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Women and the Bible: A Modern Debate

Minutes

Socratic Club's fourth forum was held on October 30th, from 7-9 p.m. in the Journey Room in the MU. The guest speakers were Dr. Susan Shaw from Women Studies and Dr. Sally Gallagher from Sociology. The topic about which they presented alternate views was "Women and the Bible: A Modern Debate."
Dr. Gallagher spoke first, beginning with a discussion of how she reads Scripture, then walked the audience through the main elements of a conservative, Protestant, Evangelical reading of Scripture. She stated that "any time we approach topics that are widely debated, it is important to have a sense of where people come from." For her own part, when she reads the texts, she does so as "a critical realist who understands the texts to be inspired by God -- in the sense that God actively combines divine ideas with the personality and culture of the people to whom those ideas are given, shaping ideas through a variety of people, times, and places." When she opens the Bible, she tries to understand its context, history, and what she calls "the big picture" -- the unfolding of God's revelation of salvation, and his call to people to be transformed through him.
Dr. Gallagher recognized that "salvation has an earthly, temporal component to it as well as significance for the hereafter. When I think about what the Bible says about women and gender, I have to understand this message as a subsidiary message within the overall picture of unfolding revelation and unfolding salvation. If I begin with Jesus, I see Jesus breaking cultural norms -- the norms of the Greco-Roman culture of the day which oppressed women. At that time, women had no political rights and no property rights, but were considered the property of their husbands." So when she opens the gospels and reads about how Jesus interacted with women, she sees "a culturally radical message. I see Jesus interacting with people like Mary Magdalene, a prostitute in a sexually abusive town where women sold themselves and were used to 'service' troops in the area. Jesus consistently reaches across racial, social, economic, and gender boundaries in ways that blow open contemporary ideas about what men and women are supposed to do." Dr. Gallagher cited the story about the hemorrhaging woman who reaches out to touch the hem of Jesus' garment and is healed, and Jesus turns and asks "who touches me?" Though surrounded by a massive crowd, Jesus gave his attention to her, and in Jewish culture, "the issue of blood was tricky -- blood, especially menstrual blood, was unclean, but Jesus is here willing to associate himself with a bleeding woman." Jesus also met a woman in the area of Samaria and in the middle of the day stops to talk with her at the well -- and not only did he speak with her in public, but he engaged her in a personal and theological discussion, though others of the day might have considered her "inferior" because of her ethnicity, religion and gender.
Women also played a key role in helping Jesus and the disciples. Peter and Lazarus' sister recognized that Jesus is the Christ, for Lazarus' sister said "I know you are the Christ, and that you can raise the dead." By saying this, she (like Peter) "makes the key underlying statement of the gospel, recognizing in the person of Jesus the Christ." Though women weren't even allowed to be witnesses in court, women were chosen to be the first witnesses of Christ's resurrection -- something that would be entirely "counterintuitive to the men of the day. From the perspective of the gospels, we see Jesus interacting with women, breaking the cultural constraints, taking the women seriously and demonstrating an expectation that they will engage in theological discussion. The big picture in the gospels -- the whole context for that -- is that Jesus is bringing in the kingdom of God -- entailing a transformation of individuals and a transformation of their relations/conditions; a kingdom in which individuals are adopted into a family/kingdom/community in which gender, class, ethnicity and all kinds of barriers are done away with."
In other parts of the New Testament (such as the epistles, Paul's letters to churches), Dr. Gallagher sees "an extension of the message of good news to change lives, translated by Paul out of Jewish culture into a Greco-Roman culture. When I read the letters of Paul, many of which have been interpreted as explicitly oppressive to women, I try to put myself into the culture at the time and there again I see the unpacking of the everyday relations and what it means to identify with Jesus and be transformed." Dr. Gallagher believes that the place to begin seeing this is in Galatians: "The Galatian church was struggling with the question about whether one had to be a Jew before one could be a Christian. People were concerned and asking: 'What about all these new people? How could anyone hop on board as if it were a free ride? It's not their history; it's not their Messiah -- how come they get in on all the good news?' Then Paul wrote to them in response, saying "you may not live as though you are bound to a Levitical church/ tradition; you must live in a way that is open; there is a new kind of life that is to be emergent in you and in this church and it ought to look very different. In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither man nor woman."
Dr. Gallagher recognized that "that's all very smooth sailing; those of you who have these theological ideas already are thinking 'so far so good; she hasn't said anything very screwy yet.' At this point I'd like to present two different streams of tradition that I find within the broad conservative Evangelical Protestant view and discuss the 'so what?' of gender." If Jesus "transforms the lives of human beings and communities, and if it has something to do with tearing down the boundaries between people, what does that mean for who does the grocery shopping or what does that mean for who serves communion in church, or who drives the car or who goes to work? These are the fundamental questions." Dr. Gallagher explained that she intended to give the audience both what she sees as a prevailing evangelical Christian explanation -- how it should work in practice -- and then give what seems like a minority, sometimes called Christian feminist or biblical feminist, perspective.
Both have a similar view of the authority of the text -- that "it is not just about me and my opinion but how I should be conforming myself top the message that has been passed down. Both attempt to do that, but they have different outcomes. The first perspective is generally called the complementary perspective, and it is more traditional because it has the broadest and longest historical continuity." Those who disagree with it call it the hierarchical/patriarchal view, but those who believe it call it the complementary view. "The idea is that God has created, in the male and female, elements of God's person that are baked into one's sexuality. The Genesis account discusses the image of God that is put in human beings, suggesting that it is somehow male/female, masculine/feminine, and a whole lot more, and the idea is that somehow, in the warp and woof of your biology, psychology, and person, there are essential differences between men and women that should be celebrated and preserved to reflect the diversity of the Godhead. What does that mean? We can look in Paul's letter to the church of Ephesus, a trading town in Asia Minor to see. In that letter, Paul offered some expectations about how men and women should relate to each other, beginning with a statement that we should submit to one another in reverence for Christ, and for wives to submit to their husbands. At this point, many people stop reading because this statement sticks in the craw, but if you read on, you will see that the passage is extraordinarily radical because in that same passage Paul goes on to say that we are all responsible to submit ourselves to some higher authority.
"Moreover, an idea of husbands' responsibility to their wives was unheard of in that time, when women were not believed to be persons, and even more, the teaching of the Bible is that husbands are to treat their wives not only as person but to sacrificially love their wives -- like Jesus loved the church -- laying down their own life and body for the well-being of their wives. To speak that kind of language in a culture in which women are not people is a very radical thing. Paul says that wives should respect their husbands, and husbands should love their wives; pretty good news to consider wives as equals and coheirs, and men were expected to sacrifice themselves. Peter, too, writes that men should attend to the needs of their wives, or God will not even listen to their prayers. Nevertheless, this complementary view of men, women and gender maintains the idea that men in the end have some kind of final accountability before god, and are responsible for families, and that if there are screw ups the buck stops with the man; they have final responsibility."
Dr. Gallagher pointed out that "the sticking point for our culture is the notion that wives should submit to their husbands. Within the context of these passages, conservative Evangelical Christians would explain that it really turns out to be a 'sharing thing' if he is sacrificing himself for her, and she is respecting him. And the Scripture is pretty clear that wives should defer to husbands unless their husbands ask them to do something that is disobedient to God. The theological justification for all of this is the perspective that this relationship and the differences between men and women reflect something about the character of God that is baked into creation and physiology and sets up a hierarchy of roles and a division of labor within the home and church. This difference in roles is not a result of the fall or social corruption, but represents an ideal of unity and cooperation.
"Having said that, I want to take a few minutes to present an alternative perspective of the same texts that answer the story quite differently, and that is evangelical egalitarianism, or evangelical feminism. To do that, we have to start with a passage from 1 Timothy. An evangelical feminist understands the gospels to present a message of egalitarianism, consistent with cutting down boundary walls including those of gender. We have to deal with Paul's words to Timothy, where he tells him to hang in there, stand up for what is right and make sure that you instruct men and women about how to worship, including that women should be silent in the church.
"This raises some questions, at which point you have to get a concordance and try to figure these things out -- any time we work on exegesis we have to make an effort to get inside the thinking of the times, and understand the culture. To a Christian, it is usually very important to accept the Bible -- to keep the whole thing and not throw it out -- because it is inspired and it has authority. The trick, then, is to understand and see which pieces are specific to the time and which leap across the centuries to tell me something now. In the church at Ephesus, the men were claiming that women should not teach. Some evidence suggests that a problem existed at the church of Ephesus based on a gnostic, goddess-worshipping culture in the city, and that some people claimed that Eve, from Genesis, and other women were capable of a higher level of spirituality that men could not achieve, and that the whole progress of human religious development was to move from matter to spirit. It makes sense then, that Paul should write that women should not teach such ideas. He's not saying that women shouldn't ever speak in church, but that in that particular context at Ephesus, fix the false teaching."
[Notes leave off here because this part of the recording is inaudible.]
Dr. Shaw then presented her deconstructionist views of the Bible, building on what Dr. Gallagher already outlined, but "moving it further into some of the different ways that other types of feminists have read scripture." She started with Mary Daly, who taught at Boston College and forwarded the notion that "Christianity is patriarchal and ought to be replaced. But she was Catholic and taught at a Catholic church that was nasty to her, and that influenced her reading and ideas about Scripture just as all of us read Scripture from a particular standpoint." Daly argued two things: 1. You can take anything out of Christianity and show how it has been used to oppress women. The theological notion of transcendence, for example: People tend to associate women with body, and earth, so if the highest ideal is transcendence, then of course men are more like gods than women, because they are not tied to the earth. 2. Beyond that, language itself is androcentric -- a language of patriarchy that maintains patriarchy, and all ways of expressing it will reinforce that patriarchy. Patriarchal religions legitimate patriarchy, so it is of no value to women.
Shaw disagrees with Daly on some points though she agrees with her on others and appreciates her work. She agrees that most of the ways the Bible has been used has been oppressive -- not only to women, but to other races and other sexualities. But she disagrees that it is of no value. She sees in the text the seeds of disrupting patriarchy. She believes in going back to the text itself to consider the cultural context, and recognizes the stories that are disruptive if you read them seriously.
Shaw's ideas are rooted in her Southern Baptist background and the "core notion called the priesthood of all believers: No one stands between a person and God, and that they therefore don't need anybody to interpret the word of God for them. They also believe in the liberty of the individual conscience -- to believe what I want to believe and live as I choose. Part of the ideal in our country that people have the liberty to believe or not, worship or not worship." She approaches Scripture from this position, believing that she is the only one who can interpret the Bible for her. She does this within a community, to be sure, but ultimately she makes those decisions for herself. She was also raised as a fundamentalist, and grew up with pastors who would wave the Bible around and say no error could be found, but she would write down places where she found contradictions, and finally went on to seminary school. There, she began "the process of digging in and looking at the Bible from its cultural context, asking questions, freed from the literalism that often limited her appreciation for the text." Many of her ideas changed, starting with the idea of inspiration. She believes that Scripture is "inspired in the same way that any other great literature or art is inspired; that certain writers have moments of heightened awareness and capture something about reality." That moves her away from believing the Bible has an ultimate authority to recognizing that "where the Bible speaks truth that does apply, but isn't equally true on every point."
The difference for her between the Bible and say, Shakespeare, is twofold. First, "the explicit content of the Bible makes it a little bit different; the Bible specifically speaks to our religious lives, so has quite a bit to say directly to our religious lives. Secondly, the Bible is different in the place that it holds within the faith; it is comparable to the constitution; our guide about how to be a citizen, defines what citizenship is, etc." That is the place she thinks the Bible holds in the Christian faith; it is "the definitive document with which we have to be involved in a dialogue somehow in order to have a Christian identity."
Shaw believes that the Bible is a record of people witnessing about how they saw God working in their world and "[doesn't] see it as a historical witness but rather as a faith witness. The people experienced things and identified God at work and gave that a faith interpretation. They could look around them and see a rainbow in the sky -- on one hand, in our worldview, we give a big scientific explanation for the rainbow; in their worldview, they told a story. And so they imposed their worldview of faith upon the events they saw. The point of the scripture writers though was not just to teach people history or even theology, but to teach them how to live as the people of God; how to express and shape a distinct identity. For me, as a feminist interpreter, at the core of that identity is the notion of justice. The Bible says to do justice and love God. Love God and love your neighbor; that is what it is about and what scripture teaches us. The story of scripture is central to Christian identity but the gets shaped and reshaped by who we are as we know it and live it, and we are shaped and reshaped as we hear it and see it in our lives and the lives of others. So for me, I am not often comfortable with the language connected to the idea of the Bible being the word of God because I don't believe that a text can be the word of God. What I believe though is that when I read the text and it speaks to me about the way I live in the world, it becomes the word of God too, in that case."
Dr. Shaw then wrote a few terms on the board to help us understand the tools she uses to understand Scripture when she reads it.
1. Historical criticism -- "what Dr. Gallagher was getting at when she was talking about different ways to interpret scripture. This uses a number of forms of criticism:
a. Source criticism -- looking at the documents and saying and where did the people who wrote this text get their sources and what are they?
b. Form criticism -- how did these sources get to be written down? This traces the movement of a story from oral history to written document.
c. Redaction criticism -- what is the perspective of the editor? What was Matthew trying to accomplish that was different from Mark or John?
d. Canonical criticism -- discussion of what books belong in the Bible; why did some get in and not others?
2. Feminist reconstruction:
1. Name the places where the Bible is oppressive. Paul said ___ and Paul was wrong. Acknowledges the existence of a problem.
2. Name the silences. We know women were there -- Da Vinci's "Last Supper" -- who do you think made all that food? The women were there, yet they aren't often discussed. We ought to look at the New Testament not as archetype (image lasting for all time in ultimate reality), but as prototype ('we're going to try this out and we may not get it completely, but this is a really good start'), setting us on a road to freedom and justice.
3. Narrative -- read the Bible as story. Stories are always more than we can interpret them to be, inviting multiple interpretations.
4. Experiential -- bring one's own experiences into the equation -- there will be problems between Scripture and experience, for example, God's omnipotence -- if God could stop the abuse of a young girl, why didn't he?
5. Call to radical discipleship -- what does it mean to be in the community of God in the here and now?
6. Liberation -- what can this tell me about what it means to do justice in the world and liberate people? How does the Bible speak to the liberation of women?
So all those happen kind of concurrently, and when I read the Bible, I'm not so much looking for 'THE Truth,' or truth with a little 't' but looking for ways to be in the world; to continue to be a person of God and live out the justice that I see in the story of Jesus. I acknowledge that my view is only partial and that I need to be humble enough to listen to other people. Where other people stand leads them to some piece of truth about the world that I can't see from where I stand, and I intend to bring that into dialogue. So where it ends up for me is not so much a matter of what I believe as how I live. I came from a tradition where what you believed was all that mattered and you had to say these words and these words and these to be a believer. But for me, as I look at the life of Jesus, being Christian is to do what he did: Focus on loving God and your neighbor.