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?

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

Another Flannery shirt in my mental wardrobe

“When I ask myself how I know I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say … Lord I believe, help my unbelief. And all I can say about my love of God, is, Lord, help me in my lack of it. I distrust pious phrases, particularly when they issue from my mouth.”

– Letter of Aug. 2, 1955, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

“Groundhog Day” redux

For a long time, I had heard how wonderful the film Groundhog Day was. I was skeptical. A weatherman (played by Bill Murray) who keeps repeating the same 24 hours over and over? Ya gotta be kidding.

Then I found a VHS copy on sale for a dollar or two and decided: Well, all right, let’s see. And I was impressed.

I was telling a friend recently how suprisingly deep this film was. The friend — I can’t remember if she had seen it or not — wasn’t buying it. No, really, I said. The key moment lies in the middle of the film, when Murray’s Phil Connors is driving around with two drunken acquaintances and asks them: What would you do if there were no tomorrow?

Which is precisely what Phil proceeds to explore, in predictable fashion. He gorges himself. He steals from an armored car. He conducts laboratory studies in seduction. In short, he indulges himself in every way — and eventually, like the author of Ecclesiastes, discovers that it’s all emptiness and chasing after the snowy wind. (For that handful of people out there who don’t know how — or if — he manages to get out of his predicament: Go ahead, watch the movie.)

Last night, it was like deju vu all over again. I had bought a secondhand DVD of Stranger Than Fiction, the 2006 movie in which a bland IRS agent (Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell) starts hearing a female voice narrating his life. He soon discovers that, inexplicably, he is actually a character in a novel being written by an author (Karen Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson) who plans on killing him off.

About halfway through the movie — which, despite what one might expect from Ferrell, is definitely not written as outright comedy — I was finding it lacking. “And I paid ten dollars for this!” I said to my wife.

But then it struck me: In a way, this is actually a movie about God and Man.

What happens when a person confronts his Creator about what is happening to him? Can that act — in real life, we call it “prayer” — make any difference?

Late in Stranger Than Fiction, a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman) who has read Eiffel’s manuscript reluctantly tells Harold: I’m sorry, but you have to die. That is the only way this story can end. And after all, you cannot escape death in the end anyway. This is a magnificent story, and this is the way it has to be.

But Harold refuses to accept that. He tracks down Eiffel and asks her not to kill him. And (not to give away too much), his plea does change the ending of the story in a way.

I was reminded of the story of King Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20. The Judean king becomes ill, and the prophet Isaiah comes to him and says: Get your affairs in order; God says you are going to die.

Now, if the Master of the Universe goes to the trouble of sending you a personal message that you’re not going to make it, it does seem a bit cheeky to fight it. But Hezekiah does. He prays that God will remember what kind of person he has been.

And the startling thing is that before Isaiah even gets out of the palace, God changes his mind: “Go back and tell Hezekiah, the leader of my people, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of your father David, says: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will heal you. … I will add fifteen years to your life” (NIV).

You always hear that life is sometimes stranger than fiction. Maybe there’s more to that than we usually think.