Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion

2. Fear and Women’s Writing: Choosing the Better Part

11 Mary sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work for myself? Tell her to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” —Luke 10:39-42, NRSV During childhood holiday dinners, I, like Mary of Bethany, chose the better part: I eavesdropped on two generations of pastors while they discussed theology and the women served dessert. When my father, grandfather, and uncles debated women’s ordination and the rule barring women delegates from attending the annual meetings of the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, I admired their mastery of the subject matter and memorized arguments on both sides of the issue. Oddly enough, I had little sense that this debate had anything to do with me. Decades later, when the debate had everything to do with me, I assured my grandfather that I would pursue “only” academics at seminary. In a tradition that values the life of the mind, no one could object to my pursuit of a theological education; but I would not risk controversy 2 FEAR AND WOMEN’S WRITING Choosing the Better Part Michelle Voss Roberts 12 / Women, Writing, Theology by pursuing ordination without that mysterious, unambiguous (as well as gendered and socially constructed) certainty of a “call to the ministry ” that had been fostered in the men in my religious community. Mary chose the better part: she listened and learned from what Jesus said. The gospel does not tell us whether she spoke or questioned. It is unlikely that she took up a pen to write. Graduate school trained me to write, but it was years after seminary that I finally enrolled in a preaching course to attempt to speak my theological voice. The act of proclamation differed from my scholarly writing, and the process of preparation to speak subtly altered what I allowed myself to write elsewhere. I began catching more and more frequent glimpses of the internal censor that, with subtle but vicious efficacy, warned me as a writer when I got too close to the boundary from which my original religious tradition would not allow me to return: “If they knew I’d written that, they’d say I’m no longer a Reformed Christian. If I ever stand up to speak from the pulpit, I’ll put myself once and for all on the ‘wrong’ side of the debates over women’s authority.” The obstacle that stood between my theological education and any aspiration to a position of religious authority was a peculiar kind of fear that women experience as subjects within patriarchal religious traditions. Lynn Japinga’s survey of fear in the Reformed tradition offers the beginnings of an explanation for my terror. She identifies fear of the other as a particularly potent barrier to growth for my home tradition . The original motto of the Christian Reformed Church was “In isolation is our strength,”1 and the denomination has exhibited schismatic tendencies over issues ranging from Freemason membership to women’s ordination. Japinga notes that “fear of women’s bodies, women’s minds, and women’s power . . . has at times led the church to limit and control women’s lives.”2 The Reformed fear of the other, so potently directed at religious others, has been directed at women within its fold as well. Religious traditions take shape amid wider cultural forces. Women are the ultimate other of patriarchal culture, which has been crafted by and for men. Indeed, as Simone de Beauvoir eloquently states in The Second Sex, the association of women with the body, coupled with Fear and Women’s Writing / 13 Christianity’s association of sin with “the flesh,” ensures that “the flesh that is for the Christian the hostile Other is precisely woman.”3 The confluence of these facets of women’s otherness within patriarchal religious traditions, I suggest, creates a dynamic in which our fear of the other manifests as fear of being the other. Religious identity is a subtle and complex thing. In the Reformed and Christian Reformed churches there are many ways of determining who...