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?

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.

None of that around here

Quote for the day:

“I attended a Christian college at a time when a sister school, Moody Bible Institute, posted instructions on what to do in case of ‘Emergencies,’ which they defined as fire, tornado and air raid, bomb threat, emotional upset and/or suicide, sickness or injury, and ‘charismatic activity.’”

– Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God

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