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The Word of God May Be Hazardous to your Health by Sharon H. Ringe Sharon H. Ringe served as one of the editors of the new volume The Women's Bible Commentary (1992), and she has also published Jesus, Liberation, and the Biblical Jubilee: Images for Ethics and Christology (1985). She is Professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington "Given the fact of woman's absence, the Bible is a flimsy 'authority' for us in the sense of that which empowers the naming and articulation of our lives as women. To read the Bible as 'authorizing' in that sense requires us always to be doing a kind of simultaneous translation into the languages of our own lives. We can do that, of course. We have had to team to be at least bilingual in order to survive in cultures whose languages reflect men's reality... [Y]ou risk becoming so fluent in the language that gets you the rewards that you lose fluency in your own tongue and break the connections with the community that sustains your life." "Authority" is a word that makes folks nervous. Never mind, for the moment, biblical authority-just authority in general. It's a word that carries weight." My broker is E.F. Hutton. . ." No, it isn't, really. My broker is a very junior-level employee who may or may not know what she is doing in the market, but her work carries the full cachet of the house. She speaks with authority, and so do I when I quote her: Heads turn, according to the ads, and conversations stop. Authority gets your attention and influences subsequent action. If E.F. Hutton says to, we'll all run to the phones to buy shares of Consolidated Widget, even though logic may tell us that new cars don't contain widgets any more, and Consolidated's corporate office has recently relocated to an uninhabited off-shore island just beyond the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission. That's a silly example and one subject to the changing landscape of corporate takeovers that soon makes the authority conveyed by such a name into a period piece, but it makes the point that even ephemeral and highly contingent "authority" is a notion to be reckoned with. In itself, though, authority is a value-neutral word. It can suggest a relationship of inequality where one party, at least for a time, has power over another. For example, a lecturer at a conference or the author of a book or an article is granted a certain authority by readers or members of the audience. It is of course a limited authority; readers can put aside a work without finishing it, and members of an audience always have the option of walking out, or arguing later, or simply dismissing what has been said as utter nonsense. If what a speaker or author says is to have authority, it has to find an echo in his or her audience's experience or longing. I Relationships in which patterns of authority are appropriately limited can become oppressive and domineering when structures or systems of reward and punishment collude to make the perspective of one party binding on others. Such systemically enforced authority carries the day, whether or not it coincides with others' experiences of reality, whether or not the perspective represented by it is harmful to the person who is unable to counter it, or even whether or not it is harmful to large segments of humankind or to the planet itself. In its most blatant forms, this is the authority by which an abuser imposes his or her will on a spouse or child or a regime in the pockets of the rich uses strategically random violence (death squads, for instance) to manage the activities of masses of utterly destitute people or a church assembly determines the limits of the "truth" available for exploration in a university. We are all too familiar with such abuses of authority. If we arc not immediately on the giving or receiving end of them, we have lived close by, thanks to the media. Some oppressive forms of authority can be much more subtle, supported not by brute force but by limited access. Those of us who are accustomed (by race, class, nationality, or gender) to defining the world for others are often perplexed to find that not everyone sees the world the way we do. Sadly, few of us enjoy (in either sense of the word) the challenge of other voices speaking from other places, most especially voices from below. It is often hard to climb down from our precarious perches to labor, struggle, hurt, love, and play eye-to-eye and hand-to-hand with others on the solid but often hard and messy ground on which they live. From our illusory place of safety, we lament the breakdown of authority (ours), and we invoke "authorities" (rules, standards, orthodoxies, methodologies, if not literally the Guardia Rural) to make things stay put a little longer. What challenges or threatens us (and what we try to stave off with the "authorities" we invoke-a bit like using a broom to turn back the ocean tides) is the empowering dimension of authority. It is related to the notion of "authorship," the creative power to be subjects of the verbs of one's own life and not objects of another's. Such authority embodies the definitive human power to know and name one's world, which in time will change the world's landscape of power. It is expressed in the power of a base community to articulate the truth to the military and economic force of the North about how human life remains human in a world enthralled to idols of death.1 Such authority gives voice to the recognition that women's realities, in whatever racial or ethnic community, are different from men's, and it empowers those whose perspectives are rejected by the powerful to say with Galileo, "But all the same, it works!" Little wonder that Letty Russell has said that the question of authority is to a feminist/womanist/mujerista theologian what gold was to King Midas! Whatever we touch turns to the question of authority. No matter where we start, sooner or later we bump into one or more of these dimensions of authority. Our lives are taken up with their often painful expressions. We suffer them together, and we hurt one another with them; we try out new voices, and we struggle to "hear one another into speech."2 The questions around authority take on particular shape and voice for those of us in the Christian-and especially the Protestant Christian-community because they lead us (usually sooner rather than later) to the Bible.3 As long as we still find ourselves within that community (and many women no longer do, in large part because of the way they have experienced the Bible), we cannot ignore the Bible. With our communities, we call the Bible "the Word of God," meaning by that label one or more of the same things our traditions have meant by it. For some, it means that every word of the Bible (in the original languages and certain "inspired" translations) has been dictated by God and is therefore without error in historical or scientific fact as well as in morals. For others, its absolute correctness is affirmed in the moral and theological spheres, while it is not seen as a reliable historical or scientific textbook. Most Protestant Christians acknowledge some human involvement in the formation of the Bible, whether in the form of accidental errors of "transmission" of God's words, or the foibles of particular authors otherwise recognized as "inspired," or as the product of human beings and communities struggling in their full historical and cultural particularity to live faithfully in covenant with the God no human can ever know completely. (Some would add, " except, of course, Jesus," who has revealed the full and unvarnished truth about God-but that only gets us into the same debate about the thickness of the coats of evangelistic varnish applied to the icons of Jesus found in the Gospels!) Even more varied than our participation in the debate about what it means to call the Bible "the Word of God" has been our experience of its authority. At that point, the full spectrum of meanings of "authority" sketched earlier comes into play for women, and sometimes for the same women at different times in our lives. The Bible for many is a source of strength. Its cries for justice echo our deepest longings, and its pictures of a gracious, loving God show us the companion we have known at moments of greatest joy and most awful pain. African American women and men carry in their hearts, as well as in their minds, the memory of ancestors encouraged toward freedom from slavery and Jim-Crowism, from apartheid and economic imperialism. Spirituals, sermons, the very lives of such leaders as Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, the lay church worker Bernadette Mosala, the biblical scholar Itumeleng Mosala, and Bishop Desmond Tutu have been nurtured by the biblical vision of liberation as well as by their African roots and the historical realities in which they have lived. Women and men in Christian base communities throughout Latin America have discovered in the Bible their own story as the poorest of the poor, empowered to stand up to incredible displays of raw power with the integrity of truth and the strength of a community of trust and solidarity. So striking have been the changes in urban neighborhoods and rural villages when people have taken into their own hands the Bible and have seen in it their own faces looking back that such theologians as Pablo Richard4 and Elsa Tamez5 have been led to talk about the Bible as the authentic history of the poor by the poor. Where the Bible speaks against the poor, as indeed it does, they dismiss those as alien voices trying to drown out the Bible within itself as well as in subsequent interpretation. In fact, so clear are they that the Bible belongs to the poor that they simply dismiss anything else as not-the-Bible. And women-mothers, sisters, grandmothers, and aunts-of every class and every race have found their lives strengthened by the Psalms they have sung and prayed, the gospel stories and parables that explain life (or at least how it ought to be), the stories of valiant women in Israel and of women leaders in the early church. Long before Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza publishedIn Memory of Her,6 many women had figured out where to look for our stories: between the few lines that were written, and underneath the prohibitions and rules bent on keeping women passive and quiet. Someone must have been talking, praying, and leading if folks got so upset about it! But underneath and perhaps prior to such examples of the authority of the Bible to "authorize" and empower the lives of the marginalized are other experiences of the Bible's authority. While the spirituals were being sung in the fields and slave quarters of the plantations and on the marches of the civil rights movement, the Bible-truncated and carefully pruned, but the Bible nevertheless-was also the slaves' Bible. It was and is read to give a blessing to racism and apartheid and to applaud the economic and military triumphs of God's "chosen people" over the despised of the earth. The Bible blessed five hundred years of conquest, as well as served as a fragile thread-only recently become strong-in the fabric of five hundred years of resistance. And the Bible many women meet as a "liberating word" has also supported women's silence and oppression and has given theological legitimacy and pronounced a benediction on millennia of verbal and emotional abuse, physical violence, even murder committed on women perceived as getting out of line. Frighteningly common has been such counsel as, "If you were an obedient wife, he wouldn't have to beat you. After all, ' whom one loves one chastises.' Your marriage vows are forever, so go home and pray that God will make you a better wife." Faced with such "pastoral care," many women have been forced to conclude that the line in the marriage service "till we are parted by death" means "until he kills me." II Clearly such readings that find in the Bible support for abuse, slavery, apartheid, and other death-dealing institutions are misreadings and, indeed, abuses of the Bible. But the fact is that the requisite words are in there. Once you call the Bible "the word of God," all of it is entailed, and those of us who would argue against the authority of some parts find ourselves on the defensive. We want to second the motion of Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, who after a particularly frustrating day working on the Inclusive Language Lectionary, suggested that we require that the cover contain the disclaimer, "The Surgeon General has determined that the contents may be hazardous to your health." However, the Bible is a dangerous authority for women not only because of what it contains, but also because of what it does not contain. A liberating hermeneutic, a commitment to justice, and a healthy suspicion can empower one to recognize the abusive passages as subversions-even perversions-of the divine project of justice and peace, witnessed to at the heart of Scripture and in the lives of communities in covenant with God. But no such hermeneutic can overcome women's absence from the Bible as subjects of their own lives and stories. Where women are present-for example, included among "the poor" and other marginalized groups and in the stories of such female heroes as Deborah, Miriam, Mary Magdalene, or Priscilla-they are present only as the grammatical objects of the verbs of others' lives. All of the Bible, finally, has come to us from men. Even if, as some have suggested for parts of the Bible, we have traditions stemming from communities led by women, in their biblical (canonical) context, these traditions have been preserved for us and presented to us in terms of their importance for concrete religious communities in Israel, Judaism, and the church, which are dominated and normed by men. Our foremothers do not get to speak for themselves. Laws, stories, and other glimpses we have of the lives and spirituality of women of ancient Israel and of the early church give us, finally, men s views of the women around them-how they were or how they ought to be. Given the fact of women's absence, the Bible is a flimsy "authority" for us in the sense of that which empowers the naming and articulation of our lives as women. To read the Bible as "authorizing" in that sense requires us always to be doing a kind of simultaneous translation into the languages of our own lives. We can do that, of course. We have had to learn to be at least bilingual in order to survive in cultures whose languages reflect men's reality. But as our sisters and brothers in the Latino community remind us in light of our linguistic imperialism as English speakers, to function always in one's second language is disempowering. Or alternatively, you risk becoming so fluent in the language that gets you the rewards that you lose fluency in your own tongue and break the connections with the community that sustains your life. III What I have said about women, as women, I think could equally well be said about the destitute, about "resident aliens" in Israel or racial or ethnic groups not dominant in Israel or the church, about the religiously marginalized or "impure"-the list is long of those who are talked about, but who do not speak. I cannot share the optimism or the critical judgment of Pablo Richard that in the Bible we have the story of "the poor" by "the poor." Any remnants of that story are filtered through lenses of varying opacity, colored by wealth, political or military might, religious power, and ethnic, class, and gender dominance. Most obviously, for those on the losing end of those categories, the silent and silenced, but (I would argue) also for the powerful as well, the authority of the Bible is at best ambivalent. In light of that ambivalence, the question that faces us is what are we to do? How can we affirm that in the Bible we in fact do encounter glimpses of God's will for life in its fullness and, at the same time, say, where such words are called for, "In the name of God, this is wrong"? I don't have a prize-winning recipe to offer for never-fail liberative reading of the Bible, but I have some hints, many so basic that they resemble the instruction in a recipe, "Don't forget to grease the pan!" But don't forget, or the results of even the fanciest techniques and costliest ingredients of biblical interpretation risk being irretrievable: (1) Read the Bible with suspicion, being alert to benignly and maliciously intended (but always harmful) expressions of patriarchy at its heart." Patriarchy" here refers to the institutional as well as the ideological domination of women by men, poor by rich, out-group by in-group. Be alert to presumptions of voice or privilege that go unquestioned, and listen to what is communicated by the silences, by what is not talked about, and by who does not get to speak. (2) Read the Bible historically-critically. Explore the social, economic, and political contexts of the writers, editors, and preservers of the various texts, and examine the consequences of those contexts for the shape and content of the material they relate. What does the writer's context suggest about why particular groups are condemned or ignored (often long after the events being described)? What can be known about the subsequent role of the descendants of those people or of groups in a similar relationship to the centers of power at the time of the writing? Can knowledge of social roles and relationships in the writer's context shed new light on the theological content conveyed by a story or parable (for example, medical practices in the ancient world helping to interpret biblical stories of healings or exorcisms)? What do specific laws, teachings, or "self-evident" truths contained in proverbs teach about underlying historical reality? If particular behaviors are forbidden or commanded, can those regulations in fact attest to contrary practices (for example, injunctions to silence and submission testify to women's leadership in prayer, preaching, and prophecy in the early church)? Can casual asides by a narrator alert us to practices that otherwise might be lost to the historian's picture of the period being investigated (for example, the possibly common practice of women's sabbath liturgies portrayed in Acts 16:13)? (3) Perform your exegesis in the context of the history of the text's interpretation in the church and Judaism. If our purpose is to understand as best we can what a biblical text means and how it has functioned in its communities of origin and transmission, as well as in the larger theological project of the author, study of the biblical text must include its role in the life of church and synagogue. Identifying past mistakes of interpretation in order to arrive at a correct reading is not sufficient if the misinterpretations themselves have shaped people's lives, for those misinterpretations are also part of the received text with which our interpretation must deal. Thus, even though exegesis might demonstrate that the household codes (Ephesians 5:22-6:9; Colossians 3:18-4:1; 1 Peter 2:18-3:7) were not intended to sanction abuse of any members of the household, the fact that they have been used in that way cannot be ignored by interpreters. Similarly, though Paul's letter to Philemon may not have been intended to sanction slavery as a social institution, that reading must be addressed in contemporary studies of the letter, since it was read in that way by proslavery advocates before and during the Civil War and used as a palliative for unrest among the slaves. (4) Read the Bible theologically and critically. Inquire into the assumptions about God, human nature, and the divine-human relationship that are carried in and supported by the text. Recognize that all human speech about God or about Christ is metaphorical, pointing toward a reality that is, by definition, beyond the capacity of finite human language ever fully to define or express. Recognize that verbal or programmatic human expressions of God's project of justice and peace (even those contained in the Bible) always risk identifying God's voice with our own echo and God's will with that which supports our comfort and security, even at the expense of others of God's beloved creatures. Be wary, for example, of the shifting of such terms as " sinner" and "poor" to pious categories without economic and social roots. Look for the social values and ethical assumptions behind seemingly theological categories. Be aware, for example, of how christologies that emphasize the divinity of Christ have as an ethical consequence the devaluing of material (economic and political) human life and how doctrines of atonement assume divine participation in capitalist economic assumptions of debt and scarcity, or in what Rita Nakashima Brock7 and Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn8 (among others) have identified as the theological legitimizing of child abuse. (5) Read the Bible compassionately. Let the first question of a text be how it is understood by the poorest of the poor, those most thoroughly marginalized from society's benefits, those most deeply hurt, then read the Bible accompanying them, sharing the dangers that describe their lives and sharing, too, their courage of heart and intellect sustained by the God of life in the face of idols of death. (6) Never simply "apply" a biblical text or teaching to the contemporary context, treating the text like an immutable template used to shape all subsequent moments and contexts. Instead, work with the text, examine it, ask questions of it, seek to understand it, then decide on theological, pastoral, and ethical grounds what we are to do about it. As we have been taught about the Sabbath, so also for the holy Word: Such symbols of God's presence and will are made for humankind, and not humankind for their sakes. Keep the option of saying, with Rosemary Radford Ruether, that a particular text is not revelatory of the divine or of a community of redemption.9 Be prepared to read the Bible not as a rulebook for how to act but as a reflection of what we are like at our most defensive and least faithful-a truth that, when we recognize it, we can perhaps take action to change. Or read in memoriam10-in memory of broken lives and bodies described in and resulting from the text. And read in thankful memory of the deeds of powerful public and private witness to God's longing, a longing for justice and peace, a longing for life that triumphs over death, a longing for relatedness or friendship with us, a longing for the befriending by human beings of each other and the whole creation.11 But this longing, because it is at the very heart of God, is no mere wistfulness. It is God's project, dominion, reign, or "kingdom" (he basileia tou theou) that is in fact being accomplished. Our human ways of frustrating, ignoring, and distorting that project are legion. We know them and do them, as did our biblical ancestors. But the wonder-the authorizing power or "authority" of the Bible-is its witness to the fact that nevertheless that project will carry the day. In spite of us. In spite, even, of the Bible.
1 Pablo Richard et al., The Idols of Death and the God of Life: A Theology,
translated by Barbara E. Campbell and Bonnie Shepherd (Maryknoll N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1983). 4 Pablo Richard, La fuerza espirtual de la iglesia de los pobres (San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial D.E.I., 1990). 7 Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988). 10 Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).
Theology Today, October, 1992
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