Bibe Believing and Women

To review: in the 1970s and 80s, the Southern Baptist Convention underwent a sea change in which the conservative forces essentially took over. These conservatives (opposed not by liberals but by "moderates") purged the ranks of the SBC's upper bureaucracy and its seminaries of non-conservatives, winnowing the wheat from the tares by means of a simple question: do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God?

Thus were my parents on the losing side of the Battle for the Bible. As I've mentioned, both my mother and my father held graduate degrees (a Master of Religious Education for my mother, a Master of Divinity for my father) from Southern Baptist seminaries. It is a marker of how radically the SBC transformed that I generally have to qualify to other seminary-trained clergy that my parents got their degrees before the Big Shift happened.

Now, by the standards of more liberal denominations, my parents' training and (at the time) theological orientation likely fell solidly on the conservative end of things. By Southern Baptist standards, however, they were quite "moderate," becoming more so as the Takeover unfolded year after year.

I do not recall either of my parents ever strongly taking a stand on the inerrancy of scripture. They never in my memory came close to claiming that every assertion in the Bible is scientifically accurate, but neither did they campaign explicitly against such an assertion. I do remember times when my father presented passages such as those from Genesis or Revelation as possibly metaphorical rather than literal--a no-no for strict "Bible-believers." By the mid 1980s, however, the simple failure to affirm dogmatically the inerrancy of Scripture was itself viewed by the SBC as evidence of heterodoxy. While my parents did not occupy high enough positions in Baptist hierarchy to be themselves subject to an official test of faith, the culture of inerrancy-only trickled down to local levels, making it awkward to be a Baptist without insisting upon, say, a literal understanding of Revelation imagery (the flying scorpions, etc.).

I always had the sense that my mother's views of scripture were a bit more conservative than my father's. Yet her departure from SBC's rightward drift was no less ignorable. As a whip-smart woman gifted with considerable abilities, my mother did not conform neatly to the preferred SBC role of the wife (particularly the pastor's wife) as submissive help-mate. She did not hide her opinions, remaining "silent" in church as women are supposed to do. She took up leadership positions (at least, those offered by the church) eagerly and fulfilled them excellently.

Such agency from a female jarred with the SBC's growing culture of Bible-believing. I have in previous posts explored how inerrancy doctrine functions in maintaining the cycle of certainty/anxiety fueling conservative evangelical views of salvation. But of course inerrancy also functions to ratify certain social structures and stances as divinely inspired. Most configurations of inerrancy preserve men's political superiority over women as ordained and required by God. The Bible's presentation of women isn't exactly diverse; with some notable exceptions (Deborah, for example) scripture tends to categorize women in terms of their relationships with men: wives, daughters, mothers, widows, or prostitutes. True to the patriarchal cultures of Biblical peoples, men are allowed to act as free agents in the world in ways that women are not. Women, in general, belong to, or at least fall under the authority of, men (by blood or by contract).

Inerrancy doctrine argues that this system of gender relations isn't an accident of history but a kind of Command By Example: thus did God create the two genders, male and female. Now, current evangelicals will typically insist that they do not see females as constitutionally inferior to males (this is of course a departure from historical understandings of divine gender design). God creates the two genders with separate roles but with equal worth. Women are made to tend to the home and to children. They are built to sustain emotional ties, to be supportive, and to follow their husbands' lead. Men are made to protect and provide for their wives, giving totally of themselves to their spouses but never relinquishing their duty to lead.

For conservative Baptists then and now, feminism represented an unscriptural overturning of this divine plan. The equality of the sexes promoted by the Equal Rights Amendment threatened the distinction of the sexes that (conveniently) kept men in control politically and socially. Worse, the feminist impulse was seen as inspiring a truly awful bit of heresy: ordained female ministers. Like other culture war issues (homosexuality being one of the main ones currently), the question of women's ordination contained focused into one argument the underlying questions about Biblical interpretation and inerrancy.

To an inerrantist, the Bible--in the epistles--is clear: women are not to be preachers. They are to remain silent in the church (I Corinthians 14:33-35). It cuts no mustard to point out that this passage and others like it may refer to a specific situation in a specific church or to ask whether cultural norms from two thousand years ago ought to be applied today. Such historicizing (qualifying Biblical assertions as bound to a particular era or culture) is precisely the anti-literal trend that Bible-believers have resisted since the mid-1800s. Either the Bible is true in an unchanging way, they argue, or every assertion in the Bible becomes vulnerable to the charge of historical/cultural contingency.

Now--my mother did not so far as I know formally advocate for women's ordination during the Battle for the Bible era. But I doubt that anyone talking to her, anyone observing her activity in the life of the church, could doubt the fact that she saw herself as called to ministry, woman or not.

Thus, as the SBC lurched to the right, my parents--simply by staying still--moved to the relative left. Baptist churches were by the early 1990s no longer comfortable places for my parents to work.

More tomorrow,

JF