Women in the Story of Jesus

The Gospels through the Eyes of Nineteenth-Century Female Biblical Interpreters

Marion Ann Taylor, Heather Weir

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781467445856
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This volume gathers the writings of thirty-one nineteenth-century women on the stories of women in the Gospels—Mary and Martha, Anna, the Samaritan woman at the well, Herodias and Salome, Mary Magdalene, and more. Retrieving and analyzing rarely read works by Christina Rossetti, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Wordsworth, and many others,  Women in the Story of Jesus  illuminates the biblical text, recovers a neglected chapter of reception history, and helps us understand and apply Scripture in our present context.

PART 1

HEART AND HANDS:
WOMEN’S SPIRITUALITY

Introduction

The terms “devotion,” “piety,” and “heart religion” were the nineteenth-century words for what we call spirituality.¹ It is not surprising that women living in the nineteenth century, who were considered naturally more pious and religious than men, embraced devotional practices and purchased devotional books published by clerics, academics, and devout laymen. Nineteenth-century women, however, did not only purchase these books; they published their own books on spirituality. While some women wrote books specifically about devotional practices, others discussed spirituality in books of other genres, such as commentary or Scripture biography. This section contains fourteen excerpts from nineteenth-century women’s writings on the Virgin Mary, and Mary and Martha of Bethany. These readings reveal glimpses of a robust, complex, and mature spirituality, encompassing both the private and public spheres of women’s lives. Particularly, this section reveals women’s thoughts on virtues associated with Christian piety, their understanding of such devotional practices as prayer, their commitments to the importance of participating in communal worship, and their thoughts on the practical challenges of Christian discipleship.

The spiritual practices of nineteenth-century Christians in Britain and North America varied according to tradition, experience, knowledge, and personal preference. Many common devotional practices were church-based and varied according to denomination. While the Eucharist, for example, was central to Catholic church–based devotion, the Salvation Army did not celebrate this sacrament. Anglican or Episcopalian spirituality centered around the creed and the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. Less liturgically-based deonominations encouraged regular meetings for worship, prayer, and Bible study. Women and men gathered together for public worship in most church services. Mothers’ Meetings and Sunday Schools afforded women places to teach and lead services.

Private devotional practices were more diverse and are difficult to quantify and document. Some written records of private devotional practices are extant, however, including published devotionals on various subjects, as well as materials not intended for publication such as journals, letters, and notes and in the case of Florence Nightingale, an interleaved Bible, complete with prayers and study notes in a variety of languages.² Many devout Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics used aids to private devotion, including rosaries, medals, icons, and manuals of prayer.³

Christian spirituality was not simply associated with church services and private devotional practices. Anglican writer Hannah More described Christian piety as not an “abstraction of the mind,” but rather a practice that animated action.⁴ Many devout Christians in the nineteenth century similarly believed that in addition to public and private devotional practices, the public expression of faith as love to one’s neighbor was a vital expression of Christian faith. Most women writers excerpted in this section included hospitality toward others and actions of social justice in their understandings of spirituality. Their faith was not simply an interior, private matter, it also included outward, public acts of service; both attitudes and actions, being and doing, needed to be integrated into the life of the Christian woman. Spiritual practices bridged women’s private and public worlds.

The key virtue that nineteenth-century women associated with Christian piety was humility. This virtue, along with others such as gentleness, temperance, discretion, and love, was exemplified by the biblical women examined in this section. The Virgin Mary was the premier example of humility, though the sisters of Bethany also learned this virtue. Martha served joyfully; Mary of Bethany loved Jesus and showed her loyal love in all her actions. Virtues were fruit of a spiritual life, of spiritual practices, and of the presence of God in a person’s life. The nineteenth-century authors featured in this section saw the virtues as characteristics for themselves and their readers to strive after. Their inward spiritual lives should be shown outwardly in Christian virtues.

In the case of some nineteenth-century women, their spiritual practices led them to produce published devotional materials. These materials included a variety of genres, such as books for Sabbath reading, manuals on prayer and preparation for Holy Communion, children’s Bibles, hymns and inspirational poetry, as well as aids to the reading and studying of Scripture. The intended readers of these works included children, teens, women, and a general Christian audience. Especially relevant to this section on spirituality are topical studies, Scripture biographies, and commentaries authored by women.

While very few women had the privilege of a formal theological education in the nineteenth century, many were conversant with the theological and spiritual issues of their time. The tract Cottage Controversy, attributed to Catherine McAuley, the Irish Catholic founder of the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, presents a series of conversations between Margaret Lewis, a Catholic cottager, and Lady P., the Protestant Lady of the manor, that show how women from different classes and denominations participated in theological debate and Scripture interpretation.⁵ This tract and many other works of nineteenth-century fiction featured theological discussions, which showed women engaged with theological and spiritual issues such as conversion or denominational differences.⁶ Without opportunities for formal theological education, women pursued knowledge by reading and attending classes or lectures. They then taught others what they had learned. The works excerpted in this section were primarily written with that teaching intent.

Three named women of the gospels are discussed in the two chapters of this section: Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary of Bethany, and her sister, Martha. The nineteenth-century women featured in this section used an exemplary hermeneutic when discussing the Virgin Mary and the Bethany sisters: the characters in the gospels provided examples of piety to be followed. A straightforward application of this kind of hermeneutic can be seen in Elizabeth Wordsworth’s address to the women of Lady Margaret Hall in which she called them to follow the Virgin Mary’s example in being good, saying prayers, and being obedient and loving. One example of a more nuanced approach to this kind of hermeneutic can be found in the writings on Martha of Bethany. Nineteenth-century women preferred Martha’s example of hosting and preparing meals, and so had to find out what Jesus found objectionable in her actions so that they would not fall into the same mistake. The authors in this section held up the Virgin Mary and the Bethany sisters as important models for nineteenth-century women. Much about the lives of these gospel wormen remained veiled or hidden. To fill in the blanks of their lives, ninteenth-century women used their own life experiences, tradition, and their sanctified imaginations.

The two women called Mary featured in this section modeled the spiritual practices of contemplation and prayer. The silence of the Blessed Virgin Mary, both her own silence as she pondered things in her heart and the silence of the gospels on aspects of her life, spoke to the need for contemplation as an important habit of mind. Women were encouraged to take time in their busy lives to be silent and still. Mary of Bethany was held up as an example of a contemplative devotional style endorsed by Jesus.

These two women were also exemplary students of Scripture. Mary knew Scripture well and modeled keeping “all these things, and ponder[ing] them in her heart” (Luke 2:19); Mary of Bethany “sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word” (Luke 10:39). Many nineteenth-century Christian women regarded reading, studying, and meditating on Scripture as essential to the life of a Christian disciple. The collect for the second Sunday of Advent in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer called Anglicans to study Scripture: “Blessed Lord, who has caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning, grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”⁷ The two Marys provided examples of women who loved to read and study Scripture.

A number of women studied the Scripture in the original languages. Mary Ann SchimmelPenninck, Elizabeth Wordsworth, and Elizabeth Rundle Charles, who are excerpted in this section, were themselves students of Greek and/or Hebrew. Those who did not know the original languages drew on the writings of scholars who did. Women appropriated a variety of classical approaches to interpreting Scripture, including careful attention to the literal sense of texts and an exploration of the fuller sense of Scripture when the literal sense warranted it. SchimmelPenninck, for example, expounded the literal sense of the meaning of Jesus addressing his mother as “Woman,” before turning to the spiritual sense of the text, claiming Mary was a type of the church.

Not all women felt that the tools used by academics and clerics to open up the meaning of the Scriptures were adequate. Phelps, for example, made it clear that women did not have to study the Scriptures in the same way men did; in fact, she argued that women alone properly understood the parts of Scripture about women. She believed that women’s perspectival readings often introduced new insights and issues missed in more traditional readings and prompted fresh ideas and reflection. Behind many of these writings is the early feminist conviction that women were authorized by a sense of call, vocation, and experience to teach others about the inward and outward expressions of Christian spirituality. The women excerpted in this section discipled their readers, acting as mentors from a distance. They wrote to transform their readers’ lives. This mentoring at a distance was a two-step process. The women were first inspired and discipled through their reading and studying of Scripture—specifically the stories of Jesus’ early female disciples, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the sisters Mary and Martha of Bethany. Then they wrote about the spiritual life for others to learn and be transformed.

1. See, for example, Hannah More, Practical Piety; or, the Influence of the Religion of the Heart on the Conduct of Life (London: T. Cadell, 1811; printing cited here, Baltimore: J. Kingston, 1812), passim. See particularly 18–19 for a discussion of what she means by these terms.

2. Nightingale’s interleaved Bible attests to her practice of journaling, her prayers, thoughts, and comments inspired by commentaries and academic works on Scripture she read over a number of years. On the blank pages opposite the published text of Psalm 42:4–8, for example, Nightingale wrote: “All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me; les eaux d’une violente mortification [the waters of a violent mortification] 27 October 1861, 15 October 1867, 3 January 1873, 22 February 1874.” Florence Nightingale’s Spiritual Journey: Biblical Annotations, Sermons and Journal Notes, ed. Lynn Mcdonald, Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001), 144.

3. For more information on Catholic piety in Victorian England see Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

4. More, Practical Piety, 18.

5. See the discussion of this tract in Elizabeth M. Davis, “Wisdom and Mercy Meet: Catharine McAuley’s Interpretation of Scripture,” in Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible, ed. Christiana de Groot and Marion Ann Taylor (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 67–68.

6. Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

7. This prayer is the collect for the second Sunday of Advent in the Book of Common Prayer.

1

Mary: The Exemplary Disciple

Introduction

The Virgin Mary has been the most important female religious figure for Christians throughout church history.¹ During the nineteenth century, Mary had a powerful influence on the spiritual and devotional lives of women, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. While Mary’s impact on Catholic devotion and spirituality is well known and documented,² her effect on Protestant spiritual thought and practice is not. The selections found in this chapter were written by Protestant and Anglo-Catholic women who regarded Mary as a guide for their spiritual lives. Mary’s profound interior life, her unique relationship with Jesus, her knowledge of the Scriptures, and her extraordinary experiences provided them with an example of a blessed life. In good Protestant tradition, most women excerpted here structured their reflections about Mary around the gospel stories.³ Christina Rossetti was a notable exception: her reflections on Mary are structured around the feast-days of the church year. Within this structure, Rossetti used the Bible, weaving a variety of Scripture passages into her reflections. These women all found in the gospels a portrait of Mary that encouraged them in their spiritual journeys, which they shared with their readers.

Mary the mother of Jesus is mentioned in all four gospels, at the beginning of Acts, and in the epistle to the Galatians.⁴ The infancy narratives, found in Matthew and Luke, provide the most information about Mary. Luke provides the most detailed account of Mary’s involvement in the birth of Jesus, beginning with the annunciation and culminating in the presentation of Jesus in the temple. Matthew focuses on Joseph’s point of view in telling the story of Jesus’ birth. Matthew also records the visit of the Magi from the east, and the holy family’s flight to Egypt to escape Herod. The excerpts found in this chapter draw primarily from Luke’s infancy narrative with its focus on Mary’s story. Elizabeth Rundle Charles, for example, meditated at length on Gabriel’s visit to Mary. Clara Luc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on References and Editors’ Additions
• Introduction
• PART 1 HEART AND HANDS: WOMEN’S SPIRITUALITY
• PART 2 UNSEALED LIPS: WOMEN PREACHING
• PART 3 UNVEILED EYES: WOMEN AND THE BIBLICAL TEXT
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Selected Bibliography of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writings on the Gospels
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture