Laura’s Weblog

Personal assumptions challenged

I have been recently, in another class, concerned with the nature of sexuality and the way evangelicals deal (or do not deal) with it in their churches. My own experience growing up in the conservative South has been a mixed bag, to say the least. When I began reading Van Leeuwen’s book, I hoped she would give me some tools to move forward like a spelunker in the messy realm of sexuality and personhood. Because I have been doing so much reading and studying on the subject in the last few quarters, there are few assumptions I have that have not already been challenged and stretched and re-couched in new terms and with enlightened understanding.

What I did learn from this book is the inseparable interrelatedness of nature and nurture: not only is it nearly impossible to determine when nurture actually begins to affect nature, but it is also pointless to try to determine the extent to which each affects a human being or which affects that human being to a greater extent. Everyone debates one way or the other, but Van Leeuwen argues that there should be no argument at all because “[b]iology and experience are mutually influential” (67). And while “biology…can nuance…behavior” (77), “biology is both augmented and reshaped by learning” (108).

Life circumstances explained/clarified

What I was hoping for out of the concluding chapters of Van Leeuwen’s book was a delving into the issue of sexuality as it relates to personhood, who we are as sexual beings, bodily beings. While she covers some of that concern within the context of marriage (and to be fair, she is speaking as a married woman), she leaves only a chapter for homosexuality and only something like two pages for singleness. Van Leeuwen is not the only author to concentrate on sexuality within the context of marriage. Carrie Miles spends a good deal of time on marriage and parenting in The Redemption of Love, which I read for Dufault-Hunter last quarter, but she also offers no guidance on the single life. Granted, much of the talk about male headship concerns a woman’s place within marriage, but when a husband and wife share a common understanding of mutual submission, that marriage state offers a considerable amount of protection for a woman’s sexuality. Single women (and for that matter, single men) have a precarious place in the church as it is, even more so when in leadership positions. The debate over women’s role in ministry is difficult enough without having the added pressure to get married or the added stigma of being some kind of temptress. If we cannot even deal with our own sexual natures properly, how can we deal with the gender debate?

Of course, it sounds as though I did not enjoy the reading or benefit from it. I actually appreciated the opportunity to read a kind of synthesis of psychology, sociology, and theology concerning the nature and nurture of women and men. Putting ideas and concepts from different areas of study into one critical work helps to get a big picture of the many issues involved in the debate about the authority of women in the home and in the church. I especially appreciated Van Leeuwen’s effort to couch her arguments within a biblical model and under the premise of kingdom work. The missionary principle for hermeneutical approaches and the kingdom model are essential to Van Leeuwen’s argument that there is freedom and grace for human beings to move differently as the Holy Spirit inspires in different times and places but that this freedom must be bounded within the kingdom model and thus within the scriptural model for living a Christian life and glorifying God with one’s talents and gifts. Whether single, married, male, female, suffering, fighting, or free—the best we can do with our fallen understanding is to try to live as consistently after God as possible. The rest is grace.

Strange aspects

In the sense that I do not have a calling to preach in any capacity or to seek ordination for any purpose, the experiences of each of these women included in Riggs’ anthology Can I Get a Witness? are unlike my own. They each offered a profound and undeniable supernatural calling to the work they either accepted or resisted. Whether they responded as confidently as Sojourner Truth who lived true to her God-given name (21), or as tremulously as Zilpha Elaw who likened herself to Jonah or Julia Foote who described herself as “so weak and ignorant” (52), these women experienced the Jeremiah-like burning ( 8 ) to speak publicly and with authority regardless of the consequences. Also unlike my own experience as a white woman who has only ever known freedom, these women suffered and fought against not only sexism but racism, many of them being former slaves or the daughters of slaves. Ironically, their prophetic calling to speak against injustice met with opposition not because of their sex but because of their color: “And if I didn’t have faith, I wouldn’t spend so much of my time talking to ninety percent white audiences all over the country…because America must wake up and learn the truth about itself and its racism” (Fannie Lou Hamer 171).

Out of Hogan’s article describing Phoebe Palmer’s ministry, the strangest part of her argument was her conservative insistence that the woman’s sphere was separated from the man’s, that women and men had different natures, but that by the baptism of the Holy Spirit God brought spiritual equality to both men and women. As Hogan sums, “Men and women were different, and yet, men and women were called to the same baptism and the same task, proclaiming the good news” (220). Certainly an unusual approach in light of the argument from personhood that is so much more favored in this debate. I have never heard anyone mix their arguments like Palmer does here, certainly a strange choice.

Familiar aspects

More familiar in my experience of the debate about women’s authority to speak in public his Palmer’s own admission concerning the difficulty of women who are called to preach but unable to find a forum in which to do so: “‘And what a dilemma! The will of the church and the will of Christ in conflict!’ (vi). Before women could obey the command of the spirit to speak, they first had to secure the right to speak (218). While her argument may have some contradictions, people certainly would have been hard-pressed to contradict her ultimate claim to God’s authority over both men and women. Hogan notes, “Spiritual equality, as used by Palmer, was grounded in the God-given equality between women and men….All of this was under God’s direction and command. It was God’s doing, not theirs, and this was the final and crucial distinction between personhood and spiritual equality” (221).

More familiar as well is the constant struggle African American women faced in securing an opportunity to be heard at all. Jarena Lee records that in eight years following her call “I had only been allowed to exhort, and even this privilege but seldom” (8). Virginia Broughton narrowly escaped being thrown from a window (37). I admire Julia Foote’s courage to speak regardless of opposition, asserting that “[m]an’s opinion weighed nothing with me, for my commission was from heaven, and my reward was with the Most High” (57). Another common experience is the jealousy that emerges when women’s ministry flourishes, like that of Broughton: “Ministers and laymen…who were jealous of the growing popularity of the woman’s work, as if there was some cause of alarm for the safety of their own positions of power and honor, all rose up from their churches…to oppose the woman’s work and break it up if possible” (35-6). Even when women are promoting daily Bible study and holy, righteous living, the fact that they are women promoting anything at all is cause enough for many men insecure in their own callings to fight the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Jane Dempsey Douglass, in her article “Christian Freedom: What Calvin Learned at the School of Women,” suggests that Calvin might be something of a cloaked and even accidental feminist. She notes that the significant mark of his attention to women is his choice “to place Paul’s advice for women to be silent in church among the indifferent things in which the Christian is free” (155). In other words, Calvin thinks a woman’s silence is not an irrevocable command from heaven but rather a “human law which is open to change” (156). If this is the case, then churches have the freedom to decide individually what is and is not consistent with order and decency in worship.

Douglass argues that Calvin makes no remarks in his many works that would contradict her reading of the implications of his classification of a woman’s silence in church as “indifferent.” She notes that the “only mention of women’s subjection I have found is in the context of submission of the church to the Word of God” (160). In fact, in the passage in his Institutes concerning head coverings, Calvin writes, “If the church requires it, we may not only without any offense allow something to be changed but permit any observances previously in use among us to be abandoned” (qtd. 158). Thus, argues Douglass, Calvin is open to changes in church order concerning indifferent issues. She even goes so far as to suggest that “Calvin feels the need to correct the apparent meaning of Paul’s statement lest his readers understand that women lack the fullness of the created image of God” (159). He even allows women to speak in church should God call them in a special situation (164). In light of this evidence, Douglass suggests several conclusions: Calvin argues concerning the subordination of women “in the context of Christian freedom” (165); he labels Paul’s directive as human, not divine, law; he advocates for women being made in the image of God theologically if not in the realm of human order; interestingly, Calvin seems to “relativize the authority of the epistles” because he does not take Paul’s statement or arguments at face value (166). Nevertheless, Douglass must conclude that regardless of the implications Calvin’s classification raises, he “expected women to return to their traditional subordinate roles” (172). This conclusion leaves me with the question: how much good does a proposition like this do if it is unintentional and in any case not capitalized on in general church order during and after the Reformation?

John Thompson, in his article “Polity as Adiaphora in John Calvin: The Strange Case of Women’s Silence in Church,” is less enthusiastic about the positive implications of Calvin’s classification than is Douglass. He argues that in fact Calvin would never have supported women speaking in church and wrote to that effect, because “such an office [of public ministry] does not befit one who is in submission” (2); Calvin was also unaware of the positive implications Douglass attaches to his classification since he never discussed them further; mostly, Calvin was not a man likely to approve any kind of change, much less one so controversial. At best, Thompson asserts, Calvin means by his classification the possibility of “a suspension of the rules, not a change” (4). Thus, there may be occasions when the voice of a woman in church will be called for or at least unavoidable, but these occasions do not permit “ a change in polity but a temporary suspension thereof in circumstances of necessity or emergency” (5), a position Calvin is not the first to hold (re. Vermigli). Thompson also notes that while “polity is a humanly-created order,” there are some rules of polity that “are divinely-instituted” (6). Since Calvin’s only examples for his classification of women’s silence as indifferent concern occasional or emergency situations, and since Calvin does not seem to be aware of any other implications of his concession, it is more likely—Thompson argues—that Calvin is not advocating very much freedom for women at all but rather asserting that one’s lack of decorum in a certain instance will not endanger one’s salvation (8).

Models/lessons from Calvin

Calvin’s example of stressing order and decorum in church worship is commendable. As a Presbyterian, I can at least give him that much credit. His distinction between God-ordained commands and human-devised rules is also a useful model as we try to extricate from its cultural seat the truth of scripture for today’s practical application in our many and various church settings. Even his admittance that indifferent rules may be suspended when necessary (if not amended or entirely altered) shows a flexibility in order and structure that allows one at least to breathe, if not grow. In my opinion, regardless of Calvin’s intention or motive, his classification of the issue of women’s silence in church as indifferent to salvation does have positive implications for women in ministry. He may not have meant to give the kind of freedom Douglass hopes for in her analysis of his humanist background and theological writings, but he did open the door for it. Perhaps it is for later theologians and scholars to build on the foundation Calvin laid for an orderly kind of worship that he would not have been able to see clearly through his own cultural lens. If Calvin, in his context, could make concessions on a temporary basis, perhaps he has paved the way for more permanent changes in today’s context.

“I finally decided that God formed a vile creature when He made woman, and I wondered how such a worthy artisan could have deigned to make such an abominable work which, from what they say, is the vessel as well as the refuge and abode of every evil and vice…I considered myself most unfortunate because God had made me inhabit a female body in this world.”

~ Christine de Pizan

Vile. Abominable. Abode of every evil and vice. Indeed, what woman could feel anything but “most unfortunate” when convinced of her sorry state of existence before the perfection that is held up as man? The querelle des femmes, and later the witchcraze, feature in the great debate about the nature of a woman: is she good (like Mary) or is she bad (like Eve)? With the advent of a wider availability of education for women, a new realization of and outcry against oppression and misogyny arose. Are women really as bad as “they” say, these men who are educated by men and surrounded by educated men and uneducated women, these men who capitalize on each other’s propositions about the female sex and project their own sexual appetites onto them, these men who happening upon a woman of equal or superior learning/courage/virtue, etc can only scratch their heads and pronounce her to have risen above her sex—are women as bad as “they” say?

While courtly love, this ideal of romance, was at its peak, women like Christine began to expose “the attitudes it promoted toward women, and its reduction of romance to sexual conquest—and abandonment” (Kelly 10). Women were nothing more than sexual objects made to feel empowered for the purposes of the game but ultimately losing. A counterpoint to courtly love may be the rise of fear concerning witchcraft; where one’s romantic interest is held to be without fault, the witch is the epitome of fault. In the Malleus Maleficarum, the two authors surmise that witchcraft appeals more to the woman because (as Monter summarizes) “women are more credulous than men; women are more impressionable; also, ‘they have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things they have learned by evil arts’…[they have a] greater sexual appetite…[and are by] nature quicker to waver in the faith” (129). So courtly love holds up a woman as the virginal Mary, but only for purposes of conquest. The accusation of witchcraft colors woman as the deceptive, lustful Eve who is vindictive and in cahoots with devils. Whether she is good like Mary or bad like Eve, she is still just a woman, rationally inferior (Kelly 12).

I try not to get frustrated when I read about what men used to think about women, but it is difficult when I realize that it is sometimes still the case today. Arguments from nature may have softened their terms and tone, but they are just as harmful and hurtful as ever. I’m reading Dan Doriani’s Women and Ministry right now for another class, and the gentleness of his tone and the caution with which he steps ever harder on the attempts of women to do God’s work are beginning to infuriate me more than the brash diatribes of these centuries-old documents like the Malleus Maleficarum. I want never to find myself in the place Christine de Pizan once was, despising her own sex, despising her own self, lamenting that God would make her at all if he would choose to make her so deformed and despicable as to suffer being a woman. If such a state is the logical conclusion of the pontification of men over the nature of a woman, there is no good in the reason of such men. God made male and female and pronounced them good. Anything short of that pronouncement is a lie, and one men have perpetuated and built upon for thousands of years.

So I say hurray for the women who “rose above their sex” to the extent that they could recognize their oppression and speak against it. Hurray for the women who would not accept lies about themselves or allow anyone to continue telling them to other women. Hurray for the women who suffered and toiled and even lost for the sake of the querelle des femmes and in the face of accusations with as heavy a price as death by fire. Hurray for women who stood up and said “no” to the insistence that they had less rationality, less virtue, less strength of character, less natural ability, less faith. May I have such courage to speak with gentleness and yet persistence when I face accusations of my own. The way has been paved for me. And that is a blessing.

The idea of referring to God as Mother, or even as Mother-Father, has never sat comfortably with me. I cherish the image of God as Father and attribute much of my relationship with God to the understanding that image has fostered. Nevertheless, I felt no discomfort when reading Julian of Norwich’s Showings. Perhaps that is because it was not my first reading of her revelations using such prevalent maternal language and imagery when referring to God and especially to Jesus. Or perhaps I was not uncomfortable because she is not agenda-driven in her writing. Though Julian often refers to Jesus as our Mother, she continues to refer to him as “he” and just as often pairs the parental reference as God our Father and God our Mother. Particularly, Julian is writing in explication of sixteen visions she had of Jesus revealing something of himself to her. If her explanations include maternal imagery in conjunction with paternal imagery, I am not upset by it but appreciate what her revelations add to my understanding of God in the role of tender nurturer.

Likewise the use of maternal imagery in the writings of Hildegard and Hadewijch, as recorded by F. Gerald Downing, does not bother me for similar reasons. These women are not pushing an agenda, trying to force out the man in favor of the woman or trying to emasculate men or make God a woman. They are simply recording their own experiences of personal encounters with Jesus, using the kind of language and imagery that is both appropriate to their own life experience and to the way in which Jesus chose to reveal himself to them. As Downing notes, “Hadewijch enjoys a fully tactile (and indeed erotic) sensation of being embraced by him [Jesus] during a mass,” and Julian’s less sexually-charged image of “Christ’s motherly suckling care” is just as intimate and personal a description (429). Downing notes also that the images these women draw on in their writings are all scriptural and traditional sources available but not utilized by other theologians like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas (430). This kind of imagery, Downing argues, leads to an understanding of “the actions of Father, Son, and Spirit towards us [as] personal, specific, and interconnected, culminating in the Incarnation of the Word and the response the Spirit enables” (433). The point is not a triumph of feminine imagery over masculine but of personal, bodily imagery of a real and experienced relationship with God over impersonal, abstract imagery of a distant God who is perfect but inaccessible.

Marianne Meye Thompson writes in her article “Speaking of God” that it is important not to lose one’s audience for the sake of pushing a theological conviction that the way has not been prepared for (6). What is the help in praying to God as Mother before a room full of people who have no idea what you are doing? But Julian teaches her readers, in the midst of her sensuous and bodily language, how to imagine God (and particularly Jesus) as relating to us not just like a Father but like a Mother as well: “for God’s fatherhood and motherhood is fulfilled in true loving of God; which blessed love Christ works in us” (chapter 60). I think Thompson would agree that reading Julian out of context would be detrimental to an unprepared audience, but Julian’s unashamed use of maternal language (“[Jesus] feeds us and nurtures us: even as that high sovereign kindness of motherhood [does],” chapter 63) in general draws no particular criticism.

Jewett would probably also agree that Julian’s use of maternal language is appropriate because they are just metaphors. She still uses the masculine pronoun “he” to refer to each of the three persons of the Trinity—“for he [Jesus] is our Mother, Brother, and Savior” (chapter 58, emphasis added)—which is the only thing Jewett is concerned about. She also does not use maternal language to the exclusion of paternal language, so Jewett would not be too concerned about her usage but would probably praise her ability to integrate these images so smoothly into her descriptions. In fact, Jewett actually declares that “the church needs to teach that God is as much like a mother as like a father” (139), and thus Julian does.

Thompson notes that while there is a “predominance of male imagery for God” in the Bible, it is also true that “the Bible does use feminine imagery for God” as well (2). Since “much of our language for God is metaphorical and analogical” (1), there is no grounds for the claim that it is “unbiblical to picture God in analogies from the sphere of women’s experience” (3). What Julian does in her writing is provide a balanced analogy of the parental relationship, both that of the Father and the Mother whenever she deems appropriate. In that way, she is able to elevate from a “second degree” status the part of the woman in the image of God (5).

Jewett echoes Thompson in the acknowledgement that women have been demeaned in the church, relegated to a secondary or “human-not-quite-human” status in relation to men (119). Since God has revealed himself in masculine language through the biblical authors, and since theologians have followed that tradition in referring to God, Jewett argues that it is appropriate to use masculine language, especially the masculine pronoun “he,” to refer to God (123). Nevertheless, it is important to educate Christians that while a masculine pronoun can be more appropriate in some contexts than a feminine one, that usage must be balanced with the recognition that “God so transcends all sexual distinction as to be neither male nor female, yet appropriately likened to both” (124). Julian does just that: likens God to both a Father and a Mother, “as truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother” (chapter 59). Ultimately, Jewett asserts, God has revealed himself not as masculine but as personal, the “personal Subject, saying I am who I am” (127), so while masculine language about God is appropriate because of tradition, “we must not continue to think of the male as supremely the bearer of the image of God” (128). Julian helps us understand God in feminine terms as well with her many references to Jesus as the suckling mother who cares for his children: “The mother may give her child suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus feeds us with himself” (chapter 60).

From the nature of woman

Plainly, Paul Jewett states in his book The Ordination of Women that this argument is “about as bankrupt as an argument can be” (9). The idea that a woman cannot preach because she will be a sexual distraction from the word of God is nothing short of ridiculous, not to mention insulting. Jewett acknowledges that the root of this argument is actually a “thinly veiled admission that the woman is still regarded as a sex object rather than as a person” (10). Men should use their positions in power to change that regard rather than perpetuate it. Jewett laments that instead of empowering women, “the church sees to it that god never authorizes a woman to escape male guardianship” (12) by creating a convoluted theology that puts a woman at odds with her divine calling (to wifely duties?) should she accept an actual divine calling (to seek ordination).

From the nature of the ministerial office

In Jewett’s estimation, the nature of ministerial office does not limit women from being ordained except by the lack of open-mindedness of the men. If it is “the woman’s relationship of subordination to the man that disqualifies her for ordination” (19), then we are back to the argument from nature that men should rather rise above than perpetuate. If women are capable of receiving “the same spiritual endowment” (18), and if it is true that “in Christ there is a universal priesthood of all believers, female as well as male” (20), then there is nothing to say that women cannot hold the office pertaining to that endowment. The underlying argument that women are unable to receive the sacrament of ordination even if it were placed upon them because they are women has no firm foundation but is merely an assumption based on cultural expectations. The arguments do not hold water theologically or practically, yet the rule stands on a tradition of faulty belief and teaching.

From the masculinity of God

In this section, Jewett calls perpetuators of this argument to account, arguing that “an affinity between maleness and divineness remains the basic assumption” (35). Those who make this argument simply like for God to be more male than female so that “to the male belong the privilege and the responsibility and the dignity in God’s church, because God is a masculine Deity” (35). The problem with this argument, Jewett points out (aside from degrading women), is that it does not jive with the theological principle that “there is only a ‘personal’ distinction in God (Trinity), not a ‘sexual’ one” (36). There may be male imagery for God in the Bible, says Jewett, but there is female imagery, too; there may be condemnation of goddess worship, but there is condemnation of god worship, too (37). Ultimately, “if God transcends human sexual distinctions in his essential being, then one cannot predicate of him either masculinity or femininity in the human sense of the terms” (43). God is like a father, and God is like a mother; “he is not subject to the either/or of fatherhood or motherhood as we are” (43), and both images are necessary to more fully explain the character of God and the manner in which he relates to his children. From a grammatical and linguistic viewpoint, Jewett advocates that when we “refer to God as ‘he,’ [we] should mean only that God is a personal God in contrast to an abstract, philosophic idea,” not that God is male (45); however, that usage must be taught and understood correctly and not allowed to be warped into an argument against woman’s capability to image God equally to man’s (47).

On a side note, I found Jewett’s discussion of the Holy Spirit as female (47ff) really interesting. I had never heard the argument before, always assuming that like the “he” used for God the Father and God the Son is meant to denote personhood and not sexuality, so too the Spirit was described with the pronoun “he.” It is appealing, I must admit, to consider the Holy Spirit in the role of Sophia, the feminine counterpart to all this masculine divinity. But I was convinced by his argument that any persuasion toward femininity comes solely from the fact that the word itself is feminine, not from any discernable specialty of character of the Spirit. Making the Holy Spirit female presents just the same set of problems we are already dealing with by the misunderstanding that the other persons of the Godhead are male. Ultimately, “the Trinitarian fellowship of the Godhead knows no male and female distinction, and the human fellowship of male and female knows no discrimination against the female as bearing the divine image to a lesser degree. Therefore, God’s Incarnation in the form of male humanity [and likewise the Greek word for “Spirit’s” being a feminine word] is theologically indifferent” (55). I can jive with that.

Since the previous post seems to be getting a fair amount of traffic, I am adding a bit more of the art section of my final project concerning the link between body theology and visual art in the Church.

There is profound beauty in the Incarnation of God in human form, a good human form that was just like every other image of God.[1] We have lost, I think, the ancients’ sense of beauty as that which is supremely Good,[2] as that which possesses a unique expression of truth in a way that draws us to look through it to that ultimate Beauty—the beauty of God. The Hebrew Bible draws a nuanced connection between beauty and holiness, preferring God’s glory as an expression of the beauty of holiness[3] rather than beauty for its own sake; yet its language and imagery is masterfully, powerfully creative—worthy of being deemed both good and beautiful for its ability to point beyond itself to the Goodness and Beauty of God.

Even our Newer Testament scriptures contain creativity in narrative and imagery, especially in the gospels and the Revelation of John. But as evangelicals we tend to narrow our focus to Paul’s letters which, though worthy of literary merit, were not designed or intended as artistic expressions of God’s truth. We focus on the divine and humiliated Jesus of the Philippians 2 hymn, on creedal statements, and on Paul’s contextual lists of do’s and don’ts for his churches. We have lost our emphasis on aesthetics for proper worship, as though God is better glorified by whining in a white-and-brown room than with the Sistine Chapel and Handel’s Messiah. We forget that our God is creative[4] and that he pronounced his creation good not because it is capable of standing alone but because it contains that element of truth[5] that points beyond itself to the goodness, beauty, truth, glory, holiness of our creative God. We forget, in our fear and shame, what we have been created for.

What I have discovered in particular, in my delving into the lies the Church perpetuated in my life concerning my own body and how to relate to other bodies is the connection, or perhaps more aptly the disconnection, between beauty expressed in art and the holiness of God expressed through Christian piety. We the-evangelical-community don’t know how to deal with our bodies. We don’t know what they’re for. We don’t understand physical beauty or its relation to any other kind of beauty.[6] We don’t know how to deal with our physicality, so we just label it sin to be safe. And anything in art that reminds us of our humanity or—dare I say it—Jesus’ humanity, is labeled just as sinful.[7] Consider the controversy in the Church when Caravaggio began depicting Jesus as ordinary and fleshly and real. We prefer the Gnostic or even Docetic Jesus,[8] the one who doesn’t disrupt our body-soul division or challenge us to live bodily into our role as the imago Dei.