Theology for the Masses

Scott, over at Grace is Unfair, looks at Amos and Isaiah and comes to some troubling conclusions about personal and societal sins.

In Amos, God condemns oppression of the poor and sexual sin in the same breath.  And in Isaiah, God shows that He detests both when people amass too much land at the expense of the poor and when people act as drunkards.  Neither passage suggests that God is placing a greater value judgment on personal sin or societal sin.  What does that mean for us as Christians, who desire to do God’s will?

At the end of his post, he quotes James 4:17, which says: “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” We know the right thing to do – therefore societal sins that we participate in are our own.

When I first began reading feminist theology, Schusseler-Fiorenza and Welch drew my attention to how language, particularly patriarchal language, shapes not only abstract theological concepts, but also the everyday, practical matters of the Christian life. Among other things, we assume male dominance in the masculine pronouns we use for God, even though we classically maintain God is neither He nor She, but Spirit.

Though I could continue to criticize the church’s use of vocabulary in the oppression of certain peoples, the ecclesiastical rhetoric I want to appraise presently is the church’s employment of the vocabulary of the Empire – particularly its economic verbage.

I often hear Christians refer to “investing” in either non-believers or people whom they are mentoring in the faith. The language of investment is procured, obviously, from the economic world referring to putting money to use in order to gain a potentially profitable return. That is, one invests in order to gain a return.

But is the return what Christian friendship is really about? It is supposed to be what I can gain from my time and effort spilled into another person? When we “invest” in a non-Christian, what we often mean is that we spend time with them in order to make them Christian! When we “invest” in a disciple, we mean we spend time with them in order to elicit the return of sanctification!

But is the return at the heart of Christianity? Is my primary agenda in befriending a non-Christian that they might buy into my product? Does this language not dehumanize and objectify our “investment”? Does this language not communicate that this whole Christianity thing is about what I can profit, or God can yield? Being friends with people outside the Christian faith is not about investment, it is about being genuine friends! Genuine friendship, for sure, involves demonstrating God’s love to the other. But this demonstration of love is not artificial and contrived; it is not about reciprocation or return. Consider my friendship with JR.

I would never say of JR that I am “investing” in him. That would entail certain things which are not inherent in sincere friendship. It would imply that I deem him spiritually below me or that he needs me in his life to be spiritually fruitful. It also implies that my agenda is to correct his spiritual imperfections, and because of my investment, I expect that he will provide a certain return. In the end, the language of investment doesn’t appear to be a natural part of genuine friendship.

But, in the end, this is not even the most dangerous aspect of investment rhetoric.

For me, the most dangerous part of the church’s employment of economic language is that we have taken the language of America’s dominant deity (economics, consumerism, materialism), and leaving it unchanged and unchallenged, we have taken it into our communities like a long lost brother. But as long as the economic rhetoric involved in America’s one true religion is warmly accepted by the church, we will never be able to counter the influence of capitalism, consumerism, materialism, or just plain-ole Mammon in our lives.

Now from where I sit, it appears we have two options. First, the church can completely rid itself of economic language. We can completely drop the language like a deflated stock. No more language of investment or any other kind of rhetoric that smacks of capitalism.

The second option, and one that requires a bit more creativity, is to continue to use economic language, but subvert it by investing it with distinctly Christian meaning. This option falls in line a bit more with what we see in the New Testament. The Gk. word we translate “fellowship” often referred to partnership in business agendas in the first century. Also, and more obvious, the word we translate “redeem” means to “buy back.” It too is an overtly economic word.

I like this second option the best, but there are two difficulties with it.

First, are we creative enough, or even powerful enough, to change the way Christian people generally employ economic rhetoric? Like Wal-Mart in a small town, economic language dominates our American landscape. Completely subverting it and changing it is a nearly impossible task. We may try, but in the end, our use of language is merely a text which is interpreted and misinterpreted by our hearers. Just because I invest economic rhetoric with new meaning doesn’t mean my hearers will observe that investment.

Second, when the New Testament writers reinvested economic language with Christian meaning, they were not using the language of the dominant deity of the Roman Empire. So, even assuming our hearers will understand our new meaning, might we be safer in simply abandoning the language altogether?

So, that’s as far as my thoughts have taken me on this topic thus far. I’m looking for some help getting past this roadblock. What do you think? The bottom line is that Jesus did not heal people for his own glory, and he even healed some who never even thanked him or his Father. It doesn’t seem like his investment in people was only about what he or his religion can get out of it. What about just showing people the love of God for its own sake?

During the next few posts I will seek your thoughts on a fresh interpretation of I Tim. 2 and the way Paul deals with women in this chapter. Some of the arguments will be stronger than others, but hopefully in the end my arguments will be articulated well. Far from being a proof-text for male-only-pastorates, this passage is in fact a text against female dominance! I will argue that the text is not forbidding women to pastor/preach, but is actually forbidding them to abuse their male counterparts.

Argument #1: the use of authentein.

I Timothy 2:12 – (NIV) “I do not permit a woman to teach of to have (authentein) over a man.”

The first issue I wish to deal with is the use of this Greek work authentein. Some important points concerning this word must be noted:

1. Authentein is a hapaxlegomena. For those of you not familiar with terminology of the biblical studies elites, hapaxlegomena is merely a fancy expression for a word that only appears in the New Testament a single time. The sole time it appears is here in 1 Tim. 2. Hapaxlegomena’s always pose difficulties for biblical translators and interpreters. They are forced to go outside of the biblical text to derive the words meanings and nuances. This becomes especially important for determining the meaning of this word.

2. While I noted that this word is a hapaxlegomena, I must also inform you that 2 cognates of this word appear in the deuterocanonical books. In both cases the context reveals the meaning of this word: In 3 Maccabees 2 the word was used in the context of slaves having their bodies “branded with fire.” Furthermore, the Wisdom of Solomon 12:6 uses authenta as a noun referring to the murder of children in child sacrifice ceremonies of the Canaanite peoples. So, from these two examples, we know that the word was used before the first century in a manner related to the physical oppression of other people.

3. The word was also used in Greek tragedies and was exclusively used in reference to suicide and murder. As we move further into the Hellenistic period we find that the word retains its meaning as “murderer” but it expands to include crimes of violence, master-mind of a crime, and perpetrator.

Since we know the meanings of words are fluid and they change with time, and we have seen that the meaning of this word was modified over time, the question becomes, how was the word used in the first and second centuries?

First, we must recognize there were many words Paul could have used if he merely wanted to denote authority. In fact, Paul uses these other words (especially exousia) throughout his other (non-disputed) letters. Since we know Paul uses these other words, and this word is only used by him once in all his extant writings, then this word must have a specific meaning in mind for ‘Paul’ that is relevant to the Ephesian context.

This is exactly what we find. Authentein is never used in the first or second century denoting simple authority. In the literature of this time this word was used in a similar way to those previously mentioned: to dominate, destroy, murder.

Interestingly enough, the history of translations of this passage is that the dominant translation of this word before WWII had to do with the violent treatment of men in the congregation – ‘usurping authority’ in the KJV is among the least obvious of these and even it has remnants of the idea.

What happened after WWII that shifted the translation to “authority” from something like “dominate”? The women left the home. Once the American/Western women began working outside their homes American patriarchy had to attempt to theologically keeping women ‘in their place.’ As the conservative translations of the Bible presupposed a woman should be in the home, they twisted this word in translation to justify their patriarchal bias.

In the end, what we have here is a word describing, not that women shouldn’t have authority, but women shouldn’t dominate men – implying they did have some rightful authority.

Next post – Toward an Egalitarian Ecclesia Part 2/6 – I Timothy 2 and the Artemis Cult – bringing historical context into our reading of an otherwise difficult passage. And yes, my analysis will eventually explain the ever intriguing “they shall be saved through childbearing.”