After Exegesis

Feminist Biblical Theology

Patricia K. Tull, Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Patricia K. Tull, Jacqueline E. Lapsley

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781481304795
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

After Exegesis frames an inclusive feminist biblical theology, exploring creation, providence, divine judgment, salvation, praise, justice, authority, inclusion, the "other, " moral agency, suffering, violence, reconciliation, flourishing, and hope. Each chapter places multiple related biblical texts in dialogue around a common theological concern. In so doing, this work exemplifies a central feminist claim: that bringing two or more texts, often born of different contexts, into conversation with each other generates a productive tension that transcends the dominant theological tradition.

After Exegesis thus underscores the fact that the context for feminist biblical theology must be understood more broadly than it has been traditionally construed. The volume demonstrates feminist theology fulfilling this promised breadth, while also staking a claim to the future: theology must attend to humanity's interdependent connectedness to the rest of creation and to such realities as human embodiment, suffering, oppression, hope, and the multivocal nature of truth.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Wisdom Rebuilds Her House

Jacqueline E. Lapsley and Patricia K. Tull

When Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe first considered creating the edited book now known as the Women’s Bible Commentary, they wondered whether they could find enough women scholars to author short commentaries on each of the Bible’s sixty-six books. By the time they were writing the introduction to their third edition twenty years later, the problem had been transformed into an embarrassment of riches, with far more potential contributors than chapters to write. By 2012, not only among white North American women feminists, but among womanist, mujerista, Asian, African, European, male feminist, queer, differently abled, and other liberation-oriented scholars, the abundance of perspectives and possibilities had blossomed into an interpretive Eden.

Feminist biblical interpreters, and female interpreters who identify with liberation theologies but for diverse reasons do not call themselves feminists, vary widely in preferred exegetical methods, social locations, training, and faith and faith stances. Yet there are some characteristics that can be named as widespread.

First, most feminists reject the idea that interpreting Scripture as women is an exegetical “method” alongside of, and on the same plane as, historical criticism or rhetorical criticism. Rather, individuals who hold feminist or liberationist sensibilities can and do employ an eclectic range of exegetical tools, tools both traditional and recently developed.

Second, unlike traditional scholars who have presumed that their views held universal relevance, and therefore that their own particular social settings had little impact on their studies, feminist biblical scholars recognize that social location shapes interpretation. It formulates who the interpreter is and what questions and concerns that interpreter will bring to particular texts. In fact, a feminist writer’s social location is often named explicitly. Unlike scholars who systematically avoid personal pronouns, we seldom disguise our own agency.

Third, feminists tend not to predetermine what the assumed “center” of biblical theology must be, nor do we view our chosen starting points as givens. Accordingly, we seldom oblige ourselves either to ignore or to smooth over the diverse theological positions of biblical writers themselves—a practice that underinterprets or ignores texts that threaten a central idea’s prominent place. Instead, feminist interpreters acknowledge and even celebrate fundamental diversities among biblical passages and writers.

Fourth, although some of us adhere to faith more than others, few feminist biblical interpreters set out only to defend or to debunk the Scriptures. Instead we engage in a complex, often dialogical process of acquainting ourselves with the “other” whose authorship underlies the text, seeking in sympathy to understand before responding. As we construct our reading of an ancient text, our work may be compared to home remodeling: having examined the materials available, we highlight what has been hidden from view, reclaim everything we can, repurpose or recycle what we must, and carefully refuse what we can no longer consider appropriate to the project of life-affirming inquiry—recognizing full well that other readers in other places or times may beg to differ.

Fifth, such complex layering of thought is built into feminism itself, which resists organizing the world into the wholesale, weighted dichotomies that earlier philosophers and theologians often employed. Such dualisms have valued, for instance, mind over body, male over female, reason over emotion, control over creativity, one over many. Within polarities such as these, all too often, “the female body becomes a metaphor for the corporeal pole of this dualism, representing nature, emotionality, irrationality and sensuality . . . all that needed to be tamed and controlled by the (dis)embodied, objective, male scientist.”1 Feminists often draw attention to sources of knowledge or ways of knowing that are disparaged or ignored in such dualities, such as experiences known not through reason first but through emotion and bodily, lived events.

The project of constructing feminist theology in conversation with an ancient book written mostly if not wholly by men in a male-dominated culture may seem, at least at first glance, doomed to failure. But significantly, the Bible in general and the Old Testament in particular, when examined closely, are more amenable than one might think to feminist thought. First, Scripture itself is eclectic in its own messages and genres. Second, few passages of Scripture claim universality. Rather, its writings are positioned within specific times, places, and circumstances, and are often surrounded by other texts that bring into serious question the universality of particular claims. Third, the Bible points to no thematic center. Even God—who is almost but not quite ubiquitous in Scripture—is not imagined in any set way. In fact, reducing God to one image is considered idolatry. Fourth, while there are some biblical figures who are celebrated without reserve or rejected without mercy, and some actions that are categorically proscribed or everywhere commended, Scripture itself maintains a certain ambivalence about the character of most everyone and everything under the sun, even that of God. Its production, in fact, entailed a continuous process of reevaluation, renovation, recycling, rejection, and reintegration of earlier views. And fifth, Scripture itself is unsystematic and unphilosophical. Its writers and its figures live in gendered bodies, in time, in pain, in longing, in experience, in confusion, in hope. In fact, much of the Bible’s long-standing readability derives from the recognizable day-to-day experience of ancient people whose bodies and minds resemble our own. Thus, as this volume’s contributors will demonstrate, Scripture itself offers many examples of personal, temporal, specific, and experiential ways of knowing.2

Given all this, one would think that, nearly forty years since both feminist theology and feminist biblical interpretation first emerged, plenty of feminist biblical theologies would have been produced. But in reality, while biblical readings, interpretations, and even hermeneutics by female biblical scholars from around the world have burgeoned, and while constructive theologies by female theologians from a wide variety of social settings have likewise flourished, very little has emerged in feminist biblical theology as such.

Back in 1989, before several of the contributors to this volume had yet entered graduate studies (or, in some cases, high school), Phyllis Trible reviewed the masculine history of biblical theology, asking, “Can feminism and biblical theology meet?”3 Her own response was a qualified yes—but not yet. Nevertheless, she suggested some “overtures,” projecting what a feminist biblical theology might look like should it be written. She viewed the project as constructive and hermeneutical, not simply descriptive; as belonging to diverse communities, neither essentially nor necessarily Christian; as varied in its interpretive methods, organizations, and expositions; and as springing from exegesis—in particular, highlighting neglected texts and reinterpreting familiar ones, especially those dealing with women. She called for grounding theology in creation, particularly regarding the theological meaning of gender; for opposing the absolutizing of any particular image of God; for welcoming meanings that have not been anticipated by writers and readers before; and for wrestling with models of authority.

All that she pointed out was already being practiced by Trible herself and by other feminist biblical interpreters before 1989 and has continued since. But by the mid-2000s, when both Leo Perdue and James Mead drew on her overtures in their own discussions of biblical theology, feminist work that was specifically called biblical theology had seen almost no significant development.4 Even today, as biblical theology has enjoyed resurgence, very few women have ventured into book-length biblical theologies, much less explicitly feminist biblical theology.5

There may be several reasons for this. Biblical theology itself has been somewhat less certain since its failed mid-twentieth-century attempts to discover a central theme around which to organize. In contrast to the magisterial multivolume works of Gerhard von Rad, Walther Eichrodt, and others in biblical theology’s heyday, contemporary biblical theologies usually pursue less ambitious programs for unifying their works. Biblical theology has also suffered from some confusion about its goals, confusion dating back to its origin: Should biblical theology be descriptive or constructive? If it is descriptive of the thought of ancient Israelite writers, feminists have clearly been working in this area for quite some time, often without calling it biblical theology. But some of the most important work in biblical theology has been constructive, not purely descriptive.

Although Carol Newsom does not call herself a biblical theologian, her contributions to rethinking the problems and possibilities of biblical theology are vast and fundamental. They come to clear theoretical expression in her 1996 article “Bakhtin, the Bible, and Dialogic Truth”6 and are exemplified in her work on the book of Job.7

Newsom opens her 1996 article by recounting a scene familiar to many seminary professors. In a job interview, a candidate for a position in Old Testament reaches an impasse with a theologian on the committee over the nature of the Bible. The theologian inquires about the Hebrew Scriptures’ theological center or primary theme. The biblical scholar resists repeatedly, insisting on the Bible’s variety and particularity, leading to the theologian’s exasperated response: “I’m just trying to find something that theology can work with.”

Newsom quotes a series of prominent biblical theologians from the past who have given theology something it could work with, but at the expense of distorting the Bible’s own nature. The problem, she says, is that the monologic sense of truth that has dominated Western thought does not suit the Bible or its theological quest. Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Newsom offers instead a description of dialogical, or polyphonic, truth capable of negotiating the compositional and ideological complexity of biblical texts.8 Dialogic truth “exists at the point of intersection of several unmerged voices”9—as a conversation among different consciousnesses embodied as persons. It is not systematic, but rather it is manifest in “event”—in the dynamic interaction of perspectives that do not merge with one another, and remain open, “unfinalizable.”

Bakhtin gave Dostoevsky credit for creating such dialogic events in his novels. Within the Bible, Newsom acknowledges, only the book of Job shows evidence of similar orchestration. However, the biblical redactors’ practice of leaving the voices of source materials unmerged, much as it may frustrate a seeker of monologic truth, invites investigation into the (usually implicit, but occasionally explicit) dialogues among texts and their authors. By way of example, she notes side-by-side creation accounts, interpolated flood narratives, and repeated and varied treatments of such themes as identity, land, and outsiders in the patriarchal narratives. “Would it be possible,” Newsom asks, “for biblical theology to ‘play Dostoevsky’ to the various ideas and worldviews of the biblical text? There are many implicit quarrels in the Bible which need only a little prodding to make them explicit.”10 A biblical theologian’s role, then, Newsom said, “would not be to inhabit the voice, as the novelist does, but rather to pick out the assumptions, experiences, entailments, embedded metaphors, and so on, which shape each perspective and to attempt to trace the dotted line to a point at which it intersects the claims of the other”—to “self-consciously go beyond what the texts themselves explicitly say to draw out the implications of their ideas.”11

It is instructive to compare Trible’s and Newsom’s suggestions with the expressed aims of the most prominent recent writer of biblical theology, Walter Brueggemann. He defines Old Testament theology as the “coherent, wholistic [sic] presentation of the faith claims of the canonical text, in a way that satisfies the investigations of historical-critical scholarship and the confessional-interpretive needs of ongoing ecclesial communities.”12 Several aspects of this definition are worth comment. First, as has already been observed, and as Newsom has made explicit, feminist biblical theology resists the idea that a holistic or comprehensive treatment is necessary to qualify for the title “biblical theology.” Feminist biblical theology may well take up the larger categories of systematic theology (“sin,” “grace,” “redemption,” etc.), but it is likely to do so in ways that differ from those of the dominant tradition. Readings of individual texts, explicit engagement with present-day social and political realities, reflection on themes occurring in a minority of texts, and so on—these, without apology, are often the purview of feminist biblical interpretation. To be sure, while Brueggemann offers the above description as the “aim and task” of Old Testament theology, he acknowledges that there are many “legitimate” means of inquiry and that particularity in perspective is necessary. Yet many biblical theologians suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that comprehensive approaches are preferable. Feminist thought, by contrast, prefers to eschew totalizing schemas since they have tended to reflect androcentric bias—and this includes the way feminists do biblical theology. Second, while feminist biblical theology certainly attends to historical-critical scholarship and may well present the “faith claims of the canonical text,” both of these are tools in a larger project of constructively engaging the biblical text in theological conversation on current realities and contexts. Third, in agreement with Brueggemann’s definition, as well as the concerns of Trible and Newsom, most but not all feminist biblical scholars do their work with and for confessional communities that seek to understand how the biblical texts may inform life lived before God.

Few feminist biblical interpreters understand their work as participating in the construction of theology per se. Nevertheless, the field of biblical theology is here to stay, and since biblical theology shapes the church and other confessional communities in powerful ways, to leave this field to men is to neglect our influence with the people who care the most about the Bible. Feminist biblical theology can have a positive role in facilitating the church’s participation in loving the people and the world God has made. In addition, while feminist constructive theologians outside the field of biblical studies are understandably more reluctant to begin with an ancient text that is, if not consistently or irretrievably patriarchal, at least sometimes discouraging to read and interpret, it is important to them to know what feminist biblical scholars perceive regarding Scripture and the central theological themes that our forebears derived from it—creation, sin, suffering, grace, and others.

Constructing a list of themes that ought to be covered in a feminist biblical theology proved challenging for us. Not all themes traditional to systematic theology are amenable either to what the Old Testament offers or to what interests women, and some topics that are extremely interesting both to the biblical writers and to contemporary women (such as inclusion and exclusion, moral agency, violence, and leadership) suffer neglect at the hands of traditional biblical theologians. Ultimately we chose to balance the book between what might be possible to treat in depth and what kind of breadth seemed called for, between what we hoped for ideally and what emerged among real people in their real-life settings, between aspirations and time limitations. Because the trails are not yet blazed, much less trampled, we view our efforts as preliminary and suggestive forays into the field, explorations to see what might be discovered. Yet we believe that the essays in this volume address important issues that can help shape discourse on what the church might be.

Wishing to make the volume more cohesive than is often possible in edited works, we set out with certain parameters and methods in mind for engendering conversation both within each essay and among them. This is what we did:

First, since this volume is intended to honor the life, work, mentorship, trailblazing, and collegiality of our friend Dr. Carol Newsom and to gesture toward her significant work in the Women’s Bible Commentary, we made the difficult decision to limit the volume to women—recognizing full well the fine male scholars, many of them feminists, who have also been her colleagues and students. Every contributor to this volume has at least one debt to pay to Carol, either as friend, as colleague, or as protégée (the majority of us were her students at Emory)—and all as learners from her own finely reasoned work. Most of us were contributors to the third edition of WBC, though only two of us contributed to the second edition and only one, Jo Ann Hackett, appeared in the first edition.

Echoing Carol’s suggestion that biblical texts need only a little prodding to begin to quarrel, we offered each scholar a theme to explore, asking that they do so by means of two or more specific scriptural passages of their choosing, researched in some depth and placed in dialogue with one another. Some contributors chose two passages that they balanced in dialogue. Others chose one central passage, brought into question or expanded in significance by its resonance or discrepancy with two to five others. Some chose passages from the same book of Scripture, and others chose from across the canon.

We first asked each contributor to write a brief abstract explaining what they expected to do. After we collected these abstracts and distributed them to all participants, almost all of us met face-to-face over coffee and pastries early one morning at the November 2012 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Chicago, graciously hosted by Carey Ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Wisdom Rebuilds Her House
• 2 Jobs and Benefits in Genesis 1 and 2: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Creation
• 3 Women’s Doings in Ruth: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Providence
• 4 Job and the Hidden Face of God: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Divine Judgment
• 5 Embodiment in Isaiah 51–52 and Psalm 62: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Salvation
• 6 Reading Psalm 146 in the Wild: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Praise
• 7 Woman Wisdom and Her Friends: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Justice
• 8 When Esther and Jezebel Write: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Authority
• 9 Miriam, Moses, and Aaron in Numbers 12 and 20: A Feminist Biblical Theology Concerning Exclusion
• 10 Be Kind to Strangers, but Kill the Canaanites: A Feminist Biblical Theology of the Other
• 11 Rahab and Esther in Distress: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Moral Agency
• 12 The Traumatized “I” in Psalm 102: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Suffering
• 13 “Missing Women” in Judges 19–21: A Feminist Biblical Theology Concerning Violenceagainst Women
• 14 Zechariah’s Gendered Visions: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Reconciliation
• 15 Path and Possession in Proverbs 1–9: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Flourishing
• 16 Counterimagination in Isaiah 65 and Daniel 12: A Feminist Biblical Theology of Hope
• Biography of Carol A. Newsom
• Selected Bibliography of Carol A. Newsom’s Writings
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Scripture Index
• Subject/Author Index