Halden on Driscomania

I sometimes suspect that Halden Doerge, one of my favorite theo-bloggers, only blogs about Mark Driscoll because those posts generate such massive comment rolls and visitor traffic.  But this post hits some really good points about the evangelical press’s reactions to Driscoll, and I figured it was worth cross-posting here.  One of the best bits from why do evangelicals care more about cussing than the treatment of women? is thus:

Most everyone is talking about the fact that the problem with Driscoll is the inappropriateness of his language. Its just not okay for you to be talking explicitly about sex and cussing from the pulpit. That’s the downbeat of the current backlash, and that’s the central issue that has framed the current debate among evangelicals that run in these circles. To his credit, MacArthur (who I generally despise, at least theologically if not personally) has put is finger on the more troubling issue here. Namely that Driscoll’s sexual explicitness is all deployed in the interest of coercing women to fulfill whatever sexual whims their husbands might have. As MacArthur rightly points out, Driscoll’s regular sermons on what the Song of Song has to say about sex always ends up pointing out “obligatory acts wives must do if this is what satisfies their husbands, regardless of the wife’s own desire or conscience.” This is the real problem, people.

Lest anyone think Driscoll is being misrepresented here, listen to just a couple quotes from one of these sex sermons: “Ladies, let me assure you of this: if you think you’re being dirty, he’s pretty happy. Jesus Christ commands you to do this.” This is misogyny sexual domination at its worst. From the pulpit we have an evangelical pastor ordering the women in his church to perform any sex act a husband might desire because, after all, Jesus commands this. In the Song of Songs. I guess. 

I’ve intentionally avoided direct contact with Driscoll’s growing web-presence and other mediated messages because he seems like too much of a polarizer for any such contact to do much good.  I know that on a Christian feminism blog, this is far too easy a target, but it seemed worthwhile.

There’s Trajectories, then There’s Trajectories

Tony Jones Interview with Bart Ehrman

Let me get three things out of the way so that I don’t have to clutter the post up with them later:

1. Bart Ehrman is a petulant man-child who gets the press he does because he plays the evil henchman to Ditchkins so nicely.
2. Tony Jones should have taken him to task a number of times for his bad historical methodology, not to mention his inconsistent hermeneutics.
3. Homebrewed Christianity is a fun little podcast and well worth the listen.  And besides that, if you look at their links page, I’m a Deacon!

Alright.  That’s out of my system.  I had meant to link to this episode a while ago because Ehrman, true to form, has taken hold of what he calls “the trajectory theory,” reified it, and dismissed anyone who deviates from what he dreamed up in his university office, and I figured, since I wrote a post about what I called the vector approach to ethics a while back, I should say a thing or two about what Ehrman says and how my hermeneutic differs.

When Ehrman lays out “the trajectory theory,” his working assumption seems to be that it starts in the earliest-composed books and ends with the latest-composed books (and assumes that Bart Ehrman’s dating of things is right), claiming that “women’s roles” get better uniformly as one progresses.  As Tony Jones chuckles along without so much as a “let’s reconsider,” he moves on to the next point.

I’ve not read much Rob Bell (to whom Jones makes reference at this point), but when I talk about ethics as vector, I’m thinking of taking each Biblical text as speaking out of and to a particular moment in history, taking stock of which direction the text moves ethically and how radically that move is (hence vector).  In other words, I don’t look to Titus as some kind of “next step” after 2 Corinthians any more than I expect Isaiah to proceed from Exodus in any simplistic progressive manner.  Instead I look at the assumptions and expectations (the building blocks of culture) that surround men and women in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, then I look at 1 Timothy.

When one reads 1 Timothy and other texts-accused-of-misogyny in that light (as John Howard Yoder did in The Politics of Jesus), one discovers not anything one should call feminism positively but certainly a negation of the systems and structures that make patriarchy intelligible.  In other words, whereas I would not call Paul a feminist writer, I would say that, in the context of the Roman provinces and their culture, he makes space for what I could call feminism.

That making-space, I think, is what makes possible a Christian feminism that does not derive from a positive liberalism but attempts to live together in new ways where Christ breaks open the old wineskins.  Paul did not articulate an intelligibly feminist theology for the same reasons that he did not articulate a post-Hegelian phenomenology, but he does make intelligible moves away from the ontologically strong divisions on national, traditional, and gender lines.  That 20th-century reactionaries used Paul’s texts in order to enforce an order that’s not much to Bart Ehrman’s liking seems a rather shoddy reason for anyone with any historical sense to label the letters of Paul the way he does.

But I already said that in item one already.

At any rate, I’d recommend this podcast to anyone who listens to podcasts, and this episode I commend as an exercise in catching what Tony Jones (who should know better) seems to have missed because he was starstruck by a modern atheist celebrity.

Jesus Creed Piece on Junia and Props to our Project

A Woman in the Footnotes

I’ll admit that I’ve traded most of the little text-critical ability I developed in seminary for a rewarding life teaching college English (which might explain why my best-received post was related to Shakespeare), but I do know that Jesus Creed is a high-exposure blog, and it can’t hurt, eh?  The argument itself seems sound enough for a lapsed Greek student like myself.

Also, I should have posted this sooner than this, but life has been hectic of late.  Anyway, our blog got mentioned in my friend and colleague Victoria Reynolds’s paper on conservative “fourth wave” feminism and evangelicalism at Toccoa Falls College’s “Evangelicalism: Then and Now” conference on Friday, February 27.  I have to think that’s partly because her friend Nate is a contributing writer, but I’d like to think that perhaps some of those young evangelicals might visit some day on her account.

And V?  Don’t you think you’d be a great contributing writer here?  Please?  Please?

Tam’d Shrews: A Brief Reflection on Antifeminism

The Shakespeareans I know (and being one myself, I know a few) aren’t entirely sure about how to read and to teach the Bard’s works that take as given certain prejudices common in the Elizabethan era.  Merchant of Venice, for example, is a source of never-ending (good-natured, usually) sparring between one of my colleagues and myself.  She maintains that the play is poking fun at English anti-Jewish bigotry; I think that it made money in the theaters precisely because it reinforced said bigotry.  (Our fights, raging as they do through the English department’s hallways, have become a sort of running joke in the department.)  And so the questions rage: is Othello an early black face minstrel show?  Is the subtext of Romeo and Juliet a working assumption that Italians are trigger-happy goons who marry too young?  What in the world does one do with Caliban from The Tempest?

Deserving at least honorable mention among those plays is the early comedy The Taming of the Shrew. If you’re not familiar with the text of the play or with its best-known movie adaption, Ten Things I Hate about You, the plot involves the family of Baptista, a gentleman in Padua, and his daughters Katherina and Bianca.  Bianca is a most desired bachelorette, largely because of her quiet ways (you knew this was going to be a feminist discussion, right?), but her father refuses to give her hand in marriage until he can find someone who will take the feisty Katherina (the shrew from the play’s title) off of his hands.

Over the course of the play, a young dandy named Petruchio, for reasons that critics cite variously as mercenary questing for dowry money and the challenge of “taming” her, agrees to marry her, then launches on a campaign of psychological abuse–showing up at his own wedding drunk and dragging her off before she can celebrate with friends and family, depriving her of food and sleep, contradicting everything that she says until she’s willing to agree with him on anything–and eventually taming her tongue and fists, thus taming her.  The debate among feminist critics, of course, is whether Shakespeare thinks Petruchio is a brutish boor or just the kind of man the world needs more of.  Being a suspicious Bard-reader myself, I’m inclined towards the latter.

In the final scene of the play (mercifully a scene without analogue in Ten Things), the audience learns quite vividly that Katherina’s violence and sharp tongue have not gone away; she simply has learned to turn them on socially acceptable targets, namely other women:

Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled-
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience-
Too little payment for so great a debt.

That’s about half the speech.  Again, critics debate whether Kate is a caricature or whether she’s Shakespeare’s ideal woman, but there’s the speech nonetheless.  When she finishes her tirade, Petruchio utters the play’s most famous line (“Kiss me, Kate!”), and the play shortly wraps up.  This week, as I browsed around some threads on The Ooze (I still read occasionally; I just don’t post any more), it occurred to me that The Taming of the Shrew sheds some light on the fact that some of the most vocally anti-feminist Christians are themselves women.

(You were hoping I’d get to a bit of Christian theology eventually, weren’t you?)

Like Shakespeare’s Kate, some of the antifeminists with whom I’ve interacted have no trouble breaking lutes over people’s heads.  (I do confess that I love that scene and the music tutor’s retelling of the story: “And there I stood amazed for a while”)  On the contrary, antifeminists seem to take a degree of pride in “putting in their place” both women and men whose philosophies do not match up with their favorite authors’ or preachers’.  They’re often just as skilled and less scrupulous in the ring when they set to textual brawling.  Such is not to condemn people who have a fighting streak: it’s only to say that it’s not especially becoming in women whose ideology calls on women to be silent in the assembly.  But there’s the rub: because by definition public spaces that allow women are not in these women’s “assemblies,” they use that green light pretty quickly to turn loose, to loose their venom on their fellow women (and on male feminists, if there happen to be any around), perhaps to get some kisses from their Petruchios.

Now I tend to prefer irenic exhanges, in Internet settings and otherwise, not because of any great virtue on my part but because I have no stomach for grand eristic exchanges with other Christians.  (I wouldn’t have made a very good Renaissance academic.)  So do take my suggestion with a grain of salt that perhaps in our exchanges with such Kates, we should not be lured into the violence of the exchange, that our own ethos should be one of mutual submission not only in marriage but among any group of Christians, no matter what the nature.  I know that some folks have a fighting streak more pronounced than mine, but if we are truly on a mission of peace as well as of justice, perhaps our light should shine as a contrast to the Kates of the world.

Vector as an Ethical Category: A Brief Reflection

First, an introduction. I’m Nathan Gilmour, and linda (I can’t remember her capitalizing it, so I tend not to either) invited me to write for this project, so here I am. I’m also a contributing writer at iwonderasiwander, Out of the Ooze, and Conservative Reformed Mafia as well as writing my own blog, Hardly the Last Word, so I crank out my share of words on the web (often for conflicting constituencies) in any given month. I’m also married to Mary, father to Micah, member and teacher at Athens Christian Church, and English teacher at the University of Georgia, where I hope to take and to pass my comprehensive exams for the Ph.D this May.

In physics a vector has magnitude and direction, and those two variables are at stake when we Christians interpret the ethical teachings of Paul and other New Testament texts. When I interpret the NT’s texts about women I think neither in terms of authority versus novelty nor progress versus tradition first but in terms of magnitude and direction.

To use an easy example, 1 Peter offers three parallel ethical injunctions for dealing with power relationships.  In one (1 Peter 2:13-17) the text calls for Christians, despite our freedom in Christ, to “accept the authority of every human institution, whether the emperor as supreme or of governors” (NRSV).  If we consider the direction of the injunction, it is towards accommodation with the imperial order, and the magnitude is slight.  Then a second admonition comes, this time to slaves (1 Peter 2:18-21), calling for “all deference” (NRSV) to kind and mean masters alike.  To the exhortation the text adds theological reasoning: as Christ’s submission to Caesar and Pilate’s whips saved creation, so your submission to your master’s whip can be part of your being saved by Jesus.

In both of these injunctions, the direction is away from strident assertion of the (real) freedom that God has granted through Christ, and the resulting submission seems to set cultural norms as the target.  Just to give a couple hypothetical examples, the text neither calls for a return to Persian-style god-kings nor for a return to Assyrian slave laws, which were much harsher than Roman ones.  Instead 1 Peter, apparently keeping in mind the aim of presenting the Gospel as something reasonable (1 Peter 3:15), calls not for immediate negation of those orders but peaceable life within them.

Likewise, writing to women inside a Greco-Roman system of marriage that grants rights of imperium (in other words, of life and death) to the paterfamilias (the eldest male in a household), calls for women to submit to their husbands (1 Peter 3:1-7).  Noting in verse seven that legally and culturally women are the weaker vessel, 1 Peter also calls  (almost as a sidenote, perhaps because such a call is unnecessary in a community governed not by imperium but by caritas) for men to treat women better than their heathen counterparts do.

Now this reading of the text does not appeal to any authority outside the text, but its conclusions will perhaps seem alien to some readers.  Rather than taking late-20th century western cultures as the starting point, I have taken late 1st-century  Greco-Roman custom as the base.  And instead of seeing Peter’s aim as resistance to late-20th century philosophies, I see the third call for submission as parallel to the first two, all three coming as concessions to a system that is unjust but still not God-forsaken.

Still working within the text, given that 1 Peter calls not for a return to worse systems but living with the one given, I think that a responsible and pious reader could say that 1 Peter would not call for a return to pre-feminist gender relations, if in fact one lived in a post-feminist world, but to a peaceable life within the system at hand.  Just as Christians should not be in the business of advocating returns to Roman-style imperialism or Roman-style slavery, Christians should not be in the business of returning to Roman-style paterfamilias family life.

None of this is to say that Christians cannot or should not disagree about what cultural structures are less unjust than others, but it is to say that such discussions are not about biblical authority but about biblical vector.