Friendship is much lauded in our society and publicly encouraged from our pulpits, held in high regard and longed for by children and adult alike. Though it’s press is good, the reality of friendships in the real world are less than satisfactory: friendship as an art, as a life long relationship has been lost to us in the fragmented relationships and fast changing jobs of a mobile western world. Moltmann-Wendell attempts to examine friendship and reflect on it from a feminist and theological framework.

Her examination and discussion of friendship is rooted in the conviction that friendship between women is not like that of friendship between men. Female friendship is not combatative or comparitative, not rooted in being defined against the other which is how men typically think of friendship. Female friendship values the other, affirms difference and liberates the friends. She applies this hermeneutic throughout her book—opening a discussion on the nature of friendship, exploring the theological, ecclesiological and relational consequences of redefining and rediscovering a friendship that uses the female rather than the male model as normative. In her rediscovery she offers a means of saving women and men, the church and Jesus himself from a binding and destructive (male) understanding of God and relationships.

Her thought is developed within a Roman Catholic theological framework and the most direct target of her critique is the hierarchy of Roman Catholicism. She stands too, in the line of Catholic liberation theologians in theological reflection on perceived systemic injustice. She also unapologetically and self-confidently stands within a feminist framework that feeds on the radicalism of Mary Daly and the revisionism of Rosemary Radford-Ruther. These three factors will lead her writing to be loved by some of her readers as a brave and radical challenge to the hierarchies of churchMANship which have denied the traditions of Mary Magdalene the tender and erotic friend of Jesus who teaches us what it is to be a friend of God, of women and men and even a friend of the earth in an open and liberating way. For other readers Moltmann-Wendell’s writing will prove a typical liberal and revisionist reworking of Scripture: where Scripture is not God’s Word nor Jesus the flesh and blood Son of God but the ‘Christ’ (or Christa) of ‘the Jesus Movement’ and as such are empty of content other than the interpretations of theologians wish to give them; where history is to be played with, and any negative critique is dismissed as an outworking of the male mindset.

I found reading Moltmann-Wendell without merit—only useful as an illustration of how far the liberal hermeneutic will divorce itself from God ordained revelation and replace it with human centred imagination.

---