“Communicate Life”: Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel Imagines Biblical Models for Women

Abstract

This article explains how Moltmann-Wendel “communicates life” by inviting us to participate in the stories of biblical women. Three themes are developed: (1) how Moltmann-Wendel employs “imagination” in a way that is consistent with the Reformed theological commitment to the extra calvinisticum, and why this matters; (2) how Moltmann-Wendel’s narrative reading of biblical stories about women resists a Nestorian separation between the divine and the human, between Word and words, between “theofantasy” and empirical fact—and why this matters; and (3) how Moltmann-Wendel’s interpretation of the women around Jesus becomes flesh in her theology of Mary Magdalene, which she simultaneously identifies as a theology of tenderness.