A Year Of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans

Like The Cross In The Closet, this book represents an experiment. For Timothy Kurek, that was consciously pretending to be something he wasn’t in order to better understand. That’s a version of what happens in A Year Of Biblical Womanhood, but it’s not the whole story.

The author – Rachel Held Evans, a blogger, evangelical in the Dayton, Tennessee and author of  this and Evolving In Monkey Town – is a woman who takes on a year-long project to take what the Bible says to and about women as literally as possible. She does this as one who is happy to wear the feminist label, so this was always going to be an uncomfortable journey, if one that naturally fits a book. All of this presupposes that it’s possible to distill what the Bible says to and out women into list of things to do and be. Which is, to a certain extent the point of the project.

The sometimes bizarre sub-sub-culture of evangelical Christianity is not short of opinion when it comes to gender. We’ll be tackling different aspects of that opinion on the blog over the next while. Gender and sexuality are increasingly issues of fracture for churches and individuals – they are straws which break the proverbial camels’ backs. This is the stuff which causes people to leave churches; it’s important, and goes to the core of our personal identity. Books like this and The Cross In The Closet represent, for me, an inevitably imperfect but ultimately hopeful attempt to reframe the debate and provide something solid to stand on for those of us who feel increasingly alienated by each wing of the arguments.

In the case of Rachel Held Evans her project has her focus on a different theme every month: October (month 1) is gentleness, November is domesticity, March is modesty, June is submission. Naturally division by title makes things seems more tidy than they are in reality; there’s overflow and blurred edges all the way. Rachel is married to Dan, and they are people who approach marriage as a mutual, equal partnership; so inevitably there’s going to be some bumpy places along the way. There’s also a good deal of interesting conversation with people and exploration of texts to discover what the Bible may actually be saying or not saying. Take, for instance, Proverbs chapter 31:10-31, a section often titled ‘A Wife Of Noble Character’. So often this has been seen as a list of what women in general should aspire to be as wives, or should be working towards. Held Evans, tellingly, suggests that Jewish tradition sees the passage in a quite different way: it’s aimed at husbands, as a list of general strengths and achievements to honour and celebrate when they are seen and demonstrated in a woman. She reframes this as, for her culture, ‘woman of valour’, a blessing for a man or woman to speak over a woman. A throw-away example: her husband Dan greeting her tired arrival home,  bearing take-away having not been able to cook that day, with ‘Pizza? Woman Of Valour!’. Burden becomes blessing. Who could possibly thought men could have got it so (wilfully?) wrong?

It’s at moments like that, and in describing the unlikely friendships she forms over year, that the book is at its strongest points. I got a little frustrated by not hearing more from her husband – there are excerpts from his journal, but for me not enough. I’d love to hear his view of his wife’s journey in parallel detail. Necessarily it’s a personal book, but given the profound impact such a journey is likely to have on a significant relationship, it would have been instructive to hear more from him. None of us, ever, exist in a vacuum; the conclusion of the book handles this well. I just would have liked a little more from Dan peppered throughout. Bizarrely, I was also a little annoyed by the photographs. Rachel’s usually pictured holding something she’s just described herself making; often that process has featured frustration, tears, anger. Yet in the photos she’s almost always smiling. Maybe there’s a cultural thing going on here, but to me the photos of a smiling Rachel near a passage where she describes sobbing on the kitchen floor seem a little incongruous.

I and my wife Bev have long been people who have held ‘traditional’ Christian interpretations of gender roles and characteristics at arm’s length. We don’t find ourselves as isolated from the evangelical community as Rachel Held Evans does, but we do often feel like we’re swimming upstream. Books like this give people like me hope .I don’t agree with everything she writes, but certainly I do with most of it. It’s oxygen  – proof that we’re not mad, that there are other people who want to be faithful to the Bible but don’t want to assume that a ‘Biblical’ view of some issues is always what the vocally dominant say it is. The book shed light on some things and confirmed as viable what I had often suspected may be the case but hadn’t gone to the trouble of exploring. I’m humbled by Held Evans reaching the end of her year and finding herself confronting her sense of judgement and grudge-holding against those who feel differently. Given how suffocating it can be to hold views which aren’t recognised by the majority, that’s admirable. Experience suggests that the majority may not always be the majority – that when oxygen is offered, there are plenty there ready to breathe more deeply. May we do so – and speak. There’s more to people than a 2,000+ year-old list culled from carelessly applied texts.

You can find Rachel Held Evans’ excellent blog by clicking here. I rated this book 4/5 on goodreads.com

Enough

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (The Bible)

There must be more to life than stereotypes. (Blur)

The great John Stott, one of the grandfather figures of Western evangelicalism, a man you couldn’t be in the same room as without being struck by his humility and graciousness, titled his brilliant book on the Sermon on the Mount ‘Christian Counter-Culture’. Those three words speak volumes about Stott’s prophetic vision for the church. One where church and Christians are so devoted to Christ’s call to a radical self-redefinition and compassion that a vision is painted of how life can be that’s compelling and luminous. It implies a way of living as Christians which calls us to something subversive, something liberating, something hard but offering eternal rewards. Stott was a man of conviction with whom you could disagree – which of course meant he was far more likely to win you over in the end.

This Christian faith to which Stott devoted his life takes as undergirding and forming it a book and as its object of worship a God who is so beyond us that He makes Himself accessible to us by living amongst us as a human being. It’s a journey of faith replete with revelation and mystery, with liberation to be who we are called to by our creator to be and of radical self-giving to neighbour and enemy. It’s what God’s done first for us, and it’s what He calls us to model towards others in His power.

It’s a majestic vision of life. It’s one I can’t live up to, but I love trying to because doing so sets me free. It’s tempting as one who’s been called by God through the church to exercise leadership within the church to simplify the call. At times, of course, it’s right to do so. Sometimes pretence and pomposity needs to be stripped away and unvarnished simplicity must shine through. God can do anything and often does; we are saved; Jesus is the Way. God forbid self-aggrandisement obscures the King of Kings from view, even if it is through a glass darkly. With that, there’s a temptation to strip mystery away and make it all easy. Do this and more people will be healed. Do this and you’ll have more Sunday School volunteers. Do this and you’ll have a better prayer life. Deep down we all know it can’t work the same way in every case, but it’s no less tempting to portray it as such.

Still, I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of much of this over-simplification, of what should be a vision of counter-culture instead being a pale imitation of the sea we swim in. That takes many forms; for me, today, it’s about being reduced to archetypes and stereotypes.

There’s a few foundational truths about humanity in Scripture; the first is that we bear the stamp of the creator. His signature is written on our souls and bodies: on mine, on my wife’s and  on every last single snowflake unique human being ever to grace creation. It’s a signature that at times seems smudged and illegible; that’s my fault and our fault, not the artist’s. Why, then, do such vocal parts of what should be the Christian counter-culture persist in such a shrivelled vision of our mutual gendered image-bearing? Why do we shrink the culturally specific and historically located complex individuals like David, Moses, Sarah and Delilah into examples of what men and women should be thousands of years later? Biblical people are just that – people trying to figure out how to follow God in a specific place and time. They don’t show us that a man has to be a warrior or a woman must wait for a man to win her.

I’ve had enough of Christian books and talks and articles about men and women taking their templates from fairy tales and movies, then reading those back into scripture, shrinking God’s image-bearers into versions of pop-quiz pseudo-wisdom that belong more properly on the back of a cereal packet. I’ve had enough of marriage being reduced to who obeys whom, when Scripture frames it as mutual submission and leaves us to figure out the rest in the awkward ambiguity of squaring eternal words with two people living together in a time and a place. I’ve had enough of women being told they are all waiting to be rescued and men being convinced they are the ones who have to do the rescuing. I had enough of the unbearable pressure that puts on anyone who feels that somehow they don’t quite fit. I’ve had enough of lazy analogies about roses and thorns, of stereotypes about being passive or active, of big name preachers going on and on about sex and intimacy, about his role, her role. I’ve had enough of single women being told they are being prepared for something that may never come, so missing out on God’s rich and deep calling to them. I’ve had enough of men’s groups that always seem to revolve around curry or outdoors activities, alienating fifty per cent of men.

I’ve had enough of a reductionism in Christ’s name which bears no relation to the expansive new creation I read of God bringing about in the pages of Scripture. I’ve had enough of God’s mutual image bearers being reduced to seven quick tips for a peaceful marriage. I, you, we are graced by the image of God; we also obscure it. We’re preciously, dangerously unique. We’re called to express that and also hold back from expressing it in mutual submission to those with whom we live. We’re called to read the God-inspired words of Scripture with brains and hearts and bodies – all of which are alive now, so of course it will need some interpreting.

Yes, it’s hard being called to be part of bringing to birth a new creation which we only see fleetingly.

Who said that which is hard isn’t worthwhile, though? It’s easy to swap the words of eternity for glossy magazine-style quick tips. It’s tempting to trade wisdom for one word answers. Jesus is the Way. That’s a process, a journey, not a cop-out.

Enough, then. I’m trading in answers for wisdom, solutions for ways, archetypes for endless variety.

Enough.