Getting The real Paul To Stand Up

For dealing with disagreements about belief and action in the church, a long-standing rule of thumb says that the buck stops at the Bible. Lip service to this rule notwithstanding, however, most Christians violate it a lot. Thank goodness. Here is one recent case of Bible wrangling that may make the reason for my gratitude a little clearer.

Recently, officials of a near-by seminary denied a faculty member the opportunity to earn a permanent appointment on the ground that, as a woman, she should not be placed in a position of authority over men preparing for the ordained ministry. There are a number of institutional integrity issues here, not the least of which is that these same guys gave her the job in the first place, and seemed happy to do it. But I want to focus instead on the reasoning behind the specific decision to send this young scholar packing.

It seems to have been based upon a very uptight reading of 1 Timothy 2:12, which prohibits women teaching or "dictating to" men. The basis of the passage's churlishness is its own overly literal take on Genesis 2 and 3, which Paul's ghost writer (Pauline authorship of this particular letter is doubtful in many quarters) summarizes roughly as follows: Adam was created first; Eve was deceived first; and all of the women they set loose on the earth are saved only in the bearing of children.. So, if women can't keep quiet performing the latter, at least they ought to do so in church.

My, my. And this from an apostle who says that instruction in the church "has love as its goal." (1:5) In fairness, it has to be said that he doesn't let men completely off the hook either. Especially clergy types of men. They are enjoined to control their children "with dignity" and to "manage" their own families (3:4-5), ostensibly to show all and sundry that they are able to control and manage their congregations. We can only guess by what means.

It is difficult for me to understand folks who with a straight face talk this way about women in the church. In the first place, the Bible keeps reminding us that in the divine economy of salvation, firstborns often have to give way to secondborns, e.g.: Ishmael to Isaac, Esau to Jacob, the elder to the prodigal brother, Jew to Gentile. And still further, it tells us to quit blaming others for our own sinning. And then, according to church rhetoric, it was in Adam's fall, and not Eve's, that we have all became the sinners we are. First Timothy to the contrary notwithstanding, Eve got such a raw deal in the Garden that maybe it should be only her successors doing the shouting in the churches, while the menfolk clean up the dishes and the bathrooms in the basement.

It is this Eve-started-it-all kind of stuff that people get into whenever they succumb to the temptation to let the buck stop with the Bible, and then to shut down all further conversation while gazing reverently upon the Good Book. Actually, in many cases, the conversation never even gets started. Having a Bible waved in your face by a bug-eyed or a seductively mellow-toned preacher is often quite enough to provoke biting your tongue and saying with a smile how welcome its bloody taste is.

Most thoughtful Christians are more than happy to resist the buck-stops-here approach to the Bible, and without passing the buck besides. For them, the Bible is the place to start, but rarely if ever the place to stop. For one thing, it has to be read in its original contexts, about which we still do not know a lot of what we yearn to know. (Anybody still sure about all the geneologies?) For another, tradition has had a lot to say about what the Bible can and cannot mean for later contexts. (Anybody still believing in a purely human or a purely divine Jesus, but not both?) And then there are all those changing contexts over time which only experience and reason can help us to understand. (Anybody still want to mount an argument for slavery?)

I can't help wondering what might have happened at that theology school had somebody insisted that alongside the Timothy correspondence, attention should be paid to the Galatian. Or had they listened when the suggestion was offered. On the matter of a woman's place in God's scheme of things, the Paul of the first letter seems so very different than the Paul of the second. In the latter, the real Paul wrote, "There is no such things as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)

The Right Hand Of God

In the Sunday School class my wife and I attend, our gifted teacher was commenting wisely on the meaning of Christ's being "seated at the right hand of God" (Colossians 3:1). Then, some members of the class wondered out loud about God's other hand. When the teacher asked if I could contribute anything to the discussion, I did the only thing a theologian of my learning and stature could do in a situation like that: beg for time to think of something. For better or worse, here is what I came up with.

Of all the many stops in London that our family loved to make, one stop still stands way out. It was to a little shop that catered to lefties and was filled with wonderful things for our left-handed daughter that we couldn't seem to find anywhere else. The "right" kind of scissors, for one. And school notebooks with the spirals on the "right" side. Pay attention to the quotation marks here; you'll be asked questions on them later.

Across the milennia, human communities have rarely been as accommodating to left-handed people as shops like this one are. The 90% of the population (ok, maybe only 85%) that is right-handed has always shaped things to its own preferences, the very word "right" included, and in a lot of languages besides English. Nobody wants to be wrong rather than right, bad rather than righteous, muddle-headed rather than right-minded, any more than any of us is content with merely a left-handed compliment. Everybody wants to be on the right side of an argument, a fist-fight, or a judge's decision, to be the right man and the right woman for the job, and when the curtain finally falls on our lives, we most definitely want to be on the right side of our Maker. The way to heaven is always upward and to the right --- right?

Unhappily for the left-handed minority of the human race, there is very little affirmation of their own handedness to be found in the symbols of the Christian tradition. The Old and New Testaments are full to the brim with anthropomorphic imagery of all sorts in their references to God: arms and hands and fingers, eyes and ears, not to mention mouth and back and feet. But above all, to God's right --- and not left --- hand. People who keep track of things like this tell us that the image of the right hand of God shows up around 60 times in the Bible. That's a lot of sacred right-handedness.

Once, one of my seminary students shared in class a flashback to his childhood that he experienced following my just completed presentation on the doctrine of the Atonement. We were looking especially closely at a passage from The Book of Acts. After Jesus was put to death ignominiously as a criminal, Luke wrote, God raised him up and "exalted him at his right hand as leader and savior, to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins." (5:31) Embarrassed that his flashback had so little to do with the big point here, my student nevertheless ventured to tell us that he was remembering a painting of The Last Supper and his Sunday School teacher's quizzing him about who was sitting where around the table with Jesus. When he said the Apostles' Creed later that morning in the worship service, my student went on, the image of the Lord's being "seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty" almost knocked him over in its splendor. But then his best friend spoiled the moment by whispering, "why not the left hand?" Seven of my seventy students quietly raised their pens in the air --- with their left hands.

Why not the left hand indeed? Well, primarily because the weight of tradition will likely crush any serious attempt to invest the expression with symbolic power when it comes to speaking about God. To be sure, old symbols in the Christian tradition sometimes do rise to a new prominence in Christian understanding, e.g., the "womb of God." But the divine right-handedness is going to be around forever as a highly preferred image for ultimate power, meaning, and value. This may not be "right," but it is most probably true.

In the face of this symbolic lock-down, though, there is still one thing one thing we can and should do, whether we are lefties or not. It is to ponder how deeply the language of faith, from the Bible forward, incorporates unreflectively the attitudes and values of humanly wrought societies and cultures, and sicklies o'er the transcendent glory of a literally indescribable God with the pale cast of images that often demean whole segments of the human race. The descendents of Ham and Ishmael know this all too well.