On Biblical Conversations Around Women: From My Unpublished Book

            In recent years, theological movements have grown up that center around specific moral issues. Less concerned with Biblical interpretive models or metaphysics, they instead focus reflection on God on key ethical struggles. Biblical scholarship has revealed an important fact about Jesus, something that has long been lost on most Christians: the specificity of Jesus' message. Jesus' brand of preaching was not highly abstract. He was a particular person, of a particular time, with particular pressing ethical and political issues he dealt with. We have good reason to believe that the historical Jesus was Jewish-centric in His message and that He had a particular concern for the plight of the Jews (CONVERSATIONAL LOOK-UP). The Kingdom He was trying to usher in was a Kingdom that would include and center round the Jewish people and would supplant the order that had been put in place by the Romans. Yet Christianity has tended to focus on the parts of Jesus' message that can be abstracted and applied to all people all the time. We have de-judaized Jesus so that we can more easily appropriate His teachings. By re-acquainting ourselves with Jesus' struggle within the political and cultural milieu of His own day, we can begin to appreciate the importance of doing theology within the context of specific struggles and needs. In that way, we prevent our religion from being divorced from our real lives, and we allow the community to find God within the very fabric of their lives, rather than forcing a vision upon them that is cooked up on a computer at a seminary or at home (yes, I'm aware of the irony).

            Thus liberation theologians have brought the Christian message to bear on the specific issues that concern third world and oppressed peoples. They have discovered in Jesus' Jewish-centric message of liberation a mirror for their own underdog status, and their own struggle for freedom and prosperity. Politically active Christians have used Christian imagery to energize movements for specific political issues of varying stripes, realizing that Jesus was dealing with specific political problems, they have been inspired to do the same, not shying away from the political realm because of the moral dangers involved. Two movements of this type that will be particularly important for our discussion of the Holy Spirit are feminist theology and eco-theology.

             Feminist theology's main goal has been to champion the cause of women in a world where women too often and for too long have suffered from abuse and oppression. It has rightly identified religion in general and Biblical religion in particular as partly culpable for this evil, and has sought to act as a corrective. Jesus' fight against specific oppression inspires the feminist theologian's protest against paternalism in much the same way it served to inspire the struggle of oppressed races, countries, and classes through liberation theology. In some ways feminist theology is a branch of that same movement. However, feminist theologians tend to focus much more on Biblical theology, because the Bible itself struggles with the role of women in society. Much of the Bible is misogynistic. In the Old Testament, women are identified as the main cause of man's betrayal of God in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:4-6, 3:16), they are treated as property and given lower rights than men in marriage (Genesis 34, Deuteronomy 24, Hosea 3:2), and the Wisdom writings are constantly warning against the evils that women bring upon men, but little about the evil men can bring upon women. God is almost universally identified as male, and there is at least the implication in this identification that somehow the male experience of life is closer to the Divine than the female experience of life. Over and against this tendency to exalt maleness are a few individual protests, voices that proclaim the importance of women for God, and their value alongside their male counterparts. The stories of Deborah and Judith run counter to the subordinate roles women are seemingly assigned by God in much of the Old Testament (Judges 4-5, Judith chapters 8-15), and their place as God's soldiers and messengers decry the idea that somehow women don't have an equal share of the Divine within them. Even the story of Eve's creation tends to run counter to the subordinate position women are said to have in most of the Old Testament. In the first Genesis Creation Story, God makes male AND female in His image. In the Second Genesis Creation Story, contrary to popular translation, God does not make Eve out of Adam's "rib". The word traditionally translated "rib" actually means something like "side". What happens is that after God tires of trying to make mankind a suitable animal companion (Genesis 2:18-25), He gets frustrated and splits Adam in two, resulting in a male and female human dynamic.

            But the biggest 'feministic' protest against misogynistic tendencies in the Old Testament is the Book of Ruth. The book is focused almost entirely on the relationship between two women who are left to struggle with a world where they have little rights, trying through their love for each other to find a way out of utter despair. The most striking imagery in the book can be found in chapter 4 verse 15, which claims that Ruth is of more value to Naomi, her mother-in-law, than seven sons. This seems to me to be a clear commentary against the prevailing male-centric voice of the Bible.

            The New Testament has a lot more to commend itself when it comes to women's rights. Women play a big role in Jesus' life, and Paul often speaks highly of women leaders in the early church, like the deaconess Phoebe, and female Apostle Junia (Romans 16:1, 16:7). Paul's own view that ultimately through Christ all are given equal access to God, also tends to de-emphasize gender distinctions. However, there are other places where Paul seems to reinforce the subordinate role of women. A big example is 1 Corinthians 14:34. Some people have suggested that this particular passage seems out of place when put in context, and was probably edited in later. The cadence and subject matter of the passage just doesn't match up with what surrounds it. When I read the passage I definitely get the feeling that this is the case. I'm inclined to think that the passage is a later redaction. The subordination of women just doesn't match up with Paul's overall vision, one where we all become one with Christ through the Holy Spirit. Gender distinctions may make sense 'in the world', but not inside the church. Other passages found in Timothy and elsewhere that seem to express similar sentiments to the 1 Corinthians passage are widely believed to be written pseudonymous long after Paul's death. That doesn't change the fact that they are part of the canon, and that the New Testament also has a strong misogynistic tradition, but it does mean that this does not necessarily begin with Paul or Jesus.

            None of the women-friendly passages amounts to much when put against the general thrust of scripture. This 'conversation over the role of women' is downright depressing. The very fact that women's equal status under God was ever questioned at all would be disgusting enough. More abhorrent is the fact that the main voice in the conversation speaks to the lesser status of women. Feminist theologians have done us a service by helping us focus on those lesser voices of protest against this prevailing view, and their criticism of that prevailing view is equally important.