From 9 to 12 February of this year, LLSTA representatives, Bishop emerita Jāna Jēruma-Grīnberga and the association’s development manager Līga Puriņa-Purīte, took part in the annual meeting, or convent, of German theologians. The gathering took place in Germany, in the city of Landau in the Palatinate.
The 2020 German theologians’ convent was an anniversary event – this was the 95th annual gathering of German women theologians. Nearly a century! This means that in Germany, the country of the Reformation, women theologians began to gather as early as 1925, a good 40 years before women were ordained to the office of pastor.
This year more than 70 women pastors and theologians from all over Germany took part in the German theologians’ convent. There were also guests from abroad: a theologian from the Protestant Church of France, a Protestant Theology student from Palestine, a pastor from Romania who has already been working for 15 years in the Lutheran Church in Germany, a representative of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church, as well as several students from Germany itself and two representatives from Latvia – members of the Latvian Association of Lutheran Women Theologians.
The theological theme was process theology. The convent’s theme was based on the scripture passage
For in Him [God] we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28)
A group photo of the convent participants
The LLSTA representatives told the convent about the association’s past, present and plans for the future.
Part of the presentation was devoted to the LLSTA’s research and documentary storytelling project, led by director Kristīne Briede. The LLSTA representatives also presented a 20-minute documentary research story, “Women and God”, which showed the path of Dace Balode and Rudīte Losāne to the office of pastor.
The lecturer Julia Enzing spoke about process theology.
In her introduction she presented some of the founders and present-day developers of process theology (Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, Catherine Keller, Thomas Jay Oord), noting that process theology is not a single direction but encompasses several theological directions and ideas. Process theology, in contrast to the classical Greek and Latin formulated theology of God’s unchanging nature and inability to suffer, holds that God is changeable and capable of process. God and the world are in a reciprocal relationship, in which each influences the other.
It is precisely God’s capacity to change and God’s changeability or flexibility that are the signs of God’s stability and faithfulness.
The next bold insight that process theology asserts is that all images/representations and models of God are metaphors. They address rather than actually describe. Our task is to develop the best possible metaphors. Moreover, metaphors are contestable and open to criticism. It is essential to develop a living relationship between God and the human being, so that a ‘feedback exchange in the relationship’ can take place, and so that the metaphors continue to develop ever further.
According to the views of process theology, the world is contained within God, much as a child is contained within the body of a pregnant woman. If the mother is unwell, the child fares badly too, but the two are nevertheless not one organism. If the world is harmed, God hurts too, because our well-being is the well-being of God’s ‘body’. God is like a fellow-sufferer who understands suffering. This runs counter to the classical views about God’s inability to suffer. God has an actual and mutual relationship with creation, and consequently God’s changeableness or mutability is axiomatic. What is unchanging is stable, but rigid and inflexible (in contrast to what Anselm and other thinkers held).
It follows from process theology that this world is subject to the possibility of change, rather than being unchanging and static.
Photo: LLSTA