IWD: A God Who Cares About Women?
“It was written by old, white men.”
A teenage girl, not much older than 14, gave this answer to the question, “Why might someone object to the bible?” The secondary school class was doing a workshop on the historicity of the bible and I was struck by two things. Firstly, it was clear that the bible’s geography, diversity of genre and voice were not wholly understood. But, more importantly, it revealed a sense of suspicion around the bible as a tool of patriarchal and even racist oppression.
This idea of the bible had reached the consciousness of an articulate teenage girl and, to her credit, it was not wholly unfounded. We don’t have to look too far to find women who face spiritual and other kinds of abuse through the weaponizing of the bible. From the stories of enslaved women like Mary Prince to the testimony of women harmed by power scandals of today, this young girl’s sense of suspicion is understandable. Even the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale amplifies this objection to the bible in high definition. The politics of Gilead mean that women’s rights are suppressed through distorted interpretations of scripture.
An agenda. A ruse. An attempt to dupe women. All of these concerns lay behind the girl’s answer. But in that moment, I wanted to encourage her to read and see what women in the very pages of the book, of which she was rightly suspicious, had to say about the God who revealed himself it its pages. Did they reject him, or did they experience something different? There’s a certain irony in having a (healthy) suspicion of the bible that, if left uninterrogated, could result in the words of the women within its pages going somewhat overlooked, or even erased.
She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” Genesis 16:13
These are the words of Hagar, an enslaved, sexually exploited woman of colour, voicing her response at being seen by God. The first theophany recorded in scripture is God’s encounter with a woman. And Hagar’s words resonate with women today as we see with Delores S. Williams’s seminal work on this moving passage in, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk.
In Hagar’s words we glimpse a God who sees women.
A God who sees. This feature of God’s character rings true in the person of Jesus.
I’m always amazed by the account of the hemorrhaging woman in St Luke 8. What strikes me is that the raw, embodied and bloody suffering of a woman is not sanitized from the pages of scripture. The embarrassing and unflattering detail of Peter who dismisses Jesus’s question, “Who touched me?” points to the authenticity of the account but also the significance of Jesus’s persistence.
Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.” Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”
Luke 8:45 – 48
When others saw a nuisance, Jesus saw a woman.
In our present-day culture which, rightly, seeks to hold Christianity to account in its treatment of women, Rebecca McLaughlin highlights the phenomenon of women who were compelled by Jesus as the movement emerged.
“Sociologist Rodney Stark has shown from a wide array of textual and archaeological sources that the early church was majority female. This is particularly striking, given that the Greco-Roman world in the first and second centuries was disproportionately male, due to selective infanticide of baby girls and the high proportion of maternal deaths in child birth. Indeed, early Christianity was mocked by outsiders for its appeal to women. The second-century Greek philosopher Celsus snarked that Christians “want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable and stupid, only slaves, women, and little children…”
McLaughlin, Rebecca. Confronting Christianity (pp. 144-145). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
In the context of a sexist view of women in the ancient world, we see that women followed Jesus. Today, with all of our post-modern progress, we have a similar picture. Several studies by Pew Research Center illustrate that women attend church or are more religious than men, and this increases with black women.
Women are still compelled by Jesus, and this warrants investigation. Why do women – critical, thinking, living, breathing women – choose to follow Jesus? This isn’t the work of old, white men. This is an invitation to get to know and be known by a God who loves and cares deeply about women. A God of safety, not suspicion.
~ By Clare Williams