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A lecture presented at “Time to Wake Up: Racism in the World Church,” a conference hosted by the George W. Truett Theological Seminary, February 2024.
Dear friends and colleagues at Baylor University and Truett Seminary: Thank you for these crucial and distinguished conversations on racism. It is truly an honor and pleasure to learn from you and to contribute some of my own experiences and observations as together we groan in eager expectation as Christ is formed in our lives, churches, and communities.
Lord, please give us guidance, attentiveness, and your Spirit’s power that we might be fully birthed—a new creation in Christ, our hope now and always. Amen.
If you are like me, your fingers tremble each day as you click to read world news, anxious about the atrocities documented since the day before. How many more children, elderly, and defenseless have been maimed, exploited, or killed as we slept comfortably, well-fed and in our warm, safe beds? Why have humanitarian aid, medical attention, protection, and justice been denied to certain groups while their perpetrators are not brought to trial in courts worldwide? Why are we silent as minors are unjustly imprisoned—in violation of international law—for their minor offenses.? Where is the support from those with power and from countries with influence and resources to make a difference? Where is the church—we who claim to have the mind and power of Christ? Do we draw close to victims in prayer, lament, and action on their behalf? These are questions laid at our feet today, as the church in the West.
As the daughter of immigrants from an ancient branch of Christians arising from the mountains between Lebanon and Syria, I often gain wisdom and strength from our history, from our ancient Christian practices, traditions, and teachings. Though these may seem antiquated, foreign, or feeble, do not underestimate the impact they had in upending one of the cruelest forces in human history—The Roman Empire.1 Rome, you ask?
Christians and Rome
If you are unacquainted with Tom Holland’s bestselling book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, I highly recommend it to you.2 A leading historian of antiquity, Holland describes, in excruciating detail, the manifold ways Rome exerted world domination through a ruthless brutality few dared to oppose. Rome’s capacity for exploitation, impunity, torture, and enslavement of entire people groups is legend. Resistance, of course, was useless, and anyone who tried became a deterring example to others. Rome was swift to torture and crucify opposition, large and small. Even more, Roman cities glorified torture and death as entertainment. Those who refused to offer public sacrifices to Roman gods became sacrifices themselves. Rome’s many victims were demeaned as ontological inferiors, “slaves and females” considered beings without souls, and were routinely denied protection. Those deemed useless to Rome were tossed over its city walls and, defenseless, became prey to wild animals. Infant girls were often left to die on city walls. You need a strong stomach to finish Holland’s book. The fact that we find the history of Rome’s dominion horrifying is precisely and entirely Holland’s point!
The idea that torture, domination, and exploitation prove disturbing to us today demonstrates the radical impact Christians had on Roman culture. The Christian ethic that forgiving one’s enemies, caring for the frail and defenseless, and valuing all humans as created in God’s image was the unimaginable cultural transformation Christians forged with their lives. Holland goes on to show that, while many dismiss Christianity as arcane and even an obstacle in achieving justice today, they critique the church’s failures through Christian values that are so much a part of our ethos that they are blind to its influence. Opposition to injustice, cruelty, sexism, and racism as evil, and demanding adjudication by legal systems—imperfect as they are—as pathways to justice for victims and perpetrators alike, through due process have deep Christian roots.
For Holland, the belief that all humans are made in the image of a loving, just, personal—even proximal—God who at the height of Rome’s cruelty took on human flesh in Mary’s womb, who lived, suffered, and died unjustly that we might find forgiveness and life abundant through the Spirit, is uniquely and entirely Christian. Supremely, in the example of Christ and his followers, we are left with accounts of the birthing of a new creation with its groanings inward and outward—the remaking of humanity and communities in the image of Christ.
Those of you searching for a research topic might consider analyzing the groanings of Christ’s disciples and those Paul worked beside as their moral compass shifts. It is intriguing to observe their surprise, disgust, and offense as outliers and untouchables, those exploited because of gender or ethnicity, become the beloved of Christ. The groaning of insiders marks the birthing of God’s new creation as cultural values and power shift in seismic ways, not only during the early centuries but also throughout history. As evil reaches new heights—here supremely we recognize our need for the Spirit’s power to rebirth humanity once again.
Intriguingly, Scripture uses feminine metaphors to describe God’s character, particularly the remaking of humanity in the image of Christ! Just as women groan in labor, so too the Spirit’s work within us. Scripture’s birthing images depict, through women’s experiences, the power of God’s Spirit bringing forth our “newness of life.” Of course, the birthing process is always fraught with danger, mess, blood, fear, and hours and hours of pain. While not all women give birth, all people have been birthed, and sisters, mothers, aunts, and friends describe the massive effort of body, spirit, and mind that robs women of comfort and sleep as the newborn tears through their bodies, taking on a life they had part in creating. That is why the birthing metaphors so perfectly describe our journey as Christians—as we are remade through much groaning as the Spirit separates us from our dependency on lesser gods in taking on life abundant in Christ. The painful groanings of our rebirth are supported through spiritual disciplines of confession, communion, prayer, fasting . . . and opportunities to lament the longstanding sins of patriarchy, the two-headed monster of racism and sexism.
Racism and Sexism: The Two-headed Monster of Patriarchy
The brutality of patriarchy is a double-edged sword for women marginalized by ethnicity and race. As journalist Adele Stan has written, “It’s difficult to imagine a system more patriarchal than the one on which the U.S. economy was founded . . . slavery. Plantation owners raped the women they enslaved, then enslaved any children resulting from those assaults. . . . This is our legacy, the part we don’t talk about. It courses silently through the veins of the body politic.”3 Patriarchy’s logic breeds male dominance and grows in brutality against women marginalized by race, tribe, and ethnicity. Seeking ultimate dominance, patriarchy’s toxic ideas and deadly consequences share a common root—the dehumanizing of women based on their flesh—their gender and race—an evil that too often positions females at the margin. Indeed, this is a crisis we continue to face.
#MeToo and #ChurchToo
We have Tarana Burke from New York City to thank for launching the #MeToo Movement in 2006. An activist and community organizer, Burke’s goal is the empowerment of Black girls and women to confront their abusers and defend themselves. Burke has devoted her life to addressing the systemic abuses that women of color face.
This graph shows a thirty-three percent increase in the number of homicides for Black women from 2019–2020.
While Burke, Stan, and others rightly recognize the horrors women have encountered in a country that has socialized and normalized patriarchy and racism through more than 245 years of U.S. slavery, followed by the brutal practices of segregation—as it continues in many forms today worldwide. Yet we find comfort, wisdom, and power knowing that Jesus challenged the two heads of patriarchy—sexism and racism—centuries ago.
The Samaritan Woman (John 4)
Is it not significant that Jesus, early in his public ministry, reveals himself as Messiah to a woman considered an outsider to Israel? Seeking her out is a frontal challenge to Greek, Roman, and Jewish assumptions that gender, class, and ethnicity determine value, belonging, and vocation. Waiting for her in the heat of the day, when the disenfranchised fetch water, Jesus speaks with a woman from a hated tribe and holds the longest conversation recorded in Scripture. As a Jew asking a Samaritan for a drink, Christ exposes her tribe’s marginalization. Asking for her husband, Jesus reveals her exploitation by numerous men. As with God and Hagar, Jesus is the God who sees (Gen 16:13). He is a personal, loving God who is closer to her than she is to herself. Jesus declares to her that he knows and cares about her story intimately. Christ’s welcome to her “amazes” (thaumazō, “marvel, amaze,” John 4:27) the disciples, and thus begins the inward groanings of a new creation.
The disciples’ response exposes their deeply held bias of tribal and male superiority. Yet, their surprise by Christ’s intentional welcome of the Samaritan woman is also an encounter that shifts their moral compass as she too joins his beloved community, a member of Christ’s new creation people. Even more, by disclosing himself as Messiah, Jesus enlists her as an evangelist to a hated people, knowing that she would do what any Jew or Samaritan might in response to his personal, loving revelation. She dashes, leaving her jar to tell her community she has met a man who sees, who knows all about her. He must be the Messiah! She becomes the first evangelist, proclaiming the good news that, lowly, outcast, and hated as she is, Jesus sees, knows, and laments her injustices. Jesus is proximal to her social location, and he enters in and heals her and her community. Several verses later we learn that many Samaritans come to faith because of her encounter with Christ. A despised woman brings the good news of her people’s inclusion. Her groanings have been heard.
The Syrophoenician Woman (Matthew 15 and Mark 7)
Like the Samaritan woman, Jesus travels outside Jewish territory, this time to Phoenicia, a country we call Lebanon today. Here Jesus encounters the Syrophoenician woman. Considered an unclean Gentile, the Jews viewed her people as “dogs”—as undeserving of God’s gifts.4 Astonishing, then, that Jesus—a Jewish rabbi—approached her. But in response to his initiative, the disciples try to shoo her away (Matt 15:23)5—a groaning to be sure. Yet she is determined and begs Jesus to deliver her demon-possessed daughter. Jesus tells this suffering woman that he has come to feed Israel’s children first, not the “dogs,” meaning non-Jews. Testing her faith, as Jesus tested the disciples a few passages earlier before feeding the 5,000, Jesus raises the bar with her. In what some consider a cruel conversation, Jesus states the disciples’ assumption: that he should feed first Israel’s children. And who would expect faith in a woman from “the dogs?” That is Christ’s point! To our amazement, her faith is strong, even stronger than the disciples. She leaps over the bar and says, “even the dogs eat the crumbs under the table!” Her faith is miraculous and stands in stark contrast to the disciples who had no idea how Jesus will feed the multitude with a few fish and loaves (a chapter earlier, in Mark 6:35–36). But not this woman from the “dogs”; she knows that a few crumbs are enough to heal her daughter. She too is God’s beloved “child,” and Jesus heals her daughter. Her response makes clear that the bread of heaven, Christ’s body, is food for all, perhaps especially for the “dogs”—those who are hated and excluded. This woman stands as an example that women and outcasts have greater faith than the privileged, the people of Israel, and even the twelve men representing Israel’s twelve tribes. The birth pangs and groanings of a new creation continue.
A Bleeding Woman Healed (Matthew 9, Mark 5, Luke 8)
Defying the logic of patriarchy that demeans female bodies and defiles men who touch them, Jesus agrees to heal the daughter of a synagogue leader who asks him, “Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live” (Mark 5:23 NIV). As Jesus and the disciples follow him through a crowded street, an unseen woman touches Jesus first. Ravaged by vaginal bleeding, depleted financially and isolated from human belonging and touch, she approaches Jesus from behind, like an untouchable. In desperation she reaches out, unseen, and her fingers brush the edge of his robe. It was her last effort for healing. And immediately, she no longer feels blood flowing between her legs! She is healed! As the blood stopped so does Jesus—proximity! He turns and asks, “Who touched my clothes?” And the disciples groan in confusion. Is it not obvious! “We are in a massive crowd. Many have touched you, Jesus.” But her touch moves her out of the invisible margins and into the gaze of “the God who sees”—and also into the sight of the disciples and the crowd. What God sees, they too must see. Now front and center, she falls trembling at his feet and receives Christ’s welcome as family. He says “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering” (Mark 5:34). With these words Jesus repositions a woman who has suffered twelve years, moving her from the shadowy margins as an untouchable into the welcoming sunlight of Christ’s beloved community. Two daughters were healed by touch that day, but the one without privilege came first—a key moment in rebirthing women as human. Yet, there is more groaning that awaits the disciples as still another woman touches Jesus.
A Woman Anoints Jesus (Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 7, John 12)
In all four Gospels we find a story of a woman who anoints Jesus. Using a costly oil, she pours her expensive treasure on Jesus, an extravagant service that enrages onlookers. They believe the oil should have been sold to feed the poor. What the woman understands, but they do not, is that her anointing prepared Christ for his greatest work of all, a death on a Roman cross. “She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial” (Mark 14:8). So, like the priests in the OT, this woman anoints a king of Israel—the greatest king in all of history, for a death that constitutes the crowning achievement of all kings. While Peter could not accept Christ’s death on a cross (Matt 16:22; Mark 8:32), this woman does. Hers is the greatest priestly anointing in history—the responsibility of a woman.
These Gospel stories consistently demonstrate Jesus’s faithfulness to Israel, inviting them first to the marriage feast of the lamb—an invitation they do not always value or accept. In contrast, we find women marginalized by gender, ethnicity, and illness who by their courage, faith, and leadership put themselves on the guest list, insisting that they too be included, healed, fed, and empowered to serve. While Jesus welcomes their faith and initiative even as it exceeds that of the Twelve, we watch the disciples groan as untouchables become a new creation and join God’s beloved people. And the groaning continues in the ministry of Paul—who was himself an elite leader among the Jews.
Paul and Peter
A leader with enormous privilege both by birth and achievement, Paul’s encounter with Christ on the Damascus Road alters the sense of privilege he held for his ethnicity, heritage, and achievements, counting them as rubbish and exchanging them for a new status, that of a slave (Acts 9:1–19; 22:6–21; 26:12–18). Paul had not participated in Pentecost—the birth of the church—with the Holy Spirit filling “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs” (Acts 2:9–11 NIV). It is a giant inclusion of ethnicities, ages, and both women and men, events that were “amazing” and “perplexing.” Onlookers believe they are drunk! Peter, having done much groaning, explains to his fellow Jews that what they are witnessing is the fulfillment of the prophet Joel’s prophesy, that young and old, male and female of many ethnic and racial groups are uniting as a new creation community through the Holy Spirit.
Galatians 3:28, a Rebirth
Like Jesus, Paul also serves beside women, ethnic minorities, and slaves—his coworkers in the gospel. Hence, Andronicus and Junia are prominent among the apostles (Rom 16:7). In fact, the majority of leaders Paul mentions in Rom 16 are women, slaves, or “dogs”—non-Jews. Reframing authority and power in terms of belonging, kinship, and love, Paul returns to Philemon his slave Onesimus—whom Paul calls his beloved son—someone of instrumental use to Paul during his imprisonment. Even more, he identifies Onesimus as a brother, an equal in Christ, and asks Philemon to forgive his debt which Paul will repay, confident that Philemon will do even more. Love wins out and Onesimus is freed, for history teaches that Onesimus becomes Bishop of Ephesus—a city once famous for its worship of Artemis but now under Onesimus’s giftings and leadership, the city becomes a thriving center of Christian faith.6
This story and others demonstrate the centrality of Gal 3:28, considered Paul’s heartbeat—a summary of his theology and practice.7 The passage states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ” (NIV). For Paul, Christ inaugurates a new creation ethic so that the value and privilege of Jewish, freed males is now the that of the “dogs”—the non-Jews, the slaves, and last of all, women. It is fascinating that Gal 3:28 is incorporated into early Christian liturgies8 and carved on baptismal fonts that are shaped like wombs, making Paul’s point! Dead in sin, we enter our baptismal waters united to Christ in his death on our behalf.9 We then rise in newness of life with Christ victorious over sin.10 Clothed in Christ, we are remade in his image, no longer valued and privileged by earthly standards but through our newness of life in the Spirit. It is our second birth that forms our true and lasting identity, purpose, and destiny. Stunningly, leading anthropologists consider this passage the most feminist of the texts we have from antiquity.11 What is more, Paul lives this new creation ethic beside outliers and outsiders rendered so by their race, gender, and class.
Old Testament Women
Through these stories and others, Scripture shows how women demeaned by gender and race are called and used by God. Outsiders like Ruth the Moabite and Rahab the Amorite become insiders, and both are cited in Christ’s lineage. Confronting patriarchy’s dominance (Gen 3:16), made brutal through tribal and ethnic disparities, Jesus makes clear what patriarchy’s dominance obscures. Women and especially those degraded by race are equally created in God’s image (Gen 1:26–29), renewed in Christ (2 Cor 5:17), and empowered by the Spirit (Acts 2:16–18) for service to the church (Rom 12:6–8; 1 Cor 12:7–11; Eph 4:11–13) whom Paul calls his ministry coworkers.12 Women too are equally recreated in the image of Christ as leaders in the church (2 Cor 3:18). This is the work of Christ who absorbed, in his own flesh, sin’s ultimate dominance on Calvary.
Early Evangelicalism
As the early Christians lived in contradiction to Rome by forgiving their enemies, by rescuing and caring for girl babies and those deemed useless to Rome, they built hospitals, schools, and communities with vocations devoted to their care. The wealthy and educated lived and worked in proximity to those on the margins, breaking down barriers of class, gender, and race. Limping its way through history, groaning while being redeemed and while awaiting their full restoration, I am reminded of the writings of Lilias Trotter (1853–1928), a missionary to Algiers who herself encountered much groaning beside the women and children there. I love her faith as she celebrated the fruit of our groanings. She wrote: “Take the very hardest thing in your life—the place of difficulty, outward or inward, and expect God to triumph gloriously in that very spot. Just there He can bring your soul into blossom.”13
The wisdom of her faith is worth considering today. Lilias was steeped in the crucicentrism of early evangelicals.14 As historian David Bebbington observed, they were the most cross-centered generation of Christians in history.15 They preached and wrote extensively on Gal 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ. . . .”
The early evangelicals identified themselves as part of the mystical body of Christ. “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20b NIV). Why was this passage so precious to them? Like the early Christians, they faced an increasingly cruel and abusive world, one in which certain Christians were deeply complicit. With the expansion of slavery and the trafficking of girls and women from Africa and Asia into the United States, prominent leaders also deceived and exploited poor rural families, convincing them to send their daughters to earn money in urban communities. The truth was, they were sold to brothels and chained to beds in the iron mines of Michigan, in over 500 lumber camps of Wisconsin, and in brothels in Denver. But their traffickers underestimated the power of Christ in the early evangelical women, who were proximal to the suffering of girls and women and were sometimes themselves both victim and rescuer, like Harriet Tubman (1822–1913). She and others rose victorious in Christ and, through the Spirit’s power, led others to freedom from within brothels and slave communities.
Most horrific in these circumstances were the Christians who either turned a blind eye or who were part of the trafficking network, including judges and legislators. The exploitation of girls and women too often went unopposed because slaves and women were viewed as inferior to men, largely through a misinterpretation of Scripture. Deemed lesser, slaves and women were treated as less. But the Spirit ignited revivals in slave communities and beyond, filling people with spiritual power and centering the cross in ways that broke down prejudice and exploitation.
The Welsh revivalist, Jessie Penn-Lewis (1861–1927), is one example. She wrote: “Christ upon the Cross of Calvary broke down the middle wall of partition. . . . He died that in Him there might be a new creation. . . . All divisions caused by sin cease in Him.”16
Paul’s context when writing Gal 2 concerned the groaning of Jewish believers over serving beside the “dogs,” the uncircumcised Gentiles, which resulted in significant conflicts and divisions in the Galatian church. Thus, Paul points to the cross—where all Christians are reborn in Christ’s image—a new being or ontology that reframes their old identity shaped by race, gender, and class. As Gordon Fee taught, soteriology, the work of Christ, becomes ecclesiology, the work of the church.17 The cross does not eliminate ethnic, racial, or gender distinctions because these bring a strength and vitality needed in the church, as seen in ministry of Jesus and Paul. Women, slaves, and non-Jews infused a needed capacity that the church might not have known otherwise. The same was true among the early evangelicals as God raised up leaders outside the dominant class in opposing slavery and women’s subjugation. It was their belief that Calvary renewed human identity and purpose in Christ’s image, extending new voices, hands, and minds to advance the gospel and social justice. Here are a few examples.
Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) was one of the most gifted speakers of her day. Revered by Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Lincoln, Truth was deeply admired for her piercing logic as she challenged racial and gender prejudice. At the 1852 suffrage meeting in Ohio, Truth said that denying women the right to vote or preach because Christ was male ignored the fact (articulated by fourth-century theologians18) that it was Christ’s humanity, not his maleness or his ethnicity, that made him the perfect atonement for all people.
Consider also the missionary doctor, Katharine Bushnell, MD (1856–1946). After working as a physician in China, Bushnell returned home to lead the U.S. Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s anti-trafficking work.19 After decades of exposing sex-slavery that all-too-often exploited women of color in the United States and abroad, Bushnell believed God was calling her to expose the root cause—racist and sexist assumptions based on a misreading of Scripture. Working to dismantle the two headed monster of patriarchy, Bushnell wrote:
So long as [Christians] imagine that a system of caste is taught in the Word of God, and that [men] belong to the upper caste while women are of the lower caste; and just so long as [we] believe that mere FLESH—fate—determines the caste to which one belongs; and just so long as [we] believe . . . the “he will rule over you” [Genesis 3:16 is prescriptive] . . . [then] the destruction of young women into a prostitute class will continue.20
Brilliant thinkers, Sojourner Truth, and Katharine Bushnell confronted the theological patriarchy that exploited girls and women at ethnic and socio-economic margins.
Today
Today we face again a deeply flawed theological proposition that fuels horrific suffering in the Middle East—one I alluded to at the beginning of this discussion. Are we, as Christians, once again complicit in advancing shallow theology that values and prioritizes one group over another, resulting in a seismic slaughter of humanity? Why have so many ignored atrocities suffered by the people of the Middle East, one that has been ongoing for many decades? Do we justify it biblically, asserting divine sanction—the greatest authority one can evoke? Who suffers the most? It is always women and children!
According to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, in times of war, conflict, and displacement the vast portion of those who suffer are girls and women.21 We need a theological declaration of human rights that critiques distorted theological assumptions that foster abuse especially of those at the margins. Acknowledging we worship a God who sees, a personal, loving, and just God, flawed end-time theologies that undermine human flourishing must be critiqued historically, biblically, theologically, and socially. How can we walk in newness of life while fostering injustice and abuse among the very people our Lord welcomed as the beloved, even if it causes much groaning among us today. Let us remember that their inclusion disrupted prejudice among the disciples who groaned as the “dogs” were given bread they believed was intended first for the Israel’s children. A voice from this region can give us much hope.
I would love to introduce you to Dr. Charles Malik (1906–1987), a Lebanese theologian and diplomat who, beside Eleanor Roosevelt, drafted the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Dr. Malik famously said, “The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world.”22 A member of my grandmother’s Orthodox church in Ras Beirut, Dr. Malik was known to weep every time the name of Jesus was mentioned. A highly respected Christian diplomate, theologian, and leader, Malik was awarded fifty honorary doctorates. Invited to speak at the 1980 launch of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, the committee that issued his invitation likely regretted it once Dr. Malik finished his speech. Why? Though the occasion was celebratory, even triumphalist, Malik exposed the unwarranted confidence that had beguiled evangelicals and fundamentalists alike, who in his view had lost, rightly so, their moral and intellectual influence in the academy and broader culture. And, he said, it would take decades to recover the respect Christians had once enjoyed in the public square. There was groaning to be sure! His lecture was published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.23
Malik’s admonition moved a young scholar that day, Dr. Mark Noll, seated in the front row, to dash home to research and write a significant assessment of critical thinking among evangelicals titled, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.24 Noll’s book was followed by Ron Sider’s, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why are Christians Living Like the Rest of the World.25 Like Noll, Sider also traced failed theological and historical reflection with its tragic impact on social justice—a failure further critiqued by Kristin Kobes du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.26 Kobes du Mez’s book was followed by Beth Allison Barr’s, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.27 Clearly, other books will follow, to examine the groaning needed today in remaking the church in the image of Christ.
In each generation, the Spirit continues to lay at the feet of Christians significant opportunities to confront injustice, to groan in becoming holy, to lament abuse and prejudice, and to pray for wisdom in seeking redemptive ways to upend inequities and impunity. May we always address these biblically and theologically, with Scripture in one hand and world news in the other as our commitment to remain proximal with those who suffer as Christ once did.
Conclusion
While this may sound idealistic, even abstract given human enslavement, genocide, and exploitation today, especially as Christian leaders abuse and exploit women in churches with impunity, as #MeToo and #ChurchToo survivors note. Yet while we stare in the face of history (slavery in the United States, Apartheid in South Africa, the Third Reich in Germany, and more), lament plays a critical role. Lament not only acknowledges our complicity and brokenness as sinful humanity. Lament also reveals our need for Christ’s saving grace and the Spirit’s power for healing and reconciliation. Even more, lament prioritizes empathy that helps remove obstacles to true and abiding reconciliation by resisting quick fixes to deep wounds too often rationalized or ignored. Lament helps open necessary space to sit with our complicity and pain, to wait on God’s transforming power, and to seek wisdom of leaders at the margins who know best the logic of patriarchy and thus more viable, lasting solutions. Without collective lament we speak “peace when there is none” (Jer 6:14). Lament reserves a place for the groanings of Christ’s new creation to be heard, not only in our present circumstances but as we are also inspired by previous generations who have groaned so faithfully and courageously. As the letter to the Hebrews states, let us consider: “the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith” (13:7 NIV).
Notes
- https://archive.nytimes.com/nytimes.com/books/first/b/bok-mayhem.html.
- Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2021).
- Adele M. Stan, “This Is What Patriarchy Looks Like,” The American Prospect (Nov 22, 2017).
- Deb Beatty Mel, “Jesus and the Canaanite Woman: An Exception for Exceptional Faith,” Priscilla Papers 23/4 (Autumn 2009) 8–12.
- Craig Keener, https://craigkeener.org/category/new-testament/mark/.
- https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.v.ii.i.html. See also https://1517.org/articles/font-to-table-the-deeper-meaning-behind-baptismal-fonts.
- F. Bruce, “Women in the Church,” Christian Brethren Review 33 (Dec 1982) 7–14; Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians (Paternoster, 1982) 188ff.; Bruce, 1 and 2 Corinthians, NCB (Eerdmans, 1971) 103; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 2nd ed. (Eerdmans, 2014), cites Gal 3:28 in his claim that “the gospel absolutely transcends, and thereby eliminates altogether, all merely social distinctions (345). Craig Keener, “Together in the New Humanity,” Priscilla Papers 37/2 (Spring 2023), calls Gal 3:28 the “universal principle” (4) and “Paul’s essential principle” (6).
- https://brill.com/previewpdf/book/edcoll/9789004250369/B9789004250369-s003.xml?srsltid=AfmBOoqri9-HWJq79.
- https://repository.digital.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/554253.
- “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Rom 6:4 NIV).
- Daniel Boyarin, “Paul and the Genealogy of Gender,” Representations 41 (1993) 1–33.
- https://margmowczko.com/paul-romans-16-women-coworkers/.
- Lilias Trotter, A Way of Seeing: The Inward and Outward Vision of Lilias Trotter, ed. Miriam Huffman Rockness (Oxvision, 2016) 62.
- David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (Routledge, 2004) 2–3. Also Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism (IVP Academic, 2004) 19.
- Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 13.
- Jessie Penn-Lewis, Thy Hidden Ones: Union with Christ as Traced in the Song of Songs (Marshall Brothers, 1899) 30.
- Gordon D. Fee, Listening to the Spirit in the Text (Eerdmans, 2000) 59.
- Gregory of Nazianzen, “To Cledonius the Priest against Apollinarius,” New Advent, writes: “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed. . . .” For Nazianzen, redemption requires representation. For Truth, Christ, born of a woman, represented women on Calvary.
- Referred to as the “Social Purity Department of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union” (WCTU). See https://bu.edu/missiology/missionary-biography/a-c/bushnell-katharine-c-1855%E2%80%931946/.
- Bushnell, Dr. Katharine C. Bushnell: A Brief Sketch of her Life and Work (Rose and Sons, 1930) 14, https://godswordtowomen.org/bushnell_brief_sketch.pdf. Also Bushnell, God’s Word to Women: One Hundred Bible Studies on Women’s Place in the Divine Economy (Mossville: God’s Word to Women, 1999) 10ff.
- See https://brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2021-Room-documents_Room5.pdf and https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2022.pdf.
- https://wlcunsw.org.au/culture/charles-malik.
- Malik’s speech, “The Two Tasks,” was published by the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. Also: https://charlesmalikinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Two-Tasks-green.pdf.
- Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994).
- Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? (Baker, 2005).
- Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020).
- Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos, 2021).