Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters

A Historical and Biographical Guide

Taylor, Marion Ann

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441238672
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Référence biblique

Word Guild 2012 Canadian Christian Writing Award Honorable Mention, The Grace Irwin Prize (2013) 2012 Book of the Year Award, Foreword Magazine The history of women interpreters of the Bible is a neglected area of study. Marion Taylor presents a one-volume reference tool that introduces readers to a wide array of women interpreters of the Bible from the entire history of Christianity. Her research has implications for understanding biblical interpretation--especially the history of interpretation--and influencing contemporary study of women and the Bible. Contributions by 130 top scholars introduce foremothers of the faith who address issues of interpretation that continue to be relevant to faith communities today, such as women's roles in the church and synagogue and the idea of religious feminism. Women's interpretations also raise awareness about differences in the ways women and men may read the Scriptures in light of differences in their life experiences. This handbook will prove useful to ministers as well as to students of the Bible, who will be inspired, provoked, and challenged by the women introduced here. The volume will also provide a foundation for further detailed research and analysis. Interpreters include Elizabeth Rice Achtemeier, Saint Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine Mumford Booth, Anne Bradstreet, Catherine of Siena, Clare of Assisi, Egeria, Elizabeth I, Hildegard, Julian of Norwich, Thérèse of Lisieux, Marcella, Henrietta C. Mears, Florence Nightingale, Phoebe Palmer, Faltonia Betitia Proba, Pandita Ramabai, Christina Georgina Rossetti, Dorothy Leigh Sayers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, St. Teresa of Avila, Sojourner Truth, and Susanna Wesley.

Achtemeier, Elizabeth Rice (1926–2002)

Elizabeth Rice Achtemeier was born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, on June 11, 1926. Her strong faith and her love for the church were instilled in her by the example of her mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and by the worship and Christian education offered at the First Presbyterian Church of Bartlesville. The church was the center of the family’s life. Particularly meaningful to the young Elizabeth were the hymns and music of the church, through which, she recalled, she came to know the language of faith. She also developed an appreciation for good preaching and sound biblical scholarship at an early age. Faith, she learned, was “to be informed by sound and diligent learning” (Not Til I Have Done, 11), a commitment that shaped her life and her career as a biblical scholar.

Achtemeier was raised with a belief in the equality of women and was supported by her parents in her academic pursuits. She completed her undergraduate work at Stanford University, where she was encouraged to attend seminary by a university chaplain whom she credited with shaping her religious thought and her academic future. In the fall of 1948, Achtemeier entered Union Theological Seminary in New York with plans to become a Christian educator. After some congregational experience, however, she discerned a call to ordained ministry. She noted the influence on her life of many outstanding theologians and church leaders who taught at Union Seminary in the mid-twentieth century, including Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, John Bennett, Paul Scherer, George Buttrick, and James Muilenburg.

While a divinity student at Union, Elizabeth Rice met Paul J. Achtemeier, a fellow student. They married on her birthday in June 1952 and became partners in marriage and in scholarship, raising two children and coauthoring several articles and books. Together they traveled to Europe on fellowships to study with Gerhard von Rad in Germany and Karl Barth in Switzerland. Barth’s teaching on the Word of God in Jesus Christ and transcendence in Scripture inspired Achtemeier’s own lifelong emphasis on the Word of God, especially as it is made manifest in preaching. After returning to the United States, Achtemeier entered the PhD program at Columbia University in conjunction with Union Theological Seminary, focusing her work in the area of Old Testament, under the direction of Professor James Muilenburg, who had inspired her academic interest and her commitment to “solid scholarship with revelatory insight into the Word of God” (Not Til I Have Done, 40).

While completing her doctoral work, Achtemeier joined her husband on the faculty of Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where she taught Old Testament as a visiting professor. She also traveled to teach at Gettysburg and Pittsburgh seminaries. As she moved from teaching Old Testament theology to content, she adopted the methodology she had learned under Gerhard von Rad in Heidelberg, “dividing the Old Testament into three Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) units, each with its own major theological testimony” (Not Til I Have Done, 81). She was thereby able to organize and teach the vast amount of diverse material found in the Old Testament. In the process of working with Old Testament texts, Achtemeier also discerned a pattern of promise and fulfillment in the activity of God as revealed in both the Old and New Testaments. On examining specific texts more closely, the Scriptures became for her “a unified story” that defined much of her future work as a biblical scholar. Her understanding of God’s ongoing divine activity by means of the continuity of both Testaments was set forth in her first book, The Old Testament Roots of Our Faith.

In 1973 the Achtemeiers moved to Richmond, Virginia, where Paul joined the all-male faculty of Union Theological Seminary as a professor of New Testament. Despite gender bias and an unwritten policy forbidding the hiring of faculty wives, Elizabeth was offered an appointment as a visiting and, later, adjunct professor of Old Testament. The need on the faculty at the time, however, was for a homiletics professor, and Achtemeier was asked to serve as a visiting professor of homiletics. She had recently published what would become one of her most popular works, The Old Testament and the Proclamation of the Gospel, making her the ideal choice for the appointment. She welcomed the opportunity, having embraced the field of homiletics as the ultimate venue for her biblical work, and she focused many of her subsequent publications on various aspects of preaching.

Achtemeier’s joint appointment in Bible and homiletics led to one of her greatest and most important contributions to the field of biblical scholarship: bridging the worlds of biblical scholarship and Christian preaching. Throughout her life, Achtemeier had been inspired by good preaching and came to see its importance for the life and work of the church. Because of her belief in the centrality of preaching, she lamented what she perceived to be a decline in the quality of preaching in many churches by the 1970s. In The Old Testament and the Proclamation of the Gospel, she addressed what she discerned to be one of the primary reasons for that decline: the loss of the Bible and a disregard for biblical authority in the church. Mainstream Protestantism, she lamented, had strayed from its biblical foundations, resulting in preaching that was little more than feel-good therapy or personal opinion, worship that reflected the congregation and its culture more than the Bible and the heritage of the church, and pastoral ministry shaped by the ideas and practices of secular psychology and social agendas. “The Bible is that which creates the church,” she stated in an interview in 1989. “It is that story that sustains the church’s life. As soon as the church wanders away from the biblical story, it ceases to be the Christian church. It becomes something else—a social society, a good works agency, an ideological group, etc.”

Part of the reason for the loss of the Bible in the church, Achtemeier maintained, was Christianity’s abandonment of the Old Testament. Restoring the Bible and its story to a central place in the church meant acknowledging the whole story, including the Old Testament, as necessary for the life of the Christian church. The Old Testament’s understanding of God and God’s activity “forms the basis of the New Testament’s view of Jesus Christ and his church,” she wrote in The Old Testament and the Proclamation of the Gospel. “When the church lost the Old Testament, it therefore lost the Bible—and the Christian faith—as a whole,” leaving it “to carry on its life apart from the totality of its Scripture” (44). To that end, the majority of Achtemeier’s interpretive work was focused on the Old Testament and its use in Christian preaching.

Achtemeier entered the professional worlds of both the church and the academy at a time when feminism was on the rise. She played an interesting and important role in the evolving debate over feminist theologies and approaches to Scripture. After years of encountering feminist ideology, she wrote her definitive statement on feminism in an article for the journal Interpretation: “The Impossible Possibility: Evaluating the Feminist Approach to Bible and Theology” (1988). She concluded that “there is no one feminist approach to Bible and theology,” a field that embraces a multitude of views and is constantly changing (45). The question, she stated, was “not if women should enjoy equal status, personhood, and discipleship in the church but how that God-given freedom is to be gained—or perhaps better, regained.” She affirmed the work of biblical scholars in the 1970s and 1980s showing evidence in Scripture that women “enjoyed equal discipleship and service in the company of Jesus and in the earliest New Testament Church” (46). Over the centuries of the church, much of that freedom had been lost, she observed, making the question not one of “if women should enjoy equal freedom in Christ but how to reclaim it. How can the church in our time become the whole people of God? How can it be the one Body of Christ in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female?” (46).

The question of “How?” is the point at which Achtemeier diverged from other feminist scholars. She acknowledged the discrimination against women that persisted to some degree in all Christian communions, even those that ordained women as clergy, but the remedy for that discrimination lay in a deeper look at the Bible rather than in noncanonical resources such as personal experience or non-Christian religious traditions. She condemned the feminist approach that abandoned the authority of Scripture and claimed the Bible to be “a totally androcentric book, compiled and interpreted through the centuries solely by men, and therefore useless for evaluating feminist positions” (“The Impossible Possibility,” 48). She also feared that in such an interpretive stance, “the basis for deciding what is or what is not the Word of God has been shifted from the givenness of the canonical whole to the subjective position of the reader” (49). Such a “standpoint-dependent” theology is open to distortion, she believed. One the one hand, “When our own experience is the criterion, what overcomes our tendencies to self-interest, to pride, to rationalization, and to sin? What becomes the measure of what is just and unjust?” On the other hand, “there is a ‘givenness’ to the canon. It has been assembled and handed down to us; it contains words that stand over against us and judge us; and we have to come to grips with it,” including its demands and call to obedience (51).

Countering the claims of some feminist scholars, Achtemeier argued that the texts they sought to “exorcize” from the Bible were neither as numerous nor as problematic as those scholars portrayed them to be. The Pauline strictures against women’s participation in the church found in 1 Cor. 14, she maintained, “are clearly contradicted by his assumption in 1 Corinthians 11 that women will prophesy and pray in worship, and chapter 14 is therefore historically conditioned.” Another seemingly problematic text, Eph. 5, was certainly “written out of a patriarchal setting,” but it “overcomes its own culture with the love of God: Husband and wife are to be subject to one another in Christ, acting toward each other as if toward the Lord (symbolized for the husband in Christ’s body, the church) and rendering to each other that sacrificial love with which Christ loves his own” (“The Impossible Possibility,” 53). There is nothing demeaning in that portrait, Achtemeier wrote. Texts about women found in the Pastoral Epistles “reflect the struggle of the church to set its own house in order, in the face of Gnostic asceticism and libertinism.” The “weak women” in 2 Tim. 3:1–9 had been led astray by gnostic teaching. The portrayal of women in that text “vividly illumines the problems that the church was up against, if it does not excuse the surrender to patriarchal culture that the church adopted” (53).

Rather than “throwing out portions of the canon,” especially in an age when many have questioned biblical authority and abandoned the Scriptures, Achtemeier advocated accepting the Bible as a whole and applying “the Reformation principle of letting the Scriptures interpret the Scriptures to understand rightly any particular passage” (“The Impossible Possibility,” 53). She maintained that at the very beginning of the sacred history, there is the affirmation of female equality: “our equal creation in the image of God, our mutual helpfulness and companionship with our mates, and the affirmation that male domination over female is the result of our sin.” At the end of that sacred history in Jesus Christ, “there is the defeat of that domination and the ringing affirmation that we are all one in our Lord, an affirmation acted out so vividly in Jesus’ own attitudes and actions toward every sort of woman” (52). Christ is “the final reinterpretation of the whole sacred history” (53), making the ultimate message of the Bible a “liberating message, in which in fact countless Christian men and women have found their one source of true freedom in the service of their Lord” (54).

In addition to her contributions to the fields of biblical scholarship and homiletics, Achtemeier sought the Bible’s aut...