Isabel Carter Heyward is an American feminist theologian and priest in the Episcopal Church, the province of the worldwide Anglican Communion in the United States. In 1974, she was one of the Philadelphia Eleven, eleven women whose ordinations eventually paved the way for the recognition of women as priests in the Episcopal Church in 1976.
Author of a number of books and numerous articles, Heyward's most distinctive theological idea is that it is open to each of us to incarnate God, and that we do so most fully when we seek to relate genuinely to others in what she calls "relationality". When we do this, we are said to be "godding", a verb Heyward herself coined. God is defined in her work as "our power in mutual relation". Alluding to mainstream Christian views of God, Heyward has stated "I am not much of a theist". For her, "the shape of God is justice", so human activity can, as theologian Lucy Tatman has observed, be divine activity whenever it is just and loving. In her book Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right, Heyward asserts that "the love we make ... is God's own love". In Heyward's work, God is therefore not a personal figure, but instead the ground of being, seen for example in compassionate action, which is "the movement of God in and through the heights and depths of all that is".
Jesus
Again in contrast to the more traditional Christian focus, Heyward believes that "God was indeed in Jesus just as God is in us – as our Sacred, Sensual Power, deeply infusing our flesh, root of our embodied yearning to reach out to one another". This power works to change despair, fear and apathy to hope, courage and what Heyward terms "justice-love". But God's Spirit is not contained "solely in one human life or religion or historical event or moment". God was Jesus' relational power for "forging right relation, in which Jesus himself and those around him were empowered to be more fully who they were called to be". Insisting on the God-incarnating power of all, Heyward observes that "the human act of love, befriending, making justice is our act of making God incarnate in the world". In her recent work she suggests that even the non-human creation may incarnate God, commenting that "there are more faces of Jesus on earth, throughout history and all of nature, than we can begin even to imagine". Not unrelated to this perception, Heyward founded the Free Rein Center for Therapeutic Horseback Riding and Education at Brevard, North Carolina, where she is an instructor
Task of theology
A consequence of this dynamic view of God and Christ is that truth is evolving, not static. A hint of this can be seen in Heyward's approval of Dorothee Sölle's remark that God's Spirit works through "revolutionary patience". This leaves a certain openness to the church's work of proclaiming the truth of Christ: there is an insistence that "we who currently constitute the Christian church are the temporary authors and guardians of 'Christian truth'. It is ours to determine and ours to tend". So the theologian's task involves "a capacity to discern God's presence here and now and to reflect on what this means", and is part of a communal effort and struggle to enable the flourishing of love and justice in a world where the potential for relationality is broken, often violently. The project of "godding", or relationality, then, is an alternative to an authoritarian understanding of social/relational power, both inside and outside the church. Mutual relationship entails a willingness to participate in healing a broken world, and so is not a private or individualistic task. Heyward sees her own task within this broader program as working particularly for the expansion of the church to include people who have historically been left out. In short, the theologian's task is to help bring a greater measure of redemption to the world. Though that task is always concrete, the precise shape it takes depends on the exact "shape of the evil from which people need to be redeemed". On her home page at Episcopal Divinity School, Heyward's wrote that her passion as a theological educator was to enable students to "do theology at its roots: making connections between their daily lives, their relationships and work, their faith and politics – and those of others, past and present, those like them, and those unlike them. The only theology worth doing is that which inspires and transforms lives, that which empowers us to participate in creating, liberating, and blessing the world."
