After Eve: Unleashing women’s spiritual and psychological identity through a reclamation of the Divine Feminine

Abstract

This dissertation joins the vibrant chorus of feminist voices agitating for reform in cisheteropatriarchal understandings of sacred biblical texts. Where these texts have remained intransigent to the winnowing of social change, they dislocate woman from the Divine Feminine and negate her holistic development into a sacred self. Three biblical texts are examined for clues to individuation, parsed for feminine undertones, and their liberative intent reclaimed. A Romanyshyn-Gadamer hermeneutics study using a feminist lens form the basis of the methodological approach. As a contribution to scholarship in theology, depth psychology, and feminist studies, this dissertation sits at the interstices of psyche and spirit seeking a bridge for interpretation that liberates both the text, and women, from the patriarchal chokehold on traditional meanings of classic biblical texts.