Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 24:3 (Summer 2010)
Article: Gender Relations And The Biblical Drama
Author: Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

PP 24:3 (Summer 2010) p. 14

Gender Relations And The Biblical Drama

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is Chair of the Psychology Department at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, and the author most recently of A Sword between the Sexes? C. S. Lewis and the Gender Debate (Brazos Press, 2010). She is a charter member of Christians for Biblical Equality and serves on CBE’s board of reference. This article was originally presented as a paper at the Conference on Scripture and the Disciplines (2004) at Wheaton College.

How should Christians approach gender studies from a view that is both psychologically and biblically informed? Let me explain some principles I have taken, mostly from the broadly Reformed theological tradition, about the appropriate use of Scripture as a whole, in the context of which I will try to show—in a selective fashion—how such principles get worked out in the writing and teaching I do, especially in gender studies.1

The Importance Of Hermeneutics, Even Unacknowledged Ones

My first point has already been implicitly made in my reference to a theological tradition—namely, that there is no unmediated reading of Scripture, notwithstanding the claims of primitivist-leaning Christian groups throughout church history. And you do not need to be a scholar of biblical hermeneutics in order to have a (usually unacknowledged) biblical hermeneutic. For example, it is still not unusual to find evangelicals who carry around only a New Testament, or who do carry around a full Bible, but with the words attributed to Jesus printed in red. Each of these practices embodies a hermeneutical assumption: the first to the effect that the Hebrew Scriptures are at best background to the doctrinally authoritative New Testament, and the second to the effect that, in matters of doctrinal or ethical dispute, the words attributed to Jesus automatically trump other parts of Scripture. Either of these assumptions may be defensible (although in the simplistic forms I have just described I do not think they are), but my point is that they are assumptions with which certain readers approach Scripture—not self-evident claims of Scripture itself.

More troubling, given the legacy of the fundamentalist/ modernist divide that characterized much of twentieth-century North America, is the residual tendency among evangelicals to reduce the Bible to a “flat book”—that is, to an encyclopedic collection of decontextualized, propositional statements, all of which are either historically or scientifically “objective.”2 Ironically, while claiming to confront “godless science” with a high view of Scripture, fundamentalists allowed the ...