A Year of Biblical Womanhood Tim Keller Review
Rachel Held Evans' new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, presses evangelicals on the correct spot. Simply what she doesn't exercise is every bit important as what she does, and therein lies a tale.
I'chiliad going to skip the backstory, as intriguing as it is, and go straight to the substance. Don't thank me–it's a long review. That said, Rachel has written a book meant to demonstrate how people "pick and choose" their verses when reading the Bible. Every bit she puts information technology:
For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is non a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and cull. Nosotros are all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and employ the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a trend to notice it. And then the question we accept to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and ability, self-interest and greed?
It's "biblical" she's worried near as an adjective, and so she sets out to spend a twelvemonth living as a "biblical woman." Once again, I'll quote:
Rachel Held Evans (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This quest of mine required that I study every passage of Scripture that relates to women and acquire how women effectually the world translate and apply these passages to their lives. In improver, I would attempt to follow as many of the Bible's teachings regarding women every bit possible in my solar day-to-day life, sometimes taking them to their literal extreme.
The results? Well, if you really similar earnest and authentic writing about a manufactured year, then this is the book for you. I can't wade through all the layers of meta at work in all this, honestly. I've spent the past week trying to figure out what it means, culturally, that we've reached the indicate where we're paying people to spend a year doing what amounts to operation art, so that they tin can write near our normal lives. I'grand still not sure, just that Mayan prophesy matter makes a lot of sense to me these days.
All the same, there is much more good here than Rachel'due south critics have allowed. For instance, her defense of singleness needs a broad audience. Information technology had me cheering, just then these days any defense of singleness volition. What's more, I was happy to run across that she took down the deeply problematic thought that women owe men sexual practice (fifty-fifty if she does reach Driscoll territory past tacitly sanctioning strip poles in the sleeping accommodation). Her writing nearly her husband, Dan, is really quite lovely. And this bit, well, it's spot on:
The writers of aboriginal Scripture seemed to acknowledge what all women instinctively know— that our bodies change every bit we get older, equally we bear children, when nosotros go sick, and as we feel joy, pain, life, death, victory, heartache, and time. And frankly, the suggestion that men are too weak to handle these realities is as emasculating as it is unbiblical.
Precisely. I have been stunned past the willingness of Christian men and women to consider plastic surgery as they age in order to stay upwardly with the young folks. Information technology'due south a scandal, I hate it, and I am thrilled that Rachel has said information technology. I hope she says it again, louder and with even more passion.
I realize that right now you're waiting for the "And notwithstanding." And it's coming, I suppose. But the fact that information technology feels inevitable makes me sad. I don't want to pass off my praise as cursory or simply prefatory. The thing is, I mean information technology when I say there'south more good than her critics make room for. In fact, while Rachel fabricated the thought that women should exist homemakers 1 of her key points of critique, I walked abroad impressed past how much piece of work homemaking can be. It's non easy to make a place and and so to keep it, and Rachel's efforts and acknowledged failures made me all the more grateful for those women who do.
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One other betoken of concord, actually, that sets up the critique. I think Rachel has the correct target in mind past challening our use of "biblical."
Take the issue of women working outside the home. The question of whether women are "permitted" really presupposes a structure of the household that Rachel ably points out did not drop out of heaven. Were the home the center of economical gravity for a city, the question would be meaningless.
And lo and behold, so information technology in one case was. But I didn't learn that from Rachel, simply from Nancy Pearcy, who makes a like point. I wish, every bit a complementarian, that complementarians had a footling more fear and trembling before enscribing current household realities with the authority of "biblical." In doing so, we potentially cut ourselves off from reimagining households and economics together, and how union might provide a more stable ground for both. And now I'm going to finish, because I might start sounding similar Wendell Drupe.
That to say, Rachel wants to put the difficulty of interpreting the Bible earlier us, to remind us of how hard it is. I remain uncertain of her view of the Bible's authority—she says she loves it, and I believe her, but so I dear Shakespeare and he's not the rule for faith and practice. Merely I proceed to think that the question of interpretation that Rachel highlights needs to exist disambiguated from the question of potency. Let me to drag my own intellectual hero, Oliver O'Donovan, into all this:
Behind the crisis of authority at that place lurks a crunch of Biblical interpretation, which ways that even those who proclaim their respect for the Bible still cannot decide how it should be used in moral discussion. How may we induce the waters of Shiloah to flow gently to quench the thirst of Zion? Could information technology be that if we are ready to pay disciplined attention to the logic and meaning of moral language, its nuances, its varieties of function, its modes of expression, its implications, nosotros might at terminal succeed in building a aqueduct? I leave the question with you.
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What of Rachel'south solution? I'm tempted to say information technology might exist worse than the disease she identifies. For example, she says that she takes some texts to the "literal extreme." I know what she's getting at here—because I've read the volume—but still detect myself frustrated. Her "extremes" suffer from the trouble of not beingness literal at all. The literal reading of a text isn't any happens to come up to mind when your eyes cross the folio. It's the meaning of the text set within the genre. One tin read a metaphor literally, but that but means reading it…as a metaphor. To practice otherwise to it is just to read it badly or not read it at all.
In that fashion, her use of these terms actually sets evangelicals back a long ways. Vii or eight years agone, evangelicals—led by Kevin Vanhoozer—spent all sorts of time working out what they meant past Scripture and how to exercise theological interpretation. Most of that conversation went on outside the context of the gender debates. And what happens at the theological level doesn't ever brand it to the churches. But it'southward as though none of that went on for Rachel'southward projection, which gives the volume an almost exclusively critical experience.
What's more than, I sympathise her worry that we are smashing texts together to find a unity when one isn't apparent. Biblical exegetes have warned against that for years, and so it'south not exactly new. And bluntly, her indicate about all looking for something in the text and wanting to find it there is a basic hermeneutical trouble, also. I'k non and then certain she's commending eisegeses so much as arguing for what the church building fathers would accept called a "rule of faith" for biblical interpretation. Augustine thought texts had to accommodate to charity, afterward all, which I take her to be (unintentionally) echoing when she says:
Are we reading with the prejudice of honey or are nosotros reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed?
My trouble, though, is that the "prejudice of love" can stop upward being sentimentalized to the indicate of unhelpfulness and that it leaves the how of our "picking and choosing" capricious and capricious. The linguistic communication of "option and choose" even points in that direction, which is precisely why folks similar me are going to resist it. She makes biblical arguments throughout the text—but are those arguments for abiblical positionor are they justabout the Bible? It's hard to say, really, since once Rachel's deconstructive work is done whether we tin say "biblical" at all anymore. And it really matters, because it is possible that nosotros would adopt a biblical nihilism that allows the "prejudices of love" to be determined by our experience, primarily, which we then read back into the text.
Which is to say, even if nosotros do read our experience back into the text, the question is whether we should—or whether in doing then, our reading into is challenged and corrected by the text itself. At what point, in other words, is the standard of finding beloved and justice determined and decided by the text itself? Rachel points to the double-commandment to love God and neighbor, and that was Augustine's move too. But Augustine thought love needed ordering if it's to exist any good, and Scripture was at every bespeak a correction on united states of america for doing then. Only I call back all this is ambiguous in Rachel's book, which is why interpreters accept come away with the impression she's hollowed out the Bible despite her protestations to the contrary.
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This is the longest review ever, but let me make two more points.
First, for someone who has staged a "Rally to Restore Unity," this is clearly not a book that is intended to pursue that. And that strikes me every bit tragic, for a lot of different reasons. I call back Rachel Marie Stone's betoken almost Rachel's conservative critics not practicing a charitable reading of the book is probably right. Only that'south a buzzsaw that destroys everything in its path, and Rachel'southward own project shows very piddling hermeneutical sympathy with the targets of her critique.
She didn't set out on her journeying attempting to observe out what her intellectual foes idea, or why they thought information technology. She gear up out from the conclusion that they were incorrect and and then read their texts accordingly. I mean, after she notes that Proverbs 31 is recorded past King Lemuel "equally an oracle his female parent taught him," she comments that this "totally upset my programme to cast the Proverbs 31 woman every bit an unrealistic archetype of the misogynistic imagination." That may exist sarcasm, and I might take missed it. I was born in Canada, which means I don't exercise sarcasm. Only it certain seems like she set up out on her reading with her conclusions predetermined, which isn't exactly modeling the sort of hermeneutical sympathy that nosotros might admire.
I'll become one step farther down this road. Rachel tends to lump "patriarchalists" together, such that John Piper is treated as equivalent to the Vision Forum. I realize distinctions don't sell well, but I am also aware—having read a number of feminists and feminist theologians—that painting intellectual movements with a wide castor can be a way of unfairly marginalizing people we might otherwise be impelled to heed to. And feminists accept resisted having that done to them for years (I noted, for the tape, that I described feminism with an overly broad brush in my own handling on the field of study). If I was to put Mary Daly and Rachel Held Evans next to each other and get on nigh "feminists" and what they recollect, you lot might recall that I'grand being uncharitable to i or both. It may be the case that John Piper and the Vision Forum have more than in mutual than it seems (though I am skeptical), but from reading Rachel's book no one will be able to tell. And we all wonder why the Reformed community is then frustrated by how they've been treated?
All that to say, it saddens me that Rachel approached this discipline as she did, in part considering these are such weighty issues for all evangelicals to wrestle with and I worry that her arroyo has taken us backward on them, rather than forward. These questions deserve the care and labor that comes with making distinctions, weighing arguments, and reading very closely. I realize none of that sells well. It'south boring,which is very near to decease. But it seems obvious that this sort of project is liable to easy misinterpretation, and Rachel'southward hope of retreating into "irony" and protestations seems totally tone deaf. Information technology feels–and I am happy to be wrong–as though her desire to provide levity has crossed into the flippant. (I was struck by how she included "deal with a crisis of religion" in a brief list of otherwise disconnected chores, every bit though such a profound moment could be one thing amidst many.) Rachel's readers tin blame the critics for not getting the irony—and I may have missed information technology likewise. If anyone's still reading, I'm certain they'll happily point it out. But at what indicate does knowing that a way of approaching an upshot has a likelihood of causing a major controversy actually make the author culpable? Given the country of the evangelical world, this book is the equivalent of carrying a torch through a forest that hasn't seen rain in years. The odds of a burn are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.
Even so, a give-and-take to those who I find myself in agreement with, my friends in the conservative evangelical earth. The responsibility to pursue unity is on us all, and when I read the reviews it strikes me that the kickoff and clearest impulse has been to make the boundaries of interpretation clear first and foremost. I understand the reasons why, I recall, and the pastoral sense of responsibility to hold firm to audio doctrine and challenge those who seem to undercut it. I write at a blog named Mere Orthodoxy, after all, which I'm pretty sure makes me anathema to virtually people my age.
But such a duty should exist conducted, I think, with something of a heavy heart and sorrow at the tragedy of a divided church. And maybe information technology could be done the day later on a volume comes out, or two days later on, or three. It seems unfair to accuse writers of creating controversy in order to grab attention, a charge that I've seen here and at that place, when our most prominent outlets seem quick to press publish on their rebuttals. I understand the responsibility to reply and the freedom because these are public matters. But when such responses happen chop-chop as chop-chop as this one did, they only fuel the controversy. And that is something that I am increasingly wary of.
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I actually accept gone on too long. Information technology'south late, and I am tired. Which means I have officially reached "rant" style. But I actually will be done with this: I am increasingly saddened by the land of our Christian soapbox online, including my own interest in it.
I'm no Roman history expert, merely I take it that it was their dear of entertainment that led them to the Coliseum. It's a bloodthirsty idol, amusement, for information technology knows no boundaries nor respects no persons. Over the by 2 years, Christians have engaged in a variety of controversies—which they have been doing for a long fourth dimension, but which seem to be coming and going with a greater rapidity while being discussed at a significantly more shallow level. I think of Rob Bell's volume, Jesus>Faith, Mark Driscoll'southward book, the Wilson dustup, and at present this conflaguration. And in that location are, I call up, others I am forgetting.
In each, the grade of arguments have rarely been commendable and the level of soapbox ennobling. We have increasingly, information technology seems to me, been taken past these controversies and fought for pageviews in the midst of them. And that has meant mostly fighting each other, ambivalent verbal swords and letting the digital blood flow in the streets. I know well that there is a fourth dimension to disagree and to draw lines. And I also know that when the controversy is upon u.s.a., the drumbeats of state of war always beat the loudest, and it is ordinarily in such moments that nosotros should speak of peace. Perhaps we would all do well to wield our intellectual swords with a good deal more care.
Eight years ago, I thought that blogging held promise for the church to ameliorate its dialogue and help minds think more Christianly. I now wonder whether that is true, or whether the intrinsically shallow nature actually induces an entertainment-oriented mindset that prefers the activeness of a controversy to silence or to the boring, mundane work of saying the aforementioned onetime thing. I run across the tendency toward degrading speech in myself and have watched it come to the fore over the past year. And I am not at all certain it should continue, either in me or in the residue of this pocket-size corner of the internet. Considering if evangelicalism continues to be a movement that lives on controversy, then information technology is sure that it volition someday die by information technology.
Source: https://mereorthodoxy.com/controversy-and-interpretation-biblical-womanhood/
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