Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Collective TABLE we have got a special bonus episode for you today. To celebrate making it Halfway through season 10, we are bringing you the full UNCUT interview with Reverend Dr. Will Gaffney. So if you loved our two part conversation last month, now you can hear the entire discussion in one go. No interruptions, just pure brilliance from Dr. Gaffney.
For those of you who may not know, Reverend Dr. Will Gaffney is a Biblical scholar, Episcopal Priest and Professor of Hebrew Bible at Bright Divinity School. She is widely known for her work in womanist Biblical interpretation.
So basically that means she highlights the voices of women and marginalized people in Scripture. She is the author of many books including Womanist Midrash and A Woman's Lectionary for the Whole Church. All of her work reimagines how the Bible is read and preached from a womanist justice centered perspective. Her scholarship is where academia meets the church, making Biblical text more inclusive, relevant and transformative for today. We had an amazing time nerding out with her, asking her all of our burning questions and we learned so much in the process. So we hope that you will nerd out with us too and take away something meaningful from this special release. So let's dive in.
We're so happy that you are here with us. Just to start us off, we know that you are a Biblical scholar and I'm curious if you could share a little bit with our listeners about what specifically is the work that you do.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: I teach Hebrew Bible. That's the first part of the Bible in its older sequence, the earliest table of contents order, so to speak, is different from the Christian Old Testament. And I teach Hebrew Bible in its own world. So not reading it as leading to the New Testament, but how it functioned as Scripture for its original audience. And then we can think about how Jesus understood it and see how he's using it and how that's in conversation. Now. I don't do the Jesus part in my classes. I do it in my preaching.
I teach master students, some of whom are going to be clergy, some of whom are going to organizations that serve the broader community. Some are going to be military or hospital chaplains, some are going to go into grad school. For some, they are following this path, not sure where it's going to lead, feel called to some degree, feel interested to some degree. But then I have people who take my courses from wide circumstances. I think of the young Muslim man who wanted to know the, as he put it, Old Testament stories so that he could better understand his Quran.
I had a woman who is a professional writer, and one of her characters was clergy. So she enrolled in seminary classes so that she could write her character more responsibly. I thought that was wonderful.
The other group of students I have are my PhD students who are pursuing PhDs in biblical interpretation, Hebrew biblical interpretation. But our program is special in that all of our students are required to have competency in both testaments. So whatever testament they focus on, they need to be strong in the other testament, which makes them more employable, even as things are sketchy out there.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Can you tell us a little bit more about the perspective that you come from? A lot of our listeners may not know about womanist biblical scholarship, and I would love to hear more about that.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: It has to begin with my formation in the black church. And that is a rich stew of Bible study. Sunday school service, sometimes two days on a Sunday midweek service.
So I came into seminary knowing a lot of Bible. I didn't understand it in the same way that my professor was teaching us to understand it. But I knew the stories, I knew the events, I knew the name. So I come into the world steeped in scripture. And my experience of the black church is. And I did a little survey when I was in divinity school for a project that we learn the Hebrew Bible stories because they are stories. So that's what we learn in church.
Jonah and Job and Moses and Miriam, and then plus Jesus, we get the story of his life and his miracles. What we don't get a lot is epistles. There may be one thrown into a Sunday school lecture. But I describe the black church as Hebrew Bible plus Jesus. And I had this notion when I got into seminary. And Kelly Brown Douglas was my professor in two instances. And she gave us the book Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. And in there, he makes a point when he's visiting India and someone says, why are you a Christian? Christians enslaved Christians, Christians conquered. And they go through this list. And he says, I'm not a follower of Christianity. I'm a follower of Jesus.
And that struck something in me. And I said, no. He said, I'm sorry. He said, the religion of Jesus.
And that struck something in me. If I want to understand the religion of Jesus, I need to understand the scriptures of Jesus. So that's where I started to move academically and professionally at the beginning of my seminary education, and it was in seminary with Kelly Brown Douglas, among others. I went to Howard University School of Divinity. So I have to do this for Hu.
And we explored feminist theologies, international Feminist theologies.
And then we just discovered for us, it was new womanist theology, black women's theology, black women's feminism, which in the US and some parts around the world is distinctly different from white women's theology.
It can be said that in some cases, white women's theology is about getting a place at the table, having a seat with the boys, getting ordained, getting made bishop, achieving these goals.
White women's theology was from the beginning, really quite racist.
And black liberation theology was a male centered enterprise around the dignity of black men, but not so much the dignity of black people. So womanist theology emerged in response to the sexism and black liberation theology and the racism in white feminism.
And it was crafted to take the experience of the black woman and make it a central prism for biblical interpretation or interpreting the media, the world, the social work that we're going to do with the sort of refrain that if it's not good for a black woman, it's not good for anyone. So any theology that doesn't address the centuries of marginalization, the continuing marginalization, the public disdain for black women, the way that beauty culture has been structured such that black features are not desirable unless it's a white woman plumping up her lips. So womanist theology emerges from the lived experience of black women.
And unlike feminist theology, which is one dimensional around power structures, womanist theology takes in the whole person. So it is multi layered, and it's focusing on intersectionality. And let me give you the proper definition of intersectionality. It's not having multiple dimensions. Being a mother, being queer, being a woman, being poor. It's the compounded results of that. It's the type of suffering you have when you are poor, plus the type of discrimination you experience as black, plus the lived fear and reality of black mamas called black mama trauma, the fear that your child will be shot every time they leave the house, plus the terror you live in as a queer woman, plus the lack of access you have as a disabled woman. So all of those negative outcomes piled on top of each other.
That's what intersectionality is. And womanism looks at any number of these things together.
So it is a type of framework like feminism. It's not unique to biblical studies or theology, which is where it started religiously. But just as there's feminist literature or feminist magazines, it's a way of seeing and being in the world.
[00:11:18] Speaker C: Dr. Gaffney, thank you for unpacking that for us. You anticipated one of the questions that we were getting to regarding intersectionality, so thank you for doing that one of the things that I have been really excited to ask you about is how it is or when it is that you connected the Jewish notion of midrash and that art of sort of creatively reading between the lines and then connecting that to contemporary issues, like when you connected that to what you have written about and spoken about in the past as the sanctified imagination of a black tradition. That connection to me seems very powerful and very liberating, certainly starting with people who suffer under intersectional oppression, but really for everybody, including oppressors, to realize that there is a kind of liberation available in the text by using a certain hermeneutic. And I wonder, like, if you could tell us when you first came to that realization or when you first sort of discovered that that might be a way of approaching the text that might be liberating.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: Of course, for your listeners who are unfamiliar with the sanctified imagination as a practice of the black church, in all kinds of black churches, conservative, progressive, there is this cultural practice that shows up in preaching where even in a church where people will say the letters of the Bible and its punctuation are fixed and unmovable and unchangeable, the preacher will be able to go beyond the text and say, oh, Samson, Samson was rolling through town on a chariot with 22s. He had the latest gold plated sundial on his wrist, right? So they will tell a story and embellish a story, but they will begin that by saying, and often the hand goes to the ear, signaling that this is coming from the Holy Spirit as much as from the preacher.
In my sanctified imagination, I see Samson rolling through town in his 22s, clocking the world by his new gold plated sundial. And so that practice of filling in the gaps in the text, unknown to many black preachers, and certainly unknown to me until I got into my doctoral program.
That is the same kind of practice that the rabbis do in rabbinic literature. They have different goals, but they're doing things like supplying the names of women who don't have names in the text.
That was part of what drew me in. I was like, okay, rabbis, I can rock with you a little bit. And as they argued with each other, I was very struck by the notion that even when they just dragged each other, you clearly do not understand the form of the word.
No, you're wrong.
My favorite patristic figure is Ibn Ezra, and he's one of the shoutier ones that no one gets put out of the synagogue or told they're not a Jew, or that you have to agree with these principles in order to stay in the community. You have to do these things. You can't fulfill the obligation this way and have it still count in a way that continues you to allow to call yourself a Jew, that there's no. There were no schisms, there were no excommunications, there were no executions. And if you know the early history of Christianity, the arguments did result in schism.
It resulted in separation of the Eastern churches, like the Greek Orthodox and all those churches from the African churches, the Ethiopian and Egyptian Orthodox, Coptic is the name of the Egyptian church, and the Western Church, Rome, etc. And of course, more than a few folk were murdered and later called martyred around the lines of the Apostles Creed, the lines of the Nicene Creed, and do you believe all of these things about Jesus? So I was really interested in academic and religious conversation where people who, this is a Christian construction, believed passionately, people who were deeply invested in their tradition, studied together, argued together, yelled together, and ultimately stayed together. So I was drawn into rabbinic studies. And as I began to read the literature, I had the light bulb or lightning moment where I said that the use of the sanctified imagination in black preaching is a type of American indigenous midrash. And so my interest in midrash grew from there.
[00:17:16] Speaker C: So thank you for unpacking that a bit. As one of the pastors at a church that is. That calls itself progressive, we're part of a mainline denomination, the Disciples of Christ.
Yeah. But I'm a former evangelical pastor. My wife and I, along with Claire, co pastor this church, we all have roots in evangelicalism. And so consequently much of the congregation, not the whole congregation, but much of our congregation, are people who have migrated out of high control expressions of religion, including white evangelicalism. And really, one of the reasons I think, I really have appreciated your work is because it seems to unlock the thing that so many people who are. Who have left high control or fundamentalist expressions of religion really struggle to do, and that is to enter into that space, that creative space of sanctified imagination when they engage with the text because they have been indoctrinated with a notion of the text that is authoritarian. And so there is no room to wrestle with it. There is no room to read it with a sanctified imagination. And they're often afraid to do that. They're afraid to read the text in that way. And I wonder if what I heard you, one of the things I just heard you say is that key to this is the willingness to wrestle, the willingness to have discourse, the willingness to fight over it in a non violent way. Hopefully. And I'm reminded that you said elsewhere that you wrestle with the text and sometimes the text, Text fights back.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:59] Speaker C: And I wonder, like, how would you encourage or exhort Christians who are breaking away from those sort of authoritarian ways of hearing scripture and reading scripture to be liberated, to wrestle with the text even when the text fights back? Like, how would you encourage them?
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Well, in Judaism, in feminist Judaism, I heard many a rabbi say that she was God wrestling. And that became a rubric for exegesis. There are so many places in the scriptures where human beings talk back to God, confront God, yell at God, and God goes along for the ride, occasionally rebukes, but remains present and engaged with that person, continuing to be their God in the story.
So the scriptures demonstrate that for us and thereby make it available to us. So I. One of the ways in which I've been successful is that I ground everything in scripture, even if I'm going to argue with it or argue against it, because people from fundamental and evangelical backgrounds are not always willing to start with a theory like womanism. Womanism is. And womanism does, and then bring that to the text. That's the wrong starting place for them. But as one of my students says, if you show it to them in the text doc, it'll be all right. So important to start in the text. And then there's a line that I heard before I was an Episcopalian, and it is a bit of an Episcopalian motto, and that is that we take the text too seriously to take it literally. The last piece is as I'm introducing our approach to studying the Hebrew scriptures in, in my intro classes, where there'll be people from the backgrounds that you described, people from black church backgrounds, people from Latino, Catholic backgrounds, every sort is that the scriptures, and I try not to say Bible because Bible is misleading, gives the impression that it's a singular book. The scriptures are a library. And when you go to your library and you park your child in the science section to do his report on clouds, you don't later say that the science section is untrustworthy because there's fiction in the fiction section, that it all has to be one thing. Either all has to be true or none of it is true. And so thinking about the text as a library is really thinking about the genres of scripture, some of which is historical, some of which is mythic.
So I bring those approaches together.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: Well, I would love to get into the text itself. And hear from you if there are any particular scriptures or stories about women specifically that you think have been misunderstood. I mean, I'm sure the list is long or underrepresented, misrepresented.
And where do you see that?
And how have you maybe used Midrash? Or you talk about the prism of the womanist perspective. Any stories come to mind?
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Certainly, I think it would be remiss to not say that I have done that in two volumes of womanist Midrash. Yes, they're there. But of those characters and stories, the one that comes to mind with your question is Bathsheba. And the notion that is still articulated.
I got a Facebook inbox where the clergyman said, Dr. Gaffney, I told my bishop that I was sure Bathsheba was raped. And he told me absolutely not. It was impossible.
And I just wanted to hear from you, am I wrong? You know, of course you're not wrong. And so that story has often been presented as adultery.
Adultery requires consent.
I walk my students through a reading practice called close reading. You can think of it like lectio divina for people who have that practice, but in principle, it's reading phrase by phrase. And I often say punctuation of punctuation. So if there's a comma, just stop. And a close reading where you take in the words individually rather than. Yeah, yeah, I know this story. You see that David sent armed men to take her. That's not how adultery works. It also says, depending on your translation, that he lay her, even though there's a little preposition. And I actually use lay with her this time, because that's how it's more widely understood. But it would be appropriate to translate as he lay her, he did a thing to her. And the most important piece in that story is that when God gets outraged about this, God sends the prophet Nathan to show David he's wrong. God does not condemn Bathsheba. God does not send Nathan to rebuke Bathsheba. All of the story about sin and transgression is rooted in David. And for people who know the Hebrew Bible, that is often very harsh with women. I put it this way. The text would not refrain on calling a woman a whore or an adulteress, because there is plenty of that labeling, some of which is in fact, not valid. But so the way that the text and God in the text and the prophet in the text treat David but not Bathsheba, those things together make it clear that this was a sexual assault. Plus, we also know that the culture of monarchy is that when the king says, come and do this, there's no option to say no. That power differential is so overwhelming.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: I'm curious how your students are practically applying this in their work. You talk about having a student who is studying theology because she has a character in a book she's writing. You are also training chaplains and other clergy people. How does this hermeneutic approach to Scripture, what does that say about women's liberation?
[00:26:59] Speaker A: Now, many of them are teaching in church. They're teaching children, they're teaching youth, they're teaching adult Bible studies. And the great work, as it were, of mine that I pass on to my students is eradicating biblical illiteracy. The application process, process goes to every level, not just in our religious spaces, because I do teach Jews as well. I have taught in rabbinic college. Is that if people, the people taught by my students, have a better understanding of the text, one that's not authoritarian and one that's not rooted in binaries, good, bad, then the people that they're teaching, some of them will be national leaders. They will run for office, or they may already hold office.
And then their policies and the morality of their policies won't be based in biblical ignorance.
And as a result, beyond quite harmful. As we have seen, theological teachings such as love of neighbor doesn't apply to the immigrants of many colors and cultures at our border because love of neighbor only applies to our community. That's a teaching that's out there. Another is that heaven has gates because not everyone gets in. So we get bad policy, bad social and governmental policy rooted in bad theology.
And I do say I aim to change the world. I aim to have people think differently about the text and then apply that in their lives, in their relationships. Many people know the verse. Many women are indoctrinated in the verse, wives, be submissive to your husbands, but they skip the verse that says, husbands and wives be submissive to each other. And so if you have two marriage paradigms in the text and one is domineering and one is egalitarian, what does it say about you if you choose the domineering, when egalitarian is also scriptural and inspired by God in the way that Scripture functions in the church, those are the applications for me. Big. I do have a student who's a legislative aide, and one of the things he's doing is fighting the Texas abortion laws. Right now, they're talking about prosecuting abortion providers in other states. If they service Texas women.
They're criminalizing having Plan B in your possession when I go to the gynecologist and I get that long list of things I have to acknowledge knowledge of. One of them that I now have as a person who lives in Texas is the notice that my practice will give my gynecological records to the state if they ask.
So that's literally fighting the fight. And his theology is why he has that position, why he feels called.
So that's one way. The second question you asked is about the application of womanism in particular.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: I was really just curious, kind of following out about, like, this is a very general question about, like, how this approach to reading the Bible and learning to read the Bible this way, how does that play a role in the liberation of women? I think you have really answered that in a lot of ways. Like I. I've heard you say the quote, the language you use about God tells me what you think about me.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: And from hearing what you are talking about today, the. The way you read the Bible, the way you understand stories, David and Bathsheba tells me what you think about me. And I would love to hear you.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: Speak more on that liberation of women. It's not a category that I write in, but perhaps this will get to your question that as we understand that these texts are not literal, that there was no notion of literal writing in the worlds and cultures from which these authors emerged. And the text cannot be literal if it's not in its original language because things change in translation because of the differences in contemporary languages. And so when you have those things as a base understanding, then you don't have an argument, an argumental point to say, well, women are cursed because Eve ate the apple. Dude, there's no apple in that story.
But also when God gets around to saying that there's something sinful in the world, in this new created world, it's not Eve, it is Cain murdering Abel. That is the first use of sin in the Scriptures. It's not applied to the Eve story. And in the Eve story, the ground is cursed, but she's not cursed. The multiplication of her pregnancies and her labors is not. You're going to be in labor a long time now. And before that you could just pop one out by sneezing.
It's that she's going to have multiple labors because the world is harsh and because children died at birth and in their tiny years so often. It's a description of the world in which the people live and a story about how it got to be that way. A close reading of that story recognizes that if God created everything. God created that serpent. How is the serpent crafty, sneaky? In Eden, before anything goes wrong, God planted a trickster in their Eden paradise. What is that?
So a question I often have my students answer is, who is the God in this text? Is this a compassionate God? Is this a wrathful God? Is this a trick playing God?
Is this a judge? Is this, you know, a poet? Is God a poet? Is God a sculptor? Like, who is God? And how is God different in the next book, in the next chapter, in the next story? So we start to understand that all kinds of things are happening in that story. But what Genesis is not is a recipe for how to build the world. If you happen to have divine power.
[00:34:48] Speaker C: Or one might say power, period, that you interpret as divine right, that's because that's what we tend to do.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: Well, that's, that's actually not what I meant. I meant that for people who will say it's literally true, well then a divine being with world creating power could just do that. Like that's not the purpose of Genesis, Just as the texts and stories are not always, well, you do what all of these biblical characters do. That's how you should live your life because it's in the Bible. So I'm saying that the creation epic is not about, well, humans can't do this, but there's another divinity out there. They could absolutely do it. Because this is a literal description of how to set up people and how to set up a planet, et cetera. That was what I meant.
[00:35:42] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you for that clarification. It occurs to me, based on some of what we've already talked about, that speaks to part of the problem with a one dimensional literal reading of the text is that every kind of power is evident in the text and attributed one way or another to God. And so whatever power I happen to have or gain or attain, it's very easy for me to rationalize whatever I want to do with that, using the text. If I read the text in that sort of one dimensional literal way.
And I appreciate you bringing up this question, who is the God that's depicted in this text? Or how is God depicted in this text? If I could, I'd love to read a quote from you. It's from your conclusion to the wisdom commentary on Nahum Habakkuk and Zephaniah. And so I love this bit at the end.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Oh yes, my best selling book.
[00:36:38] Speaker C: That's right, that's right. New York Times bestseller. It should be. I love this quote from the conclusion. You Say, the recent proliferation of superhero movies with characters that sometimes do as much harm as good suggests that people are hungry for stories of superhuman avengers to set the world to rights. And strikingly, those heroes are often deeply flawed, even antiheroes, immoral or amoral characters who perform heroic or even moral deeds while leaving carnage in their wake. And then you just drop this sentence, in Zephaniah, God is both monster and hero. And I love that. I love how you tease that. You really do tease it in the conclusion. You don't really like, unpack it a lot.
But I'm a fan of David Pinchansky, who has written about the monstrosity of God. And I think one of the reasons why that's so helpful is because it gets at what you, I think, brought up when you said, I teach my students to ask the question, question, who's the God being depicted in this passage? And so thank you for that, number one. I'd love to hear you talk a bit about what you mean by God being the monster and the hero in Zephaniah or in other texts.
And I would like to maybe connect that, if you think this works, I'd like to connect that to this idea that the text is a discourse that is at odds with itself all the time. And you know that the authors of scripture are in a discourse with each other, often a heated discourse about who God is and you know, what God is.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: So God is monstrous. In texts where God is a world eater, a planet killer, we would say today, when that level of punishment is brought down on an entire people because a leader made a bad decision or practiced bad religion, right, that the consequences are no longer like in the wilderness. But even then, that was monstrosity. You violated these principles and the earth is going to swallow you up. Also your wife and your children. Doesn't matter how old they are, just killing them all.
That's monstrous. When God tells Moses in numbers to just annihilate the Midianites, I don't want them anymore. I know your wife is Midianite. Then the text is very silent about what happens in Moses household. And God continues, well, you know, if you see a girl, well, first kill the men and boys, including the baby boys. Get the babies. Kill them if they're boys. And if you like one of those women, just take her. And then in a sort of bizarre set of details. Well, because it's not going to go over well with her. And this is now quoted material. Give her a month to mourn her mother and her father. After that you can penetrate her. Bibles frequently say go into her, but it's sexual penetration, but also at that time cut down her nails. That's a very specific detail to facilitate rape and shave her head. That's meant to humiliate her humble hero dehumanizer in the culture. So God is giving specific instructions on murdering babies and kidnapping women for sexual servitude and keeping them in what I'm going to call a dungeon.
That's monstrous. But then you have the God who is tender and compassionate and what was a hero heroically delivers all the people of Jerusalem when the Assyrians come. And it's considered a miracle in the biblical text. And as a scholar looking at it, it's somewhat miraculous because there's no good reason why a mighty army like the Assyrians, who were known for such viciousness and violence that at one point Hezekiah paid them a ransom, gave them every bit of gold and silver he had, and then he went to the temple and scraped the silver off the doors to pay them off.
Because in a town called Lachish, they had come through. And we have these bas relief people may know from museum visits. It's basically a three dimensional plaque, a carving, a sculpture where the characters sort of lean out at you. And there is a panel of the Torture of the Israelites, where they are cut down to the bone and the flesh peeled off of them while they're alive and they are lynched. And then their bodies are placed on not very sharp wooden poles so the gravity will slowly push the body down and penetrate the person while they're alive. That technique was picked up by the character behind the Vlad Dracula stories.
The actual warrior used that Assyrian technique. So that they come to Jerusalem in 701. The biblical explanation is that they hear that they're about to be attacked on their other flank by this brilliant Egyptian tactician, Tir Haka, and they're like, well, forget about these people, we have to go over there.
Historically, we don't know what all of that was, but they just poof and left. Rather than sack the city, take gold, food and resources, and then be strengthened to apply their enemy. So that's a very heroic decision. And in fact it changed the shape of Israelite theology because there was this idea that Jerusalem was inviolate, that no one could come into Jerusalem, that it was protected by God. So when the Babylonians did come in, they fell apart theologically. They needed to figure out what their religion is, a modern word, but what was their way to go forward. They couldn't sacrifice, they couldn't go to the temple. And God was not Goding, as we say in the culture. And it was Ezekiel who put a theological framework around it that God had left the temple because of the people's sin. So God in fact was not defeated. And then the prophets, you know, find ways for the people to come back to God and God to come back to the people. So those are some of those kinds.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Of stories because we have been talking about the monstrosity of God. I have to ask, I've been thinking a lot lately about the ways that scriptural texts, not just in Christianity but in any religion throughout time, seems to always be co opted by those who are in power and want to stay in power again. That's a huge theme throughout the history of Christianity as well. And I'm curious about how you navigate this tension between honoring ancient Christian traditions with the presence of that and calling for transformation in church practices, given that so much of Christian tradition has been co opted to reinforce those in power.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: We start by reading what's actually in the text and taking it seriously. So if you start your study of the Christian Testament with Romans 16, you will see that nearly half of the leaders that Paul is addressing, leaders in the church, arguably pastors, if the church is in their home, are women. And he calls them his co worker and his co laborer, as he does with Timothy later. And he mentions a woman named Junia, chief among the apostles. And then we talk about why old Bibles like the King James have Junius, when that's not even a name that you can find in any ancient Roman records. And that the feminine name was changed to a masculine form so that there would not be a female apostle. So if we start with the text tells us more than we think we know. And people have resisted the text to the point of changing it while still saying it's immutable and infallible, then we have a foundation on which to go forward into the world in which our churches are set up. So we can start there, but we can also, and this is really important, and churches don't do this as a rule. Look beyond the text that includes the archaeological record.
So can women be elders or leaders? Were they leaders in the synagogue? When a leader of the synagogue brings the little boy, the child to Jesus and that word for leaders, synagogue is arche synagogus. A colleague who's now a friend to me, Bernadette Bruton wrote a whole book on women leaders in the synagogue. And I was curious, like what's her evidence. What are you doing? Well, just like we have engraved things in our churches and plaques, pastor's wife, gift of the Brown family. They have their surviving plaques of women with the title Arche Synagoga, woman leader of the synagogue, and Rebecca the elder. And so she just digs them all up, takes photos of them and presents them to the public. So when we're talking about, people say, oh, well, the world in which Jesus came from, well, actually it was a little more gender diverse and women had a little more power. And these are at the same time as the early church, which means that the church was working and organizing itself in a time where there was female leadership in its sister religious tradition, or maybe mother religious tradition, rabbinic Judaism, and. And churchmen made a point of eradicating that. Just as there was a movement of women prophets, they eradicated them. But if we look at, say, records from Roman Catholicism, early Catholicism, then we have women who have the authority of bishops and all kinds of things.
There's a physical image, a carving of Theodosa, Episcopal, right, Theodosia, the woman bishop. That carving was savage. The hair was cut short, just hacked off of the sculpture so that it would look more male. But now it looks like a cross dresser because the clothes are female. And I don't mean cross dresser derogatorily, but it mix and match. And then the name was like recarved. So the last letters that put a masculine ending on the name are not the same font as the rest of it. So that thing is a mess. And by all of those alterations proves that there were women bishops and at some point someone decided that the memory of them should be erased. So when we look to resources outside of the church, we can talk about what's happening historically and then look at what the writers of Scripture are doing in that very same world.
[00:49:45] Speaker B: Thank you for that. I've heard you call it a conspiracy and biblical translation, this reduction that we see and are finding ourselves, you know, having to continually recover. So thank you for answering that.
[00:49:59] Speaker C: We've talked a lot about how the text and recognizing the plurality of the text reveals something about the authors and the way we read it and interpret it reveals something about us. I wonder, given all of that, what you think the text still does reveal about God.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: For me, the most enduring and significant portrait of God in the text is the Immanuel concept that God is with us. In all of the terrors and travails of ancient Israel, God remained with them. And the other part of Ezekiel's theological reframing was that God left the Holy Land, God went into exile with God's people. So when Ezekiel says, look, I saw this, this chariot and the wheels and the eyes and the things, he's saying, this is the real deal on which the cherub chariot in the temple was based. You know, that was the sculpture. This is the, the thing. And it moves and it does all this stuff. And so he says, and I saw it by the river Khabar. I saw it in Babylon. God came to Babylon.
And speaking to God's prophets, sending messages to God's people. So whatever horror we find ourselves in, God is with us. And the text communicates that over and over.
Every time God, you know, threatens to just smash the earth and start over or even begins doing some ravaging, you know, God relents.
There's promise and threat about one of these days I'm going to come back and I'm, I'm really going to do it. But until that time, God remains with us.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: Thank you listeners for tuning in to today's special bonus episode. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it's YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, we don't want you to miss the rest of season 10. And speaking of what's next, next Monday, we are kicking off a powerful two part conversation with Reverend Teresa Terry Hord Owens. She is the general minister and president of the Christian Church or the Disciples of Christ in the US And Canada. And she is actually the first person of color and only the second woman to lead the denomination. And if you didn't already know, Oceanside Sanctuary is a part of the Disciples of Christ denomination. So we are especially excited to welcome her to the podcast. We can't wait to share this conversation with you and we'll see you next week.
