"Aristotle," "Abraham," "an apple," and a "female" "Godde"

This post of mine is about language.  The post has two parts.  In the first part, I want to show some strong reactions to some new English.  In the second part, I'd like us all to look at how we use language.

"the first part"

"Theophrastus" has been conversing with several of us about some of the terms used by the "Christian Godde Project" and particularly about the new English proper nouns, Godde and Christa.  He has said (in the context of one conversation in particular) the following:

By supporting her translation, you are indicating that you are comfortable with "Godde" having a gender. The only debate is does "Godde" have a penis or a vagina?

And 

And, Suzanne, if you so easily favor making arbitrary changes to language, what do you think about her use of the word "Christa"?

And

The "God of the Philosophers" (e.g. Maimonides, Aquinas, Averroes) is impassible and non-anthropomorphic. Shawna [Atteberry, one of the team members of the Project] teaches idolatry.

And

Note also that her translation is called The Divine Feminine Version (which even in its title assigns a gender to "Godde") and her trinity is "The Mother, The Christa, and the Divine Feminine Spirit."

"the second part"

What should be very obvious to all of us is that Theophrastus was one of Aristotle's disciples.  The blogger who has used his name as his very own nom de guerre has subtitled his blog, "What I've learned from Aristotle."  So when we think about Theophrastus and then Aristotle, we have to keep in mind the language and the people and the correspondences and how these fly with our help into various directions.

To help us with this is one of the world's best philosophers, Catherine Z. Elgin.  She has said this helpful thing:

Aristotle, of course, was not named "Aristotle"; the name he went by had a different pronunciation and a different spelling. So the claim that our use continues the chain that began with his being baptized "Aristotle" needs refinement. Then there is the worry that chains that originate in a single stipulation may later diverge. In that case a term has two different reference classes despite its link to a single introducing event.... Ambiguity occurs because correction... allows for alternative continuations of the causal chain.... Each continues the chain, but the two uses of the word... are not coextensive. Nor do we always succeed in referring to what our predecessors did, even when we intend to do so.

This quotation is from Elgin's books, Nelson Goodman's Theory of Symbols and its Applications and Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, but I once quoted her here just to make the points she's making.  Now I'm making the points that proper nouns in English are useful for us.  The blogger Theophrastus could have never named himself as he's done without this ridiculous transliteration Aristotle, which the real Aristotle would have called absolutely bar-bar-ic, except he would have used the term, βαρβαρισμός·

What Elgin has written a couple of places about the name Aristotle, and how we use it (incorrectly, barbarously) with precision, is exactly what Adele Berlin has said about the name Abraham.  Let's just recall that in Hebrew this name means "father."  Yes, it means more than that.  And we read his story, that narrative about him, in Genesis to get all of that.  Is that all we get?  Even if we only read Genesis and only read it in Hebrew, is that all we get?  No.  And then there's this other thing to consider, like one spouse has to consider the other.  For better or for worse, we get "Abraham" in translation.  And then we really do get less.  And then we get more.  Residue!  But enough of this nonsense.  Let's listen again to Adele Berlin:

Above all we must keep in mind that narrative is a form of representation. Abraham in Genesis is not a real person any more than the painting of an apple is real fruit.

I once tried to picture, to represent all of that, here.  But, to be absolutely accurate and not to mis-quote or to mis-represent anything, let me point you to her book where you can best find, exactly, what Adele Berlin has said in the precise context in which she said it:  the book Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative.  After all, "Above all we must" is such a really absolute statement.

This might prepare us, finally, after all, to consider "God."  Is it a gender-less representation in narrative?  Does God "have" gender?

Does God have "hardness"?  Now, I'm thinking about the Mohs hardness scale, which we all learned as children.  In the Bible God is a "rock."

Does God have "wings"?  Does God make a "shadow"?  These are biblical re-presentations.

Are these idols?

And what is "narrative" after all?

Well, what if my body is sexed female?  What is narrative then?

And what if my body sexed female is also raced Jewish?  What is narrative then?

And what if my body, because it is sexed female and is raced Jewish, finds itself behind electrified fences?  What is narrative then?

And then where would "God" be?

These are some questions asked and answered by Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk.  God in Auschwitz-Birkenau, they tell Melissa Raphael, a narrative writer, has a female face.  This is what they've lived, where they've been, who they've seen.  But all we have to go on, to believe them, is this book, these words, that representation, called The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust.

We could call it idolatrous, if our own language and representations are other-wise.  Or we might just listen.

Electrified Fences and Conversation Hopefully to Remove Them

In a single sentence [my book critic] reimposed the very dichotomies I had constructed the book in order to call into question, putting electrified fences around the categories “academy,” “criticism,” and “writing” to keep the various critters from intermingling, maybe interbreeding to create some nameless monster very like the one I aspire to be.
--Nancy Mairs

Thanks to Kristen, Suzanne, and Theophrastus for joining in conversation yesterday around three posts here, each related to Shawna R. B. Atteberry's helpful and hopeful new book, What You Didn't Learn in Sunday School, Women Who Didn't Sit Down and Shut Up.

Suzanne says, most recently:  "Okay. I have to admit that this conversation has me completely baffled."  Kristen writes again, "Switching gears here to talk more about the actual blog post."  Theophrastus, still in high gear, signs off as "Emmanuel Goldstein" after confessing first, "I haven't read Shawna's book (and I'm not likely to ...), and then further complaining, "I think that weak arguments benefit the oppressor....But most of all, I think her 'Godde' and 'Christa' are gimmicky and reminiscent of Newspeak."

I myself am feeling again what Tonya and Daniel have kindly acknowledged: "Conversations in person are rarely this stressful."  And now I'm afraid that this weekend I'm not going to have much time to add anything, hoping that the conversation, nonetheless, will continue on without me as it is important, to me, and to the conversants here so far.  I know it's important to Shawna and the readers of her book.  Please feel free to join in, as you would.  If things get (more) heated and out of hand, then please do watch your own boundaries of protection for yourself.  (Remain anonymous or pseudonymous even, as you wish.)  The space of a blog can be hurtful.  The personal is, nevertheless, important.  So is, I think, your voice.  Please don't sit down or shut up; this is Shawna's point.

I'm going to use my remaining few minutes on the blog today to quote one of my favorite writers from one of my favorite books of hers.  She does expose the sorts of judgmentalism that would seek not to listen but to silence others.  This writer expresses resistance to binary thinking of the sort that would force a neologism, such as Godde, into a pure and one-gendered category (i.e., as if it must always and only be the exact opposite of the "divine masculine," somehow obviously just "feminine," and clearly, theologically heretical).  I'm hoping the writer I'm quoting below here will encourage us to keep talking and to consider more what Shawna is saying, what women of the Bible are saying.  Here's the quotation; its from pages 3 and 4 of the book Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, by Nancy Mairs:

     An anonymous reader of an early version of this book, about whom I only know that “she” is “an academic,” concluded:  “It is obvious from her criticism that she wasn't meant to be an academic, from her encounter with French feminist theory, that she wasn't cut out for a career as a critic.  What is obvious is that she is a real writer.”  I could have wept, if frustration any longer had the power to elicit the tears reserved now for anguish unspeakably deeper.  In a single sentence she reimposed the very dichotomies I had constructed the book in order to call into question, putting electrified fences around the categories “academy,” “criticism,” and “writing” to keep the various critters from intermingling, maybe interbreeding to create some nameless monster very like the one I aspire to be.
    And what queer syntax. “Meant” by whom?  “Cut out” by whom?  Is there a God in the Academy creating academics in His own image and dispensing careers according to some holy plan?  If I'm the product of intention, I'd like to know who intended me.  And how is a “real” writer distinguished from other sorts (what sorts?) of writers?  These are not idle questions.  And they do not have merely private significance. The capacity -- the drive -- to segregate and hierarchize intellectual pursuits, to speak of them in the passive voice as though they were ordained by some anonymous agency, and to envision “real”as a discrete state distinguishable (by the rigorous critical mind) from some other way of being infects otherwise fluid and flexible intelligences with a kind of cerebral tetanus that inhibits jouissance before the first lovely ripple of pleasure has fairly begun.
     I am a not a “real writer.”  I am a writer.  Without modification.

Approaching the Divine Feminine: a male, Jewish Hebrew-Bible translator's musings

     The differences between our two versions [of the creation account in Genesis] are so pronounced that by now some readers may be inclined to conclude that what I have proposed as a complementary relationship is in fact a contradictory one. If, however, we can escape the modern provincialism of assuming that ancient writers must be simple because they are ancient, it may be possible to see that the Genesis author chose to combine these two versions of creation precisely because he understood that his subject was essentially contradictory, essentially resistant to consistent linear formulation, and that this was his way of giving it the most adequate literary expression. Let me explain this first in the notorious contradiction about the creation of woman, and then go on to comment briefly on the larger cosmogonic issues.
     It may make no logical sense to have Eve created after Adam and inferior to him when we have already been told that she was created at the same time and in the same manner as he, but it makes perfect sense as an account of the contradictory facts of woman's role in the poet-edenic scheme of things. On the one hand, the writer is a member of a patriarchal society in which women have more limited legal privileges and institutional functions than do men, and where social convention clearly invites one to see woman as subsidary to man, her proper place, in the Psalmist's words, as a "fruitful vine in the corner of your house." Given such social facts and such entrenched attitudes, the story of Eve's being made from an unneeded rib of Adam's is a proper account of origins. On the other hand, our writer -- one does not readily think of him as a bachelor -- surely had a fund of personal observation to draw on which could lead him to conclude that woman, contrary to institutional definitions, could be a daunting adversary or worthy partner, quite man's equal in a moral or psychological perspective, capable of exerting just as much power as he through her intelligent resourcefulness. If this seems a fanciful inference, one need only recall the resounding evidence of subsequent biblical narrative, which includes a remarkable gallery of women -- Rebekah, Tamar, Deborah, Ruth -- who are not content with a vegetative existence in the corner of the house but, when thwarted by the male world or when they find it lacking in moral insight or practical initiative, do not hesitate to take their destiny, or the nation's, into their own hands. In light of this extra-institutional awareness of woman's standing, the proper account of origins is a simultaneous creation of both sexes, in which man and woman are different aspects of the same divine image. "In the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them" (Gen. 1:227). The decision to place in sequence two ostensibly contradictory accounts of the same event is an approximate narrative equivalent to the technique of post-Cubist painting which gives us, for example, juxtaposed or superimposed, a profile and a frontal perspective of the same face. The ordinary eye could never see these two at once, but it is the painter's prerogative to represent them as a simultaneous perception within the visual frame of his painting, whether merely to explore the formal relations between the two views or to provide an encompassing representation of his subject. Analogously, the Hebrew writer takes advantage of the composite nature of his art to give us a tension of views that will govern most of the biblical stories -- first, woman as man's equal sharer in dominion, standing exactly in the same relation to God as he; then, woman as man's subservient helpmate, whose weakness and blandishments will bring such woe into the world.
     --Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, pages 145-46

The quotation above is fascinating, especially as it makes exactly some of the same points as does Shawna R. B. Atteberry's new self-published e-book, What You Didn't Learn in Sunday School, Women Who Didn't Sit Down and Shut Up, reviewed here.

Alter has his readers "recall the resounding evidence of subsequent biblical narrative, which includes a remarkable gallery of women -- Rebekah, Tamar, Deborah, Ruth -- who are not content with a vegetative existence in the corner of the house but, when thwarted by the male world or when they find it lacking in moral insight or practical initiative, do not hesitate to take their destiny, or the nation's, into their own hands."  Atteberry has her readers do the same.

The quotation above is also fascinating because it gets to the literary that resists Western, Aristotelian thinking.  In the first place, the writer of Genesis clearly values females as equals to males -- whereas Aristotle by his logic (his tightly-boxed up "objectivity") must conclude that females are merely inferior to males, are botched beings of human and of animal species.  In the second place, the literary style of the writer of Genesis defies how Aristotle wanted his male-only Greek-only elite-only students to write.

Michelle Baliff, not a male, not a Greek, not a writer like Aristotle but more like the writer of Genesis, can better help us remember, as Robert Alter does too.   She and the writer of Genesis, as Robert Alter reads him, helps us remember history in relation to "a remarkable gallery of women."  Proper writing doesn't have to abstract out the women and it doesn't need to make, in some legislative or scientific vacuum, disparaging proclamations about the lack of females or the need to contain their speech, their writing, or their stories, which intersect with ours, whoever we are.  Thus, when focusing on histories of men and of women, Baliff recalls, with some protest agains Aristotle, the following:

According to Aristotle’s aesthetics, a narrative must be arranged according to some organizing principle.... Aristotle also offers us the classificatory system of binaries to help us order our stories, to order our experiences, to order ourselves.... But perhaps Woman can (un)speak in the unthought, not-yet-thought, non-spaces produced by alternative paradigms, by new idioms, by paralogical and paratactical and, thus, illegitimate discourses. What... if our narrative had no syllogistic, metonymic, linear or triangular structure? .... What if Truth were a Woman... what then? Cixous replies, Then all stories would have to be told differently....
     --"Re/Dressing Histories; Or, On Re/Covering Figures Who Have Been Laid Bare by Our Gaze," (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, v22 n1 p91-98)

The Bible You Didn't Read

Shawna R. B. Atteberry has written a book you didn't read yet.  This is my review.  But Shawna is more interested in your reading the Bible you didn't read yet.  That Bible is the one you didn't read in Sunday School.  It's the Bible chock full of women who didn't sit down and didn't shut up.  It's the Bible.  Period.  So to encourage you to read the Bible, Shawna has written her book, What You Didn't Learn in Sunday School, Women Who Didn't Sit Down and Shut Up.

Shawna shares in her book what may be your story, how she herself once upon a time did sit down and did shut up as a girl, as a woman, because she is female.  She writes:

Growing up in an evangelical church, I heard some about the women of the Bible. Not much. Just enough to tell me that Godde's will for me was to grow up, get married, and have kids. That's what Christian women did.  That's what the women in the Bible did. And sure enough, whenever I heard about the women in the Bible, they were wives and mothers, taking care of their families.... [I was taught in Sunday School] that the Bible was full of stories, chapters, and verses declaring that women should have no authority anywhere. Women should always be in submission to a man whether it be father, husband, or church leader. They can't be trusted to teach, preach, or lead because that was the way they were made. Not to mention Eve was the first one to sin, so that means women have to be more gullible and easily deceived than men.... [I was taught] eight verses ... used as a prism to interpret every other story, chapter, and verse in the Bible regarding women[:]

As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
--1 Corinthians 14:33b-35, NRSV [3 verses of "out of over 30,000 verses in the Bible"]

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.
--I Timothy 2:11-15, NRSV [5 verses of "out of over 30,000 verses in the Bible"]

When Shawna started reading and studying the Bible for herself, however, her story changed.  Today, here's Shawna:

Shawna R. B. Atteberry is a writer, theologian and storyteller who empowers women to be the leaders Godde calls them to be at home, work and church by exploring the Divine Feminine and stories of the women in the Bible. In addition to Women Who Didn't Shut Up & Sit Down, she is working on her second book, Career Women of the Bible. She blogs at Shawna R. B. Atteberry, a safe haven for women to explore their calling and vocations without antiquated judgments about what a woman's role should be.

Shawna is also an associate editor for The Christian Godde Project: Exploring the Divine Feminine Within the Christian Godde. The goal of The Christian Godde Project is translating the New Testament using Divine Feminine names, images, and pronouns for Godde. The Divine Feminine Translation is a work in progress. The Gospel According to Matthew is available free of charge on the Christian Godde website.

Shawna has over 10 years of pastoral experience, and she worked in the publishing industry for six years. She was an ordained minister and is now a lay leader at Chicago Grace Episcopal Church where she teaches on the women of the Bible and occasionally preaches.

She lives in Chicago with her husband Tracy and their cat Victoria.

So how did Shawna get from Sunday School (where she wasn't taught to read the Bible except through the prism of the 8 verses quoted above) to being the person she is today?  Well, she's read the Bible for herself, and continues to study the Bible, and from it she's gained examples of biblical women who have encouraged her own experience.

Experience is the prism, or hermeneutic, by which Shawna reads all of the Bible now.  In her book, it's also the prism by which she has us, her readers, consider and re-consider women and women's roles in the Bible and in our own contexts too.  So let me talk some about my experience with Shawna's book.  She kindly sent me an early draft for review.  I read it on a cross-country plane flight; the professional flight crew were exclusively white men, and the servant flight attendants were only black women and men.  It was 2011.  I mention the race and gender and class of the people employed by the airline for this flight, and the date, for a reason.  The striking and noticeable context of separations along racial and gender and class lines on this particular airplane was my experiential context as I read how Shawna considers the once-normal but still-lingering experiences of human separation by race and gender and class caused by the Bible you didn't read.  She considers how the prism of a few verses of the Bible can impact the ethics of many.  Shawna writes:

So, what are we in the 21st century supposed to think about this? Do Christians (particularly Christian women) have to be held in rigid gender roles based on these verses? Do women have no choice but to sit down and shut up because these eight verses are used to marginalize and negate every Scripture regarding women working, women making their own decisions, and women in – 1 Timothy 2:11-15, NRSV authority? That's the way these eight verses have been used through the 2,000 years of the Christian Church. But I've learned that just because something in the Bible has been interpreted in a certain way for millennia doesn't mean that interpretation is right. Look at slavery. Over 100 years ago American Christians were using passages in the Bible to justify [the class of slaves and to justify race-based] slavery. Now no American is going to use those passages in Scripture to justify slavery today. We recognize that even though it’s endorsed in the Bible, slavery is wrong. It's unethical.

We've changed how we interpret the slavery passages in the Bible. Why can't we change how we interpret the passages about women?

Her book goes on to review scholarship that opens up the interpretation of the eight prism verses.  Readers, getting to the very last page of Shawna's book, will have encountered Shawna's gleanings from the works of scholars and writers such as Claudia Camp, Mary J. Evans, Sarah S. Forth, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Catherine Clark Kroeger, Richard Clark Kroeger Jr., Carol L. Meyers, Carol A. Newsome and Sharon Ringe, and Miriam Feinberg Vamosh.  Shawna offers research and insights both for her "more conservative readers" and for those "more liberal."

But the power in her book doesn't just come from Shawna's own secondary research sources.  The strength of What You Didn't Learn in Sunday School, Women Who Didn't Sit Down and Shut Up also comes from the women in the Bible themselves.  It's Shawna's prism, or hermeneutic, of lived experience.  Shawna has her readers actually read the Bible for themselves, and then to reflect on the lives of people who would challenge the prism of just eight verses too-narrowly and rather un-ethically interpreted.

The best part of the book (and this short book's lengthiest part) is the reading of the stories of biblical women, the part organized into three sections.  The sections are "Women Who Didn't Shut Up"; "Women Who Didn't Submit"; and "Women In Authority (Even Over Men)".   In each section, Shawna starts with women in the Hebrew Bible, and then she moves on to women of the Greek New Testament.  It's obviously a chronological order, but a wonderful if unintended effect here is that the arrangement gives primacy to the Jewishness of the context of these women.  All of the women in the Bible who Shawna has her readers read about are in Jewish contexts even if some are clearly marked in the literary and historical contexts as not Jews.  If Shawna is writing as a Christian mostly to Christians, then her book is nonetheless opened up to readers who are Jewish.  Moreover, the book is open to anyone of any religion and / or culture since its focus is on experiences that are authorized as legitimate, and ethical, by the Bible of Judaism and of Christianity.  Shawna does a wonderful job of presenting the experienced lives of more than a dozen women in history as individuals who you and I might encounter in our own lives today.

The book is inclusive with regard to gender, to race, to class, to religion -- and that's one of its many strengths.  The weakness is that the early mentions of "Sunday School" and of verses in the "New Testament" that have been used to silence women might make some readers conclude too easily and too quickly that it's a book just for women, only for Christians, simply for Bible readers, and therefore these readers might shut the book too early.  My own experience reading Shawna's book is that it compels me to reconsider how I read the Bible in light of lived experience, others' and my own.  The lives of the women of the Bible whom Shawna gets me reading validate the ethics of lived experience that refuses the prism of silencing and of separations.  Shawna encourages me and you to read the Bible we didn't read.  I'm encouraging you, then, to buy and to read her book.