Who's Telling the Old, Old Story?: Women in the Story of Redemption

Our sense of the biblical story is shaped by who has told us the story. Our narrators have lingered over particular details. They've skipped over others. We see what they tell us to see. As a consequence, sometimes the truth is right under our noses, but we've missed it entirely.

I know this because my students tell me so. Last night at an event on campus, a few of my students told me what a huge difference it makes to have a Bible class with a woman. They are hearing different things. The text is framed in fresh ways. 

It's the same text, of course. The truth is still the truth. I bring nothing new to the Bible except a new set of questions to investigate what has always been there. The text yields different answers when we ask different questions. 

Is the Bible good for women? Whose has power in this story? Who is doing the telling? Where are the women?

I have not always asked these questions. I was already in my 40s the first time someone asked me to read the Bible as a woman. I'm not new to biblical studies. I attended a private, Christian school with regular Bible classes from Kindergarten through high school graduation. Then I headed to Bible college for four years of robust training in engaging the biblical text, followed by five years (part-time) in seminary and five more years (full-time) in graduate school, where I earned a PhD in Biblical Theology with a concentration in Old Testament. I had a grand total of one female instructor for a Bible class, a grad student who worked under the male professor of record (both of whom were wonderful). I was blessed to have two female Bible scholars on my dissertation committee, but I never had a class with either of them. I have never studied theology with a woman professor. Only once in all these years of school (that I can recall) did a Bible or theology professor ask me to read a book written by a woman. 

Then suddenly at 43 years of age in the space of a few weeks not one but two Christian publishers asked me to contribute textual notes for women's study Bibles. I have never read a woman's study Bible. I wondered whether women even need their own Bibles. But as I prayerfully considered these opportunities, I felt the Spirit of God nudge me to say "yes" to both projects. I'm so very glad I did.

Both projects -- one for Tyndale House and one for Lifeway -- envisioned a Bible that would meet women where they are, addressing their questions and concerns and helping them encounter God in a fresh way. It was a powerful experience for me to return to the pages of Scripture with this goal in mind. What will women wonder when they read this text? What will bother them? What will encourage them? How do women contribute to the storyline of the Bible? How does this text call women in particular to respond faithfully?

I have always held a high view of Scripture. I believe it is the word of God for the people of God. I believe it is inspired and authoritative. I believe the Spirit of God works through Scripture as we read and helps us to respond to it. I even believe that the meaning of the Bible is tethered to the author's intent. However, as I read Genesis and Exodus with these new questions in mind, I noticed things I had never seen before. I encountered God in powerful ways. I wrestled more deeply, and as a result I came away with a deep conviction that the Bible is good for women. When we only ever hear the Bible taught by men, whose questions and contexts are in some ways different than those of women, we risk not seeing the whole picture.

Intentionally reading the Bible as a woman and for women felt like finally slipping into an outfit that fit after a lifetime of hand-me-downs that were too tight in some places and baggy in others and which didn't quite match the rest of my outfit. I began to wonder if I needed to write a whole book about the experience. After all, since most pastors are men and most sermons are by men and most Bible teachers are men, a lot of other women (and men!!) might be missing out on these insights, too. 

About that time, I sat down to read Kat Armas' book Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us About Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength. I read it because not only do we have a lot to learn from women, we have a lot to learn from the global church. 

As her website explains, 

"Kat Armas, a second-generation Cuban American, grew up on the outskirts of Miami's famed Little Havana neighborhood. Her earliest theological formation came from her grandmother, her abuelita, who fled Cuba during the height of political unrest and raised three children alone after her husband passed away. Combining personal storytelling with biblical reflection, Armas shows us how voices on the margins--those often dismissed, isolated, and oppressed because of their race, gender, socioeconomic status, or lack of education--have more to teach us about following God than we realize."

Writing as a Cuban-American woman prompts Kat to ask a different set of questions of the biblical text. She invites us to listen in and pay attention to a broader range of voices and experiences in the biblical text. Her book is magnificent. I closed it and said, "I don't need to write the book. Kat has already done it!"

Armas amasses mountains of evidence that God calls and equips women. God honors women. God commissions women to participate in kingdom work. For Armas, the biblical narrative disrupts the status quo and points to women on the margins as a source of wisdom, persistence, and strength. Not only does Kat write beautifully, she exegetes Scripture faithfully and calls the church boldly to turn our gaze outward and learn from new voices. I'm so grateful for her work and  I'm excited to share it with my students. 

The Bible is good for women. I'm finally learning to articulate how and why.

 

Mary Comforts Eve,
by Elizabeth Rubio (prints available
by contacting the artist directly)

I'll leave you with an image painted by one of my Latina colleagues. Elizabeth Rubio reinvisioned the famous painting by Sister Grace Remington. She was selling prints at the event yesterday evening on campus, an event to celebrate Women's History Month. How appropriate!

Women are an integral part of the story of redemption. Eve's partnership with Adam in tending the garden of Eden illustrates one of the roles to which women are called. Eve's subsequent rebellion, for which she was personally held accountable, affirms the agency of women and underscores that our choices matter. Mary's willing submission to God's work suggests that women have not been written out of the story. God chose a woman to birth and nurture the Savior. From the cradle to the cross and from the ascension to the pouring out of the Spirit, Mary stands as a model for all believers, inviting us as participants in the kingdom of God.* 

Gender isn't everything, but it's something. We can rush past these women and many more, but if we do, we're missing out on part of God's beautiful story of redemption. Let's listen to new retellings of the old, old story and see what we might have missed.

*For more on Mary from an Evangelical perspective, see Amy Beverage Peeler's impressive new book, Women and the Gender of God (Eerdmans, Fall 2022).

Introducing the Majority World Theology Series

I've written before about what we stand to gain when we read the Bible with the Global Church. It's getting easier to do just that.

Introducing the Majority World Theology Series.

The brain child of Gene Green, then at Wheaton College (now Academic Dean of NAIITS), K K Yeo of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Stephen Pardue of Asia Graduate School of Theology, this series is making a major contribution to Global Theology. With grant funding, Yeo, Pardue, and Green gather majority world scholars each year to contribute to a project on a specific theological theme written from their cultural location. They present their work at the annual meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Institute for Biblical Research. It's been my privilege to witness several of these gatherings in person.

Scripture and Theology in Global Context at ETS 2015,
(left to right) Gene Green, Emily J. Choge Kerama, Jules 
Martinez, Raymond Aldred, Sung Wook Chung (photo: C Imes)

Stimulated by the conversation with other participants and observers, each contributor revises their essay for publication in a collected volume (published by Eerdmans and Langham Literature). Each chapter includes a bibliography of other sources on that theme from the author's area of the world. The result is a collage of insight from which the rest of us can learn. Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity and The New Face of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, gave the series a raving review in The Christian Century. 

The most recent volume to be released in the Majority World Theology Series includes essays by the following global scholars on the topic of the church:

Ecclesiology (2018)

Veli-Matti Karkkainen
Ruth Padilla De Borst (Costa Rica)
Wonsuk Ma (Korea)
Stephanie A Lowery (Kenya)
Carlos Sosa Siliezar (Guatemala)
Xiaxia E Xue (China)
Peter Nyende (Kenya / Uganda)
Munther Isaac (Palestine)

Four other volumes are already available from Eerdmans (pictured above):

Christology (2014)

The Trinity (2015)

Pneumatology (2016)

Soteriology (2017)

The volume on Eschatology will release in 2019. We can all look forward to that! (Did you catch what I did there?) A seventh series of conference presentations on the topic of Scripture is tentatively planned for 2019. Hopefully that means we'll see a volume on the doctrine of Scripture in 2020.

A huge thank you to Green, Pardue, and Yeo for their excellent work on this project. Most faculty in theology and biblical studies are acutely aware of the need to listen to global voices, but these men have turned that sentiment into action. The result is both affordable and immensely valuable.

Why We Need Latin Americans to Help Us Understand the Bible

I'm beginning to see the Bible with new eyes.

It began with a syllabus. Increased ethnic diversity at both of the universities where I teach has made me more conscious of how "white" and Western my assigned readings have been. With the help of my beautifully diverse Facebook community, I've made the effort to discover books written by Africans, Asians, and Latinos. Armed with a list of friend-approved favorites, I ordered copies of a half dozen or more.

I want to tell you about two favorites. Both are from Latin America. Both are slim, inexpensive, and accessible. Both are rocking my world.

Justo Gonzalez is known for his work as a church historian. But in Santa Biblia, he offers us a glimpse of what it's like to read the Bible through Hispanic eyes. Some of you may object: "We should be reading the Bible for what it says, not for what we bring to it. Our ethnicity doesn't change what the text means."

Agreed. But our social location can prevent us from seeing what is there. We make assumptions about the situations the Scriptures address because we see the world from a particular vantage point—say, white, middle-class, suburban American—unaware of the authors' context and concerns. We have blinders on.

Old Testament Israelites and New Testament Christians have far more in common with the average Latino, African, or Asian than they do with wealthy Americans. That's one reason the perspective of these communities is so valuable. They are a bridge.

Gonzalez is not engaged in a special hermeneutic, as far as I can tell. He is simply reading the Scriptures with his community and noticing what it says. But because of his life experience, he notices things I miss. In some cases, his observations simply add insight. In other cases, he turns my interpretation on its head.

Here's an example from his first chapter, focusing on marginality. Gonzalez takes us to Luke 4, where Jesus gives his inaugural sermon in Nazareth, quoting Isaiah 61. At first, Jesus' listeners are pleased (v. 21–22). Gonzalez notes,

"But Jesus suddenly changed his tune—or at least, it would seem so from the point of view of his audience. Until then he had said that they were at the very center of things. The Scripture was being fulfilled right there, 'in your hearing.' Now he tells him to expect no special privileges. He is not about to do in his hometown the things he did at Capernaum." (Gonzalez, 43)

Jesus brings up two Old Testament examples, Elijah and Elisha. Both prophets went to those at the margins, to non-Israelites—a Phoenician and a Syrian, in fact—to work their miracles. The mood in the room radically shifts. Gonzalez explains,

"This was no longer a message about how they were at the very center of things, seeing the Scripture fulfilled before their eyes. This was rather a warning that they should expect no privileges, for God often works at the margins rather than the center. No wonder they tried to hurl him off a cliff!" (Gonzalez, 43)

Imagine if Jesus appeared in your church this Sunday, announcing that God's kingdom had arrived, and that he was here to make all things as they should be. Great, right? But what if he told you his first plan of action was to welcome exponentially more Syrian and Lebanese refugees, to help them set up shop in your neighborhood, and to live among them? How would you feel then?

We tend to read Scripture as though it is God's good news to us. But in the case of Luke 4, the good news indicts those who prefer to keep all the kingdom benefits for themselves. I never noticed this until Gonzalez showed me.

In her book, The Scandalous Message of James, Elsa Tamez brings a similar perspective, but instead of offering examples from various places in Scripture, she works her way carefully through the book of James.

James is a practical book, addressing matters of wealth and poverty, among other things. Tamez explains how a Latin American reading of the book is different:

"For James the oppressors are the rich (plousioi). He does not hesitate to point them out as such. His antipathy toward them and his sympathy with the poor is undeniable. Interestingly enough, many of the commentaries on James dedicate long pages to the rich, thus consciously or unconsciously attempting to relativize this contrasting picture that James paints." 

"This great concentration on the rich is to be expected: on the one hand, many biblical commentaries from Europe and the United States are written in situations where there are many rich people in the churches. How does one tell these members that according to James there is no room for them in the church? We should note that many of the points made in these commentaries are accurate enough; what is striking is simply the angle of the perspective and the special concern for the rich. A Latin American reading of the epistle, on the other hand, fixes its gaze on the oppressed and dedicates long pages to them, their sufferings, complaints, oppression, hope, and praxis." (Tamez, 21, emphasis added)

By now it should be obvious why these books will not just be important for students of color, but for all of us in the classroom. Reading outside our tradition overcomes myopia.

I've heard it said (I don't remember where) that the Bible is intended to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. Reading the Bible with people from other cultural and socio-economic backgrounds reinvigorates the Bible's message and sharpens its critique of our own complacency.

This won't be easy, but our brothers and sisters from Latin America stand ready to help. Together we can learn more, love more, and become more. Are we willing to listen?