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Silence
With Full Submission?:
Jay Twomey (University of Cincinnati)
Contemporary debates about key passages from the Pastoral Epistles limiting women’s active and full participation in the life of the church tend to emphasize how un-Pauline such passages are. This, of course, is an important political/critical strategy, one likely to be effective not only for feminists, but for anyone invested in the authority of the authentic Paulines. Such a desire to debunk at least some aspects of Pastoral misogyny, moreover, has deep roots, and can be found even in the writings of those who saw the Pastor as Paul: from Chrysostom’s recognition that 1 Tim. 3:11 allows for women deacons; to the Wife of Bath’s mocking critique, in The Canterbury Tales, of those who speak controlling “wordes in the apostles name” against women’s dress, and against women; to the fiery determination of the Quaker Margaret Fell who, in “Women’s Speaking Justified” (ca. 1667) understood the Pastorals in the context of a broader biblical warrant for women’s religious rights – the Pastorals have been interrogated by critical voices throughout much of Christian history. But the direct approach to the apparent myopia of the Pastorals is neither the only, nor necessarily the most effective, means of getting the church to recognize the potency of its own democratic vistas. Another possibility, one made available through a study of the reception history of the Pastorals which is attentive to the complex rhetorical contexts in which the Pastorals are invoked, is rather more indirect, more subtly critical. This approach, quite simply, is to willfully and consciously engage in a sort of hermeneutics of credulity, reading the Pastorals as if one were blind to their social effects, and so to appropriate them for another, what we might call today alternative, cause. A particularly exciting instance of such a reading is to be found in American theologian Jonathan Edwards’ writings on religious revivalism during the Great Awakening. Edwards uses the Pastoral Epistles in ways one might expect – principally in order to stress important issues of church order and leadership, but also to provide support for the experience of religious revival itself. Writing in the contentious, intensely-charged religious climate of revival, Edwards wants to encourage true participation in religious awakening while at the same time curbing potentially dangerous excesses of religious zeal. The Pastorals, with their emphasis on true doctrine and on the sober and socially respectable in religious life are well-suited to Edwards’ task in this regard. And they, along with texts like 1 Peter, would seem especially useful concerning the controversial roles women were appropriating for themselves within and on the margins of religious life at the time. However, far from making use of the anti-feminist elements of these letters to restrict women’s religious enthusiasm, Edwards actually upsets the misogynistic logic of passages such as 1 Tim. 2:9-12, either by giving them a thoroughly gender-neutral valence or by limiting their validity to specific, highly-attenuated secular contexts. What’s more, Edwards is very careful to avoid any reference at all in these writings to comments in 1 Corinthians on problems in the Pauline communities as a result of women’s religious activities, and to the Haustafeln passages from Colossians and Ephesians, even as he cites from the very epistolary contexts in which those passages appear. His careful excising of such texts, and his creative recasting of others, allows Edwards to produce a rhetoric of tolerance for women’s active participation in the revival experience while effectively neutralizing precisely those New Testament texts which could be, and indeed were, used to keep women circumscribed within their domesticity. This presentation is part of a larger project which focuses upon issues of the reading/misreading of Biblical texts. In developing a theoretical framework for this study I am, as will be evident, especially indebted to the work of Steven Mailloux who, in his 1998 book Reception Histories, develops a rhetorical hermeneutics in order to “use rhetoric to practice theory by doing history.” Mailloux’s ambitious project, however, seems ambivalent when it comes to deciding whether or not one can speak of misreadings of the Bible. My presentation will explore what is at stake in such ambivalence, and I hope the discussion which follows will help me further to clarify my own ongoing concern with creative (mis)appropriations of Biblical texts.
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