Quotes by Women Theologians

Anne Hutchinson
Margaret Fell
Julian of Norwich
Elizabeth Johnson (theologian)

Sight is not faith, and hearing is not faith, neither is feeling faith; but believing when we neither see, hear, nor feel is faith; and everywhere the Bible tells us our salvation is to be by faith. Therefore we must believe before we feel, and often against our feelings, if we would honor faith.

Here saw I a great oneing betwixt Christ and us, to mine understanding: for when He was in pain, we were in pain.

Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich
If the Christ we follow sent out his disciples with no extra possessions (Luke 9:1-6 and 10:1-12) and warned would-be devotees that he had nowhere to lay his head (see Luke 9:57-62), then we must recognize that it is extremely difficult to live in a Christian way in a consumer culture.

We are born in relation, we live in relation, we die in relation. There is, literally, no such human place as simply "inside myself." Nor is any person, creed, ideology, or movement entirely "outside myself."

Eternal life is personal existence in continuity with the present life, but transfigured.

I shall I not equivocate, there is a meeting of men and women and there is a meeting only for women.

Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson
Intellectual neutrality is not possible in a historical world of exploitation and oppression.

If you are under the dominion of sin, you are yet an utter stranger to the salvation of God.

For many people - from secular feminists to observant Jews - the notion of a feminist Judaism is an oxymoron.

Only in the longing for a world of economic and sexual justice together, and not subordinated to one another, can the encounter with the divine take place. But this is an encounter to be found at the crossroads of desire, when one dares to leave the ideological order of the heterosexual pervasive normative. This is an encounter with indecency, and with the indecency of God and Christianity.

If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.

Woven into our lives is the very fire from the stars and the genes from the sea creatures, and everyone, utterly everyone, is kin in the radiant tapestry of being. This relationship is not external or extrinsic to our identity but wells up as the defining truth from our deepest being.

Elizabeth Johnson (theologian)
Elizabeth Johnson (theologian)
You were created as a masterpiece and you are one of God's expressions of beauty. Short, tall, thin, thick, freckles, big eyes, small ones... it doesn't matter.

Hospitality is the practice of God's welcome by reaching across difference to participate in God's actions bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis.

God hath put no such difference between the Male and Female as man would make.

Margaret Fell
Margaret Fell
Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination. They must unite the demands of the women's movement with those of the ecological movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of this [modern industrial] society.