Next month, I’m presenting at Humble Gathering, a lecture series for the organization Christian Feminism Today, an inordinately supportive group of smart and soulful people who take their theology seriously.
I first met the group back when they were the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, and I wrote a book about growing up fundamentalist. When you write a book that throws rocks at your own church, well, let’s just say no one wants to sit by you at the next church picnic, and really, can you blame them.
I couldn’t have found a more radical welcome among EEWC/CFT members, and though I’m not a particularly active member, I pay dues and keep up with the goings-on long-distance.
My topic is the title of this piece, because it’s taken me years to convince myself that yes, Jesus loves me, despite the fact that I am a woman, a weaker vessel, a help-meet. That’s what I was taught growing up and those lessons are difficult to shake. Perhaps you heard nonsense, too, from your faith group. My Sunday school lessons were sprinkled with admonitions that I keep myself confined to a very small space, submissive to the menfolk, which never sat well with my tomboy, up-yours vibe.
But then, can a tomboy, up-yours vibe get you into heaven? I figured no, so I retained the vibe, but read my Bible closely and memorized large portions of it because that was rewarded in that time and in that place. If I couldn’t act the part of a submissive woman, I could at least argue my point, sola scriptura, using scriptures alone (which is about as effective an approach to Christianity as being an originalist with the U.S. Constitution is to being a citizen — but oh well). You can’t convince a fundamentalist unless you have mad Bible skills, so that was my goal. I’d convert the whole lot of us to a kinder, gentler Christianity — maybe something more akin to what Jesus proposed.
Well, that didn’t happen. The problem comes when someone says X and you know the text says Y, and you speak up and you’re a girl in an orthodox, patriarchal world.
So I took my tomboy, up-yours vibe and left the church, and spent years looking over my shoulder for the first sign of Judgment Day, when I would be thrown into hell.
I am over that now, thanks.
I’ve been building my presentation this week. As I’m writing it, I realize that I am a different person than when I wrote the book mentioned above, “Dating Jesus.” I certainly didn’t stop studying my Bible when my book was published, but I’ve recognized over and over that for all my mad Bible skills, I am still playing catch-up with context. Context is everything, but context doesn’t sit well with sola scriptura. Knowing the target audience of the epistles, say, is context. Understanding the fervor of the new convert is, as well. A little history helps, too.
I realize now that I’m no longer angry at Paul, who is the traditional author of so many clobber verses used to keep women in the pew — or tending to the babies in the nursery because that’s what girls do. Given context, Paul might have been welcoming women more than I was taught. Given context, Paul might have been telling women not to sit silently in the assembly, but to wait their turn to speak, which is only right. This is Paul, after all, who held up Phoebe, a deacon of the church, as an example to all, and Paul, who greeted as many women as he did men at the beginning and closing of his letters.
It has taken me years to admit this but: I may have been wrong about Bro. Paul and I’d like to apologize here, as if he gives a rip, but there you are
Most of what I know about modern Biblical interpretation I learned from Bart Ehrman and John Spong and some enlightened priests and congregants in the Episcopal church I used to attend. There was less emphasis on Paul and the Letters that are attributed to him, and more on the Gospels, especially the Judgment of the Nations ("When did we see you hungry, ..., when you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.") I don't have to tell you that all our translations are based on texts that are copies of copies of copies .... with all the errors, omissions, and additions that implies. Ehrman says the best effort at a true translation is the New RSV. I admit I miss the old familiar language of the RSV. Sometimes I even miss the KJV language.
The Greek Orthodox church I grew up in did its share of charitable works -- they got that part right -- but they were also entrenched in the whole "husband is head of the wife" paradigm which has been unexamined even in light of modern scholarship. In that paradigm, there is no place for unmarried adult women who don't live at home, and that's why I fell away. Several times. I kept going back until finally, I didn't. I still get sad about that sometimes, but as the child of divorced parents, I started out with two strikes against me.
love everything about this. If I had a faith, I would come to whatever church you found yourself in