Women's Culture: The Gospel and the Future

Lilian Barger addressed one of the plenary sessions at the God and the Academy conference for Christian professors held in June. The following is an excerpt of her speech.

My engagement with the ideas that are formed in the academy is the result of a long and often perplexing journey living my life in this culture. It is part observation, part-life experience and wholly the result of the gospel work in my life. As an immigrant raised in an evangelical home, I learned two things: that you begin to understand a culture by observation, and you retain your biblical distinction by asking questions of that culture.

In my attempt to understand the social and spiritual place that women in our society find themselves, I backed into the academy. I arrived there by a series of dead-ends, unanswered questions, curiosity and frustration. Many of you here tonight are experts in many of things that I will only touch on. With all due respect, I hope to provide a quick survey of women's culture and the academic ideas that impact it. When I say "women's culture" I am speaking of the attitudes, language and behavior that define women in western society. By connecting ideas that often seem merely academic to how people really live, we can have a more holistic gospel message to this generation.

My search started with a basic question: Why were we--evangelical Christians--losing the brightest women in the culture to alternative spiritualities and secularism? Why was there widespread disinterest in Christianity among my peers--many of whom had grown up in the church? It is known by sociologists that the higher the levels of education and influence, the less likely a person will embrace a traditional religious system. For the educated woman, this is much more pronounced.

This is the problem that I want to explore. How do we speak to the most educated and influential group of women in history--a group of women made up of those inside and outside the academy? How do we reach the woman who not only has been affected by secularism and post-modernism but her particular brands of these worldviews has a distinct feminist consciousness? It does not take much to realize that traditional women's ministries do not reach these women. They simply do not respond to the gender images presented in the church.

Women's Studies--Interdisciplinary

Women in the academy have played and are playing a large role in this evolution of ideas. The first women's studies department came out of second wave activism of the sixties as the academic and philosophical arm of the women's movement. Emboldened by the social vision of the feminist movement, women's studies emerged on college campuses, bringing a new gender perspective into every discipline. They pressured academic institutions to acknowledge the contribution of women in the world and to included their experience in research work. This interdisciplinary work has produced many different approaches that attempt to provide a coherent social vision from a variety of feminist perspectives--equity, radical, classic and Marxist to name a few. It is not monolithic; however, all these theories use gender as the primary mode of analysis.

In the last 30 years feminist scholarship has produced a huge volume of work in which the biblical perspective is absent. In part this is because the Christian community did not take women's studies programs seriously. Seen as a politically radical and passing academic fad, we were not ready to send our young women into this area lest they never return. From the first women's studies department in 1970 to currently over 600 departments and programs, women's studies have now been joined by gender studies and they are here to stay. It has become institutionalized and has affected not only how scholarship is done but also who does it and why.

Women's studies excesses are many and critical review is needed, but its core issues have been constant. First, it challenges the male as the human norm and the collapse of the male into the human as identical. Thus in masculinist thinking the distinction between maleness and humanity is clouded over and "man" truly becomes the measure of all things. Femaleness is viewed as an exception to this standard or as the "other." This results in the male experience as the defining experience of what it means to be human and ignores the unique experiences of women as fully human experiences.

The feminist point of view has challenged the dichotomy of characteristics traditionally ascribed to men and women. Where aggression, power, leadership and rationality are characterized as good and male, women are defined as dependent, illogical, passive or worse.

Few disciplines have been left untouched by gender-based analysis. Of those disciplines affected, history, anthropology, law, sociology, psychology and literature are the most prominent. Women's studies has brought up the issue of women's voice, agency, identity and power in regard to every academic discipline. It has challenged the male viewpoint and masculinist assumptions about the world.

In science, women's studies has questioned the interpretation of "objective" science. It has pointed out male bias in research and interpretative models by challenging sex difference research, including the assumption that if we find a sex difference in some ability or behavior that means that all males or all females will behave in the same way. They also challenged the idea that sex differences are biologically based and therefore inevitable and unchangeable. They have questioned how science is done and interpreted. They question the ability of scientists to discover and describe "Truth" without a male bias, particularly in the area sex and gender research. They questioned not only how things were studied but also what is chosen or considered worthy of study. The scientific study of women done mostly by men in which women were the object was particularly assaulted. In women's studies, woman becomes the subject.

Feminist scholarship has impacted the writing of history. An indeed, much of the history of the world that has been written revolves around political and military activity and fails to capture what the women were doing when men were fighting the wars. What exactly were women doing during the revolution? Much of this history is lost forever or very difficult to recover. Women's studies nevertheless attempts to include women in the writing of history in several different ways. One way is through the unearthing of diaries and neglected writings by women. Through their work, feminist scholars have demanded that women's contributions to social institutions be acknowledged by the inclusion of the role of women in the writing of history.

Feminist analysis has not remained enclosed within the secular disciplines; they have also challenged ideas about the nature of God. Mary Daly's famous pronouncement, "When God is male the male is God" has resounded not only in theological schools and religion departments but also in the culture. It has put into women's minds the suspicion that maybe the biblical God is a male construction to control women.

Feminist theologians created a two-prong attack on the Bible as the word of God. Philis Tribel in her book Text of Terror developed a hermeneutics of suspicion to focus on abused and oppressed women of the Bible. She called women to identify with the silenced women of the Bible, those ignored women whose role, names or influences sexist writers over looked. In this paradigm, the fall of Eve is reinterpreted as an act of self-determination and awareness --to be is to sin. Through this type of reinterpretation of biblical passages they have heightened women's disillusionment with traditional views of God and the Bible. Feminist theologians have rejected the fall, redemption by blood sacrifice, the fatherhood of God, and the wrath of God as male creations among many others. The Bible is therefore interpreted through the experience of women. Feminist theology and feminist spirituality are having an influence on women because they fill the vacuum created by secular feminism.

This theological challenge is affecting a multitude of seminaries, religious studies departments and mainline churches. Feminist theologians have been successful in redefining the conversation about God for many women. It is reflective of the categorical protest against the silencing of women, their experiences and their perspectives. They will not go away but will continue to define the world, in which we will find ourselves living.

Our Response, Our Challenge

With this situation in the culture and the academy, our response as biblical Christians has been less than adequate. We now find ourselves shut out of the conversation and to gain a place at the table will require that we do some work. Underneath layers of anger and hostility, women's studies is asking legitimate questions we have either ignored, or toward which we have taken a defensive posture in regard to western culture in the name of traditional values. Our search for truth wherever it may be found often stops at the doorstep of women's and gender studies.

There are many questions that we need not fear. Why is a woman's work devalued? Why have women's contributions to the world been hidden? Why are women not viewed as fully rational human beings? Why is being female so dangerous in so many cultures, from female infanticide in China, honor killings in Jordan to the international sex trade? For myself, why is it that many Christian young women seeking role models have no idea what women who have come before them have done as mothers, teachers, nurses, missionaries, writers and artists? Feminist scholars are giving us a history. Personally I am thankful for much of this scholarship. We need to appropriate feminist scholarship where it is good and useful, and we should open up dialogue in this area, one professor and one discipline at a time.

Many barriers exist to constructive dialogue. Some barriers come from the discipline itself; others we have created. We can only deal with our part of the equation.

First, we as believers must admit the reality of gender problems in the world and that we are hopelessly lost in this area of life. Across history and societies, women and their contributions have been devalued simply because they are women. We must admit what the Bible plainly teaches regarding fallen humanity: unquestionably males have ruled over women throughout history and in every society, and women have participated in this by making males the standard instead of God. The description of fallen humanity recorded in Genesis 3 explains the gender trouble in the world. God knew how large a role this would play in our lives and did not waste any time in pointing it out to us. Men and women as co-conspirators against the rule of God have layered cultural definitions, biases and philosophy on creation. As believers we should be on the forefront of questioning cultural conventions. The only hope for humanity is to acknowledge God as the one who defines the boundaries of our identity.

Jesus Christ broke with the conventional gender behavior of his day, choosing to speak to women in public, teaching them and receiving from them financial support. He chose to make women the first witnesses of his birth, death and resurrection. In light of this foundation, our claim that Christianity values women seems hollow when we refuse to acknowledge the contributions of women which many feminist scholars have pointed out. It seems hollow when we do not give women credit for their work and giftedness in our churches, parachurch organizations and homes. We forget the last part of Proverbs 31, "Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gates." This is recognition in the community.

Now there are not too many people in this room who will say that men and women are the same. Many of you have strong opinions on the nature of those differences. We all probably agree that women are fully human beings with moral agency and stand equal with men before God. It would follow then that women's experience in the world would not only be different but also valid and worthy of study. This is the basis by which we can enter women's studies.

Many of us recoil at women's studies because of the excesses that have been pronounced in many institutions. This is a valid concern but we continue to contribute to these excesses by remaining absent. We are impeded by our failure to acknowledge our own cultural biases. We often present a reductionist approach to truth and do not acknowledge that we bring our experiences and backgrounds to bear on how we interpret that truth. The Bible is God's word, but each time that I approach it I read it through the lens of my experience and my particular place in history and society. That is the only way I can approach scripture because I live in context of my time and place. We read things into the text and do not approach it with humility. It is a life-long process of sanctification that over time allows us to transcend our experience and to see the fullness of God's created reality.

The Greek/Roman dichotomies of the public and private realms have influenced how we interpret gender. Here, the public world is associated with men. It is the world of activity, logic, reasoning, leadership, authority and culture. The building of institutions, bridges, railroads and companies, and the leading of nations and armies occur in what we have categorized as public endeavors. This work has been associated with men. Public life provides men a way to transcend the mundane of life.

The private world of the home has been associated with women and as a place of reproduction, emotion, intuition and dependency. In Greek/Roman thought women were defective and incapable of reaching full humanity and transcending this lower nature. There was one way for a woman to be a guardian in Plato's Republic: she could give up her female nature and transcend to become a pseudo male.

We must question this dichotomy of private/public and reason/intuition that has influenced how we interpret gender. The biblical worldview sees life as one thing. There is no public/private split in the Bible. All of our lives are wholly before God and both male and female are created in the image of God with the cultural mandate to multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. We must question the western ideas and structures that impeded the full humanity of us all.

We must question and be honest about our western cultural heritage in which there are countless ways women are mocked and devalued. This history is too long to go into this evening, but we can start with our heritage of Christian thinkers who believed that woman were by nature worse than men. I point this out not minimizing their excellent contribution in many areas. Tertullian in his treatise On the Dress of Women stated of women, "You are the devil's gateway, you are the unsealer of the tree, you the first forsaker of the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the devil was not brave enough to approach; you so lightly crushed the image of God, the man Adam. Because of your punishment, that is death, even the Son of God had to die."

Ambrose the bishop of Milan wrote in his treatise On Paradise, "In fact, even though the man was created outside of paradise, he is found to be superior, while woman, though created in the better place, is found inferior."

And we could continue with Augustine, Aquinas and John Knox who all expressed a historical tradition that in regard to women in nothing but shameful. We need to deal with this squarely because even though we deny any claim to these ideas we have and are continually influenced by them. It is part of our history and those who question that history have a valid concern.

Even as feminist theology has attempted to create a God in their own image, we must examine how we have layered anthropology and philosophy onto theology and are in danger of distorting the biblical narrative. Many evangelicals will argue more than the fatherhood of God--they will argue that God is male. I have been asked by more than one to prove that God is not male, an argument with no resolution.

We need to repent of our arrogance that leads to ignoring, minimizing and shutting out gender issues. We cannot call people to repentance unless we live in a state of repentance, and unless we always question our intentions and biases as we approach any subject. We are, after all, fallen creatures that are being redeemed by God's grace.

To approach these issues requires us to have a theological renaissance that intersects with culture and scholarship. Meaningful gender dialogue depends on us being able to articulate an understanding of the body from a biblical worldview. All gender issues are based on what we believe about the body. This irreducible bedrock of who I am is located in time and space. It is what makes us creatures. The body is the concreteness on which we layer culture and faith.