One of the top books of 2022 in our annual Books of the Year is Joy A. Schroeder and Marion Ann Taylor’s Voices Long Silenced: Women Biblical Interpreters Through the Centuries (WJK). At this year’s Society of Biblical Literature an entire session was dedicated to this book. Four respondents followed by two follow-up responses by the authors. The four respondents were Jaime Clark-Soles, Mitzi Smith, Eunjoo Kim, and me. I am honored that each of the respondents has agreed to post their responses here at Tov Unleashed. Today’s post is by Eunjoo Mary Kim.
Dr. Eunjoo Mary Kim is the Charles G. Finney Chair, Professor of Homiletics at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and an ordained minister PCUSA). She has published many books and articles, including Women Preaching: Theology and Practice of Preaching through the Ages (Pilgrim, 2004), Preaching in an Age of Globalization (Westminster John Knox, 2010), and Christian Preaching and Worship in Multicultural Contexts (Liturgical Press, 2017).
Bio | People | Divinity School | Vanderbilt University
It is astonishing that professors Joy Schroeder and Marion Ann Taylor have analyzed more than seven hundred books and articles written by and about female biblical interpreters, and have presented more than three-hundred of these interpreters in a chronological order from 100 CE to the present over the seven chapters of their book. Because I teach and research in the field of homiletics, I read this book from a homiletical perspective. Let me share with you, a summary of each chapter and then outline the contributions made and the challenges raising for biblical interpretation and Christian preaching.
Summary
Chapter One focuses on women’s biblical interpretation during late antiquity. Twenty-seven Christian and Jewish women, both named and unnamed, are introduced, along with their life stories, writings, and artworks. These women were martyrs, queens, copyists, skilled painters, and leaders of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues. Among many insights this chapter offers, the consideration of personal diaries—such as the prison diary of martyr Perpetua (d. ca. 203), and the Holy Land travel diary of Spanish pilgrim Eugeria (ca. 381-84)—as a literary form for biblical interpretation, suggests that reflection on daily life in light of biblical texts is a practical way of interpreting the biblical text for contextual preaching.
Chapter Two presents forty-six medieval women who studied and interpreted the Bible in various literary and artistic ways. Female theologians, who were mostly nuns, abbesses, and anchoresses, offered women’s perspectives on biblical passages in a misogynistic ecclesial culture that suppressed women’s voices. Among them, the twelfth-century German theologian and preacher, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), preached her prophetic message, not only to women, but also to the entire patriarchal institution of the Christian church, calling herself “the small sound of the trumpet.”[1] The English mystic and anchoress, Julian of Norwich (1343-after 1416), described Jesus with the feminine image of “a tender mother.”[2] This chapter also includes Byzantine Christian women who wrote hymns and poetry, women leaders in the Coptic Church of Egypt, and female Jewish scribes and scholars. These women’s imaginations made it possible to offer alternative views on God and their “small” voices did not allow male voices to monopolize the interpretation of Scripture.
Chapter Three offers the stories and works of twenty-three female biblical scholars and preachers—both Christian and Jewish—during the Reformation era. Many of these women used the printing press to publish and circulate their theological and biblical debates on the rights of women to study and preaching the Bible. They continued to describe God using feminine images,[3] and understood Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman, Deborah, Jael, Judith, and other biblical women as the role models for women preachers.[4] This chapter also highlights the “rhetoric of femininity,”[5] a subversive rhetoric with the “extreme self-effacement”[6] and ironic and dry wits that sixteenth-century Spanish nun and mystical writer Teresa of Avila (1515-82) and other women used. [7] Through this mode of communication, they could protect themselves from censures by misogynistic male leaders and share their open letters, books, devotional proses, polemical tracts, and poetry across political and geographical boundaries. Their rhetoric teaches us that how we write and how we speak are as crucial as what we write and say.
Chapter Four presents globally, forty-eight female biblical interpreters during the early modern period of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, who not only interpreted Scripture from a female perspective but also advocated for women’s education, literacy, and the study of Scripture. They did so by talking back to “the perpetual slander of male detractors who maligned females as treacherous daughters of Eve.”[8] Like the women interpreters of the Reformation era, they argued for and defended the dignity and worth of women studying and preaching the Bible by using the printing press and their rhetorical skills.[9]
The chapter also informs us of the female biblical interpreters who gave voices against colonialism, racism, sexism, and enslavement. The musical drama, Loa to Divine Narcissus, by Seventeenth-century Mexican criolla (creole) nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95), is a protest against Spain’s mistreatment of indigenous Mexican people.[10] Black woman Juana Esperanza de San Alberto (d. 1678), enslaved in a convent in Puebla, paraphrased Song of Songs 1:5 (“Although I am black, I am beautiful . . .”),[11] and Afro-Peruvian slave Ursula de Jesús (1604-66) in a Franciscan convent in Lima, Peru, wrote her spiritual diary by weaving biblical passages in reflections on her suffering from a system of racial hierarchy and white supremacy.[12] Ethiopian noblewoman Walatta Petros (1592-1642) resisted Spanish colonialism by fighting the Jesuits to see the restoration of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,[13] and Kongolese woman Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1684-1706) argued that European priests were wrong to adorn churches with images of a white Jesus and that they lied in claiming there were no black saints.[14] These women were the precursors of contemporary womanist, liberationist, and postcolonial feminist interpreters.
Chapter Five selects seventy-two women from hundreds of female biblical interpreters and preachers of the nineteenth century and teaches us at least three distinctive characteristics of their biblical interpretations. First, America’s Second Great Awakening (1790-1844) motivated numerous women, especially those of African descents, to interpret the Bible based on their lived experiences and to participate in evangelistic preaching. Jerena Lee (1783-1864), Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797-1883), and many other African American women resisted racism and sexism through their sermons and life stories, despite lacking formal education.[15]
The second characteristic is that during the second half of the century, an increasing number of European American women did have the opportunity to acquire formal theological education. They published biblical commentaries and theological writings as biblical scholars, translators, textual critics, and ordained ministers.
The third distinctive characteristic of women’s biblical interpretation is that their voices were diversified based on their different racial and cultural experiences. Black and white female abolitionists and suffragists debated on slavery and women’s rights, and their different views on race and gender resulted in conflicts and divisions among them. In addition, not all educated Christian and Jewish female biblical interpreters read the Bible from a liberative perspective. Instead, some of their interpretations were limited by the culturally determined assumptions of nineteenth-century ideal womanhood, which emphasized “the Victorian values of piety, purity, submission and domesticity.”[16] This historical remark leads us to reflect critically on women’s ways of interpreting the Bible and ask the question, “Should all the interpretations offered by women be regarded as equally valuable?”
Chapter Six covers women biblical interpreters from 1918 to 1970. Although the early twentieth century signaled a downturn in women’s theological education, caused by fundamentalist movements and the cultural pushback on women’s movements in church and society, this chapter discovers forty-two women who participated in biblical interpretation across denominations, geographic regions, and religious backgrounds.[17] It is remarkable that some women pursued graduate-level education and pioneered teaching at colleges and seminaries despite the sexist policies and attitudes of those institutions. They also published and presented their writings in professional journals and guilds, which were historically male arenas.[18] This chapter broadens the dimension of women biblical interpreters by including professional female artists such as Marguerite Nakhla (1908-77), one of Egypt’s first recognized female artists (244), and Mary Lou Williams, the first African American female music composer and performer working at the intersection of jazz and faith.[19]
The last chapter focuses on contemporary women’s biblical interpretations from the 1970s to 2020 by presenting fifty-six female biblical interpreters. The chapter identifies the distinctiveness of this historical period as its diversity. The voices of contemporary female biblical interpreters are diverse, depending on their audiences, ranging from a radical revisionist type of feminism to quiet protest, and even those who might not want to be called feminists. This chapter includes the voices of evangelical women, with their countless evangelical books and blogs on women in the Bible, and indicates that they repeat traditional patriarchal interpretations of women in the Bible “in line with literalist-historicizing approaches.”[20]
The increasing awareness of women’s diverse experiences in race, culture, sexuality, and class challenged contemporary female biblical scholars to critically reflect on their interpretive works and take seriously “the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression.”[21] Alice Walker, bell hooks, Delores Williams, and other African American writers and theologians have identified their multidimensional intersectional interpretive approach as “womanist.”[22] The Asian American biblical scholar, Gale Yee, identified herself with neither black womanists nor white feminists because her life experience as an Asian American woman was different from theirs. She became a pioneer Asian American postcolonial feminist biblical interpreter by employing in her research “a wide variety of interpretive approaches, including literary, feminist, postcolonial, cultural, and context-specific gender and racial/ethnic readings.”[23] Ada Maia Isasi-Diaz and other Latina biblical scholars developed mujerista biblical interpretation based on their experience as oppressed and colonized women.[24] Furthermore, this chapter introduces us to the diverse voices of the Native American perspective of Cherokee descent Laura Donaldson, the Indian perspective of the New Testament scholar Sharon Jacob,[25] and the perspectives of Jewish and Catholic biblical scholars.
Like the previous chapters, this chapter also includes diverse female voices from different parts of the globe, such as renowned Malaysian Christian visual artist Hanna Cheriyan Varghase (1938-2009)[26] and Sarah Navaroji (1938-2014), a South Indian evangelical preacher, songwriter, and the founder of the Zion Gospel Prayer Fellowship Church.[27] Their unique life situations led them to read the Bible differently and to create new meaning relevant to their historical and cultural contexts.
Contributions and Challenges
The seven chapters of the book humbles us. The biographical stories of female biblical interpreters and their interpretive works in various literary and artistic forms demonstrate how costly their struggles were. When I see the gender and racial discrimination continuing in our contemporary world, tit depresses me. Women’s struggles to live out their callings to interpret and preach the Bible seem unending, as misogynistic references to Eve and Paul’s writing against women’s leadership are still dominant in many religious communities and theological schools.
Nevertheless, the contribution of this book is enormous. First of all, we discover overlooked or forgotten female biblical interpreters and their works in history. As the authors legitimately claim, this book is the first attempt “to narrate a two-thousand-year history of women as interpreters of the Bible.”[28] On behalf of the women and men who teach and preach the Bible, I deeply appreciate the authors’ diligent work for this book. When reading this book, I learned that numerous books and articles on female biblical interpreters and preachers have been published since my own book, Women Preaching: Theology and Practice though the Ages, was published in 2004.[29] It is amazing that the authors referenced 41 primary sources and 236 secondary sources, published in and after 2004. These recently published materials fill the gap in studying the history of female interpreters and their works.
This book also contributes to the study of biblical interpretation by highlighting distinctiveness of women’s biblical interpretations. Historically, women lived their lives differently from those of their male counterparts. They were educated differently and experienced their cultural environments differently. As a result, their ways of thinking are different from those of men. These differences made women interpreters see things in biblical texts differently and use varied hermeneutical approaches and communicational tools. However, rather than essentialize women’s experiences and their ways of thinking, this book emphasizes the diversity of female interpreters’ voices globally and helps us understand the breadth and depth of women’s ways of biblical interpretation.
Moreover, this book contributes to the critical evaluation of the history of women’s biblical interpretation by revealing the shortfalls in female biblical interpretation in given historical and cultural contexts, such as anti-Judaism, racism, colonialism, classism, white supremacism, and even adoption of patriarchal worldviews and the oppressive masculine notions of value of ideal womanhood. This candid self-criticism of female biblical interpreters and preachers helps us recognize and identify our own limitations and encourages us to critically evaluate the ethical value of women’s biblical interpretations.
While this book is a tremendous resource for studying the history of biblical interpretation, the authors admit to two limitations in their introduction: First, they are not able to pay “adequate attention to all the stories of significant women interpreters.” [30] While I agree with that, I wish more space had been available for the authors to share more of their research results with readers. Perhaps, this book could be expanded into four or five chronological volumes and include more of the stories and work of the interpreters the authors have researched.
The second limitation of the book, for the authors, is that their research was primarily focused on European and European-descended Christian women of privilege, because more of their writings have survived than those of women of other races. While true, this book nevertheless does include many previously unheard stories of female biblical interpreters worldwide. Each chapter intentionally includes non-European women’s biographical stories and their interpretive works, thereby challenging non-European biblical scholars to dig deeper into their own histories of female biblical interpretation. While I was glad that Dr. Jing-Young Choi is mentioned in the book as a Korean American female biblical scholar, I am also challenged to discover and retrieve more hidden Korean and Korean American voices to complete the global mosaic of women’s biblical interpretation.
This book also challenges us to think about how the resources for the history of women’s biblical interpretation can be used effectively when teaching biblical interpretation and preaching. Books written from women’s perspectives tend to be recommended or suggested resources for a course, rather than primary texts. In this situation, it is significant to reconsider the learning goals and outcomes of a course by raising questions such as: What is different about teaching the history of biblical interpretations from female perspectives? Why is it necessary to decenter the disciplines of biblical interpretation and preaching where male voices have taken center stage for two millennia? How can our teaching and research help students and readers decenter their approaches to biblical interpretation and preaching? Nowadays, many women teach and preach the Bible from a variety of female perspectives. How then might this new normal continue to positively influence academia and religious communities as part of the creation of an egalitarian and inclusive society in which women’s voices are heard and valued? This book invites us to this never-ending project as teachers, scholars, and preachers.
[1] Joy A. Schroeder and Marion Ann Taylor, Voices Long Silenced: Women Biblical Interpreters Through the Centuries (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2022), 67.
[2][2] Ibid., 50.
[3] For example, Protestant Katharina Schütz Zell (1498-1562) used “motherhood imagery” for God and described herself as “church mother” (ibid., 73). Roman Catholic Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) also used a new image of Jesus Christ as her “brother” and herself as “Christ’s sister” and “mother” by citing the pronouncement in Matthew 12:50 that those who do the Father’s will are Jesus’s mother, sister, and brother (ibid., 85-6).
[4] Ibid., 75.
[5] Ibid., 93.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 99.
[8] Ibid.
[9] For example, in Hail, God, King of the Jews, published in 1611, English poet Aemillia Lanyer (1569-1645) reminded male church leaders that “men alone crucified Jesus and committed a sin worse than anything Eve had done” and demanded women’s liberation from the oppressive patriarchal power of the Christian church. (ibid., 100-101).
[10] Ibid., 111.
[11] Ibid., 112-3.
[12] Ibid., 113.
[13] Ibid., 119.
[14] Ibid., 119-120.
[15] Ibid., 155-7.
[16] Ibid., 198.
[17] Among them are Nazarene Olive Mary Winchester (1879-1947), ibid., 215; Unitarian Margaret Brackenbury Crook (1886-1972), ibid., 219; Adventist Leonora Gidden Running (1916-2014), ibid., 221; Jewish biblical scholar Nehama Leibowitz (1905-1997), ibid., 226; and Catholic biblical scholar Kathryn Sullivan (1905-2006), ibid., 222.
[18] For example, Loise Pettibone Smith (1887-1981) received a doctoral degree at Bryn Mawr and began to teach as a professor at Wellesley College in 1915 (ibid., 211). Mary Redington Ely was also one of the first female professors with a PhD degree in biblical studies. She received her PhD in New Testament at the University of Chicago in 1924 and taught at Vassar College and later at Union Seminary (ibid., 214).
[19] Ibid., 245.
[20] Ibid., 261-2.
[21] Ibid., 254.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid., 255.
[24] Ibid., 256.
[25] Ibid., 257.
[26] Ibid., 263-4.
[27] Ibid., 264.
[28] Ibid., xiii.
[29] Eunjoo Mary Kim, Women Preaching: Theology and Practice through the Ages (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2004).
[30] Ibid., xiv.
Your question “Should all the interpretations offered by women be regarded as equally valuable?” leads to its corollary: “Should all the interpretations offered by men be regarded as equally valuable?” Realizing that we need to test the “spirits” of women it likewise reminds us that the same goes for men.