The CBE Scroll

I would like to point out an article in The Weekly Standard by Christina Hoff Sommers, in the May 21, 2007 issue, called “The Subjection of Islamic Women and the Fecklessness of American Feminism.” The first paragraph reads as follows:

“The subjection of women in Muslim societies–especially in Arab nations and in Iran–is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.”

She goes on a couple of paragraphs down: “The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women’s issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not? The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is–by tendency and sometimes emphatically–antagonistic toward the United States, agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be greater.”

Sommers then follows with example after example of the skewed priorities of American (secular) feminism and takes them to task for their moral short sightedness. She sites Katha Pollitt, a columnist at the Nation, for example, who draws a “common thread of misogyny” between Christian Evangelicals and the Taliban, and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who characterizes Christian evangelical movements (that’s us!) as “Christian Wahhabism,” i.e., the name of the sect that is the inspiration for Osama bin Laden. These radical feminist philosophies “collapse moral categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency,” such as casually placing “limiting young people’s access to accurate information about sex and opposing abortion [in the U.S.] on the same plane as throwing acid in women’s faces and stoning them to death” [in third world countries]. Likewise they seem to be “incapable of distinguishing between private American groups that stigmatize gays and foreign governments that hang them.”

It may be that some of these feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism, she says, and find it difficult to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. Maybe they find it easier to find fault with American society for minor inequities than criticizing heinous practices elsewhere. To her credit, Sommers does mention some activity in the secular feminist movement, such as Eleanor Smeal and Mavis Leno’s efforts with the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) to create a national campaign in 1997 to expose the crimes of the Taliban.

Fortunately, Muslim women are creating their own growing movement to address their plight. “Islamic feminists,” says Sommers, “believe that women’s rights are compatible with Islam rightly understood. One of their central projects is progressive religious reform. Through careful translation and interpretation of the Koran and other sacred texts, scholars challenge interpretations that have been used to justify sexist customs. They point out that forced veiling, arranged marriages, and genital cutting are rooted in tribal paganism and are nowhere enjoined by the Koran. Where the Koran explicitly permits a practice such as the physical chastisement of wives by husbands, the feminist exegetes try to show that, like slavery, the practice is anachronistic and incompatible with the true spirit of the faith. This kind of interpretation of scripture has been practiced by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scholars for centuries. Now Islamic women want to play a part in it, and nothing in Islamic law, they believe, prohibits their doing so.”

I don’t know how much of this slanted piece I believe, but it does appear that Islamic feminism differs radically from its best known contemporary American secular counterpart — having instead a faith-based, family-centered and positive-towards-men approach. Too bad that the CBE version of gender equality isn’t better known, or Sommers might have seen some hope in America.

I appreciate CBE’s international scope and was happy to see the most recent issue of Priscilla Papers highlights gender justice worldwide. The moral need and imperative to engage Muslims can’t be emphasized enough. Does anyone else see an opportunity for Christian egalitarians to dialog with and help our Muslim sisters? Although the details may be different, we speak the same type of religious language and have similar approaches. Perhaps some CBE members have already involved themselves in such projects. If so, why aren’t they better known? Maybe if [more/bigger/more impressive] joint projects could be undertaken, perhaps both our respective patriarchal societies could be helped.

Amnesty International recently reported that American Indian women are at a higher risk for rape and sexual assault than other women in the United States. At least one in three American Indian women will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Many of the rape perpetrators are non-Indians, which causes confusion about where the rape should be reported, since tribal courts cannot try non-Indians. This means that rape and sexual assault survivors often go hours or days before receiving medical care and rape kits, and sometimes not at all. Not only is their health compromised, but so is their chance at justice. State and federal courts are hesitant to try the cases because they involve Native Americans.

This news is an example of the need for “intersectional analyses” by feminists. Kimberle Crenshaw coined this term as a criticism of the type of feminism that does not also take into account the factors of race and class alongside of gender. Crenshaw’s argument was particularly in regards to the experience of black women, who are doubly marginalized—first, for being a racial minority, and second, for being women within a minority. Her point was that black women experience being a woman differently than white women experience being a woman, differently than Asian women, and differently than Native American women. Feminist theory should reflect these differences.

Thus, it is impossible to posit a notion of essential “womanhood” when women experience their gender in different ways all over the world. What Crenshaw suggests is taking other factors into account when addressing the issue of gender. All of the aspects of a person’s existence intersect to create each person’s reality.

Perhaps this might help our understanding of the gravity of the recent news from Amnesty International. American Indians have been marginalized for hundreds of years, and as these reports alert us, American Indian women are abused as females within a minority. In order to grasp the meaning of the experience of tens of thousands of rape survivors, we must acknowledge that various factors go into this specific instance of injustice.

Just as there is not an essential “womanhood”, there is not one experience of inequality. Oppression manifests itself it many ways. Addressing the matter will be complex, but I hope we would agree, necessary. Biblical equality needs to address all levels of injustice and discrimination based on gender.

One of the issues we grapple with from time to time is when to speak up for biblical equality and when to stay silent. In some instances, it seems more circumspect to ignore the comments or criticism because we know the background of the people and what their beliefs are regarding the place of women. However, maybe we can miss golden opportunities to speak some truth into the situation because we’re too concerned about being a stumbling block and only back up the other person’s pre-conceived ideas.

I recently re-read an article by Rebecca Groothuis where she categorizes people into 3 groups concerning biblical equality. She discourages conversation with people who are very vocally against what they term ‘worldly feminism’ and says it is most often a fruitless exercise to try to convince a person whose mind is made up.

Those who hold to hierarchy but accept that Christians who have other views are also concerned for being true to the scriptures are good candidates for some discussion but here again, it seldom convinces them to change their view. The most profitable group to speak with are those who have genuine questions and are willing to discuss different ways of translating certain passages and are open to learning what we have to communicate.

Of course, the difficulty is that we often do not discover to which category a person belongs until we have said something that crosses an imaginary line of biblical correctness, and then we have the choice to keep going and maybe end up arguing or back out gracefully while still retaining the friendship.

I would be interested in other readers’ encouraging experiences of sharing their beliefs with other Christians as I guess we all have had far too many discouraging times!

I was working on my thesis in seminary. Tired of being asked if I was going to seminary to be a pastor’s wife, I had decided to write a biblical theology of single women in ministry that would show God’s calling for a woman was not dependent on her marital state. I was talking with my thesis advisor, Dr. Joseph Coleson, the professor of Old Testament Studies. He had looked at my outline and thesis proposal and told me that I needed to add a chapter addressing the Creation Story in Genesis 1:1—2:25, particularly the second creation account found in Gen. 2:5-25, where woman is created to be an ezer cenegdo to the man. If the Hebrew phrase simply meant “helper”, then could a woman hold a leadership position in the church, let alone a single woman? But if that isn’t what ezer cenegdo meant, then that would open up the vistas I needed to write and successfully defend my thesis. Defend, not in front of the professors at seminary, but to defend from those who say woman was created to be a wife and mother and only a helpmate for her husband.
So what does this little Hebrew phrase mean?

Ezer is used 20 times in the Old Testament: seventeen times to describe God and three times to describe a military ally or aide. “Help” or “helper” is an adequate translation, but English has different nuances than the Hebrew does. In English “helper” implies someone who is learning, or under a person in authority. In the Hebrew “help” comes from one who has the power to give help—it refers to someone in a superior position. That is why God can help Israel: he has the power to do so. God helps Israel because they do not have the power to help themselves.

There is another possible definition for ezer: “power” or “strength.” Both words are from the same Hebrew root and the nouns would be identical. This is seen in how ezer is translated as either “helper” or “power/strength” in the Judean king’s name, Uzziah, which means “God is my strength,” as well as the other name he is known as, Azariah. There are also poetic passages where “power” or “strength” are the only logical translations of ezer. It is clear that in some passages the root for ezer is “helper,” and in others it is the root for “power.”

Cenegdo is two prepositions, and together their literal meaning is “facing.” Ke is the first preposition and it means “like” or “corresponding to.” Negdo means to stand in someone’s presence. Paired with ke it means to be in the presence of an equal. Together these two prepositions show the relationship between two people: it means they are standing or sitting facing each other, which shows they are equals. Ezer cenegdo does not mean or even imply to mean one who is subordinate or inferior—in creation or in function. Woman was created to be a power equal to man; an autonomous being that God created so that the man would have someone like him, and equal to him, to share his life with.

The man acknowledges this when he sees the woman. In the second poetic passage in the Bible he proclaimed: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”! He knew at last an ezer cenegdo had been brought to him. His speech reinforces the woman as his equal. Unlike the animals, she corresponds to him—she is like him; there is mutuality, unity and solidarity. The man recognized what God had done by calling her woman and saying she came from man. The narrator then stated, “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). This seems odd in that in all Near Eastern cultures it was the woman who left her family to live with her husband and his family. Again, we see that one is not above the other. Flying in the face of patriarchal culture, the mandate for marriage is one where the man leaves his family and clings to his wife.

Woman is not subordinate to man because she was made from man. This would imply that man would be subordinate to the dirt he was formed from. As Phyllis Trible points out both man and woman are made from raw material that God fashions into something else. When God is done there is no longer dirt—there is man; there is no longer a side—there is woman. In both cases it is God’s creative activity that creates and sustains both man and woman. Woman is not dependent on man, but on God, for her creation and her being, just as man is.

In Genesis 2:23 when the man recognizes the woman as someone comparable to him and calls her “woman,” some believe that he names her as he named the animals earlier. They interpret this to mean that as man has dominion over the animals, now in a similar way he has dominion over the woman, and this is God-ordained. But the normal naming formula that can denote authority over another is not used here. Normally call is immediately followed by the naming of a name, and here the text does not say that the man named the woman, only that he recognized her as one like him and called her “woman.” The first time the female is called “woman” is by the narrator in verse 22: “And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman.” She is recognized as “woman” before the man sees her. He is simply affirming what God has done: given him an ezer cenegdo.

In the beginning, men and women were both created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), and they were created to be equals. They were both given the commands to be fruitful and to rule over the earth (Gen. 1:28-30). The woman was not created to be a subordinate helper to her husband. She was created as an autonomous being; she was a complete human being, just as the man was. Her existence was not dependent on him as his existence was not dependent on her: their existence depended on God alone who created them both.

Another assumption is that since woman was made because it was “not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18), and the first marriage covenant comes after man’s declaration of woman being “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23), that a woman’s primary purpose is marriage and that should be her primary goal in life as well. Even though woman was created to alleviate the man’s loneliness and provide him an ezer cenegdo, men are not raised to believe that marriage should be their primary purpose and goal in life. For men their main purpose is a career. How are single women with a call to ministry to react to the attitude that they are just “playing ministry” until Mr. Right comes along? After all, isn’t Genesis 2 clear that marriage is the God-ordained, and therefore, the “natural” state to be in?

Certainly marriage is a part of God’s design, and marriage is to be the ultimate expression of love, fidelity, and sexuality, but it is just one of many relationships. As Christians, we must remember that marriage is not the supreme relationship—the supreme relationship of any believer’s life is with God; our relationship with God is what makes us whole and complete.

Although I began this with Genesis, I would like to end with what the New Testament has to say about women and ministry. As Christians we believe that Jesus Christ came to redeem all people—both men and women, and now “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). At Pentecost the Holy Spirit filled all the believers who had been gathered—both men and women, and they went out to the streets proclaiming all the things that had happened in the last few weeks. It is reasonable to believe that the women who were at the foot of the Cross were in the upper room as well. When the Holy Spirit came, he came to all: men, women, married, single, old, and young alike, which Peter affirms in his sermon. All that God required of these believers was obedience: they stayed in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit came, and then they all went out and proclaimed what he had done. Whether one is married or single, male or female, is irrelevant in the Kingdom of God. All that is required is obedience to the call and the will of God.

Sources:

Shawna Renee Bound, Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: A Biblical Theology of Single Women in Ministry, unpublished thesis, (© by Shawna Renee Bound 2002), “Helpmate or Power Equal to Him?” 11-22.

Joseph Coleson, ’Ezer Cenegdo: A Power Like Him, Facing Him as Equal (Grantham, PA: Wesleyan/Holiness Women Clergy), 1996.

Loren Cunningham and David Joel Hamilton, Why Not Women? A Fresh Look at Scripture on Women in Missions, Ministry, and Leadership (Seattle, WA: YWAM Publishing), 2000.

J Lee. Grady, Ten Lies the Church Tells Women, How the Bible Has Been Misused to Keep Women in Spiritual Bondage (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House), 2000.

Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy A. Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today, 3rd rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.), 1992.

Aída Besançon Spencer, Beyond the Curse: Women Called to Ministry (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers), 1985.

Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 1978.

All biblical translations are from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.

P. S.: Since the writing of the thesis, I have married a wonderful egalitarian man who fully supports me in my callings as pastor and writer. He’s also fine with the fact that I cannot have children. :)

One of my favorite blogs is the thoughtful and humorous “Bridget Jones Goes to Seminary” written by Meg, a theology student at Calvin Theological Seminary. In her most recent post, “Why I Am a Feminist,” she declares: “I am a feminist because my Christianity, my Reformed Christianity no less, constrains me. I am a feminist because I cannot live faithfully in God’s world without believing in the full humanity of all persons.” She credits Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen’s Gender and Grace—a book that began my egalitarian journey, too—with some foundational insights. Read the rest of “Why I Am a Feminist” at her blogsite.

I think what I most appreciated about her initial post is the way she boiled down her thinking into an “elevator statement.” When someone asks her why she is a feminist, she has ready a brief, articulate response. It’s a good exercise: if you had 30 seconds and/or 100 words, how would you respond to the question?