How willing are you to rethink your image of God?
How willing are you to hear a different perspective on the divine name than you grew up hearing in church or even studied in seminary?
How willing are you to reconsider what you believe about the gender of God?
All these questions — and more — flooded my mind during the recent annual gathering of the Alliance of Baptists, where the theme was “I Met God and She’s a Black Woman.”
Now, I know some of you want to stop reading right here, and you’re exactly the people who need to keep reading. Let me explain why.
Why we need the Alliance
From its inception, the Alliance pushed the leftward edge of the Southern Baptist Convention, creating a home for the scholarly and the inquisitive among us. Even after splitting from the SBC 35 years ago, the Alliance has cherished its role in stirring awakenings on the nature of the Bible, the reality of LGBTQ Christians, the limits of capitalism and the need to dismantle the racism inherent in the Christian church in America.
“From its inception, the Alliance pushed the leftward edge of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
All those factors came together in the two presentations of Wil Gafney at the recent Alliance meeting at Riverside Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. Gafney, Hulsey Professor of Hebrew Bible at TCU’s Brite Divinity School, is one of the leading womanist scholars of our time. She’s also an Episcopal priest. And after hearing her speak, I can only imagine what a popular professor she must be. She is dynamic and compelling and one of the most articulate spokespeople for womanist biblical interpretation I’ve ever heard.
She was received with tremendous enthusiasm by the Alliance crowd, but I can guarantee Southern Baptists would try her for heresy and even many Cooperative Baptists would raise their eyebrows and wonder what they were hearing. Same for American Baptists and National Baptists and Progressive National Baptists — although to a lesser degree.
For most traditional white Christians — particularly white male Christians — her message is a jolt to the system. But if you listen closely, and with an open mind, you’ll realize she has the receipts on everything she says. This is not far-out theology or interpretation with no biblical basis. Instead, she preaches a new way of understanding Scripture and the nature of God by taking us into the biblical text and into ancient history.
Womanist biblical interpretation isn’t just for Black women. It’s a way of reading and understanding that offers a different lens, a new imagination for all people, even white men.
Listening to her talks over two days, I pondered how much more likely American Christians are to rethink their view of the Bible when challenged from the right than from the left. People in the pew too often rededicate their lives when presented with a more conservative interpretation of Scripture while covering their ears when presented with a more progressive view of Scripture.
Again, this is how the Alliance has lived on the cutting edge from the beginning and continues to do so today. The Alliance is the thoughtful conscience Southern Baptists ran off and Cooperative Baptists too often want to ignore.
“Womanist theology isn’t just for Black women.”
Those of us raised in conservative evangelicalism have been conditioned to close our ears and our minds anytime we’re presented with new information that’s difficult to process. We have been conditioned not to listen, lest we be changed.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know
With that background, I listened for two days to Wil Gafney’s presentations and realized how much I didn’t know I didn’t know.
Here are some notes from her talks:
The area we call the Ancient Near East is only “east” to people who live in the West. As Gafney said, “That’s a Eurocentric designation. It is the Afro Asiatic world. The two continents come together in the Jordan River.”
“What passes for a name for God (in the Bible) is a title borne of an ancient footnoting system, a stumbling block set in place to prevent the ignorant and the careless from attempting to pronounce the most sacred name of God, … what is meant by the Hebrew that is translated and so loosely and nonliterally as taking the Lord’s name in vain. The only part of the divine name we know is ya, that we hear in hallelujah and in some other phrases. … But God is faithful and God listens even when we mispronounce her name or attempt to say a name that not even Jesus attempted to say.”
Use of the English word “Lord,” from a bad translation of Hebrew to say “Adonai,” “is slave-holding language. It is how the enslaved addressed their enslavers. It is the most frequent portrayal of the relationship between God and humanity as well. We have yet to come to terms with how much the Scriptures of ancient Israel and the emerging Jesus movement are slave-holding.”
There is a “gulf between the God of the text and God beyond the text.”
“The challenge of the honest biblical interpreter is trying to hold the disparate portraits of God in the Scriptures together as one coherent being. It’s an intellectual, academic, theological task. … The Israelites and their biographers were playing three-dimensional chess of which only the first dimension is included in any notion of literalism.”
“The relationship between translation and interpretation is fraught particularly when dealing with religious texts. And as a contemporary scholar of biblical literature, I’ve been shaped by the Western scholarly academy. We all have womanists and liberation minded menfolk and folk of other genders who are doing this work inside the master’s house, destabilizing the pillars and sometimes the stuff falls on our heads.”
“We say there’s Torah in the Torah, but not all the Torah in the Torah is Torah. And there’s Torah in other parts of the Scripture than the Torah, right? So when it says, ‘Write the words of this Torah on these stones, it’s not the Ten Commandments or even the 613 affirming commandments. It’s everything.”
Those were not fathers who put those babies on his lap. … And that’s why those disciples were so pissed off.”
In the biblical account of Jesus blessing the children, “mothers brought their young babies for Jesus to bless them. Those were not fathers who put those babies on his lap. … And that’s why those disciples were so pissed off.”
“Masculine language is not the only language that’s used for the divine in the Scriptures. The Spirit of God is grammatically feminine, taking feminine verbs exclusively but never translated with a feminine pronoun in any of your Bibles.”
“The Spirit of God is only ever feminine grammatically and neuter in the Greek Scriptures. In no biblical text or testament is the Spirit ever masculine in any of the original languages.”
“All the English translations of the Scriptures in English-speaking lands have been done exclusively by male translation committees until the NRSV … (when) three women translators (were enlisted) for the Hebrew Bible and one for the New Testament.”
“The majority of Christians on the planet have an 80-book Bible. All of the Orthodox, all of the Catholics, all of the Anglicans, all of the Episcopalians. So Protestants have the shortest Bible, the newest Bible, and they are the loudest. … The 66-book Bible did not come into being until … 1782. It’s a very new thing.”
What is literalism?
What was beautiful about Gafney’s presentations is how closely she adhered to explaining the biblical texts and challenging our traditional English translations. She is more of a literalist than most conservatives who call themselves literalists.
This is where the conversation gets complex. Not everything that has been sold to us as literalism is actually literal. Some of it is interpretation — always by white males — rather than mere translation.
Yet we’re not open to hear interpretation from women and people of color.
“Self-identified ‘conservatives’ are not always the most conservative with the text.”
Self-identified “conservatives” are not always the most conservative with the text.
Just to put the icing on this revelatory cake, I’m writing this on an airplane flight from Washington back to Dallas. About 30 minutes into the flight, the young woman sitting beside me leaned over and asked, “Are you a pastor?”
Always a complicated question for me. I explained who I am and what I do and she replied, “I noticed you had a Bible app open on your iPad. I’m a pastor too.”
We spent the next hour talking about her current seminary studies and her role as an associate pastor at a marginally Southern Baptist megachurch. It was fascinating and invigorating.
She clearly starts from a more conservative place than me theologically, yet she also takes the biblical text seriously and can quote chapter and verse as well as the next person.
For this 63-year-old white male, raised in patriarchy, it was a refreshing weekend from beginning to end. And challenging. The thing I’ve determined above all is that I need to listen more. Always.
Mark Wingfield
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality.