Usually, when I read an intellectually and/or spiritually stimulating Substack post, I engage with it through all the traditional channels: liking, commenting, restacking, sometimes even restacking with a note. I also often end up featuring such posts in my own writing should themes and timing happen to line up.
Every once in a while, however, I read a post which demands to be engaged with in post format because none of the other avenues will do. Anne Kennedy’s essay this past Tuesday — subtitled “In Which I think About How to Read the Bible” — was one such post.
She opens her piece, much like I have begun this one, by linking to a post that she found stimulating—albeit in a much less positive sense than I alluded to. The post in question is Sheila Wray Gregoire’s “The Egalitarian/Complementarian Debate Is Not Just an Intellectual Exercise.”
Agreement #1:
Kennedy notes that Gregoire is unhappy with Preston Sprinkle’s new book, From Genesis to Junia: An Honest Search for What the Bible Really Says About Women in Leadership, because even though she agrees with the book’s conclusions, Sprinkle “didn’t rely upon a sufficient number of women scholars.”
The book, apparently, is full of the theological argumentations of white men.
Already, it is perfectly understandable why Kennedy is exasperated with Gregoire. Gregoire’s gripe with Preston Sprinkle and, specifically, with the skin colour of the scholars he quotes would at least be funny if it were expressed with a wink and a nod. But, no, Gregoire is serious. And she is not the only who thinks like this.
I remember sitting in my grade 12 AP Literature class when my white-male English teacher proudly announced that he would only be assigning books written by black women for the rest of the school year. The man called himself a feminist and was absolutely ravaged with “white guilt.” I also vividly remember the day he made me and my classmates endure a Hannah Gadsby “comedy” special at a time when I would much rather have been watching Bill Burr.
That teacher was my first introduction to the kind of thinking which leads people to either disregard or pay attention to an idea based almost entirely on the genetic makeup of the person expressing it. It just about broke my brain. My poor, innocent self was still genuinely “colourblind” at the time. Alas, that worldview has struggled to hold up under the weight of five years living in North America amidst both left and right wing versions of identity politics.
Disagreement #1:
As much as I agree with Kennedy on the ridiculousness of Gregoire’s identity-based critique of Preston Sprinkle, I very much disagree with the next part of her essay:
I don’t want to be unkind, but I have a hard time believing that any woman alive today in any Western country, except if she lives in some kind of ethnic enclave that follows other kinds of rules, has been told that her “voice” should be silenced. I have been in both complementarian and egalitarian “spaces” and no one has ever said that to me. My goodness, is there a law against women getting online and starting a blog or a podcast or writing a book?
No, there are no laws against women writing books and starting blogs or podcasts. Thankfully so. But what Kennedy misses is that there does exist, on the other hand, many an individual who would not mind the institution of such laws. The problem, as is so often the case, lies not with systems per se but with the human heart.
Of course, the answer cannot be to police people’s thoughts. You cannot legislate morality, nor can you mandate common sense. But to claim that women never have to push back against resistance from those who long for a more oppressive age is to misunderstand what made society freer in the first place. Hint: it was not that misogyny evaporated from men’s hearts overnight.
Agreement #2:
In an effort to counter the methodology that Gregoire allegedly employs to read Scripture, i.e., “looking for affirmation and empowerment… rather than to discover the steadfast love of the Lord,” Kennedy outlines how she seeks to approach the text. “The main thing,” she argues, “is to go to the text on purpose to find Jesus” (emphasis mine). I love this take. It is nothing short of a tragedy, however, how controversial it has become.
“Go at the text on purpose searching for images, shadows, pictures of Jesus and you will find them,” writes Kennedy, “even when theologians and scholars tell you you really mustn’t do that.”
Some like to insist that the only safe typologies we have in the Old Testament are those explicitly named by people in the New Testament. So, for example, the “sign of Jonah” is ok because Jesus himself pointed it out. And obviously Isaiah 53 is fair game, and Psalm 22. And I don’t like to contradict those wise scholars who know their stuff, but I can’t help but find traces of Jesus all over the place.
Unlike Kennedy, I do not much mind contradicting the scholars who rail against spiritual and allegorical readings of the Bible. In fact, I was able to do just that when I made the acquaintance of Back to the Bible Canada’s Dr. John Neufeld at an apologetics conference a couple of weeks ago. He graciously invited me into the green room on the conference’s second day, where I wound up rubbing shoulders with the likes of Wes Huff and Nancy Pearcey as I grilled him on comments he had made during a breakout session that morning.
He had claimed that the reformers held a firm line in opposition to spiritual and allegorical readings of the Bible and that good Protestants today should do the same. I asked him if this meant he rejected Christological interpretations of Song of Songs to which he emphatically responded in the affirmative. The trouble with this view, however, is that John Calvin himself stood in full support of a Christological reading of Song of Songs.1 According to modernreformation.org:
Calvin’s view was representative of the broad agreement among the Reformers: the Song was canonical and holy, and it used figurative or allegorical terms to speak of God’s relationship to God’s people.
Disagreement #2:
Finally, speaking of scholars railing against things I hold dear, my main gripe with Kennedy’s essay was her crusade against individualism. As the Church pursues the “great work” of living into its calling as the Body of Christ on earth, Kennedy argues that it “helps not to think of oneself as an individual.”
Who we are and what we’re supposed to be doing is something that the church and, yes, even families and cultures, should tell us. And I do mean “us” and “we” in this case because the individual—I by myself—am useless at sorting out my place and position in the world God has made.
I obviously agree that Christians should live in submission to the Church as embodied in local communities by those whom God has appointed to be shepherds. My problem with Kennedy’s argument, however, is the idea that families and cultures are entitled to tell us “who we are and what we’re supposed to be doing” with our lives.
Born and bred in Rwanda, I grew up in a culture that is broadly categorized as collectivist. The collectivist aspects of my upbringing, however, only ever served to make me appreciate the virtues of individualism more than many of the Westerners I would later meet in university seemed to. If I had made a dollar every time I heard a professor at my alma mater say something negative about “individualism” (or, by the same token, something positive about collectivism), I could have pooled together enough money to constitute a legitimate scholarship.
To be clear, I understand and even agree with many of the arguments against individualism—including ones that Kennedy herself raises in her essay. For example:
The trouble is that avoiding discomfort and letting other people know who you really feel yourself to be is a fairly shallow way to live. It doesn’t satisfy the depth and breadth of the spiritual well of human need and desire.
I think this is true. But I also think that the virtues of rugged individualism are essential for a flourishing Christian life. When my family’s patriarch back home dictated that I partake in spiritually shady rituals during my grandmother’s funeral, for example, it was my mother’s rugged obedience to her Lord that prompted her to stand up to him and protect me as a result. As Jesus said in Matthew 10:
34“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. 35For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, 36and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
This is not even to mention the fact that, as much as the Lord pursued me in order to make me His own, I also have very much chosen Him. The same free will that led me to Him should not so swiftly be dismissed when it comes to the rest of my life.
And with that, I encourage you to go subscribe to Anne Kennedy’s Substack.
Erin Risch Zoutendam, “Reading the Song of Songs as Allegory with the Protestant Reformers.”
To an extent, the notion of Individualism within US culture will take care itself, or perhaps better to call it the mythologizing of individualism. We are so dedicated to it that we don't even realize that the line "to thine own self be true," was delivered in Hamlet by a blowhard who is promptly murdered in the next Act while hiding behind a curtain, and we take the line as a mantra. Of course, while most Americans idolize individualism the trend more and more is to sublimate oneself into the notion of identity, which has some sort of vague notion of a collective identity. All the while remaining devoted to the myth of individualism.
But when it comes to approaching the Bible it is important to remember that it is a text that was built to be read in community.
I have been turning over in my mind what I see as the false dichotomy of "egalitarian" vs "complementarian" as put forth by Gregoire and discussed by Kennedy. Thank you for adding your insights and perspective.
In the universal sense, all followers of Christ are complementary. We are members of one Body with Christ as its Head, fitted together by the Holy Spirit (Romans 12). I will not rehash Paul's foot vs hand illustration, but it is important for each of us to walk in the good works he designed for each of us without denigrating or vaunting our place in the Body.
Silencing others because of their sex, ethnicity, background, age is a universal, sinful inclination and practice.While the powerful have been men for the supermajority of time, I have witnessed too many women tell men their opinions and desires are irrelevant, to say otherwise.