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?

Alice Walker: The Color of the Bible in a Field Somewhere

A'kierra Smith introduced me to Alice Walker. Alice Walker introduced me to new ways to read the Bible. (A'kierra is not her real name, but she's quite real. We met as co-workers, our first job right out of college. Except she was making just $0.68 to my $1.00. She was more qualified at our work than I was. It may not surprise you to know that our boss, the one who hired us both, was white and heterosexual and male; and so am I. But A'kierra is not. She is not even a feminist; she's one who's found herself abandoned by majority feminists; she is a womanist, like Alice Walker).

I remember how encouraged A'kierra was to "finally" read the Bible "with real and honest eyes," encouraged by Alice Walker's book, The Color Purple. (This was after it had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award and before it was turned into a movie).

Read me some of it, I asked her. Why "the color purple"?

So she flipped a few pages and lent her voice to the following:

You saying God vain? I ast.

Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

Then A'kierra lent me the book. I read (wondering if there was a way I could keep noticing, if I could keep on hearing A'kierra's and Alice's voices, the spoken musings of Celie and Shug and even Nettie and Sophia, talking about how the bible looks and sounds, when you're not a part of it really):

Then she say: Tell me what your God look like, Celie.

Aw naw, I say. I'm too shame. Nobody ever ast me this before, so I'm sort of took by surprise. Besides, when I think about it, it don't seem quite right. But it all I got. I decide to stick up for him, just to see what Shug say.

Okay, I say. He big and old and tall and graybearded and white. He wear white robes and go barefooted.

Blue eyes, she ast.

Sort of bluish-gray. Cool. Big though. White lashed, I say.

She laugh.

Why you laugh? I ast. I don't think it so funny. What you expect him to look like, Mr. ------?

That wouldn't be no improvement, she say. Then she tell me that this old white man is the same God she used to see when she prayed. If you wait to find God in church, Celie, she say, that's who is bound to show up, cause that's where he live.

How come? I ast.

Cause that's the one that's in the white foles' white bible.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it.

How come he look just like them, then? Only bigger? And a heap more hair. How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed.

I never thought bout that.

Nettie say somewhere in the bible it way Jesus' hair was like lamb's wool, I say.

Well, say Shug, if he came to any of these churches we talking bout he'd have to have it conked before anybody paid him any attention. The last thing niggers want to think aobut they God is that his hair kinky.

That's the truth, I say.

Ain't no way to read to read the bible and not think God white, she say. Then she sigh. When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest. You mad cause he don't seem to listen to your prayers. Humph! Do the maor listen to anything colored say? Ask Sofia, she say.

But I don't have to ast Sofia. I know white people never listen to color period. If they do, they only listn long enought to be able to tell you what to do.

Now that you've listened a little to Alice Walker for yourself, let me remind you that she's influenced how I read the Bible. Except I don't remember ever telling you how. How some of us really do think our view of God in the Bible and our view of the Bible is more like us than some other folk. Alice Walker began showing me that, whoever we are, whatever our eye color, we read the Bible and about God in many degrees from the margins, from the outside, as outsiders, listening in. It's not necessarily an advantage to read yourself in the Bible as its central character.

In Anything We Love Can Be Saved, Alice Walker writes:

Looking back on my parents' and grandparents' lives, I have often felt overwhelmed, helpless, as I've examined history and society, and especially religion, with them in mind, and have seen how they were manipulated away from a belief in their own judgment and faith in themselves.

It is painful to realize they were forever trying to correct a "flaw"--that of being black, female, human--that did not exist, except as "men of God," but really men of greed, misogyny, and violence defined it. What a burden to think one is conceived in sin rather than in pleasure; that one is born into evil rather than into joy.... I create characters who sometime speak in the language of immediate ancestors, characters who are not passive but active in the discovery of what is vital and real in this world. Characters who explore what it would feel like not to be imprisoned by the hatred of women, the love of violence, and the destrcutiveness of greed taught to human beings as the "religion" by which they must guide their lives.

My friend A'kierra introduced me to new ways of reading the Bible, through her introduction of me to the works of Alice Walker. (My eldest daughter just asked me to make reservations to go with her to hear and to see and maybe even to meet Walker when she comes on campus this semester.) Hope I can tell her thanks for helping me read the Bible, from the margins, the pleasing colors as in a field somewhere.

how do you read the Bible now?

Let this be a biblioblog. Let this be a biblioblog post. Let it encourage you to read the Bible in the month of March.

How, you might ask.

So I’d ask you to clarify:

How let this post encourage you? Or how do you read the Bible?

And I’d just insist:

How do you read the Bible?

How if you are one of the 8 men of the “February 2011 Top 10 Biblioblogs”?

or

How if you’re one of the 48 men with a “Biblioblog Top 50 for February [2011] (by Alexa Rank)”?

or

How if you’re one of the 69 men whose 182 posts [of 70 individuals whose 183 posts] were featured in the “February 2011 Biblical Studies Carnival”?

How do you read the Bible as if it’s centered on males on International Women’s Day in Women’s History Month? And if you so read the Bible, then how will you position yourself? At the top again? In the center or at the margins of the Bible? How will you be most encouraged? How can you encourage others? With all of the objectivity you can muster, how do you read the Bible now?