Grounded in the Body, in Time and Place, in Scripture

Papers by Australian Women Scholars in the Evangelical Tradition

Jill Firth, Denise Cooper-Clarke

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781725288799
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

"In my bibliographies there are no women in the evangelical tradition, and no Australian women scholars." This unique volume addresses this gap, with eighteen biblically rich and academically rigorous chapters by established and emerging Australian women scholars in the evangelical tradition. The authors consider our relationship with the land and Indigenous peoples, neighborhood, embodiment, (dis)ability, abortion, leadership, work, architecture, the media, Song of Songs and domestic violence, and Jeremiah and weaponized rape, and demonstrate recent methodologies such as a social identity reading of Exodus, sensory readings of Psalms and John's Gospel, and discipleship readings of Mary and Martha and the woman at the well. A contemporary Kriol psalm and stories of pioneering Australian women theological students and teachers complete the volume. Valuable for students and teachers across Bible, theology, ministry, and practice subjects, this book is an essential inclusion in any theological library.

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Introduction

Denise Cooper-Clarke and Jill Firth

“There Are No Women in My Bibliographies!”

In 2015, music student Jessy McCabe observed that there were no women among the sixty-three composers featured on her UK school music syllabus. Five years later, another syllabus showed only 4 percent women composers.1 Similarly, women’s voices are underrepresented in the Australian media, as documented by Jenna Price and Anne Marie Price in their report, 2019 Women for Media: “You Can’t Be What You Can’t See.”2 Theological college students can resonate with the experience of Marion Taylor, who asked her university professor if he could recommend a woman biblical interpreter as a topic for an upcoming essay. He replied succinctly that there were none. Marion’s subsequent research identified many nineteenth-century women biblical interpreters, and later broadened out to her Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters (2012), which introduces 180 women interpreters from Paula, associate of Jerome, and Macrina, sister of the Cappadocian fathers Basil and Gregory, in the fourth and fifth centuries, to Katharina Schütz Zell and Mary Sidney Herbert in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to Florence Nightingale and Christina Rosetti (who wrote a commentary on the book of Revelation) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3

Publishing, rather than public speaking, marks the “entry of women preachers into male dominated discourse,” as early Methodist women observed.4 Recent Australian research into women in theological education identified female representation in bibliographies and female role models as among key factors for encouraging women students.5 In past decades, there were few or no women authors in many academic theology reading lists, and today there is still a dearth of women’s writing, Australian women’s writing, or evangelical women’s writing in theology and biblical studies.

This book grew from a desire to offer accessible readings by Australian women scholars in the evangelical tradition, for students and lecturers in biblical studies, theology, and applied subjects. We invited chapters from established and emerging scholars from around Australia, and from a variety of theological colleges. Many of the chapters were first presented at the Evangelical Women in Academia conference, which took place at Ridley College in Melbourne on August 3, 2019. This conference was the third in a series of annual conferences, from 2017–2019. The inaugural Evangelical Women in Academia conference in 2017 featured speakers Lynn Cohick and Delle Matthews. The 2018 conference, Finding Her Voice, explored women’s writing and public speaking with publisher Katya Covrett, Old Testament scholar Katy Smith, and missiologist Moyra Dale. At the 2019 conference, the theme Grounded: in the Body, in Time and Place, in Scripture was explored by featured speakers Paula Gooder and Jude Long and in around twenty academic papers that were presented by Australian evangelical women scholars. Alongside the conferences, Ridley has also developed women’s writing groups and a women’s preaching network.6

In this introduction, we consider what women, and Australian women in particular, bring to theological and biblical scholarship, then provide an overview of the chapters.

Women and Australian Women in Theological Scholarship

In considering the rationale for publishing a book by Australian women scholars in the fields of theology and biblical studies, it is reasonable to ask whether women have a particular contribution to make in these fields. We believe that they do. In 1889, over a century ago, Frances Willard, president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, issued this call: “We need women commentators to bring out the women’s side of the book; we need the stereoscopic view of truth in general, which can only be had when woman’s eye and man’s eye together shall discern the perspective of the Bible’s full-orbed revelation.”7

Women’s perspectives include the distinctive questions and concerns we bring to the text, arising from our distinctive experiences “of self and family, our relationship to institutions, the nature of our work and daily lives, and our spirituality.”8 As Amanda Benckhuysen notes, we need to acknowledge and consider the way gender affects the interpretation of texts.9

In 2016, an anonymous voluntary survey of women students and lecturers in the Australian College of Theology was undertaken to answer the question, “What do women bring to theological education as learners and teachers?”10 Some of the students who responded said they valued a female perspective.11 These respondents named dimensions frequently contributed by women to be “empathy, pastoral care, pragmatism, complex view of relationships, compassion, counselling, emotional engagement with Scripture, pastoral implications of biblical exegesis, experiential approach to spiritual formation, humor . . . serving God in the messiness of everyday life, and a holistic view.”12 Of course, none of these dimensions or qualities are exclusive to women, but some respondents drew attention to “the unique life experiences of women as daughters, sisters, mothers, wives, widows, and women in unpaid ministry”13 that informed their understanding of discrimination and injustice, especially in relation to issues such as domestic violence and body image.

Even in this age of equality, women do experience the world differently to men in a number of ways, and so contribute a particular perspective. One aspect of this perspective is perhaps surprisingly captured in the teaching of 1 Peter: “Husbands, in the same way, show consideration for your wives in your life together, paying honor to the woman as the weaker sex, since they too are also heirs of the gracious gift of life—so that nothing may hinder your prayers” (1 Peter 3:7).

As women who take the authority of Scripture seriously, what are we to make of this text? Lucy Peppiatt has a helpful approach. She believes that few today would consider that women are weaker than men “intellectually, emotionally, spiritually” or in terms of physical stamina or ability to withstand pain.14 It is true that that women are generally physically weaker than men, but Peppiatt points to another, albeit related, aspect of the weakness of women: their disempowerment in patriarchal societies. In the ancient world, the context in which Peter wrote, “on the whole women were socially, economically, politically, and educationally disadvantaged in comparison to men.”15 So we might paraphrase “weaker sex” as “disempowered or disadvantaged sex.”

Whether to a greater or lesser extent, this is still the experience of women. There is a growing awareness, even among feminists who are wont to emphasize women’s strength, of their vulnerability: “Women are almost universally at the mercy of a man’s physical strength and in most cultures of the world at the mercy of men’s economic and political strength.”16 On average, one woman a week is killed in Australia by her male partner or former partner. The #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements have made us more aware of the sexual harassment and assault experienced by so many women, including in Christian communities. Such violence is part of the reality for women and informs their perspective.

On the other hand, we should not speak of a “woman’s perspective” as if this were distinct from an “objective” perspective (hitherto mostly understood as a male perspective, by default). What Lucy Peppiatt says of herself is true of every theologian and biblical scholar, male or female: “There cannot be any real objectivity in the task. I can only write as an insider of a particular world.”17 Or, as ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part I: Context
• Part II: Old Testament Explorations
• Part III: New Testament Explorations
• Part IV: Applied Theology
• Epilogue—Saam