Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel (25 July 1926 in Herne – 7 June 2016) was a German feminist theologian, best remembered as the founder of the European Society of Women in Theological Research (ESWTR) in 1986.
Her publications translated into English include Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood: The Women around Jesus, A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, I Am My Body, and Rediscovering Friendship.
Her parents were traditionalist nationalists who detested everything about National Socialism, but as far back as she could ever remember she understood that she must avoid repeating at school everything that was said at home.
After May 1945 she was able to travel from her Potsdam home to Berlin, some 15 miles / 25 kilometers away, to attend lectures in Protestant Theology, initially at a Church College and subsequently at the "Friedrich Wilhelm University" (as it was still known at that time).
It seems to have followed an incremental build-up driven by various articles that friends brought her from the USA, concerning the feminist movement there and trends in theology (and sometimes on both of these at once).
In terms of the iterative deductive reasoning familiar from traditional German teaching methods, this new material seemed to turn the thought-process on its head, starting not from some theological premise, but from women themselves, including their societal contexts and their lived experiences.
[19] "Wholeness" ("Ganzheit") and "women's experience" ("Erfahrung von Frauen") became the core interpretational tools of Moltmann-Wendel's biblical understanding and, more broadly, of her theology.
[22] 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.
[11][23] That was part of the context for her establishment of the "Fernstudium Feministische Theologie" ("Feminist Theology Distance Learning") project in Württemberg.
[7][24] 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.
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.
[7][26] 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.
In 1986 Moltmann-Wendel was one of thise involved in creating the "Europäische Gesellschaft für theologische Forschung von Frauen“ (ESWTR / "European Society of Women in Theological Research").
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.