ABSTRACT
As Krister Stendahl Professor of Scripture and Interpretation at Harvard Divinity School Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has an international standing in contemporary Christian theological scholarship and education that few women engaged with theology and gender can make claim to. In exploring the implications and possibilities of feminist analysis and criticism for Christian theology Schüssler Fiorenza offers the image of the feminist informed theologian as a "troublemaker, as a resident alien". This, then, moves away from a stress on the critical dependency of feminist informed Christian theologies on a conflictual or marginal relationship with "mainline" Christian theology. One of the key areas of feminist theological concern in which Schüssler Fiorenza's work has had most impact is in the area of the early Christian Church studies. She has proposed and developed, particularly in her earlier studies, a radical reconstructionist approach to the recovery and elaboration of women's Christian history and heritage.
