“Unless educated and aware women can find a creative and liberating understanding of God and Jesus, one which does not glorify masculinity at the expense of femininity and does not justify the oppression of women by men, they have no future in institutional Christianity.”
Sandra M. Shneiders, Women and the Word
my friend Kendra had this quote on her blog. i think i would take out the words “educated and aware” and just leave it at women. i, too, wonder what this writer means when she says “institutional Christianity,” as i find the word institutional to be quite a loaded word.
regardless, this concept causes all my little cogs and wheels to turn. makes me want to get this book and further explore what she is saying. i’m really interested to hear thoughts and opinions on this quote, and whether you agree/disagree, and what you think the implications of this quote are, etc. please, COMMENT!!
well, i’m still just wimpy enough to NOT want to get myself into trouble and to care what people think of me… that was just a little pre-comment confession. with that being said, i’ll go ahead and tread these turbulent waters as much as i am able.
i think that scripture has a great deal to say about the individuality of maleness and femaleness (and how wonderful that is). we’re different. and we were designed to be such by a wonderfully creative GOD who doesn’t make anything the same. and because we are different in creation, we are also different in function - for a wondeful purpose (that’s a lot of ‘wonderful”).
kristen’s post about staying at home because of her infection is a wonderful case in point. GOD gave her the roll of the nursing mother, instead of giving josh the roll of nursing father. but this does not mean that kristen is oppressed because she must function differently within her family than her husband does.
i think that the church is easily tossed back and forth between extremes on this issue - either we act like there is no distinction between men and women or we create a huge divide between them (and women have always been on the business end of a crappy deal). and both the church and christians suffer because of this.
why can’t we just admit that there are intentional differences between us and how we function without someone getting their panties in a wad? and without becoming chauvinists or feminists? both extremes are absurd, as far as i can tell.
is it really bad for me to read the bible and come to the conclusion that, outside of historical-cultural contexts, there are still created differences between men and women in both form and function?
am i missing the point of the original post and the question? i tend to do that. sorry.
Notice she says, “glorify masculinity at the EXPENSE of femininity” i.e. “oppression”.
Just some thoughts => Shneiders seems to realize the differences and to say, to me, that we can glorify each other, male glorifying female and female glorifying male, but that in much of ‘institutional’ Christianity in her experience there is just ‘oppression.’
I think, whatever her meaning of ‘institutional’ Christianity, and some would say that is all of it(I guess I would have to read more from Shneider to know her views), there is much to say for how we view leadership. If for years in a specific church group men have primarily been the leaders, and here by leaders I mean decision makers and those in power over another group(which is a crappy way of looking at leadership), for it to remain that way in a time when women are educated and as aware as men, there is and will be oppression. Because God gives women gifts of leadership too if a group of men doesn’t like it there will be oppression. And this happens more than what many of us see in our experiences. Being birthed by a woman, married to one, and the father of one I think it’s crap.
“creative and liberating understanding of God and Jesus”:
Any interpretation and teaching of scripture that does not give us creative freedom and liberation is wrong because our God, who we are made in the image of, is creative and liberating.
My mother, Heather, Kiara, Judah and you Kristen are all FREE indeed. And I hope all of you are as creative as He gives you the freedom to be.
And goodness, do I love our differences! :^) Even the ones that cause the conversation you and Josh had the other day….they help us grow if we are loving to each other.
peace
ps - Creative glorification of each other and our God, who is nurturing, is liberating!
thanks, scott, for saying the things that i meant to say much more gooder than i could have said them.
if a community of believers holds to a view of masculinity and femininity in which both are glorified for what they are (distinctions honored, gifts recognized, etc) and neither are trampled, then they are truly honoring the glory and image of GOD.
three rather divergent thots …
(1) uhmuhgush! she thinks ‘institutional christianity’ had a future? well, it did/does but shhh! I’m not telling what it is! (at least, not right now)
(2) observation: editorially speaking, she almost has paul beat for length and complexity of sentences.
(3) it’s an intriguing quote and i like it - though it has those modernistic flaws kristen pointed out. you want to tweak your brain, replace all instances of the word “women” with “men” and re-read it. (p.s. leave the word ‘feminity’ in.) as a man who has been oppressed by toxic-leader-males in institutional churches, i find that reading equally intriguing
… and a mini-rant on the nature of gender and engendering nature. okay, so, just for the record in case needed, i don’t go with the jungian version of sort of co-blended masculine and feminine either - seems to me that approach keeps a lot of culturally-based concepts of gender intact and therefore misses the mister and masters the misses, to coin a phrase. as if ‘nurture’ is a feminine quality (culturally it has become that) instead of a human quality that may be manifested in somewhat different ways by men than by women. but okay, that’s a rant for another day. we all have a LOT of work to do on this stuff, and i’m glad for the posting of this provocative quote. sounds like a book worth reading!
okay, so now it’s five hours later after my last comment posted, and i did want to add a p.s. to it.
i may be an iconoclast (who ironically, doesn’t necessarily mind icons?!), but i am not a heretic. the Church does have a future. in fact, fabulous futures in apostolic, ecclesiastic, and monastic versions. but when we start talking about “institutional Christianity” being the standard thing to focus on, i wonder if we’ve already succumbed to a secular “politics of power” mentality. and then, what makes that any different from the same old modernist, enlightenment (i.e., educated and aware) philosophies that led to socialism, nazism, marxism, democracy, feminism, and all those other isms for usms?
simply giving more people access to roles of power in the same old systems has done nothing but co-op them into thinking they’ve accomplished something strategic. when perhaps what we need to see if we can do that is truly strategic in Kingdom culture terms, is to see if we could, like, love one another as if we really and truly were brothers and sisters in Christ.
when God adopts us as “sons” in Christ (and no, the Greek text there in Romans does not add “and daughters”), it applies to all men, women, girls, and boys who follow Him. this would have been a quite shocking thing, especially to women in Rome and throughout that institutional empire, as women there had fewer rights than we’ve probably been led to believe. (for instance, were women not liable to being sold as part of their deceased husband’s estate, if they did not have their own means of support?) and so, knowing they could be adopted into the family of God as “sons” in Christ was doubly shocking, because girls and women in Rome were rarely adopted. it was a rare possibility for people of either gender, and had huge legal ramifications. parents could renounce their natural-born children and cut them out of any inheritance, but could NEVER do so under the law to any child they ‘adopted.’ so this is about a permanent, irrevocable family, not formalisms of temporary institutions.
and yes, i get it about how any group has social structures to it. but - and i choose my words to be provocative and (again) ironic - to hell with institutions of churchianity, to heaven with the family of the Church. those are two biblically qualified futures … are they not?
to bring it back to the main point: we need to make sure we’re investing ourselves in answering the right question, and i’m not sure that discussions that make ‘institutional christianity’ a focal point for gender power equalization are orbiting the best question.
hmm. this is what happens when i only get 4.5 hours sleep (i know, if you do the math, it seems i got 5.5, but i didn’t tell you til now that i’ve been up since 7:13 a.m., and did the dishes and cleaned the stovetop for our “family” of sisters and brothers here in austin!).
Here are my thoughts, as the reader of the book being quoted: (p.s. thanks kristen for spurring on discussion!)
a) glorifying masculinity AT THE EXPENSE of femininity are key words. I don’t want to pretend we are an androgynous culture. I don’t want to avoid words like “father” or “Lord” when referring to God, for the sake that they might be too patriarchal. However, I don’t want women to be shut up or shown to nursery work or clerical work in churches because of some confusion about their own abilities. Some women choose that…and great! However, if we dismiss that there is more for women to contribute to the church, then that is truly a great loss.
b) I’m reading this book, and a handful of others, to explore the idea of Women As Pastors. The only arguments I’ve heard for why they shouldn’t are pretty weak. I think there is a lot of fear in the ‘why’ of discussing contemporary gender issues in regards to Christianity. Fear, perhaps, in the issue of women doing traditionally feminine things….does not equal oppression. And, rediculously enough, fear that if women start doing the leading, men won’t. I simply can’t understand that logic.
Anyway, it’s complicated. I don’t know if I’ve made any sense with this, but I’m happy to embark on the dialogue about it!