Provenance and early years Elisabeth Wendel was born at
Herne, a large industrial town a short distance to the west of
Dortmund. In 1945 Berlin had been divided for administrative purposes between the armies of the USA, Britain, France and the Soviet Union:
the university had ended up
administered as part of the
Soviet occupation zone. As the
Soviet military administration became established she and her contemporaries found themselves under increasing pressure to choose between a version of
God and a version of
Marx. Many chose Marx, but Wendel chose God. She was, however, "disappointed with the Theology Faculty there", and while sources are vague over time lines in respect of this period, Wendel's stay at Tübingen was relatively brief, and is indeed ignored by some sources. In 1947 Elisabeth Wendel switched to
Göttingen where she continued her studies in Theology. She was, in particular, encouraged in her studies by
Otto Weber, the University Professor in Protestant Theology. The couple's first baby was stillborn for reasons unknown. Between 1955 and 1963 they had four daughters, all of whom survived. Later, in a work of autobiography, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel would recall about motherhood: "I was no longer 'a nobody', in the way that was sometimes enforced on me by 'just a wife' existence.... But barely perceptibly and slowly I moved into a role that I could never have imagined". Her project concerned the life and theological contributions of the
Amsterdam theologian
Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrugge.
Jürgen's doctorate, on
Moses Amyraut and his teaching on predestination, would follow a few months later, still in 1952.
Domesticity Between 1952 and 1972 Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel had very little public profile. As a married woman, there were fewer job opportunities available to her within church institutions than there would have been if she had remained single. Looking after her infant daughters kept her busy during the 1950s and 1960s. There were frequent house moves in connection with her husband's career. During the 1960s she nevertheless found time to research and publish the occasional scholarly paper relating to theology. By 1970 the family were living in
Tübingen: that was where the Moltmanns would continue to live for the rest of Elisabeth's life. "I am good: I am whole: I am beautiful!" became the
mantra she employed to recast
Lutheran Justification doctrines for women in both bodily and holistic terms. For Moltmaann-Wendel "wholeness" always meant a unity of body and spirit, of political action and theological underpinning. A quasi-binary distinction between body and spirit could not be intellectually sustained because it stems from a tradition whereby the body is given a "sacred" significance. Tellingly, her definitions of the
Last Supper and of
Christian baptism rituals, based on the widely-shared experiences of women, met with harsh criticism from the traditionalist
Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg. That was part of the context for her establishment of the "Fernstudium Feministische Theologie" (
"Feminist Theology Distance Learning") project in
Württemberg. The flair that Moltmaann-Wendel repeatedly displayed for formulating the central tenets of
feminist theology in terms that instantly made sense to the women in (and outside) the pews led to admirers describing her, with affection, as "the mother of the ecclesiastical women's movement" in Germany. In a contribution during the 1990s to the anthology "Im Einklang mit dem Kosmos" (
"In Harmony with the Cosmos") she included a plea in support of Arendt's personal compilation "Denken ohne Geländer", and thereby urged her readers to think through the doctrine of
the Incarnation uncompromisingly to a conclusion. A deep love for everything corporeal-sensual and for the Earth ran through Moltmann-Wendel's thinking. Her autobiography demonstrates this vividly. In the context of the various
New Testament stories of Jesus healing women, the importance of women's bodies for theological understanding becomes another interpretational key to her thinking. In pursuit of her urge to communicate and to test her ideas, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel was a copious networker, especially with other female theologians. As early as the 1980s the
Tübingen home that she shared with
her husband - by this time a noted theological scholar on his own account - was a meeting place for theologians from
Germany,
Austria,
Switzerland and further afield. Regular guests included her friend
Herlinde Pissarek-Hudelist, a theologian from
Innsbrick, who in 1988 became the first ever
female dean of a Catholic theology faculty. Others included
Catharina Halkes from
Nijmegen,
Helen Schüngel-Straumann from (originally)
Switzerland and
Elisabeth Gössmann who had received her
doctorate in Theology from
the University of Munich at the same time as
Joseph Ratzinger. (1954 had been the first year in which doctorates in catholic theology were awarded in Germany.) Between 1955 and 1986
Gössmann had worked in
Tokyo, but the final decades of her teaching career she spent back in Europe. In 1986 Moltmann-Wendel involved in creating the "Europäische Gesellschaft für theologische Forschung von Frauen“ (ESWTR /
"European Society of Women in Theological Research"). In order to secure and preserve the rapidly increasing fruits of researches in
Feminist theology, Moltmann-Wendel joined with Pissarek-Hudelist and others to launch the "Wörterbuch der Feministischen Theologie" (
"Dictionary of Feminist Theology") in 1980 which, now into its second edition, remains a standard work. She turned town invitations to help on preparing the feminist
"Bibel in gerechter Sprache" ("Bible in the right language"). She shared the belief that "the language of the [Lutheran and later] bible(s), like the church itself [was] male-sexist", but she believed that the guidelines for this particular project were excessively rigid and one-sided. == Publications (selection) ==