Scripture scholar and Dominican Sister Barbara Reid took her first
Bible course when she was a junior in college. It was an elective. "I
was just so amazed at how it opened up a whole world for me," she says.
"I was also a little angry and thought, 'Why didn't anyone ever teach me
anything about the Bible?'"
She'd attended Catholic schools her whole life but had never
been encouraged to do more than listen to the stories of scripture. That
course in her junior year changed everything. Later that year, she
joined the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids and dove into all the
scripture courses she could find. She also joined a charismatic prayer
group and was unsettled by some of the ways scripture was being
interpreted. She knew that wasn't the way the Bible ought to be read. So
she pursued a doctorate in scripture because she wanted to learn good
biblical interpretation.
Reid is now the general editor
of the Wisdom Commentary, a series of feminist commentaries on every
book of the Bible, the first of its kind to offer feminist
interpretations of the entire Bible. Contributors hail from around the
globe and bring experience and expertise from a variety of traditions
and cultures, something Reid says is crucial to reading and interpreting
the Bible. She's quick to point out, however, that there are many
forerunners to the Wisdom Commentary: "This is not a modern day
phenomenon. Women have been interpreting the Bible through their own
experience and their own lenses from time immemorial."
What does it mean to do feminist biblical interpretation?
Feminism
is a perspective and a movement that begins by recognizing that there
are great inequities toward women in the church and in society. The
movement advocates for changes in not only interpersonal relationships
but also the structures that keep all people from flourishing. It's not
only about women. All of us benefit when the inequities against women
are addressed.
Feminist biblical interpretation approaches
the Bible with the consciousness that the Bible was, for the most part,
written by men, for men, about men, and to serve men's interests.
Now,
as I say that, I am not trying to denigrate men. It's very important to
recognize the historical contexts from which our scriptures come and
that, for the most part, the perspectives represented in the scriptures
are not women's.
Feminist biblical interpretation starts
from that basic recognition and then approaches the Bible with a set of
questions such as: Where were the women? What was their experience? How
would they have received what was being said about them or addressed to
them? What do we know historically about what women were doing? What do
we know about the cultural mores of the day?
For example,
if Paul says women should keep silent in churches, what did the women
think about that? What was the precise situation he was addressing?
Clearly women had to have been speaking out if Paul is saying, "You
shouldn't speak out."
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