The Good Book
Page 16
Language has become the battlefield for the conflict between old and new ideas, and the inclusive language debates with which Christian churches have contended in the last twenty years demonstrate just how hard and bitterly people will fight for the right to their language of choice. Perhaps even more than the ordination of women, the language issue has been the place where the conflicts of inclusion have been most painfully addressed. More perhaps than through the Bible itself, the popular piety of most Christians, particularly Protestants, has been expressed in the hymns people sing in church. The late New Testament scholar and poet, Amos Niven Wilder, once said that what incense is to the Catholic, hymns are to the Protestant: an indescribable, primal association of the personal and the holy. One learns the hymns of the faith in childhood. They provide a theological vocabulary that may be supplemented and improved upon by age and experience, but is never supplanted. It has been my experience time after time that what remains with the dying Christian is the hymns of childhood. And it is my experience as well as that of practically every other preacher that worship depends upon the hymns. The sermon may be good or bad, the liturgy indifferent, but the effect of the service depends upon whether or not the people know and like the hymns. And most people like the hymns they know and on that basis know what they like. Thus to tamper with the hymns is to get perilously close to the emotional center of the worshiper.
“Textual Harassment?” 2
Women recognized this early on, knowing that the hymnic images are for most people the determining images and language of piety. Thus, to be excluded from the language was in their minds to be excluded from the fundamental experience of worship, or to be included under terms that did not affirm their particular identity as women. Women would ask, “Where am I?” when at funerals we sang Isaac Watt’s great paraphrase, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away.” Even in so basic an act of Christian praise as the Doxology, which affirms, “Praise Him all creatures here below” and closes with the Trinitarian formula of “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” women increasingly asked where they were in these classical formulations. When the congregation is asked to sing “Rise Up, O Men of God,” are the women to remain seated, or are they to think of themselves as Elizabeth I did, as a man trapped in the puny body of a woman?
Challenges in scholarship are one thing. But challenges to popular piety, which strike at the heart of the believer and the language of devotion, with all of the fond and intimate associations that language evokes, are another thing. Congregations were set at each other over the battle for the hymns. Radical inclusivists were accused of Freudian-like “pronoun envy,” and the hymns, once the point of commonality, became symbols of the great divisions among people. It is difficult to say if the scholarship of women generated the disease with the language of hymnody, or if the distress at the exclusive language of hymnody generated the case for a new and compelling scholarship. Whatever the answer to this particular chicken-and-egg dilemma, hymns will never be quite the same again. For my part, I have been no more willing to edit out offending passages in hymns than I have been to edit out offending passages in scripture. But while it is not possible to write new Bibles that reflect the spirit of the age, it is not only possible, but essential, that we write new hymns to add to the storehouse of piety, hymns that include more people.
It seems to me that where the old hymns are concerned, we do not have to be like Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan New Model Army, which took great delight in smashing the medieval iconography of the English cathedrals, justifying such vandalism in the name of God and of their revolution. Had they been more successful in their efforts than they were, we would be the poorer today. It was an English cleric friend of mine who, at the height of the revision of liturgical language in the English prayer book two decades ago, observed that the glories of English worship had survived Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, and Adolf Hitler, only to be done in by the heavy hand of the liturgical reformers of the 1970s.
Somewhere between a thoughtless veneration of the past and the total destruction of all that is out of step with the latest conclusions of the moment is where most of us within the church would like to stand, and it is possible that women may show us, at least in part, how to do this.
Dianne Bergant in her article “Women in the Bible: Friends or Foes?”3 divides the biblical scholarship of women into revisionists and reformists. The revisionists, or revolutionaries, as some of the feminist theologians prefer to be called, “contend that the Bible has not only outgrown its usefulness, but is, in fact, detrimental to the development of women—and men for that matter. They often seek to reconstruct history as it should have been remembered, not as it has been remembered.” The tradition for this point of view is not simply exclusive, it is destructive, and therefore irrelevant. The reformers, on the other hand, while equally opposed to patriarchy, “maintain that the message of the Bible is itself intrinsically liberating.” To get at that biblical message and its liberating truth depends, of course, on how the Bible is to be read.
Bergant defines herself as a reformist, which means to her that the biblical tradition is a source of revelation for her, and remains so in its contemporary reinterpretation. She makes the telling but not so radical point that every generation, “successive communities of faith,” as she calls them, has struggled with the relationship between the received tradition and the demands of its own unique experiences. Technically, this process in the field of biblical interpretation is called canonical criticism, but so technical a term should not disguise the fundamental fact that each age can read what it has received only through the lenses of its own experience.
Anyone who considers the matter will realize that eighteenth-century Christians do not necessarily interpret the texts of scripture in the same way as twelfth-century Christians. Augustine did not read scripture in the same way as Paul, and Luther repudiated centuries of Roman Catholic interpretation. American fundamentalists read scripture very differently from nonfundamentalist communions—and in fact, very differently from the primitive church, although they would dispute that as a slander upon themselves and scripture. This is not simply a matter of relativity, as many with a high view of scripture would contend, but an unavoidable and perfectly understandable phenomenon of relevance. That women should do this is no more destructive of scripture than it was when Augustine, Luther, or Calvin did it. Scripture will survive such an inquiry, although there may be some reasonable doubt about the survivability of the exclusively male view of scripture.
Bergant’s method is disarmingly simple, and I will describe it only briefly and without doing full justice to her discussion, simply to demonstrate that the best of this feminist scholarship is both accessible and constructive, taking both scripture and its interpretation as seriously today as ever it was taken in the great historical days of biblical interpretation. She calls her method “recontextualizing,” and it involves (1) Looking carefully at the received tradition; how has this text come down to us in the history of interpretation? (2) Operating out of a feminist sensitivity to the contemporary context; how is the text received now? (3) Finally, pointing out how “the dynamics within the text” can achieve a significance within the community that now reads and hears it. This is really no more than the Saturday-night method of any responsible preacher who has to stand up in the pulpit on Sunday morning, text in hand: (1) What did it mean then? (2) How do we understand it now? (3) So what do we do with it, or what does it do with us?
Rather than terrorizing scripture or subverting the faithful, this particular example of a feminist hermenutic, one among many, I might add, actually works toward liberating both text and reader and is hardly a radical methodology—except, perhaps, in the including of perspectives hitherto excluded. Bergant concludes: “The result of such an approach is a reading that is both faithful and challenging. It is faithful because as ‘word of God,’ it is challenging; and it is challenging precisely because as open to God, it is faithful.”
A story of W. C. Fields has the old reprobate on what he thinks may well be his deathbed. When his doctor comes in to see him, he finds Fields leafing furiously through a huge Bible. Surprised at such a sign of piety in so notoriously profane a fellow as Fields, the physician asks, “What are you looking for?” Replies Fields, “Loopholes.”
That may appear to be the only paradigm available to those who would look at the hard passages here and hope to find something other than a confirmation of the status quo, but there is more to it than that, and a survey of critical literature presents us with a range of opinion on how to “read” what we find here. These are not loopholes, but they are options, and we look at them now. The options, adapted from a technical but useful study by Arthur Rowe,4 are these:
Paul, a man of his time
Permanent principles
Particular problems
Not from Paul
Hermeneutical problem
The first option may well be called the principle of context. Paul writes as a man in a man’s world. The roles of men and women in agrarian first-century society were prescribed by the circumstances of that society, where, with very rare exceptions, women were subordinate to men. In the three worlds of which Paul was a citizen, the Jewish, the Greek, and the Roman, women’s societal roles were dictated by the subordination principle. His teachings on women, therefore, while reflecting the mores of his time, are no more relevant to an age where those mores no longer apply then, say, first-century standards of dress, of social etiquette, or of dietary rules. Paul is a social and political conservative. He does not, for example, advocate revolution against the state, and as we know, he requires that Christians obey lawful authority. Only in his theology, and in anticipation of the world to come, is he radical. So we should understand him, his social teachings, and those who imitate his teachings such as the writer of Timothy, as writing from within the social assumptions of the age of which they are a part.
The second option sees Paul enunciating in these hard passages permanent principles of behavior, normative rules for the organization of the church and the relations between men and women within those churches. Here we should not necessarily infer that one role is better and superior to, or less good and inferior to, the other; they are simply different and distinct. The model and order of creation to which Paul himself appeals is an example: The man is made first, and the woman second. This does not mean that the man is better than the woman, or the woman inferior to the man. It does mean that they are different, by order of precedence, and by function. Harmony is assured when that order is understood and the different functions in the relationship are appreciated and affirmed.
The third option looks at the hard passages in Corinthians and Timothy as addressed to particular and particularly troublesome situations in the places to which the letters are addressed. As we do not have all of the correspondence and do not necessarily know what it is that provokes Paul’s response, we may well infer that women were party to some contentiousness in these churches. These then are Paul’s instructions to put these troubles in those places, and at that time, to rest. These instructions are situation-oriented, and are not meant to be normative, and they certainly are not meant to inhibit the work of the Lydias, the Phoebes, and the Priscillas, and they do not negate the “equality principle” enunciated in Galatians 3:28, where all distinctions are leveled in Christ on the basis of baptism.
The fourth option is perhaps the most attractive for those who want to liberate themselves and Paul from Paul: These texts are not from Paul but from a “proto-Paul.” One tempting theory, supported apparently by the earliest manuscripts, is that the instructions about women are to be found in the margin of the manuscript and not in the text, and they appear in their present places in the manuscripts by virtue of a later editorial decision on the part of a copyist. The problem remains, but at least it is not a problem of Paul’s, and lacking that ultimate authority, can be “situationalized.”
The fifth option is perhaps the most demanding, and that is that we must seek principles of interpretation that allow for the cultural presuppositions both of Paul and of the reader in making sense of these texts. In other words, if we expect to find women in a subordinate cultural position in Pauline times, we read that condition as normative in reading the text; and if in our own climate of interpretation we understand that subordination to be biblical, we are not surprised to find it there and affirm its presence and its application to our own time as well.
If one has no interest concerning the role of women in New Testament times, or now, for that matter, and if one does not see these hard passages as essentially inconsistent with the larger picture of the gospel as found in the New Testament, then, as we have said before, the problem is no problem. However, the last twenty-five years of New Testament studies with respect to the role of women both in the Bible and now in the churches makes this of interest, indeed, of concern, to everyone who takes the Bible and the churches seriously, even those who are opposed to any construction of these hard passages other than what they believe to be their clear, if painful, meaning. No less a resource than The Women’s Bible Commentary, published in 1992, with the ambition, as stated in the introduction, “to gather some of the fruits of feminist biblical scholarship on each book of the Bible in order to share it with the larger community of women who read the Bible,” says of I Corinthians 14:34–35: “The inclusion of these verses in the text of Paul’s letter is particularly unfortunate, for their strong wording affects the way the rest of Paul’s comments on women are read. They reinforce, for example, the conservative tendencies of Chapter II, and obscure the more liberating aspects of Paul’s statements about women.”
From a brief review of these options we might well conclude that rather than loopholes or ways out of a sticky situation, they are in fact variously related efforts to get into, and behind, and admittedly beyond, the texts. Women who might be expected willingly to toss out the offending passages, in much the same way as Thomas Jefferson edited out of “his” Bible all those Pauline passages not consistent with his view of the ethical and moral teachings of Jesus, have by and large done no such thing and have fought for the Bible, hard passages and all, and for the right to interpret them within and against the context of the larger principles for which Paul writes and which his own experience with women co-workers amplifies.
Although Christian traditions as diverse as the Roman Catholic Church and the Mennonite Brethren Church continue to affirm that such passages as I Corinthians 14 and I Timothy 2 are normative texts whose prohibition against the teaching of women “concerns the official function of teaching in the Christian assembly” —a phrase from the “Declaration on the Question on Admission to the Ministerial Priesthood,” of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church—the overwhelming consensus of the vast literature on these texts since 1970 suggests that they are meant to be understood situationally, contextually, and not normatively. Despite the firmly stated desire of Pope John Paul II and his allies within significant portions of the evangelical Protestant communions to put the divisive nature of this debate to rest in favor of the Pauline status quo, the issue will not go away for women, nor for those who demand for them a role at the very least as central as the roles played by Lydia, Phoebe, and Priscilla.
With women bishops in the Anglican Church, women clergy throughout the ranks of the Protestant churches, an unremitting campaign for women within the Roman Catholic Church, and the prodigious scholarship of women and men on the frontiers of biblical study, this particular fight for the Bible is by no means over, but it certainly looks nearer to 1945 for the Allies than it does to 1940 for the Germans. Let no one mistake that this is a battle still in progress, however. As one critic has pointed out, the issue for the conservative position is not women. That tradition honors and cherishes women and their unique and biblically approved gifts, for without women the churches
would not function, let alone flourish. The pope’s most recent pastoral letter on women makes this point. The concern is not women, but rather the authority of scripture, the teaching tradition of the church, and the social, theological, and moral upheaval that is sure to come from selective principles of interpretation that relegate the teachings of scripture to the realm of first-century sociology and the control of a cadre of experts. If we are wrong, say the more perceptive and worried among these conservatives, on so clear a matter as the biblical warrant for the subordination of women, on what else could we be wrong, and what other changes, even less agreeable than these, are in store for those who worry that a Bible diminished by interpretation is no Bible at all?
These are not new concerns or issues. They are as old as scripture itself, and they have arisen in every age when the prevailing climate of interpretation has been challenged. The conservative rabbis of biblical times raised the same issues about Jesus and Paul, and we heard the same anxious concerns expressed about the authority of scripture and the order of society in the debates about temperance, to a lesser degree, and far more urgently, about race within our own lifetimes. When Roland Bainton declared in the matter of total abstinence that he was giving precedence to biblical principle over biblical practice, and regarded doing so as biblical, he did not provide us with a way out but a way in to the fight for the Bible which is as old as the Bible itself, and as painful and new as each age’s attempt to understand and appropriate that book for itself. Making that point upon a review of the New Testament discussions of women, Malcolm O. Tolbert5 concludes that one of our most fundamental mistakes in the reading of scripture, particularly of the New Testament, is to assume that the structures and the systems it describes are as sacred and authoritative as the principles it affirms. Not only is this wrong, it is idolatrous, even blasphemous, to use the word of God to affirm and maintain human privilege. It was wrong in the interpretation that God approved and encouraged chattel slavery, it was wrong in the maintenance of a climate in which the persecution of the Jews could be regarded as biblical, and it is wrong, unequivocally wrong, in imposing first-century social standards on the participation of women in the life of the church simply to preserve the abstraction of the authority of scripture and the preservation of a status quo favorable to those already in power.