The paper explores female rage as a neglected yet generative force in theological discourse, especially regarding 20th/21st-century attention to embodied, socially situated, and vulnerable subjects. In feminist theory (Audre Lorde, bell hooks), female rage signals that something is deeply wrong: it functions as an epistemic tool revealing structural inequalities across gender, race, and class, and as a communicative act calling others to accountability. Rage exposes complicity, oppression, and hidden power asymmetries, making visible what dominant groups often ignore. Far from being destructive, it is a creative and transformative affect, energizing political, institutional, and communal change.
Theology has largely marginalized rage, seeing it as contrary to meekness, emotional restraint, or rational reflection. Even in accounts of doctrinal development, such as Michael Seewald's Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church (2023), rage plays little or no role. Yet understanding dogmatic history as an "unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity" opens space to see affective responses like female rage as catalysts of development.
Building on Seewald's models - a positive, exploratory type inspired by Gregory of Nazianzus and an "actualizing" model in which revelation is ever anew actualized in the Church - female rage becomes an epistemological instrument. It illuminates injustice, challenges inequality of ratio and affectus, and fosters reflection on institutional hierarchies, including access to ecclesial offices. Integrating Black feminist insights, theology can reorient toward the concrete and vulnerable, allowing dogmatic development to respond to persistent human, social, and ecological inequalities. Ultimately, female rage is not a threat to theological integrity but a catalyst: it makes injustice visible, energizes communal transformation, and enables theology to rethink its subjects in light of enduring asymmetries.