Despite my best efforts to get to the morning blog in a timely way I just can’t seem to manage it before 10 am. Start living now as if the end is nigh, I say to myself every evening. Wake up earlier to get everything done before the “work” day starts. You’ll be so sad when the school year begins and you haven’t adjusted to reality. But then the sun creeps over the edge of the world and I think, oh, well, maybe the next time. Today I need a few more minutes of sleep. The cold, hard inevitability of the forthcoming scholastic endeavor is going to be exactly as it is every year—a horrible jolt to my delicate constitution. It just isn’t possible to artificially adopt the schedule of school before time. Who will save me from this body of death?
Anyway, that’s not what’s important. What’s really important is the sheer number of news items online that are so scintillating. From famine to feast, as it were.
First, my piece about Amy Peeler’s The Gender of God is out. Here’s a taste:
Peeler contends that many within Christian history have blasphemously believed and taught that God is male. The necessary consequence of this wrong belief is that women up to the present day have been grossly mistreated. These “failures,” she writes, “against women proceeded unabated, sometimes malicious and predatory, sometimes subconscious and unintended, practiced by both men and women, on each other and on themselves.” It is for this reason that the “claim that God values women sounds audacious given Christianity’s checkered history and, infuriatingly, its tabloid-worthy present.” Peeler makes the ahistorical assertion that Christianity itself “was birthed and cultivated in patriarchal soil, and therefore, it simply got women wrong.” This declaration, made so early in the book, makes it difficult to fairly consider her argument. What does Peeler mean by “Christianity” in this instance? Does she mean the writings of the New Testament? Or the era of the church fathers? And what did they, whoever they are, get wrong?
Vagueness and ambiguity plague the work. Imprecision allows Peeler to assemble uncontested doctrines and then draw conclusions unwarranted by the data she presents. For example, in discussing the roles of women in the church, she insists that “If women are not allowed to represent Christ, those Christian communities are utilizing a flattened view of His maleness, one that forgets the mode of His incarnation. This weakened Christology becomes a pathway to the false and damaging male-making of God the Father. The male Savior whose flesh came from the body of a woman provides a radically inclusive embrace of all humanity, a humanity made in the image of God.” Thus she sweeps away those communities closest to the view of Mary she espouses — Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. In neither of those traditions are women “allowed to represent Christ” in the way she means, at the Eucharistic Table. And yet I think it unfair to say that they “utilize a flattened view” of Christ’s “maleness.” These kinds of judgments are imprecise, at best, and slanderous at worst. What does she mean by “maleness”? If Jesus was a man — and Peeler agrees that in virtue of His earthly body He was a man and continues to be so in eternity — then the incarnate Son of God is male (and the very standard of maleness and masculinity).
Read the whole thing! And check out the podcast I did with Melanie:
Second, speaking of gender and all its attendant fascinations, I keep coming across clips of that young actress who is playing Snow White in Disney’s latest effort to trample into the dust all their greatest and most beloved cinematic accomplishments. She is adorable, though not in possession of a most desirable and becoming virtue—gumption. Lady Wisdom seems to have given her a wide miss. She is careening from one interview to another saying things that are making even the most liberated of our time shudder.
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