Encountering God in Tyrannical Texts

Reflections on Paul, Women, and the Authority of Scripture

Frances Taylor Gench

• Verlag: Westminster John Knox Press
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611645460
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Biblical Studies

The Bible includes any number of "tyrannical texts that have proved to be profoundly oppressive in the lives of many people. Among them are Pauline texts that have circumscribed the lives and ministries of women throughout Christian history. What are people who honor Scripture to do with such texts, and what does it mean to speak of biblical authority in their presence? In Encountering God in Tyrannical Texts, Frances Taylor Gench provides strategies for engaging such texts with integritythat is, without dismissing them, whitewashing them, or acquiescing to themand as potential sources of edification for the church. Gench also facilitates reflection on the nature and authority of Scripture.

Encountering God in Tyrannical Texts provides access to feminist scholarship that can inform preaching and teaching of problematic Pauline texts and encourages public engagement with them.

1

Beyond Textual Harassment: Engaging Tyrannical Texts

1 Timothy 2:8–15

I have been spending a good bit of my time of late musing over the question of what to do with problematic, offensive, downright tyrannical texts in the Bible—a book we describe as “holy” and revere as “authoritative,” as “normative” in some sense for Christian faith and practice. And I’d like to pose a question for reflection that, I think, gets to the heart of the matter: Is there any biblical text that you would reject? Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School says that when this question was posed to her by a colleague, she could not get it out of her mind: “What should we in the church do with biblical texts that do not seem to accord with a well-considered understanding of the Christian faith? … Is there a point,” she asks, “at which we have to give up the struggle and admit that in this case edification is not possible? That this particular biblical text must be repudiated as a potential source of valid theological insight? That it is disqualified for public or authoritative reading in the church?”1

It seems to me an important question for mainline Christians to consider. I confess that it is one I have wrestled with my whole life. At one time I thought I had an answer, a solution to the problem—for there have been rough moments in my relationship with the Bible, particularly during my teenage years, when I began to read the Bible with some seriousness and found myself tremendously insulted by what I thought at the time to be Paul’s view of women. For example, I didn’t care for the fact that in 1 Corinthians we read that it is shameful for women to speak in church gatherings (14:35), or for the fact that Corinthian men appeared to be advised that “it is well for a man not to touch a woman” (7:1). Nor was I fond of 1 Timothy, which commands that no woman is “to teach or have authority over a man” (2:12). Women, rather, are told to be silent and submissive and to earn their salvation by bearing children (2:15). So much for justification by grace through faith alone!

I had a solution to this problem: it was simply to take my magic marker, “X” these portions out of my Bible, and then record obscene remarks about the apostle Paul in the margins for future reference. But even that did not suffice when I came to Ephesians 5: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands” (5:22–24). When I came to Ephesians 5, I got out the scissors. These were words that had to be forcibly removed—excised, banished from my personal canon of Scripture. It was, I suppose, my first experience of “textual harassment,”2 though it was not my last, for the Bible is full of repellant, tyrannical texts—texts that have proved to be “texts of terror”3 for women, slaves, Jews, Palestinians, Native Americans, gays (to mention but a few)—instruments of oppression. And early in my relationship with the Bible, it seemed to me that the best solution to this problem was to perform radical surgery on the canon. Of course, other and less drastic strategies, with much the same effect, were surely available and are more often employed by mainline Christians confronted with such texts: we can always simply ignore them, or dismiss them as antiquated relics and their authors as benighted savages.

But these no longer seem to me to be the most constructive ways of wrestling with tyrannical texts. Is there any biblical text that you would reject? I’ve been challenged by Ellen Davis’s own answer to that question: “No biblical text may be safely repudiated as a potential source of edification for the church.” She even goes on to say, “When we think we have reached the point of zero edification, then that perception indicates that we are not reading deeply enough; we have not probed the layers of the text with sufficient care.”4

Not reading deeply enough—now there’s a challenge! This challenge has compelled me to spend much of my time of late in the company of texts that raise my blood pressure to see if that might be possible—to read deeper, probe further, and perhaps find some word of edification for the church in tyrannical texts that I have failed to hear. I returned first, of course, to texts I used to tackle with my magic marker and scissors in hand, and I invite you to consider one of them, from 1 Timothy 2, as a test case. As you read it, listen for what the Spirit is saying to the church!

1 TIMOTHY 2:8–15

8I desire, then, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument; 9also that the women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes, 10but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. 11Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. 12I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. 13For Adam was formed first, then Eve; 14and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. 15Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.

The Word of the Lord? Thanks be to God? It is hard to say that without gagging. Recently, when I assigned this text for exegesis (translation and interpretation) in a New Testament epistles course, every woman in the class showed up that day in braids and pearls. Few texts in the New Testament are more painful to our modern sensibilities, and few have had such far-reaching, fateful consequences for the lives of women around the globe, within both the church and society. It has frequently been used to silence all women, to exclude them from leadership, to confine them to domestic roles, to legitimate hierarchical relationships. Indeed, to this day, it is the pivotal biblical text in ongoing ecclesial controversies over the role of women in church and society, in many quarters still justifying the church’s exclusion of women from certain leadership roles. These controversies, and thus this text, may strike members of most mainline denominations in the U.S.A. as irrelevant and passé, since we resolved our own controversies over women’s leadership in the church decades ago. My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has been ordaining women as ministers of Word and Sacrament,5 elders, and deacons for some time and has long since moved on to other ordination controversies. So perhaps it is important to remind ourselves that some of the immigrant congregations within mainline denominations still struggle mightily with this matter, as do other Christian communions that remain adamantly opposed to the ordination of women. Moreover, the global communion of Christians more often than not does not share our sensibilities about this text or our struggles with it, finding in it normative guidance—a rather clear word about the universal will of God for relations between men and women and leadership in the church, grounded in the very orders of creation. All of this suggests that it behooves us to stay engaged with this text as well and to be part of the conversations it evokes rather than relinquish our opportunity—and our responsibility, I think—to make a contribution to it, for a lot of people out there are talking about this text, rather loudly, and if we are not engaging it seriously, we are not likely to be heard or to make any impact on that global conversation about a text that continues to circumscribe the lives of women to this day.

My own newfound willingness to try to stay in conversation with a text I have long despised, to keep company with it for a sustained period of time, is indebted not only to Ellen Davis but also in no small part to a recent formative experience on a denominational task force appointed to wrestle with issues uniting and dividing Presbyterians (issues related to sexual orientation and ordination, which have roiled most mainline denominations over the last decades). It was an experience in which twenty Presbyterians—as different from one another as we could possibly be, who under ordinary circumstances never would have dreamed of hanging out together for six years—found ourselves engaged in a profoundly challenging learning experience in the art of listening. An important part of our work was learning how to lower the decibel level of our conversations—to speak our truths with love and respect, but also to listen to each other, to really try to hear and understand the logic and integrity of other points of view—even if we considered them misguided. The biblical text surely requires no less of us, for we truly are every bit as related by baptism to the author of 1 Timothy as we are to disputatious believers in our own time and place. We are part of the same church, the same family of faith, for as Joel Green has astutely observed, “To speak of the church, theologically, is to speak of its oneness across space and time. There is only one people of God.”6 The writers and readers of Scripture constitute one community of faith. What that means is that, whether we like it or not, the author of 1 Timothy is part of that family, a brother in the faith, and that when we read his letter, we are not reading someone else’s mail. We are reading our own mail, addressed to the one, holy, catholic, apostolic church, past, present, and future.7

It is an ecclesiological perspective, at least, that has helped me re- engage 1 Timothy 2 with a bit more charity and patience than I was first inclined to do. And Deborah Krause’s observation in her brilliant commentary on 1 Timothy has also proved enormously helpful: “Rather than an enemy,” she says, “I like to think of the writer of 1 Timothy as a distant great-uncle. While he may be strange and even creepy, he is a member of the family and one with whom I need to learn to converse. If I deny my relationship with him, I miss an opportunity to better understand who I am and what it is that I believe.”8

It also turns out that if we deny our relationship with him, we stand to lose invaluable pieces of our family history, for as we listen to this text, his is not the only voice that we hear. Indeed, as we engage 1 Timothy, we need to bear in mind a very important distinction, now axiomatic in feminist biblical scholarship: the difference between prescriptive and descriptive literature. If a text is prescriptive, we should not assume that it provides a description of actual behavior or practices—a glimpse of the community addressed as it really was. Instead, it presents the author’s ideal—that is, what a congregation should look like according to his vision. So listen again to verses 11 and 12: “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.” Is that description or prescription? It is clearly prescription, and prescriptive material is often the best historical evidence we have that the opposite is happening! As Deborah Krause has observed, “You don’t tell women to shut up, unless they are talking.”9 You don’t command them not to teach unless they are, in fact, teaching.

So between the lines of this text, we hear the voices of foremothers in the faith and perhaps other voices of those who listened to their teaching.10 Maybe some of those men who, in verse 8, are directed to pray “without anger or argument” were inclined to dispute the author’s prescriptions for church order and his silencing of women and thus were presented with a gag order too. Deborah Krause puts it this way:

I have come to see that rather than a megaphone commanding silence, 1 Timothy 2.8–15 is a site in which there is an argument about who has a voice and why. All of a sudden the text has opened up for me in new ways. Where it had seemed to close doors, it now presents possibilities. Rather than an edict to silence women, 1 Timothy 2.8–15 has become transformed into a debate about who can and cannot have a voice in the church. … The power to speak is … something women have fought about for a long time, from the very origins of the church. For its role, even unwitting, in preserving this argument I now affirm 1 Timothy 2.11–12 as ”Holy Scripture.”11

Indeed, 1 Timothy 2 is a space in which that argument continues in our own day and invites our participation. As I began to consider these possibilities, I found myself admitting that my old nemesis might have more edifying potential than I had imagined—that these Pastoral Epistles (1–2 Timothy and Titus), which have more to say about women and exhibit more anxiety about managing their behavior than any other New Testament documents, inadvertently preserve important pieces of our family history that would otherwise be lost to us, documenting the struggles of foremothers in the faith, straining against prescribed reality, from whom we can take courage.12

The effort to read more deeply, to try to discern edifying potential in tyrannical texts, should by no means ignore or attempt to whitewash the real problems they present. In the case of 1 Timothy 2, the problems are considerable. These are, after all, the best-known and most frequently quoted words in the Pastoral Epistles and the most well-known New Testament restrictions on women’s behavior. Indeed, the text is remarkable for its stringency and the lengths to which it goes to prove the unsuitability of women for teaching and leadership roles—all the way back to Genesis. An...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Beyond Textual Harassment: Engaging Tyrannical Texts
• 2. Wives, Be Subject? Articulating Biblical Authority
• 3. Women and Worship Wars (I)
• 4. Women and Worship Wars (II)
• 5. Reining In Rambunctious Widows
• 6. Women in Ministry
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Author Index