My Response

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 me.

She Who Needs No Orders

         In pondering how to frame this response to the encyclopedic Voices Long Silenced, one can be tempted by two extremes. One is to stand here and “say their names” by reading aloud the hundreds of names of women whose contributions were sketched by Joy Schroeder and Marion Ann Taylor. The other is to stand here for ten minutes and say nothing, silencing my voice to echo the silenced voices of these women. The first would unnecessarily weary nearly everyone here today because, one can presume, most of us don’t know who Angelo of Foligno or Leona Glidden Running or Antoinette Brown Blackwell are, and I merely selected a few random names of women I was not familiar with when I began reading this book. Such is the revelatory nature of this book. The second, just standing here in silence, would tax us all because we’ve gathered this week at SBL and AAR to talk for two, three or four days. Introverts included. These temptations are real because the impact of this book upon this panelist is weighty.

In 1989 Toni Morrison gave a lecture at Queens College in Queens NY called “Women, Race, and Memory,” and it can be read in her book with the title The Source of Self-Regard. In that lecture she made the observation that “the most effective and reliable saboteur is she who needs no orders” (87). That is, women who do not need to conform to a masculinist culture. She also warned her audience of the powers of code-switching when she said “the tacit agreement that masculinity is preferable is also a tacit acceptance of male supremacy” (93).

I’d like to approach my opportunity on this panel to explore how people in the evangelical world might respond to this book, a book that tells the stories of hundreds of women “who need no orders.” These are women possessed by an unusual, culture defying courage that drove them to be dissidents who resisted systemic masculinist culture. My theme then is courage and the expression for that courage is “she who needs no orders.”

         Evangelicals, whom I represent – not very well according to some – divide deeply about whether or not women should be pastors or preaching or even interpreting Scripture in a public context. Plenty of exegetical gymnastics occur on the part of some over whether teaching theology, which for some is always prohibited by the apostle Paul, and writing books about theology is actually the sort of teaching Paul prohibited. Complementarians believe God made men and women to “complement” one another in roles, with the men leading and the women supporting the leading men by following them. These sorts of complementarians are patriarchalists, hierarchicalists, and at times misogynists. Martha Nussbaum, in Citadels of Pride, defines sexism as “a system of beliefs holding that women are, in specified ways, inferior to men” while misogyny is “an enforcement mechanism: the misogynist digs in behalf of entrenched privilege and simply determined not to let women in” (9). Evangelicalism has deep pockets of both sexism and misogyny, and I would add to Nussbaum what can be called “structural sexism,” which denies women autonomy and subjectivity and turns women into instruments in systems privileging men. Structural sexism is created by what Nussbaum calls “male gender pride.” Evangelicalism’s widespread complementarianism is structural sexism.

         The other side of the ledger about women in ministry in evangelicalism is called Egalitarianism, which affirms men and women as equals and affirms women’s role in church, in society, and in biblical interpretation as equals. Whether egalitarians make women equal is a topic for another occasion, but Lisa Weaver Swartz’s new book, Stained Glass Ceilings, examines the structural sexism of Southern seminary and the egalitarianism of Asbury seminary and finds the latter in need of a deeper form of egalitarianism. When men create and define a culture systemic sexism almost always follows.

Schroeder and Taylor’s book illustrates the history of systemic sexism, or various earlier forms of today’s rendition of it, complementarianism, with the occasional breakthrough of developing forms of code-switching egalitarianism. Code-switching, that is, women conforming to male expectations for what was deemed a male-only activity, was an act of subversion at times by women who needed no orders but pretended they did. This kind of subversion occurs today across the globe among Christian women gifted to teach but whose voices continue to be silenced. Not everyone agrees with the social visions of Western universities.

The strategy of denunciation used by complementarians that contends what is now being taught by evangelical egalitarians, like Lynn Cohick and Lucy Peppiatt and Beth Allison Barr, has its roots in feminism of the 1950s and later. That kind of feminism has been sketched recently by Maggie Doherty in a stunning book about what was going on among women in post World War II when men returned from Europe and the Pacific, when those men went back to work, and women went back home to make room for the men. Her book is called The Equivalents.  

Nearly everything our two authors of Voices Long Silenced conclude in substance – whether it is exegetical observations about a text, the appropriation of women biographies in the Bible, the analogical potency of what the Bible says about slavery – was said by women before the 20th Century and was stated with full force long long ago. A good introduction to women in the early churches comes from Lynn Cohick and Amy Hughes, Christian Women in the Patristic World, which follows up on Cohick’s Women in the World of the Earliest Christians. Women, Schroeder and Taylor demonstrate century after century, have always sensed their gifts for teaching, studying, and leading, and in most of those centuries there were women active in biblical and theological studies, women who “needed no orders,” women who played the game of code-switching and deference, but many of those women were silenced. More importantly for my point, nearly all of them have been forgotten. I know I was surprised by how many names I had never once heard of. A NT woman, Junia, was turned into a man in the textual tradition, and so she was silenced for centuries. Junia is not alone in being silenced.

I shall present a synopsis of four women in Voices Long Silenced to illustrate that what shook the systemic powers of masculinist church and synagogue cultures was the courage of women who needed no orders. One of the strategies in the shifting and transforming of cultures is play by the rules in a manner that overcomes those with power. Charismatic voices with a capacity to tell a better story, voices that refuse to back down while playing by the rules, have always been the culture transformers. I begin with…

Margery Kempe

The code-switching of a woman with the gift of teaching or writing or preaching, a woman who “needed no orders,” can be seen in Margery Kempe (1373- post 1438). She also happens to be Beth Barr’s “bestie.” Schroeder and Taylor conclude that “Kempe strategically overstated her illiteracy and lack of education to deflect criticism from religious and civil authorities who were suspicious of laypeople’s biblical learning” (52). Kempe stated that she had to employ scribes to put her Book of Margery Kempe into a coherent argument, but Lynn Staley, an author about Kempe, concluded that “Kempe may even have penned the Book herself, inventing a ‘scribe’ whose preface attested to Kempe’s sanctity” (52). Why? Because “dictating to a clergyman was less controversial than writing the text herself” (52). A really good example of dissident code-switching by a woman who took orders because she needed none.

The authors of the book celebrated today continue with Kempe’s story. She was interrogated by the Archbishop of York who demanded that she not teach, to which she replied by appealing to the woman who, in Luke 11:27-28, said “Blessed is the womb that bore thee and the breasts that gave thee suck.” Jesus replied to her that the blessed are those who hear and do the word. Margery Kempe then said to the Archbishop, “I think the Gospel permits me to speak of God.” Which incited clerics against her for speaking of the Gospel! A priest then opined that Paul banned women from teaching, to whom Kempe responded with some eloquent code-switching with more than a touch of dissident needing no orders when she said, “I don’t preach, sir, I enter no pulpit. I use only discussion and good words. And I’ll do so as long as I live” (52-53). They found no fault in her, and she went on because she was a woman who accommodated herself to males in ways that subverted their orders.

Argula von Grumbach

         Argula von Grumbach (c. 1492-c. 1554), a Bavarian noblewoman with “Lutheran sympathies” when Roman Catholicism was the culture, in 1523 challenged the faculty of theology at Ingolstadt to a debate about the meaning of Scripture. Her challenge took on the form of a Bible-citing pamphlet that, though never responded to by the faculty, went into 14 printings. By the time her lights went out, over 29,000 copies of her works were in print. Though living in a predominantly Catholic region, von Grumbach read deeply in the Lutheran reformers. It was when a student at the University was coerced into recanting his Lutheran beliefs that von Grumbach became a woman who needed no orders. She relied on the words of Jesus to confess him publicly, which for her was her Reformation convictions. When criticized for speaking where no woman was to speak, she code-switched and appealed to Deborah, Jael, and Judith. Her biggest opponent was probably her husband. As Schroeder and Taylor sum up her story, they write that she “was one of the many self-assured women who used the printing press to engage Reformation debates and circulate writings that interpreted Scripture” (68-70).

Margaret Askew Fell

         Margaret Askew Fell (1614-1702), older than and surviving her husband, George Fox (1624-1691), were Quakers who encountered the troubles of not following orders because they dissented from the restoration’s Church of England. Their authority, as is well known, was the Inner Light present in all believers. Margaret was imprisoned for four years so she used that time, as did Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr, to write. One of her pamphlets provided biblical arguments for women preaching. As many women had done and will continue to do, she trotted out the examples of women preachers, prophets, judges, and leaders in the Bible, including Deborah, Huldah, Anna, Mary Magdalene, and the woman of Samaria. (The Samaritan woman has recently been rehabilitated by Caryn Reeder, The Samaritan Woman’s Story: Reconsidering John 4 after #ChurchToo.) Fell, who needed no orders, pushed prickly hearts when she stated that the Book of Common Prayer used the words of Mary in the Magnificat, which gave voice to a woman’s voice while attempting to silence women. She warned the same men of hypocrisy, and said they ought not to be paid when they preach using the words of women in the Bible.

Zilpha Elaw

         A powerful woman’s voice of the 20th Century was the African American Mary Bethune Cookman, who had more irons in the fire of uplift and equality for women and African Americans, but behind her a full century was another woman who needed no orders, Zilpha Elaw (1790-1873). She, too, has been recently discussed by Lisa Bowens in her extraordinary book African American Readings of Paul, 83-97. Serving a Quaker family as a servant, Zilpha experienced a vision of Jesus that helped sustain abusive treatment by her Quaker masters. Like Paul, she heard a voice calling her to preach and to become “another Phoebe.” As with Argula von Grumbach, she encountered her deepest resistance from her husband. But, she, too, needed no orders. To fund herself following her husband’s death, she opened a school where she fought systemic racism and sexism. She code-switched to show that the restrictions on women in the traditional reading of the NT did not apply when the Spirit had called the woman. Phoebe she note wryly, could not have done what she did “if she was required to receive the commissions of the Church in mute silence, and not allowed to utter a syllable before them” (155). She preached in the face of dangers, condemning racism and restrictions as she appealed to the apostle’s Paul for a church in which believers are all one in Christ.

         What is one to say then of others – like Harriet Livermore, Phoebe Palmer, Charlotte von Krischbaum, and Adrienne Speyr, who also had the courage to resist the powers. I testify in my own life to women whose writings and speaking have shaped me. As a PhD student I began to read and then met, while riding a bike in Cambridge on (what else but) a rainy day, Morna Hooker. Her articles on gospel studies methods, not to ignore her insightful studies of the apostle Paul’s theory of atonement. I studied with James D.G. Dunn, but I almost went to Wales to study with Margaret Thrall, whose work on 2 Corinthians in the ICC series is second to none on that epistle, or epistles, of the apostle Paul. Closer to home and age is a Jewish scholar who has influenced me and whose piercing criticisms I fear – Amy Jill Levine. Her ever vigilant eyes watch over Christian scholarship to make sure it speaks accurately about Jews, especially Pharisees, and whom I consider a prophet to the church. Her book, The Misunderstood Jew, should be required reading of all seminary students and everyone who ever gets behind a pulpit. If you read her carefully you may well prepare your sermons or talks fearing that she just might show up, and she’s not afraid – as she writes – to stand up in a sermon to correct the misreading of the Gospels. These women, too, need no orders and today are perceived as top drawer scholars of the New Testament.

         I want to mention a woman whose interpretation of the Bible has shaped more Bible readers than she is generally given credit for. Her name is Henrietta Mears, famous Sunday School teacher at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, and who shaped both Billy Graham and Bill Bright. Notably, her book What the Bible is All About, was given away to those who made decisions at Billy Graham Crusades, and I have heard the number of 6 million copies of her books were published. The most influential Bible teacher in the USA today is Beth Moore and she, too, has learned like Mears, that she needs no orders from men to teach. Their orders come from God, whether men accept them or not.