IMPOLITE TOPICS

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The dramatic rise to fame of Sarah Palin—a woman most of us had never heard of a few weeks ago—demonstrates the enormous power of publicity to create celebrities.

What continues to amaze me more than anything else is how Sarah Palin’s meteoric rise to the role of savior within the Republican campaign requires conservative Christians to ignore any questions about women and authority.

For generations, women have been denied leadership positions because of Bible verses that seem to prohibit female authority over men.

And yet, in one bold stroke, a woman was chosen as the Republican vice-presidential candidate and her selection was widely hailed by conservative Christian leaders as a brilliant choice.

“Sometimes people can be a little fickle. They’ll go for the newest, hottest thing.” Kari Anderson

In his post from the Republican National Convention, Doug Pagitt reflects on exactly this point.

The most surprising response for me was to the role of a woman as vice-president and as it related to the worldview of religious conservatives. I asked questions about how people who hold that women should not be in spiritual leadership over men (a view called “complementarian”) would respond to having a woman vice-president and potentially president). If you are not familiar with the line of thinking, it goes something like this:

Men and women are created in a relational order. Men are under God and women are under men. This is not to say that women are lesser than men, but just as tools are designed for specific purposes so is gender a guide to relational order. The Bible is used to support this view specifically passages like Genesis 2:7, 21-24; 1 Timothy 2:12-15; 1 Corinthians 11:8-9; Genesis 2; 1 Corinthians 11:8-10; Romans 5:12-19.

This is not a totally fringe view. It is supported by the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, and many independent churches. It is perhaps the most common perspective among the evangelical religious right. Doug Pagitt: Sarah Palin and the Role of Women in Religion and Politics

As I written before, I encountered tremendous hostility as a woman studying for ministry in an Evangelical seminary. The objection against women in ministry was based on obedience to the Bible as the infallible, inerrant word of God. According to this “high view of scripture,” women are forbidden from having authority over men.

Particular Bible verses have been cited and cited and cited some more to argue against ordination of women, to oppose the ministry of women, and to teach submission to male authority in marriage. Pagitt includes these verses in his article.

And yet, all of this opposition to the authority of women to lead men was apparently thrown out the window, swept under the rug, or hidden in the closet in a dramatic display of instant adulation for the barely-known woman chosen to run for the second-highest leadership position in the United States.

Pagitt explains how he raised the question of female authority with the delegates.

I raised some form of this question with the delegates I interviewed. I asked, “Do you think it will be a problem for religious conservatives who hold that women should not have authority over men and who do not allow a woman to be a pastor of a church or teach a Sunday school class with men in it? Will they have a problem with a woman vice-president?”

To a person the response was “Yes, I am sure they will. But they will just need to get over it.”

 
I was fascinated to think that this nomination could actually weaken the complementary view or the view of the president being God’s chosen leader because of the commitment to support the pro-life ticket. It will be quite a dilemma for some religious conservatives who will have to choose between commitments. And there is no doubt that the support for Governor Palin rests squarely on her pro-life stance.  Doug Pagitt: Sarah Palin and the Role of Women in Religion and Politics

Whatever this candidacy says about Sarah Palin, it demonstrates clearly that obedience to the authority of Scripture can be a fickle thing for believers. 

I have observed this fickleness more than once. A firm declaration of authority to Scripture can be replaced by a stronger desire for something else. When this happens, the Scripture that held primary authority is replaced by a higher claim. In the case of Sarah Palin, her resolutely anti-abortion stance was apparently more important than any prohibition against women in leadership.

I watched a similar transformation in a seminary student I got to know quite well. We were in the same preaching class together, and despite his opposition to women in leadership, we became friends.

We sat in the cafeteria one day and he explained his dilemma to me. His denomination ordained women to ministry. All candidates for ordination were required to answer this question: Would you participate in the ordination of a woman? 

This meant that his ordination to ministry required him to agree that he would support the ordination of women. Up to this point in the conversation, the discussion about his “obedience to the authority of Scripture.” And then he said something that brought the real issue to the surface.

At the Christian college he had attended, one of his professors was adamantly opposed to the ordination of women. The professor extracted a pledge from his students who were going to study for the ministry that they would not agree to participate in any ritual that would ordain a woman to ministry. They were supposed to stand firm in their faith and be willing to forgo ordination rather than submit to this “unbiblical” decision by the denomination to ordain women.

Suddenly, I realized that the issue was about something more than obedience to Scripture. It was a highly emotionally charged choice. He said to me. “Please tell me. I want to know. How can I be obedient to Scripture and support the ordination of women?” But I saw clearly that the real issue was that he had made a promise. He could be ordained or he could refuse ordination to uphold the promise made to his professor.

At that moment, the whole issue clicked into a different focus for me. I saw that claims to the authority of Scripture are seldom as straightforward as people claim they are.

That is when I began to see how much obedience to Scripture is a fickle allegiance, based on shifting sands. A non-negotiable, bottom-line commitment to the authority of Scripture can be quickly replaced by allegiance to something else with a higher emotional charge.

Since that moment in the cafeteria, I have seen this again and again. People will cite Scripture as the ultimate authority until they reach a point where what they want conflicts with any sort of abstract notion of biblical authority. At this point, they begin to change their opinion of the meaning of Scripture.

My name for this process is “selective hermeneutics.” Hermeneutics is the process of interpreting what the Bible means. And more often than not, “what it means” depends on what you want. And if what you want changes, “what it means” must change as well.

In the well-known adage from sales, people buy based on what they want and then justify with logic. This same principle applies to the authority of Scripture. It can be breathtaking to watch people abandon avidly held positions to accommodate a new want, and watch them attempt to justify the validity of their new positions with strange logical contortions.

In the case of my friend from seminary, he wanted to be ordained to the ministry. This want was more important to him than his promise to his professor. You will not be surprised to learn that he was ordained to the ministry in his denomination.

What changed for him? It wasn’t that he suddenly changed his understanding of biblical verses that seem to prohibit the leadership of women. What changed is that he had to choose between being ordained and being obedient to his “high view of scripture.” In his case, his desire to be ordained won.

In the case of Sarah Palin, objections to a woman in leadership have been shoved aside—at least publicly—in favor of higher claims of allegiance. In this case, the higher allegiance was to her anti-abortion stance.

I have no idea how this election will turn out, and if Sarah Palin will be elected to the office of vice-president of the United States. I do know that sudden fame is a fickle thing, and will give the last words to Henry Miller.

Fame is an illusive thing / here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months.  Henry Miller.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

Have you watched the video with my original nature photos?  Click here to watch ”Rise Into The Blue.” 

written by Kalinda \\ tags: authority of scripture, Bible, biblical authority, Doug Pagitt, hermeneutics, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, obedience to authority, Republican convention, Sarah Palin, Women And Leadership

On Saturday, August 16, Barack Obama and John McCain will attend a “Civil Forum” at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. The forum will be moderated by Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church.

Time Magazine made Rick Warren the subject of a recent cover article. The cover identifies Warren as “America’s most powerful religious leader” (Time Magazine Cover, August 18, 2008 Issue.)

A more cautious figure than Warren might have passed on the opportunity to become a political lightning rod. But he has spent the past few years positioning himself for just such a role as a suprapolitical, supracreedal arbiter of public virtues and religious responsibilities.
…
The payoff is the Aug. 16 event, a kind of coronation for the 54-year-old, jovially hyperactive preacher. “It’s remarkable. The candidates are according him tremendous status,” says William Martin, author of the definitive biography of Billy Graham, A Prophet with Honor. “I don’t see them doing it with an Episcopal bishop or a Cardinal – or another Evangelical.”

If Warren is not quite today’s Graham, who presided as “America’s pastor” back when the U.S. affected a kind of Protestant civil religion, he is unquestionably the U.S.’s most influential and highest-profile churchman. The Global Ambition of Rick Warren

The idea of the forum as a “kind of coronation” for Rick Warren raises all kinds of interesting questions about the connections between religion and politics.

What is clear is that Obama and McCain are making a kind of religious pilgrimage to one of America’s evangelical megachurches, to make an appearance before “the U.S.’s most influential and highest-profile churchman.”

What is obvious by now is that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain is an evangelical. This means that both are problematic candidates for a significant number of evangelical Christians. The reason this matters politically is that so many American Christians identify themselves as evangelicals.

“It’s quite an extraordinary thing, it’s the first time a preacher has convened the two presumptive candidates …

They are both fighting for that vote,” said Michael Lindsay, a political sociologist at Rice University in Houston.

Evangelicals account for one in four U.S. adults and have become a key conservative base for the Republican Party with a strong focus in the past on opposition to abortion and gay rights and the promotion of “traditional” family values.

Such issues delivered almost 80 percent of the white evangelical Protestant vote to President George W. Bush in 2004 but the movement is more fractured and restless this year though it remains largely in the Republican camp. Obama, McCain Aim For Faith Vote At Forum 

So, both Obama and McCain are in the position of having to prove themselves sufficiently evangelical to satisfy evangelical voters, especially on the litmus test issues of abortion and gay marriage.

McCain has not excited conservative evangelicals because of his past support for stem cell research, his blunt criticism of the movement’s leaders in 2000 and other political heresies.

But the Vietnam veteran and former prisoner-of-war has long been opposed to abortion rights, a trump card with this group.

“McCain has a good record on that issue (abortion) and he must show that he will continue it as president,” Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative lobby group the Family Research Council, told Reuters. Obama, McCain Aim For Faith Vote At Forum 

The most significant point I want to make here is that the “faith” of these two candidates is being defined by their stances on these issues—especially the issue of abortion.

Once again, public discussion of religion has been reduced to a few critical, hot-button issues. Complicated issues of faith, the relationship of religious groups to political power, the role of religious education in public schools, and a multitude of social justice issues get little attention. Instead, religion and faith become defined by a few issues.

It is important to note how Rick Warren has expanded his focus beyond the evangelical hot-button issues since the 2004 presidential election.

During the 2004 presidential election, he seemed to toy with using his new influence to become the next Jerry Falwell or James Dobson. Although he did not officially endorse George W. Bush, the mega-author made no secret of his preference. Two weeks before the election, he sent an e-mail to the several hundred thousand pastors on his mailing list, enumerating “non-negotiable” issues for Christians to consider when casting their votes: abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, euthanasia and human cloning. The Global Ambition of Rick Warren 

Since then, Warren has started a global program to mobilize churches in the Third World to deal with poverty, disease, and illiteracy, among other global issues.

And he is both leading and riding the newest wave of change in the Evangelical community: an expansion beyond social conservatism to causes such as battling poverty, opposing torture and combating global warming. The movement has loosened the hold of religious-right leaders on ordinary Evangelicals and created an opportunity for Warren, who has lent his prominent voice to many of the new concerns.

A shift away from “sin issues” – like abortion and gay marriage – is reflected in Warren’s approach to his coming sit-downs with the candidates. He says he is more interested in questions that he feels are “uniting,” such as “poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and human rights,” and still more in civics-class topics like the candidates’ understanding of the role of the Constitution. There will be no “Christian religion test,” Warren insists. “I want what’s good for everybody, not just what’s good for me. Who’s the best for the nation right now?” The Global Ambition of Rick Warren

Yet, despite Warren’s larger vision, for many evangelicals in this election season, “faith” is neatly defined by the “right” answers on a handful of hot-button issues.

So, Barack Obama and John McCain will sit down as Rick Warren—who promises that there will be no “Christian religion test”—will ask Obama and McCain about abortion.

And many Evangelicals have, like Warren, broadened their agenda of concerns to include issues that should favor Obama like global poverty and the environment. But in practice, abortion continues to be a threshold issue for a large number of Evangelical voters.
Warren has already said he will raise the issue with the candidates on Saturday, and Obama could well take advantage of the opportunity.
…
Large numbers of Evangelical and Catholic voters will be listening for Obama to articulate his abortion position in his conversation with Warren. A significant number of them remain undecided in the race, and their votes may hinge on his answer. Obama and McCain’s Test of Faith

When I read the words of Jesus in the four gospels, I wonder how abortion and gay marriage have become the defining issues for evangelicals. As far as I can tell, Jesus had nothing to say about either topic. Does this mean that Jesus would approve of abortion and gay marriage? It only means that they were not mentioned in the gospel narratives. It is hard to make any case on any issue based what someone didn’t say about it.

Although Jesus did not directly address current hot-button issues, he had plenty to say about power, justice, and the poor. My impolite question is: How is that these are not the defining issues for people who base their identity on scripture as the sole authority in faith and practice?

Emphasis on the “sin issues”—as Time magazine calls them—without giving at least equal weight to such central gospel topics as justice, power, and poverty is an example of “selective hermeneutics.”

Exegesis focuses on “what it meant.”  Hermeneutics focuses on “what it means.” Selective hermeneutics occurs when people pick and choose portions of the Bible, to decide which parts are relevant and which are not relevant to their lives. This is what has happened with abortion and gay marriage, along with stem cell research and cloning. They have become the defining issues of faith, even though none of them is explicitly mentioned in scripture.

When selective hermeneutics is at work, religion becomes reduced to a small set of issues. This means that politicians find themselves in the position of having to tiptoe carefully on a tightrope between the hot-button issues and their own religious beliefs—whatever they are—to placate potential voters who have reduced ”faith” to a limited set of beliefs on a few defining issues.

“Faith” reduced to these few topics is dramatically diminished biblical faith. We all deserve more than a few carefully chosen responses on a handful of topics to determine how any candidate for public office will address the relationship between religion and political power in a multi-cultural, multi-religious nation.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

written by Kalinda \\ tags: abortion, Barack Obama, Bible, civil forum, evangelical, exegesis, gay marriage, hermeneutics, Jesus, John McCain, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, politicians, politiics, Rick Warren, Saddleback Church, selective hermeneutics

As a biblical scholar, I can’t go any longer in this “Impolite Topics” blog about religion, politics, and the Bible without mentioning the two most important words behind every post I write.

These two words are “exegesis” and “hermeneutics.”  

The academic world carves up areas of study. Long ago, the “Academy” made a fateful decision. Biblical scholars would do “exegesis” and theologians would do “hermeneutics.” Despite the big words, the difference means that biblical scholars would study the Bible to determine “what it meant” (exegesis) in the biblical era and theologians would take the results and tell people what “it means” (hermeneutics) in the contemporary world.

I am at home doing exegesis. I truly love words. My love for words carries with me a passion for precision in the use of language. (It also makes me unbeatable–so far–at Scrabble.) It also means that I have an ear for speech and pay attention to what people say and how they say it.

I have also developed a keen awareness of how religious and spiritual communities develop their own code languages, known to insiders but not immediately obvious to outsiders, unless you tune in on them.

I have never been as interested in the study of systematic theology. It’s too much abstraction, too much effort to fit concepts into a system, and not enough digging into the words, and what the words mean in particular texts to suit me.

And so, I am happy doing exegesis. The problem is, the division of labor between biblical scholarship and systematic theology isn’t working very well. The biblical scholars merrily study ancient texts without being too concerned about bringing their insights forward into the world of here and now. And the systematic theologians are too busy with their abstract systems to immerse themselves in what the Bible scholars could tell them about what it meant. And so biblical scholars write amazingly erudite books about the Bible that only other biblical scholars will read, and systematic theologians write books about systematic theology that systematic theologians read.

The scholar in me must immediately qualify these statements. I am speaking about tendencies, not hard-and-fast categories. There are notable exceptions of wonderful scholars who bridge the gap between the Academy and non-academic audiences. 

The practical result is that many of the books and articles about the Bible that reach the general public tend to be written by people who have not spent their lifetimes immersed in rigorous study of either Biblical exegesis or systematic theology.

So, exegesis–”what it meant”–and hermeneutics–”what it means”–are like two neighbors on the opposite side of a high fence at the top of a hillside.  Neither pays much attention to the other and whatever the other knows is not being passed through to the other side.

Meanwhile, the big game is being played in an arena far away down the hillside. In that arena, the people with the loudest amplifiers teach the Bible in ways that are superficial at best and deeply flawed at worst.

My first goal is to take what I know as a biblical scholar–an exegete–and make it real in the contemporary world as a hermeneut. (I didn’t make up this word. Hermeneuts do hermeneutics!)

The big game about religion, politics, and the Bible is too important to let the people with bad exegesis and worse hermeneutics dominate the discussion.  It’s long past time to bring solid exegesis of the Bible and responsible hermeneutics about the Bible into the public arena.

[These words are excerpted from the "About" page, which I just completed. I have laid out as clearly as I can who I am and my passion and my purpose behind "Impolite Topics."  Click here to read the whole "About" page.]

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson 
http://kalindarosestevenson.com/ImpoliteTopics/about

written by Kalinda \\ tags: biblical exegesis, biblical scholarship, exegesis, hermeneutics, Kalinda Rose Stevenson

Claims about authority are always personal, because they either increase or take away take personal power. And so rather than begin with an abstract study of authority, power, and persuasion, I will tell you a personal story.

My story began in the fall of 1973, with three days of orientation at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which is a large evangelical seminary north of Boston, Massachusetts. I was an incoming student, who knew almost nothing about the Bible and very little about evangelicals.

I had recently experienced what I perceived was a call from God to attend seminary and study for the ministry. I chose to attend Gordon-Conwell rather than one of the other theological seminaries located in the Boston area on the recommendation of the minister of the church I was attending, who told me that he didn’t trust any of the other seminaries to teach the Bible accurately.

With hindsight, I can see many warnings signs of what was to come, and am sure that I would have been much happier if I had chosen to attend one of the other Boston area schools. But I simply didn’t know enough to anticipate what lay before me.

And so on a beautiful September day in New England, when the leaves were already beginning to turn, I joined more than two hundred other incoming students for orientation. I noticed immediately that I was one of only five incoming women enrolled in the Master of Divinity program. I found out that there were three women in the class ahead of me.

So, in a student body with more than seven hundred students, there were eight women enrolled in the degree program leading to ordination, as well as a few women enrolled in the Christian education program. I also happened to be the only student in the entire school who was also a mother. I soon began to feel that I had stumbled uninvited into a stag party.

Since the seminary required us to be present at orientation all day, it provided us with lunch each day. On my first day, I sat down at a table in the dining room across from a young man. He looked me up and down, as if he was inspecting a side of beef, and obviously noticed my wedding ring. He then asked this question: “Is your husband a student at this school?”

I thought the question was odd, considering that all of us in the room were incoming students, and so I said: “I am a student at this school.” And then his eyes narrowed into little slits and he asked: “What is your degree program?”

I said: “M.Div.”

And then his tone, which was cold enough to start with, turned even colder and he said: “Haven’t you heard of 1 Timothy 2:12?  What is your hermeneutical position which allows you to be disobedient to the Word of God?”

The truth was, I hadn’t heard of 1 Timothy 2:12 and I had no idea what the word “hermeneutical” meant. And so I said: “I believe that I have been called by God to be here.”

At that point, the young man started to pound his fist on the table to create a drumbeat to emphasize each word he proclaimed loudly with dramatic pauses between them: “God!    Does!    Not!    Call!   Women!”

I remember thinking at that moment: “This is going to be harder than I thought.” I had never met a women minister, but I thought that was simply a cultural thing. At that point, I hadn’t met a woman doctor, lawyer, or truck driver either. This was the era of Women’s Liberation, with expanded possibilities for women, and I naively assumed that I was simply entering into new territory for women. I didn’t know that I was challenging the authority of the “Word of God.” 

I truly was ignorant about so much of the Bible. I didn’t know that many evangelicals thought (and still think) that women have no authority to be leaders within the church. I didn’t know that 1 Timothy 2:12 is the single verse most often cited to prove that God forbids women to be ordained into the ministry.

I did grasp in a single instant that I was in a battle for which I was not prepared. I had no answer for the question I was asked again and again: “How can you justify your disobedience to God by being here?”

A wiser woman would have said, “I am not going to put up with this,” and transferred immediately to a more welcoming seminary. But I was not wise enough to do that. I really thought I was supposed to be there. And so I endured. And “endured” is the proper word, in a place where most of the male students and many of the faculty (all male) thought that women had no right to be there. They felt that it was their obligation to continually “confront the women with their disobedience.” And the administration that accepted us as students and cashed our tuition checks did absolutely nothing to quell the endless harassment.

What made it tolerable for me was that I didn’t live at the seminary, but commuted back and forth. The women who lived at the seminary and ate their meals in the dining hall were exposed to relentless assault, day and night, by the male posse accusing them of disobedience to the authority of scripture.

Not surprisingly, of the five of us women who started in September, the woman who told us on the first day of orientation that she had dreamed of being a minister since she was a child  and couldn’t believe that she was finally in seminary, dropped out before the end of the first term, with her dreams of ministry shattered.

The second woman transferred to a friendlier seminary at the end of the first term.

The third woman dropped out in the middle of the second term, feeling devastated by the relentless attacks.

The fourth woman had made very clear that she had no intention of seeking ordination to the ministry. She simply thought that the Master of Divinity degree was a better career choice than the degree the seminary offered for Christian education, and so the male posse left her alone.

By the end of the first year, I was the only woman of five who started together in September who still intended to seek ordination.

In my rude awakening among the evangelicals, I learned how the concept of “authority” lies at the root of an evangelical world view. The idea of “authority” shaped almost every topic of study, from biblical studies, to systematic theology, to church history, to pastoral counseling.

And yet despite this relentless assault by the most vocal critics of women in ministry, I was also exposed to teachers who began to teach me how to answer such questions. I began to learn Hebrew and Greek and see beyond the limitations of English translations to grasp a larger vision than exclusion based on gender. I even learned what the word “hermeneutical” means. And I began to understand why those who use Timothy 2:12 as a weapon against women seeking ordination are misusing the verse, to claim that it means something it does not.

At this point, I will not answer the questions that my angry inquisitor demanded that I answer: “Haven’t you heard of 1 Timothy 2:12?  What is your hermeneutical position which allows you to be disobedient to the word of God?”

I promise that I will return to this story, to demonstrate a new perspective on these words, based on what the original Greek actually says. For now, I will leave this story at the point I was when I started my theological education, with no answer to the questions except to know that something was very wrong with the type of  relentlessly cruel authority that created such pain and suffering for women whose only crime was a desire to serve.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
     

written by Kalinda \\ tags: 1 Timothy 2:12, authority, hermeneutics, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, ordination of women, theological seminary

“About Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson”

The first things you need to know about me are that I am both a seeker and a scholar.

I’ll start with my identity as a scholar. I have excellent academic credentials to write about religion, politics, and the Bible.

I have a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Graduate Theological Union  in Berkeley California in cooperation with University of California at Berkeley. 

The GTU is a consortium of nine theological seminaries of various denominations, along with several centers of study. Since the GTU has a cooperative relationship with the University of California at Berkeley to offer Doctor of Philosophy degrees, I was also admitted to study at the university. So, I had access to a broad swath of theological perspectives and free access to the classes, libraries, and faculty of both the GTU and UCB.

“The Graduate Theological Union is the largest and most diverse partnership of seminaries and graduate schools in the United States, pursuing interreligious collaboration in teaching, research, ministry, and service.”

Located in Berkeley, California, where the diversity of cultures and faith traditions reflects our own, study at the GTU is intellectually challenging and rich in resources. Students can pursue the Ph.D., Th.D., and M.A., plus two joint Ph.D. programs with the University of California, Berkeley.

As a union, we have the largest theological faculty in the United States, including renowned experts in Christian spirituality and liturgical studies as well as critical and creative scholars in 14 other areas.”

Graduate Theological Union

If you are interested in my doctoral dissertation, The Vision of Transformation:  The Territorial Rhetoric of Ezekiel 40-48, is available on Amazon.  It combines classical rhetoric, human geography, and close study of the Hebrew, to demonstrate that the temple vision of Ezekiel is not a blueprint for a building, but a vision of a new society shaped by holy space.

I am still very proud of my work in that study. It was published as a distinguished dissertation and is recognized as a groundbreaking study in the field.

And in case you are wondering, I don’t earn a penny in royalties from sales of the book, because publishers don’t make money publishing doctoral dissertations, so they don’t offer any to their authors. 

I also have a Master of Divinity Degree (magna cum laude) from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. Theological seminaries train students for ordination and ministry in churches.  I must admit, I have not been back since the day I graduated. Seminary was an endurance contest and left me with many unhappy memories.    

(By the way, I have always thought it odd to offer a degree called “Master of Divinity.” I am still working on figuring out what it is to be human. Who am I to master the divine?)

So my official biblical and theological education spans a continent and joins the vastly different mindsets of resolutely evangelical Gordon-Conwell with the dizzying array of theological perspectives of the GTU and the intellectual ferment of the world-class institution that is the University of California at Berkeley. I have also worked in churches, taught in theological seminaries, and developed an acute awareness of the differences between different theological perspectives among a wide range of religious organizations.

So what am I doing with this blog?  I am paying attention to the extraordinary power of religious words to affect people’s lives.

The academic world carves up areas of study. Long ago, the “Academy” made a fateful decision. Biblical scholars would do “exegesis” and theologians would do “hermeneutics.” Despite the big words, the difference means that biblical scholars would study the Bible to determine “what it meant” (exegesis) in the biblical era and theologians would take the results and tell people what “it means” (hermeneutics) in the contemporary world.

I am at home doing exegesis. I truly love words. My love for words carries with me a passion for precision in the use of language. (It also makes me unbeatable–so far–at Scrabble.) It also means that I have an ear for speech and pay attention to what people say and how they say it. I have also developed a keen awareness of how religious and spiritual communities develop their own code languages, known to insiders but not immediately obvious to outsiders, unless you tune in on them.

I have never been as interested in the study of systematic theology. It’s too much abstraction, too much effort to fit concepts into a system, and not enough digging into the words, and what the words mean in particular texts to suit me.

And so, I am happy doing exegesis. The problem is, the division of labor between biblical scholarship and systematic theology isn’t working very well. The biblical scholars merrily study ancient texts without being too concerned about bringing their insights forward into the world of here and now. And the systematic theologians are too busy with their abstract systems to immerse themselves in what the Bible scholars could tell them about what it meant. And so biblical scholars write amazingly erudite books about the Bible that only other biblical scholars will read, and systematic theologians write books about systematic theology that systematic theologians read.

The scholar in me must immediately qualify these statements. I am speaking about tendencies, not hard-and-fast categories. There are notable exceptions of wonderful scholars who bridge the gap between the Academy and non-academic audiences.  

The practical result is that many of the books and articles about the Bible that reach the general public tend to be written by people who have not spent their lifetimes immersed in rigorous study of either Biblical exegesis or systematic theology. 

So, exegesis–”what it meant”–and hermeneutics–”what it means”–are like two neighbors on the opposite side of a high fence at the top of a hillside.  Neither pays much attention to the other and whatever the other knows is not being passed through to the other side.

Meanwhile, the big game is being played in an arena far away down the hillside. In that arena, the people with the loudest amplifiers teach the Bible in ways that are superficial at best and deeply flawed at worst.

My first goal is to take what I know as a biblical scholar–an exegete–and make it real in the contemporary world as a hermeneut. (I didn’t make up this word. Hermeneuts do hermeneutics!)

The big game about religion, politics, and the Bible is too important to let the people with bad exegesis and worse hermeneutics dominate the discussion. It’s long past time to bring solid exegesis of the Bible and responsible hermeneutics about the Bible into the public arena.

Once after I preached a sermon, a woman came up to me and said: “You are the most interesting combination of practical and intellectual.”

I liked that. I still do. I never spent a moment in the Ivory Tower during my seminary education. I might have been learning Greek and studying systematic theology and church history, but I also had laundry to do, meals to fix, and children to take to soccer practices and piano lessons, along with long commutes in rush hour traffic each time I went to school. (And in Massachusetts in winter, long commutes to seminary often meant shoveling snow from the driveway in the dark, scraping ice from the windows, and a long, careful drive on treacherous roads.) 

I used to arrive at seminary after getting my children ready for school, and driving exactly fifty miles to school, only to encounter young, single men who had done nothing more that morning than walk downstairs for breakfast. In their little Ivory Tower world, they treated religion and Bible as a set of abstract concepts, without ever paying attention to how their theological constructions were affecting real human beings. They were part of the posse who continually “confronted the women with their disobedience” because we had the audacity to attend theological seminary. 

This, more than anything else, motivates me. I care about how the words of the Bible affect real people, because I know how they affected me.

I have observed over a lifetime how often the Bible is used a weapon of power against people who cannot defend themselves. I grew up in a family that was full of violence, deprivation, and ignorance, and felt the wounds of growing up afraid that I would die if I ever spoke the truth. I was terrified of the angry people in my life, but I was more afraid of the Father God in the sky who would kill me if I ever told the family secrets. Where did I learn that idea? I learned it at Sunday School, where they told me I had to be obedient to my parents.

Of course, they never told me that God would kill me if I told the family secrets. All they did was tell me I had to obey the people I feared more than anyone else in the world. My scared little mind made up the rest of the story. And no one in Sunday School or church ever seemed to notice how scared and dirty and hungry I was, as they told me cotton candy stories about God and happy families.

That God was never my friend and church was never a place where I felt at home. And so, I have always been a seeker. My religious and spiritual influences range from a stark New England Congregational church, with its Unitarian theology about Jesus, to a seminary education among ardent evangelicals, to doctoral work a continent away in miles and light years away in consciousness, in that wonderfully bizarre place called Berkeley (or “Berzerkley” for these who don’t love it as much I did in my years there.)

And along the way, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Framingham State College, with lots of calculus and physics and literature thrown in for good measure. I have studied all kinds of topics, from rhetoric and persuasion, to languages, to new age religion, ayurveda, naturopathic medicine, and Chinese medicine. I have taken classes in screenwriting and photography and painting. I have been married forever to a man I met as a sophomore at UMass. I am also a mother and a grandmother, which have shaped my consciousness of the world in ways that I would not have imagined before I held my firstborn in my arms.

I’m not a young woman, and so I have seen the world change in radical ways over my lifetime. I vaguely remember “I Like Ike” and knowing about the McCarthy hearings during the Red Scare. I remember “duck and cover” exercises in elementary school, when they scared us half to death with warnings about the “The Bomb.” I remember the civil rights movement, the rise of feminism, the uproar over Vietnam in the sixties. (I could write pages about these three movements in our collective history.)

I have lived through an era when television went from being a rare novelty to being the constant big eye in our lives. I even worked briefly as a computer programmer when programmers wrote out lines of code and waited for a day or two until the keypunch operators sent back stacks of cards. And now, I put up web pages and make blog posts on a machine that connects me to the entire world at the speed of electrons. 

I have also been shaped by the places I have lived. I grew up near the Atlantic Ocean, among the cranberry bogs, kettle ponds, and scrub pines on Cape Cod–a place that has never left me, although I left it long ago. I have lived on Air Force bases during the Vietnam War, and worked in an elementary school in Arkansas when the worst horrors of the civil rights movement were a recent raw memory and reminders of Jim Crow segregation were still alive and well. I have lived on an island in Puget Sound near Seattle and in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Now, I am in a temporary sojourn in the desert, in a small place at the very tip of Nevada.
 
In the online world, there are places where you can find confident declarations of faith. Such places are not provided by seekers, because they have already found their truths. There are other places, where people do their best to tear down religion and the Bible as ignorant superstitions. They also have their unshakable truths. They aren’t seekers either.

I will do neither. My goal is to use my questions as a seeker and my art and science as a biblical scholar to write about what I have learned the hard way about religion, politics, and the Bible. I think it would have made a transformative difference in my life if I had known earlier what I know now. My deepest desire is that it makes a transformative difference for you. I invite you to join me in the quest.

Seeker and Scholar,

Kalinda

Dr.Kalinda Rose Stevenson

“Impolite Topics”

http:www.kalindarosestevenson.com/ImpoliteTopics

written by Kalinda \\ tags: biblical scholar, exegesis, hermeneutics, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, seeker