INWARD APOCALYPSE
Editor’s Note: Today’s article is an excerpt from longtime Earth & Altar writer Anna Howard’s first book, Inward Apocalypse. Her book releases today, and if you like what you read, please consider purchasing her book! You can do so via the links below.
Purchase via your favorite independent bookstore here: https://bookshop.org/books/inward-apocalypse/9781666735819
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He leaned towards me across the tiny Starbucks table. “It almost sounds like you’re saying you’re a...” and here his voice dropped so as not to be overheard, “a feminist.” As though this was the ultimate “f” word that couldn’t be overheard in polite conversation amidst the murmur of the coffee shop around us. I looked at my friend and just said, “well, yes.” And he stared back at me—shocked—as if I’d just denounced my faith. And to him I probably had. He’d been raised like I had: you couldn’t be a feminist or a Democrat and be a Christian. All these rigid lines around what Christianity could and couldn’t be, as though the gospel needed our protection to keep it from corruption. But who did this protected, rigid gospel benefit? It certainly wasn’t the least of these. And it certainly didn’t protect me.
This type of Christianity told me I had a specific role and place and to be godly was to stay within those boundaries and also not to question them. After all, you can’t have faith if you have doubts right? Thomas was sneered at as a bad example. You shouldn’t have had to touch Jesus to believe that Jesus was alive. Thomas, of course, was just the scape-goat to deflect our attention from the fact that it was the men who were hiding behind locked doors. All of them, not just Thomas. Their fear of consequences because of guilt-by-association had them trembling in the dark. The women risked association because their love was greater than their fear. They’d seen what this empire did to their teacher, surely there was some risk involved in going to his tomb. After all, there were soldiers posted to prevent someone from stealing the body. They could have easily been suspects.
***
I was probably nine or ten when I encountered the story of Deborah leading the nation of Israel. I don’t remember how. I was a precocious reader so perhaps I’d read it myself at that point, I’m not really sure. I asked my dad something about the story. Surely this is “biblical” proof that women can be in church leadership. Surely. “No, no,” he said. It was proof of God’s deep judgment on Israel. They had “done what was evil” and they were being punished because none of the men would step up, evidenced by Barak not going into battle without Deborah and Jael getting to strike the winning blow by assassinating the enemy general.
One chapter in Judges that contains brief, tiny stories of these two fierce women, and he kicked the legs of their stories out from under me as I tried to hold their power up. Women in leadership are part of God’s judgment for men not taking their “god-given” place. I’ve got the word “biblical” in quotes because in American Christianity it is probably one of the most abused words there is. Just about anything can be “biblical” if you pull out a tiny portion of the text. The funny thing is in American Christianity certain things have been deemed as contextual and certain things are held as absolute truths. Like a “godly” marriage can only be between a man and a woman and the man is the head of the house.
Incidentally, if we jump back to my early twenties and that conversation with a friend in Starbucks, the argument I’d made that got me called a feminist in those hushed and disapproving tones, was that marriage should be a partnership. Shocking, I know. I hadn’t even gotten onto the idea of women in church leadership. Women as bishops. Women as presidents. And we were talking about heterosexual marriage. This was very introductory level stuff here, the idea of marriage as a partnership, but even that was enough to bring out the word “feminist” as though just the invocation of this dirty word would be enough to get me to reexamine what I’d just said.
I chafed against the straight-jacket that this Christianity—this rigid “gospel”—tried to place on me and all of my siblings who had questions or doubts or thought that maybe this wasn’t really the freedom Christ had come to offer. How is the subjugation of everyone who isn’t a cisgendered, straight, abled, white man good news? If this was the gospel, then the crucifixion was a waste. Just one more brown, indigenous activist killed at the hands of the state whose death was interpreted by those in power to fit their agendas, and it didn’t really hold any meaning for the rest of us.
My faith had become to feel like a tapestry whose bindings had been cut and the more threads I pulled, the more it came apart and the more I wondered if there was going to be anything to put back together.
In Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd wrestles with some of these questions. On a walk one winter day she reflects, “Mostly, I didn’t want to believe that I had been wounded by my own faith. I didn’t want to acknowledge how it had regulated half the human population to secondary status and invisible places. I didn’t want any of this to be true.” (1)
Earlier this week as I wrote this chapter, I had a conversation with an old friend and as we were swapping book recommendations, we discovered we had each made a rule against reading any white, male theologians. We had both attended the same seminary albeit a few years apart as Rachel was in the high-school youth group at the church I worked at in LA. And it wasn’t that we hadn’t learned a great deal from white male theologians, it’s just that they made up at least 90% (and that’s probably a generous estimate) of the writers and professors we’d each experienced. In my time at Fuller, I had one Black male professor for one New Testament class, three white female professors, and one Korean female professor. I took one class from each of them so that was five classes out of thirty or so that were necessary to complete my degree.
Feminist theology and liberation theology were both considered to be specialist areas, as opposed to integrated into the whole. I’d never even heard of womanist or mujerista theology, and I only remember a single conversation about queer Christians. None of my classmates were out, and I hadn’t come far enough along in my own journey to even realize how strange that was. What happens when white and male and straight and abled is the default theology and anything else is a specialized class? In thinking about divergent experiences, Elizabeth Johnson writes, “Feminist reflection is therefore not alone in its use of human experience as a resource for theology. What is distinctive, however, is its specific identification of the lived experience of women, long derided or neglected in androcentric tradition, as an essential element in the theological task. (2) When you only describe human experience from a single, narrow segment of the population, you not only leave out a lot of people, you also create a theology and a reading of the gospel that is decidedly lacking in multiple dimensions.
In my own life, just the title of Johnson’s book, She Who Is, was like a drink of fresh, cool water on a hot and thirsty day. She who is. Something inside me unclenched as I realized that I had been made fully in the image of Mother God, and that female pronouns for her were just as legit as the male ones. This fits in well with some lovely mother images of God that we find in Scripture to counterbalance just a bit all the heavy male pronouns and father images we see.
Mother God was one thread I could pick up out of the tangle of my faith tapestry lying at my feet and put back on the loom as I tried to envision just what a faith that included all of these humans I had grown to love would look like. Because if it left any of them out, I didn’t think I could believe it anymore.
Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, (New York: Harper Collins, 1996) 42.
Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is, (New York: Herder and Herder, 2002) 61.
