Still Loving, Honoring, And Growing Into Freedom -- By: Maxine Hancock

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 14:2 (Spring 2000)
Article: Still Loving, Honoring, And Growing Into Freedom
Author: Maxine Hancock


Still Loving, Honoring, And Growing Into Freedom

Maxine Hancock

Maxine Hancock is the author of nine books, including Child Sexual Abuse: Hope for Healing (Shaw, 1997), with Karen Burton Mains, Living on Less and Liking It More (Victor Books, 1994), and Readings in Biblical Hebrew, with Ehud Ben-Zvi and Richard Beinert (Yale Univ. Press, 1993). She is associate professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, and frequently appears on Canada’s Vision Television.

It is twenty-five years since my first book, Love, Honor and Be Free, was published by Moody Press. Subtitled “A Christian Woman’s Response to Today’s Call to Liberation,” it offered a thoughtful, if very conservative, place to stand in the midst of the swirl of antifamily—and often anti-Christian—rhetoric that accompanied the second wave of feminism. The book takes its place quite legitimately in a long literary tradition of women taking up the Scriptures in an attempt to find their “place,” but it failed to examine the system of interpretation on which its exegesis was based.1

Over the years since the publication of that first book, a number of key life events prodded me toward rethinking my acceptance of traditional “wifely submission” and “women under men’s authority” within the church. One of these was the research and writing of a book on child sexual abuse (Child Sexual Abuse: Hope for Healing, with Karen Burton Mains [Shaw, 1987, rev. 1997]). As I turned from the cozy, sunny certitudes of the Christian family to the frighteningly dark world of women who had experienced sexual exploitation, I began to burn with a long anger against the sexual use of women’s bodies against their will; against language, including religious rhetoric, which supports male dominance; against the obvious injustice of a world in which a wide disparity of power between the genders is disguised, tolerated, and supported. I finally understood the anger that fueled some of the angry anti-male discourse of the women’s movement, and while I knew from experience that there were good and godly men for whom exploitation was abhorrent, I began to question the God-given-ness of a system that allowed for oppression to go unchallenged.

While I was still working out the implications of the discoveries I made while researching this book, so far from my own experience, a second major upheaval was under way in my life. I had early negotiated with my husband that, in return for my support of him in his decision to farm, he would one day support me in fulfilling my career goals. As our children nudged their way through and out of high school, I felt the time had come...

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