The Week at Tov Unleashed
It’s been a good week at Tov Unleashed while I spent a great week with our DMin NT Context cohort at Northern Seminary as we pondered the Book of Revelation.
Newsletters this week — apart from the hiccup of one not wanting to be posted — started conversations about:
Women preparing for ministry with Nicole Massie Martin:
Here’s the place to begin: Nicole Massie Martin, Made to Lead: Empowering Women for Ministry.
I loved this book: it’s a kind of first-stop or one-stop book for the basics of sensing one’s call, becoming a leader like Jesus, and facing the challenges of being a woman in ministry. She also examines confidence, your love life, sacred space, mentorship, finding your place, owning your body, and having passion in your back pocket.
Dr Martin sketches for us what we can learn from women in the Bible who were called by God — Mary, the woman at the well in Samaria, Mary and Martha, the Syrophoenician woman, Joanna, Suzanna and unnamed women.
What challenges? Sexism, ageism, biases about singleness and motherhood and marriage, projection, jealousy.
She wisely advises to trust your gifts, to practice, to sing your own song, and to welcome feedback.
I could go on… get a group of women friends and read this book together. It’s filled with wisdom.
Two posts about Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s important and challenging reminder of the rise of masculinism among evangelicals, showing us all that evangelicalism is as much a culture (if not more) than a theology (second post here):
But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad. By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates “the least of these” for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses. Rather than turning the other cheek, they’d resolved to defend their faith and their nation, secure in the knowledge that the ends justify the means. Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with a vengeful warrior Christ, it’s no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same way. In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values. In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. [My emphasis]
And Beth Allison Barr dipped into translations and domesticity as a culture:
Piper and Grudem got control of the RSV, edited it and revised it, and out came the ESV.
The TNIV was gender inclusive; it irritated Grudem and Piper and the controversy was explained in favor of the Grudem-Piper side in World magazine and from those days on the ESV got the press by some for being accurate and the TNIV for not being accurate. Politics has lots of influence, so much so the TNIV was scratched and we got the NIV 2011 (in this newsletter the NIV). It’s not the translators behind the NIV were liberals; they were conservative evangelicals. To be honest, this was a storm in a coffee cup and the Grudem side made it seem like one side was faithful and the other side unfaithful, while most of us were watching with surprise that anyone could claim the NIV was anything but reliable and faithful. The SBC weighed in and evidently sided with the Grudem-Piper debate. Numbers, by the way don’t count, in translations. Judgments do. Politics seemed to rule the day.
The ESV is no plain reading translation but favors complementarianism, male headship, and at times Calvinism.