Preaching Lessons: John Bell Part II

When I read that Bell's lecture was on "Hidden Women in Holy Scripture," I knew I wanted to attend. Not only would I be enjoying the lovely ringing of his Scottish accent, but I would be hearing about something so often overlooked in preaching that I find myself desperate for it: taking up the female in the Bible.

Bell began his lecture by acknowledging the power of the male reading of the Bible in its shaping of how we read it now. The male gaze tends to overlook the female, to under-read her, to skip over her contributions to the story in ways that are unfaithful to the fullness of the Biblical witness. I'm kind of glossing over this point because it's one that I already understand, but if this is coming as a novel concept to you, leave a comment, and I'd be happy to chat with you about it.

Mostly, the lecture was John taking up stories of women in the Bible and reading them imaginatively and with value. For example, he read the parable of the lost coin as just as strong a witness as the parable of the prodigal son. Why hadn't he seen God there before, he wondered aloud. He read the story of the Samaritan woman at the well with such imagination: he saw her as a woman who was outgoing and vibrant, who was persuasive and outgoing, and who had these gifts redirected in her encounter with Jesus. It was a pleasure to listen to, really.

The best part of the lecture was the handout he gave with a breakdown of Biblical women, their appearance in the Testaments, and how they were treated by the text (Protester, Deliverer, Sexual Intrigue, Victim of Male Cruelty, Honored by God). It is a fantastic resource for preachers who would like to dig further into stories that don't come to light all that often, or for engaging familiar stories from a different vantage point. I'll plan to post a link to this sheet here sometime in the near future.

Here's a link to a PDF of that handout. Feel free to save and use!

After the lecture, a group of us from Eden approached John for a photo. But I also needed to ask him a question. At the beginning of his lecture, he acknowledged his male gaze, but he also spent a long time discussing how males and females read the Bible differently. I didn't want to categorically take his remarks as still being sexist despite their awareness of the male gaze, and so I approached him about it. I said, "I have a sincere question. Do you really think that men and women read the Bible differently?" He answered yes, that he thought that there were different sensibilities brought to it. I asked a further question about how he thought cultural conditioning might just be a part of this, and he acknowledged that it could. I thanked him for adding that nuance and left it at that.

When I looked around the room, I noticed that the majority of people in the session were women. Listening to a man tell us about women in the Bible. Now if Bell's assertion was right, that men and women read the Bible differently, then what exactly could he tell a group of women about women in the Bible, since we've been reading it as women the whole time? I'm being ridiculous to make a point. Bell's assumption that men and women read the Bible differently assumes a culture that conditions us differently. The reason his reading of these stories is novel to us is because we, as women, also live in a culture that has conditioned us to gloss over these stories, not to preach these stores, not to know what to do with them. Just because we are women does not mean that we have eyes to see.

By upholding the false dualism of the male and female gender, Bell not only excludes anyone who considers themselves to fall outside of those two poles, but also assumes a greater democracy in ways of knowing than is fair. More than his maleness clouding his ability to see these stories, it is his conditioning in maleness that does so. And he forgets that women are often conditioned in the exact same way. This is a long way of saying that yes, a man and a woman might read Scripture differently. But so might a woman and another woman, a man and another man, a woman and a transgender person, a man and a boy, a woman and a girl. What Bell illustrated well is that when you begin to value differences in reading, the possibilities for revelation in the Biblical text absolutely explode. But his binary understanding of that reading actually do more to reduce it than to explode it further.