Scripture, gender, babies and bathwater

A little report on a book that I read recently … A review of another Crossway book on a similar topic is posted at the moment at www.wineskins.org.

Jesus and the Feminists: Who Do They Say That He Is?
By Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger
Crossway, $19.99

That splashing sound you hear is Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger swimming against the tide when it comes to religion and sex/gender — or at least against the tide in certain seas. Decades ago, Köstenberger writes, Albert Schweitzer found that many of those seeking the “historical Jesus” found someone who looked much like … well, themselves. In Jesus and the Feminists: Who Do They Say That He Is?, Köstenberger takes on a similar question, and what emerges is “not one version of the true Jesus but many different accounts of who feminists perceive Jesus to be.”

“The evidence shows that the feminist quest for self-fulfillment and self-realization leads to a distortion of the message of the Bible,” the author writes. “In an attempt to fit Jesus into their feminist mold, feminists are ultimately kept from experiencing the fulfillment they are seeking.”

In Köstenberger’s view, the problem with full-blown feminist theology is that the feminism trumps the theology – on the question of which comes first, Scripture or one’s sex, the answer is too often the latter.

Köstenberger divides her thinkers into three strains: radical, reformist and biblical evangelical/egalitarian. The radicals – examples are Mary Daly, Virginia Mollenkott and Daphne Hampson – throw the baby out with the bathwater. This viewpoint “rejects Scripture in its entirety as irredeemably patriarchal and turns to other sources of validation .… it defines itself in direct antithesis to Scripture.”

Reformists such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and others are less thoroughgoing: The bathwater goes, but the baby can stay – IF he behaves himself. For these thinkers, “the problem lies with the church’s suppression of … earlier egalitarian impulses and with its reversion to a patriarchal, male-dominated model. Here Scripture and the church must be liberated from their patriarchal captivity.”

The biblical egalitarians, with their high view of Scripture, are cut from a different bolt of cloth: “The teaching of Galatians 3:28, that in Christ ‘there is no male and female,’ serves as the key biblical text by which all other teachings of Scripture are to be measured.”

Their problem, in Köstenberger’s mind, is that this group wants to argue from no distinctions in souls to no distinctions in roles – a leap that the author sees as unsupported by the Gospels. Jesus was indeed countercultural in his treatment of women, she says, but he was neither a feminist nor a modern egalitarian.

Köstenberger deliberately addresses only one aspect of the controversy – the title, after all, is Jesus and the Feminists rather than Jesus, Paul, Genesis and the Feminists. The greatest strength of her book is probably its documentation of the Procrustean treatment of Scripture in some feminist circles: If the text doesn’t fit the bed they’ve built, they hack it up or stretch it until it does. Why even bother?

Story-telling vs. essay-writing

Quote for the day for English teachers and would-be English teachers like myself:

“For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

Language, faith, fiction and long Russian names

Herewith a review of a book I read recently. It’s not for the intellectually faint of heart, though!

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction
By Rowan Williams
Baylor UniversityPress, $24.95

In an old “Peanuts” comic strip, Lucy finds Linus reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “Don’t all those Russian names bother you?” she asks her brother.
 
“No,” he replies, “when I come to one I can’t pronounce, I just bleep right over it!”
 
A little advice if you happen to pick up Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction: Before starting, do your homework on the 19th-century Russian author. Some background in literary theory and criticism (particularly Dostoevsky critic Mikhail Bakhtin) would help, too. Otherwise, you may find yourself taking the Linusian approach and bleeping over large sections of Rowan Williams’ book.
 
The unresolved tension in Dostoevsky’s novels, says the archbishop of Canterbury (yes, it’s that Rowan Williams), “is not — as it is too often portrayed — a tension between believing and not believing in the existence of God. … Dostoevsky is not presenting to us a set of inconclusive arguments about ‘the existence of God,’ for and against, but a fictional picture of what faith and the lack of it would look like in the political and social world of his day.”
 
Another key point (and this is where some of that literary theory comes in): “[W]hatever Dostoevsky actually believed himself, he could not but put it into a novel as one perspective among others, since he was committed to a particular view of what authorship can and can’t do …. we have a text that consciously writes out the to and fro of dialogue, always alerting us to the dangers of staying with or believing uncritically what we have just heard.”
 
Working from The Brothers Karamazov and Dostoevsky’s other major novels — Crime and Punishment, Notes From the Underground, The Idiot and Devils (also known as The Possessed) — Williams addresses various questions. What did Dostoevsky mean when he wrote that “if someone were to prove to me that Christ was outside the truth … then I should choose to stay with Christ rather than with the truth”? How are freedom and the diabolical connected? Why is open-endedness important to the concepts of dialogue and narrative? What might “taking responsibility for others” entail? How does Dostoevsky employ the ideas of holy images and blasphemy?
 
If all that sounds like quite a mouthful … well, it is. Rowan’s book assumes not just a thorough working knowledge of the novels — there are no plot summaries or character lists — but also an ability to hike in the rarefied atmosphere of academic discussion. CliffsNotes this ain’t.
 
“[O]ne of the most serious mistakes we could possibly make in reading Dostoevsky,” Williams says, “is to suppose that his fundamental position is individualistic, simply because of his passionate opposition to determinism.” True freedom, according to Williams’ understanding of the Russian writer, involves the ideas of language and exchange — it is not something that focuses on my arbitrary choices and obliterates any need for an “other” whom I must react to and dialogue with. “Freedom as detachment or freedom as self-assertion will equally lead away from language, toward the silence of nonrecognition.”
 
So if you’re up to a thorough intellectual workout, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction may be the right exercise machine for you. Otherwise, you’ve got a few rounds of literary push-ups to do.

Bin Laden and the Bene Gesserit

So according to The Associated Press, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari says that Osama bin Laden may be dead but that there’s no proof.

I’m reminded of an exchange in Frank Herbert’s Dune between Count Fenring and his wife, Margot. The count expresses regret about the reported death of Paul Atreides, the ducal heir of the planet Arrakis.

“There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” his wife says. ” … It goes: ‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.’ “

A pause for thought at the wordsmith’s anvil

“We are all like the Word himself — we might say that we are ‘little words,’ made to be communicators in words just like our Creator. God is the One who called all worlds into being by his creative word, who sustains and rules over all things by his powerful and law-giving word, who reveals himself by his truth-giving word, who communicates by his life-giving word. We are to use language in imitation of him by exercising the gifts of creative imagination, by understanding and naming the world around us, by revealing ourselves truthfully in all we say and write, by communicating with our Creator and with one another to build trust and to give life to all our relationships.”

– Jerram Barrs, Through His Eyes: God’s Perspective on Women in the Bible

I thee wed

Quote for the day in a society in which matrimony seems to weigh lightly in many minds:

“The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the ‘I do’ of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married. I hope that I will always have faith in the giddy wonders of romance, but in considering what makes a marriage endure, I am likely to employ such ascetic and unromantic terms as discipline, martyrdom, and obedience.”

– Kathleen Norris,
Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life

Jingle all the way

The most memorable Christmas present that this recently laid-off newspaper copy editor received in 2008:

My older daughter  bought me a book when the University of Missouri was culling its stacks: Arville Schaleben’s 1961 (my birth year) Your Future in Journalism.

And just to make it extra-special, on the spine label was stamped, in big red letters, “DISCARD.”

Gotta love it.

The writer’s constant difficulty

“You are absolutely right to consider nothing but major problems. My major problem is finding the next word.”

– Flannery O’Connor, June 1963 letter in The Habit of Being

Don’t we all …

Quote for the day:

“I hope that before I die I either mend my manners or have less occasion to employ them.”

– an April 1961 letter by Flannery O’Connor in The Habit of Being on what she viewed as her too-harsh response to a letter about her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Cloaked in shadow

Late in Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, the psychic Paul Atreides spots an unfamiliar face in the entourage of a galactic ruler.

“The Emperor’s errand boy, Paul thought. And the thought was a shock crashing across his consciousness because he had seen the Emperor in uncounted associations spread across the possible futures — but never once had Count Fenring appeared within those prescient visions. …

“Something in his own secretive depths stayed the Count [later], and he glimpsed briefly, inadequately, the advantage he held over Paul — a way of hiding from the youth, a furtiveness of person and motives that no eye could penetrate.

“Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost-Kwisatz Haderach … his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he’d ever experienced.”

I identify with the count. In some ways, I am always more comfortable in the background — if I’m going to be out in front, I like it to be on my terms. (And yes, it is sort of counterintuitive for a sometime columnist and book critic to be that way, but … what can I say? There it is.)

And oddly enough, I find this trait to be handy when I put on my blogging hat these days.

The Internet seems to bring out a certain mental incoherence in some people, particularly younger ones. They metaphorically (and sometimes literally) strip down to their birthday suit in terms of personal revelations, leaving the rest of us slack-jawed and thinking: “They do understand, don’t they, that a gazillion people can see this? And that once it’s out there, you can never erase it?” Apparently discretion is not the better part of valor in some people’s books.

At the moment I find myself caught between two imperatives. On the one hand, I am blogging, tossing my two cents out onto the street like alms in reverse. On the other hand, I am looking for a new job in a professional world in which I must assume that one of the first things that any halfway interested employer will do is run my name through an electronic search and see what pops up.

So I am forced to think twice — yea, thrice — about anything I might post. If I gripe about an unpleasant job-search experience, well, the person responsible might see it. That might come back to bite me. On the other hand, a specific reference to a pleasant experience might tip a different party off to the fact that I’m interested in some other job.

So it’s actually rather handy to be someone with a liking for being only half-seen, with no urge to lay it all out for everyone. It makes blogging harder but restraint much easier.