Biblical Womanhood That Wasn’t

I was recently able to acquire for myself a copy of Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I haven’t had time to really get into it, other than to note, at the outset, that she is a good, funny, writer, and that, though her premise is utterly flawed, I feel sympathetic and sorry for her, about her church experience.

In fact, based on her introduction alone, I think a great mounting defense can be made for what I’ve been complaining about lo these many months–the church in the west is in crisis, evangelicalism in particular. Her plan to take all the commands of the bible regarding women literally for one year, in order, essentially, to mock and undermine that same bible, is illustrative of the utter failure of Gospel Preaching in America over the last fifty years. And by failure I mean that it wasn’t tried. It wasn’t that everyone tried it and it failed. It’s that it wasn’t tried. Sure, almost every sermon in every church has a Come to Jesus moment, but the deep, full throated, painstaking exposition of the gospel through the scripture was not undertaken. Everyone thought it was, but in truth, there was a subtle shift off of the scripture and on to the individual’s behavior and feelings about the scripture. Instead of going carefully through the book of John, for example, John would be used to gather principles for “godly living”.

I know this because I lived through it. It was the bread and butter of my childhood. Either I was in the episcopal church hearing ten minute charming poetical reflections on the bible lessons printed in the bulletin, or I was at school listening to 45 minute “biblical” preaching. The length isn’t the issue. Neither kind of preacher would have thought the other was doing anything useful. But neither did either of them really exposit the text. The nondenom/baptistish preacher opens up the bible, tries to understand what is being said, considers his people and what he thinks they should be like, and then makes between three and ten action points of stuff his people should do or understand in order to be better. At least the episcopalian usually had no actionable guilt. Sure, we should all be worried about AIDS but the most anybody can do is feel guilty and send money. Later, when the check is in the mail, you can feel the warm glow of your personal concern about the prevailing issues of the day. Whereas the evangelical can get all tangled up in the labyrinth of applying the scripture as an instrument that gets people to be less awful. Understanding the bible becomes a means to the end of you being a better, more loving, more joyful, more godly person.

The most gentle, lovely, kind, believing pastors who wanted their people to be saved more than anything, nevertheless did not trust the scripture to do that work. The bible wasn’t splayed open into the hands of the ordinary person. It was mediated and doled out carefully as a tool of self actualizing discipleship on the road to personal holiness. So of course Ms. Evans didn’t ever learn what it was for. She didn’t meet Jesus. She didn’t hear the fullness of the gospel. Rather, the bizarre and seemingly contradictory commands of the Old Testament, having been wrenched out of their own context of scripture, could be easily delivered into her hands to do with what she liked.

In this way of preaching, the concept of biblical womanhood necessarily becomes incomprehensible. All the time I’m trying to help women of all ages who are confused and worried about what the bible says about women. They know it says something, but they don’t have a comprehensive understanding of how to read the bible at all and so they read other popular books about submission, and sex, and Proverbs 31, trusting the author to rightly interpret the scripture. This leads to ordinary women, who should be able to read the bible for themselves, but who don’t know how, to impose unnatural and ill fitting behaviors–that they’ve been led to believe are from the bible–onto their own marriages. Those are the women who have heard the gospel and do love God. The women who haven’t heard the gospel and have no love of Jesus, of course they either obviously undermine, or utterly reject it. Why would they do anything else?

I look forward to getting out of the introduction and into the body of the text, and her experiment. I expect the book will be fun to read. I can see why she’s so popular.