Justice is what love looks like in public. ~~Cornel West

PART 1
These next blogs are about justice, what love looks like in public, and the “last” taboo: daring to question the patriarchal, traditional, white Western male interpretation of Biblical stories. Daring to propose that God imaged as a man and addressed with male language is unjust. Daring to say that I long to hear my woman name spoken in liturgies and raised up in Bible studies. Daring to proclaim the abuse of women in Biblical stories. Daring to suggest that male-centered language and liturgies are driving people from churches and synagogues. Daring to recommend that we begin to read Biblical stories of women—and of men, once we have considered the stories of women—through a hermeneutic (interpretation) of suspicion, wondering who benefits from the way the stories are written and interpreted and lived out in the world.
In this series, I will begin each blog by challenging you to reflect on two questions. I encourage you to jot down your thoughts before continuing to read the blog. I hope you will discover that your thoughts add to my reflection. I have led studies on many of these stories with over 500 people. Each time there have been fresh insights. Please add your final reflections in the comment area of the blog so that we can enrich our collective knowledge.

Let’s begin with the first two questions.
1. What is your response to what you have read above?
2. When did you recognize male privilege in your life?

The way women and girls are represented and spoken about by the world’s religions has a profound impact on women’s and girls’ sense of their bodies/themselves. Because Western society has been permeated by a patriarchal and male-centered Jewish and Christian ethic, Biblical images of women are ingrained into the collective unconscious in ways often destructive to women’s sense of themselves. In addition, with rare exceptions, Christian and Jewish teaching, preaching, liturgies and theologies continue to image God as male. As a result, women are faced with the ultimate stained-glass ceiling: God is pictured and referred to as a man. The implicit message is that women’s bodies and beings are less acceptable than men’s. The impact of the Godhead depicted as a man has distorted women’s images of themselves, body, mind and spirit. The reverse is also true. Men have a distorted view of their superiority, lording over others being a birth right as well as often burdened by not measuring up to this God-standard.
Christian, Jewish and Muslim teachings and doctrines (as well as those of other faith expressions) that devalue, degrade and dismiss women have resulted in spiritual as well as psychological stress and trauma for millennium. To challenge the pervasiveness of this connection, it is as vital to raise up empowering and life-giving Biblical images of women as it is to proclaim dis-empowering and traumatizing aspects of the Biblical stories of women. Naming narratives which have oppressed women can release blocked energy. Re-imagining narratives which have the power to liberate women can become the creative and redemptive use of that freed energy.

To take your thinking a step further, I encourage you to write down your responses to these questions:
1. What are you thinking after reading the above?
2. What have you learned?
3. What life giving action might you take in response?
These questions will be asked at the conclusion of each part of this series. Thank you.