holy hellions

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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…

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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

Seattle grabs your gut, stuffs it with cupcakes, and puts you on a bike to “work it out.” It’s thrilling.

But that’s not what brought me to the Emerald City. It was my brother first. It was Parker Palmer second. And it is my work with his organization, the Center for Courage & Renewal on Bainbridge Island, that has me “pink-cheeked and plucky” as I wrote in my latest article for Duke Divinity’s Call & Response blog. You can read it here.

The rub of it is that all the cheery idealism of millennials like myself can be an asset to those institutions ready to run off the fuel of our feverish energy. This is integral to not only ailing churches but stagnant feminist organizations.

As we used to say in the publishing world, “Fail quickly.” And then move on, preferably on a fixie with mustache handlebars and lavender cupcake crumbs flying off your mouth.