Rod: Ain't He a Womanist?

Ain't I a woman?

--Sojourner Truth

Man cannot speak for her.

--Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Woman, where are those thine accusers?
[stoning the sinners by tweeting "Farewell"
quoting my translators as if proving "Hell"]

hath no man condemned thee?

--Jesus

What is written in the Torah [Law]?

How do you read it?

--Jesus

Somehow, I hope you will find in this post some encouragement for yourself.

(Is this my Rob Bell post?  Heck no!)

With this post, I'm hoping to review somebody who's influenced how Rod of Alexandria reads the Bible and to get at some how she's influenced him.  I'd also like to review someone else who's influenced how J. K. Gayle reads the Bible and just how she has influenced him.  That "she" for Rod is Dr. Katie Cannon.  That "she" for me is Dr. Krista Ratcliffe.

Then I'd be absolutely delighted and encouraged if you'd take a moment to consider who has influenced how you yourself read the Bible and how she has influenced you to do so.

Just do it.  But first...

First, read Rod's post for yourself.  (Don't worry yet that Suzanne, in her admittedly "Scattered Thoughts," calls it Rod's "exemplary post on Rob Bell."  If you also read her post for yourself, then you'll get all the rest of what she sees in "Katie’s Cannon(ization): Inerrancy As White Evangelical Folklore.")

Now, how do you read it?  Did you get "the shackles of the hermeneutic that comes with affirming the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy"?  Did you see the "body in the [Sunday School] classroom who didn’t belong?"  Did you follow the block quote with Rod's own underlinings?

“The doctrine of infallibility reinforced and was reinforced by the need for social legitimization of slavery.  Thus racial slavery was accepted as a necessary fulfillment of the curse of Ham This had the effect of placing the truthfulness of God’s self-revelation on the same level as Black slavery and White supremacy.”

Do you see Rod's modifiers of this "inerrantist hermeneutic"?  Can you look up the words pro-slavery?  Are you able, moving forward, to get past Rod's borrowing of other adjectives for a few "women for women" (whom the pro-slavery, pro-kyriarchic ones once considered to be heretics)?   Are you able to get past Rod's reading of them as "courageous" and as "Christian" and as women "preachers"?  

Are you reading this?  Rod is reading Katie Cannon reading Mae Henderson reading the Bible.  And she is reading "bodies as texts."  And "[b]lack women’s bodies as texts."  So Rod reads the Bible, the book of Colossians, the book of Ezekiel, 1st Corinthians 1, and the translating gospel's Christ, the Son of Mary and the Son of God, who is our Perfect Bio-text.

"I'm not sure I'm a womanist," we hear somebody say.  Is it Rod?  Is it Dr. Monica A. Coleman, the founding Director of Womanist Religious Studies at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, NC, the first undergraduate religious studies program to focus on the spiritual experiences of women of African descent?  Yes, it's Coleman expressing uncertainties, not about some dogmatic construct of "hell" to keep some out and others in, some above and others down.  Yes, it's Coleman asking questions:

Just as the field of womanist religious scholarship has grown in convergence with and departure from [Alice] Walker's life and definition, so the term womanist may now be larger than the women who initially claimed it. Can womanists reclaim the term? Do they even want to? Is this commercialization a sign of advancement? Or have hierarchical (often white and male) entities co-opted it, as yet another way to brand and classify black women and our thoughts?  ....We can identify ourselves as male and female [can't we?]

[see page 93 of her "Must I Be Womanist?" (Lead Roundtable article) Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22.1 (Spring 2006): 85-96.]

So it's not just "hell" but it's also "bible" and "body" and "womanist" that are terms used "to brand and classify."  And we see that Rod is not so using these terms, is not so using the words this way.  He's rejecting the "hierarchical," is casting off "the shackles of the hermeneutic that comes with affirming the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy," is listening to and is reading from, a woman with a body that is black and free because of the Son of a Woman with a Body, a text.  See how?

Now, briefly let me say again how Dr. Ratcliffe has influenced how I read the Bible.  When I met her, she was listening to and reading from women with bodies that are black while we were being served lunch by others with black bodies.  (I wrote about that some here once).  What Krista Ratcliffe does and has done is recovery work in rhetorics, recovery of listening with intention as a hermeneutic.  She's made clear (and this is one of my own areas of research) how Aristotle robbed women and men of this "rhetorical listening."  (He left us to guess why he didn't listen to women.  And still Maya Angelou, who was raped by a misogynistic gynophobe when she was an 8-year-old girl, listens rhetorically to Aristotle and insists:  "One needs to know Aristotle.... One needs it desperately....  Must! I mean desperately... if one is to be at ease anywhere.")  Ratcliffe has herself recovered and practiced such listening, such rhetorical listening, by hearing and by overhearing and by eavesdropping, as an outsider, on the contention between black feminist Audre Lorde and white theologian feminist Mary Daly.  Ratcliffe says it's "hearing what we cannot see."  It's a "A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a [much needed] 'Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct'."  My friend, Dr. Jason King, has rendered "rhetorical listening" as follows:  "Rhetorical listening is not a refuting of but a rendering of the ones I hear. I may choose a stance of openness towards any person, text, or culture in cross-cultural exchanges."  I like that.  Whether it's the contentiousness of Lorde and Daly, or the rhetorics of disagreement of various experts and parents and "affected" about autism (which is King's research); whether it's Rob Bell's hell or Jesus's or some kyriarchical preacher's; whether it's somebody's co-opted "feminism" or Walker's first or Coleman's third-wave "womanism"; whether it's Colossians or Christ - I'm listening rhetorically.  I may choose a stance of openness toward any body, openness toward "any person, text, or culture," especially openness toward the one Rod says is "our Perfect Bio-text, ... in [whose] body are the marks of all of the world’s suffering."

Can you find here something to encourage you?  How do you find yourself outside what other people tell you is the Bible?  How do you read it?