who learned to ask questions? what's the benefit of the doubt?

This weekend, I finished reading Rachel Held Evans's book Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions, and I must say that it is an impressive memoir in which the author gets at how she has had several, incredibly thoughtful human conversions as an adult.  To me, that's what learning is.  That's awfully important.  When we stop learning, stop changing or "evolving," then we die.  Viewpoints change.  When it comes to religion, to views about sex and gender, to the Bible and what it offers us on religion, on God, on sex and gender, then we can hope our methods for learning, for knowing, for understanding, for believing can adapt some to circumstances over time.  Otherwise we insist on the sort of objectivity that stuck Aristotle in a science that makes females naturally lesser than males.  Otherwise we insist on the sort of arrogant absolutism with "apparently plain meanings of biblical texts" that makes females naturally lesser than males so that the former can only learn from the latter, and not the reverse.

(See how Rachel blogs today, wonderfully and powerfully on the rigid weaknesses of "the complementarian manifesto, the Danvers Statement," endorsed by men like Wayne Grudem and John Piper of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.)

Last week, I posted a few paragraphs excerpted from Rachel's book.  Kristen made a typically astute comment with a question, an important question:

"Rachael saw her father like the Father God; but her mother was so like Christ, and yet she doesn't mention that; only that her mother pointed her to Christ. Why is that?"

So today, I'd like to look at how else Rachel writes about her mother in relation to God.  Is God only a father?  Or is the image and imagination of God as Father as inclusive of Rachel's female parent as it is of her male parent?  Here are a few more paragraphs, a few more pages into Rachel's book, a few more years into her life and her learning, her evolving.  What do you think?  And do you see the image of God, male and female, in either of your own parents?

 

Did you notice how Rachel says her mother influenced her?  What is it her mother teaches her about?  And for whom is she to look out?  What does she encourage her and her sister, as equals, to do?  How does she speak about others and who does she herself stand up to?  And why?  Did you notice how people around Rachel's mother feel when they are around her?  What did Rachel, and Amanda, inherit from their mother?  Why, nonetheless, do some "a lot of good Christian people" try to convince her that her mother's characteristic -- lived and taught and passed on like genetic material -- is "a sort of spiritual liability"?  Whose ways are more like "God's ways"?  Whose are "higher"?  And who is this other woman, also a mother, whom Rachel mentions in the context of speaking about Justice and equality and egalitarianism and the deserved chance to be loved and her own mother?  Who is this one whose life and death rocks Rachel's world?  She is Zarmina; so, who's she?  

(So I'm asking you now to buy Rachel's book and to read it for yourself.  To see whether you and your world might evolve a little too.  To see what and how you might learn something.  Yes, I know Rachel is a woman.  John Piper says it's okay for all of you men to learn from her, a little only.  Just don't let her become your spiritual head.  After you read Rachel's book, then come back over here; and pardon me for linking to a world-rocking video of this other mother, the one that changes Rachel's perspectives in profound ways.  Maybe click this link first and read again a bit more.  Just only then and after that click this link from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan when you are ready and not before, please.  We may never be ready. But what can we learn? Can we evolve?)

who and God had a lot of things in common

If Frank Schaeffer and Pearl S. Buck are my MK cousins (that is, are evangelical Christian missionaries' kids, like me), then Rachel Held Evans is similarly kin to my spouse (whose parents are in full-time Christian education and churchwork).  She recently finished Held Evans's book Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions, saying how it really resonated with her, and so now I'm reading it.  Just a few pages in, I'm struck by how the author describes her parents, and how differently.  Through daughter and little girl eyes, she somehow finds God like father but mother otherwise.  Take a read and see for yourself.  A telling contrast comes in the final sentence of the four paragraphs excerpted below.  I don't have much time really to say more here at the blog but have been thinking about this all day, about imagination and where it ends up sometimes before it can evolve elsewhere.  Your thoughts?

The daughter of a genuine, certified theologian, I'd memorized the "Four Spiritual Laws" before I'd memorized my own address. My father earned a graduate degree from Dallas Theological Seminary, a school famous for producing megachurch pastors like Chuck Swindoll, Tony Evans, and Andy Stanley. Instead of pursuing full-time ministry, however, my father committed his life to Christian education, which I suppose explains the plastic cups. A college professor, he often invited his brightest students over for coffee and long talks about hermeneutics and eschatology and epistemology. I loved falling asleep to the sound of their voices undulating from the living room. I felt secure in knowing that while I slept, my father was awake having important conversations about God.

I always looked up to my father with a sense of reverent awe. It wasn't that I thought he possessed supernatural powers or anything; I just imagined that he and God had a lot of things in common, that they subscribed to the same magazines and wore similar shoes. Looking back, I realize how important it was that my father loved me so openly and listened so carefully. My first impressions of my heavenly Father were that he too was gentle, playful, and kind.

Despite knowing about dispensationalism long before I probably should have, I never felt trapped in a world of endless churchgoing. My mother had been raised Independent Baptist and as a girl was forbidden to dance and go to movies. Determined to avoid legalism, she let Amanda and me wait until we were good and ready before we got baptized, took communion, or asked Jesus into our hearts. Her private disdain for potlucks and church business meetings kept us from being at church every time the doors were opened, and I noticed that she got a little fidgety whenever the pastor discussed wives submitting to their husbands. I loved this about her, the same way I loved the scent of her cherry-almond lotion when she tucked me into bed at night.

A substitute teacher at my elementary school, my mother earned a reputation for doting on the needy kids. Those with absent parents, stained shirts, runny noses, and learning disabilities always left her classroom beaming with self-confidence. I think I must have gotten my bleeding heart from her, which, combined with my father's cautious idealism, accidentally made me into a liberal. If my father gave Christianity a head, my mother gave it a heart and hands, and it was her tender telling of the story of the cross, mingled with cherry almond, that first moved me to ask Jesus into my heart.

How she (a biblical disaster) responds

Rachel Evans Held has a piece up today entitled,

"How (not) to respond to a natural disaster:"

which points out how John Piper and Skye Jethani respectively tell Christians the meaning of the earthquake for Christians. "One presumes to know the mind of God," she observes; "the other simply imitates the actions of Jesus." You'll find which is which and her response to both men when you read her post, which I'll link to below.

And you'll read how helpfully agnostic Held Evans can be, how helpfully open.  She says, "We cannot know for sure why these things happen. But we can weep.... The Japanese people don't need our lectures; they need our love."  Now that's quite a response.  And some of us are weeping; I know a Japanese mother is crying here in the USA, where she studies English, although she was to board an airplane for home, where her daughter was to have wed her own bridegroom in Sendai later this month.  Sadness.  Profound sorrow.

This, then reminds of a really biblical response.

It's very similar to Rachel Held Evans's response of empathy.

It's also the Jewish, pre-Jesus response of an earthquake or of the Earth herself.

Well, hmm, only some Christians might agree it is a biblical response.  And most Jews would agree, that if biblical, it makes no mention of G-d whatsoever. And then many Christians and Jews would question whether it was really ever canonical, although entirely historical, in the first place. It's the stuff of translation and of gendered translation and such.  Pathetic really.

Without further ado, here it is (in four - or five - translations - if you'll work with me on a fifth):

25 Great sorrow came upon Israel,
.....wherever they lived.
26 Nobles and elders broke out wailing,
.....maidens and young men lost their vigor,
.....and the women's beauty was marred.
27 Every bridegroom took up the dirge
.....while his bride sitting in the bedchamber turned to mourn.
28 Indeed, the earth had quaked against its inhabitants,
.....and the entire house of Jacob was clothed in shame.
..........--Jonathan A. Goldstein, for the Anchor Bible series

 25 Israel mourned deeply in every community, 26 rulers and elders groaned, maidens and young men became faint, the beauty of women faded. 27 Every bridegroom took up the lament; she who sat in the bridal chamber was mourning. 28 Even the land shook for its inhabitants, and all the house of Jacob was clothed with shame.
..........--the Revised Standard Version translation team 

25 And there was great mourning in Israel, in
...............every place of theirs.
26 .....And rulers and elders groaned,
virgins and young men weakened,
..........and the beauty of the women was
...................deformed.
27 Every bridegroom took up lamentation;
..........she who sat in the bridal chamber was in
...................mourning.
28 And the land quaked for those dwelling in it,
..........and all the house of Iakob was clothed
...................with shame.
..........--George Themelis Zervos, of the NETS translation team

25 καὶ ἐγένετο πένθος μέγα ἐπὶ Ισραηλ
..........ἐν παντὶ τόπῳ αὐτῶν.
26 καὶ ἐστέναξαν ἄρχοντες καὶ πρεσβύτεροι,
..........παρθένοι καὶ νεανίσκοι ἠσθένησαν,
.....καὶ τὸ κάλλος τῶν γυναικῶν ἠλλοιώθη.
27 πᾶς νυμφίος ἀνέλαβεν θρῆνον,
.....καὶ καθημένη ἐν παστῷ ἐπένθει.
28 καὶ ἐσείσθη ἡ γῆ ἐπὶ τοὺς κατοικοῦντας αὐτήν,
.....καὶ πᾶς ὁ οἶκος Ιακωβ ἐνεδύσατο αἰσχύνην.
..........---some anonymous Jewish translator rendering
................some anonymous Jewish writer's Hebrew into Hellene
....................in, of all places, Alexander the Great's Alexandria, Egypt

To be sure, Goldstein and the RSV team and Zervos are only working from the Hellene, bringing the Greek language into their English.  The real struggle for them is to know how to render the preposition epi (ἐπὶ).  It might have been written, and certainly can be read, as a bookend preposition, appearing at the start of the poetic stanza of the initial verse (25) and then at some point of the ending verse (28), which concludes the sad song.

Notice in verse 25, Goldstein chooses "upon" for the English, while the RSV team and Zervos make it "in."  What's better "upon Israel" or "in Israel" or does it make a difference?   But then in verse 28, to round out the poetic stanza, Goldstein has "against."  In contrast, the RSV team and Zervos have the opposite of "against":  "for."

I think all these men translating have missed the fact that the phrase for "the earth" or "the land" is in the feminine form in Greek:  Hē Gē (ἡ γῆ).  That's not so important until you're trying to translate the feminine pronoun:  autēn αὐτήν.  She's such a troublesome little pronoun for English bible translators these days!  Should she be he or she or it?

Couldn't we all just as easily note the Pathos, specifically the Penthos, of the Earthquake here?  Everybody is sad and is weeping.  Old people, young people, brides and bridegrooms.  Even the Earth is.  If great sorrow has come upon Israel (men and women), as Goldstein shows it has, then listen again to that Greek of verses 25 and 28 of I Maccabees 1:

25 And It birthed - Sadness did - a tremendous pain upon Isra-El,
..........in each of Its places - His places, Her places.

28 And She quaked - Earth did - a shaking upon those of
..........Her household,
.....And everybody of Jacob's house dressed with Her in shame.

(If that's not enough Bible for you, then go here for some real "New Testament."   And then do notice what Held Evans says that Jethani says that Jesus says -- and what he does not say, while he's weeping, while he's helping, when it all seems way too late.)


Now, if you're really ready, then please go read Rachel Held Evans's post.