Theological definitions !

 Androcentrism: Literally it means ‘male centeredness’ (from the Greek word ‘aner’ -‘male’).  It is a linguistic and cultural system that understands male/man as the norm and wo/men as secondary, peripheral and deviant.

Androgyny: It is derived from the Greek Word for ‘man’ (aner) and ‘woman’ (gyne).  Androgyny is a synthetic term and social ideal that combines traditional masculine and feminine qualities and virtues but still privileges the male.

Conscientization: Conscientization is a process in which an individual or group names and understands the structures of internalized oppression and begins to become free of them.

Deconstruction: Deconstruction is a critical theory and constellation of methods that question assumptions about identity, truth and perceived norms.  This is done chiefly through identifying binary opposites or dualisms and revealing how the primary, positive term determines the second term in a negative fashion in order to assert its own positivity.

Epistemology: From the Greek for ‘knowledge’, epistemology refers to the study of the ways in which knowledge is articulated and made possible.  It sets standards that are used to assess what we know and why we believe what we believe.

Feminism: Feminism is a movement and theory for the economic, social, political and religious equality, rights and dignity of all wo/men.  It is focused on the struggle of wo/men against domination, exploitation, oppression and dehumanization. The definition preferred by Fiorenza is ‘Feminism is the radical notion that women are people’.

Gynecentrism/Gynaikocentrism: Gynecentrism is a ‘theoretical perspective that points women/females (in Greek, gyne) as paradigmatic and argues that women, as superior in essence to men, should be dominate in the social order.

Hermeneutics: Hermeneutic is derived from the Greek Word Hermeneuein, which means to interpret, exegete, explain or translate.  Hermeneutic refers to both the theory and practice of interpretation.

Historical Criticism: It is the study of historical sources in order to determine events in history as they might have occurred and how knowledge about them is transmitted.

Historiography: Historiography is the act of writing.   It involves three phases – Documentary research, Explanation and writing in the composition of historical narrative.

Kyriarchy: A neologism coined by Fiorenza from the Greek words ‘kyrios’ and ‘archein’, Lord and to rule.  It is a socio-political system of domination in which elite educated propertied men hold power over wo/men and other men.

 Kyriocentrism: The cultural-religious-ideological systems and intersecting discourses of race, gender, heterosexuality, class and ethnicity that produce, legitimate, inculcate and sustain kyriarchy.

Malestream: This is a term marking the fact that history, tradition, church, culture and society have been defined by men and have excluded wo/men. Frameworks of scholarship, texts, traditions, language, standards and paradigm of knowledge have been and are male-centered and elite male dominated.

Neologism:‘The creation and employment of new words, or the new use or the redefinition of existing ones.’

Patriarchy: Literally, it means the rule of the father and is generally understood within feminist discourses in a dualistic sense as asserting the domination of all men over all women in equal terms. Reconstruction: ‘A method of remembering, recovering, reclaiming and restoring that seeks to deconstruct the kyriocentric dynamic of a text and to recontextualize it in a different interpretive framework.  It tries to make the subordination and marginalized others ‘visible’ and their repressed arguments and silences ‘audible’ again by displacing the kyriocentric text and by reframing it in a hermeneutic context of struggle.’

Rhetoric: ‘Not simply to be understood in the colloquial sense of stylistic figure and ornament, linguistic manipulation, deceptive propaganda, or ‘mere’ words.  Rhetoric/ rhetorical inquiry assume that biblical texts and interpretations are argumentative and persuasive discourses that involve authorial aims and linguistic symbolic strategies as well as audience perception and construction.  It acknowledges that the interpretation of texts and the production of meaning are determined by particular socio-political-historical locations and political-cultural-religious interest and power.’

Sophialogy: Sophialogy is derived form the Greek Sophia= wisdom/Wisdom and legein=to speak.  Sophialogy is coined in analogy to theology or sociology and means the teaching and practice of wisdom.

Wisdom- Sophia: Sophia is a divine female figuration who appears in the Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha such as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Sirach as well as in the Christian Testament.

Wo/man – Wo/men: This is the way of writing proposed by Fiorenza meant to ‘indicate that the category ‘wo/man – wo/men’ is a social construct.  Wo/men are not a unitary social group but are fragmented by structures of race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, colonialism and age.  This destabilization of the term ‘wo/men’ underscores the differences between wo/men and within individual wo/men.  This writing is inclusive of subaltern men who in kyriarchal systems are seen ‘as wo/men’ and functions as a linguistic corrective to androcentric language use’

 Ekklesia: Ekklesia is defined by Fiorenza as ‘The radical democratic assembly of free citizens who gather in order to conduct critical debate and to determine their own communal, political and spiritual well-being’. In the New Testament, the word is translated as ‘Church’