Author Archives: christa

by Amber L. Griffioen

In Book I, §44 of her allegorical masterpiece, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 13^th-century German theologian Mechthild of Magdeburg presents the reader with a dialogue in which the soul, depicted as a woman of noble birth, longs to dance with her youthful suitor and potential bridegroom (a.k.a. Christ) in the garden. Her male chamberlains, the five senses, instruct her to dress herself in the traditional female virtues – the “chemise of gentle humility”, the “white dress of sincere chastity”, and the “mantle of good reputation” – before entering the garden to search for her lover, and she obliges.

Yet after hearing the song of the “birds of holy knowledge” and dancing “a splendid dance of praise” with the personifications of the theological virtues she has summoned to her side, the bride’s own tune begins to change. When her overly-sensitive^[1] chamberlains try to get her to “cool down” from the heat of the dance of knowledge, she rebukes them. In response to their “helpful” suggestions that she stop and refresh herself with chastity, confession, apostolic wisdom, martyrdom, and “holy austerity”, the soul notes that she has already suffered enough in her life and has been “martyred so many a day”. She claims that she has already attained the requisite theological wisdom for the journey and that this wisdom will be her sole (and soul-) guide. She even rejects her stewards’ sensual offer to suckle from the “supernatural milk” of the Virgin, asserting that nursing is for babies and that she is a “grown-up bride” who requires an adult lover. “Leave me be,” she tells them. “You understand not what I mean. I will drink for a while the unmingled wine!”

The senses, still playing the role of paternalistic bodyguard, warn that without them the soul will surely go blind and will not be able to “survive for even a moment” in the fire of the “divine breath”. But the soul is not to be dissuaded. She calmly replies that “a fish in water cannot drown” and that she is created with all that she needs to encounter the Divine: “God has made all creatures to live according to their nature,” she tells them. “How, then, am I supposed to resist my own?” She wonders aloud whether her guardians might not have ulterior motives – “Perhaps you don’t even want me to experience him?” – but nevertheless patronizingly assures them that, despite taking leave of her senses for the time being, she will still have use for them when she returns from her rendezvous.

The soul then enters into the “hidden bedchamber of the pure Godhead”, where she is instructed by her bridegroom to take off her clothes. When asked for an explanation, Christ tells her, “You are so completely en-natured in me that nothing more must come between us”. She should thus “set aside her fear and shame and every external virtue” and instead feel the “noble longing” and “unending [groundless] desire” that is most internal to her. Christ then “gives himself to her, and she gives herself to him” in mutual love, and there arises a “holy stillness” and intimacy that both desire.

*  *  *  *  *

OK, so why am I giving the SparkNotes version of a story that, to the average reader, might look like nothing more than a piece of 13^th-century Jesus fan fiction? Well, in addition to being quite the medieval page turner, I think Mechthild’s story can provide the occasion for a few reflections on what the inclusion of women and minority voices can mean for philosophical theology as a discipline.^[2] If one thinks, as I do, that theology is a dynamic, living discipline, then it is worth asking how such inclusion might transform the discipline in ways that both speak to our present concerns while remaining grounded in its history.

Let’s begin with Mechthild herself. Those who have heard of the Beguine author may have been surprised to see me characterize her in the opening paragraph as a theologian. True, Mechthild probably did not know much Latin beyond the liturgy, meaning that even if she had access to theological and philosophical sources, she could not have read most of them without assistance. She certainly did not enjoy the kind of scholastic theological training that would have been available to her medieval male contemporaries (including Thomas Aquinas, whose Aristotelian views on women as defective and misbegotten babymakers, incapable by virtue of their sex to represent the image of Christ, don’t exactly hold up as well as much of his other theology^[3]). Instead, Mechthild’s work is usually classified under the heading of ‘mysticism’, since the entire work is an expression of her religious visions, her continuing sense of God’s presence, and what she has learned from reflecting on her revelations.^[4] But the term also unfairly serves to push thinkers like Mechthild to the margins of Christian thought and to largely exclude them from the domain of the “serious”, the “systematic”, and the “philosophical”.^[5] This marginalization is exacerbated by the fact that Mechthild wrote in the vernacular Middle Low German and employed diverse non-scholastic literary genres like courtly-love poetry, allegorical dialogue, hymns and prayers, and first-personal testimony.

Yet Mechthild’s contemplative work displays significant theological erudition and philosophical nuance, and although The Flowing Light of the Godhead is not structured like a scholastic summa or a quaestiones disputatae, it is another kind of theological and rhetorical treatise – an extended, intimate reflection on the nature of the Trinity, the Incarnation, Christian eschatology, and the relationship of human beings to the Divine. It might look to us today like a harlequin romance written for randy Christian noblewomen, but the fact that The Flowing Light was translated into both Latin and Middle High German and distributed throughout Germany and beyond indicates that her work was taken to have value for both scholastic and monastic readers. Indeed, Mechthild’s vernacular text is encoded in a rich theological symbolism – one with which medieval readers would have been familiar. In fact, the trope of the soul as female (represented simultaneously as sister, mother, and bride of Christ) was a symbolic with which devout men and women were invited to identify. Even Mechthild’s overt erotic imagery was not overly unorthodox for the period (although it does seem to have been edited into a PG-13 version for the Latin translation).

At the same time, despite Mechthild’s continuity with the theological and literary traditions of her day, there is also a subversiveness to her work. Like many female (and quite a few male) authors of the period, Mechthild repeatedly emphasizes the importance of humility and her own human wretchedness. But she also claims for herself religious authority, insofar as it is the Flowing Light of Godhead itself that speaks directly through her. (One wonders what kinds of debates she might spark if she were writing today.) Mechthild presents herself both as her own person and as the vessel of divine illumination: Her personal voice is at the same time God’s voice; her words express the Holy Wisdom of the divine Logos. And if we look at what she is doing in §44, we see in the words she puts into the female mouth of the personified soul a “demand [for] the direct apprehension of God without any mediation”,^[6] even that of the church, the apostles, or the Virgin Mary herself, as suggested to her by the ever-dominating (male) voices of the physical world. Moreover, although the soul must initially adorn herself in the righteous “undergarments” of humility, purity, and respectability, she is told by Christ himself to throw these “external virtues” off, in order to become one with her Beloved and the “Secret Word” that he embodies. In this sense, the female soul, through illumination and the demand for knowledge, becomes free of the restrictions imposed on her by the world in the secret chamber of the Divine. This is more than a demand for knowledge: It is an affirmation that the true nature of the human soul – even that of a woman – lies beyond these extrinsic virtues in the love of God and is not bound by them. For similar (purportedly antinomian) ideas, another Beguine, Marguerite Porete, would be burned at the stake less than 20 years after Mechthild’s death.

*  *  *  *  *

So what does all this mean for philosophical theology? First, from the standpoint of the historical philosophical and theological canons, recovering – and, in some contexts, strategically centering – figures like Mechthild and her contemplative contemporaries can complicate the way we think about the history of Christian thought. It can also provide occasions for interrogating ideas about what kinds of texts belong to “theology proper” and which kinds of persons count as “genuine theologians”. It can bring other perspectives into theological focus and create opportunities for students and scholars to find new voices with which they can identify and on whom they can draw for inspiration. It can also remind us that not all theology is systematic theology as we know it – or, perhaps better put, that theological ‘systematicity’ might not always look the way we’ve been trained to expect it to look. Moreover, if it is at least part of “analytic and exegetical theology” to reflectively interpret and understand the meaning of Scripture, the doctrines of the Church, and the nature of God in ways that promote and cultivate love for the Divine and our fellow human beings,^[7] then the addition of historical contemplative literature and vernacular theology gives us an extended set of hermeneutical tools to do so.

Mechthild’s work can also remind us that philosophical theology – analytic or otherwise – is not, and should not be, detached from the religious life and the perspectives that inform it. As feminist philosophers of religion have discussed at length, there is no abstract, neutral “view from nowhere” that will simply deliver us an impartial understanding of what aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari potest [that than which nothing greater can be conceived] might be, and many of our divine imaginings – even in analytic theology – might turn out to reveal as much about us as fallible and biased human beings as they do about God.^[8] It is thus perhaps hasty and irresponsible of Christian theology to assume that the God of classical theism or perfect-being theology is (or ought to be) the only imagining of the Divine in the game. Instead, if we think it important to develop a philosophical theology that truly confesses the catholicity of the church – and to pursue the aim of genuine religious understanding as opposed to merely defending the rationality of a particular version of Christian theistic belief – we need to aim at an objectivity that is not impersonal and monotonic but instead perspectival and polyphonic. We need what José Medina has called resistant imaginings to create the necessary “epistemic friction” to be able to walk forward in faith, instead of remaining stuck in modes of imagining God that may do more epistemic and moral harm than good for all concerned.^[9]

By reading and taking seriously historical and contemporary perspectives from women, gender and sexual minorities, persons of color, refugee and migrant populations, and other communities often marginalized in “mainstream” theological discourse—by centering and making visible feminist, queer, liberation, and protest theologies and liturgies—by reflecting on what these perspectives can reveal about the way we construe both ourselves and the Divine—by inviting and including and (ahem) hiring members of underrepresented groups in academic contexts… These are just a few ways the discipline of philosophical theology can better promote the common pursuit of a fides quaerens intellectum et caritatem – a faith that seeks understanding and love. Perhaps, then, to borrow an idea from Karl Rahner, the theology of the future will be “mystagogical”,^[10] insofar as it will strive to both understand and respect the epistemic and social situatedness of our fellow human beings in their particularity, while at the same time cultivating the kind of “noble longing” and “unceasing desire” with which we can give ourselves over to each other – and thereby to the Body of Christ – in mutual, transformative love.

Amber Griffioen works on topics in philosophy of religion, value theory, and history of philosophy at the University of Konstanz. She has conducted extended research stays in Iran to study comparative mysticism and in South Africa to work on bridging the gap between Analytic and Continental philosophical theology. She also engages in research and teaching in moral psychology and the ethics of belief, Islamic philosophy, social philosophy, and philosophy of sport. She is a committed umpire voluntarist and baseball evangelist who actively advocates for the abolition of the designated hitter and the K-zone box. When not debating the finer points of theology or baseball, she can be found running road races, biking the Bodensee, or hiking the Alps with her husband.

[1] Pun intended.

[2] Even today, some women readers may also recognize in Mechthild’s allegory elements of their own experience in the earnest pursuit of religious knowledge.

[3] For more on St. Thomas’ views on women, see Prudence Allen (1997): The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C.-A.D. 1250 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans) 385-407. For an interesting feminist reappropriation of Thomas’ conception of the common good, see Susanne M. DeCrane (2004): Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press).

[4] See Frank Tobin’s (1998) introduction to his translation of the Flowing Light of the Godhead (Mawah, NJ: Paulist Press), 11.

[5] For a genealogy of the term ‘mysticism’ and its relation to power and exclusion, see Grace Jantzen (1994): “Feminists, Philosophers, and Mystics,” Hypatia 9(4): 186–206. In this vein, Christina Van Dyke often designates the women thinkers she works on as ‘contemplatives’ instead of ‘mystics’ and the tradition in which they write as ‘contemplative philosophy’. This seems perhaps a better term to classify this form of philosophical theology than Bernard McGinn’s “vernacular theology”.

[6] Amy Hollywood (2001): The Soul as Virgin Wife. Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 71.

[7] Bernard McGinn reminds us that “the great scholastic masters, such as Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, would have been horrified at the thought that the scientific scholastic mode of theological appropriation was not finally intended to increase love for God”. In Bernard McGinn, ed. (1997): Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics. Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete (New York: Bloomsbury), 8.

[8] See, for example, Pamela Sue Anderson (2005): “What’s Wrong with the God’s Eye Point of View: A Constructive Feminist Critique of the Ideal Observer Theory,” in Harriet A. Harris, Christopher J. Insole (eds.): Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 85–99; and Grace Jantzen (1999): Becoming Divine: Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

[9] See José Medina (2013): The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

[10] See Karl Rahner (1988): “Christian Living Formerly and Today,” in Theological Investigations VII (New York: Crossroad Publishing).

by Elizabeth Shively

I left an evangelical seminary to do my PhD at Emory University as a conservative young woman in a progressive institution. At one point, I wrote a paper for a directed study in hermeneutics, in which I discussed the authority of the Bible, and my professor, Gail O’Day, called me to her office for a conversation. Gail could be terrifying. She was tall, smart, articulate, and assertive. And so I was terrified. When I sat down with her, she said she was concerned about certain assumptions I had made about “God’s being at work” in the process of canonization. She didn’t conceive of it that way and genuinely wanted to hear my views. She didn’t terrify me at that moment; instead, she put me at ease. She encouraged me to articulate my ideas and she listened. In the course of the ensuing discussion, she helped me to distinguish between what I could claim in a critical argument based on empirical data and what I could not. She didn’t ask me to change who I was or what I believed, but instead challenged me to refine the critical nature of my thinking. While Gail was not my supervisor, she continued to come alongside me to name my aptitude for biblical exegesis, to call out any sloppy thinking, and press me to follow my aspirations. In seminars I took with her and classes in which I served as her teaching assistant, she modelled what it is to be an excellent scholar who happens to be a woman. I often thought, “I want to be like her” (but perhaps not so terrifying!).

There are countless others (both women and men) who have inspired, encouraged, or challenged me. But my relationship with Gail serves as a perfect example of the sort of mentoring and modelling that helped to retain and sustain me as I progressed from my masters studies to doctoral studies to teaching.

Retaining and sustaining women in theological education isn’t easy. A recent UK study reveals a female/male ratio of 60%-40% at the undergraduate level (comparable to other undergraduate degrees); a female/male ratio of nearly 40%-60% at the Masters level, 33%-66% at the PhD level, and 30%-70% at the level of academic staff. In short, women drop off through the educational trajectory. The study also compared the educational trajectory in religious and theological studies to that of other fields and found that women drop off in theological and religious studies at more than twice the rate as they do in philosophy, English, math, chemistry, or anthropology.^[1]

It is not surprising, then, that the 2018 gender distribution of Society of Biblical Studies members, according to member profiles, is 68.46% male and 21.55% female (less than 1% transgender and 9.93% no answer). Even though women outnumber men in religious and theological studies at the undergraduate level, we haven’t figured out how to encourage many capable women to continue beyond that.

Yet we need to figure it out, because not to see and hear and read women (and minority and global voices) in biblical studies and theology impoverishes us. Without them, our scholarship, and our thought and practice may tend towards the monochromatic (as the history of interpretation and university syllabi show). Yet this does not correspond to the appearance of society, nor to the appearance of the church, which are variegated. Moreover, not to see and hear and read women damages our witness in a culture that is occasionally obsessed with identity politics. Even more, we lose key capable resources for developing our thought and practice. In a world such as ours, we need all hands on deck to contribute to the church, engage the public square, and progress the gospel.

So we need to begin early to encourage women to study and continue to encourage them through the trajectory of their studies on to teaching and scholarship. From my own experience, I suggest that women and men alike work intentionally to mentor women and model for them the sort of infectious teaching and scholarship that makes them say, “That’s what I want to do!”

Elizabeth Shively is Senior Lecturer at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the Synoptic Gospels and Mark in particular. Secondary interests include pedagogy and homiletics.  

[1] See M. Guest, S. Sharma, and R. Song, R. [2013] Gender and Career Progression in Theology and Religious Studies, Durham, UK: Durham University

by Christa L. McKirland

Though not without controversy, 169 Russian athletes were allowed to participate in the 2018 Winter Olympic games on the heels of a pervasive doping scandal. While these competitors were not found culpable, they shared the incrimination of being from the offending country. Thus, they were prohibited from wearing any national identification or from hearing their country’s national anthem. Yet, they retained access to the world’s most prestigious arena of competition.

Why was it so important, not only to these athletes, but also to the International Olympic Committee, to allow them to compete? It’s simple, really. To claim an Olympic medal implies that this person is the best in the world. However, if some of the best athletes are not allowed to compete, then this calls into question the caliber of the winners and the rigor of the competition itself.

Now, imagine if half of the world’s athletes were not allowed in the Olympics.

Such has been the state of play for women in both the religious academy and the church for millennia. While in many ways different from the Olympic games (much more is at stake than medals), these are spheres of influence in which women have been barred or significantly hampered from investing in to the fullest extent.

Logia exists to help remove gender-specific barriers that inhibit women’s thriving, especially in the academy and church. Women and men deserve equal voice and equal standing within the academy; but women still face gender-related obstacles to entry, full inclusion, and advancement across the Divinity disciplines. Consequently, the excellence in these disciplines is diminished because half of the potential scholars are inhibited from contributing to these pursuits. We miss out on half of the world’s most critical thinkers contemplating, writing on, and teaching about the divine and the nature of reality.

Furthermore, historically, the Christian theological tradition has not fully recognized or valued the voices of women^[1] Yet women’s contributions to the church are just as valuable as men’s. By having women involved in various levels of service, the church is able to be the body of Christ more completely when everyone is maximizing their gifts and callings.

Fortunately, we can take practical steps to see this change. Specifically, as Logia seeks to affect the academy, here are ways you can help.

IN YOUR CLASSROOM

• Include women scholars on your course syllabus (for a developing list of women Divinity scholars, see the Logia webpage).
• Invite women to guest lecture in your class.
• Mentor women students and new faculty.
• Encourage collaborative engagement in classroom discussion.
• Establish constructive Q&A guidelines for discussion. For instance, students should ask themselves: Is this question about making me look good? Is this question about making the speaker/author look bad? Will my question benefit the majority of the class? Will my question further this discussion?
• Structure class time to include small group discussions such as the think-pair-share technique.^[2] This helps students test their voice in a lower-stakes context before speaking in a larger group.

AT YOUR INSTITUTION

• Conduct a survey of both students and faculty to assess your institutional gender climate.
• Review parental leave policies to examine if these support faculty who are parents (and ask them for their input).
• Allocate financial resources to contribute to childcare costs of affected students and faculty.
• Set up breast-feeding sites and baby changing facilities with clear signage. This helps to communicate that having a family and an academic career are not mutually exclusive.
• Schedule meetings and seminars within the regular working day.
• Allow for flexible working hours where possible.
• Install glass windows on all office doors so that meetings can occur with privacy and transparency.

You may not have a classroom or be in an academic environment, but there is still plenty you can do to help:

IN YOUR OWN LIFE

• Foster perspective-taking and active listening of those with different gendered experiences.
• Seek out friendships with those who do not share your gender or gendered experience.
• Be an advocate when someone dismisses the need for full inclusion of women in the academy and church.
• If you have a church community, encourage women’s active and visible participation in your gatherings (praying aloud, reading scripture, etc.)

These are all just the tip of the iceberg in terms of addressing gender-specific barriers. Be creative. Be intentional. And one day, we’ll be amazed at the richness of all of our contributions to the academy and the church.

*Much of the material for this post can be found on our website in a distributable format.

Christa L. McKirland is a Research Fellow in the Logos Institute. Her research proposes a pneumatologically-Christocentric anthropology based upon the significance and uniqueness of the fundamental human need for intentional dependence upon the divine presence.

[1] Unfortunately, this restrictiveness is not limited to the Christian tradition, but this is the tradition in which Logia is sourced and is most immediately seeking to affect.

[2] This is a technique wherein students are given a prompt for discussion and first think to themselves (possibly writing down their responses), then they pair up with a partner to talk through their responses, and finally, they share out with the larger group.

by Hud Hudson

I can think of many excellent reasons to encourage women to teach and to contribute to the fields of theology, biblical studies, and philosophical theology including reasons centered on the richness and value of attending to diverse voices in these disciplines – voices that have long been underrepresented to the disadvantage of us all.  I must acknowledge, however, that others have spoken far more eloquently than I can about systematic exclusion and the need for institutional change, and I am grateful that they have given those reasons the compelling articulation they deserve and that they have helped me to appreciate their force.

I would like to use my invitation to say a few words on this topic to add to the reasons that focus on benefits to the disciplines and their practitioners why I think studying and working in these fields can contribute to a life that is good for its subject.  Some aspects constitutive of our flourishing surely have to do with the fact that we are embodied – strength, fitness, health, beauty.  Some are social – admiration, respect, friendship, caregiving, mutual love.  Some emphasize will, proper judgment, or agency – achievement, skill, power, exercise of freedom and autonomy, creativity, contemplation.  Some are more passive but nonetheless excellences – joy, experiences of pleasure, aesthetic appreciation.  Some an admixture – knowledge and virtue.

In choosing a career, one makes a decision about how a great portion of one’s life – one’s time, energy, passions, and attention – will be spent day to day, week to week, year in and year out.  Working as an academic (in philosophy of religion and analytic theology in particular), I have been fortunate enough to spend the last quarter-century devoting the hours I trade in order to make a living to learning and to thinking (and to sharing with others what I’ve learned and thought by teaching and writing) about topics that seem to me and to others who share my religious orientation to be the most significant issues to which we can address ourselves.

And doing so strikes me as having contributed to my own flourishing (or to whatever degree of flourishing I’ve managed to approximate) more than any other career I can think of – certainly more than any other career that was ever for me a genuine alternative.  Although I can’t say that it has done much to make me more beautiful (it can’t do everything), my professional experiences studying and teaching and contributing to philosophy of religion and analytic theology have helped me to make improvements in nearly every category catalogued above.

Among the unsung or at least inadequately acknowledged compensations for a career in these fields are the tremendous opportunities to develop meaningful interpersonal relationships, to exercise freedom, autonomy, and creativity in one’s own scholarship and pedagogical choices, to experience a remarkable variety of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures, and (if not to become virtuous) to acquire and sustain a set of skills and capacities for self-reflection that make it much less likely that ignorance of one’s own failings is the obstacle to growing in virtue.

In short – the joys and goods to be had in pursuing this sort of vocation and the ways in which doing so can contribute to making one’s life valuable for its subject are deeply attractive.  And these are not goods or a strategy for acquiring them somehow especially suited to men.  They are goods which I would wish for my mother, my sisters, my daughters, and my female students, colleagues, and friends.

I very much hope the variety of traditional and contemporary burdens and barriers to participating in and enjoying these goods for women who are so inclined to pursue them continue to diminish.  Whereas I suppose only a very few individuals (regardless of gender) might have anything like an obligation to study and teach and contribute to these fields, it is perfectly clear that there are many women who would genuinely excel in such an occupation, who would enrich the discourse for all of us similarly engaged, and who would substantially contribute to their own happiness in the process.

On a personal note, I would like to acknowledge the impact (on me) of a woman who has persevered against difficulties both great and small to make contributions in all of these fields.  Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness and her Atonement are spectacular examples of what one can achieve in the course of such a career, a career devoted to inquiries of the highest importance (once again, a judgment that arises from my own religious orientation).  And I can’t help but think that her kindness and wisdom and quality as a friend have been nurtured and enhanced by the questions and duties and projects she has explored and pursued in the course of her professional life.  Eleonore is a personal hero of mine.  And a woman who today is on the verge of choosing to carve out a professional life in one of these disciplines may well become (and deserve to become) a hero and inspiration to future individuals tomorrow by focusing her talents and energies on pursing topics that genuinely matter while simultaneously contributing to her own flourishing in one of the best ways available to her.  That’s a fine thing to aspire to.

Hud Hudson is Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University,
where he has taught for twenty-six years. He is a recipient of the Peter J Elich
Excellence in Teaching Award and of the Paul J Olscamp Research Award.
Hud works primarily in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and
analytic theology. He is the author of The Fall and Hypertime (Oxford 2014),
The Metaphysics of Hyperspace (Oxford 2006), A Materialist Metaphysics of
the Human Person (Cornell 2001), and Kant’s Compatibilism (Cornell 1994),
and of a philosophical novel, A Grotesque in the Garden (Xerxes Press 2017).

by Anna Moseley Gissing

Each month Blogos features an article created in partnership with the Logos Institute’s Logia initiative. This month’s Logia post is by Anna Moseley Gissing. More information about Logia and additional articles are available here.

I was fresh out of college and serving as a youth director at a local church. Because I was new to the area, a friend’s parents, stalwarts in my new city, invited me for dinner. Our conversation turned toward churches, theology, and polity quickly enough, and though it was almost twenty years ago now, I still remember it vividly.

In the midst of a conversation about women in ministry, in church leadership, and what Paul really meant, my friend’s father, an elder in his own church, remarked that he thought God had called men to make hard decisions about leadership because women were too emotional.

This comment sparked in me a desire to know more. To study. To learn how and why people who loved God and loved Scripture would come to this insulting conclusion.

When I started divinity school a couple of years later, I was on my way to a PhD, eager to teach theology and convinced of my call. I fell in love with a fellow student talking theology, and we married a week after I graduated. And my plan faltered. I doubted my call.

It didn’t even cross my mind that my new husband could or should follow me to a doctoral program. It wasn’t that he refused. We didn’t consider it. We decided that we’d go where he was called to a ministry position and then I’d apply. But I’ve never applied.

I won’t go into all of the many twists and turns of this story. I know now that other women have different journeys, and some of their stories include husbands and children following them to grad school or to academic jobs.

And just a few years ago, I too had that experience. My husband and kids moved across the country for me to take a position as a book editor. Life has come full circle.

Over the years, I’ve grown more passionate about lifting up women’s voices—why? For one thing, it’s a matter of justice. For too long women have not been speaking, teaching, and writing as much as men have, especially in the theological disciplines. Those women who have ministered, written, and interpreted Scripture have not had the same influence as their male contemporaries. And God has given both men and women voices, intellect, and passion.

Second, women often see things that have been missed. I’m not arguing that all women are the same and therefore share one viewpoint. But women do tend to notice different things since their life experiences and social locations influence their readings, just like men’s do.

Because women are still a minority in the theological disciplines, their work can sometimes become marginalized and seen as “niche,” “too narrow.” But women’s ideas and research interests are not niche by default. And the more women writing, teaching, and researching in these fields, the more mainstream their ideas will be perceived to be. Sometimes it’s not a function of the ideas themselves but the perception that work by men is unbiased and ungendered while women’s work is not.

It’s true that women often enter the theological disciplines spurred on by research interests connected to their life experience. I was motivated initially by my friend’s father’s comment to study and learn more. I went back to grad school a decade later with different research questions, this time related to kinship language. I wanted to know how Jesus’ redefinition of family in Matthew 10/Mark 3 would sound for first-century listeners and what it might mean for theological reflection on family life. But does that mean that my question is too narrow because it stems from my own concerns about women’s roles in family life, in the biological family as well as in the family of God? I don’t think so.

Third, God is calling women to study, teach, and contribute to the theological disciplines, and it’s important to heed that call, despite the risks and challenges.

How can we help women heed God’s call to the theological academy? It depends on where we sit. As an editor, it’s a priority for me to publish women’s voices—to develop relationships with women scholars, to encourage them as they write, to share their work with the world. If you are a professor, make sure to call out the gifts you see in your women students. Perhaps they too have been doubting their calling and you may be the way that God speaks to them in their discernment. If you are a husband or significant other, you could volunteer to move so that your loved one can pursue this call.

No matter where we find ourselves, we can encourage women by sharing stories of others who have gone before or who are on the path to the theological academy. How have others inspired us? What has worked? What advice would we give our younger selves? Let’s share our stories far and wide.

We must also share our power. What power do you have in your academic institution, in your church, in your life? How can you share your power with another woman? Recommend a woman–pass along her name for a writing project, to an editor, for a lecture invitation. Consider asking her to coauthor with you. Invite her to present her work.

Sharing stories, sharing power, and giving voice to the research of women will help them follow God’s call to lead in the theological academy. May it be so.

Anna Moseley Gissing is associate editor at IVP Academic where she acquires and develops projects particularly in biblical studies and biblical theology. She is also the project editor for the revision of the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters. Previously she served as associate director of Women in the Academy and Professions and editor of The Well. She has more than a decade of ministry experience serving in local churches and on university campuses and is an elder in the Presbyterian church. Her theological degrees are from Beeson Divinity School (Samford University) and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She’s married to Jeff, a Presbyterian pastor and book marketer, and is parenting two elementary-aged kids. She (rarely) tweets at @amgissing.

by Carolyn Custis James

Each month Blogos features an article created in partnership with the Logos Institute’s Logia initiative. This month’s Logia post is by Carolyn Custis James. More information about Logia and additional articles are available here.

Recently a female seminarian posted the following lament on Twitter:

You’d think after all these years in seminary I’d be used to men keeping their distance, not engaging with me, etc. because I’m a woman. The truth is, I’m not. It still sucks. It still feels like rejection. And it still hurts.

Thankfully, not all men react this way. I was in the first class of female students (five of us) admitted to the same seminary she attends and, although I’ve experienced plenty of resistance since graduating, that wasn’t my experience as a seminary student.

Our arrival was uneventful. No fanfare, drumroll, or historic speeches. We just walked into the classroom and went to work. I don’t recall anyone discussing with us why the seminary was opening its doors to women or the five of us discussing it among ourselves.

To be honest, we were simply grateful to be there and assumed the seminary had done us a favor by letting women into this previously male-only bastion. Over time, however, I’ve come to realize something monumental had happened. This was more than another breeched barrier for women. Our female contributions were needed for theological reflection and practice to fulfill the mandate for which we were created.

In the field of higher education, scholars Jan Meyer and Ray Land have coined the phrase “threshold knowledge.” Threshold knowledge refers to “core concepts that once understood, transform perception of a given subject.”^[1]

Genesis 1 and 2 contain vital threshold knowledge, for this is where God is vision casting for his world and for humanity. God’s creative activity climaxes with the creation of humanity and God’s wholly unexpected decision to create human beings—male and female—as the imago dei. The Creator could not have conferred on us a nobler identity and calling than for us to be reflections of himself, to speak and act for him. Nor could he have placed before us a more demanding challenge.

As the imago dei, humanity’s first and most urgent task is to know the God who created us to become like him. This foundational enterprise stands at the center of every human life and requires significant effort from each of us—male and female. Every other human endeavor falls within and is shaped by what we learn about our Creator and how we work to represent him more faithfully and engage his purposes in the world.

It must be said, although some remain uncertain about this, the creation narrative doesn’t contain the slightest hint that responsibility for the study of God falls only or primarily on the shoulders of men. Everything God commissions at creation falls fully on the shoulders of his daughters too. The Creator prefaces the creation of the female with an unqualified statement that has bearing in every arena of human life: “It is not good for the man to be alone.”

When female scholars engage in biblical and theological studies along with men, their male colleagues will be the first to benefit. If they are willing to listen and collaborate, men will discover a richer, deeper, more robust theological discussion has just become possible. Walter Brueggemann confirmed this when he wrote in the preface of his remarkable work, The Prophetic Imagination,

I am growingly aware that this book is different because of the emerging feminine consciousness as it impacts our best theological thinking. That impacting is concerned not with abrasive crusading but with a different nuancing of all our perceptions. . . . In many ways these sisters have permitted me to see what I otherwise might have missed. For that I am grateful—and amazed.^[2]

The scholarly study of God and Scripture is not primarily for personal fulfillment, although that surely happens. Nor are such pursuits ends in themselves. They serve the church and indeed, all humanity. The whole church benefits when a diversity of scholarly minds devote their lives to Biblical Studies, Theology and Philosophical Theology and do this vital work together.

A scientist once noted, “If earth were an apple, the exploration we have done beneath the earth’s surface would not yet have broken the skin.” If that’s how far we’ve gotten in exploring this finite planet, how much more remains for us to discover about our infinite God?

With such a daunting task before us, can it be any less true today than it was in the beginning that it is not good for the man to be alone?

Carolyn Custis James (B.A. Sociology, M.A. Biblical Studies) is an activist, blogger, and award-winning author. Her books include Finding God in the Margins, Malestrom, Half the Church, and The Gospel of Ruth.She was founder and President of the Synergy Women’s Network, is a consulting editor for Zondervan’s Exegetical Commentary Series on the New Testament, and an adjunct professor at Missio Theological Seminary. She’s a member of Evangelicals for Justice and blogs at www.carolyncustisjames.com, Huffington Post/Religion, and as a Leading Voice at Missio Alliance. Her work focuses on the intersection between Christianity and twenty-first century cultural issues facing women and men globally and has earned her recognition by Christianity Today as one of “50 Evangelical Women to Watch.”

[1] Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land, “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge—Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising,” in Improving Student Learning—Theory and Practice Ten Years On, ed. C. Rust (Oxford: Oxford Center for Staff and Learning Development, 2003), 412–24.

[2] Walter Brueggemann,  The Prophetic Imagination, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), xxiv.

by Katya Covrett

Coming to work for an academic publisher fresh out of seminary, I often found myself starstruck. Not even a year earlier, I was nose-deep in the latest and greatest books in biblical-theological studies; now here I was on a first-name basis with many of the academics whose books had formed me theologically. As is likely the case for many (most?) in my generation of divinity students, the vast majority of the authors we read, much like professors who assigned them, were white men—brilliant scholars and encouraging teachers to be sure—but men nonetheless.

Sixteen years hence, the stardom has long worn off to give way to questions. How would my path have been different had there been female scholarly role models on it, whether in the classroom or on the pages of the many academic tomes I devoured? How many more women in my class would have chosen a path of teaching and writing in the fields of theology, biblical studies, or philosophical theology if we had been taught by female scholars? I wonder.

In November 2017, Dr. Ellen Stofan, director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and former chief scientist at NASA, wrote an article about women in STEM disciplines (that is, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). In what she cites as “appalling” numbers, women make up less than 25 percent of the STEM workforce in the US. “We know some of the reasons women and girls participate in STEM fields at lower rates,” she writes, “lack of encouragement, active discouragement, lack of role models, negative peer pressure and harassment. … ‘You can’t be what you can’t see.’ When asked to draw a scientist, most students draw a white man in a lab coat. The great majority of portrayals of scientists and engineers in movies and television shows has been men.”^[1]

Divinity fields are not faring a whole lot better than the sciences. NAPS (the North American Patristics Society) and SBL (Society of Biblical Literature) match STEM at 25 and 24 percent female members respectively. IBR’s (Institute for Biblical Research) 16 percent may look like a failure but must be nuanced by the society’s active support and encouragement of its existing and new female members. Half of IBR board normally consists of women and its newly elected president is New Testament scholar Lynn Cohick. In fact, knowing the makeup of the board, I was surprised by the lower actual percentage of IBR female scholars.The consistent presence of women in IBR leadership certainly gives off a different vibe than the numbers alone might communicate and IBR’s female constituency is in fact growing. And then there is ETS (the Evangelical Theological Society) with a dismal 6 percent. That speaks for itself. But too many women never even reach the level of scholarly society membership: according to research done in some UK universities, the female dropout rate between undergraduate and doctoral programs in theology and religious studies is a staggering 50 percent.

“Well, look who’s talking,” you might say if you knew me. I never intended to go into publishing; I stumbled into it on the way to an abandoned idea of a PhD in biblical studies. In retrospect, I would not change that. I am enjoying a fruitful publishing career, which will continue through and beyond my recently started doctoral work. In fact, my work in academic publishing has afforded me an opportunity to speak on behalf of and develop female academics across a broad range of divinity disciplines.

Publishers are routinely chastised for lack of women in our publications and catalogs. As a female academic editor, I am acutely aware of the imbalance between male and female authors in publishers’ catalogs in general and the Zondervan Academic catalog in particular. Having worked hard to address this problem for over a decade, I can say from personal experience that the lack of women in publishers’ catalogs is often not for lack of trying. But with as few women as enter the academy, publishers typically start with a small pool of prospective authors to begin with, and once you layer on limitations of discipline, expertise, specialization, approach, the book idea itself, or any theological parameters, you are left with a handful—at best. And the few (or any) women left are already booked up for years to come or have other priorities, commitments, or preferences. Many simply say no. The representation of women in our academy—or lack thereof—is indeed appalling. We are in a better position now than even a decade ago but not nearly where we should be. If women are to be better represented in publishers’ catalogs, it has to be a publishing vision upfront and a constant commitment in the publisher’s acquisitions strategy. Speaking for Zondervan Academic, we are constantly and intentionally seeking out qualified, capable, and willing female scholars to write and contribute.

Publishers play a key role in shaping the future of the academy, if even by the choices we make in what we publish. One often-overlooked but decidedly strategic way to shape the future of the academy is in publishing textbooks that become formative for future generations of academics. Think about it. If my own experience is any indication, students tend to adore their teachers, whether in classrooms or in books. How will this new generation of divinity students, both women and men (maybe especially men), ever learn to learn theology from women if all of their core textbooks are written by men? Face it, even today many divinity students may never have an opportunity to be taught by a female professor in person. But every class has textbooks. Strategic opportunity? I’ll say.

Strategy or not, publishers are constrained by the shape of the academy. Indeed, there are more women teaching and writing in divinity disciplines now than when I was in seminary twenty years ago, offering female academic role models and mentors my generation did not have. But if the aforementioned percentages say anything, it is that we have a lot of work to do. We need more women studying, teaching, writing in the fields of theology, biblical studies, and philosophical theology if we want our daughters to imagine what they can be and our sons to learn learning from women.

.

Katya Covrett is Executive Editor at Zondervan Academic, responsible for acquiring works in various areas of biblical-theological studies. Originally from Russia, where she served as a translator at Far East Russia Bible College, she came to the US to study the Bible and theology, stumbled into publishing, and has been part of the Zondervan editorial team now for over sixteen years. She has extensive experience acquiring and editing academic books and actively seeks to support female scholars entering and persisting in the academic publishing world. Katya also serves as an advisory board member of Logia, an initiative of the Logos Institute at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, which seeks to support women in divinity education. She has a BA in English Linguistics from Khabarovsk State Pedagogical University and an MTS in Systematic Theology and New Testament from Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. She is currently working on a PhD in the New Testament at the University of Aberdeen, supervised through Trinity College Bristol.

^[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/women-in-tech-engineering-ellen-stofan/?utm_content=bufferffa93&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

by Juliany González Nieves

Each month Blogos features an article created in partnership with the Logos Institute’s Logia initiative. This month’s Logia post is by Juliany González Nieves. More information about Logia and additional articles are available here.

She studies, and disputes, and teaches,
and thus she serves her Faith;
for how could God, who gave her reason,
want her ignorant?”

-Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Villancico^[1]                 

From Hagar naming God to Mary’s Magnificat; from Martha’s Christological confession in John 11:27 to the Syrophoenician woman who argued with Jesus; from Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, to Priscilla, teacher of preachers; from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to all the enslaved African and Indigenous women who saw God the Liberator in spite of the theological orthodoxy proclaimed during the Conquista and colonial era; from me sitting in my Barth seminary class at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to my abuela taking care of her sick neighbors in our barrio in Puerto Rico. Throughout the centuries and across the globe, women have been doing theology, formally and informally, reflecting about God and how the Godself relates to the created order in everyday life –what Cuban theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz called lo cotidiano. And although women’s contributions to the field of theology and church life are not always acknowledged and valued, there are at least three main reasons why we need more women studying, teaching, and doing theology, biblical studies, and philosophical theology.

First, without women’s (and POC’s) contributions to theology, we cannot articulate a theology that honors the catholicity of the church. 

“And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” It has always fascinated me how the Nicene Creed is constantly confessed at churches and theological institutions where the only voices that are continually heard are those of men, especially those from the Minority World. However, to truly confess the catholicity of the church requires us to move towards a theologizing that brings in the voices of women, minorities, and Majority World Christians into the conversation, not as an add-on, but as equal dialogue partners and members of the body of Christ. For it is contradictory to confess the universal nature of the church while holding tight to the structures that keep the majority of the global church outside of the rooms, classrooms, and spaces where formal theology is done. Without the contributions of women and POC to the fields of theology, biblical studies, and philosophical theology, we cannot articulate a theology that honors the catholicity of the church.

Second, theology should be done by the church and for the church and its mission. Women make up the majority of the global church.

I believe that theology is missional and should be done by the church and for the church. Interestingly, although in many countries across the globe women make up the majority of the faithful,^[2] the theology that has historically shaped our communities has been male- and Minority World-centered. And although I am against projects that seek to discard all the theological contributions that men in the Minority World have made to this date, I do believe we need to take another look at what we have inherited. For how are we hoping to help equip the church for its mission when our theologizing doesn’t even seriously consider the concerns and questions of the majority of the church? Our theology needs to ask and seek answers to those questions which emerge from our ethnic and gender identities, and socio-economic and political realities as women who are members of communities and caregivers of the earth. Therefore, in order to move towards a more robust articulation and embodiment of the faith, women have to continue taking up space and raising their voices in seminaries and local churches.

Third, it is a calling.

Lastly, it is crucial we understand that the main reason why it is essential for women to study, teach, and contribute to the fields of theology, biblical studies, and philosophical theology is that the God of the church has always been calling them to do so. For this reason, it is vital that the church and theological institutions establish practical ways to cultivate the theological mind of women and encourage them to pursue God’s call.

Philip Jenkins writes, “If you want to think of the average Christian in the world today, then think of, perhaps, a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a favela [in Brazil]…”^[3] The church is not only getting browner but it is also mainly female. It is due time for our theologizing to reflect these realities. It is time that we honor the catholicity of the church.

Juliany González Nieves is an evangélica Puerto Rican student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. Before beginning her Master in Divinity program, she earned a B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Her areas of interest include systematic theology; Majority World Christian theologies, especially Latin American liberation theologies; feminist theologies; and social justice. She describes her work as intersectional, always taking into account her liminal identity as a caribeña, trigueña, Puerto Rican woman living between the island and the U.S. mainland. She is currently doing an academic internship at the Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico. You can follow her on social media and read her blog De vuelta a lo básico.

[1] Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Villancico, or Carol, in celebration of St. Catherine of Alexandria (1692), quoted by Theresa A. Yugar, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Feminist Reconstruction of Biography and Text (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), vi.

[2] “The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World,” Pew Research Center, accessed September 11, 2018, http://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/

[3] Philip Jenkins, “The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,” in Religious Educator 8, no. 3 (2007): 113-125.

by Christa McKirland

Each month Blogos features an article created in partnership with the Logos Institute’s Logia initiative. This month’s Logia post is by Logia Director Christa McKirland. More information about Logia and additional articles are available here.

The present Logia Blog series has focused on women’s stories from the disciplines of Biblical Studies, Theology, Science & Religion, and Philosophy. The narratives have taken many forms, but the common thread throughout these stories has been: Being a woman explicitly affected each person’s decision to pursue postgraduate studies. To conclude this series, I will share some of my own story and how this has influenced my research interests and where I am today. I will also introduce the new series that will begin this September and carry through until August of 2019.

A few years ago, my mom found a Bible devotional journal of mine from when I was 9. Each page has a short passage of scripture and questions for engagement. I flipped through the pages of my pencil-scribbled responses until a note in the margins caught my eye. Given my predilection for order and rule-following (even as a 9-year-old), to see something scrawled outside the boundaries of the prescribed lines gave my 30-something-self pause. The story was about Jesus miraculously feeding 5,000 men, and right next to the description of this audience, my little hand had queried: “Where are the women and children?”

Even as a small child, I knew something was missing from this story. As my young, imaginative mind likely thought of being on that hillside, I wondered why I wouldn’t have been included in this headcount. Why were the women and children invisible?

Later, I would wonder why women never preached, were never allowed up front in the service, could not serve communion, baptize people, or even pass offering plates. As I wondered about all these things, my developing mind arrived at a singular, though misguided, conclusion: God must want women to be invisible. I didn’t know why—I just knew this is what the Bible said.

The problem was, I knew I was a leader, a teacher, and a preacher. I knew that these were gifts from God to be used for God and that curtailing them was wrong, yet somehow, so was utilizing them.^[1] This tension only grew more pronounced as I pursued a double-major in Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia. Philosophy helped me think critically about the illogic of women’s subordination while my Women’s Studies exposure helped me think of patriarchal influences and the role of power in these conversations. Simultaneously, I was serving at a local church as a youth director, teaching nearly 70 students on a weekly basis.^[2]

Inevitably, as this youth group consisted of boys and girls, the question of my continuing to teach a mixed audience began to be raised. Here, finally, my crisis came to a head. Either I could abandon my faith or abandon my calling. Thankfully, a mentor of mine recognized my plight and gave me a book expositing another interpretation. I went home and read it for six-hours straight and, for the first time, learned about a third way. A way that was true to my faith and true to my calling.

I had never read about cultural context or conceived that the interpretation of the text and the text itself were two separate things. I had always been taught that “the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” This book opened my eyes to the depth of the text and the history that surrounded it.^[3]

My crash course in exegesis and hermeneutics influenced my story in two pivotal ways. First, it revealed a faithful reading of the texts which encouraged me to pursue studying, preaching, and teaching to anyone who would listen. Second, it uncovered how little I knew about this Book that I thought I knew so well. Thus, I determined that if I was going to stake my life’s work on this interpretation of the text, I needed to learn Greek and Hebrew and pursue postgraduate Divinity education.

Furthermore, upon thinking through all the things I love to do: teaching, preaching, mentoring, and writing, a professorship made the most sense as a future career aspiration. I also knew that influencing the conservative local church would likely require having credibility in the academy. Upon pursuing a Master of Arts in Bible Exposition, I also discovered my love for Theology—especially because ideas have consequences, and theological ideas have especially potent ones. While this can be used for ill, it can also be used for good, and I began to think that I could one day be a theologian. Now, those dreams are becoming a reality as I am completing my Ph.D. in Analytic and Exegetical Theology, and directing an initiative born out of a 9-year-old’s troubled concern: Women and children aren’t invisible—we’ve always been there, and we were fed that day too.

In our new series, beginning with a post from Juliany Gonzalez, we will hear from a range of contributors speaking into a two-fold question: 1) Why is it important for women to study, teach, and contribute to the fields of theology, biblical studies, and philosophical theology? 2) What are some practical ways we can encourage women to do this?

We hope you will journey with us as we answer this question from various perspectives.

Christa L. McKirland is a Research Fellow in the Logos Institute. Her research proposes a pneumatologically-Christocentric anthropology based upon the significance and uniqueness of the fundamental human need for intentional dependence upon the divine presence.

[1] I will be forever grateful that while I received this message implicitly and explicitly from my spiritual communities, I only ever received the fullest support from my parents—my dad, a Southern Baptist minister and my mom, a successful lawyer. I am confident I would not be where I am today, pursuing all that I am, had it not been for their bold (and subversive) encouragement.

[2] I was functioning as a youth “pastor” but the church’s beliefs about what a “pastor” entailed prohibited that language from being used.

[3] In light of learning about a different hermeneutical method, I would now read the feeding of the 5,000 within its patriarchal context in which men were more societally valued. However, such a description does not imply a prescription, especially in light of the radically equalizing “Good News” of Jesus Christ (cf. Gal 3:28).

by Stephanie Nicole Nordby

Each month Blogos features an article created in partnership with the Logos Institute’s Logia initiative. This month’s Logia post is by Stephanie Nicole Nordby. More information about Logia and additional articles are available here.

To the younger among us in the academy, Dorothy Sayers’ ‘Are Women Human?’ seems at times to have been written today and at others to be written on another planet. Sayers was a novelist, poet, and classicist; she was not a philosopher or social theorist. ‘Are Women Human?’, however, is not a lecture on writing, poetry, or classics. Instead, it contains Sayers’ (rather begrudging) reflections on the nature of womanhood and the relationship between women and their occupations.

Much of what Sayers says is anachronistic: Sayers’ famous 1938 address to a women’s society includes language that shocks millennials like myself and belies current epistemological trends relating to the embodied nature of knowledge. At one point, Sayers remarks,

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say, “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.”^[1]

Some feminist epistemologists would disagree with what the aforementioned assessment entails about the nature of knowledge. Still other readers might object to the way Sayers’ essay presumes the dualisms and binaries that have so long permeated discussions of gender: Increased attention to underrepresented groups and improvements in our understanding of human biology has complicated our understanding of what it means to be male or female, man or woman, and shown that there is still so much discussion to be had about terms we have so long taken for granted.

Still, I find Sayers’ frankness and insight remarkable, especially considering that the address is 80 years old as of this year. When I stumbled across this little talk a few months into my entrée into graduate school, I was struck by the sensibleness of her central observation:

Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general. And though for certain purposes it may still be necessary, as it undoubtedly was in the immediate past, for women to band themselves together, as women, to secure recognition of their requirements as a sex, I am sure that the time has now come to insist more strongly on each woman’s—and indeed each man’s—requirements as an individual person.^[2]

Sayers’ comments were not so much directed at the feminist program of the day or what manner of activism is best.^[3] Rather, the central claim of her address is simply the unexceptional proposition that women are human beings. Sayers proceeds to give extended examples in which sexist statements or questions of gender propriety are rendered preposterous, strange, and even flatly ridiculous once individual women are considered qua human rather than, to quote D.H. Lawrence, ‘as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopædia, an ideal or an obscenity.’^[4]

The idea that I could consider myself, my interests, and my abilities as a human being, and not only as a woman, had never occurred to me. I personally cannot blame Christian teaching or even ecclesial culture since the idea that my entire existence was encompassed by this thing called ‘womanhood’ pre-existed exposure to either. (I was not raised in a particular religious tradition.) So far as I can tell, the strange philosophy that women are not quite human—at least, not the way men are human—was ambient in my surroundings, and it was absorbed by me—and at that, unquestioningly.

When I then revisited the Bible, the book that had been my favourite since I first laid my hands on one at age 11, you can imagine how differently I read it. As a young Christian, I had always related to the men in Scripture, much to my frustration. Now it made sense: They were human, like me. That, perhaps, is the appeal of my religion’s strange book, and it is an appeal that is sometimes robbed from women in a way it is given freely to men: It is God’s revelation, wrapped up in the fragile threads of human experience. It was this quality that long ago wooed me but had never before been apparent. Women are human, and the Bible speaks to us, too.

What we women do with this book is likely as varied as human beings themselves. Women are a diverse group of creatures, just as men are. They have unique experiences, ideas, and ways of interpreting the world. Their stories are multifaceted and curious, and I would not expect anything less from individuals belonging to the human race. The remark by D.H. Lawrence referenced above is quoted by Sayers in regard to this very phenomenon:

“Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopædia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.”^[5]

“Accepted as a human being!”—yes; not as an inferior class and not, I beg and pray all feminists, as a superior class—not, in fact, as a class at all, except in a useful context. We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. There is a fundamental difference between men and women, but it is not the only fundamental difference in the world. There is a sense in which my charwoman [cleaner] and I have more in common than either of us has with, say, Mr. Bernard Shaw; on the other hand, in a discussion about art and literature, Mr. Shaw and I should probably find we had more fundamental interests in common than either of us had with my charwoman. I grant that, even so, he and I should disagree ferociously about the eating of meat—but that is not a difference between the sexes—on that point, that late Mr. G. K. Chesterton would have sided with me against the representative of his own sex. Then there are points on which I, and many of my own generation of both sexes, should find ourselves heartily in agreement; but on which the rising generation of young men and women would find us too incomprehensibly stupid for words.^[6]

Sayers’ last statement is right. I might be reticent to share her essay with my colleagues in philosophy if they were looking for a rigorous argument on the subject of a woman’s right to education and occupation, as her writing would likely seem too archaic to be useful. I, too, did not draw upon Sayers’ work when contemplating whether or not to study philosophy. Perhaps this is naïve, but I hope that most American women do not need to make conscious recourse to their humanity to legitimize their pursuit of philosophy or history or many subjects in the academy nowadays.^[7]

Sayers’ words did come flowing back to me, though, when I found myself faced with the decision to study theology and the New Testament at the postdoctoral level. For all the times I turned to Scripture, relished in studying it, and was exhorted to continue sharing what I was learning with others, I had never realized that these profoundly human experiences were the most pivotal in determining whether or not I should pursue further study. My confusion about my femaleness and all that it entailed loomed so large that I risked missing the greater point. I, for one, had to remind myself that all humans stand to benefit from close engagement with theology, church history, and (for me, most of all) the Scriptures, should they be so inclined. For women like myself who eventually found their respective ways to a divinity school, of all places, Sayers’ words may still ring fresh: I find myself in graduate school because I had the good fortune to realize that I am human.

Stephanie Nicole Nordby is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at Lee University. Nordby received a Ph.D. in philosophy under the supervision of Linda Zagzebski at the University of Oklahoma. Her dissertation focused on divine predication and attributes, biblical genres and philosophy of language, and classical theism and the Hebrew Scriptures. In addition to her interest in analytic and exegetical theology, Nordby is interested in metaphysics, animal ethics, and virtue ethics. She is also working on a Ph.D. in theology at the Logos Institute, working under supervisors Oliver Crisp and Christoph Schwoebel. Her dissertation project is a book on the philosophical and systematic implications of the early high Christology movement.

[1] Dorothy L. Sayers. “Are Women Human?: Address Given to a Women’s Society, 1938.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 8, no. 4 (2005): 174.

[2] Ibid. 177.

[3] Sayers gives some passing thoughts on the status of feminist activism in 1938, and I imagine most will find her ideas relatively controversial. However, her talk is brief, and I’m sure a more thorough-going and interesting debate about the status of feminism in the 1930s can be found by more capable authors elsewhere. In any case, it is not my intent to assess the feminist movement one way or another in this short post (nor do I feel qualified to do so), so Sayers’ thoughts on the matter are not worth recounting here.

[4] Lawrence, D.H. “Give Her a Pattern.” 1968. In Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence. Kindle Edition ed. Hastings: Delphi Publishing, 2015. Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works.

[5] As I hope is obvious, by including this quote, I by no means endorse the idea that Lawrence’s characterization applies to all or even most men. (I imagine Sayers did not mean to imply this, either, but I suppose you can judge this for yourself.)

[6] Sayers, 175-76.

[7] This is not to make light of the unique challenges women face in these fields; as a woman who has completed a PhD in philosophy, I can vouch these fields are fraught with their own obstacles.