American Consumerism Asks, "Are You Woman Enough?

Enough: Or, why we should all be laughing hysterically in the magazine aisle

http://rachelheldevans.com/enough

by Rachel Held Evans

May 16, 2012

Comments

I can’t for the life of me recall what book I read it in, but I remember an author saying once that he raised his children to be wary of consumerism by teaching them to laugh at commercials.

Like, the whole family would sit around the TV together and bust out laughing when someone from LG asked, “Is it a washer? Or something better?”

(It’s just a washer.)

I’ve decided I like this idea, particularly as a woman, who most advertisers seem to take for a complete idiot.

Case in point: Last night, Eva Longoria winked at me from the TV screen and, with a gold-colored tube of mascara between her fingers, said, “Don’t just volumize your lashes! Millionize them!”

Okay, first of all, Eva, neither “volumize” nor “millionize” are words.

Second of all, even if it were scientifically possible to “millionize” my lashes, would that really be safe? (I’m getting a creepy vision of Animal in a Muppet Special.

Millionize your lashes!

And third of all, if L’Oreal wants to join the feminist movement for real, how about they begin by not perpetuating the stereotype that girls are so bad at math and science that they’ll go out and buy a product that promises to “millionize” their eyelashes.? I mean, what’s next? A “trillionizer?” A “gazillionizer”? When you start with “millionize,” there’s nowhere else to go but crazy town.

It reminds me of the text on the back of my shampoo bottle, which promises that all my dry, frizzy hair needs is a little “fortified fruit science” and all will be well.

Fortified fruit science.

Because that’s a thing.

You gotta laugh at this stuff to keep from crying.

Same goes for the magazine aisle. Strategically placed near the checkout line at the grocery store, where, after a frustrating hour of decision-making, calorie counting, list checking, and child-bribing, women would otherwise be forced to stop, wait, and ask themselves a few questions about the meaning of their existence, the magazine aisle dazzles us with photoshopped images of super-skinny models, next to impeccably arranged place settings, next to actresses praised for losing their baby weight in five minutes, next to Martha Stewart holding a perfectly frosted chocolate cake.

As if all of those scenarios are possible at once.

The headlines say things about “10 Ways to Snag a Man” and “4 Recipes Your Family Will Love” and “29 Ways To Lose Weight And Still Eat a Donut Every Day,” but what we really read is:

Are you pretty enough?

Are you crafty enough?

Are you sexy enough?

Are you stylish enough?

Are you domestic enough?

Are you enough?

Too often, we forget to laugh at the absurdity of these questions, and instead find ourselves grabbing a magazine from the rack, flipping through its pages, desperately looking for something that might make us “enough”— fortified fruit science, perhaps?

Well, last week, TIME Magazine skipped past all the subtleties and came right out with it. Next to the now infamous picture of a thin, provocatively posed, bombshell of a mother, defiantly breastfeeding her nearly four-year-old son, were printed the words:

Are you mom enough?

The cover sparked a flurry of responses as women around the world issued a collective, “WTF, TIME?”

There has to be a way to write a compelling cover story on attachment parenting without exploiting every woman’s deepest insecurities, pitting mothers against one another, and making this poor kid’s future college life a nightmare!

But the way I see it, TIME gave us a something of a gift. By stripping that cover of all pretense, it revealed in plain language the lie behind so much of the media’s messages for women: If you aren’t a sexy, put-together, powerful, super-mom, who breastfeeds her kids until they’re four while baking apple pies, making crayon art, and investing in a successful career, then you’re a failure. You will always fall short. You will never be enough.

Such an idea is so absurd, it should elicit laughter, not groans. It’s like millionized lashes and fortified fruit science—too stupid to take seriously!

And yet a small part of us believes it.

Why?

This whole idea of the “ideal woman” is one reason I decided to take on my year of biblical womanhood project.

I hated how well-intentioned pastors and leaders were taking the Bible I loved so much and turning into yet another magazine cover that asks: “Are you biblical enough?”

And by “biblical,” most pointed to a glamorized, westernized version of the Proverbs 31 Woman, who rises before dawn each day, provides food for her family, trades fine linens for a profit, invests in real estate, and works late into the night weaving and sewing. Christian books and conferences tend to perpetuate the idea that a woman’s worth should be measured by the details, rather than the message, of Proverbs 31, and like the magazines in the checkout line, often focus on fitness, domesticity, beauty, and success as ways of earning the favor of God and men.

But here’s the thing.

The poetic figure found in Proverbs 31 is not the only woman in the Bible to receive the high praise of, “eshet chayil!” or “woman of valor!”

So did Ruth.

And Ruth could not be more opposite than the Proverbs 31 Woman.

Ruth was a Moabite (a big no-no back then; men were forbidden from marrying foreign wives).

Ruth was childless.

Ruth, was a widow— “damaged goods” in those days.

Ruth was dirt poor.

Rather than exchanging fine linens with the merchants to bring home a profit to her husband and children, Ruth spent her days gleaning leftovers from the workers in the fields so she and her mother-in-law could simply survive!

And yet, despite looking nothing like the ancient near Eastern version of a magazine cover, Ruth is bestowed with the highest honor. She is called a woman of valor. Eshet chayil!

She is called a woman of valor before she marries Boaz, before she has a child with him for Naomi, before she becomes a wealthy and influential woman.

Because in God’s eyes, she was already enough.

The brave women of Scripture—from Ruth to Deborah to Mary Magdalene to Mary of Bethany—remind me that there’s no one right way to be a woman, and that these images of perfection with which we are confronted every day are laughable to those of us who are in on the big secret: We are already enough.

We are enough because God is enough, and God can turn even the smallest acts of valor—letting go of a grudge, cleaning puke out of a kid’s hair, inviting the homeless guy to dinner, listening to someone else’s story— into something great.

Proverbs 31:25 says the wise woman “laughs at the days to come.”

I don’t think the Proverbs 31 Woman laughs because she has it all together.

I think she laughs because she knows the secret about being enough.

And so my big act of valor this week will be simple: I’m going to pick up the first magazine I see in the grocery store, point to the cover, and laugh like a maniac, right in front of God and everybody.

....Let’s just hope it’s not something sophisticated like The Atlantic, cause then I would look like an idiot.

(Read more posts like this one.)

(Learn more about my year of biblical womanhood.)

Yes, Relationships Between Equal Married Partners Does Work Better (And it's Biblical!)

It’s not complementarianism; it’s patriarchy
http://rachelheldevans.com/complementarians-patriarchy

by Rachel Held Evans
May 3, 2012
Comments

Russell Moore is concerned that too many evangelical marriages are complementarian in name only.

The dean of the School of Theology and senior vice president for academic administration at Southern Baptist Seminary recently said this at the Together for the Gospel Conference is Louisville, Kentucky:

“What I fear is that we have many people in evangelicalism who can check off ‘complementarian’ on a box but who really aren’t living out complementarian lives. Sometimes I fear we have marriages that are functionally egalitarian, because they are within the structure of the larger society. If all we are doing is saying ‘male headship’ and ‘wives submit to your husbands’ but we’re not really defining what that looks like...in this kind of culture, when those things are being challenged, then it’s simply going to go away...”

He’s right. Whenever I speak or write on this topic, I hear from men and women who say that they went into their marriages expecting to impose upon them the hierarchal structure advocated by the complementarian movement, but who found that, practically speaking, a relationship between two equal partners just worked better than a relationship between a boss and a subordinate.

“It just didn’t fit,” they often say. “Hierarchy felt awkward and imposed. It made so much more sense to work together as a team, to settle into roles based on giftedness rather than gender.”

This is exactly what happened to us. Even though Dan and I were both raised in a complementarian culture, our marriage was “functionally egalitarian” long before we began reevaluating our interpretation of those passages of Scripture so often used to support hierarchal-based gender roles.

We make decisions together. (No one holds a trump card.)

We share household chores. (No one gets out of doing the laundry or helping with the yard work based on gender.)

We don’t impose gender-based absolutes on one another. (I like football more than Dan, and nobody’s particularly concerned about that. Roll Tide!)

We don’t have a single leader. (Dan likes to say that “leadership” requires context. It’s not something you are; it’s something you do. So depending on the circumstances, sometimes I lead, and sometimes Dan leads. Sometimes I support, and sometimes Dan supports. We see our gifts, particularly our spiritual gifts, as complementary. We function best—as individuals and as a team—when we do what we’re good at and what we love, and when we cheer one another on. We also function best when our leadership looks more like service than authority, just like Jesus said.)

Moore is right. Complementarians are losing ground. And they’re losing ground for several reasons:

1. They are losing ground because more and more evangelical theologians, scholars, professors, and pastors are thoughtfully debunking a complementarian interpretation of Scripture and doing it at the popular level through books like The Blue Parakeet (by Scot McKnight), Discovering Biblical Equality (by Ronald Pierce, Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, Gordon Fee), How I Changed My Mind About Women in Church Leadership (by a who’s who of evangelical leaders), through evangelical colleges and seminaries that celebrate women’s giftedness to lead and are producing record numbers of female graduates, and through organizations like Christians for Biblical Equality.

2. They are losing ground because their rhetoric consistently reflects a commitment to an idealized glorification of the pre-feminist nuclear family of 1950s America rather than a commitment to “biblical manhood” and “biblical womanhood”—terms that many of us recognize as highly selective, reductive, and problematic. This reactionary approach often comes at the expense of sound biblical interpretation. (I touched on this in a post about Mark Driscoll’s interpretation of Esther and Vashti a few months ago. We’ll be talking about this a lot more in the weeks and months to come.)

3. And they are losing ground because, at the practical level, evangelicals are realizing that complementarianism doesn’t actually promote complementary relationships, but rather hierarchal ones.

Complemenarianism is patriarchy—nothing more, nothing less. (Though sometimes it is referred to as "soft patriarchy.") This was made crystal clear when John Piper announced months ago that Christianity is inherently masculine. Such a view can hardly be described as “complementary” when it excludes one gender entirely! We experience the same discomfort when we realize that, based on the “complementarian” understanding of gender, Fred Phelps would be more qualified to speak to your church on Sunday morning by virtue of being a man than someone like Lois Tverberg or Carolyn Custis James or Christine Caine. When a man with no biblical training whatsoever is considered more qualified to teach than a woman with a PhD in theology or a woman whose work in New Testament scholarship is renowned the world over, we are not seeing complementariaism at work, but patriarchy. (And, I might add, we are missing the Apostle Paul’s point to Timothy about teaching entirely—but that’s a topic for another day.)

Furthermore, as Russell Moore himself has observed, even married couples who identify as “complmentarians” are functioning as equal partners rather than forcing a hierarchal pattern onto their relationship that is highly prescriptive regarding gender. This should come as no surprise seeing as how a truly complementary relationship is one in which differences are celebrated, but not forced. If your marriage is like mine, this means that the complementary differences between you and your spouse often fall into gender-influenced norms (I am more emotional; Dan is more even-keeled), but not always (Dan is better at nurturing relationships than I am; I am more competitive). Rather than trying to force our personalities and our roles into prescribed molds based on gender, it just makes more sense to allow our natural difference to enhance and challenge one another. We lead where we are strong; we defer where we are weak.

Complementarianism isn’t working—in marriages and in church leadership— because it’s not actually complementarianism; it’s patriarchy. And patriarchy doesn’t work because God created both men and women to reflect God's character and God's sovereignty over creation, as equal partners with equal value.

In June I’ll be running a more in-depth series on the Bible and gender in which we will tackle some of those passages of Scripture that are used to promote hierarchy in the home and in church leadership, because I realize and respect the fact that that, particularly among evangelicals, it’s not enough to say that hierarchal-based gender roles don’t work; we must also be able to show that they are not required by Scripture. So stay tuned for that discussion!

See also:
Complementarians are Selective Too
Esther and Vashti: The Real Story

What do you think? Are complementarians losing ground? Should it be called “complementarianism” when it’s really just patriarchy?

John Piper on Men in Ministry, and the Masculinity of Christianity

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2012/02/12/john-piper-on-men-in-ministry-and-the-masculinity-of-christianity/

by Ben Witherington

February 12, 2012

Alert reader of this blog, Craig Beard sent me the following link which presented a precis of John Piper’s recent address at a conference on the ‘Masculinity of Christianity’.

Here is the link -

http://www.christianpost.com/news/john-piper-god-gave-christianity-a-masculine-feel-68385/.

God and Jesus, on this showing are not in favor of women in ministry, or for that matter female images of the deity either, despite the fact that there are many such images in the Bible. If you take time to read the article there are several things that come to light.

John Piper is concerned, as are other Reformed writers and thinkers, for instance some in the Gospel Coalition, with what is perceived to be the stripping of male dignity and honor in our culture. He seeks to rub some healing balm in the wounds of men who have been assailed about their male chauvinism and macho approaches to women and life in general, especially in this case, men who are ministers. But as I have mentioned before on this blog, the problem with the church is not strong women, but weak men who can’t handle strong women, much less tolerate women in ministry. So, they have to provide rationales for these views. And to do so requires all sorts of exegetical gymnastics, ignoring of contexts, and even dubious theology and anthropology.

Here is some of what Dr. Piper said recently -

• God’s intention for Christianity is for it to have a “masculine feel,” evangelist John Piper declared on Tuesday.
 
• “God revealed Himself in the Bible pervasively as king not queen; father not mother,” Piper said at this year’s annual pastors conference hosted by the Desiring God ministry.
 
• The "Second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter; the Father and the Son create man and woman in His image and give them the name man, the name of the male.”
 
• “God appoints all the priests in the Old Testament to be men;
 
• The Son of God came into the world to be a man;
 
• [Jesus] chose 12 men to be His apostles;
 
• The apostles appointed that the overseers of the Church be men;
 
• And when it came to marriage the [apostles] taught that the husband should be the head.”

“Now, from all of that I conclude that God has given Christianity a masculine feel. And being God, a God of love, He has done that for our maximum flourishing both male and female.”

I decided to let this percolate for a while before I reacted. Let me be clear that this sounds like a classic over-reaction to what is perceived to be the malaise of our culture. It’s like the reaction of a certain Pacific Northwest pastor who decided to lecture the ‘men’ on the campus of a Christian University in Seattle on true manhood, by associating ‘real men’ with those who focus on getting their wives naked and eating red meat. That’s real manhood.

It’s an interesting portrait of true manhood since: 1) Jesus and Paul and many early Christians probably never ate red meat, and 2) Jesus was never married nor interested in objectifying women and treating them as sex objects. But back to Dr. Piper. What Dr. Piper says is not merely bad theology in various ways, its dangerous theology. If I am hearing him right, it sounds closer to Mormon theology than Christian theology. Why do I say that?

Well let’s start with the orthodox Christian point that GOD IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE IN THE DIVINE NATURE. The Bible is clear enough that God is ‘spirit’, not flesh and gender is always a manifestation of flesh. In the book that Laura Ice and I wrote some time ago, entitled The Shadow of the Almighty we made reasonably clear that:

1. there are plenty of both masculine and feminine images and metaphors applied to God in the Bible; 
2. that interestingly enough it is not true that God is much called Father in the OT. In fact such language is rare, with almost no examples of God ever addressed as Father in the OT in prayer or entreaty, and, 
3. connecting such language with culture and human anthropology is a huge mistake on both sides of the ledger.

Just as it is wrong to say that the father language in the Bible is just a bad outcropping of the thinking of those who lived in an overwhelmingly patriarchal culture and couldn’t help themselves, so it is also equally bad theology to suggest that the reason for the Father and King language in the Bible is because this tells us something about the divine nature or even the divine will that ‘Christianity’ have a masculine feel.

In fact the Father language for God is much more plentiful in the NT than in the OT (for example about 145 times just in the Gospel of John). Is NT Christianity meant to be somehow more patriarchal than OT religion? One of my concerns here is the false suggestion that we should draw an anthropological conclusion on the basis of some of the theological language. Really? Really? I find this an amazing chain of illogic on so many fronts.

Let’s start with the fact that one of the probable reasons why we have so much more Father language in the NT compared to the OT is because of the unique relationship Jesus had with God who was, to judge from the metaphorical use of the language ‘only begotten’, to be seen as the only non-adopted child of God. Now none of us have such a relationship with God. We are at best sons and daughters of God by adoption. Not so Jesus. In other words, you can’t draw anthropological conclusions about all of us based on the masculine imagery used of God the Father and his Son. That dog simply won’t hunt.

But there is more to be said as well. Jesus had a human mother. He could not and would not address God as mother lest he dishonor the one who was actually his mother. And this leads to a further point– the language of Father and Son when applied to God the Father and Jesus is, wait for it, metaphorical language trying to indicate the special and intimate nature of the relationship of these two. It is relational language and it tells us nothing about the inherent divine nature of either the Father or the Son. It tells us nothing about the gender or masculinity of God. It tells us that God the Father and God the Son are family, intimate. Why do I say this?

Because, unless you are a Mormon and think God literally, sexually begat the Son, then you realize that this language has nothing to do with gender or sex. Nothing. It is simply making clear the intimacy of the relationship between two members of the Trinity. Were there something inherently gendered to the relationship we would expect the same to be true of the relationship of God the Father with the Holy Spirit, and yes, it’s heresy to genderize the Spirit and talk about the Spirit as a woman. No member the Trinity, in the divine essence, has a masculine or feminine DNA.

Now there was a further good reason that God-talk in the Bible avoided genderizing God, especially when it came to female language. This was because most pagan female deities were so highly sexualized in both image and concept that they were seen as deities of fertility. But the God of the Bible is not a fertility God, not a God of the crop cycle, not an Astarte or an Aphrodite or an Artemis.

The God of the Bible is a God of history, a God of grace rather than a God that is simply part of nature, like the pagan deities who manifest themselves in all too human or animal ways by copulation and propagation. In other words, the ‘regenderizing’ of the God language in an attempt to rescue the floundering masculinity of Christian males is a ploy of desperation which does dis-service to the nature of such language in the NT which is relational without being genderized.

And at the anthropological level we must take seriously what Paul says, namely that we are not carrying on the old fallen patriarchal heritage of OT times, because frankly in Christ there is no male and female (Gal. 3.28).

It was the original curse, not the original blessing that was pronounced in the following form— ‘your desire will be for your husband and he will lord it over you’. The effect of the Fall on human relationships is that ‘to love and cherish’ became ‘to desire and to dominate’ which entailed unilateral submission of females to males, something that was never God’s original creation plan. You won’t find a single statement in Gen. 1-2 (before the curse of sin, and fall of man) about the silence or subordination of women to men. Eve is simply the necessary compliment and suitable companion to Adam. What you will find is statements making clear the inadequacy of the man without woman who is the crown of creation, for the text says ‘it is not good for man to be alone’. This is never said about the woman. Patriarchy is not an inherently good thing, an inherently God thing, and it should not be repristinized and set up as a model for Christian ministry.

Let’s deal with some of Piper’s ‘subordinate’ arguments. Jesus picked twelve males. Of course Jesus operated in the context of OT Israel didn’t he? And the Twelve were quite specifically sent to the lost sheep of Israel which was still living under the Mosaic covenant, were they not? You will notice that after Acts 1, the 12 as 12 literally disappear from the landscape of early Christianity and the telling of its tale. And you will also remember that Jesus had said that even at the eschaton the role of the 12 was to be in relationship to OT Israel, sitting on judgment seats judging the 12 tribes. The choosing of the 12, in short, is no paradigm for "Christian ministry" of the sort that John Piper and I do [that is, "minister"] - which is to say, ministry in relationship to an over-whelmingly Gentile audience!!! Ministry to a group of people who never lived under the old covenant, and as Paul makes clear, never should!!

Now I could go on about how Jesus also chose female disciples (see Luke 8.1-3) and how they were the first and crucial witnesses to the Easter events last at the cross, first at the empty tomb, first to see the risen Jesus with Mary Magdalene commissioned to go and proclaim the Good News to the remainder of the 12, but you can get all that from reading my Women in the Ministry of Jesus.

More importantly I would want to stress that there were women apostles. The 12 were not all the apostles, as the example of Paul himself shows. Romans 16 is clear enough that the husband and wife team of Andronicus and Junia were noteworthy apostles. Acts 18 is clear enough that Priscilla and Aquila both taught the notable Christian evangelist Apollos. 1 Cor. 11 is clear enough that women can share inspired speech and prayer in worship, yes speaking out loud, to the glory of God. Romans 16 is also clear enough that there were women deacons too.

In short, roles in ministry have nothing to do with gender, whereas some roles in the physical family do, as the household codes in Paul suggest. One of the great problems in modern conservative Christianity of all forms is the muddling up of the physical family with the family of faith. Roles in ministry are and should be determined by calling, gifting, not by gender. And there is a good reason for this. It is the Holy Spirit who determines what gifts and graces a person is given, for the common good. It is not male leaders who should decide this issue, or for that matter female leaders.

Did Paul and other apostles appoint overseers to congregations? Yes apparently they did according to not only the Pastorals but other Pauline letters. Were they all men? Nope. Euodia and Syntyche in Philippi are Paul’s co-workers there, and the term ‘sun-ergoi’ is precisely the term Paul uses for his fellow leaders of congregations. In any case, he would not have addressed the issue of a private squabble between two church members in a public letter like Philippians.

No, he addresses the problem and asks for crisis intervention precisely because these two women were some of the leaders in that church. One of them may even have been ‘the Lydian’ referred to in Acts. In other words, Acts and Paul and other parts of the NT make clear enough that there were women in ministry in the early church, just as there should be today.

What about those household codes? Just a final word about them. Paul is a wise pastor and he must start with his converts where he finds them, and then correct things as he goes along. One of the dominant institutions of the Greco-Roman world he must deal with is the patriarchal household structures, and if you bother to compare what Paul says to what Plutarch or other pagan writers say it is clear enough that Paul is putting the yeast of the Gospel into the existing fallen structures of society and working to change them in more Christian directions. For example, when Paul says things like the body of the husband belongs to the wife alone, this was a radical notion in those days (1 Cor. 7). He is eliminating the prevailing sexual double standard which was typical of the patriarchal system.

Or for example when Paul places more strictures and responsibilities on the husband/father/master than you ever find in the secular literature, he is changing the nature of the game and ameliorating the harsh effects of the existing patriarchal system. Paul addresses both children and slaves not as property but as persons who are moral agents and can respond positively. And yes, Ephesian 5.21 does show where all of this is meant to end up– with mutual submission of all Christians to all other Christians in love, not merely unilateral submission of females to males, or wives to husbands.

Christ himself, who indeed was a male, provides the model of true submission for us all. He did not come to be served but to serve, and what characterized him most of all is what Phil. 2.5-11 says characterized him– he stripped or emptied himself and took on the role and function of the most submissive member of that society– a slave, and died a slave’s death.

In short, John Piper is not helping the cause of either orthodox theology or orthodox praxis or orthodox anthropology with his pronouncements. And it is a great shame and pity.

If Jesus is “Masculine,” the Holy Spirit is “Feminine”

http://kylearoberts.com/wordpress/?p=569

by Kyle Roberts

February 6, 2012

Rachel Held Evans has awoken me from my bloggging slumber.

She threw out a gauntlet recently, challenging men to respond to a statement John Piper made at his recent pastors conference devoted to the theme, “masculine Christianity.”

John Piper has caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the blogging world recently with his proclamation at a recent pastors conference that, “God has given Christianity a masculine feel.” God, Piper said, revealed Himself in the Bible as “king not queen; father not mother.” Furthermore, “the second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter; the Father and the Son create man and woman in His image and give them the name man…the Son of God came into the world to be a man; He chose 12 men to be His apostles; the apostles appointed that the overseers of the Church be men; and when it came to marriage they taught that the husband should be the head.”

Piper concludes that “God has given Christianity a masculine feel.” I say that Christianity that has given God a masculine feel.

Granted, there are plenty of male-oriented images, allusions, and references in Scripture that are male-oriented. (It doesn’t surprise anyone to learn that the Bible’s authors are mostly — or exclusively — male in mainly patriarchal contexts). “Father” and “Son” are unmistakably male references. The term “masculine,” however, is a highly ambiguous, socially constructed, and culturally dependent term. Further, as Scot McKnight points out, the Greek word for ”masculine” (andreia) never appears in the New Testament (see McKnight for the lone exception, which does not save Piper’s argument).

But I want to focus on another issue. Piper bases much of his argument for a “masculine Christianity” on the idea that God is revealed as male. God (Yahweh) is the eternal “Father”; the eternal “Son of God” becomes incarnate as a human male in Jesus of Nazareth. What do we make of this language? Is “Father” and “Son” supposed to be interpreted literally, or do these terms denote the familiarity and intimacy of the relationship itself? This question flings us headlong into a debate regarding the nature of religious language. Piper’s literalistic hermeneutic involves a univocal view of language, such that “Father” becomes exclusive of anything “feminine” and is used to prioritize the male over the female. It’s a handy move if you want to retain patriarchy. But is God actually gendered as male and therefore exclusively or primarily masculine (whatever that might actually mean?). Any literal ascription of gender to the eternal divine being (think ‘ontological Trinity’) has generally been ruled quite out of bounds in Christian orthodoxy. The notions of divine simplicity, unboundedness, incorporeality, etc., long have prevented theologians from taking gender references to God literally.

Of course, in the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity quite literally becomes in-fleshed in the Jewish, male body of Jesus of Nazareth. Christians rightly take joy and comfort in the particularity of the incarnation for, in Jesus, God was and is reconciling the world. In and through Jesus God heals creation from the inside out. What is not assumed is not healed; therefore God becomes a unique human individual in order to heal all of humanity. The Jewish flesh of Jesus makes sense given that Jesus was to be the Messiah and his mission was to announce and embody the kingdom for Israel and on behalf of the world. But there is nothing really to suggest that the incarnation required incarnation as a male. Perhaps, as some have suggested, the Logos became a man because, to have become incarnate as a woman, and to have sacrificed oneself for the world as a woman, would have been rather unsurprising and unremarkable to first-century observers. That’s just what women do. But when Jesus, this Jewish Rabbi who had come from the right hand of God, willingly set aside his “rights” and his power in order to lay down his life in solidarity with and for the salvation of humanity, he made quite an impression (Phil 2:1-11).

Furthermore, according to orthodox theology, we must be careful when conceptually transferring from the human particularity of Jesus to his divine nature. The Council of Chalcedon asserts the two natures of Jesus are related “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence.” The human nature of Jesus, having the particularity of male humanity, does not imply that the divine nature of Jesus becomes distinctively male – or most certainly — “masculine.” The incarnation, by the logic of the creed, does not imply that “God is male.”

Furthermore, Piper’s focus was on God the Father (Yahweh) and the Son of God. But has he forgotten the Holy Spirit? Irenaeus suggested, quite memorably, that the Son and the Spirit are the two hands of God in the world. If the Son causes us to think of God in terms of maleness and “masculinity” (again: a constructed notion), then the Spirit might draw our attention to more “feminine” aspects of God. The Spirit (“ruach” in the OT and “pneuma” in the NT) suggests creative and re-creative (nurturing, sustaining, and life-giving) activities. In Genesis 1, the Spirit hovers over the waters and spirit gives life to human and animals. The Spirit re-creates the earth (Isaiah 44:3), the Spirit comforts (Jn. 14), teaches (Lk 12:12) and heals. Images of the Spirit in the Bible include breath, wind, and wisdom (the latter is often personified in Scripture as female). The prevalence of what could be seen as female allusions in Scripture’s depiction of the Spirit led some early Christians to refer to the Holy Spirit in explicitly female language. The fourth-century Syriac Christian, Aphrahat, wrote, “By baptism we receive the Spirit of Christ, and at that moment when the priests invoke the Spirit, she opens the heavens and descends and hovers over the waters, and those who are baptized put her on” (Demonstration 6:14). Several medieval theologians felt free to play a bit fast-and-loose with gender distinctions in the Godhead, certainly allowing for a female dimension in God. But while some early Christians were happy to speak of the Spirit as “she,” our age is one that has largely forgotten the importance of the Holy Spirit altogether. As Elizabeth Johnson points out in She Who Is (Crossroad Publishing, 2002), the marginalization of the Spirit in the church corresponds to the marginalization of women in the church.

So, if one wants to speak in terms of “masculine” and “feminine” traits in Scripture and in God, one should do so hesitantly. Our talk about God must always take into account the mystery of God and the anthropomorphic and metaphorical nature of theological language–yes, even Scripture’s inspired language. To the degree that the terms “masculine” and “feminine” are helpful distinctions, the “two hands of God” in Jesus and the Spirit ought to cause us to be inclusive in term of how we speak of them in God and with respect to God’s relation to us. We should not make a habit of saying that God is, in any literal sense, either male or female. Granted, Jesus was a male. But his Jewish, male body was resurrected and has ascended. There is no way to know what resurrection and ascension imply for gender particularity.

In any case, if one wants to insist that Jesus was “masculine,” keep in mind that Jesus redefines what it means to be a human, and therefore he redefines what it means to be male and female. We dare not define Jesus’ “masculinity” in the image of our culture’s ideals. Furthermore, if Jesus is ‘masculine,’ the Spirit is “feminine” We (both male and female) are created in (the Trinitarian) God’s image; we don’t create God in our image.

God has not given us a Christianity with a masculine feel. Rather, Christianity has created a God with a masculine feel, to the extent we have forgotten that (1) God is not literally gendered (except in the incarnation) and (2) The Spirit and the Son — the two hands of the Father — suggest a diversity that just might validate the diversity in human creation and thereby give value equally, not just to both sexes, but to all configurations and combinations, in individual persons, of what society has traditionally called “feminine” and “masculine.”

The Rhetoric of Masculine Christianity

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/02/13/the-rhetoric-of-masculine-christianity/

Scot McKnight

February 13, 2012

Lindsey Hankins is working on a second master’s degree and aiming at a PhD in the gendered rhetoric of martyrdom so her take on the masculine Christianity discussion provides insight. This is her response to the John Piper claim.

At a recent Desiring God conference, John Piper contended the church and its ministry ought to have a “masculine feel.” Piper argues this is simply a biblical given. In his own words,

"God revealed himself in the Bible pervasively as King, not Queen; Father, not Mother. The second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter. The Father and the Son create man and woman in his image, and give them the name “man,” the name of the male. God appoints all the priests in the Old Testament to be men. The Son of God came into the world to be a man. He chose twelve men to be his apostles. The apostles appointed that the overseers of the church be men. And when it came to marriage they taught that the husband should be the head." [emphasis mine] 

Setting aside for now the problematic conflation of predicates (i.e., ontological being as “male” and “female” and “masculinity” and “femininity” as characteristics) and a shaky exegesis of the Hebrew adam, it is true that this glaringly selective biblical portrait smacks of men. In fact, no woman can be found. Well, Eve is there but, sadly, her name seems to have been lost in translation. Yet—and this may be jarring to some readers—the fact of the matter is that Piper is actually on to something.

Whether he is aware of it or not, Piper has stepped squarely into an age-old thread of Christian thought.

When the elderly bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, stood awaiting his martyrdom within the Roman amphitheater he’s said to have clearly heard a voice from heaven saying: “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man.” Perhaps similar to present-day beer commercials in which manliness can be enacted or lost [e.g., losing one’s “man card”] ancient gender constituted a never-ending pursuit of virtue in which, as arguably the chief virtue, courage and manliness were practically synonymous: in both Greek and Latin the word for virtue—andreia and virtus, respectively—found their root in words for maleness—andros and vir. In other words, the very vocabulary of the time belied a belief that virtue or holiness were inherently masculine.

Clearly this put ancient Christian women in quite the bind: if manliness was holiness, what was it to be a woman? A pernicious and prevailing view of much of Christian history has been that women, qua women, were, to borrow Aristotle’s verbiage, “deformed males” (The Generation of Animals, 737125). If we are to take the irascible Tertullian at his word, women were “ianua diabolic” or “the gate of the devil” (On Female Dress, 1.1). The golden-mouthed Chrysostom wrote in the late fourth-century that Eve had obviously been at fault for the garden debacle simply by virtue of being, well, a woman: “…the woman taught once for all and upset everything…for the female sex is weak and vain, and here this is said of the whole sex” (On the Epistle to the Ephesians, 42.148).

But how did the early fathers speak about those obviously holy women—and there were many—who surrounded them? As almost a contradiction in terms, the presence of these women often necessitated a rhetorical sex change to accommodate the father’s pre-conceived misgivings. With more than a little back-bite to it, Clement of Alexandria hoped that at least some women could push past their inferiority: “Women must seek wisdom, like men, even if men are superior and have first place in every field, at least if they are not effeminate” (Miscellanies, PG 8.1275). Yet to do so, to pursue holiness and a life of virtue, women needed to in essence lose their womanhood. Praising Melania the Elder, her relative Paulinus of Nola remarked: “What a woman she is, if one can call so manly a Christian a woman!” (Let. 29.6). Concerning Olympias, Palladius wrote that she was “not a woman but a manly creature: a man in everything but body” (Dialogue, 56). And Melania the Younger, because of her great piety or “manly deeds” was claimed to be “like a man” by her male admirers since “she had surpassed the limits of her sex and taken on a mentality that was manly, or rather angelic” (Life of Melania the Younger, 39).

While these comments sample only the early period of Christian thought—and in that are but a drop in an ocean of similar sentiments—this notion of masculinity as equal or synonymous to holiness has clearly lingered on to the present. Against Piper’s hope that this “masculine feel” he wishes for Christianity would, as divinely instituted, be “for the maximum flourishing of both men and women,” historically this has manifestly not been the case. When holiness is equated to masculinity, it is rather difficult to side-step notions of femaleness—or “femininity”—as ontological inferiority. If by nature weaker physically, emotionally and spiritually as compared to men, the logical—and lived—conclusion against all lip service to the contrary has been that women do not share equally with men in the imago dei. As Milton would pen in his seventeenth-century Paradise Lost: “He for God only, she for God in him” (4.299).

Piper notes that his vision is “liable to serious misunderstanding and serious abuse” and I could not agree more. His claim is fatally flawed in its rather naïve assumption that masculinity is, somehow, an extra-cultural reality. Read in light of these aforementioned church fathers, there just might be an over-abundance of male activity in church history and Christian mission simply because women were told in every possible way they were not as human, not as fully human, as the men next to them. Even more troubling, his statement that “The Son of God came into the world to be a man” seems to infer—especially in light of the greater arc of Piper’s vision—that it was maleness which God redeemed, not humanity.

Yet the most important issue is not that Piper’s view would be misunderstood. The absolute fundamental problem would be that it would be mistakenly taken as good news. The fact of the matter is that Piper is “on to something” insofar as he is rather seamlessly capitulating to a long-standing tendency in church history. When women are intentionally excised from the biblical narrative, Piper is right, Christianity sure starts to sound masculine. What the church needs now is not by any means a “masculine feel.” The church has had this broken and un-balanced “feel” for millennia and far from producing a “flourishing [for] both men and women” it has too often been complicit in a systematic de-humanization of half its constituency. When masculinity becomes the virtue par execellence the value of what it means to be a woman or “feminine” is mortally undercut. What the church desperately needs now is a prophetic voice reminding us to value both men and women as equally and wholly made in the imago dei. At the risk of sounding patronizingly obvious, this can not happen when the biblical text is intentionally re-written to exclude women and it can not happen when one aspect of God’s view of humankind is exclusively staged to norm the other. Christianity ought to have a cruiciform feel, not a masculine one.

An Open Letter to Women in Seminary

For Men Only? An Open Letter to Women in Seminary
http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Open-Letter-to-Women-in-Seminary-Kyle-Robert-11-01-2011.html

Sometimes women find a mix of support, apathy and downright hostility at seminaries.

Perhaps the best we can do is encourage them that they're loved, valued and needed.

by Kyle Roberts
October 31, 2011

Dear Friends,

I know that seminary can be a mixed bag for women studying and training for vocational ministry. You likely encounter a confusing blend of support, apathy, and even downright hostility—perhaps all in a single day. I can't imagine what it would be like to dedicate oneself to God and to devote oneself to the ministry, while sorting through such a mixed reception from fellow students, professors and church leaders.

I will never forget a female student who, after a class discussion on the theology of gender and ministry, shared—with tears in her eyes—her struggle with this confusing reception. She was about to complete her Masters of Divinity, with the goal of following her passion toward God's leading in a church. But a troubling reality was settling in: the vast majority of the jobs posted by churches in her conservative denomination were explicitly designated "for men only." No mixed message there.

Along with the bleak outlook in certain vocational areas of church ministry, women seminary students can regularly experience forms of oppression or derogation, whether striking or subtle, that can add up to a heavy burden. In many evangelical seminaries, this can be compounded by predominantly male faculties, predominantly male textbook authors, and even by male colleagues who question your right to be there. Of course, each experience is different and each seminary is different, but studies suggest that the increasing number of female students in seminary during the last 40 years has not always equated to a hospitable reception and nurturing environment. (For some reflection on these studies along with a recent study, see "Women's Well Being in Seminary: A Qualitative Study, by Mary L. Jensen, Mary Sanders, and Steven J. Sandage, in Theological Education, Volume 45, Number 2 (2010): 99-116.)

If I may, I'd like to share a brief personal story. During my seminary days, I became theologically convinced of male headship in the church and home. I bought wholesale the argument that a "literal" reading of Scripture necessitates a patriarchal authority structure. We are fallen, sinful people, so we need well-defined, established and static authority structures. Male and female are equally worthy as human beings and both are created in the image of God. But men, not women, are designated the leaders. Perplexed? Don't argue. It comes from the secret wisdom of God. And, of course, from the pen of Paul.

At that point, I hadn't yet taken into account all of the theological complexities, hermeneutical and exegetical ambiguities and ethical implications that go with applying biblical texts to modern situations. For just one example of the exegetical ambiguities, I hadn't realized that "head" (kephale), which most translations render "authority," probably didn't mean for Paul and his audience quite what we mean by it. Many Christians assume that the "head" language in 1 Corinthians 11 designates "authority over," like a CEO over a company, rather than "source" or "origin" (see Phillip Payne, Man and Woman: One in Christ, Zondervan, 2009). They sometimes miss other significant factors, such as Paul's assumption that women "preached" regularly in public (1 Cor. 11:5), that women and men are interdependent of each other and equally dependent on God (1 Cor. 11:12) and that genuine Christian community depends on mutual submission (Eph. 5:21).

While I wasn't prepared to go all the way with my literal hermeneutic (I didn't expect women to wear head-coverings in church or for men to keep their hair short), I was settled in my position; so much so that when the church where I served as youth pastor invited a woman to preach on a Sunday morning, I skipped the service. Thankfully, I didn't make my stand known to anyone but the pastor (as far as I was aware). Had I broadcast my little protest, who knows what damage I could have done to the church—in particular to women who may have already struggled to embrace their status as glorious creatures, created in God's image and equal to men in God's economy (Gal 3:28)?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

²³Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. ²⁴So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. ²⁵But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, ²⁶for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. ²⁷For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. ²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave^[g] nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In the years since, I've changed my position on women in ministry and in the home. I don't need to go into all the exegetical, hermeneutical, theological and ethical (not to mention practical) reasons for that. I'm sure you know them all anyway. But in sum, I came to realize that women and men are equal not just in "ontological worth" but in God's salvation history and that God's planned future for all people is an egalitarian community of mutually submissive, loving, and honoring relationships built on the Gospel of Christ, the Servant-Lord. Why should we structure our churches, families and relationships on the basis of past and present sins and failures rather than on the basis of God's planned future for shalom?

Furthermore, I sense that Paul was concerned less with the details of gender relationships than he was with the advancement of the Gospel. His practical theology of church and family life was meant to serve the Gospel, much like the Sabbath was made for people, rather than people for the Sabbath. In our day, I believe that the Gospel is most powerful and effective when egalitarian relationships are the norm and when the equal worth of women and men is not just affirmed, but exemplified and practiced in the church and home. It's one thing to proclaim an egalitarian theology, it's another to support it and encourage it by practice.

I think back on my immature unwillingness to listen to a woman preach in church with embarrassment, shame and a sense of lost opportunity. But I use that now, I hope, to redouble my efforts to encourage you women who desire to follow Jesus into the often inglorious, sometimes thankless, and at times seemingly-homeless life of ministry.

I'm glad you are studying and preparing for ministry in whatever capacity and role God may call you toward. When you are discouraged with "opposition," whether that opposition is explicit and brash or implicit and subtle, be assured that people do sometimes change their minds. More importantly, know that you are valued and loved and that the Church needs you.

In Christ,

Kyle Roberts
Associate Professor of Systematic Theology
Lead Faculty for Christian Thought
Bethel Seminary
St. Paul, MN

Kyle Roberts is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Lead Faculty of Christian Thought, Bethel Seminary (St. Paul, MN). He researches and writes on issues related to the intersection of theology, philosophy, and culture. Follow Kyle Roberts' reflections on faith and culture at his blog or via Twitter.

Roberts' column, "Theological Provocations," is published every second Tuesday on the Evangelical portal. Subscribe via email or RSS.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood

A Year of Biblical Womanhood
http://rachelheldevans.com/womanhood-project

by Rachel Held Evans
September 25, 2011

 

On October 1, 2010, I committed one year of my life to following all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible—from the Old Testament to the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, from the Levitical purity codes to the letters of Paul.

This meant, among other things, submitting to my husband (Colossians 3:18), growing out my hair (1 Corinthians 11:15), making my own clothes, (Proverbs 31:22), learning how to cook (Titus 2:3-5), praising my husband at the city gate (Proverbs 31:23), covering my head when in prayer (1 Corinthians 11:5), calling Dan “master” (1 Peter 3:5-6), caring for the poor (Proverbs 31:25), nurturing a gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:4), abstaining from gossip (Proverbs 20:19), and camping out in the front yard for the duration of my period (Leviticus 15:19-33).

The project brought me to Amish country in Pennsylvania, to a Benedictine monastery in Alabama, and to rural villages in Bolivia. I found myself making Thanksgiving dinner for eight, caring for a Baby-Think-It-Over, serving homemade matzah toffee at Passover, wrestling with some troubling passages of Scripture, perching on my rooftop, and sitting silently among the Quakers.

Each month I focused on a different virtue celebrated in the Bible: gentleness, domesticity, obedience, valor, beauty, modesty, purity, fertility, submission, charity, silence, and faith. Some practices I observed just once. Others I observed all year. Throughout the experiment, the Biblical Woman’s Ten Commandments served as a guide for daily living.

In addition to my own experiences, I interviewed modern-day women incorporating ancient practices into their own lives—a polygamist, an Orthodox Jew, an Amish family, a Quiverfull mom, and more. I’ve spent hours conducting research, combing through feminist, complementarian, and egalitarian commentaries, and actively seeking out Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant perspectives on each issue. And of course I’ve read the Bible, cover to cover, isolating and examining every verse I can find about mothers, daughters, sisters wives, widows, queens, and prophetesses.

My purpose in embarking on this project is not to belittle or make fun of the Bible, nor is it to glorify its patriarchal elements. It is simply to start a conversation about how we interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. (See Frequently Asked Questions to learn more.) In the end, I hope my misadventures inspire women to cut themselves and one another some slack…because the truth is, we all do a little “picking and choosing” when it comes to biblical womanhood!

(A book about the project will be published by Thomas Nelson in 2012, but you can keep up with my progress here on the blog as I post updates, photos, reflections, and videos.)
 

 

 

 

 

 

Biblical Womanhood: A Year Of Living By The Book

'Biblical Womanhood': A Year Of Living By The Book

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/25/140761994/biblical-womanhood-a-year-of-living-by-the-book

by NPR Staff

September 25, 2011

Listen to the Story

In deference to Titus 2:3-5 and 1 Timothy 5:14, Rachel Held Evans
tried to stay  "busy in the home," honing her cooking, cleaning and
 hospitality skills. She is seen here with homemade matzah toffee
for Passover.

As an evangelical Christian, Rachel Held Evans often heard about the importance of practicing "biblical womanhood," but she didn't quite know what that meant. Everyone she asked seemed to have a different definition.

 

Evans decided to embark on a quest to figure out how to be a woman by the Bible's standards. For one year, she has followed every rule in the Old and New Testaments. Her project will end next Saturday.

 

Throughout the year, she kept a blog about the experience; it's going to be made into a book that will be published in 2012.

 

One of Evans' tasks was to submit to her husband, Dan. The need for women to submit to their husbands is repeated multiple times in the letters of Paul and Peter, she tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

 

"That was a challenge because my husband and I have a very egalitarian relationship," Evans says, "so it was kind of weird trying to impose a hierarchy onto that relationship."

 

Evans made a flow chart that had an arrow pointing from God to her husband and down to her; she posted it on their refrigerator.

 

"We tried to stick by that, and it would be little things like if I wanted to watch one movie from Netflix, but he wanted another one, we would defer to his," she says.

 

Proverbs 31:23 says that a virtuous woman's husband is "respected at the city gate,"
so Evans  made a poster that said "Dan is Awesome" and stood in front of the
"Welcome to Dayton" sign for 30 minutes one afternoon.

In Proverbs 31, a husband is praised at the city gates. Evans attempted to do the equivalent by standing outside the "Welcome to Dayton" sign in Tennessee with a poster board that read, "Dan is Awesome."

 

"People thought I'd lost a bet," she says.

 

Evans says she'd hated Proverbs 31 for years "because in the evangelical culture, it's lifted up as sort of like the model for all women everywhere, and it talks about a woman who sews from morning till night and provides food for her family and clothing."

 

Her perspective shifted, however, after talking to a friend about the Jewish culture's interpretation of the passage. Her friend said men were the ones who memorized the passage as a way of praising women — her friend's husband sings it to his wife at every Sabbath meal.

 

"That whole passage got turned around for me when I started looking at it from a more Jewish perspective and seeing it less as something that God expects all women to do and more as a way of praising what women have already accomplished," she says.

 

Also as part of her project, Evans spent all year growing out her hair.

 

"Basically, Paul says that it is a woman's glory to have long hair, which basically, I'm guessing, he wouldn't have said that if he'd met me because my hair just doesn't really look good long. It's really frizzy and poufy, and right now it is just absolutely out of control," she says. "The first thing I'm going to do on Oct. 1 when the project is over is schedule a hair appointment."

 

With the project drawing to a close, Evans hasn't uncovered a singular way to practice biblical womanhood.

 

"We're all selective in how we interpret and apply the Bible to our lives — even evangelical Christians, whether they like to admit it or not," she says. "So what I have found is that any time you think you have found a sort of blueprint or standard for biblical womanhood, a woman in scripture comes along and is praised for breaking it."

 

 

 A Biblical Woman's Reading List

http://rachelheldevans.com/biblical-woman-reading-list

 

by Rachel Held Evans

September 25, 2011
Comments

(Note: Look for superlatives later this week.)

I have just one week left in my year of biblical womanhood, which means I am days away from a much-needed haircut and the ceremonial packing-away of my many head coverings. In the spirit of Rosh Hashanah, I plan to spend the week reflecting on the past year and the year to come while snacking on apples and honey and attempting to track down a shofar.

In addition to accumulating a stash of head coverings, I’ve amassed quite a few books over the past year. Occasionally people ask me what sort of resources I used during the project, so today I thought I’d share the list.

All Year:

The Bible (There are many translations available at biblegateway.com)

- Anchor Bible Commentary Series
- The Women’s Bible Commentary, Edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe
- Living Judaism: The Guide to Jewish Belief, Tradition, and Practice by Wayne D. Dosick
- Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books, and the New Testament, Edited by Carol Meyers, Toni Cravien, and Ross Shepard Kraemer
- Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem
- Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy, Edited by Ronald W. Pierce, Rebecca Merrill Groothuis and Gordon D. Fee
- Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life by Lynn Cohick
- God’s Word to Women by Katharine C. Bushnell
- Don't Know Much About the Bible: Everything You Need to Know About the Good Book but Never Learned by Kenneth C. Davis
-"On The Dignity and Vocation of Women" by Pope John Paul II
- The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

October (Gentleness):

- Etiquette by Emily Post
- Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila
- The Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux by John Beevers

November (Domesticity):

- Martha Stewart's Cooking School
- Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook
- The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women’s Work” by Kathleen Norris
- The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
- Passionate Housewives Desperate for God by Jennie Chancey and Stacy McDonald
- The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Shaeffer
- Next to Godliness: Finding the Sacred in Housekeeping by Alice Peck

December (Obedience):

- Created to Be His Helpmeet by Debi Pearl
- Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement by Kathryn Joyce
- Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy by Hillary McFarland
- Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives by Phyllis Trible

January (Valor - Proverbs 31):

- Sewing for Dummies by Janice Saunders Maresh
- The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace
- Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs by Ellen F. Davis
- The Book of Proverbs, Chapters 15-31 by Bruce K. Waltke

February (Beauty):

- Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs by Ellen F. Davis
- Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire by Jennifer Wright Knust

March (Modesty):

- A Return to Modesty by Wendy Shalit
- Amish Society by John Andrew Hostetler

April (Purity):

- The Red Tent by Anita Diamat
- Inside the Red Tent by Sandra Hack Polaski
- Living Judaism: The Guide to Jewish Belief, Tradition, and Practice by Wayne D. Dosick
- Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner

May (Fertility):

- What to Expect When You’re Expecting, 4th Edition by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel
- On Becoming Baby Wise by Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam
- The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two by William Sears and Martha Sears
- Babyproofing Your Marriage by Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O'neill, Julia Stone and Rosario Camacho-koppel
- How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
- Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay: And Other Things I Had to Learn as a New Mom by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor

June (Submission):

- Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot
- Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat
- Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender by John Stackhouse

July (Charity):

- Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices by Julie Clawson
- Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDUnn
- The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns

August (Silence):

- I Suffer Not a Woman: Rethinking 1 Timothy 2:11-15 In Light of Ancient Evidence by Richard Clark Kroeger and Catherine Clark Kroeger
- The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible by Scot McKnight
- Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women by Carolyn Custis James
- Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities by Bruce Winter
- The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
- A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Lawrence Smith
- Let Nothing Disturb You (30 Days with A Great Spiritual Teacher) by Teresa of Avila, with John Kirvan and Caroline Myss
- All Will Be Well (30 Days with A Great Spiritual Teacher) by Julian of Norwich
- The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime by Phyllis Tickle

September (Faith):

-Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle
-Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich
-No Greater Love by Mother Teresa
- Loaves and Fishes by Dorothy Day
- The Hospital By the River by Dr. Catherine Hamlin


…So what did I forget? :-)

Learn more about my year of biblical womanhood here.