Category Archives: Uncategorized

This is the tenth (and final!) post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.

—

Bless you, Erin.

This conversation has been a joy. I’m delighted to hear of your response to Coakley’s chapter on Judith Butler and Gregory of Nyssa. I remember too that’s the chapter that moved me from interest in Coakley’s work to loving it. There was something about the sheer chutzpah of pairing a secularist lesbian gender theorist with a Cappadocian father. Neither would like it very much this side of our eschatological ironing out in Jesus’ judgment. But on the other side of such judgment it’s the sort of company we’re going to have to learn to keep.

Even as I name that trait I love in her work, I worry about it. Does it do a sort of violence to the people we read to pair them over their objections this way? Doesn’t it feel like we seek extra credit for joining the ideas of the unlikeliest of companions, as if there are bonus points for cleverness?

I love your point about your complimentarian friends suggesting Galatians 3:28 as an eschatological text for future purposes only. I love it because I can’t remember ever hearing it. It reminded me that the vision of eschatology I imbibed at Duke was hyper realized. That is, in baptism, where that text was born, distinctions between slave and free, male and female, Jew and Greek are relativized. I don’t want to say demolished—we go on being male and female, Jew and Greek, etc and have to learn to be church across such lines of difference. But by the power of the Spirit now we can be the people who are Jesus’ life-giving body.

If feeling cheeky I’d want to ask your friends whether they think slavery still permissible, if Galatians 3:28 is only about a far-off eschaton. Or maybe more precise: certainly Galatians 3:28 is an eschatological claim. And the eschaton began at Golgatha; we can live in its power because of Pentecost.

I love your confident claim that there is more hope for gender transformation in the gospel than in the works of secular theory you have read. I am a preacher! I expect it to be so. But then again, ‘the world’ often lives out the gospel better than the church does, even if it has no idea (and would adamantly deny) its doing so.

So keep reading Butler and others (not that you need my encouragement to do so). Let’s hope Coakley and others keep demonstrating to us barely suppressed eschatological longings in those who wouldn’t so describe their desires themselves. And let’s all hope Jesus brings the kingdom despite our best efforts and intentions, not just through them. If we’re only dependent on the latter we’re all lost.

I’m grateful for the church as a place where male and female can be one by virtue of baptism, not least when they are teacher and student.

Gratefully,
Jason

This is the ninth post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee. 

—

Jason,

What brought me to attend Duke and what brought me to read Coakley were in part you and in part the desire for middle ground in the famously fraught lines of faith and feminism.

It is Coakley’s last section of her piecemeal collection of essays in Powers and Submissions that reminds me of the sympathetic synthesis needed between feminist theorists and orthodox theologians. Here she seeks to reconcile the theory of the notoriously thorny Judith Butler and the 4th century ascetic Gregory of Nyssa.

Anyone who’s ever read Butler either loves or hates her for her desconstructive theory of gender that claims there is no biological essence to sex and desire but rather gendered identity – if at all stable – is fashioned by the repetition of performative acts. In effect, we are what we do. There is no other way for society to “read” our gender than by what we inscribe on and enact through our body.

I confess that I love Butler. I love when theory itself is a performance of idealistic word acts that constitute their authority by a sort of scholarly repetition. Butler is an unmissable tool for any feminist theologian seeking to bridge gaps in understanding between a postmodern theory of gender construction and an enduring theory of human transformation. I curled into this last chapter of Coakley as I would a crisp new issue of the gossip rag Us Weekly, just brimming with curiosity about the smack talking that might ensue.

Coakley argues that Butler, albeit an ethnic Jew and performative lesbian, is concealing an eschatological longing in her obsessive focus on the body as the sole focus for (somewhat hopeless) societal change. As a feminist, I was already a bit taken a back at this somewhat paternalistic (“I know she’s saying no but she really means yes”) scholarly approach.

However, what Coakley concludes is monumental for the work I’m seeking to do on transforming gender in the church. She argues that Butler’s insistence on performative acts has parallels in Gregory’s practices of transformation. Both “create the future by enacting its possibilities.”

Amongst my complimentarian friends, I often hear Galatians 3:28 dismissed as an echatological vision, one that will be enacted when God’s kindgom comes to earth again but one that is not meant to be embodied now. Surely, for the sake of order we must have male and female, slave and free, Jew and Gentile! Not so.

We create the future by enacting its possibilities.

Both feminists and theologians are trying to enact the possibilities of  transforming the oppressions and inequalities of this life. Feminists often use the language of utopia to signify the potentially unrealistic and other-worldly ideal of gender liberation. But for Christians, we have the very realistic and this-wordly guarantee that such a utopia will occur when heaven comes to earth again in the form of Jesus Christ. And though we are waiting, waiting for the fulfillment of all God’s promises, we are charged to enact – whether through performance or practice – heaven on earth here and now.

What propels me in my vocation as a Christian feminist is nothing more and nothing less than the following summation: There is more feminist hope in the Gospel for gender transformation than there is any secular feminist  theory of change I’ve ever read.

Thank you for helping me to affirm as much.

Gratefully,
Erin

This is the eighth post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee. 

—

Erin,

I love the scale of the questions you raise. One of my favorite things about graduate school classes was the chance to raise a big question and then watch a major intellect work on it. I remember asking Geoffrey Wainwright about a contention of John Zizioulas’s: that if only Augustine had learned a little Greek he might have read the eastern fathers and not come to so gloomy a view of the human person as he did with his doctrine of original sin. Surely God watches over the church enough that one person’s failure to learn a language wouldn’t cause a church of billions of people over thousands of years to be permanently impaired—right? Half an hour later Wainwright hadn’t answered my question (how could he?), but it was certainly fun to watch him work.

When I was at your stage, colleagues and I pushed around Nicholas Lash with a similar question to yours. Lash was visiting for a semester from Cambridge, where he was the first Catholic chair holder since his predecessor lost his head in the Reformation (does clear the mind a bit). Lash describes “Father” and “Son” as metaphors in his Believing Three Ways in One God (a book title that already runs to the modalistic). Lash, as a Barthian, felt that we don’t know what “Father” means when applied to God, but we’re bound to use the description by scripture and tradition. Those of us reared on Wainwright pushed back, suggesting the terms are more like proper names, and so more unsubstitutable than “metaphor” would suggest.

The point, Erin, is that really smart people don’t know the answer to your question.

In the patristic era it became clear that “Father” and “Son” were not unproblematic. But the people who came to be seen as orthodox responded that the titles have a pride of place in scriptural usage across the New Testament, and that they appropriately name the one key thing: the Father and the Son are the same “thing,” just as creaturely parents and children are the same species. If the Son is not as divine as the Father is, he can’t save us. Yet they were at pains to eliminate the false meanings: there is no sexual generation involved, no mother involved, and no change implied within the Godhead. Origen came up with the crazy suggestion that the language of generation—parenthood—must refer to an eternal begetting. Who’s ever heard of an eternal generation? No one, then or now. Crazy as it was, the language was the best description we could come up with: the Father begets the Son eternally. Try to find an alternative that makes biblical and philosophical sense. You won’t.

Which brings us to feminist alternatives. I myself don’t care for gender neutral pronouns for God. God is not an “it,” but is “personal,” the living God—our “personalities” are a dim reflection of the One who is life itself. And, sure enough, I find most church members react to female substitutes with a horror that suggests they assume that God must be male (all the “he’s” you mention in Isaiah not the least reason why). Yet the church fathers insist God is not male, not a creature, has no sexual parts, is no more “he” than “she.”

So . . . where’s that leave us? Back where we were, trembling before the liturgy, nervous to show (not just tell) that God’s not a boy. Of course what we should really fear is unfaithfulness in the presence of the fiery One who meets us in Mary’s belly with judgment and grace. So as we lead those whom Coakley describes as “being progressively reborn in the likeness of the Son,” how do we name her? Maybe, when we put the question that way, the answer is clear.

Gratefully,
Jason

This is the seventh post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.

—

Jason,

I appreciate your candor about the courage it takes to know when and how to mix gendered metaphors in worship. I pick this theme up again partly because I found Coakley’s chapter on the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity overwhelming and partly because I found my commitments to feminist language questioned when preaching a sermon for the very first time in church this past Sunday.

I wasn’t going to change the language of the text itself. I read from Isaiah 56:1-8, one of the Scripture readings in the Catholic liturgy, and preached on the need to play all parts in the Christian narrative. To play all parts isn’t to erase all identifying markers of gender such as the persistent “he’s” and “him’s” peppered throughout our text. But the calling to find ourselves in union with God alone,  a creator who is neither male or female as you pointed out last week, is to ultimately acknowledge the transience or fluidity of our gendered identities and the parts we play in them.

Rush was leading the worship music in what I jokingly called a good ol’ husband and wife variety hour. I had to tread carefully in my critiques. I left the masculine pronouns but was a bit more picky about the title of ‘Father’. Would you call Father and Son titles? names? metaphors? I sense their orthodox use throughout history has you committed to their continuing utility for our post-modern era. Coakley even points out Gregory of Nyssa’s belief that these words were authoritatively given in revelation.

But there are other titles, names, metaphors like Master and Servant that we’ve used more sparingly in recent years and and in certain communities for the connotations they have with slavery. I wonder if Father and Son haven’t lost some of their radically intimate natures and become tainted by their sexist connotations. Do we keep the words and insist on different meanings or do we keep the intentions and insist on different words? Even Gregory acknowledges “father” and “mother” have the same meaning. Was God then simply giving people a revelation – one that included masculine titles – because God, like us preachers, was worried about what they could stomach? In the end, I only changed a paltry Father to Maker in one song, and Father Almighty to God Almighty in the creed we spoke.

Of course, my sermon itself provided the greatest space for creative use of language. And as much as I wanted to sprinkle the blessings of “she” for God’s personhood, I neutered it, every last gendered marker available. As a guest preacher, I measured the effectiveness my words would have on an audience I barely knew and one with whom I’d have little ongoing opportunity for conversation.

Does neutering or mentioning no gender for God really go towards Coakley’s vision of the abolition of the “sex class system”? Or does it simply fall into the trap Coakley lays out in her seventh chapter that the neutral person often stands as a substitute for the normative male? But if she reads Gregory correctly, that human transformation is “unthinkable without profound, even alarming, shifts in our gender perceptions,” then who are we to not usher people along in these shifts by any – radical – means possible?

Thinking, thinking, thinking,
Erin

This is the sixth post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.

—

Erin, if you thought you had to look up lots of words in Coakley last week . . . sheesh.

Before Coakley, you ask a question about mixing gendered language in liturgy. I agree that’s a good way to pop the imagination of speaker and listener alike. The most important goal of such language for me is to show, simply, that God is not male. If God were male, or female, God would be a creature, and not Creator.

I confess that I feel freer to do this in some contexts than others. When preaching or teaching at the Divinity School I was more likely to use “she” for God, or a feminine metaphor. In my current setting I’ve simply not done it yet, I confess. I hope that’s not lack of courage. I just don’t know how it’ll go over, and want to save up my giving offense until I know what’ll give it and how bad.

I do worry such gender mixing efforts can become a kind of affirmative action plan, as though we should now use as many feminine images as the church has traditionally used male ones (this is more common in liberal seminaries, I grant, than in the church or at Duke). For example, one common Trinitarian substitute for a while has been “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one Mother of us all.” It’s not terrible, it just sounds like we’ve mentioned a boy, so now we need to mention a girl, in pedantic fashion. And I do think Father and Son language maintain a biblical and patristic priority against which other images have to be measured, and for which they cannot be substitutes.

There’s probably enough, I know, but to the book . . .

This is our last week in the middle section of Powers and Submissions, and I feel like I’m watching one side of a tennis match. I admire Coakley for reading in and responding to analytic philosophy of religion—basically the English and American schools of philosophy which begin with a skepticism toward metaphysics and seek to offer arguments only in the form of empirical proofs.

The problem is, for Coakley, those working in those fields offer arguments that are unschooled both by feminism and by Christian orthodoxy. Their approach to the problem of evil suggests that human free will requires the ability to do wrong, independently of divine intention, or else we’d be puppets (I confess I’ve used this argument before). The problem is it assumes a rational untethered male is the free person in question—one likely cared for, taught, and sustained in his work by unnamed women.

Such philosophy also argues for the existence of God in a way that arrives at a solitary, non-trinitarian deity, and then has to work backwards in awkward ways toward a doctrine of the Trinity. The mistake is in arguing toward a solitary powerful male unit in the first place, when a feminist approach would be more inclined to begin with a God understood in relationship and the vulnerability of the incarnation.

I’m left wondering why bother with analytic philosophy of religion at all. Coakley’s committed to bothering in that literature as well as a host of others on display here (epistemology, feminism, spirituality, medieval and patristic theology, surely some I’m missing). But I am left wondering a bit how these arguments touch down in the church.

They do, of course—I used the free will argument in theodicy in preaching and teaching because I got it from C.S. Lewis; I can only imagine when I’ve argued people toward a non-trinitarian God. But a better approach would be a more dogmatically and biblically robust doctrine of God and creation, one based on revelation, not one committed only to proofs accessible to intellects uninterested in grace. Alas.

Speaking of tennis: back over to you.

Gratefully,
Jason

This is the fifth post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.

—

Jason,

Below is a list of what I googled in order to respond to your post from last week:

-”Coakley often gets her hackles up in response to intellectual uniformity and shrillness.” I now know that hackles are the hairs along the back of an animal that rise when it is angry or alarmed, like my cat Meekie used to do when I tried to put a baby bonnet over her mosquito-bitten ears.
- “I’ll just tell them to put on their big girl panties and then I’ll show them my Glock.” Frankly, I’m glad I’m naive enough not to automatically know a Glock is a handgun. We Midwestern gals are more comfortable with corn husks and corn hole.

I suspect all good (and angry) Christian feminists will need to know what hackles and Glocks are at some point in the journey with the church, and so for my brief linguistic education, I am grateful to you.

Your birthing image of Christ was such a powerful conclusion to last week’s post on what it might look like to de-center gender. Would you advocate for such language in liturgy? Mixing gendered metaphors has always been a favorite feminist move of mine. Like praying to God the Father and her only begotten Son. Again, I’m not sure Coakley would find this strategy all that effective at producing true change in the relationships between men and women at the congregational level, but I do think it does something to jar the soul and pop the lid on its imagination.

This week’s chapter found us back in familiar territory with Coakley again challenging the sweeping anti-hero of feminists – the Enlightenment’s ‘Man of Reason’ – and asking us to consider the presumed antinomies (another googler for me; meaning the incompatabilities) such a denigrating view has with the autonomous self many modern feminists aspire to.

In my experience this is one of the critical issues of a specifically Christian feminism that we’ve discussed in the last few weeks: vulnerability and dependence are part of our salvivic narrative, and as such, need to be part of our liberation narrative. The Man (or modern Woman) of Reason, upheld by the Enlightenment’s key figures such as Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant, should not be our holy grail of equality, however tempting it may be to emulate the characteristics already rewarded by society.

However, Coakley notes the arguably ill-advised move of some radical feminists to deepen women’s connection to nature and capitalize on our differentiated strength. Funny, isn’t it, that the radical feminist position is perhaps most in line with the evangelical Christian position of complimentarianism? Makes me all the more suspect of authors like Wayne Grudem and John Piper knowing their views may have been influenced by lines from Rousseau such as this, “A perfect man and a perfect woman should no more be alike in mind that in face.”

Coakley concludes that the feminist dream must be the ‘abolition of the sex class system” tout court (googled: meaning ‘and nothing else’), not simply a swapping of masculine and feminine ideals nor a complete blurring of sex all together.

To her I say, Amen. And nothing else.

Peace,
Erin

This is the fourth post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.

—

Howdy again, Erin,

Glad we have this regular discipline of reading Coakley and writing to one another. I love your comment from last time about some theologians being drawn to speak of the Spirit in particularly feminine terms: “like the Spirit is supposed to be our Wonder Woman to your Batman and Spiderman.” Coakley herself has critiqued this common move. It often draws its origin from Syriac patristic sources, but doesn’t stop to note that the Syriac Orthodox Church is not especially noted for its feminist sympathies.

I’m pretty sure Coakley is where I first heard Mary Daly’s quip about this move: “You’re included in the Holy Spirit. He’s female.”

Coakley often gets her hackles up in response to intellectual uniformity and shrillness. So in the chapter we have just read she objects to theology’s near universal condemnation of Descartes, his cogito, and its purported “peeling back” of all things that matter: the body, community, the other, and all things but the lonely self contained in a physical shell. I love this move from her—first salvaging a more sympathetic reading of Descartes before dispatching him more carefully for failing to be as fully Trinitarian in his understanding of the soul as his predecessor Augustine was.

Then she makes a pivot and describes Gregory Palamas’ triadic understanding of the human person with its greatly more elevated vision of the body and commends Palamite thinking as a potential source for reconfiguring the self after Descartes. Now that’s a lot.

Ultimately this chapter didn’t satisfy me as much as her work usually does. I know these figures better than the average Joe, and I wanted a much slower account of who said what when and why before we ran to conclusions. This feels like a book, not a chapter, and even if I agreed or disagreed I’m not much sure what would be at stake. And where’d the feminist material go here?

You asked last week how I would practice and model a de-centered genderism. I don’t really know. I was impressed by meeting an intern from Duke who retired from a law enforcement career. After she regaled with stories of target practice I mentioned that being a first woman pastor in a congregation won’t likely intimidate her. “Nope,” she said. “I’ll just tell them to put on their big girl panties and then I’ll show them my Glock.” Nice. She can drown any would-be critic in testosterone. In one way I admire it. In another . . .

I’m glad Coakley can out muscle any male philosopher of religion. But I like her work better when it’s closer to the rough ground of the church in flesh and blood now, of her own experience, of matters of the soul (however understood) that church leaders like me might actually face.

What does it mean for gender to look on Christ as our mother, from whose side we, the church, are born in blood and water, who longs to gather us under her (his?) wings, who did not fulfill his era’s expectations of a rabbi that he have children but gave birth to a church now millennia old and billions strong? No idea. But I’m glad to have friends like Coakley and you to stew on it.

Gratefully,
Jason

This is the third post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.
—

Jason,

Three weeks into our public reading project and me thinks I’ve gotten the juciest chapters to date. First, the necessity of vulnerability in Christian feminism. Now, the perils of “creaturely dependance”  for women in the church.

To start, you were right to subtly correct my essentialist and, dare I say, lazy sexist assumption in your post last week that Christian submission is soft and receptive, like a passively veiled and demurely bejeweled bride of Christ.

Coakley begins her discussion of our dependence where theologians rightly should: with a discussion of the Trinity, and the dependence of Christ to the Father God and even the Mother Mary in his vulnerable human life and death.

I remember being stunned in my class on the rabbinical tradition of Midrash last semester when our professor, Rabbi Steve Sager, suggested to us that God is always learning. Like the infant Christ who dangles precariously on Mary’s knee in Georgios Klotzas icon, even God required attention, care,  and discipline. If our Christ was ( or is?) dependent, then surely all of us should count sharing in that need as a blessed inheritance.

Thus Coakley concludes it is not the wholly mind-blowing doctrine of dependence itself – however divergent Eastern and Western conceptions of it are – but the practical implications of these theologies upon the bodies of women that is so perilous to the church. The message is: “All creatures are dependent, but some are more dependent than others.”

This is a bold-faced lie, and one Coakley pegs on the Enlightenment’s cultural ideal of the stoic man, reluctant to admit his dependency on anything more than his own free will and ambition. She even goes so far as to wonder who in the Godhead men more readily identify with – “the yielding, depotentiated Son, or more truly with the impassive and all-powerful Father?”

I gather from your attraction of late to Bride of Christ imagery that you do not find yourself in this either/or bind. But from my own experience, many Christians are eager to tout the feminine-like nature of the Holy Spirit as a condolence for women’s lack of linguistic heritage with the Father and Son.  It’s like the Holy Spirit is supposed to be our Wonder Woman to your Batman and Spiderman. We all know which ones make the big blockbusters.

As you begin to pastor your new church, I wonder how you will model that de-centered genderism you mentioned last week. Coakley is skeptical that it can come from moving beyond these male and female images of stoicism and vulnerability to one of adrogynous political-correctness. While she rightly points out the need to examine the actual relationships between men and women, leadership and laity, doctrine and practice in any church, I think she ultimately is too dismissive of the power of language and imagery in the Body of Christ.

But then again I am a theologian now. And we are nothing if not dependent on the Word.

Until next week,
Erin

This is the second post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee. See my launching post from last week here.

—

Erin,

It’s an honor to be invited into this conversation, and I don’t mind being swooned over in the least, especially as we read together a theologian I’ve swooned over myself not a little. Sarah was kind enough to blurb my small church book, to engage me in dialogue about her work for an academic article I wrote, and to eat Thai with me in Cambridge once.

The essay from chapter two reminds me why I love Coakley’s work. Here she is engaging in conversation with a man I’ve never heard of (hey, I’m a Methodist, we were probably reading church growth technique or something), one Dom John Chapman OSB, arguing with his early 20^th century reading of St. John of the Cross as she and both men wrestle together with prayer, feelings, darkness and agony, and implicitly, with gender.

This is how theology works—it’s a conversation among saints through time and space about the God fleshed in Christ, constantly poured out anew in the scriptures and the liturgy. The fact that I’ve not heard of the Dom is also oddly comforting. We’ll never run out of theology to read, just as we’ll never run out of God to contemplate.

But maybe that’s not such great news. Dom Chapman corresponded with countless professional praying people – monks and nuns—and found the bulk of them quite unsatisfied with their experience of prayer. Work at this long enough and the harder slog it’ll be, they thought. His advice was comforting: “Pray as you can, and not as you can’t.” And that saying’s correlate: “The more you pray, the better it gets.”

This advice strikes me as fundamentally right, in line with other bodily activities that make us human (exercise, sex), but which can also destroy us if done wrong.

Then Coakley shows that Dom was nearsighted in ruling out bodily affect, in ignoring sexuality altogether, and in aligning sentiment and spiritual experience with two ultimate horrors: women and Protestants.

Sorry Erin, you fail on both scores . . .

You asked last week where I feel vulnerability as a man. I guess the answer right now is as a pastor—as I’ve been back in the parish only two weeks. My entire family’s livelihood, the whole of my career, is, in some sense, in the dock for my church to judge. If they like me I do well; if not I don’t. That’s overly simple, of course. We have mechanisms in place for pastors to be prophetic, bureaucracies and bishops to stand between us and the mob if the congregation revolts.

Nevertheless I’m struck by how vulnerable it feels to have 1400 judges each week and to feel the need to please all of them or my kids may not eat. Isn’t hysteria supposed to be (quite literally) a female attribute?

You appreciate the way Coakley moves past the dismissal of all gender essentialism and wants to keep some of them, in modified form. I’m struck by how I want to keep most of them decentered. What I expressed above isn’t male or female, it’s just small-minded, fearful. It waits to be entered into by the vulnerable, power-giving God and exploded. I am compelled by the image of the church as Christ’s bride (I’ve found myself using it in public prayer and teaching twice already in two weeks), but I’m not sure that means soft or receptive or submissive.

All of this Dom Chapman would pillory—affect, women, sex, Protestants.

All the good stuff, in other words.

Gratefully,
Jason

Be still my Christian feminist heart.

Amidst the indulgent romance novel One Day and stacks of In Style magazine, I’ve added the most ambitious tome to-date to my summer reading list: Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender by Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley. Only a contemplative Christian feminist whose love for the word paradox is rivaled only by my own (and perhaps, Quaker philosopher Parker J. Palmer) could make my brain twitch with such affection.

But the swooning continues. My friend and mentor Jason Byassee formerly of Duke Divinity and currently of Boone United Methodist Church has joined me in my ambition (fresh into a new gig as senior pastor). For the next two months, we’ll be reading Coakley together – section by section – and sharing our candid conversation on this blog every Wednesday.

Truth be told; both Coakley and Byassee are beyond my intellectual chops. But they’re both invested – to my benefit – in distilling the sometimes murky water of Christian feminism for the church, not just the towers.

Without further gushing…

—-

Jason,

We have a tough task ahead of us to keep our mutual musings on topics like power, submission, and gender to a brief blog post. In the prologue and first chapter alone, I made a total of twenty-three check marks for further reflection.

I want to home in on the idea of vulnerability this week, as it was central to Coakley’s first chapter on the self-emptying quality of Christ that has been absent from much of Christian feminist prescriptions. As a woman, and one who vacillates between embracing the (naive, yet compelling) idea of global sisterhood and eschewing its generalist assumptions of gender, I am admittedly still a bit honored when I’m able to prove my ability to “hang with the guys” – including you.

Power is at stake and submission is for pansies. Herein is the mistaken assumption (laden with gender anxieties) that Coakley combats with her insistence that vulnerability and empowerment can co-exist. This central contribution of Christ should be a central contribution of Christian feminists if only we could  loose our own ambition for the secular movement’s promises of agency, accolade, and accomplishment.

My husband Rush, as you can attest, is an admirably sensitive man. So why do I still relish telling anyone who will listen (this blog audience now included) that he cried three times during the sappy epic The Notebook while I merely got a round of goosebumps when the score kicked it up a notch? Masculine stoicism still has its grip on our aspirations.

I wonder:

• how do you embrace vulnerability as a man? 
• where do you resist its strength? 
• and are you compelled by imagery of being Christ’s bride, willing to be soft and receptive and  submissive?

Coakley made a subtle distinction between a Christ who “choos[es] never to have certain (false and worldly) forms of power” and one who “reveal[es] ‘divine power’ to be intrinsically ‘humble’ rather than grasping.” While she favored the former, I found myself being more convinced by the latter, that power is a relationship dynamic that rightly exercised is in service and joy and humility to the other.  However, I can’t help but be a bit cynical that the one in service of another – the Christ-like self-emptying ‘man’ of Ephesians 5:25 – still ultimately has more honor and privilege, although a number of complimentarian champions would try to argue otherwise.

What I love about Coakley is that she questions the gender generalizations that would see vulnerability as a feminine weakness rather than a human strength. I’m curious to see as we continue reading if she’ll concede any “core attributes” of sex based on biblical interpretation.

For now, I’m taking her advice – and looking forward to your discussion next week of contemplation – and praying “not for negation of self” but “for the self’s transformation and expansion into God.”

And next time we’re watching a Kodak commercial, I’ll try not to smugly ask Rush, “Are you actually crying?”

In gratitude,
Erin