Letting God Out of Hell

In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic. Under the standard conception, unless answers to philosophical questions are absolute, they are arbitrary. Unless a philosophy is grounded in determinate, agent-neutral facts, it is right only relative to a perspective that cannot in the end be justified. Elgin charts a course between the two poles, showing how fact and value intertwine, where art and science intersect.

--the publisher's description on the dust jacket

Yesterday, I started a blogpost with a quote from Dr. Elgin, one of the world's pre-eminent philosophers.  Today, I'm doing the same in order to look with you at the problem of pre-dominant and dominating tendencies in male logic. 

The tendencies are to insist on avoiding ambiguities and to demand that what is observed by the observer by boxed up into categories and classifications on the hierarchical map of knowledge.  Many Bible readers get stuck in this mode.  Many bloggers and tweeters have tended to worry with whether Rob Bell's book's hell is a universalist's hell or whether universalist doctrine is heresy.  "It's either a universalist book or it's not."  "It's either heresy or it's not."  "There are either absolute and sensible answers to be insisted on here or all we're left with is random, nonsensical, and arbitrary wishful thinking."

Male logic?, you might ask.  Why qualify it this way?  Why not just "the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic"?  Are you saying Anglo-Americans are male dominant?

Well, you don't even have to know that Aristotle coined the word and formalized the system of logic, by which he, a male, boxed up females as naturally inferior, even as botched males, as NOT males.  If you yourself are not male or if you're abused by another male who uses the binary on you, then you "know" the answer without even having to take a college class in logic.  Maybe for you like for me, it was your father, who gave you the experience of male logic.  Then reading how Nancy Mairs writes of the binary, then you get it:

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. . . [in] a dimorphic world.

--Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer (page 41)

Let's come back to Mairs in a moment.  If God is like the patriarchy with this fundamental structuring of his world in splitting binary fashion, then -- follow the logic -- we on the other side may have hell to pay.


Suzanne has been writing a series, Blogging heaven and hell (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 – and another I'll link to below).  She invited some of us to join in as she continued; she'd mentioned Sheol, then מְצוּלָה, and so I brought up Gei Hinnom as New Testament translator Willis Barnstone has had to deal with that hell.  The male binary logic, we might have noted right at that point, has a problem.  It has a decision to make.  If heaven is not hell and if not hell is heaven, then is Sheol NOT Gei Hinnom?  Well, it's not much of a problem if you read the reviewers protesting Rob Bell's book, because he does mention (they say) the various words for "hell" in the Bible.  (I've only tried to read one of Rob Bell's books, and didn't like it enough to continue, so I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this most recent one).  His book's critics are saying it doesn't matter that there are not-the-same words for hell since there's just one absolute hell, which is a place in opposition to the one absolute heaven (and never mind what Jesus said about many rooms or mansions in his father's house, which really must be the one heaven, and NOT the one hell.)  The whole line of argument here is Western logic, inherited from Aristotle. 

I get that because, when I was an undergraduate student, going to the same university where my father had graduated from, I took the same logic course from the exact same logic professor that my dad had had.  Dad was real interested, when he learned, to see whether I could achieve the same grade he'd made.  He made my taking the same course into a competition.  Either I would be as good as he was academically, or I would not.  And I've continued to be quite familiar with Aristotle, and with his logic, even academically, even to the point of defending a dissertation on the subject successfully.  My own point here is that we try to keep things abstract, in the realm of Truth, sort of impersonal, as if being in heaven and out of hell is something that depends on logic.  (If you're still reading but protesting, "Hey, stop rambling; get on with your point."  Then I'll just say, "I'm sorry."  And add this, "What if our ears are so attuned to western logic that we sometimes miss what's in the personal, what's in the narrative, what's in the stories of life, which the binary will lop out as "not much of a point" and, therefore, as "less than important"?)

Suzanne's most recent post (the 8th so far in her series) shows what Robin Parry's book The Evangelical Universalist does.  (This post, it's interesting to note, comes after Peter's dis-agreement "with Suzanne’s tentative universalist position." He nonetheless feels compelled to add:  "But I strongly agree with her that it is wrong to use threats of hell as a way to impose one’s will on others, in the church or in the home.")  Suzanne brings out the fact that Perry shows "that scripture passages disagree - we have scriptures on both sides of this debate."  In other words, even the statements of the Bible, taken as a canonical whole, present the reader with ambiguity.  The Bible teaches exclusivism; the Bible also teaches universalism.  Ambiguities.  (Avoid ambiguities, is what Aristotle taught his male only, elite only, Greek only, students.  Following him and his logic, Aristotle's students would not have liked the Bar-Bar-ous Bible.  And for the historical record, Aristotle said little that would make his students or any of us believe that he believed in hell.  Here, he departs from his teachers.  Maybe he saw the logical difficulties with abolute claims about the afterlife, which he could not box up so easily on his hierachical map of knowledge.)


Suzanne got me looking at and reading other books by Robin Parry.  One is Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate by Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge.  At amazon.com, reviewer  makes this astute observation:

Ambiguity is the devil's volleyball, said former President of Yale, Kingman Brewster, Jr. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge's book, Universal Salvation? gives us a well matched game of back and forth with the theological hot potato that is at the heart of the book's "debate." While the writers in this volume are articulate and responsible in handling this (again) current hot topic among evangelicals, if there is one null theme the critical reader may pick up is that the debate is fueled, in part, by the inherent ambiguity of the concept in the biblical text that all sides claim for their points of view. Biblical ambiguity is the one reality few seem ready to confess when conceding an opponent's point on the issue.

Well, I'm not so sure "inherent" is a useful modifier of "ambiguity," but we can understand what this reviewer is saying.  We readers of the Bible do well to see the ambiguities in it as the writers of the Bible have written it.  Maybe the writers of the Bible, maybe its translators, intended to avoid ambiguities in their writings.  And yet, stories will often have unintended ambiguities.  It's pretty much Western or male-dominant logic that insists on ridding a text of its writer's ambiguities.  And Nancy Mairs has already suggested why men (and women using male logic) will so insist on the binary. 

So Catherine Elgin says there's more than just either the absolute or the arbitrary.  And Nancy Mairs does too.  Mairs says we can get beyond the either / or fix.  We can do this, she shows, with "woman's language," a delightful alternative to boxed-up male logic, to binary patriarchal structuring of language.  She calls it "women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it."  (And I've blogged elsewhere to call this the ironic but useful "feminist binary.")
In thinking about the Bible, then.  In thinking about God in the Bible. In talking about the hell of the God of the Bible.  There's more than just either the absolute or the arbitrary.  There's more than just a need for logic to really know, to really understand, to get it and then to live my real life.  There's thinking that meets the emotions, the head and the heart connected in such awareness.  And Nancy Mairs, if we'll listen to her and can read some of her writing, is most helpful. 

In her book, A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith, Mairs discusses her own "meta-noia," and for that reason alone the book is worth reading.  (I'd recommend reading it after reading some of her earlier books just to get the direction of some of the changes in her, in her thinking.)  This Lent, then, it may be worth our listening and thinking about giving up some of our binary thinking.  Maybe even some of our binary thinking about Hell.  Maybe we can let go and let God out of an absolute hell concept.

Maybe Nancy Mairs can help.  Here's a page from her book:


     Some people, troubled by ambiguity, collapse the world into just two categories, "good" and "eveil" (which too often means "everybody whose beliefs differ from my own"), and claim to know who or what belongs in each, a certitude that smacks of the sin of pride, of pretending to be "like God."  The trouble with this view of morality lies in its inflexibility.  Every group, defining its own beliefs and behaviors as good, righteous, even stamped with God's personal approval, has only the idea of an opposite with which to identify all who believe and behave differently.  They share the vision fo the Puritan Jonathan Edwards predicting Judgment Day:  "When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly different from it!"  It is a closed system in which everybody, regardless of creed or practice, thinks in the same way.  When Muslim extremists point at America and scream, "You're the Great Satan and we have to blow you up," we shout back, "No, you're the Great Satan and we have to bomb your countries," for all the world like the fractious children who made God wish to have stopped with the elephants, only grown large and deadly.  No one dares step outside the good/evil paradigm and invent some altogether different structure for human interaction.  We could have helped to overturn any number of dictators if, instead of squandering billions of dollars on ordnance, we had bombarded their countries with butter, medications, and wireless devices; a healthy, well-fed, and well-informed populace is much less vulnerable to oppression.  If battles there must be, they can fight their own. 
     To our peril throughout the ages, dualism has been humanity's most prevalent mode of constructing the world, however.  Is it because we have two of everything?  If we grew three hands or three feet, would we think outside the binary box?  Fortunately, it is possible, without drastic evolutionary modification but with vigorous practice in discernment, to conceive the world otherwise:  not in terms of dyads--good opposed to evil, right opposed to wrong, you opposed to me--but more realistically and fluidly.  Those who can do so--and this includes not only Christians but practitioners of all faiths--make no judgments on God's behalf but pray for guidance in their own decisions and actions and then for mercy for all the times these fall short. 
     Any number of times when I've attended an Ash Wednesday service, the priest has observed, looking out across the overflowing chapel, that more people go to church on this day than on any other.  Neither the great festivals, Christmas and Easter, draw as many worshipers.  Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the second great penitential season in the liturgical year, and such high attendance attests to a fundamental human characteristic:  our preoccupation with wrongdoing and atonement.  Knowing ourselves to be sinners, we aren't satisfied simply to acknowledge our transgressions.  We want to do something about them.   People who envision God as a remote and fearsome judge may be motivated by the fear that they will be thrown into hell in punishment for breaking divine decrees too numerous to mention (there are more than six hundred such laws in the first five books of the Bible alone).  Those of us for whom God is a beloved presence manifest in everyone we meet, because we believe that God grieves our faults, seek to make amends to anyone we have injured.  Regardless of impetus, believers wolcome Lent as a period of contrition.

Readerly Intercourse: Nancy Mairs

How do you read the Bible?  Who has influenced how you do?  Who else might transform the ways you interpret the collection of texts?

Well, would you be interested in how Toni Morrison might, with no small degree of astuteness, regard texts as more open inter-texts?  Or, at least, when closed as some sort of container that would contain her:  "It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl ... and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world."  Morrison's writing here in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination about how the white world is a fish bowl for blacks in literary America USA.  Similarly, a white woman blogger in North America, Suzanne McCarthy, is astute to the reality of the fish bowl for women grasped by the likes of kyriarchic masculinists such as "Denny Burk [, who] writes for the CBMW"; in her blogpost "Not even all devils..." McCarthy points out how "some theologians writing for the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood have interpreted 'did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped' as an indication that Christ is in some way not equal to God" and the there's a glass ceiling where females in the church and the Christian home, "not equal to men," must live by implication:  "What kind of 'equality' did he [Jesus in Philippians 2:6] refuse to grasp for? He refused to 'grasp for' a functional equality with the Father that would have usurped the Father's role as Father."  So Morrison has us white and black readers look at the literary glass of the fishbowl; and McCarthy has us look at the relatively recent literary glass ceiling of the CBMW.  We read the Bible differently by examining this social constraints of other would-be readers of it.

Well, would you be interested in how Krista Ratcliffe might recover listening rhetorically?  So that we readers might take an open stance when listening in on a text?  Doesn't this method allow us to stand back, to be open, to listen not for the author's singular intention but with our own intent?  Here's how Bible translator Phyllis A. Bird in her work aims "to overhear an ancient conversation, rather than to hear [one]self addressed directly"; and so she moves forward:  "It is not the translator’s duty to make her audience accept the author’s message, or even identify themselves with the ancient audience, except in the sense that any literary work invites identification with its subjects. I am not certain that the translator is even obliged to make the modern reader understand what is overheard.”  Bird is writing of "women and gender in ancient Israel"; but what of this Philippians 2:6 hymn in ancient Macedonia?  Why when we read someone else's mail (i.e. Paul's letter to somebody else) do we immediately assume he has arguments that will, that must, order our world?  Their world was that land of Alexander the Great, where his teacher Aristotle had taught that females and barbarians (like most of us) don't really belong.  What might we overhear in Paul's conversation with his readers?  In their hymn about their Jesus, the slave, obedient, dead?  Ratcliffe, and Bird, are quick to hear, slow to speak, and doesn't this seem a wise way to read the Bible rather than telling everyone else exactly what the text must mean to everybody else?

Well, would you be interested in Alice Walker?  I've already told you in my recent series of posts here how she helped me see all reading, and all reading of the Bible, is an outsider experience.  For black American women in a predominately white Christian man's world, it can be a particularly difficult text when God is viewed as a white man.

Well, since we're talking about Alice Walker, would you be interested in Nancy Mairs's ways of reading?  Yes, this is the Catholic Nancy Mairs, author of Dynamic God.  But, I'm talking about even before she authored that book, when Nancy Mairs, white, couldn't read Alice Walker, black, and how the one was subsequently influenced by the other.  Let's listen in as Mairs writes to you and to me (and we really are her intended audience for her Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer):

[Growing up as a white girl, then a white young woman, then as a white writer, isolated from literature of and from much contact with African Americans] I was missing any meaningful black reality.  In the end, Alice Walker forced me beyond my readerly timidity [when I finally read her In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose]....  [I'd also had] a lifetime of academic training, teacher after teacher admonishing me to trust not myself or the text but them and the authorities they'd direct me to.  But they never taught me how to read a black woman.  Just as well.  Then and in the years since, I have let Alice Walker teach me to read Alice Walker."   

When Mairs talks of her "readerly timidity" she also wants to talk of readerliness otherwise.  Her readers who write to her, she says, sometimes want to give advice, sometimes criticism, many times thanks:  "many want simply to thank me for putting their feelings into words.  These voices, lending materiality to my readerly ideal, transform monologue into intercourse."

This is what I like best about bible blogging if anything.  It's the intercourse.

But even beyond the Aspasia or Socrates like dialogue, there's something else in Mairs's methods.  Something most important.  Let's listen:

Like the French feminists, I subscribe to the premise that the world we experience is itself an immense text that in spite of its apparent complexity has been made in Western throught to rest on a too-simple structrual principle opposing reason to emotion, activity to passivity, and so on, every pair reflecting the most basic dichotomy -- "male" and "female."  Like them I seek to disrupt the binary structure of this text, or Logos, through l'écriture féminine, which "not only combines theory with subjectivism that confounds the protocols of scholarly discourse, it also strives to break the phallologic boundaries between criticalanalysis, essay, fiction, and poetry...."  I took on the dichotomies, in particular the one that has proved most vexatious to my work, the one between "creative" and "critical" writing. It is rooted, like most binary distinctions, in a very complicated struggle....  [In choosing not to divide creative writing from critical] I've chosen, or been chosen, to be a poet-scholar in an age when that option renders me a shady character in both camps.  I've become everybody's other.  A true woman.  I believe in the reality of work.  Period.  I do not distinguish between creative and critical writing because all writing is creative.

So, if we were to go with Mairs back to, say, the text of Philippians 2:6, we might want to challenge the readerly binaries of some.  We've already talked about the "God above" / "unequal Jesus" dichotomy of the CBMW effected by Denny Burk's "functional equality."  

So now what if we read Paul's letter here, just this bit even, not only as (A) some doctrinal statement separate in importance from less important creative writings but also as (B) poetry, as (C) lyric, as (D) a hymn whose words do also give life to varieties of meanings, ranges of them?  And what if, likewise, we do not accept the binaries imposed:

• that Paul's chosen word "ἁρπαγμός" is / NOT the "ἁρπαγμός" of Plutarch or of Vettius Valens?
• that the non-Paul "ἁρπαγμός refers to the event or action and are therefore / NOT equivalent to ἁρπάγμα"?

Just to be clear, here are the troublesome Western, Aristotelian binaries imposed on this Jewish text: 

• God / Jesus
• doctrinal text / musical lyrics
• Paul's inerrant HARPAGMOS / earlier, non-Christians' HARPAGMOS
• Paul's HARPAGMOS (that might not imply exploitation) / Gorgias's HARPAGMA (that implies exploitation, abduction, robbery, and RAPE of a woman)

Isn't this necessary binary, the dichotomies, the issue for one of my blogger friends at Better Bibles Blog?  Isn't this issue for Nancy Mairs "every pair reflecting the most basic dichotomy -- 'male' and 'female' "?  And what if we could, if we would, not so easily separate the Logos, the male and the female?  What if we read the Bible the way we might more easily be willing to read other texts, the text of our life?


In summary, this is a continuation of an ongoing series during Women's History Month, in which I'm trying not only to identify some who have influenced my reading of the Bible but also to get into how they help me read it.  I'm hoping it encourages you some, that you might be interested in these writers and their ways of reading also, and that you might try reading the Bible this month in most helpful ways.

Of Slaves "and" Women

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. 

-- Toni Morrison 

(and/ or Morrison's griot, 

the wise blind woman, 

"the daughter of slaves,

black,

American, 

[who] lives alone

in a small house

outside of town") 

Aristotle's project was systematic, a linguistic insurance policy against slippery-slope language.  Aristotle's project was to separate each natural thing from other things in Nature and to place them all into neat, differentiated, named categories.  A "natural born slave" is inherently different from its "master."  A "female" is essentially other than "the male" who chooses to marry her.  "Obedience from one's own slave" is one thing.  "Obedience from the female who is one's own wife" is another thing. 

This method of separation is what many in the West still tend to use when they try to make subjugation of a person by race different from subjugation of a person by gender or by class or even by sexual orientation.  This is even what some today do when they try to separate Roman slavery from American slavery.  And this is why Aristotle and contemporary Aristotelians are so careful to name their separate categories.  Contemporary Aristotelians, for example, will say that Aristotle or the Apostle Paul might (1) "command wives to submit to their husbands" but that this must be kept separate from the fact that Aristotle and Paul might (2) allow natural born "slavery."  Contemporary Aristotelians warn that it is not good to mix "suffrage" with "abolition" or to put "egalitarianism" in the same category as "civil rights."  "The slave analogy" -- or worse the metaphor "wife submission is slavery" -- is just illogical.  And, of course, "most feminists" must be separated from "the christian feminists."

So notice how "logical" separation tends to label one thing over the other.  The language of logic will exclude the middle and will put everything in its proper place on the map to under-stand hierarchical Nature.  Separate is only equal in the abstract ideal.  Syllogistic reasoning -- from the premise of an objective given to the next premise to the next to the invariable conclusion -- is real logic, the language of Nature's objective reality.  Hence:  "Master" is over his "slave."  "Husband" is over his "wife."  "Roman slavery" is over "the golden rule" which is over "American slavery."  "Complementary" Christian marriage in the twenty-first century understanding of the submissive wife is over the now-illegal "complementary" Christian institution of slavery with its now-outdated understanding of the obedient slave.  And, of course, "the christian feminists who try to use the Bible to support their case" are conclusively more logical than "most feminists."

Nonetheless, it may be good for us to remind ourselves that many, some Christians even, have not found Aristotle's logic method of separation so useful.   We might listen, for example, to Nancy Mairs, who is a feminist christian "and" a christian feminist too:

The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. 

Which is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. Some theorists would claim that all subjects function thus. But as Julia Kristeva points out, female subjectivity, traditionally linked to cyclical and monumental time rather than to linear time, lies outside “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb, topic – comment, beginning – ending).” Possessing an “irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,” a woman may be driven “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.” (Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, page 41)

Hearing the name "Nancy," one might naturally label her a "female" and, therefore, more naturally a "feminist."

Nonetheless, it may be good for us to remind ourselves that many men, some black and enslaved and others white and always free, have not found Aristotle's logic method of separation so useful.  You may want to stay with me just a bit more for a couple of examples.  Here they are:

Frederick Douglass and John Stuart Mill saw the enslavement of the black race "and" the subjugation of women and as inextricably linked.  Therefore, they acted and spoke out as if they believed that to work "and" argue on behalf of the rights of the one group was also to work "and" argue for the other group as well.

Douglass was a black boy, a slave.  In 1830, when it was illegal for him to be taught to read because he was a black slave, a white woman, Sophia Auld, broke the law and taught Douglass how to read before he was a teenager.  And by age sixteen, he was breaking the law by teaching other slaves to read parts of the Bible and other works that he considered abolitionist.  Some years later, he married a freed slave Anna Murray -- who gained her freedom as a black person before he could; they worked together side by side.  In 1846, he was the publisher of several abolitionist newspapers, including the North Star, which had as it's motto:  “Right is of no sex--Truth is of no color--God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."  Note the inclusivity of persons with respect to both gender "and" race.  In 1848, Douglass participated in the first women's conference in the United States of America in Seneca Falls, New York, where he signed the Declaration of Sentiments.  By 1863, Douglass had been engaging President Abraham Lincoln in conversation about abolitionism and, that year, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  In 1870, the fifteenth amendment was passed, giving blacks but not women the right to vote.   In 1872, Douglass ran as the U.S. Vice President candidate of a woman, Victoria Clafin Woodhull, a candidate for President.  Woodhull could not vote although Douglass could.  In 1882, Douglass's wife Anna passed away and, a couple of years later, Douglass remarried and wed Helen Pitts, who caused controversy because they were a mixed-race couple.  Douglass, of mixed race himself, said:  "This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father."  Douglass worked side by side with Helen, for eleven years as husband and wife, until the day he took his last breath (February 20, 1890 when he died of a heart attack in the evening at home); it was a day when Douglass, still fighting against the subjugation of women, had taken the platform at the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C.  (Just to complete some of the timeline here:  it was not until 1920, some thirty years after Douglass passed away, that women in the USA were granted the right to vote.)  Douglass saw the subjugation of people because of race as the same sort of problem as the subjugation of people because of gender. 


I won't take as long here to sketch out the contributions of John Stuart Mill.  I do want to show that a free, white male in high power can still sound like Toni Morrison's wise black slave women, blind but seeing the blurring of Aristotle's convenient categories as important for freeing blacks from slavery and women from bondage in marriage, religion, politics, and civil society.

Mill wrote a work, "The Subjection of Women," in 1869 in England where for some time he was an influential Member of Parliament.  (He had worked side by side with Harriet Taylor, as husband and wife of seven years, before she passed away in 1858.)  By the title and content of Mill's essay, you can gather that he's advocating for women's rights.  But I want you to see how Mill deconstructs Aristotle's notion of separate categories.  I want you to know that Mill was an early expert on Aristotle.  This post will end now rather abruptly with Mill's words as he sees no difference between the awful subjection of women to the powers of men "and" the awful subjection of blacks to the powers of whites:

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is natural. But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be natural, and the only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect, and one which contributed no less to the progress of human thought, than Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and rested it on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the dominion of men over women is usually based, namely that there are different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures; that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian races of Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to Aristotle? Did not the slave-owners of the Southern United States maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate their personal interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is natural, that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out for slavery? some even going so far as to say that the freedom of manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere.

Ways of Translation: Part 2, Language as Imposition

The telling strategy assumes that people are guided by reason.... Telling often leads to resistance. The forcing strategy assumes that people are resistant and must be coerced into changing.

--Robert E. Quinn, Change the World : How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results

כִּי כְּמֹו־שָׁעַר בְּנַפְשֹׁו כֶּן־הוּא אֱכֹל וּשְׁתֵה יֹאמַר לָךְ וְלִבֹּו בַּל־עִמָּֽךְ׃
פִּתְּךָ־אָכַלְתָּ תְקִיאֶנָּה וְשִׁחַתָּ דְּבָרֶיךָ הַנְּעִימִים׃

--Solomon, Proverbs 23:7

I must have told you a thousand times. You know better than that. Since you're obviously not capable of hearing what I said, kid, let's see if you can't feel my belt. Now, bend over.

--my father

Part 1: Review

In part 1 of this series on ways of translation, I noted how many linguists follow Aristotle in conceiving of Language (or "logos") as Proposition (or as "logic," as purely defined binary categories or sets of oppositional features, as naturally-ordered statements toward conclusions). It may be Noam Chomsky's divisions of Language vs. languages, of Competence vs. Performance, of plus / minus features - or it may be Relevance Theorists' divisions of explicatures vs. implicatures with respect to propositions and divisions of types within those two different and distinct categories and divisions of the message that's delivered and processed and the message that is not. The conclusion, therefore, about translation (given Language as Proposition) is generally that there is a transfer of the relevant categories or features of the source language (especially the intended message or proposition of the speaker or writer) into the target language. The more the binary categories match, the better the transmission of the proposition. The more equal the features on both sides of the equation, the better the translation. The Language-as-Proposition Problem is that the logos falls by the wayside. The seed emitted never gets transmitted. In the bible, Mark's translation of Jesus's parable of the sower (in Mark 4) starts with this problem. Mark hearkens back to the LXX translation of the story of spilled seed, of the sin of Onan in Genesis 38. The function of language as Proposition requires that it is either a successful transmission of the message or it is not.

Part 2, Language as Imposition

In part 2, we come to the post-proposition problem. Language does not always have the effect the speaker or writer wants. Language, at that point, then, is viewed less as propositional and more as impositional.

Jesus speaks to this (as Mark translates him in Mark 4, in the parable of the sower).  After he notes the problem of sown seed falling by the way side and after he gets to the explanation of the proposition heard but lost on deaf ears and stolen from the heart, he gets to problems of force.  He says: "5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away." And the explanation speaks to other difficulties of force: "16 And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. 17 And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away."  I've given this to you in the forceful ESV translation, but I might as well have given it to you in Mark's forceful Greek translation.  The nature of force reminds us of things Gorgias wrote in original Greek when he tried to excuse Helen for leaving the men of Greece for barbarians.  He wrote, playing with language without translating:

εἴτε λόγῳ πεισθεῖσα
εἴτε βίᾳ ἁρπασθεῖσα

either she was by proposition seduced
or else she was by imposition induced

In Genesis 38, as translated into Greek, we see something similar.

9 γνοὺς δὲ Αυναν ὅτι οὐκ αὐτῷ ἔσται τὸ σπέρμα ἐγίνετο ὅταν εἰσήρχετο πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ ἐξέχεεν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν τοῦ μὴ δοῦναι σπέρμα τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ

9 But Onan had birthed knowledge that the sperm-semen seed would not be born to him. So whenever he went in to his brother’s birthing wombman he would waste it on the ground of birth, so as not to give the sperm-semen seed to his brother.

10 πονηρὸν δὲ ἐφάνη ἐναντίον τοῦ θεοῦ, ὅτι ἐποίησεν τοῦτο,
καὶ ἐθανάτωσεν καὶ τοῦτον

10 It was wicked, in fact, appearing in the face of God, this mess that was created,
and so he put him to death and so that was that.

At this point, no one using language is thinking about making it easy. We're thinking about what happens when propositions emitted fail. There usually comes force afterwards, an imposition like a rock or heat or judgment and death. George Steiner, in his little essay "On Difficulty" in his book by the same title, gets at this some. He first talks about the information gaps in poetry first as a difficulty. When a poet uses a proposition and the reader or listener doesn't get it, there's a problem. But then there's more: Steiner mentions how the poet sometimes will make a poem difficult because of authorly decisions to slow the reader down or to force a reader's eyes one way or another on a page or to impose a particular rhyme and rhythm on the reader's ears or to put in metaphorical rootlessness or rhetorical tribulation in the mix.

Language as post-proposition Imposition is beginning to sound a bit literary. And yet it's much more profound than that. Aristotle created "logic" but, for Alexander the Great, it wasn't enough. There was the move from Nature to human nature, and I want to suggest that the human condition is gendered. I'm suspecting that "logic" (for Aristotle and his students) gives way to "phallo-logic." So a little later in this post, we'll get to that suspicion with some observations from Nancy Mairs. But first, I want to go back to the beginning of the post and to the quotations there from three men, Robert E. Quinn, Solomon, and my dad.

My epigraphs to start this post get at just how deep Language as Imposition can be.

Quinn: Two Conceptions of "Language," for Change

Quinn is an expert in human change, especially in the context of businesses and organizations. After surveying the literature in his disciplines, he found that there are a very limited number of reasons adults change. Similarly, there are just a few respective strategies that CEOs and leaders of businesses use to effect corporate change. In the quotation above, only two are mentioned: the telling strategy and the forcing strategy. Does that sound familiar? We might as well call these "the propositional strategy" for change and the "impositional strategy." These two, Quinn says, are most common both in the literature of business scholarship and in the practice of business change. A CEO who employs the "telling" strategy might propose a "mission statement" or might send a directive by official memorandum. When the strategy fails, then language becomes force. The CEO will likely next engage in the "forcing" strategy. Let me include half of Figure 1.A in Quinn's book Change the World because I'd like you to see how Aristotelian the notion of "telling" and how Alexandrian the concept of "forcing." And then we can talk more about language and translation - as imposition.

In the world of business, and this is the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Western world, the telling strategy owes much to Aristotle. There's the emphasis on facts, the method of rational persuasion (i.e., logical rhetoric), and logical argumentation among other things. In addition, the forcing strategy in our day looks much like it did in the day of Alexander the Great. The bit about "controlling the context and flow of information" is what jumps out at me with respect to language.

Now, when a context and flow of information has authority, then I tend to think of discourse and of texts such as Aristotle's Organon. And I think of the Hebrew scriptures, and the Christian Bible, and the Qur'an of Islam. The purists and fundamentalists who most prize these texts resist their translation. That is, the authority who possess the texts preserve them rigidly in untranslated and original form.

For example, expert and authoritative Aristotle scholar, Thomas M. Conley, works against rhetoric students reading Aristotle's Rhetoric in anything but Aristotle's original Greek. And in a published article entitled "The Greekless Reader and Aristotle's Rhetoric," Conley disparages all rhetoric teachers and students of rhetoric who would read Aristotle in translation; and he disparages all English translations, and one in particular. The force of Aristotle, in language, is in his original, so argues the authority. Ironically, Conley must resort to making his arguments by proposition, and by proposition in English. However, if he could force such a thing, Conley might ban all English translations of Aristotle's Greek works.

One of my own rhetoric professors, Richard Leo Enos, has written a fine rebuttal to Conley's argument, calling it a "country-club mindset." (The article's entitled, “The Classical Tradition(s) of Rhetoric: A Demur to the Country Club Set.”) I think Enos is on to something, that Conley's emphasis is "authority" and by it his method is what Quinn sees as "leveraging behavior." Enos says further that "The entire point of translations . . . is to put wisdom in the hands of readers who have an expertise other than philology, so that their insights can enrich our understanding in another dimension . . . . Aristotle’s Rhetoric can continue to enrich our discipline [of rhetoric]." But I believe that not all translators have such a point of enrichment. In fact, it seems to me that most Christian Bible translation publishers tend, at times, to employ a forcing strategy. There is, in many cases, a political reality for the translation teams.

If you hang around the biblioblogosphere for any time at all, you get the sense that there are Bible translation fights over methods (i.e., formal equivalence vs. dynamic equivalence), arguments about approaches (i.e., "theological" vs. "linguistic"), vigorous disagreements about gendered language (including not only male vs. female language but also straight vs. gay language), disputes about the sort of English to be used (i.e., biblish vs. natural vs. poetic, etc.), and contentions about resources (particularly whether the English bible is getting way too much attention when the bible is not available yet in translation in many, many, many other languages). Of course, there is the telling strategy - the use of propositional language - to build the case for one's cause(s). And yet, there is the forcing strategy - the use of impositional language - to force agenda for particular translation teams and companies and the like. Many of you would be better prepared to cite specific examples than I am. The snobbish "country club" mentality that appears to me to have set in among several Bible bloggers makes me unhappy to mention anybody. (This blog of mine catches enough unhappiness from bible bloggers already, I'm afraid).

Solomon:  The "Logos," Vomitted with Force

So that brings me to the second epigraph. Whew! Some wisdom, finally. It's Solomon. His proverb is translated: "For as one that hath reckoned within himself, so is he: 'Eat and drink', saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.   The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words." If I read that well enough, Solomon at least means that proposition and imposition go hand in hand.  

In English, the traditional propositional understanding has been from the KJV - "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he" - focusing on the first part of the first verse (and ignoring the last part of the previous verse and anything else following here).  Whatever is rational is part of the agency of power of a human.

In Hellene, the Jews translating in Alexander the Great's great city of Alexandria rendered the proverb with force, especially toward the end of the last verse - ἐξεμέσει γὰρ αὐτὸν καὶ λυμανεῖται -- τοὺς λόγους σου τοὺς καλούς, which means something like "It will, in fact, be vomited out and rottenness imposed on -- that proposition of yours, that sweet emission."

In either language, there's a profound connection between Language as Proposition and Language as Imposition.  Kenneth L. Pike's Tagmemics, with his emphasis on Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior - about which I may say more in another post sometime because Pike knew and published in both rhetoric and composition, where the force of language is important - and John R. Searle's "Speech Acts" theorizing are examples of Language as Imposition. (And Language as Imposition is part of the human condition, and the human condition is gendered.)

Dad:  Language as Imposition

If you've read some of my blog before, then you've heard me talk some about my birth father.  He's a changed and changing man.  But when I was younger, he was more abusive, with language as proposition and as power (as imposition).  Sometimes the difference blurred for me between what he did and what he said.  He was, I must clarify, a very logical man (and boasted that his mark in a college "logic" course was slightly higher than mine -- three decades apart, we'd had the very same professor of logic as undergraduate students).  He was also a very forceful man.  The change began for my father, in part, when he realized what his language and his behavior was like for my mother and for their children.  The first time I ever heard him apologize to her was when I was home from college my first year; he'd just come home too from a conference for evangelical Christian pastors (which he was) in which there was a look on the inside and not just at words and actions on the outside.  The proverb I heard him repeating all week, the week I was home, was this:  "We practice daily what we believe.  All the rest is religious talk."

Now, here's a turn, a change, for me.  When I was doing a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition a couple of decades after getting an M.A. in linguistics, I was most startled by Nancy Mairs.  My formal language background hadn't prepared me for her.  However, my life with Dad had.  I read one of Mairs's books for a course my very first semester:  Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.

I'd already read lots of Aristotle, had already read lots of Paul (because my reading of him was imposed by my father).  We read Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold first, and I was unprepared for the things she heard Aristotle and Paul say in their silences that I'd never listened to.  Then we read Mairs.

I'd like to read some of Mairs's sentences right here at the blog.  And yet I have to warn you, you might not be ready.  It's not just that there's sexual language, metaphorical stuff.  (Which reminds me when, a few courses later in the program, I began giving an oral presentation on Helene Cixous for the required Literary Criticism course.  The professor, a male, interrupted me by saying, "No dick jokes," and everyone laughed.  So please let's continue, if you will look and listen only).  There's language here that betrays the impositions of the propositions.  After reading "dominate" and "force" and "imposition" and "phallus" and "father" and the "male human", -- here's a father's proposition and imposition, from page 41:

. . . . What is hers by right he [the father] must take [from the mother] by force, through law, by giving it [Jacques] Lacan's Name-of-the-Father: "the patronym, patriarchal law, patriarchal identity, language as our inscription into patriarchy. The Name-of-the-Father is the fact of the attribution of paternity by law, by language." With his own tongue the father has named the baby. Now it is his. . . .

Once he gets her settled into domesticity, however, and gets a baby, the baby seems to belong to her, not him. They are forever together, nuzzling each other, rocking and humming and babbling. This doesn't much matter if it's a girl baby, since some stranger will one day get his own baby out of her; but if it's a boy baby, it's of his line, and he must wrest it away from its tricky mother and insert it into the chain of immortality he is forging. "No," he bellows, louder than Rumpelstiltskin, at the cowering child behind her skirts. "You can't have this one. This one is mine. He is my son." And named by the father, the child becomes a man.

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites.

Reading Mairs is a bit different from reading Quinn only in the fact that the former suggests, like Solomon and Jesus and their translators do, that proposition does not need necessarily to come before imposition.  In fact, for many men, Language as Proposition IS Language as Imposition.  Alexander is a good, rational student of Aristotle, who is just as forceful.

If I ever have time for blogging again, we just might look together at Language as Transposition and Language as Ap(p)osition.  In other words, we might think together about ways Language and Translation might be differently conceived, different from how Aristotle tells us it is and would force it to be.

preferences of the feministic Augustine

Warning: this is a pedantic post. It has Latin in it.

When I write the phrase "feminist rhetorical translating," most of you reading will think of that over and against just "translation." For, for most of us, most of the time, "translation" is not inherently gendered and is never to be either more or less persuasive or stylistic or whatever else we think "rhetorical" means. Translation then, is, of course, better than "feminist rhetorical translating." Translation is more "accurate," more "objective," more abstractively representative of the "original" - especially of the original "author" and his original "intention" for that original "text" of his. When it comes to the text of God, whether He's Allah or YHWH or Jesus, then there must be absolutely none of the feminist stuff - for translation ought to be purely a-rhetorical. (The corollaries are [1] God is not female, or [2] God is at least beyond gender, or [3] God always says what He [or It] means in ways that just translation will get right when the translator just gets out of the way.)

And yet, the other way of looking at that is to mark the usually unmarked, default mode. That is, "translation," just as it is by its very Nature, is "masculinistic." Just translation, as logical and as aristotelian as it must be, is just rhetorical. This process (i.e., this other way of looking) can be called de-construction and is suspect because the deconstructionist's post-modernism tends to become another construct. Which is why Jacques Derrida liked to spin his friends on merry-go-rounds finding that he got just as dizzy and why the brilliant Roland Barthes wrote Barthes on Barthes.

So is that all there is? Is that the way it is? Yes, it is. Yes it is unless, of course, one sits in on some voice lessons with Nancy Mairs. In Voice Lessons: On Becoming A (Woman) Writer, Mairs quotes John O'Neill talking about Michel de Montaigne. And then after the quotation marks, she goes on talking about Montaigne. (She might have easily talked about Saint Augustine of Hippo, and I'll explain in a moment. We're getting ahead of ourselves perhaps). Listen:

And as O'Neill points out, "Montaigne. . . rejected the easy assembly of philosophy and theology [both] careless of man's embodied state," aware that the "loss in scholastic abstractions is that they can be mastered without thought and that men can then build up fantastic constructions through which they separate the mind from the body, masters from slaves, life from death, while in reality nothing matches these distinctions."

Preference [is] for relation over opposition, plurality over dichotomy, embodiment over cerebration: Montaigne’s begins to sound like a feminist project. Which is not to say that Montaigne was a feminist. ("You are too noble-spirited," he was able to write to the Comtesse de Gurson when she was expecting her first child, "to begin otherwise than with a male.") But whether intentionally or not, Montaigne invented or perhaps renewed, a mode open and flexible enough to enable the feminine inscription of human experience as no other does. The importance of this contribution has been largely overlooked, perhaps because many of Montaigne's statements, as well as his constant reliance on prior patriarchal authority, strike one as thoroughly masculine. . . .
(pages 75-76)

If Montaigne didn't "invent a mode open and flexible enough to enable the feminine inscription," then I'm suggesting that Augustine did. Which is not to say that either of these men were feminists. (Shall we spend another post or even a few sentences here on the sexism of Augustine? Why not save that for another day? There's another quick story to share.)

When I was doing Ph.D. coursework in Classical Rhetoric, one prof assigned Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana, Book IV (translated by Thérèse Sullivan, excerpted in Patricia Bizzell's and Bruce Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition). Bizzell and Herzberg point to the standard translations: "D. W. Robertson (1958)" and "R. P. H. Green (1995)" while noting that "Sister Thérèse departs from the standard translation of the title, On Christian Doctrine, which we use throughout. She renders it as On Christian Teaching to emphasize the rhetorical activity Augustine discusses." And these three translators also all look back to the English translation by Philip Schaff and J. F. Shaw (1887). My rhetoric prof and classmates were more interested in what Augustine was saying about rhetoric, remarkable stuff, as an early mix of pagan and Christian learning than about how he was saying, so it seemed to me. So via Interlibrary loan, I ordered Sullivan's Commentary with a Revised Text, Introduction, and Translation, which was her dissertation at Notre Dame in 1930. She describes her commentatary as "an investigation of Augustine's rhetorical theory, and . . . a study of his own language and style." (For anyone interested, that prof of mine and some of those classmates have beautifully republished Sullivan's work and several essays in The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo.)

If you're still with me, I want you to listen in on what Sullivan does with translating. Watch how she translates the very rhetoric of Augustine on translation.

First, to note the difference, here's Shaw's translation. Then Sullivan's. Then Augustine's ambiguous rhetoricky text in which he's not only talking about an original author (i.e., the Prophet Amos - unnamed in the context below) but also about the Jewish translators of Amos into Greek and how rhetoricky that ambiguous text is (even though Augustine is saying he's going, instead, with the Christian Latin-translation translator Jerome. Oh, and I've bolded the stuff for the contrasts.)

And one more thing, Sullivan gives this footnote: "non autem, etc.: this is treated as a separate sentence by the Benedictine editors, but there is no need of considering it thus, as elliptical, since it clearly follows closely upon hoc faciam, etc., above." This bit of pedantry is showing how multidimensional, how robust, Augustine's Latin as he writes about Greek and Latin and translators and translations of a Hebrew speaking, rigidly-written-down Prophet. There's no need, she's also saying, for her the translator to commit what Robert Alter calls the "heresy of explanation."

So here goes:

SHAW'S TRANSLATION: I see, then, that I must say something about the eloquence of the prophets also, where many things are concealed under a metaphorical style, which the more completely they seem buried under figures of speech, give the greater pleasure when brought to light. In this place, however, it is my duty to select a passage of such a kind that I shall not be compelled to explain the matter, but only to commend the style. And I shall do so, quoting principally from the book of that prophet who says that he was a shepherd or herdsman, and was called by God from that occupation, and sent to prophesy to the people of God. I shall not, however, follow the Septuagint translators, who, being themselves under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in their translation, seem to have altered some passages with the view of directing the reader's attention more particularly to the investigation of the spiritual sense; (and hence some passages are more obscure, because more figurative, in their translation;) but I shall follow the translation made from the Hebrew into Latin by the presbyter Jerome, a man thoroughly acquainted with both tongues.

SULLIVAN'S TRANSLATING: And so I see that I must say something also of the eloquence of the Prophets, greatly cloaked as it is in a metaphorical style. The more, however, that they seem obscure by the use of figurative expressions, the more pleasing they are when their meaning has been made clear. But I must quote some passage wherein I may not have to explain what is said. Wherefore, I shall draw especially from the book of that Prophet, who says that having been shepherd and herdsman, he was by divine appointment taken and sent to prophesy to the people of God: but not according to the Septuagint translators, who even themselves, working under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, seem for this very reason to have expressed some things in a different way, in order that the attention of the reader might be rather directed to a study of the spiritual sense–and thus some of their passages are even more obscure because more figurative–but rather as the translation has been made from the Hebrew into the Latin language, done by the presbyter, Jerome, himself a skillful expounder of both tongues.

AUGUSTINE'S PREFERENCES: Certe si quid elus proferimus ad exemplum eloquentiae, ex illis epistolis utique proferimus quas etiam ipsi obtrectatores eius, qui sermonem praesentis contemtibilem putari volebant, graves et fortes esse confessi sunt. Dicendum ergo mihi aliquid esse video et de eloquentia prophetarum, ubi per tropologiam multa obteguntur, quae quanto magis translatis verbis videntur operiri, tanto magis, quum fuerint aperta, dulcescunt. Sed hoc loco tale aliquid commemorare debeo, ubi quae dicta sunt non cogar exponere, sed commendem tantum, quo modo dicta sint. Et ex illius prophetae libro potissimum hoc faciam, qui se pastorem vel armentarium fuisse dicit, atque inde divinitus ablatum atque missum, ut Dei populo prophetaret: non autem secundum septuaginta interpretes, qui etiam ipsi divino spiritu interpretati ob hoc aliter videntur nonnulla dixisse, ut ad spiritalem sensum scrutandum magis admoneretur lectoris intentio (unde etiam obscuriora nonnulla, quia magis tropica, sunt eorum), sed sicut ex Hebraeo in Latinum eloquium presbytero Hieronymo utriusque linguae perito interpretante translata sunt.

more, like God: women speak

This is an update of an earlier post like God: women speak.

Suzanne has complete her series with McCarthy vs Wallace 4, McCarthy vs Wallace 5, and McCarthy vs Wallace 6. And her important observations in You shall love your .... complement well today's post by Linda Jones on Christianity and charity.

Hugo Schwyzer (a "pro-feminist" and "Christian" and "feminist" and man) returns to new postings today, engaging the following questions of women and men with faith and feminism:

A reader named Mercy (I have a few with that pseudonym, it seems) writes after participating in this discouraging discussion at Christianity Today. Mercy, a young committed evangelical, youth leader, and feminist, asks in an email
How do you deal, as a Christian feminist, with Christians who seem to still believe women are an after-thought of creation, who deny any feminine qualities of God, who think that because birth control wasn’t accepted by a church until 1930 it’s still evil….I could go one and on, but how do you do it? How do you reason with these people? How do you make them see you’re not a pagan, not renouncing Christ, etc, etc.? How do you live your beliefs?

And here's from Nancy Mairs:

"As my husband has often said, when you talk about Jesus, you reveal little — maybe nothing — about Jesus but a great deal about yourself."

"... as the Mexican American theologian Virgilio Elizondo puts it, that 'the role of the powerless is to evangelize the powerful.' A reviewer of one of my books once took me to task for accepting the tenets of feminist and liberation theology merely on faith, as though one could not possibly, after long contemplation and appraisal, continue to affirm them. But God's preferential option for the poor — expressed at least as far back as Isaiah's cry for the protection of widows and fatherless children — rings true to the Christian ethos. I must accept it, both on faith and on reflection, and act upon it if I am to carry out God's will. And in the tale of a dark-skinned peasant carrying to the conquistadores for their veneration the image of a dark-skinned Lady who promised her compassion to all humanity (even, I must suppose, the conquistadores) lies a model of the care I am, I believe, required to give."

A Dynamic God, pages 109 and 31.

like God: women speak

First, there's a helpful description written by Nancy Mairs of "feminine discourse" (at the end of this post).

And also there's linked here a poem "LIKE GOD (TAZRIA)" beautifully and profoundly written and spoken by the incredibly talented Rachel Barenblat after which she says,

The Hebrew word for womb is רחם / rechem; the Hebrew word for compassionate is רחמן / rachaman. Every time we call God Ha-Rachaman, "The Compassionate One," we're also subtly hinting at the existence of God's womb. (Kind of brain-breaking if one presumes that the word "God" is masculine, isn't it?) The ability to nurture new life in the womb and then bring it forth into the world is something women have in common with God -- at least on a metaphorical level.

And here and here and here is Suzanne's important series "McCarthy vs Wallace" in which she most carefully and insightfully writes explaining and exposing: "Once again, this is the level of [patriarchal hierarchy] scholarship used to keep Christian women out of leadership positions in the church."

And Gitl Wallerstein-Braun writes here to begin her essay on fundamentalist "Judaism and feminism" with a story of her own:

It was some twenty years ago, when I was summoned to meet the principal of the local ultra religious girls school attended by my four daughters. I left the meeting shell shocked by the unexpected rebuke I was given. Across the other side of the desk from me, the deadly serious young man castigated the immodest cut of the neckline of my dress.

This experience switched me on to the subversive agenda to keep us religious women in our place; from asking any questions about the disproportionate sacrifices we were compelled to make for our ancient way of life. We were denied all academic and literary stimuli. We were expected to endure the often devastating physical toll of multiple pregnancies and child births. So it dawned on me that our communal religious ethos may represent some issues other than teaching the fear and love of the Lord.

And there's Zohra Moosa, who writes here in answer of a rather logical and rather typical question of separation, of Islamic "Faith and feminism": "I was asked directly whether I found it difficult to reconcile the two, whether there were inherent tensions I had to navigate and how did I square my religion and my belief (the two were conflated in the question) with my feminist convictions."

And Asma Barlas writing again voices here that:

I do not like to call myself a feminist; yet, the label continues to stick!

The truth is that long before I learned about feminism, I had begun to glimpse a message of sexual equality in the Qur’an. Perhaps this is paradoxical given that all the translations and interpretations that I read growing up were by men and given that I was born and raised in Pakistan, a society that can hardly be considered egalitarian. Yet, the Qur’an’s message of equality resonated in the teaching that women and men have been created from a single self and are each other’s guides who have the mutual obligation to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong.

But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur’an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God as just, consistent, merciful, and above sexual partisanship.

It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language--hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how. From reading Muslim history, on the other hand, I discovered that Qur’anic exegesis became more hostile to women only gradually and as a result of shifts in religious knowledge and methodology as well as in the political priorities of Muslim states. And, from feminism, I got the language to speak about patriarchy and sexual equality. In other words, it was all these universes of knowledge that enabled me to encounter the Qur’an anew and to give voice to my intuition that a God who is beyond sex/ gender has no investment in favoring males or oppressing women either.

Now Nancy Mairs. She is not claiming at all to speak for God or even like God here. (She has written another book in which she discusses the Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith.) But here I wanted you to hear. To see her description of feminine discourse - as you yourself think about faith, perhaps your own faith, and perhaps even God. (Oh, and you have to get through a few paragraphs of patriarchy first, the dominant implication of a "chain of immortality" that is male first, but what's so new about that? Please be patient.)

. . . . What is hers by right he [the father] must take [from the mother] by force, through law, by giving it [Jacques] Lacan's Name-of-the-Father: "the patronym, patriarchal law, patriarchal identity, language as our inscription into patriarchy. The Name-of-the-Father is the fact of the attribution of paternity by law, by language." With his own tongue the father has named the baby. Now it is his. . . .

Once he gets her settled into domesticity, however, and gets a baby, the baby seems to belong to her, not him. They are forever together, nuzzling each other, rocking and humming and babbling. This doesn't much matter if it's a girl baby, since some stranger will one day get his own baby out of her; but if it's a boy baby, it's of his line, and he must wrest it away from its tricky mother and insert it into the chain of immortality he is forging. "No," he bellows, louder than Rumpelstiltskin, at the cowering child behind her skirts. "You can't have this one. This one is mine. He is my son." And named by the father, the child becomes a man.

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites.

Which is not women's language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. . . . The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces "woman [explains Domna C. Stanton] to man's opposite, his other, the negative of the positive." No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman's immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: "Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on [observes Julia Kristeva]." Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.

--voice lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, pages 40-42.

This is the body who works here.

an excerpt from

"Body at Work" by Nancy Mairs

A "feminine text," all my reading had taught me, can be produced (by a woman or a man) only through "writing the body," the "feminine" body, which is, by definition, repressed by the "phallogocentricity" of language. So far, so good. But if language systematically represses "the feminine," yet writing requires language, then what on earth would "writing the body" entail? How could one "do" it? What would it "look" like if it were done? The rational (that is, linguistically permissible) answer is something like: Nothing at all. If the feminine is the pre-symbolic, the unconscious, the repressed, then the feminine is silence.

And yet. And yet. I have a voice--a "real" voice, the one you'll hear if you call me on the telephone--which emanates from a body--a "real" body, you believe, even when you cannot see it--and which I experience as uttering a feminine existence insofar as I am aware of being a woman (which is really quite far, almost all the way). Am I doing it, then? Am I speaking the body? And if I write down my utterances, will I then be writing the body? Have I "got it" at last?

While I was stumbling around in my head like this, straining to catch faint echoes of "difference" yet privately convinced that I'd be too stupid to recognize it even if it blatted like a tuba straight in my ear, I kept myself busy at whatever writing tasks came my way. More and more often, what I wrote had bodies in it--my own body, sometimes crippled and sometimes not (the way it continues to occupy my dreams), and the bodies of others, Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker and Chinese women with bound feet--and after a while it came to me that I was writing about bodies because a body was writing: me. Incorporation is an act. The body writing: writing the body. I couldn't think such a thing, I could only do it.

After that, I stopped worrying about whether the feminine can or cannot be written. (I think, on balance, that it can but that reviewers won't like it much.) I just keep inscribing the fathers' words with my woman's fingers and hope that the feminine will bleed through. What has come to concern me more is the specificity that bodily existence confers. I have lost, or at least have tried to lose, the desire that underlay my early, academic writing--the desire to establish myself as an authoritative impersonal consciousness capable of generally valid insights drawn with the humanistic equivalence of scientific objectivity. Henceforth, knowing myself incapable of touching without transforming, I must be careful in a way I never dreamed before. I can never write as Authority, as Essayist, as Literary Critic. I can write only from this body as it is now: female, white, well-educated, moderately prosperous, crippled, a Roman Catholic convert, heterosexual. . . .

This is the body that works here.

hidden English "man" of a woman's heart?

But
OOOO that Shakespeherian Rag--
It's so elegant
So intelligent
. . .
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or woman
--But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
(from T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land")

Suzanne has another compelling post up: this one on the question of whether "the Greek word anthropos, when used for an individual, always refers to a 'male human being'." She quotes from and reviews and offers a counterexample to a statement in Michael Marlowe's "The Ambiguity of 'Anthropos'".

I want to draw attention to another troubling statement in Marlowe's essay, his conclusion:

The usage of words relating to gender and humanity in the Greek language are no less "sexist" than the ordinary English usages which feminists have been trying to abolish for 30 years now, and this may be seen clearly enough in the case of the word anthropos. It is also evident that [. . . writers] have confused the issue with specious arguments about Greek words and linguistics are merely distracting us from the fact that the "inclusive language" debate has to do not with Greek but with our English words and their meaning, and the recent attempts to reform our English usage along politically correct lines. On this question of English usage the professors of Greek have no more authority than any layman who is acquainted with the English language.

I'm so glad Marlowe tries to move the discussion away from "professors" to "any layman" and from ancient "Greek" to our shared "English." We should notice that he himself has a "bachelor's degree in English Literature" and in "the biblical languages. . . the MA degree." I wonder what he thinks of what the man T. S. Eliot is doing with our English language in "The Waste Land." Yes, let's get beyond this authority, this alleged sexism in common English.

So, if we just consider the English language that we all share as lay-men, then is the question of gender in our shared ordinary vocabularies really something that deconstructive "feminists" are abusing and are challenging only "along politically correct lines"? As I asked in my previous post, do men challenging a woman and her language really "hear her"? But do they actually "hear her feel"?

I'm challenging "any layman who is acquainted with the English language" to hear what the (woman) writer Nancy Mairs feels. This is from pages 86-87 of her voice lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. In this conclusion to her chapter, "Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva," Mairs starts a struggle, a stuttering adventure in communication with you using the language you know (ambiguous as it is) if you just stay with her:

As my groping here suggests, despite my instruction by a host of gifted feminist critics, I certainly don't yet have a clear vision of what woman's writing might be. Pace Jacques Lacan, I know the phallus is no transcendental signifier--nor transcendental anything else--but I don't know what my transcendental signifier is, if indeed there is any such thing, which I doubt, since the whole concept seems far too located to express my experience of the world. My "I" seems simply not to be the male-constructed "I.": It is more fluid, diffuse, multiplex (giddy, duplicitous, and inconstant, I think men have called it). Maybe we need another sort of signifier for the female self--the "O" might be a logical choice, or rather a whole string of Os: OOOOO. That's me.

The fact of the matter, though, is that when I sit down at my desk to tell a story, I can't begin, "OOOOO woke this morning to the song of a cardinal in the fig tree outside the back door." Radical feminist writers like Monique Wittig and Mary Daly experiment with techniques for reinventing reality by exploding patriarchal linguistic patterns. But in passages like this one--

The Powers to break the framers' frameworks are within women. Dis-Covering our Lust of Be-ing, we can easily swing open the doors to our freedom. We work to attain the Prudence of Prudes, the Courage of Crones, the Distemper of Dragon-identified Fire-breathing Furies. Furiously focused, we find our Final Cause.

--all those hyphens and capital letters and puns and alliterations give me a wicked case of intellectual indigestion, and after twenty pages I'm too dyspeptic to go on. If I want to speak plainly to you about particulars--and I do, more than anything else--I must use the language that I know you know.

I want a prose that is allusive and translucent, that eases you into me and embraces you, not one that baffles you or bounces you around so that you can't even tell where I am. And so I have chosen to work, very, very, very carefully, with the language we share, faults and all, choosing each word for its capacity, its ambiguity, the space it provides for me to live my life within it, relating rather than opposing each word to the next, each sentence to the next, "starting on all sides at once . . . twenty times, thirty times, over": the stuttering adventure of an essay.