The Goal of Feminist Biblical Interpretation

Honzo January 30th, 2008

As I am wading through In Memory of Her1 I came across this quote from Fiorenza where she outlines what she considers to be the goals of good feminist scholarship. Given some of the issues that came up in another post, I thought this was appropriate.

The debate between feminist “engaged” and androcentric academic “neutral” scholarship indicates a shift in interpretative paradigms. Whereas traditional scholarship has identified humanness with maleness and understood women only as a peripheral category in the “human” interpretation of reality, the new field of women’s studies not only attempts to make “women’s” agency a key interpretative category but also seeks to transform androcentric scholarship and knowledge into truly human scholarship and knowledge, that is, inclusive of all people, men and women, upper and lower classes, aristocracy and “common people,” different cultures and races, the powerful and the weak.

Methods and implementation aside, the above is a worthy and necessary goal in biblical interpretation. Historically, scholars have viewed women as a variation of men, often as incomplete version of a man. Accordingly all scholarship and philosophical reflection is colored with this lens.

  1. and I do mean wading - right now I am trudging through the barrow-downs of her survey and critique of all previous feminist biblical scholarship [↩]

Thursday’s Must Read

Honzo December 13th, 2007

Today’s link of the day comes from iamjoshbrown.com ::The Consumptive Church: Appeasing The White Man’s Guilt. I wish I could quote the whole thing for you, but here is a bit to whet your appetite.

In hindsight, choosing to buy nothing like I did, had less to do with my critique of consumption and more to do with the privilege that has been afforded to me as a middle-class American. It had more to do with me wanting to appease my guilt for my consumption throughout the rest of the year than it did with me challenging the systemic injustices of hyper-consumption itself.

I get that. I really, really do.

While I think The Consumptive Church is only possible in an affluent white man’s world, I am also becoming painfully aware that critiques like mine are only possible because of the larger framework of that same affluent context. Perhaps these critiques really are more rooted in appeasing my guilt than they are in deep fundamental change.

In these critiques of mine . . . these “opting-outs” of conventional consumptive patterns, I’m afraid that the larger myths of consumption to satisfy might still go un-critiqued.

[read more]

Mark Driscoll on Joel Osteen

Hank October 22nd, 2007

Here is a link to a video where Mark Driscoll gives his critique of Joel Osteen’s HWP “gospel” (although I think Paul says in Galatians 1:7 that there really isn’t a different gospel and that what Osteen & co. preach shouldn’t be called euangelion).

H/T: FIDE-O

Dr. Denny Burk here offers a critique of Osteen’s appearance on Larry King and relates it to gnosticism.

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