“No Longer Any Male And Female”? Galatians 3, Baptismal Identity, And The Question Of An Evangelical Hermeneutic -- By: Kirsten Laurel Guidero

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 33:3 (Summer 2019)
Article: “No Longer Any Male And Female”? Galatians 3, Baptismal Identity, And The Question Of An Evangelical Hermeneutic
Author: Kirsten Laurel Guidero


“No Longer Any Male And Female”?
Galatians 3, Baptismal Identity, And
The Question Of An Evangelical Hermeneutic

Kirsten Laurel Guidero

Kirsten Guidero teaches humanities and theology in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. She holds an MA from Wheaton College and is completing a PhD in systematic theology from Marquette University. Kirsten is a candidate for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Evangelical Christianity stands at a crossroads. The claim itself may portend nothing revolutionary: the movement regularly faces such conditions as a by-product of its drive to reform Christianity and its sense of urgency in so doing. But at the moment, the specific choices confronting the community complicate the narrative it has long cherished concerning the scope and promise of its Bible- and cross-centric, conversionist, actively evangelizing faith—sometimes called the evangelical quadrilateral.1 In place of the cross, a significant number of American evangelicals take political power and control as their guiding motive. In denial of the need to be ever more converted to the Christ disclosed on that cross, demeaning and converting others by force often takes center stage. Meanwhile, the deeply rooted social holiness animating earlier evangelicals appears substantially rotted away by hypocrisy.

One way to situate the neglect of three sides of the quadrilateral is to consider how they interplay with the fourth leg—the ostensible commitment to a high theology of Scripture in which biblical texts form the basis for the other three legs. But the ongoing crises of evangelicalism evince a long-running and deeply-situated problem for the movement: many of its adherents do not, in fact, know how to read the very texts they claim establish their distinctive identity. A refreshed approach to biblical interpretation represents a non-negotiable plank without which evangelicalism surely will continue to destroy itself.

Evangelicalism can find a foothold in renewed practices of reading Scripture. This article first illustrates the larger problems haunting evangelical patterns of reading Scripture by analyzing as a test case two prevalent evangelical interpretations of Gal 3:26–29.2 One of these interpretations arises from within the evangelical communities; the other represents a cluster of interpretations adapted by evangelicals. Both approaches, by attempting to find in the text a rubber-stamp justification of gender roles, fail the evangelical quadrilateral.

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