. 17  Johan Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders to Humanize the World of Business,” Business Ethics: A European Review 7, no. 2 (1998): 119.

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Biblical texts, he argues, are an effective antidote against the fragmentation and manipulation of the self experienced by contemporary men in their professional lives because they encourage readers to reconfigure their identities into more integrated selves held together within some narrative unity. While Verstraeten draws his argument for the liberating and therapeutic use of biblical narrative from the domain of cognitive psychology, Ganzevoort provides arguments for and against narrative approaches from the perspective of practical theology. In his evaluation of narrative approaches, Ganzevoort identifies four promises and formulates three possible critiques. The first “promise” is that the narrative approach “creates the possibility of interaction with biblical theology” as it highlights “the parallels between written texts and meaningful human action.”18 Indeed, it is this potential parallelism of individual life stories and narrative traditions of the broader community that makes the work with biblical texts a useful resource in the pastoral care of men. Secondly, Ganzevoort believes that the narrative perspective can be used as a metatheoretical framework that serves interdisciplinary communication and research – an aspect of less immediate relevance in the pastoral context. Thirdly, he appreciates narrative approaches as involving a “hermeneutical stance, in which the individual biography and religious construction are valued over general descriptions and statistical averages.”19 Indeed, this aspect corresponds not only with post-modern epistemological presuppositions, but also with the lived experience of men and their engagement auf Augenhöhe, which both Knieling and Kuratle and Morgenthaler call for.20 As a fourth positive element, Ganzevoort highlights the proximity of the narrative approach to the practices being studied, thus avoiding “theoretical alienation.”21 The first critique he levels against the narrative approach is the “risk of becoming too cerebral, verbal, and cognitive.”22 This danger, indeed, always exists in both therapeutic and theological contexts, and it must be addressed. However, church-based pastoral care, in contrast to, for 18

 Ganzevoort, “Narrative Approaches,” 221.  Ibid., 222. 20  See Knieling, Männer und Kirche, 76; and Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 12. 21  Ganzevoort, “Narrative Approaches,” 222. 22  Ibid. 19

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example, most schools of psychotherapy, already possesses rich resources in liturgy, music, art, meditation that can be mobilized to counterbalance the cerebral. Men’s groups can easily add further elements like physical activities. Ganzevoort’s second critique is “that narrative approaches show limited attention to power issues and vested interests.”23 This, I would argue, is entirely a matter of the hermeneutics one applies to the narratives, be they personal or biblical, and therefore a matter I will discuss at some length in a later section of this chapter. Suffice it to say at this point that I will most certainly propose a critical hermeneutics. Ganzevoort mentions as a third possible third critique “that narrative approaches forgo normativity issues, especially in accepting human subjectivity and assuming human stories as equally normative as biblical stories.”24 A greater appreciation of human stories or experience, even as a locus of revelation, does not automatically lead to the dismissal of normativity issues. The very contrary can be argued.25 Normativity issues will be very much at the forefront of the discussions in the remainder of this chapter. I find it highly problematic to contrast “profane” human stories with “sacred” biblical stories. I would find it more fruitful, entirely viable, and theologically justified to seek the sacred in personal stories and the human in biblical stories. The very core of my approach to men-specific pastoral care is identity work. Both cognitive psychology and practical theology provide solid arguments why a narrative approach that makes use of biblical texts can be a powerful instrument in the liberating and therapeutic work of helping men to reconfigure their identities. The possible drawbacks of this approach can be addressed effectively in the pastoral context. The remainder of this chapter will explore which hermeneutical approaches or reading strategies address all these concerns most effectively.

23

 Ganzevoort, “Narrative Approaches,” 222.  Ibid. 25  For a good overview of the scholarly discussion about the normativity of experience in theology, see Annemie Dillen, “Le statut de l’expérience en théologie: L’abîme entre l’idéal et la réalité,” in Autorité et pouvoir dans l’agir pastoral, ed. Arnaud Join-Lambert, Axel Liégeois, and Catherine Chevalier (Namur: Lumen Vitae, 2016), 33-47. 24

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II. What Are You Reading? 1. Ideological Texts For a long time, ideology criticism was associated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their definition of ideology as “false consciousness,”26 the misguided worldviews and self-understandings of the working class “as a result of their indoctrination by those who control the means of production.”27 Antonio Gramsci coined the term “ideological hegemony” for a situation where dominated groups accepts dominant ideologies unquestioned.28 In recent years, the awareness that “vested interests” are evident in biblical texts has moved into the mainstream of biblical scholarship.29 In his popular introduction to the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann notes that it is now widely recognized that the traditioning process is deeply permeated by ideology. The traditioning generation in each case is not a cast of automatons. Rather they are, even if unknown to us and unnamed by us, real people who live real lives in socioeconomic circumstances where they worried about, yearned for, and protected social advantage and property. Indeed, the traditionists surely constitute, every time, a case study in the Marxian insight that “truth” is inescapably filtered through “interest.” And while Marx focused on economic interest, it is not difficult to see in the traditioning process the working of interest expressed through gender, race, class, and ethnic distinctions. […] Because the text is marked by these pressures, it is clear that the text is open, in retrospect, to critique.30

Gale Yee distinguishes between historical, “extrinsic analysis” of the ideology that shaped the production of the text, and literary, “intrinsic analysis” of the ideology present in the text.31 Walter Brueggemann  Teun A. van Dijk, “Politics, Ideology and Discourse,” in Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics: Politics and Language, ed. Ruth Wodak (Oxford: Elsevier, 2005), 728. 27  Ibid. 28  See ibid., 729; and Ann B. Dobie, Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism (Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009), 88. 29  See Walter Brueggemann, “Where Is the Scribe?,” Anglican Theological Review 93, no. 3 (2011): 396. 30  Walter Brueggemann and Tod Linafelt, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 12. 31  See Gale A. Yee, “Ideological Criticism,” in Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, ed. John Haralson Hayes (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999), 535-536. 26

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points out “that ideology not only pervades the text” but it also “pervades interpretation of the text so that there are no innocent interpretations and no innocent interpreters.”32 Biblical scholars nowadays acknowledge that “scriptural texts have served not only noble causes but also to legitimate war, to nurture anti-Judaism and misogynism, to justify the exploitation of slavery, and to promote colonial dehumanization.”33 New Testament scholar Sandra Schneiders, likewise, distinguishes between ideology in the text and ideology in the interpretation of the text.34 Schneiders treatment of ideology criticism focuses in on the latter, advocating a “liberationist praxis”35 that should free the scholarly discipline of biblical criticism from the dominance of “religiously powerful, educated, economically secure, Caucasian males.”36 For Schneiders, a female Roman Catholic exegete trained at the Gregorian University and the Biblicum in Rome,37 ideology criticism in this instance is more about the advocacy of new staffing policies in academic institutions than about therapeutic reading practices among the faithful. The problematic implication of Schneiders advocacy approach is that simply replacing a male interpreter with a female interpreter does not spell out, at the methodological level, how a reader should uncover and process ideology in biblical texts and their subsequent interpretation. A different set of genitals in theology faculties does not per se make for a new hermeneutical approach. At the level of the interpretation, what is required is a self-critical attitude of any interpreter, “an awareness and admission of our own sinfulness as interpreters,”38 a recognition that “a science free from prejudices is impossible,”39 and that every text is read from a historical and  Brueggemann and Linafelt, Introduction, 449, italics in the original.  Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship,” Journal of Biblical Literature 107, no. 1 (1988): 15. 34  See Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture, 2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier, 1991), 120. 35  Ibid., 121. 36  Ibid., 120. 37  See ibid., 1. 38  Mary Elsbernd and Reimund Bieringer, “Interpreting the Signs of the Times in the Light of the Gospel: Vision and Normativity of the Future,” in Normativity of the Future: Reading Biblical and Other Authoritative Texts in an Eschatological Perspective, ed. Reimund Bieringer and Mary Elsbernd, Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia 61 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 50. 39  Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 283. 32 33

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socio-cultural location.40 In this section, I will discuss the ideological properties of the text rather than of its interpreters, but I want to point to the “meta-questions” suggested by Bieringer and Elsbernd that can serve as a self-critical mechanism for interpreters to reflect responsibly on their own ideological biases.41 Rex Mason has undertaken an ideology-critical tour de force of the Hebrew Bible. His starting point is sociologist of religion Peter Berger’s general claim that “Religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status, that is by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference.”42 Mason shows how royal, priestly and Deuteronomic propaganda in the Hebrew Bible are providing such religious legitimation to the powerful. However, in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible, Mason also detects ideas and narratives that challenge the social institutions of the time. His analysis distinguishes therefore between propaganda and subversion as competing sets of ideologies that are evident in the Hebrew Bible. The use of religious ideology as propaganda can have unforeseen consequences. Mason shows […] that, when political and religious power figures harness the power of religion to buttress and validate their power claims, they are playing with fire. In the hands of many of the prophets of Israel that very religion became a stick with which to beat those who, they believe, had betrayed the high calling of their office. How easily those in power, in all ages, have come to forget the circumscription of that power. The Israelite prophets maintain that power is given as a trust for the sake of others. When that trust is betrayed, God becomes the God not of the betrayer but of the betrayed.43

Despite his generally liberationist sympathies, Mason argues that “both power and protest, propaganda and subversion can be both noble and tainted.”44 Just because a text is ”a piece of propaganda is not to  See for example Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, Reading from This Place (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995); and Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 41  See Reimund Bieringer and Mary Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges,” in Normativity of the Future, 21. 42  Quoted in Rex Mason, Propaganda & Subversion in the Old Testament (London: SPCK, 1997), 4; See also Peter L. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 42. 43  Mason, Propaganda & Subversion in the Old Testament, 127. 44  Ibid., 166. 40

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dismiss it as necessarily “false” or “untrue” or, even more, religiously and theologically unworthy.”45 Mason also concedes “that both the monarchy and hierocracy contributed vitally to the health and continuance of the people of Israel and the development of the religious genius which has been one of their major legacies to the world.”46 Mason’s balanced macro-analysis may serve as an invitation to confront the competing ideologies present in the Hebrew bible with curiosity, also at the textual micro-level and especially in the depiction of individual characters in the biblical narratives. Defining Ideology There is no consensus among biblical scholars on a strict definition of ideology. British Old Testament scholar David Clines’s operational definition of ideology is “a relative coherent set of ideas amounting to a world-view, or outlook on life” and “a set of such ideas special to a particular social class.”47 For Gale Yee, ideology is “a complex system of ideas, values, and perceptions held by a particular group that provides a framework for the group’s members to understand their place in the social order. Ideology constructs a reality for people, making the bewildering and often brutal world intelligible and tolerable. Ideology motivates people to behave in specific ways and to accept their social position as natural, inevitable, and necessary.”48 Sandra Schneiders defines it as “a thought world generated by and supportive of a particular power agenda.”49 A promising multidisciplinary approach to ideology, barely applied to biblical text so far,50 is critical discourse analysis. According to one of its prominent proponents, Teun van Dijk, […] ideologies are the axiomatic basis of the social representations of a group and – through specific social attitudes and then through  Mason, Propaganda & Subversion in the Old Testament, 164.  Ibid., 165. 47  David J. A. Clines, “The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible,” in Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 10. 48  Yee, “Ideological Criticism,” 535. 49  Schneiders, The Revelatory Text. 50  One recent example is Jannica de Prenter, “Language, Ideology and Cognition: A Critical Discourse Approach to the Concept of Divine Warfare in Josh 9–11” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, 2016). 45

46

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personal mental models – control the individual discourses and other social practices of group members. In this way, they also are the necessary resource of ingroup cooperation, coordination and cohesion, as well as for the management of intergroup relations, competition, conflict, or struggle.51

This definition provides a concise and useful summary of both the nature and the functions of ideology. Contrary to Marx and Gramsci, Van Dijk does not limit ideology to a single worldview legitimizing the power claims of one dominant group. Various groups in society, dominant or dominated, have each their own ideologies, and these define identity both within a social group and in relation to others. Van Dijk’s approach not only addresses the social and political nature of ideologies, but also captures their sociocognitive nature. Discourses, notably talk and text, make ideologies observable because through discourse, “ideologies are acquired, expressed, learned, and contested.”52 Ideologies tend to have a polarized structure, drawing clear boundaries between “us” and “them” and following a strategy of positive self-presentation (emphasizing our good things and de-emphasizing our bad things) and negative other-presentation (emphasizing their bad thing and de-emphasizing their good things). Fundamental categories of ideology are identity, characteristic actions, aims, norms, values, group relations and resources.53 Masculinity codes tend to address these categories and can therefore be counted as ideologies and hence critically analyzed as such. What all of the above scholars can agree on is the importance of an ideology-critical approach: Readers who are not wide awake to the designs that texts have on them (to speak anthropomorphically) find themselves succumbing to the ideology of the texts, adopting that ideology as their own, and finding it obvious and natural and commonsensical. That is the default mode for commentators on biblical texts, for they rarely, if ever, offer a critique of the text; in confining themselves to ‘understanding’ and ‘explaining’ the text they typically screen out or suppress questions of value – and so leave half their proper task unattempted.54

With a view to men and masculinity, this critical awareness is important because discourse about masculinity has almost always presented itself as obvious and natural and commonsensical. 51

 Van Dijk, “Politics, Ideology and Discourse,” 730.  Ibid., 732. 53  See ibid., 734. 54  Clines, “The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible,” 21. 52

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Ideology Criticism The increasing consensus among biblical scholars about the presence of ideological properties of biblical texts and Van Dijk’s definition of ideology leave the question of how does one uncover and critique these ideological properties. I would suggest a simple and a more sophisticated approach. The simple approach is to subject the text to the question cui bono? It means to ask for the interests and “interested parties”55 behind a text. Starting from the assumption that “ideology tends to support and enhance the power of its adherents,”56 readers can interrogate any text in terms of which and whose interests it propagates, and, by implication, which and whose interests it violates. These questions can and should always be raised when reading biblical texts. They serve to turn the reader into a suspicious and critical reader, aware of the presence of ideology. Clines himself has provided a number of examples for applying this simple approach to biblical texts.57 To analyze how ideology works in the text, I suggest to borrow a more sophisticated method from the cognitive sciences, notably the employment of cognitive linguistic tools in the framework of critical discourse analysis. Cognitive sociolinguistics serves to illuminate the “triangular relation” between language, cognition and social practices.58 Critical discourse analysis (CDA) aims to analyze how language is used to propagate ideologies and “the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context.”59 Cognitive linguistics, on the other hand, helps to explain the relationship between discourse and social practice, notably at the level of semantics and grammar. The work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser show how knowledge can be structured 55

 See Clines, “The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible,” 23-25.  Ibid., 24. 57  See David J. A. Clines, “The Ten Commandments, Reading from Left to Right,” in Interested Parties, 145-171; id., “Haggai’s Temple, Constructed, Deconstructed and Reconstructed,” in Interested Parties, 46-75; id., “Psalm 2 and the MLF (Moabite Liberation Front),” in Interested Parties, 244-275. 58  See Christopher Hart, “Discourse,” in Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. E. Dabrowska and D. Divjek (Berlin and New York, NY: Mouton De Gruyter, 2015), 322-346. 59  Teun A. van Dijk, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 352. 56

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through metaphors by mapping it onto more familiar domains of human experience.60 Because linguistic structures transmit ideology, to observe and analyze them in a text with the tools of cognitive linguistics and CDA sheds light on how ideology is employed. Christopher Hart, for whom CDA serves “to correct a widespread underestimation of the influence of language in shaping thought and action,”61 offers an analytical toolbox. By combining categories from the two disciplines into a single framework, Hart arrives at a taxonomy of eight “construal operations” and “discursive strategies,” namely structural configuration, categorization, metaphorization, profiling, scanning, scalar adjustment, deixis and modality.62 Critical discourse analysis tends to be applied to contemporary political discourse and international news,63 but as these tools work at the level of language and cognition, they can just as well be applied to biblical texts to uncover the content and rhetorical strategies of ideological discourse therein.64

60  See George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser, Figurative Language, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Mark Johnson, Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 61  Hart, “Discourse.” 62  Ibid. 63  See, for example, Christopher Hart and Dominik Lukeš, Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: Application and Theory (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007); Christopher Hart, “Legitimizing Assertions and the Logico-Rhetorical Module: Evidence and Epistemic Vigilance in Media Discourse on Immigration,” Discourse Studies 13, no. 6 (2011): 751-769; Teun A. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (London: Sage, 1998); id., News Analysis: Case Studies of International and National News in the Press, Communication (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988); id., “Ideology and Discourse Analysis,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 2 (2006): 115-140. 64  For a biblical hermeneutics based on cognitive linguistics, see Pierre Van Hecke, “‘Do You Understand What You Are Reading’ (Acts 8,30): On the Place and Role of Exegesis,” in Provoked to Speech: Biblical Hermeneutics as Conversation, ed. Reimund Bieringer et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 69-83; Other recent examples of applications in biblical studies are Kevin Chau, “Interpreting Biblical Metaphors: Introducing the Invariance Principle,” Vetus Testamentum 65, no. 3 (2015): 377-389; and Anne W. Stewart, “Wisdom’s Imagination: Moral Reasoning and the Book of Proverbs,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 40, no. 3 (2016): 351-372.

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Ideology and Hermeneutics Is there any inherent contradiction between biblical hermeneutics and ideology criticism? The debate between the German philosophers HansGeorg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s and early 1970s may indeed suggest that hermeneutics and critique of ideology are two intrinsically irreconcilable endeavors.65 Paul Ricoeur discusses their respective positions based on their assessment of tradition. I shall take the assessment of tradition as the touchstone of the debate. In contrast to the positive assessment by hermeneutics, the theory of ideology adopts a suspicious approach, seeing tradition as merely the systematically distorted expression of communication under unacknowledged conditions of violence.66

Ricoeur explains at length the contents of each argument. He finally aims at a reconciliatory synthesis by addressing two questions that probe whether hermeneutics and critique of ideology are really incommensurable. He first asks whether hermeneutic philosophy can account for the legitimate demand of the critique of ideology. His answer is yes, by moving back from general hermeneutics to regional hermeneutics, from ontology to epistemology and, ultimately, exegesis.67 At the ontological level, hermeneutics refuted the possibility of “alienating distanciation” (Verfremdung) that was meant to provide objectivity to human sciences. Instead of distance, hermeneutics emphasized “belonging,” notably the belonging to a tradition. Such belonging, in Habermas’s view, precludes a critical attitude. Ricoeur argues, however, that at the level of the text, distanciation is not only possible, it is intrinsic. Distanciation is implied by the fixation of discourse in writing. The text gains autonomy from the intention of the author, from the cultural situation and sociological conditions of its production, and from the original addressee. This “fundamental phenomenon” of the “emancipation of the text” leads first to a decontextualization of the text and then to a recontextualization in the act of reading.68

65  The debate is documented in Karl-Otto Apel, ed., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, Theorie-Diskussion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971). 66  Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 271. 67  See ibid., 295-297. 68  Ibid., 298.

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Because the matter of the text is the “world opened up by the text,” it possesses an intrinsic critical momentum, the “subversive force of the imaginary”69: The power of the text to open a dimension of reality implies in principle a recourse against any given reality and thereby the possibility of a critique of the real. It is in poetic discourse that this subversive power is most alive.”70

For Ricoeur, this subversive power links the notion of critique of ideology with the text’s transformative effect on the reader: [I]n reading, I “unrealize myself.” Reading introduces me to imaginative variations of the ego. The metamorphosis of the world in play is also the playful metamorphosis of the ego. In the idea of the “imaginative variations of the ego,” I see the most fundamental possibility for a critique of the illusions of the subject. The link could remain hidden or undeveloped in a hermeneutics of tradition which introduced prematurely a concept of appropriation (Aneignung) directed against alienating distanciation. However, if distanciation from oneself is not a fault to be combated but rather the condition of possibility of understanding oneself in front of the text, then appropriation is the dialectical counterpart of distanciation, Thus, the critique of ideology can be assumed by a concept of selfunderstanding that organically implies a critique of the illusion of the subject. Distanciation from oneself demands that appropriation of the proposed worlds offered by the text passes through the disappropriation of the self. The critique of false consciousness can thus become an integral part of hermeneutics, conferring upon the critique of ideology that meta-hermeneutical dimension that Habermas assigns to it.71

Ricoeur’s second question is “on what condition is a critique of ideology possible?”72 This addresses Gadamer’s assertion that “an exhaustive critique of prejudice – and hence of ideology – is impossible, since there is no zero point from which it could proceed.”73 Ricoeur shows that ultimately even the emancipatory ambition of Habermas’ critical consciousness is rooted in tradition – 69

 Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 300.  Ibid. 71  Ibid., 301. 72  Ibid., 271. 73  Ibid., 278. 70

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[…] it is perhaps the Aufklärung, whereas Gadamer’s would be Romanticism. Critique is also a tradition. I would even say that it plunges into the most impressive tradition, that of liberating acts, of the Exodus and the Resurrection. Perhaps there would be no more interest in emancipation, no more anticipation of freedom, if the Exodus and the Resurrection were effaced from the memory of mankind…. If that is so, then nothing is more deceptive than the alleged antinomy between an ontology of prior understanding and an eschatology of freedom.74

I find Ricoeur’s argument useful for the construction of a menspecific approach to reading biblical texts. In the above paragraph, he points out how biblical texts and their “eschatology of freedom” provide an impetus for liberation and thus extends an intrinsic invitation for ideology criticism. As my discussion in Chapter One has shown, contemporary men are often subject to a “false consciousness,” manifest and generated by misguided notions of masculinity. Reading, Ricoeur suggests, allows one to “unrealize” oneself, to explore “imaginative variations of the ego” which might ultimately allow a “playful metamorphosis of the ego.”75 Ricoeur not only affirms that ideology-critical hermeneutics is possible, he also describes the liberating and therapeutic benefits of doing so – and this should also hold in a pastoral context. Reading Strategies for Ideological Texts It is now widely accepted that ideology is present in biblical texts, both in the form of propaganda on behalf of vested interest and in the form of subversion. Among different definitions, I have suggested that Van Dijk’s definition of ideology might be helpful as it accounts for identity discourses of various groups in society and can also be applied to social constructions of masculinity. A critical awareness of ideology can help contemporary men to question what is often taken as obvious, natural, or commonsensical. Methodically, I have proposed as a simple approach the cui bono question, and as a more analytical approach the use of cognitive linguistics in the framework of critical discourse analysis. Finally, I introduced Ricoeur’s argument that the distanciation inherent in all written texts together with a biblical “eschatology of freedom” can reconcile ideology criticism with hermeneutics. 74

 Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 306.  Ibid., 301.

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Guiding Questions for Ideology-critical Reading Strategies Readers who embark on an ideology-critical reading may want to ask some of the following questions about the text: • Who is speaking? • Who controls the discourse? • What are the social locations of the speaker and the characters? • Who are the “interested parties” and what interests do they pursue? • Is there evidence of inequality, dominance, power abuse and resistance? • How would the characters define the communicative situation, its political context, and their role in it? • What is the political function of the discourse? Whose interests are served? • What practices, duties, roles or values are advocated? • At which levels can we observe ideological discourse (within the text? in the production of the text? in the interpretation of the text?) • Which linguistic strategies are operative in the production of ideological discourse? • Are there instances where the dominant discourse or power claims are subverted? • Does the text encourage resistance? • Is there a notable absence of a particular voice? Are particular voices marginalized or silenced? • Does the text construe binaries and polarizations? • Does the text define groups by means of identity, characteristic action, aims, norms, group relations and resources? • Does the text encourage in-group cooperation, coordination and cohesion? • How does the text influence intergroup relations, competition, or conflict? Gender-specific questions • How does the text construe masculinity and femininity? • What role do the body and sexuality play in the text’s construal of identities? • What has made the men in the text become the men they are? • Is there a gender binary or are there shades of grey in between? • Is gender construed as fixed and deterministic or as fluid and performative?

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Which privileges, duties and expectations are attached to gender? Which gender codes are confronted, questioned or violated? Do the gendered identities of the characters change over time? Are men depicted as beneficiaries or victims of masculinity codes? Does the text project a vision of gender justice? Which aspects of masculinity in the text do I find encouraging and stimulating, which ones do I find repugnant?

2. Future-oriented Texts The Future in Biblical Interpretation In several publications, Reimund Bieringer has elaborated a hermeneutic approach based on the “normativity of the future.”76 Bieringer shows how until recently, “the future has played virtually no role in the search for the locus of authority in our revelatory texts.”77 He lists the classical doctrinal approach, the historical-critical approach, social theories approaches, historical reconstruction approaches, the salvation history approach and the canonical approach as hermeneutical approaches where texts receive their authority from events in the past.78 In the 20th century, theologians shifted their attention to the relevance of the Bible for theology and spirituality in the present. Karl Barth’s Word theology approach, Rudolf Bultmann’s theology of proclamation approach, and Ernst Fuchs’ und Günter Ebeling’s effective history approach illustrate this shift to the present within Protestant scholarship. Spiritual exegesis and the experiential approach of David Tracy are Roman Catholic witnesses to this shift. All these approaches underline “the importance of reading and interpretation in the process of revelation.”79 They are 76  See Mary Elsbernd and Reimund Bieringer, When Love Is Not Enough: A TheoEthic of Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002); Elsbernd and Bieringer, “Interpreting the Signs of the Times in the Light of the Gospel: Vision and Normativity of the Future”; Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges”; Reimund Bieringer, “Texts That Create a Future: The Function of Ancient Texts for Theology Today,” in Normativity of the Future, 91-116; Reimund Bieringer, “The Normativity of the Future: The Authority of the Bible for Theology,” in Normativity of the Future, 27-45. 77  Elsbernd and Bieringer, “Interpreting the Signs of the Time in the Light of the Gospel: Vision and Normativity of the Future,” 50. 78  See Bieringer, “The Normativity of the Future: The Authority of the Bible for Theology,” 31. 79  Ibid., 35 The article includes the bibliographical references for the different approaches discussed.

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contemporaneous with reader-oriented approaches in literary criticism, and often share some of their post-modern presuppositions.80 Noting the absence of the future as a possible locus of revelation in biblical scholarship, Bieringer developed the Normativity of the Future approach in two steps. His first step was based on the hermeneutic theories of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Schneiders81 on the one hand, and on the dialogical dimensions of Vatican II’s theology of revelation on the other.82 The alternative world projected by the text became “the real referent of the text, the truth claim of the text”83 and thus the locus of revelation and normativity in a dynamic, dialogical, and community-shaped encounter between reader and text. This “future-oriented hermeneutic that placed the locus of revelation in the alternative world that the text projected”84 allowed Bieringer to reconcile the authority of the biblical text with the sinfulness of its authors, its revelatory quality with the oppressiveness of certain passages. The Normativity of the Future approach was initially applied to “difficult” scriptural texts like anti-Jewish passages in the gospel of John.85

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 See e.g. David J. A. Clines, “The Pyramid and the Net: The Postmodern Adventure in Biblical Studies,” in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 19671998, vol. 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 138-157; id., “Contemporary Methods in Hebrew Bible Criticism,” in Hebrew Bible, Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation., ed. Magne Sæbø, Peter Machinist, and Jean-Louis Ska, vol. 3.2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 148-169. 81  Bieringer refers to Hans G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1960); Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991); Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976); Schneiders, The Revelatory Text; Sandra M. Schneiders, “Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 19, no. 1 (1989): 3-10. 82  Reimund Bieringer, “Biblical Revelation and Exegetical Interpretation according to Dei Verbum 12,” in Vatican II and Its Legacy, ed. M. Lamberigts and L. Kenis, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 161 (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 25-58; Reimund Bieringer, “Dialogical Revelation? On the Reception of Dei Verbum 12 in Verbum Domini,” Asian Horizons 7, no. 1 (2013): 36-58. 83  Bieringer, “The Normativity of the Future: The Authority of the Bible for Theology,” 42. 84  Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges,” 5. 85  See for example Reimund Bieringer, Didier Pollefeyt, and Frederique Vandecasteele-Vanneuville, “Wrestling with Johannine Anti-Judaism: A Hermeneutical Framework for the Analysis of the Current Debate,” in Anti-Judaism and the Fourth Gospel, ed. Reimund Bieringer, Didier Pollefeyt, and Frederique Vandecasteele-Vanneuville (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 3-37.

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In a second step, Normativity of the Future was developed into a general hermeneutical approach that was no longer limited to the interpretation of texts, but of life itself. The meaning of “future” moved from literary projection to its theological understanding “as the eschatological in-breaking of the future into the present.”86 In this later conception of the Normativity of the Future approach, texts no longer project their own futures, but “create conditions of possibility for the in-breaking of the vision of an alternative world, a just and inclusive community.”87 This latter conception has been elaborated on the basis of eleven central ideas and translated into a hermeneutical method that poses specific questions to biblical texts. These questions, concerning the vision of the text, its inclusive and exclusive dimensions, its ethics, and its pneumatological perspective, together with self-critical metaquestions, could be usefully employed in men-specific readings of biblical texts. All talk of masculinity can be inherently oppressive – for men themselves, for women, and for the rest of creation. It is therefore almost unavoidable that men-specific discussions of biblical texts need to deal with oppressive texts. Bieringer’s Normativity of the Future approach therefore provides an important, self-correcting element to men-specific biblical hermeneutics, where “the text can generate the ‘lens’ through which the text itself is judged.”88 The Future in Human Experience Bieringer and Elsbernd have shown that the Normativity of the Future approach can be employed as “our approach to life itself.”89 They also postulate the future’s “hermeneutic privilege” over the past and the present.90 I would like to strengthen and sharpen these two elements by claiming that for Christians, the orientation towards the future, the hermeneutics of hope, is not one possible philosophical hermeneutical option among others, but it is the one that is constitutive of Christian identity and Christian life. I want to support this claim with a philosophical and a theological argument. 86

 Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges,” 9. 87  Ibid., 10. 88  Schneiders, “Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics,” 8. 89  Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges,” 8. 90  Ibid., 12.

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Human life is experienced as a journey through time. The human person is a historical being, or, vice versa, history is constitutive of the human condition. It is therefore indispensable for the self-constitution of human identity to define the way one relates to history. In public discourse, and especially pronounced in political discourse, I find two fundamental options of relating to history. One can either move towards the future or try to re-live the past. Accordingly, personal and social motivations are located either in the past or in the future. The present is hardly ever a locus of normativity. The present, which is merely the fleeting point of intersection of past and future, only confronts us with a question: where do we want to go? One can easily recognize backward-looking discourse in sociopolitical slogans that contain words like “back” and “again,” as in “Make America great again,”91 “I want my money back”92 or “I want my country back.”93 What these slogans have in common is a linear view of history, where the past is always superior to the present. History presents itself as a slippery downward slope, a continuous deterioration and ever increasing alienation from a “golden” past. All normativity rests in this past. The future, as far as it entails change and differs from the idealized past, is best to be avoided. The ethical implication of this downward trajectory is the need to stop historical progress and, ideally, to travel back in time.94 A forward-looking outlook is directed towards the future and embraces newness and change. The future is nothing to be afraid of. Instead, it inspires hope and imagination. The course of history holds the promise of improvement, a steady upward movement. Normativity rests not so much in an ideologically constructed fiction of what has been, but in the

91  U. S. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump during the U. S. primaries, 2016. 92  British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the European Council in Dublin, 30 November 1979. 93  British opposition politician Nigel Farage during the Brexit referendum, 2016. 94  This kind of nostalgia is not limited to the political sphere. It can often be encountered among erudite lovers of art and culture, who hold that cultural achievements have peaked at some point (e.g. in Bach’s music, Shakespeare’s drama or 17th century Dutch painting) and civilization has been on a downhill ride ever since. Woody Allen depicts this worldview beautifully in his 2011 movie „Midnight in Paris.” Two great proponents of such cultural pessimism were Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, 23rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1920); and, more recently, Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1994).

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open-ended potentialities of dreams and visions. The ethical impulse of this future-oriented discourse is to move forward. The juxtaposition of these two options constitutes a ghastly binary. When it comes to individual persons, there is no need to postulate that each person in every question will always hold views that correspond consistently to the same one of the two options. However, in the sphere of public discourse, political choices are very frequently framed within exactly this binary. Now, what is one to make of these hermeneutic alternatives? Political discourse seems to suggest that there is a choice between going forward and going backward, between accepting historical change and turning the clock backward. Yet are these two alternatives really equally viable options? Is it, after all, possible to turn the clock backward, to relive the past? Heraclitus rightly observed “πάντα ῥεῖ” and therefore he maintained that one cannot step twice into the same river. Given the flow of history, the inescapability of historical change, turning back the clock does not exist as a viable option. Resisting history’s pull towards the future therefore amounts to nihilism and constitutes an absurd – because untenable – proposition. This is the philosophical case against backwardoriented worldviews. The Future in Biblical Tradition There is also a theological case in favor of a future-orientation. Nostalgia finds no support in the scriptures of the Jewish and Christian traditions. The past is never portrayed as normative.95 Normativity is located in the future. The τέλος is eschatological. When God calls human beings in the Hebrew narratives, there is always a forward movement towards the eutopia, the better place. When God calls Abram in Genesis 12, Haran is not presented as the normative place for human flourishing. When God calls Israel out of Egypt, the Exodus is a journey towards a better future. As a matter of fact, the Exodus narrative does not deny the possibility of nostalgia. In the wilderness, the Israelites start complaining, longing to go back to the flesh pots of Egypt (Exodus 16). Yet the narrative never endorses such nostalgia. The key narrative about looking back is the story of Lot’s wife in Genesis 19. Lot and his family are the only ones to be saved from the 95

 Schneiders once helpfully equates the term “normative” with “live-giving.” See Schneiders, “Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics,” 3.

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destruction of Sodom, and they are warned not to look back. Lot’s wife is unable to suppress her nostalgic and backward-looking instincts, and turns into a pillar of salt, which I consider a powerful metaphor of the calcifying, life-denying results of nostalgic nihilism. I am keenly aware of the dangers of falling prey to fundamentalist readings “whenever we find support for our convictions in a verse or a passage of scripture.”96 Therefore I will turn around the burden of proof and simply claim that I cannot find any biblical texts that would legitimize a backward-looking hermeneutics. The narrative of the Fall in Genesis 3 illustrates the reasons for the brokenness and finitude of the human condition. But it does not dwell on the description of what the prelapsarian state looked like. The only potentially normative point is a theological one. Before the Fall, humanity and divinity inhabited the same space, after the fall, there is alienation between humanity and divinity. Apart from this single point about the relationship between humanity and God, Genesis 1–3 offers no descriptions of an ideal individual life or an ideal human society that was ever taken up as a norm for human living. In the Prophets, the ethical message is never one of returning to the superior life of a golden past. The prophetic call is always a call towards an alternative future. Even the exile experience, while it can be framed in terms of the tearful memory of a place, never amounts to a nostalgic longing for the past.97 The sense of history, and ultimately the theological message that God acts in and through history towards some eschatological completion, is so pronounced in the Hebrew Bible that it rules out the option of ever turning back the clock. The New Testament projects its own hermeneutics of hope. In the gospels, there is not a single instance where Jesus pines for the past. In Lk 17:32, Jesus uses the example of Lot’s wife as a warning to his disciples. Jesus’ message is all about the in-breaking future, the reign of God, the eschatological gift of the Spirit. Jesus’ parables are about progress – often couched in agricultural images of slow but certain growth. The Johannine Jesus encouragingly points his followers to a future that surpasses the present of his earthly life – “and they will do even greater things than these” (John 14:12, NIV). One may ask whether the many references to the Hebrew Bible as fulfilled promises (e.g. John 12:38) could serve as proof for some 96  Pollefeyt and Bieringer, “The Role of the Bible in Religious Education Reconsidered: Risks and Challenges in Teaching the Bible,” 119-120. 97  See e.g. Ps 137.

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normativity of the past in the New Testament. My answer would be that the directional vector of the promise-fulfillment model points towards the future. The very notion of promise implies future orientation and hope.98 The hermeneutical value of quoting a more ancient text lies in its interpretation as a text not about the past but about the future. These passages confirm that the authors of the New Testament texts employed a forward-looking hermeneutics. Paul, in his letters, looks back at his own past – and considers it “rubbish” in Philippians 3:8. The past is no longer normative for him. For him, the Spirit-filled future shapes the life and worldview of God’s children.99 Placing the locus of normativity and the object of human longing, the vision that guides and inspires to action, in the future does not imply that the past or the present should not be treasured. Memory is valuable. Memory is not the same as nostalgia. The narrative traditions of the Hebrew Bible are witness to Israel’s collective memory. Walter Brueggemann’s description of the Hebrew Bible as “imaginative remembering” is apt. He characterizes it as a “telling and retelling in order to make faith possible for the next generation.”100 The act of narrating is motivated and shaped by hope, and performed with a view to the future. Israel’s memory is compatible with a forward journey, with progress. Nostalgia is not. The most cherished memory in the Hebrew Bible is that of Exodus. Brueggemann claims that “Israel characteristically retold all of its experience through the powerful, definitional lens of the Exodus memory.”101 Until today, Jews have been celebrating Exodus memory annually with the Passover festival. But the Passover does not commemorate a golden past that anyone would like to go back to. The central event of the festival is the Haggadah, the home ceremony that culminates in the hopeful pledge “Next Year in Jerusalem!”102 This is hardly an expression of nostalgia. The celebration of Exodus memory serves as an 98  See the discussion of “Yahweh, the God who makes promises” in Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997), 164-173. 99  See e.g. Rom 8; Gal 3:26–4:7. 100  Brueggemann and Linafelt, Introduction, 11. 101  Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 177. 102  See Lawrence A. Hoffman, “Haggadah of Pessah,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky and Geoffrey Wigoder (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 287-288; Avraham Walfish, “Pesah,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, 526-527; George Robinson, Essential Judaism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs, Customs, and Rituals (New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2000), 118-126.

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expression of collective hope in a better future. The point of biblical memory is to give historical depth to our hope.103 It is this very future-orientation, built on collective memory, that explains the importance of biblical texts for the life of believers. Bieringer and N.T. Wright have found similar images for this. Bieringer suggests that “the reading community has the task of reading and internalizing the ancient text as the first chapters of a chain novel of which they have to write the next chapter.”104 Elsewhere, he underlines the continued activity of the Holy Spirit in the church: “It inspires people and communities of any age to write their own “fifth gospel.”105 N.T. Wright proposes in a similar vein to understand the biblical narratives as four acts of a five-act drama. The fifth act is still being written: “The church would live under the “authority” of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion.”106 If the reading of biblical texts is tied to improvised performance, readers -or the reading community- have not only “responsibility for the construction of meaning” from ancient texts, as suggested by reader-oriented hermeneutical approaches,107 but responsibility for writing the narrative itself. For the performers and co-authors, the text and the hermeneutical task gain immediacy and urgency. Reading Strategies for Future-oriented Texts A hermeneutics of hope corresponds best to the intrinsic future-orientation of biblical texts. Bieringer’s Normativity of the Future approach encourages readers to be attentive to the alternative world projected by the biblical text, and to scrutinize the signs of the time for an in-breaking of the eschatological future into socio-political reality. I have argued that human persons as historical beings have a fundamental choice between 103  This is also how I understand J. B. Metz’s notion of “dangerous memory”: “It is precisely because Christians believe in an eschatological meaning for history that they can risk historical consciousness.” See Johannes Baptist Metz, A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, ed. James Matthew Ashley, trans. James Matthew Ashley (New York, NY: Paulist, 1998), 40. 104  Bieringer, “Texts That Create a Future: The Function of Ancient Texts for Theology Today,” 110. 105  Bieringer, “Biblical Revelation and Exegetical Interpretation according to Dei Verbum 12,” 52. 106  N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992), 142. 107  See Brian Doyle, “Don’t Fear the Reader: Hermeneutical Contextual Approaches to the Hebrew Bible” (unpublished manuscript, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, 2016), 13.

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hope and nostalgia as directional attitudes towards history. The witness of the biblical texts strongly support the normativity of the future, the hermeneutics of hope. Hope, Ingo Balderstamm argues, is the great, comprehensive theme of the entire Bible.108 Philosophical reflection and the biblical tradition encourage me to corroborate and acuminate Bieringer’s proposal of a normativity of the future as both a general hermeneutics of life and a hermeneutics for men-specific reading of biblical texts. The hermeneutics of hope, the interpretive focus on the future, is not only of great value in itself, but it reinforces both the ideology-critical hermeneutics I had introduced in the previous section and it is a precondition for the transformative hermeneutics I will discuss in the next section. As far as ideology is concerned, the future-oriented approach enables us to acknowledge that individual texts may be marred by the marks of human sinfulness while still carrying a faint echo of God’s dream for the world. We can identify ideology in texts, we can characterize them as oppressive and dismiss certain elements as non-normative while at the same time maintaining respect for the normativity of the eschatological vision projected and mediated by the text. As far as transformation is concerned, the “open-endedness of the future forces us to leave room for transformation and newness, and to make space for an in-breaking which is beyond our doing.”109 The future, in other words, is a necessary precondition for human transformation. What is the men-specific importance of future-orientation? The past is littered with violent and exploitative masculinity codes that did little to contribute to male flourishing but a lot to female oppression and suffering. Androcentrism and a patriarchal gender order, reflected in and sometimes espoused by biblical texts, do not need to be accepted as normative simply because they are part of the historical tradition. The eschatological perspective promises Christians a different way of living together, an alternative world. It thus provides a lens through which any historical text can be assessed in terms of fidelity. The “signs of the time” observed in the present need not inspire nostalgia but hope in contemporary men. God’s invitation to an alternative world summons contemporary men to a liberating and therapeutic reconfiguration of their gendered identities.

 See Baldermann, Einführung in die biblische Didaktik, 11.  Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges,” 12. 108

109

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Guiding Questions for Future-oriented Reading Strategies Readers who embark on a future-oriented reading may want to ask some of the following questions about the text:110 • Where does the text contain explicit vision statements? • What are the concepts in the text which express the vision? • What is the implicit horizon of the text? • In which way does the text incorporate an eschatological horizon or an end-time dimension? • Are there elements in the text which include characteristics from visionary literature? • What kind of world does the text project? • How do the characters in the text relate to the past, the present, and the future? • Is life depicted as a cyclical repetition or as linear progress? • Are the characters moving forward or going backward? • What happens in the text to characters prone to fear, nostalgia and conservatism? • What happens in the text to characters full of hope and ready for the new? • How does the text depict the past, the present and the future? • Is history seen as an upward journey or a downward spiral? • What are the “signs of the time” in the text, and who knows to read them? • What does the text say about God’s dream for the world? • Is there any evidence of God’s future breaking into the present? 3. Transformative Texts Transformation as a Biblical Theme Kuratle and Morgenthaler borrow the phrase “das Recht, ein Anderer zu werden” (the right to become a different person) from the Protestant liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle.111 Once we consider human transformation as an appropriate rendering of Greek metanoia, and 110  The first six questions are borrowed from Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges,” 20. 111  See Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 107-110; and Sölle, Das Recht ein anderer zu werden.

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possibly of Hebrew teshuvah,112 it is difficult to deny that it is one of the most central notions of biblical spirituality. Human transformation is certainly a recurrent theme in biblical narrative. Abram turns into Abraham, Jacob into Israel. Moses, the adopted prince in the Pharaoh’s family, turns into the prophet of YHWH. The urgent call to change one’s ways, to turn back to God, is the transformative message of the Prophets to Israel, from Moses to John the Baptist (Dt 30:2 and Mk 1:15 para). In the gospels, this call to transformation is the foundation of the Jesus movement: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Mt 11:5). Persons in all walks of life become disciples of the one who calls them and invites them to be a different person. Human transformation is also a central theme in Paul’s letters. This is maybe not surprising, given that he had had a major transformative experience in his own life.113 “From Paul to Saul ” or “Damascus event” are adages still in use today. While the most explicit statements about human transformation are expressed in Rom 12:2, 2 Cor 3:18 and Phil 3:10, Paul’s talk of transformation is expressed in a range of images throughout his letters, notably those of new or liberated creation (Rom 8:21, 2 Cor 5:17), dying and rising with Christ (Rom 6:1-11; 2 Cor 5:14-21: Gal 2:19-20; 1 Cor 15:13-22), filiation (Rom 8:14-17; Gal 4:5-7), and the life in the Spirit (Rom 8:1-17; 12:1; Gal 5:16-25). Transformation as the Purpose of Reading What, then, is the link between biblical texts and the transformation of men’s lives? Drawing on Ricoeur, Verstraeten argues that “[a]s a specifically poetic ‘world’ the biblical text generates a metamorphosis in its readers which enables them (and their communities) to interpret their lives in a new light.” The reading and imaginative appropriation of biblical texts changes the life of its readers not on the basis of formal moral norms. The “transformative poesis” empowers the reader to a “new way of being,” not merely to a “new way of doing.” It is not about new moral requirements, but about new capacities for being human. He suggests that “Christians who have developed a lively relationship with the

 See Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 108.  See Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), for a contemporary Jewish perspective. 112 113

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biblical texts through reading and worshipping, are in a relationship which does not merely provide them with moral insights, it also provides them with a narrative identity as Christian moral subjects.”114 He further highlights the role of imagination on the appropriation of the biblical texts: For Christians the three sections of the Hebrew Bible (Torah, Prophets and Wisdom) find their fulfillment (not, of course, their abolition) in Jesus Christ who is the ultimate Christian model and norm. Acting in the spirit is made possible by the biblical imagination. Such an imagination enables Christians to look at the world and at life through his eyes (voir comme) and it enables them also to discover new ways of being and new models of action (agir comme). When Christians have identified themselves imaginatively with Christ, they can transform the “self” into a “christomorphic self.”115

Also based on Ricoeur, but more narrowly focused on the New Testament, Schneiders makes very similar arguments about the transformative effects of the biblical text. She uses Ricoeur’s notion of “appropriation”116 as the goal of interpretation and argues that Appropriation involves metanoia, not just a change of mind in the sense of an adjustment of opinion, but a new way of being. Genuine interpretation, in other words, is a hermeneutics of transformation And as one is thus distanced from one’s old self, one can see the illusions, the false consciousness, which dominated the old self. Appropriation of the world of the text , in other words, permits a criticism of one’s own ideology which is the first step to a criticism of societal ideology.117

For Schneiders, ideology criticism, and especially the feminist critique of androcentric and patriarchal ideologies, is part and parcel of the transformative appropriation of the biblical text. Schneiders argues that the world projected by the text is the world of Christian discipleship. For her, the text is a symbolic structure that is “susceptible to a teleological hermeneutics by which the interpreter accepts the invitation to enter into and inhabit the world of discipleship 114  Johan Verstraeten, “The World of the Bible as Meta-Ethical Framework of Meaning for Ethics: An Interpretation,” in Holy Scriptures in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Hermeneutics, Values and Society, ed. Hendrik M. Vroom and Jerald D. Gort, Currents of Encounter 12 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 141f. 115  Ibid., 144. 116  See Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in From Text to Action, 87-88. 117  Schneiders, “Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics,” 8.

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structured by the paschal mystery of Jesus and finalized by eschatological liberation for all.” The reader who accepts this invitation “experiences the transformation involved in dying to the world of sin and entering the world of the gospel, dying to the old self and putting on the new self in Christ.”118 Here Schneiders goes beyond Ricoeur by ascribing redemptive and salvific properties to the text. It remains, however, open whether for Schneiders the biblical text itself has transformative properties, or whether the transformative effects depend on the reader, whether “discipleship” is generated by the text or whether it is a pre-commitment the reader has to bring to the text as an entry ticket. Distinguishing sharply between a reader who “truly interprets the text” and those who are “merely analyzing or exegeting it,”119 Schneiders appears to be introducing a safe outlet category for those readers who do not undergo the metanoia her Ricoeurian theory would have led one to expect. The theory about the transformation of the reader thus becomes irrefutable, because non-transformed readers are simply disqualified as mere exegetes. Transformation and Method While Ricoeur, Schneiders and Verstraeten all theorize that biblical texts should have transformative effects, they are silent on method. It was the late U. S. scholar Walter Wink who proposed to operationalize Ricoeurian thinking into a method for transformation-oriented reading. Dissatisfied with the spiritual “bankruptcy of the biblical critical paradigm,” he considers the purpose of biblical criticism as “so to interpret the Scriptures that the past becomes alive and illumines our present with new possibilities for personal and social transformation.”120 In reaction to historical criticism’s inability “to render the Bible’s own content and intent accessible for human development today,121 he proposes a new paradigm for reading biblical texts, a “dialectical hermeneutic” that entails a movement from Gadamerian pre-critical “fusion” to Habermasian critical “distance” and finally arrives at a Ricoeurian post-critical

118

 Schneiders, “Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics,” 9.  Ibid. 120  Walter Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1973), 2. 121  Ibid., 18. 119

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“communion.”122 Wink describes this dialectical process which aims to overcome the subject-object dichotomy: Having begun (fusion) as the object of a subject (the heritage), I revolt (distance) and establish myself as a subject with an object (the text), only to find myself in the end (communion) as both the subject and object of the text and the subject and object of my own self-reflection.123

In order to create distance, Wink proposes a “sociology-of-knowledge approach,” which has a lot in common with what I have discussed in the context of Ideologiekritik. Our way of reading must therefore be examined for its implicit ideological bias and blindness. Our liberation from social determination depends upon the degree of insight we gain into the ways we are determined, and the conjunction of the otherness of the text with a sociology-of-knowledge analysis in our responses to the text can aid in this process.”124

At this stage of “distance,” Wink proposes a psychoanalytical approach as an essential complement to the sociology-of-knowledge approach. His purpose is to retrieve the existential “question which occasioned the answer provided by the text” from forgetfulness and “selective repression.”125 It is necessary then to struggle against our own forgetfulness of the question in the text, that is, to struggle against our own alienation from what operates in the question. This too, says Ricoeur, is a destruction, a de-construction of the assurances of the destroyer. There is, he argues, a profound unity between destroying and interpreting; any modern hermeneutic must be a struggle against idols, and consequently it is destructive. In the language of the three great “masters of suspicion,” it must be a critique of ideologies (Marx), a critique of all flights and evasions into otherworldliness or illusion (Nietzsche), a struggle against avoidance and arrested development (Freud). In this sense any hermeneutic must be a struggle against repression.126

The method Wink is proposing is communal exegesis based on historical imagination, checked by historical and literary criticism, and psychoanalytic dream analysis, where “the characters in the dream represent  Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation, 19.  Ibid., 66. 124  Ibid., 45-46. 125  Ibid., 46. 126  Ibid., 47. 122 123

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psychic phenomena within the dreamer.”127 In this proposal, Wink argues, “questions of technique have been subordinated to the overarching purpose of enabling transformation.”128 Anticipating our earlier critique of Anselm Grün’s psychoanalytical exegesis, Wink insists that “such self-explanatory analysis is not subjectivism or intrapsychic reductionism, for the understanding of ourselves which the text evokes makes possible a far more profound understanding of what the text actually says.”129 Wink’s emancipatory communal exegesis could be a suitable method for a church-based men’s group to approach biblical texts. Wink’s approach also shares some future-oriented hermeneutical presuppositions, characterizing it as a “self-explorative application of the text to our own present for the sake of a desirable future.”130 Wink summarizes the link between his method and the transformative impact of reading biblical texts as follows: “If […] our interest is re-centered around the depth-concerns of our existence – if, for example, we define our interest as the search for personal and social transformation in the light of the teaching of Jesus – then we already presuppose a process which makes transformation possible. And to seek the question which renders my own existence questionable is to assume that my not yet being what I am is encompassed by the possibility of becoming what I am but am not. When we “let the text speak,” therefore, we do not value equally everything it has to say, but fashion an order of ranked priorities in terms of the resonances it establishes with our own unknown but higher potentialities. We know of this unknown through our or the text’s unanswered questions. Therefore we do not listen just for what pleases us. Indeed, we learn to watch for what displeases us, what is most alien to us, since our interest is explicitly in being altered. It is because we do not know who we are that we need the text. For the insights which it makes possible are the means by which, in Ricoeur’s words, we advance to our being.”131

More so than Schneiders, Wink is quite explicit about the role of one’s pre-commitments to personal and social transformation as a precondition for the text to effect transformation. Wink is also honest about the reader’s selectiveness when listening to the text. Wink, writing in  Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation, 55.  Ibid., 62. 129  Ibid. 130  Ibid., 75. 131  Ibid., 73. 127 128

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1973, shows much greater agnosticism than the later Ricoeur, Schneiders, and Verstraeten about what the text can do to the reader, and refocuses attention on what the readers have to do to the text. Altogether, and despite the complexity of the language in which he presents it, I believe that Wink’s proposal of a corporate Socratic dialogue, focusing on existential concerns and based on historical imagination, and ideology criticism together with a modicum of psycho-analysis, could be operationalized successfully in a church-based men’s group. Transformation and Empirical Hermeneutics When setting out to conduct research into the possibility of menspecific biblical hermeneutics, I did not intend to write specifically about Paul Ricoeur. Yet as I progressed, I encountered scholar after scholar who referred me to Ricoeur. Ganzevoort and Streib, Bieringer and Schneiders, Wink and Verstraeten – wherever I looked, I found Ricoeur lurking behind the argument. I started to wonder what it is that makes Ricoeur so eminently influential in biblical hermeneutics. I would cautiously hypothesize that what most of the quoted scholars have in common, and I admit that I have it in common with them, is a pre-commitment to the significance of the biblical text. Yet in this post-modern day and age, it is not easy to make a scholarly argument why these texts are so important and special, and why they should enjoy normativity in the lives of our contemporaries. This argument, Schneider claims, “if it is to be persuasive for a post-enlightenment and even postmodern mind, cannot rest on an appeal to the supernatural origins of scripture.”132 The attractiveness of Ricoeur is that he seems to supply “an answer based on the nature of the biblical text, and on the nature of interpretation as a human enterprise.”133 Ricoeur will provide scholars with the non-religious language of philosophical hermeneutics134 to justify the revelatory quality of the biblical texts through a “non-religious concept of revelation.”135 Ricoeur, in his general hermeneutics, identifies 132

 Schneiders, “Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics,” 4.  Ibid. 134  Ricoeur emphasizes that he considers biblical hermeneutics as a “regional hermeneutics in relation to philosophical hermeneutics, considered a general hermeneutics.” See Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Hermeneutics,” in From Text to Action, 89. 135  Marianne Moyaert, “Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Hermeneutics,” in Provoked to Speech: Biblical Hermeneutics as Conversation, 45; See also Paul Ricoeur, “Toward 133

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various properties and functions of texts. He, and many scholars in his wake, ultimately ascribe various forms of agency to the text. We see the biblical text’s agency at work when it “projects,” “proposes,” and “subverts.”136 It explodes “the very world out of which it came,”137 it lets us “glimpse” something,138 and it “creates” a specific Christian.139 For Verstraeten, it transforms, it “generates a metamorphosis in its readers” and it “puts the common morality in a new and particular perspective.”140 For Wink, the text speaks and asks questions.141 Faced by so much autonomous agency of the text, I wonder if the post-modern charm of Ricoeur lies in his replacement of theological language by philosophical language, pneumatology by hermeneutics, substituting “the poetic power of the text”142 for what was formerly known as the power of the Holy Spirit.143 Leaving the attractions of Ricoeur’s non-religious language aside, the relevant question for men-specific hermeneutics in a pastoral context is whether his philosophical claims are validated by practical experience. Can contemporary men really be expected to be transformed by the poetic power of biblical texts? Is there any empirical evidence of what biblical texts do to you? Hans de Wit and Janet Dyk have compiled a fascinating volume of what might well qualify as empirical hermeneutics, which seeks to document the transformative effects of intercultural Bible reading.144 In his own contribution to the volume, de Wit takes account of the prevalence a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” The Harvard Theological Review 70, no. 1/2 (1977): 1-37. 136  Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges.” 137  Schneiders, “Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics,” 7. 138  Ibid. 139  Ibid., 9. 140  Verstraeten, “The World of the Bible as Meta-Ethical Framework of Meaning for Ethics: An Interpretation,” 141. 141  See Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation, 73. 142  Moyaert, “Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Hermeneutics,” 34. 143  It must be said, however, that Bieringer retains an explicitly pneumatological dimension in his hermeneutical proposal. See e.g. Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges,” 13-14; Elsbernd and Bieringer, “Interpreting the Signs of the Time in the Light of the Gospel: Vision and Normativity of the Future,” 59-60. 144  See Hans de Wit and Janet Dyk, eds., Bible and Transformation: The Promise of Intercultural Bible Reading, Semeia Studies 81 (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2015); See also Hans de Wit, Empirical Hermeneutics, Interculturality, and Holy Scripture, Intercultural Biblical Hermeneutics 1 (Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2012).

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of the claim that reading the Bible has transformative effects. He refers to St. Augustine, a U. S. church working with drug addicts in Amsterdam, a Pentecostal church in Ghana, Christian base communities in Brazil, Paul Ricoeur, and the Scottish Bible Society.145 He observes that, on the one hand, these stories must not be ignored. On the other hand, “the trajectory of this assumed or hoped for transformation is rarely, if ever, followed; what it consists of is never clarified; and how this transformation is brought about is not explained.”146 De Wit expresses incomprehension why, given the amount of scholarly work on theoretical hermeneutics, so very little empirical research has been done to date. The little empirical research on biblical reading practices, what he calls “biblicism research,” has been conducted in anthropology, but not in theology or biblical studies.147 However, this research “puts pressure on the optimism theologians have concerning the space for transformative reading. It shows that the majority of Bible readers read for success, for power, for affirmation – not for transformation.”148 De Wit concludes that there is a lot biblical scholars and exegetes can learn from such empirical research, and that it should be analyzed in an interdisciplinary fashion. De Wit, and the empirical research he is quoting, caution against taking the transformative properties of biblical texts as a given. In my Conclusion, I will explain what this could mean for further research. At this stage, it leads me towards a combination of more modest claims and also to a more explicit method for transformative reading strategies for men. Transformation in the Biblical Text Driven by pastoral concern for men, encouraged by biblical witness, but cautioned by empirical research, how can I best account for human 145

 See Hans de Wit, “Bible and Transformation: The Many Faces of Transformation,” in Bible and Transformation: The Promise of Intercultural Bible Reading, 56-60. 146  Ibid., 60. 147  Ibid., 63; He is referring to James S. Bielo, “Introduction: Encountering Biblicism,” in The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism, ed. James S. Bielo, Signifying (on) Scriptures (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 1-9; James S. Bielo, “Textual Ideology, Textual Practice: Evangelical Bible Reading in Group Study,” in The Social Life of Scriptures, 157-175; Brian Malley, “Understanding the Bible’s Influence,” in The Social Life of Scriptures, 194-204; Andrew Village, The Bible and Lay People: An Empirical Approach to Ordinary Hermeneutics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 148  De Wit, “Bible and Transformation: The Many Faces of Transformation,” 63.

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transformation in my proposal for a men-specific biblical hermeneutics? The answer may be in the narrative. A hermeneutics of transformation scrutinizes the text for incidents of human transformation. If the narrative approach in pastoral care suggests that men can draw beneficial parallels between the biblical narrative and their own life stories, biblical texts that depict transformation may at least draw the reader’s attention to the possibility of personal change and development. A reading strategy with a focus on transformation in the text will also work as an antidote to a number of contemporary reading strategies that deny or conceal the possibility of human transformation. Some reading strategies that are motivated by socio-political advocacy may tend to interpret characters within a dualistic struggle of good versus bad or in simple binaries of victim and perpetrator. Similarly, deterministic worldviews may limit the opportunities for character development. Hermeneutic approaches that seek to identify “types” in the text will also fall short of paying intention to the intersectionality, fluidity and performativity of a character’s identity. Psycho-analytical approaches that depict characters as representatives of timeless and universal archetypes will almost certainly neglect individual traits and personal transformation. Marxist approaches that consider history as determined by material circumstances and class struggle over the means of production will allow for little individuation. Certain feminist readings cannot describe male characters other than as monsters, and some post-colonial readings may be in danger of reifying their subjects into essentializing binaries like colonized and colonizer, European and oriental, indigenous and invader, or oppressor and oppressed.149 It would significantly exceed the scope of this study to do justice to the merits of all of these contextual reading strategies. For a hermeneutics that wants to be liberating and therapeutic for men, however, it is important to employ reading strategies that emphasize human transformation. A good example of a transformation-oriented, menspecific exegesis is Anja Bartels’ analysis of Job.150 By identifying the protagonist not as some ancient Everyman, but as an individual man trapped in the masculinity code of the wealthy Nomadenscheich, she uncovers in the Job narrative a liberating and therapeutic movement that transforms his spirituality, his social relations with his friends, his servants, his  For an overview of all these schools of criticism, see Dobie, Theory into Practice.  See Anja C. Bartels, “Männlichkeitskonstruktionen in Prolog und Epilog des Hiobbuches,” in Männerbeziehungen: Männerspezifische Bibelauslegung II, ed. Reiner Knieling and Andreas Ruffing (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 87-103. 149 150

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children and especially his daughters, and his attitude towards material wealth. “Undoing gender” is part of Job’s transformation. Reading Strategies for Texts of Transformation The biblical tradition affirms the centrality of transformation. A number of scholars see an immediate link between the reading of biblical texts and human transformation. Following Ricoeur, many consider transformation the very purpose of reading. Some are confident that it is brought about by the transformative properties of the text itself. Walter Wink proposes a method to bring about transformation, a corporate Socratic dialogue that I argued could indeed be a format for men-specific readings of biblical texts in a church context. I also introduced a note of skepticism about the inherent transformative agency of the text based on recent empirical research into real-world Bible reading. This led me to suggest a more modest notion of transformation together with an explicit method for transformative reading strategies for men. Based on the questions below, I suggest to read the biblical text with a sharp eye for instances of human transformation. Guiding Questions for Transformation-oriented Reading Strategies to • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Readers who embark on a transformation-oriented reading may want ask some of the following questions about the text: How does the text depict human transformation? Do the characters in the text embrace or resist change? Which powers or experiences engender human transformation? How do characters in the text respond to encounters with the divine? Are there obstacles to human transformation? What supports human transformation? What is the meaning of transformation in the domain of social relations? What is the meaning of transformation in the domain of spirituality? What are the consequences of transformation for the identities of the characters? What are the effects of one character’s transformation on others? Is there a price to be paid for transformation? Is there a common purpose of human transformation? Who grants and who denies the right to be or become someone different?

Chapter Three

Deconstructing David: Men-specific Exegesis in Practice In recent years, a little niche has developed within biblical scholarship that is dedicated to men-specific exegesis. Like much of early feminist exegesis, most men-specific approaches tend to focus on the scriptural depiction of specific male characters. In this chapter, I have chosen a small sample of representative articles for a critical and comparative review of their aims, methods, and results. I will explore in each article whether and how the three key elements of our proposed hermeneutical approach for men, namely ideology-criticism, future-orientation, and human transformation are taken into account. My objective is to see whether and how men-specific biblical exegesis incorporates reading strategies that could be useful when addressing men’s spiritual needs in the pastoral context of church-based Männerarbeit as outlined in Chapter One. In order to find a common denominator, I will compare articles that deal with the same biblical character, and settled for David. There are a number of motivating factors behind this choice: Given the focus on narrative approaches, which I explained in the first section of Chapter Two, narratives of the Hebrew Bible seem to be more suited to our current purposes than biblical poetry, the special genre of the New Testament gospels, epistolary or apocalyptic literature. Among the Hebrew Bible narratives, David’s story is one of the longest, most elaborate, and arguably one of the most popular ones. Finally, the fact that David Clines had written in 1995 what might count as the pioneering article in men-specific exegesis on “David the Man,”1 persuaded me to use David as the unifying character for my analyses in this chapter. Clines article aims to identify the essential elements of masculinity in David’s story. Jane Wootton’s article “The monstrosity of David” is a feminist and “suspicious” discussion of David and his role in the

1

 David J. A. Clines, “David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible,” in Interested Parties, 212-243.

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Christian tradition.2 Detlef Dieckmann’s article “David und Jonatan – eine ‘zärtliche’ Männerbeziehung?” is concerned with different interpretations of the relationship between David and Jonathan in the light of contemporary discussions about biblical norms for human sexual behavior.3 I will briefly synthesize the main argument of each author, followed by a critical assessment. In my conclusion, I will assess how much affinity exists between recent men-specific biblical exegesis and our pastorally-motivated, ideology-critical hermeneutics of hope and transformation. I. David the Man In his 1995 article on “David the Man,” David Clines has set an early standard and reference point for many subsequent authors.4 Clines attempts to identify both “contemporary themes in the construction of masculinity”5 and the elements of masculinity depicted in the David story, compare them, and test his hypothesis that contemporary notions of masculinity have “overwhelmed the quite distinctive portrait of Hebrew masculinity in the David story”6 in modern biblical interpretation. 1. David’s Normative Masculinity Based on a number of Anglo-Saxon studies, Clines identifies five “rules” that constitute masculinity in “the predominant culture of the West”7: Not to be female, but to be successful, aggressive, sexual and self 2  Janet Wootton, “The Monstrosity of David,” in Patriarchs, Prophets and Other Villains, ed. Lisa Isherwood, Gender, Theology and Spirituality (London: Equinox, 2007), 110-127. 3  Detlef Dieckmann, “David und Jonatan – eine ‘zärtliche’ Männerbeziehung?,” in Männerbeziehungen: Männerspezifische Bibelauslegung II, 67-86. 4  For an overview of the article’s Wirkungsgeschichte in English scholarship, see Haddox, “Masculinity Studies of the Hebrew Bible”; German scholars referring to Clines are Bartels, “Männlichkeitskonstruktionen in Prolog und Epilog des Hiobbuches,” 103; and Johannes Taschner, “Jakob – ein Mann, wie er im Buche steht? Auslegung aus männlicher Perspektive,” in Männerspezifische Bibelauslegung: Impulse für Forschung und Praxis, ed. Reiner Knieling and Andreas Ruffing (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 20-21. 5  Clines, “David the Man,” 212. 6  Ibid., 234. 7  Ibid., 212.

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reliant.8 Based on his reading of 1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 2, Clines describes David as personifying the fighting (and killing), persuasive, beautiful, bonding, womanless, and musical male. In his comparison, Clines considers the emphasis on beauty, persuasiveness and the lack of interest in sex as dissimilar from contemporary notions of masculinity, while toughness, success and self-reliance as similar. The notion of the self-reliant man, however, was different as far as in David’s story it leaves room for deep male friendships or “male bonding” while modern culture does not. Clines doesn’t address men’s musical skills in his comparison. Clines concludes the final section of his article deploring “that the function of commentary on biblical texts has been to familiarize the Bible, to normalize it to our own standards, to render it as undisturbing as possible, to press it into the service of a different worldview.”9 He builds his critique of fellow exegetes on five observations made when consulting six commentaries and five Bible dictionaries. First, Clines finds a general sense of approval of David among modern commentators. Second, Clines argues that modern commentators tend to emphasise elements that present David as successful, thereby conforming him to modern notions of masculinity. Third, faced with David’s depiction as murderous warrior, they either suppress it or transform it into notions of modern corporate or political leadership. Fourth, commentators fail to mention David’s beauty. Finally, Clines argues that monogamous heteronormativity leads modern commentators to politicize the relationship between David and Jonathan, while abstaining from ethical judgements over the harem system or rape. 2. Critical Assessment Critical Observations Chapter One of the present work should have made it clear that Clines’ reductionist, essentialist, and reifying attempt to define a single, predominant, modern notion of masculinity, based on five trait-based rules, fails to reflect most recent scholarly work on masculinity. However, even if one would accept the five rules as prevalent stereotypes in Anglo-Saxon popular gender discourse, it must be noted that they cannot be taken together as a single masculinity code. It is logically 8

 See Clines, “David the Man,” 213-215.  Ibid., 243.

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impossible to follow both the first (Don’t be female) and the other four rules (Be successful, aggressive, sexual, and self-reliant) once one acknowledges the possibility of successful, aggressive, sexual and self-reliant women. Therefore, rule one and rules two to five represent two alternative because mutually exclusive masculinity codes. In his section about the construction of masculinity in the story of David, Clines raises more questions than he answers. My scope here is the David story (1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 2), which is of course not the same thing as: ancient Israel. How typical the masculinity of this story is of the Hebrew Bible as a whole I do not know, yet; and how the literary representations of masculinity in our texts relate to real men (not ‘real men’) in ancient Israel I shall never know. But my guess is that the myth of masculinity inscribed in the David story was a very potent influence upon Israelite men, and I am quite sure that the con-struction of masculinity in the David story was not invented by its author – or by some historical David – but reflects the cultural norms of men of the author’s time.10

Clines wisely starts with a disclaimer of his agnosticism about historical men, ventures a “guess” about the influence of the David narrative on historical men, and is “sure” about the cultural norms of historical men. I find it hard to understand how Clines moves so swiftly from agnosticism to certainty. Later in the text, Clines will refer to “the Hebrew ideology of masculinity” or “the Hebrew construction of masculinity.”11 Throughout the article, Clines consistently abstains from any discussions of authorship or the compositional history of the text. His focus is the world of the text. In this sense, Clines violates the rules of his own game when he pronounces himself on the socio-cultural norms of the historical world behind the text. Clines is obviously aware of what Brueggemann calls the “doubleminded articulation of David“ that “is a key intention of the completed tradition.”12 He is presumably also mindful that biblical narrative, in its final canonical form, may contain both elements of propaganda and of subversion.13 He is therefore well advised to critically interrogate the text: Are there any conflicting masculinities within the David story? Focussing exclusively on David, I ask, Does David himself conform entirely 10

 Clines, “David the Man,” 215-216.  Ibid., 225, 227. 12  Brueggemann and Linafelt, Introduction, 173. 13  Mason, Propaganda & Subversion in the Old Testament. See also my discussion on page XX. 11

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to one set of models for maleness? Are there ways, for example, in which David breaks free of the role of the traditional male, are there any hints that David might be something of a ‘new man’?14

Clines reviews those parts of the narrative where David departs from his script – as defined by Clines – and concludes: There is no ‘new man’ here in the David story. There is a fully fledged traditional male, who for the most part recapitulates everything scripted for him by his culture, but now and then conspicuously fails – so conspicuously that any non-feminized reader knows immediately that it is a failure that is not to be excused or imitated, but is a sorry example that serves only to reinforce the value of the traditional norms.15

It remains a mystery to me how Clines manages to arrive at this judgment. In order to judge whether David’s masculinity conforms to, fails to conform to, or subverts “traditional norms,” one would need some additional evidence, external to the text, of what these traditional norms were. Given that Clines’s reconstruction of “Hebrew masculinity” is based on the depiction of David, arguing that David conforms to a cultural script is an entirely circular argument. Clines’ distillation of masculinity from David’s story is not always entirely persuasive. His discussion of David’s capacity to kill, supported by a precise numerical body count and an impressive list of all the narrative’s references to killing, is quite convincing. Given that in other adjacent parts of the Hebrew biblical tradition (Joshua, Judges and Kings), male characters are frequently praised for their military achievements, it seems difficult to refute that violence played a significant role in biblical construction of masculinities.16 As I do not subscribe to the presupposition that gender codes always have to be construed oppositionally, positive biblical depictions of violent women (e.g. Deborah, Jael, Delilah, and “the woman with the millstone”17) do not contradict this.

14

 Clines, “David the Man,” 228.  Ibid., 231. 16  See also Harold C. Washington, “Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible: A New Historicist Approach,” Biblical Interpretation 5, no. 4 (1997): 324-363. 17  See Mieke Bal, “Dealing/With/Women: Daughters in the Book of Judges,” in Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader, ed. Alice Bach (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 318-319. 15

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Clines sticks to David’s other attributes enumerated in 1 Sam 16:18, but he fails to show conclusively that these amount to a masculinity code rather than the individual, potentially counter-cultural traits of a single character. Clines’ insistence on attributing “beauty” to David seems to be contrived in order to blame those biblical scholars who use other words of being captive to “the modern ideology of masculinity.”18 Yet all they can be blamed of is to follow modern linguistic convention in the English language to refer to women as beautiful and to men as handsome. By insisting on the use of “beautiful” rather than “handsome,” Clines mischievously implies feminine qualities, something the Hebrew text does not warrant. On the contrary, I would even suspect that the reference to the physical qualities of David – ‫( איש תאר‬a man of shape or form) – conform more to the functional requirements of warrior life than to feminine aesthetics. The precise nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan remains a hotly debated issue. Elsewhere in the article, Clines insists that “they are certainly one another’s ‘significant other’” and therefore, “the question of sex has to be raised.”19 It is difficult for me to see how Clines can derive from this one particular relationship, which has no parallel in the Hebrew Bible, a cultural script for “heroic male bonding,” which “is one important way masculinity was constructed in ancient Israel.”20 Clines goes on to argue that “One of the concomitants of strong male bonding is of course a relative minimizing of cross-sex relationships.” Clines grants that David had “eight principal wives and at least ten others,” which implies David may have had numerically more cross-sex relationships than the average contemporary biblical scholar, but Clines defends his proposed masculinity script of the “womanless male” with the observed absence of romantic longing: “There is in this story, on the whole, no sexual desire, no love stories, no romances, no wooing, no daring deeds for the sake of a beloved. This is not a world in which men long for women.”21 It is not without irony that Clines, who so generously blames other biblical scholar of reading ancient texts through the lenses of anachronistic ideologies, measures the Hebrew Bible against literary and cultural conventions that emerged only in the European middle ages. There is broad scholarly consensus that the very notions of love and romance that 18

 Clines, “David the Man,” 240.  Ibid., 241, italics in original. 20  Ibid., 224. 21  Ibid., 225. 19

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Clines misses in the Hebrew text are cultural inventions of the 12th century. His “daring deeds for the sake of a beloved” are the key ingredient of the “courtly love” or “troubadour” tradition.22 Clines is right, though, that romantic love is absent from the David story, as is the modern association of sex with love. He probably goes too far when he concludes that “David does not actually like women very much, and certainly has no fun with them.”23 The notion of “fun with women” may well be another anachronism introduced by Clines. I would agree with Clines as far as saying that the David story keeps sex apart from love. The former seems to be related to politics, power, and reproduction,24 while the latter finds its object in his friend Jonathan. Again, the text alone does not allow us to generalize whether this reflects a broad sociocultural consensus, or just David’s individual affective life.25 Finally, I appreciate Clines’ exegetical effort to show that playing stringed instruments is a frequently reported male activity and may thus be associated with masculinity in the Hebrew Bible.26 This is an observation that might merit further elaboration. Clines’ criticism of his fellow biblical scholars for their ideological presupposition shares some of this project’s interest in ideology criticism. Clines levels two different kinds of criticisms at them. He blames scholars for normalizing the world of the text to contemporary cultural standards and thus concealing its otherness. But more importantly, Clines is a moralist, and demands from biblical scholars a “turn from interpretation to critique, from understanding to evaluation, from hermeneutics to ethics.”27 Biblical scholars should “register disappointment, dismay or disgust when we encounter in the texts of ancient Israel ideologies that 22  See e.g. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1936), 1-43; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Über die Entstehung der Liebe im Hochmittelalter,” Saeculum: Zeitschrift für Universalgeschichte 32 (1981): 185-208; Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1987), 280-296; R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 143-198. 23  Clines, “David the Man,” 226. 24  For a monograph-length discussion on the link between sex, power and politics, see Ken Stone, Sex, Honor, and Power in the Deuteronomistic History, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series 234 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996). 25  See also the discussion in Haddox, “Masculinity Studies of the Hebrew Bible,” 190. 26  Clines, “David the Man,” 228. 27  Clines, “The Pyramid and the Net,” 156.

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we judge to be inferior to ours.”28 If it is done with the necessary selfcriticism,29 this is a valuable endeavor. I wonder, however, why instead of unmasking the ideologies in and behind the David story, Clines saves so much venom for his psychoanalytical assessments of and ad-hominem attacks on the masculinity of his colleagues. Their ideology criticism and ethical evaluation of the David story may be deficient or absent, but it seems somewhat unfair to attack them for not performing a job they hitherto had not been aware they were meant to be doing. Ideology Criticism, Hope, and Transformation With this last point I have already arrived at the question of ideology criticism, the first element of my ideology-critical hermeneutics of hope and transformation. By trying to identify the essential elements of David’s masculinity, Clines makes a valuable contribution to addressing some of the gender-specific questions I have proposed in Chapter Two. He is much less successful in addressing the general questions about ideology. The narrator, the discourse, and its interested parties remain entirely in the dark. Despite his vehement critique of other scholars, Clines does not engage in the kind of ideology-critical self-criticism suggested by Bieringer.30 Clines does not ask about any future worlds projected by the text. His stated aim is to compare the past and the present and to warn against anachronistic readings. However, in his overall hermeneutics, he shares our skepticism towards any normativity of the past. In some of his other writings, Clines advocates the use of the present, e.g. the moral sensitivities of the contemporary reader31 or the political responsibilities of the biblical scholar,32 as a standard against which to evaluate ancient texts, rather than vice versa. By taking David as a projection screen for ancient cultural scripts of masculinity, Clines denies him opportunities for personal development and human transformation. Having distilled six “essential male 28

 Clines, “The Pyramid and the Net,” 156.  See Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges,” 21. 30  See Bieringer and Elsbernd, “The ‘Normativity of the Future’ Approach: Its Roots, Development, Current State and Challenges.” 31  See David J. A. Clines, “A World Established on Water (Psalm 24): ReaderResponse, Deconstruction and Bespoke Interpretation,” in Interested Parties, 173-176. 32  See Clines, “The Pyramid and the Net,” 156. 29

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characteristics,”33 Clines’ David remains limited to them. Given the complexity of David’s character and the mere length of his story, deeper analysis of possible life- and character-changing events and processes might well be worth the effort. The David story is full of themes relevant for men – little is said about David’s relationship to his own father, but a lot about his difficult relationships with his various children. Clines raises David’s male friendship to Jonathan, his relationships with women, and his jobs as warrior and king. In conclusion, Clines’ discussion of “David the Man,” despite the detailed critique I have offered, remains a classic among early attempts in men-specific exegesis, and it raises many of the elements that can generate useful discussions when men read biblical texts in the context of pastoral care. II. David the Monster Lisa Isherwood’s edited volume “Patriarchs, Prophets and other Villains” is a collection of feminist criticism of Hebrew Bible texts, “a celebration of how far we have come through the possibilities opened by the hermeneutics of suspicion which has fed so many diverse readings and at the same time a moment to reflect on how far we still have to go.”34 Here, I will discuss Janet Wootton’s contribution to this volume, “The Monstrosity of David,”35 and ask whether her feminist re-reading of King David’s story can be considered a contribution to men-specific exegesis. 1. David’s Normativity in Christian Tradition Wootton’s central claim is that “the monstrosity of David lives on, and wields pervasive oppressive and destructive power.”36 The aim of her article is to “tell his story through the women whose relationships with David are narrated.”37 Her method is a literalist reading of the David tradition in the Samuel books as historical biography. Telling “through the women,” however, does not result in giving a voice to silenced voices 33

 Clines, “David the Man,” 216.  Lisa Isherwood, “Preface,” in Patriarchs, Prophets and Other Villains, xi. 35  Wootton, “Monstrosity.” 36  Ibid., 127. 37  Ibid., 113. 34

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or marginalized perspectives of the women in the text, as I will show below. It refers to the author’s reckoning with David’s story from the vantage point of her own 21st-century location. Wootton thus intends to free David’s life from “spin” and to uncover “the story of a monster” whom she blames, among other things, for an exclusive and hierarchical system of worship, the “delay” in the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches and, ultimately, the “present Bush Administration.”38 Throughout the article, Wootton battles against forces that have been responsible for “spin,” by which she presumably means a reception history that failed to expose the true monstrosity of David. As evidence of this reception history she refers to some of her students, who apparently gave expression to positive assessments of David in their replies to Wootton’s essay questions. Elsewhere in her article, she identifies “Talmudic interpretation” and “Christian interpretation” as culprits, who exacerbated “the spin which already exists in the biblical narrative.” Wootton does not engage any specific sources, she merely refers vaguely to “post-biblical literature” and “the hymn books and worship resources of nearly all Christian traditions.”39 Instead, Wootton engages in her article the full arsenal of linguistic instruments of ideological discourse, especially negative other-presentation, hyperbole, generalizations, categorization, vagueness, and norm expressions at the semantic level,40 and agentless passives and nominalizations as grammatical devices.41 Wootton structures her article in four sections. In “Michal and Abigail,” David is criticized for his bisexual promiscuity, and the humiliation, abandonment and rejection of his wife Michal. Wootton attributes trans-historical significance to Michal’s falling out with David in 2 Sam 6:12-23, as she associates David’s music and dancing in a bold inter-textual move with “the full exclusive and hierarchical system of worship” described in 1 Chr 15–16.42 This allows her to link Michal to contemporary intra-ecclesial disputes about worship and gender: This means that Michal represents more than the shrewish woman, the pooper of the great party that surrounds David’s accession. In that moment of rejection, she turns her back on the whole movement away from domestic worship, focused on the household, towards 38

 Wootton, “Monstrosity,” 113-119.  Ibid., 124ff. 40  See Van Dijk, “Politics, Ideology and Discourse,” 735-739. 41  Hart, “Discourse,” 14. 42  Wootton, “Monstrosity,” 116. 39

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a male, hierarchical cult, which only men, and only men of a certain tribe, can administer and are required to attend, by travelling away from the home to the central place of worship. […] Still today, we see that centralized hierarchical forms of church are disempowering in general and specifically disempower women, especially where religious power and political power are closely intertwined. […] The legacy of that centralizing move attributed to King David is still disempowering women 3,000 years later.43

When it comes to Abigail, Wootton blames her for complicity in David’s rise and for having become the “model of a good woman” in cultures where until today “many daughters are named for this woman, who rises to the occasion, deals with the crisis, and then fades into the background.”44 In her discussion of Bathsheba, Tamar and David’s concubines, Wootton takes the Bathsheba incident as indicative of David’s own monstrosity, while she reads the separate rape incidents of Tamar and of the royal concubines by David’s sons Amnon and Absalom respectively as suggesting that “the moral bankruptcy of David is reflected in his family.”45 In “Bathsheba Again, and Abishag, the Shunammite Woman,” Wootton associates the latter with David’s loss of royal and virile powers. Bathsheba, unlike Michal and Abigail, emerges as a powerful woman, brokering the succession of her son Solomon. In the fourth section of her article, “Mary, Martha and Mary,” Wootton seeks to show how the David story has been appropriated in the Christian tradition. She argues that Abigail is “recreated” in Luke’s depiction of Martha, while “the extraordinary treatment by Christian tradition of Mary of Magdalene feeds lasciviously off the type of the harlot, whose archetype is Bathsheba, with Jezebel following in her wake.”46 Wootton’s concern ultimately turns Christological when she claims that “[b]y reading the story of David back into the Christ event, the tradition nullifies any radical outcome of Jesus’ life as narrated even [sic] in the canonical Gospels.”47 Unfortunately, the article fails to provide solid exegetical or tradition-historical evidence for such re-readings.

43

 Wootton, “Monstrosity,” 116.  Ibid., 119. 45  Ibid., 121. 46  Ibid., 126. 47  Ibid., 127. 44

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2. Critical Assessment Critical Observations Given Wootton’s frequent recourse to the notion of “spin,” one might expect that her article shared our concern with ideology. Indeed, in parts it would seem that Wootton is even more outraged at the monstrosity of tradition than that of David. Her method and her rhetoric, however, are inadequate for the task of ideology criticism. Wootton’s reading of the text as a historical report of sometimes “sickening accuracy,”48 albeit “through the stereotyping lens of male authority”49 does not allow for any critical distance from the text. Her engaged interest in the “actual lives”50 of Michal, Abigail, Bathsheba, Tamar, and David’s concubines does not permit diachronic questions about the historical reality of David’s reign,51 about the multi-layered composition and redaction history of the texts,52 or the theological and ideological interests reflected therein.53 Neither does it discuss synchronic questions about the rhetorical or literary qualities of the text.54 The inability of engaging with the text as text is further aggravated by the failure to identify interested parties behind the text. Wootton’s rhetorical insistence on agentless language – mostly in the form of agentless passives – may generate a vague sense of suspiciousness, but fails to work as a scholarly hermeneutics of suspicion. The following statement is symptomatic: By tradition’s sleight of hand, the message and teaching of Jesus recorded in the narratives of his life magically disappear, outshone by the glory of David.55

48

 Wootton, “Monstrosity,” 121.  Ibid., 118. 50  Ibid., 119. 51  For a discussion of the archaeological evidence, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York, NY: Free Press, 2001), 123-145; See also Carol Meyers, “Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy,” in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), 221-273. 52  See for example Walter Dietrich, “Die Samuelbücher,” in Die Entstehung des Alten Testaments, ed. Walter Dietrich et al., new ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2014), 232-259. 53  See for example Mason, Propaganda & Subversion in the Old Testament, 39-46. 54  See for example Brueggemann and Linafelt, Introduction, 163-176. 55  Wootton, “Monstrosity,” 127. 49

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Attributing single-minded agency to “tradition” (or elsewhere to “[t]he canonical literature”56) and invoking magic contributes little to a hermeneutics that aims to unmask the interested parties and their political interests behind ancient texts. Wootton consequently does not address any of our key questions for ideological-critical readings. This failure to account for the discourses involved in the production of the text finally undermines her own argument. Even on the basis of Wootton’s article alone, most readers must be struck by how it was possible that Wootton was able to distill so much evidence of David’s alleged monstrosity from a text that is part of a tradition which she claims aims to idealize him? Even where she admits that “the story suggests that the moral bankruptcy of David is reflected in his family,”57 she does not account for the possibility that the text itself may contain critical, or in Mason’s categories, subversive rather than propagandistic discourse. When it comes to gender-specific questions, Wootton holds sympathies and opinions about the women in the story. She is sympathetic to rebellious Michal,58 critical of complicit Abigail,59 and ambiguous about seductive and powerful Bathsheba.60 But her discussion is focused on what she sees as biographies of historical individuals, and thus she fails to pay attention to notions of socially constructed gender codes and gender relations. Similarly, by focusing exclusively on the monstrous individual character of David, any broader notions of masculinity are neglected. Ideology Criticism, Hope, and Transformation Wootton does not explicitly answer any of the questions for ideologycritical self-reflection, but some answers are implied by her text. Wootton condemns Christian tradition very broadly and in moralistic terms. She claims a superior hermeneutical position by re-telling the story “through the women,” which can be taken to imply that her own gender provides hermeneutical privileges. Wootton does not dwell on her own blind spots or sinfulness. Interestingly, her nine references to the works of other authors give an indication of who is collaborating in the interpretive process, to which communities she feels accountable, and in which corrective processes she engages. All nine works fall into the 56

 Wootton, “Monstrosity,” 125.  Ibid., 121. 58  See ibid., 119. 59  See ibid., 118. 60  See ibid., 120-121. 57

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domain of feminist biblical criticism. Wootton thus indicates accountability and collaboration within a small, like-minded sub-community of scholars, but no engagement with alternative views and broader biblical scholarship. Wootton examines the normative impact of the past on the present, the influence of King David on ecclesial practice today. Yet given the crucial absence of the very concept of text from her account of David, there can be no future projected by the text. Therefore, most of our guiding questions for future-oriented reading strategies cannot be answered by Wootton. However, Wootton suggests that historical figures can become normative for subsequent generations. Somewhat contrary to Jungian theory, she refers to David as the “archetype of the Messiah”61 and to Bathsheba as the archetype of Mary Magdalene.62 It seems that Wootton accepts the factual normativity of a past she is highly critical of. Wootton expresses regret that the story of David has replaced the radical story of Jesus. The safest conclusion is that Wootton deplores the normativity of certain stories of the past for the present, while accepting it in others. In any case, no role is envisaged for the future. As noted earlier, Wootton proposes a reading of the David story “through the women.” It is quite possible that she considers this a trans-historical or timeless hermeneutic lens. Introducing the historical David as a monster leaves little room for human transformation. Similarly, women who are identified as an archetype (Bathsheba), as a model (Abigail), or merely as passive victims (Tamar and the unnamed royal concubines), offer little opportunity for character development. Only Michal’s character is accorded “her own development,” albeit a tragic one.63 Wootton’s reading of David’s story does not help to answer any of my guiding questions for transformationoriented reading strategies. Wootton’s article shows that David’s character as depicted in biblical texts could stimulate interesting ethical discussions, notably about how men relate to women. However, measured against my ideology-critical hermeneutics of hope and transformation, I find Wootton’s discussion deficient. The key difference is that she does not share my basic aim – to read biblical texts. Wootton’s aim is to criticize what she considers a historical person (“world behind the text”), and the abstraction of 61

 Wootton, “Monstrosity,” 113.  See ibid., 126. 63  Ibid., 113. 62

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a tradition (“world before the text”), without any attention to the “world of the text,”64 which, as I have demonstrated in Chapter Two, is crucial for the men-specific hermeneutics elaborated in this book. Wootton directs her critique at an idealizing “Sunday-school” tradition of King David based on a literalist reading of the story as historical report rather than on a critical reading of the biblical text as discourse. Her article may be critical of David, but her reading of the text is based on pre-critical assumptions. Given its lack of attention to the biblical text, I would hesitate to consider Wootton’s work as biblical exegesis. The liberative and therapeutic effects of this approach on men in a pastoral context are rather limited. III. David the Lover I have introduced Reiner Knieling in Chapter Two as a practical theologian concerned about whether and how the church in Germany welcomes men. Together with Andreas Ruffing he has edited two pioneering collections of men-specific biblical exegesis in German.65 Here I will discuss Detlef Dieckmann’s contribution, “David und Jonatan – eine “zärtliche” Männerbeziehung?”66 – a topic no men-specific exegete can remain silent about when commenting on the David story. 1. David and the Norms of Contemporary Sexuality Dieckmann firmly roots the motivation of his contribution to menspecific exegesis in the contemporary debate over homosexuality within the German Protestant Church, the EKD. The 2013 position paper on the family, which declared heterosexual and homosexual committed relationships as equivalent from a theological perspective,67 acknowledges Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13 and Romans 1:26-27 as biblical texts that

64  For a detailed elaboration of the worlds behind, of, and before the text, see Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, 97-179. 65  Reiner Knieling and Andreas Ruffing, Männerspezifische Bibelauslegung: Impulse für Forschung und Praxis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); Knieling and Ruffing, Männerbeziehungen. 66  Dieckmann, “David und Jonatan.” 67  Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Zwischen Autonomie und Angewiesenheit: Familie als verlässliche Gemeinschaft stärken. Eine Orientierungshilfe des Rates der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013), 66.

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associate homosexual acts with sin, but also points out that other biblical texts mention “tender relationships” between men.68 In his short piece, Dieckmann sets out to examine the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan.69 He traces the friendship of the two men from 1 Sam 18 to 2 Sam 1:1. The Hebrew text of 1 Sam 18:1 reports how Jonathan’s soul or life (‫ )נפש‬attached itself to David’s. 1 Sam 18:3 reports about a covenant (‫ )ברית‬between the two men. Dieckmann suggests that this language could be interpreted as a lifelong commitment. The covenant language can point to both a political or an emotional dimension. The next verse describes how Jonathan undresses and hands over his clothes and equipment to David. Again, the verse could be read both politically as a handover of the insignia of power, or erotically. In 1 Sam 19:1, Dieckmann discusses another ambiguous term for Jonathan’s affection, ‫חפצ ב‬, which e.g. in Gen 34:19 denotes sexual desire. Saul’s outrage over Jonathan’s choice of David in 1 Sam 20:30-31 shows again how intertwined the private and the political dimensions of this male relationship are.70 This is followed by the farewell scene of 1 Sam 20:41b-42, where the two men kiss, cry, and swear by YHWH an oath of eternal peace between their dynasties.71 In 2 Sam 1:26, David laments the death of Jonathan in highly emotional terms, culminating in the assertion that “Your love to me was more wonderful than the love of women.“ Dieckmann summarizes his findings that throughout the story, the political and the emotional-personal dimensions cannot be separated.72 68

 Dieckmann, “David und Jonatan,” 50.  For an up-to-date overview of the status quaestionis, see Stephen B. Chapman, 1 Samuel as Christian Scripture: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 169-170; For the most comprehensive bibliography, see Anthony Heacock, Jonathan Loved David: Manly Love in the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Sex (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011); See also James E. Harding, The Love of David and Jonathan: Ideology, Text, Reception (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). 70  For a recent, men-specific study of Saul, see Marcel Măcelaru, “Saul in the Company of Men: (De)Constructing Masculinity in 1 Samuel 9–31,” in Biblical Masculinities Foregrounded, ed. Ovidiu Creangă and Peter-Ben Smit, Hebrew Bible Monographs 62 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014), 51-68. 71  On the cultural significance of crying, see Milena Kirova, “When Real Men Cry: The Symbolism of Weeping in the Torah and the Deuteronomistic History,” in Biblical Masculinities Foregrounded, 35-50. 72  Dieckmann does not mention the elaborate discussion of this topic in Stone, Sex, Honor, and Power in the Deuteronomistic History. See also the recent article by Erin E. Fleming, “Political Favoritism in Saul’s Court: ‫חפץ‬, ‫ נעם‬and the Relationship between David and Jonathan,” Journal of Biblical Literature 135, no. 1 (2016): 19-34, who argues that the Hebrew love language is typical to describe political relationships. 69

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He argues that as they enter a covenant for life, their relationship can be considered a committed and reliable one. At least on the part of Jonathan, it is a loving relationship. David’s affective investment in the relationship remains unclear. For Dieckmann, the nudity and the kisses in solitude suggest some “homoerotic tension.”73 However, he finds no indications that this relationship entailed what he calls sexual acts. Dieckmann concludes that there is no textual legitimation to conclude that the two men had a homosexual relationship. In his discussion of the implications for theology and church, Dieckmann emphasizes the hermeneutic difficulties to interpret this or other biblical texts as a statement on homosexuality. He argues that neither Leviticus nor 1 Samuel consider the kind of loving, committed, reliable and faithful partnership which today can be entered into as a registered same-sex partnership. And what these biblical texts do not know, they cannot judge.74 Dieckmann challenges those who consider Leviticus 18 and 20 as normative texts for contemporary life to reveal the criteria by which they distinguish between biblical injunctions that are normative today and those that are not. He approvingly shows how the EKD position paper takes Gen 2:18 as its hermeneutical key to human relationships, which it translates into a relational anthropology. The affirmation that human persons are created towards relationality implies reliable, loving, responsible relationships based on faithfulness. This biblical ideal can also be fulfilled in a same-sex relationship. Dieckmann concludes his contribution by asserting, however, that there are no biblical examples of such committed homosexual relationships. 2. Critical Assessment Critical Observations Dieckmann’s text could stimulate useful discussions among men in a pastoral context. It is a careful and sensitive treatment of a story that captures the attention of most contemporary readers. It addresses highly relevant issues in contemporary men’s lives, primarily of course male friendship and sex, but indirectly also the relationship to one’s father 73  Dieckmann, “David und Jonatan,” 60. Dieckmann neither discusses the cultural significance nor the semantic range of the Hebrew term for kissing (‫)נשק‬. Likewise, there is no exploration into the cultural meaning of nudity. 74  Ibid., 62.

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(Jonathan and Saul), to women (Michal as sister and wife), and to one’s job or vocation (both Jonathan and David have a “vocation” to be king). The ambiguities of language and of the narrated scenes (nudity, crying, kissing) might also serve to probe prevalent masculinity codes. Dieckmann’s even-handedness allows men with different hermeneutical approaches and different ideological or personal pre-commitments to enter into dialogue. Dieckmann performs a good exegetical exercise, not although, but because it finally remains inconclusive. Dieckmann shows that even meticulous linguistic analysis cannot finally resolve the ambiguities of Hebrew words. Clines, who is also the editor of the nine-volume Dictionary of Classical Hebrew,75 found that “almost half the Hebrew vocabulary is indeterminate.”76 Therefore, scholarly honesty requires one to acknowledge the frequent impossibility of determining the meaning of words and texts of the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, at the narrative level, Dieckmann’s article reveals that we cannot bridge the historical gap between the symbolic universe of the text and our own, and come up with a single interpretation. Today’s readers do not have direct access to the meaning of Jonathan’s nudity or the kisses between friends. A contemporary reader may – or may not – sense homoerotic tensions in the narrative. Based on his meticulous linguistic and literary analysis, Dieckmann ultimately demonstrates the futility of trying to derive authoritative readings and normative guidance from ancient texts. Ideology Criticism, Hope, and Transformation Dieckmann’s focus on the binary question whether the relationship between David and Jonathan was a homosexual one clearly narrows the scope of his discussion. Dieckmann does not raise ideology-critical questions about the narrator, the discourse, or the interests behind it. Within the text, however, Dieckmann shows a fine and suspicious sense for how power relations overshadow the affective lives of the characters, and how politics determines the discourse and the communicative situations. He does not extend this to any analysis of gender issues in the text. To 75  David J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. I-IX (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 1993). 76  Clines, “The Pyramid and the Net,” 150; See also David J. A. Clines, “What Remains of the Hebrew Bible? Its Text and Language in a Postmodern Age,” Studia Theologica – Nordic Journal of Theology 56, no. 1 (2002): 76-95.

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some degree, Dieckmann addresses questions of ideology-critical selfreflection – he situates himself in the EKD debate and problematizes different hermeneutical approaches. On the other hand, his very evenhandedness may reflect a confidence that he can be objective in this debate, which may explain some ideological blind spots on his own part. In his interpretation of Gen 2:18, he espouses a modern „couple“ ideology. Dieckmann seems to take it for granted that the alternative to being „alone“ is to be in a couple – be it hetero- or homosexual. When Dieckmann reveals his interpretation of David’s and Jonathan’s relationship as the model of a close male friendship with homosexual overtones, which are not lived out, however,77 I see further ideological pre-commitments at play, which he neither declares nor defends, namely the equivalence he maintains between love, sex, and its genital expression. This raises first the question how love is related to eros when he speaks about the homoerotic. He then claims that something is not „lived out“ (ausgelebt), presumably because it is not given genital expression in the text. Here, Dieckmann seems to be speaking from a very specific historico-cultural location. We have seen before that not all cultures at all times have seen the link between love, sex, and its genital expression linked in the same way as Dieckmann presents it here. Where, then, does Dieckmann locate the sources of normativity? In line with the EKD paper, Dieckmann rejects the validity of both the Leviticus texts and the David story as normative for contemporary issues. But rather than drawing the conclusion from his exegetical work that it is impossible to derive normative guidance from ancient texts, he aligns himself with the EKD position paper, which replaces Leviticus 18 and 20 with Genesis 2. This merely substitutes one biblical proof text with another, calling to mind Bieringer’s adage that opportunistically, we all are “anonymous fundamentalists.”78 The choice of proof text appears to be at random, only determined by the ideological position one wants to defend. And, as we have seen, just as some use Leviticus 18 to privilege heterosexual intercourse over homosexual intercourse, so the EKD paper use of Genesis 2 can be read as to favoring couples over singles. One implicit argument in the EKD paper is that the text from Genesis is protological, (“der Mensch wird von Anfang an als Wesen

77

 Dieckmann, “David und Jonatan,” 63.  Pollefeyt and Bieringer, “The Role of the Bible in Religious Education Reconsidered. Risks and Challenges in Teaching the Bible,” 120. 78

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beschrieben, das…”79) and therefore more normative in its anthropology than the text in Leviticus in its theology. In Chapter Two, I have explained my views about the past as a locus of normativity. It would exceed the constraints of this discussion to enter this discussion from the eschatological end, but it might be a worthwhile exercise with men in a context of pastoral care to reflect which forms of human relationships are part of God’s dream for our ultimate future, and which place genital expression will have in the eschaton. Finally, what role does human transformation play in Dieckmann’s analysis? As he progresses through the narrative, the characters remain lively and are shaped by events. Dieckmann steers clear of reifying them into symbols or archetypes. He wonders whether, after Jonathan’s death, David finally discovers his true feelings for his friend.80 Dieckmann’s text thus explicitly grants David the right to become a different person. Despite some divergences between his biblical hermeneutics and the one proposed in this project, I would say in conclusion that reading the David story with Dieckmann in a pastoral context could be conducive to liberative and therapeutic discussions with and among contemporary men. IV. Lessons from Men-specific Exegesis The three articles discussed in this chapter offer a small but interesting sample of different approaches to men-specific exegesis. None of these approaches was designed for lay readers in a pastoral context, but for a scholarly audience. Our discussion has shown, however, that there are useful elements in these approaches that cohere with and can be employed with our ideology-critical hermeneutics of hope and transformation. With his 1995 article on „David the Man,” Clines has pioneered menspecific exegesis by critically examining the literary construction of masculinity in biblical texts. It is situated within Clines’ broader program of a postmodern critique of more traditional biblical scholarship rather than one of liberation and therapy for contemporary men. Yet although I raised a number of critical issues regarding his methodology and his own, often deeply ideological presuppositions, Clines has defined an

 Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Autonomie und Angewiesenheit, 66.  See Dieckmann, “David und Jonatan,” 59.

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approach that remains useful and can be used when contemporary men read biblical texts in a pastoral context. Jane Wootton’s article approaches the David story with a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion, aiming to offer a picture of David that is different from traditional readings. Her article shows that David’s story as narrated in biblical texts could stimulate interesting ethical discussions, notably about how men relate to women. In this regard, men can always receive beneficial impulses from feminist re-readings of biblical texts. If feminist criticism limits itself, however, to expressions of moral outrage over the monstrosity of reified male characters, its liberating potential may be wasted. Dieckmann’s article may have been written with at least as much interest in practical questions about church life as in biblical exegesis. The approach and the subject matter of his exegetical work is certainly men-specific. It fits well into Knieling’s programme of church reform and similarly well into Kuratle’s and Morgenthaler’s vision for Männerseelsorge. Therefore, Dieckmann’s article is well suited to guide men’s reading of part of the David story in a pastoral context. None of the three articles approaches the text for the express purpose of ideology criticism as outlined in Chapter Two. Given that Clines published his article in a volume about “Interested Parties,” it comes as a disappointment that the only parties who see their ideological prejudices unmasked are some of his fellow biblical scholars. While this intrascholarly name calling may be of little interest to men outside the world of biblical studies, Clines’ intention to expose prejudice and ideology is broadly concordant with the liberating purposes of our ideology-critical hermeneutics. So is Dieckmann’s subtle hermeneutics of suspicion where it exposes power issues under the surface of the text. None of the three articles explicitly seeks glimpses of a normative vision of the future in the text. I have shown that all three reject the normativity of the past. One could argue that all three consider the present as more normative than the past. I fear that for this lack of attention to the future, to an alternative world, all three articles forego the element of hope, which would add a liberative and therapeutic dimension to their scholarly study of the biblical texts. Finally, only Dieckmann treats the characters in the text in a fashion that allows them to develop and to be transformed. Clines and Wootton turn David into a type, reified beyond redemption. I believe it is this aspect of human transformation where, despite Wink’s call for a paradigm shift in 1973, the gap between scholarly exegesis and liberating and

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therapeutic reading strategies is still the largest. I do not think that the reason for this is that the biblical texts do not yield ample material about human transformation. I fear that even in an age presumed to be postmodern, scholars still have a general preference for dissecting reified, determinate, and classifiable objects of the past rather than observing fluid, indeterminate and self-redefining subjects that project themselves into alternative futures. Therefore, while this chapter has shown how men-specific exegesis by biblical scholars can contribute to liberating and therapeutic reading strategies for men, I believe that our ideology-critical hermeneutics of hope and transformation, primarily designed for men in a pastoral context, can also inject liberating and therapeutic impulses into postmodern biblical scholarship. Entering the world of David’s story, it is remarkable how many of Steven Biddulph’s commonsensical list of men’s issues come up in the modern interpretations of ancient texts. Bridging the temporal and spatial gap between the work of a family psychologist in contemporary Australia and the narrative tradition about King David, a number of issues – the relationship with one’s father, sexuality, partnership, parenthood, friendship, work, and spirituality – seem to possess trans-historical relevance. The answers to these challenges may depend on our sociocultural location and are both in their textual depiction and their interpretation shaped by ideologies. As issues, questions, or challenges, they seem to have enduring value. Keeping these issues in mind when approaching biblical texts and interrogating the text critically how it addresses these issues, may well provide the subject matter for a menspecific approach to biblical texts.

Conclusion Men have problems. They probably always had. Our critical reading of popular literature and empirical research on men in Chapter One has shown that contemporary men’s problems are not a result of feminism and the slow transition towards greater justice in gender relations. In contemporary, late-capitalist societies, the experience of war, which for centuries has been the altar of a misguided cult of masculinity, where idols were worshipped and lives were sacrificed, has somewhat receded from quotidian life. And yet, only very recently, a number of terrorist atrocities in Germany and France have reminded us that individual males can be drawn to making desperate attempts to define and assert their identity in acts of annihilating violence. Whatever the long-term causes and immediate triggers, it would be difficult – and wrong – to ignore the gender dimension in such events. Many contemporary men suffer from less visible pathologies – loneliness, emotional repression, addiction, depression, alienation from self and others. Much of it is rooted in misguided masculinity codes that emphasize self-sufficiency, aggressiveness, and competition. In this book I have proposed a liberating and therapeutic solution. Men should seek liberation from gender codes that misdirect male energies and affections, and redirect them towards a spirituality of healing and human flourishing. Church-based pastoral care can be a venue where men find such a spirituality of liberation and healing. Churches have not always been such a venue, and thus missed many opportunities to reach and support men. The widely observed feminization of the church, no matter how patriarchal its leadership, may be related to this phenomenon. Knieling’s reform proposals for churches and Kuratle’s and Morgenthaler’s program for the pastoral care of men (Männerseelsorge) are important building blocks to help the church turn itself into a venue of men-specific spirituality. “Doing gender,” meeting and accepting men where they are, is crucial for inviting them to a spiritual journey that may lead to a liberating and therapeutic “undoing” of gender. Paul’s teaching about the effects of baptism in Galatians 3:28 –“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” – can serve as a biblical encouragement for this program. Another important spiritual

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point of departure for liberation and therapy is the fundamental Christian exhortation ein Anderer zu sein und zu werden, to seek and to embrace personal transformation. A liberating and therapeutic reconfiguration of men’s gendered identities in the church context can make good use of narrative approaches because they correspond closely to the cognitive mechanisms underlying human identity formation. This book has specifically focused on the use of biblical narrative in the pastoral context, which could be a situation of one-to-one counseling or the collective effort of a homosocial men’s group. For the use of biblical narratives, I have proposed an ideology-critical hermeneutics of hope and transformation. Ideology-criticism is an essential precondition for anyone who wants to approach biblical texts as normative, revelatory, or sacred. The explicit recognition that historical human authors have written the biblical texts, and that human interests and ideologies inevitably influence the use of language, allows the reader to scrutinize the text for a truth that transcends the finitude and sinfulness of human authors. My ideology-critical proposal does not have the ambition to replace “false consciousness” with any formulations of a “right” one. Instead, it suggests borrowing the tools of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis in order to draw attention to how specific uses of language can manipulate our thinking, our feelings, and ultimately our behavior. Unmasking these mechanisms makes way for a new method for listening to biblical texts. Biblical texts invite the reader to a hermeneutics of hope. The Jewish tradition of the Haggadah of Pesah shows how biblical memory does not serve to idealize the past, but points towards “next year in Jerusalem,” towards a better future for all. Biblical texts warn against pessimism, nostalgia and attachments to the past. It is important for readers to approach ancient texts with an acute awareness of this inherent future orientation of the text. It allows readers to scrutinize ancient texts for their eschatological vision and divine promise. It is the optimism and the openness for change generated by this hermeneutics of hope that can make biblical texts an agent of liberation and therapy for contemporary men. Personal transformation is the key objective of a liberating and therapeutic spirituality for men. A good number of Christian authors claim that the biblical text itself has transformative properties, that the reader experiences transformation in the act of reading. My own proposal of a hermeneutics of transformation is less ambitious in its claims. I encourage readers to scrutinize the ancient narratives for incidences of human

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transformation. I think it is of particular importance to encourage contemporary readers to do so, because a number of modern and postmodern contextual hermeneutics recommend doing the opposite. Some forms of literary criticism tend towards a reduction of the narrated characters to “types,” to bearers of essentialist traits, or to puppets in a deterministic mechanism. This may be a point where my men-specific proposal departs from those feminist reading strategies that conceive of gender in essentialist terms, or see individual agency stifled by the determinism of the gender order. Such essentialism and determinism, I believe, take the joy out of reading as they make any plot predictable. Instead, my hermeneutic proposal for the pastoral context encourages readers to accept the development of the characters observed in the text as invitations to seek and embrace liberating and therapeutic transformation and thus spiritual growth in their own lives. These three components constitute my proposal for an ideologycritical hermeneutics of hope and transformation, which I suggest as a useful reading strategy for men seeking to do identity work in a pastoral context. One may, at this stage, critically ask whether this amounts to a men-specific biblical hermeneutics. I have developed this proposal specifically for men. It is based on both my scholarly research into men’s pathologies and needs, and on my own practical experience with men in a pastoral context, in individual conversations and in church-based men’s groups. It has been developed specifically for men, and in this sense it is men-specific. Yet this does not mean that it is exclusively for men. Men-specificity must be understood here in a context where gender is taken as a point of departure for a narratively aided reconfiguration of identity that includes “undoing gender.” I would therefore be more than happy if women could find my proposal useful for their own reading of biblical texts. I leave it to women readers to arrive at their own experience-based judgment, and to feminist theologians to assess the value of my proposal for women. Yet while I keep it open for debate, whether my hermeneutical proposal is useful for women, my men-specific proposal for approaching biblical texts contains another gender-specific element. Steve Biddulph has identified a number of themes that were of particular interest to his male clients: the relationship with one’s father, sexuality, partnership, parenthood, friendship, work, and spirituality. My sample of exegetical interpretations of David’s story has shown that these themes appear to have some trans-historical relevance. I have suggested that paying attention to these themes in the selection and in the reading of biblical texts

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will be particularly useful for men. Once again, this does not imply that women could not also benefit from an interest in men-specific themes, just as it is sensible for men to read women-specific biblical texts and their feminist interpretations. The proposal developed in this project consists of the combination of an ideology-critical hermeneutics of hope and transformation with a thematic focus on men-specific themes. Together, these elements constitute a men-specific approach to biblical texts in a pastoral context. The guiding questions at the end of each section in Chapter Two make it possible to operationalize this proposal in a men’s group or in individual pastoral counseling. This project suggests that the implementation of this proposal will have two effects. As a form of pastoral care, it promotes a spirituality that aims to bring about improvements in the lives of contemporary men. My proposal also provides elements of a strategy for the church to become spiritually more relevant to a group that is currently not being well catered for.

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