Ideas and Idea

Barky posted about the idea-a-day website today... it made me smile a lot!

I also got site of the new idea (the magazine of Evangelical Alliance). There is loads of good stuff in it about Make Poverty History. It's so encouraging that Evangelicals are speaking out so loudly about this and even more encouraging is the meeting the arch-bish is convening with church leaders (oh and Gordon Brown) on this very theme (Ekklesia have more on this here). At the back of idea they always have an apologetic article, this months article is entitled 'Isn't the Bible sexist?'

As you would expect, Amy Orr-Ewing of Zacharias Trust , vehemently defends the Bible as something that isn't sexist in any way, nor does she really entertain the thought. She concludes...

"When we come to the text of the Bible with the issue of sexism in mind, we must be clear that while God is predominantly spoken of with male imagery and ultimately incarnates Himself as the man Jesus, female imagery is also used for God, and Jesus constantly affirms the value of both men and women"

For me the article misses the point a little. It focuses on the person of Christ, who few people believe to be sexist (though i do wish he didn't compare a Canaanite woman to a dog in Matthew 15) and almost ignores the written text altogether. Taking the text as the starting point, and not it's main character, nor it's author or any interpretation, such an article must take seriously the sexist undertones that run throughout scripture and the sexist interpretation that have held sway since its inception, otherwise it's just another case of naive evangelical theology which plagues those of us trying to engage with our culture...

Just a thought...

Comments

[Mark Berry]

I struggle with all this wwjd type stuff... to ask was Jesus sexist is a bit like asking was he a democrat... we could ask would he be? but not was he? these lables are cultural/semantic and therefore meaningless in His (earthly) context... what may be worth asking (for all you theoblogians) is if Jesus was fully God and fully Human, does that mean he was fully male and fully female? (of course I'm not talking about physicality here but psychologically/emotionally etc.)