Thy Word, Re-imagined

October 18, 2015

Genesis 3:1-16 (selected verses)

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ … ⁶So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. …  ¹³Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’ … ¹⁶To the woman God said, ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’

I Peter 2:9-3:6

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul.  Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.

For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing right you should silence the ignorance of the foolish. As servants of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil.  Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

Wives, in the same way, accept the authority of your husbands, so that, even if some of them do not obey the word, they may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing; rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God’s sight. It was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by accepting the authority of their husbands. Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord. You have become her daughters as long as you do what is good and never let fears alarm you.

This is the word of the Lord.

“Women should remain silent in worship.” “Wives be submissive to your husbands.” “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”

As I noted in the e-blast last week, about 20 years ago, Cheryl and I sat in a Presbyterian church in Kentucky as passages such as those were read. She leaned over to me and whispered, “these are not my favorite parts of the Bible.”

We were brand new to that congregation, and had never heard the pastor who was stepping to the pulpit to preach. We squirmed, and glanced about surreptitiously to see if anyone else was obviously sharing our discomfort. What had we walked into? I’ll tell you in a bit.

Given the hymns that we have already sung today, I doubt that any visitors this morning have had a similar experience. Nevertheless, these texts, taken together, reflect the patriarchal culture out of which all of scripture came, and, moreover, they have been used to perpetuate patriarchy in many subsequent cultures for more than 2,000 years.

They are, by any contemporary reading, “difficult texts.” That makes them perfect for this season of struggle, as we continue our wrestling with scripture.

Years ago, a colleague and I were talking about one of the frustrations common to ministry, and, in truth, lots of other kinds of work: we rarely see the results of our efforts. We pretty much agreed that on many days we’d just as soon be the grounds crew or the custodial staff because those folks can see results immediately. As we continued the conversation, I observed that, in fact, a lot of the time I do feel like the janitor – the theological janitor – because I spend so much time cleaning up the theological garbage that others have dumped on people in my circles of concern.

I cannot tell you how many times I have sat with young gay men who asked me if I thought they were going to hell because they were gay. I cannot tell you how many times I have sat with women deeply wounded by churches that consigned them to second-class status based on gender, and preachers who told them what their place was and tried to keep them in it.

You need not look far to understand why this matters in concrete terms. The list of ways that women and girls are demeaned, devalued, and discriminated against around the world remains unfathomable and unconscionable, and men around the world appeal to religious traditions and religious text to justify the situation. I sometimes wish I could sue for theological malpractice. The problem, though, would be tracking down all the right defendants. Obviously, patriarchy’s roots run deep in scripture, and those roots have been carefully tended for a long, long time by men – and it’s almost always men – who have used and abused scripture to justify oppression.

Just taking stock of those roots that shoot up into our own little branch of American Christianity, we find Cotton Mather’s 1692 advice for women entitled, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, of the Character and Happiness of a Vertuous Woman,[1] in which we learn that “The ‘female sex’ was to complement the male role by its radiant silent presence.”[2]

Not much had changed by the middle of the 19^th century, when much of the Presbyterian piece of the American Christian scene was shaped by the teaching of theologian Charles Hodge. Hodge taught at Princeton Theological Seminary for 58 years, and directly influenced more than 3,000 seminarians – more than any other American theologian of his century. Hodge’s instructions regarding the role of women are captured in his line from a book review in which he “used the analogy of the necessary subordination of women to defend slavery: [writing] ‘there is no deformity of human character from which we turn with deeper loathing than from a woman forgetful of her nature and clamorous for the vocations and rights of men.’”[3]

But even as Hodge was presiding over more than a half-century of theological education, the intellectual foundations of that theology were beginning to shift beneath his feet. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species created a crisis in theology that dominated the late 1800s and early 20^th century in what came to be known as the split between modernists and fundamentalists. The fundamentalists relied greatly on Hodge’s work, but they lost their hold on the Presbyterian church by the end of the 1920s, and as their influence waned in its place grew a much broader and more nuanced way of reading scripture.

We stand now as receivers of a century of intellectual development, of sophisticated hermeneutical work, of deep historical exploration, of remarkably creative theological imagination, which basically means there is simply no excuse for reading the passages we opened with as if they came from the mouth of God, as if they are the totality of the witness of scripture, as if they are the only “word of the Lord” regarding gender.

But these passages remain within the canon of scripture. We do, from time to time, read them, and, when we read them in worship, some people will still announce, “this is the world of the Lord.”

So, how ought we to hear a word from God in these ancient, troubling texts? I will freely confess that there’s a large part of me that still feels like we ought to simply chuck them altogether – at least insofar as it comes to worship. Even this morning, I feel like this material is much better suited to a classroom than to the pulpit.

So, how do we read these texts, in worship, and call them, somehow, the word of the Lord? I asked that question last spring at the Sprunt Lectures at Union Seminary in Richmond. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza was the lecturer. She is one of the most important feminist theologians of the 20^th century, and she was taking us through two days of lectures focused on the passage from 1 Peter that I read of bit ago.

My question derailed the entire last morning, and it was during the 45 minutes of community conversation that erupted after I asked the question that I decided I wanted to preach this fall on the difficult texts. In particular, it was the response from a woman who happened to be sitting right next to me in the pews that compelled me. She said something to the effect of, “look carefully at the text; it undoes itself so quickly that I suspect the author knew it all along.”

As she pointed out, the opening verse of the third chapter of First Peter says, “wives be subject to your husbands.” Then down in verse six, the author offers up an example: “thus Sarah obeyed Abraham.” After laughing out loud, the woman next me said, “Sarah is the worst example possible of obedience. She was a trickster through and through.” In other words, she suggested, perhaps this entire passage was written tongue in cheek. If read that way, it’s more about deconstructing patriarchy than about reinforcing it.

Fiorenza, in her own reading, had pushed us to consider what else was at stake in the passage, and to consider how the behavior being suggested – obedience – was not a moral code for all women at all times, but rather a strategic suggestion to a particular group of women on whose shoulders would rest the fate of the faith in their historical context. As aliens among the Gentiles, the letter of First Peter is urging a particular community, to behave in a way that attracts converts – especially by marriage – but does not attract the attention of the oppressive civil authorities.

Such a reading could have something to offer the church in North America, where we might productively consider ourselves resident aliens in a imperial culture marked by mass consumption and hyper-capitalism.

In other words, there’s always more going on in the text than a surface reading reveals – especially when that surface reading has historically been put in the service of maintaining an oppressive status quo. This is true whether or not the “author” intended it, and whether or not the institution authorized to interpret the text agrees. That, indeed, is among the watchwords of the Reformation. When the Reformers said, “solo scriptura” – scripture alone – they were liberating the word from the institution of the church.

They were not, however, saying “anything goes.” That is to say, we are a particular community with a distinctive set of values and commitments. Such values and commitments frame the way that we interpret the texts at the center of our lives.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been, for my entire adult lifetime, committed to following common guidelines in interpreting scripture, and those guidelines are codified in our Book of Order. These principles for interpretation include interpreting individual passages of scripture in terms of the whole of scripture, committing to serious study, and following the ‘rule of faith’ – that is to say, acknowledging a particular history of interpretation. Taken together, these three guidelines alone demand of us more than “proof-texting” – that is to say, they demand that we not take one verse, “wives be submissive to your husbands,” for example, as if that is all that the Bible or the church has ever had to say about gender roles.

This was the heart of the sermon that Cheryl and I heard preached in Lexington all those years ago, and it rested on the ongoing challenge to contemporary readers to take the task of reading seriously enough that we distinguish 1^st-century Palestinian worldview from eternal truth.

Eternal truth comes in the principle of interpretation known simply as the ‘rule of love.’ The ‘rule of love’ in interpreting scripture goes back to St. Augustine, and rests on Jesus’ two-fold commandment to love God and love your neighbor. Accordingly, any reading of scripture that demeans God or debases a fellow human being should be called into question.

We also acknowledge, as a principle of interpretation, our reliance on the Spirit, and, indeed, the movement of the Spirit is what opens us to fresh insights and new interpretations. In other words, the Spirit calls us to change – especially when old interpretations support systems and structures that debase human beings.

Fundamentally, our Presbyterian way of reading scripture begins with the conviction that, for us – that is to say, for Christians, Jesus is the center of the whole story. Thus we recognize that the teachings of Jesus are the lens through which we must read the rest of scripture, or, as Jack Rogers succinctly puts it, “Jesus’ teachings and attitudes should be used to interpret the Pauline teachings, not the other way around.”[4]

That conviction lies at the root of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s entire feminist theological project – and makes me suspect that though she is a lifelong Roman Catholic, she’s a Presbyterian at heart. Professor Fiorenza gets the last word this morning. She concludes In Memory of Her, a book that many critics consider her most significant contribution to contemporary theology, this way:

In historical retrospective the New Testament’s sociological and theological stress on submission and patriarchal superordination has won out over its sociological and theological stress on altruistic love and ministerial service. [In other words, both submission to patriarchy and service based on radical love are present in the text.] Yet this ‘success’ can not be justified theologically, since it cannot claim the authority of Jesus for its own Christian praxis. The writers of Mark and John have made it impossible for the Christian church to forget the invitation of Jesus to follow him on the way to the cross. Therefore, wherever the gospel is preached and heard, promulgated and read, what the women have done is not totally forgotten because the Gospel story remembers that the discipleship and apostolic leadership of women are integral parts of Jesus’ ‘alternative’ praxis of agape [self-emptying love] and service. The ‘light shines in the darkness’ of patriarchal repression and forgetfulness, and this ‘darkness has never overcome it.’[5]

Amen.

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[1] Cited in Jack Rogers, Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006) 27.

[2] Ibid.

[3] ibid. 28.

[4] Jack Rogers, Reading the Bible & the Confessions The Presbyterian Way (Louisville: Geneva Press, 1999) 32.

[5] Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroads, 1983) 334.