Gender and Bible translation

My former student Rick Hale compared how different Bible translations rendered the word "anthropos" in passages that (a) could reasonably have both men and women in view and (b) are translated with gender inclusive language in the NET Bible. The table provides interpretation of ‘anthropos’ in the specified Bible translations for each passage listed. Click on the link to download the entire PDF. (Works best in Chrome.)

Shepherd Like a Girl

Does your nativity set have any female shepherds? Mine doesn’t. And it’s amazing how much I have picked up unconsciously from art…. 

I didn’t realize that—without anything being said outright—I had internalized the idea that “shepherd” was a “guy” job. So, if I saw a Christmas pageant with girls dressed in bathrobes holding crooks, I told myself the real nativity story lacked girl roles so the directors were taking creative license. But now I know those girls in bathrobes more closely represented reality than did my misinformed imaginations.

My understanding about shepherds shifted radically when I traveled with my husband and daughter to Kenya’s Rift Valley. My husband is a U.S.-based missionary serving national leaders there. And while we were in Kenya, his ministry partner, Joseph, a Maasai warrior, introduced us to some of his friends.  

The Maasai are pastoral people—shepherds. Like Joseph, they live in individual huts inside bomas—enclosures made of brambles encircling huts made by women out of mud, sticks, grass, and cow dung. Inside the perimeter of the boma, another area, also made of brambles, serves as a livestock pen. 

The girls usually shepherd goats and sheep, sometimes with their moms or a grandparent, while boys shepherd the larger livestock. If a family has no girls—or not enough of them—the youngest son or sons also get assigned to sheep/goat duty. The pecking order is usually men, animals, women, children. For these pastoral peoples, livestock serve as their pantries, 401(k) plans, Meals on Wheels, bank accounts…. Often the shepherd-girls lack education, because someone has to guard the assets, and the boys’ educations have typically taken priority.

This setup or a similar one has been true for many shepherding tribes and peoples across time and geography. Consider that David, son of Jesse, who had multiple brothers—at least three in the army—was the youngest boy and the shepherd among Jesse’s eight sons. 

The Maasai, like some of the Bedouins my husband and I met in Jordan this summer, live—or abide—in the field. And that is exactly how Luke describes what the shepherds in Jesus’s birth narrative are doing—they are abiding, or living in the field. Not just “hanging out.” And they are watching their flock. Singular. So, the shepherds to whom the angel choir appeared were probably not a bunch of unrelated guys from different families watching multiple flocks on an open hillside. More likely, they were from one extended family unit with male, female, old, and young present. 

The highlight of my time with the Maasai in 2008 was watching the “Jesus” film with them. We threw a bedsheet over the top of a hut, hooked up a generator and voila! The best part was hearing them gasp for joy when the angels appeared to shepherds saying, in Naa—their own language— “Fear not! For I bring you good news of great joy for all the people!”   

A week later, we moved on to meet members of the Pokot tribe. And along the dirt road far from town we saw female shepherds out by themselves herding sheep.  

These experiences made me pose some questions about the biblical text to people who live much closer to its reality. And here’s what I learned: 

• Vocational shepherds are not outcasts. They smell a lot like a typical cowboy. Animal pens stink, but humans who keep the animals don’t walk around with dung clinging to themselves if they can help it.

• Nevertheless, shepherds don’t inhabit halls of power. My shepherd friends were overjoyed that in the film instead of appearing to leaders in palaces or temples, the angels came to those on the lower rungs of social power. These shepherds heard in the angels’ proclamation an emphasis on “all the people”—from the highest to the lowest.

• Girls were likely to have been present when the announcement was made about the good news being for all. The shepherds, plural, to whom the angels appeared were not individuals out by themselves alone in the dark. 

• As is true today, sheep in Jesus’s time were probably not wandering around on the hillside at night, but gathered into the sheepfold (see John 10). Shepherds guarded one entrance. And I corresponded yesterday with a Maasai brother who told me that in his world, after the animals go into their pen for the night, the whole extended family gathers around the fire for stories. That means we should probably envision an extended family warming themselves around a fire near a pen. 

So, what are some spiritual ramifications? 

• Women shepherd people. In a book on the ultra-conservative end of the gender debate, the authors imply that women cannot be spiritual shepherds because “shepherd” is a male job. Yet “Rachel came with her father’s sheep, for she was a shepherd” (Gen. 29:9). If we want to read biblical texts about shepherding as the original readers would have understood them, we will envision both males and females in view. The metaphor of a shepherd is that of one entrusted with the care of souls.

• We must read the Bible in community with Christians whose lives are closer to the world of the text than those of us with central heating and bank accounts with passwords. That means taking the posture of a learner in the presence of those who can see what many of us cannot. 

• Representation matters. When I mentioned on Twitter the possibility that females were present at the pronouncement of “good news for all the people,” some responded with tears and joy. For the first time they saw themselves in the story. In a quick search for Christmas Bible art, I found Mary to be the only female in any of the multiple scenes. The biggest demographic leaving the church is young females. Why might that be? 

• God loves the lowly; and so must we. Although shepherds are not the lowest of the low (as they are sometimes described), they themselves still acknowledge that neither are they the rich or powerful of this world. The heavenly choice to make the announcement to those outside of the usual power structures reveals something about the heart of God and inclusiveness of the good news. Do we want to be like him? 

Thanks to my time in the Rift Valley and in Jordan, I’m on the hunt for a manger scene that includes a female shepherd or two. (And some old people.) Since females were last at the cross, first at the tomb, and the first to herald the good news that Jesus is alive, it makes perfect sense that they also would have been among the first at the manger. And what does Luke tell us these shepherds did? After seeing the swaddled child, they spread the word. 

Like them, let us do the same—Go, tell it on the mountain! Jesus Christ is born!  

P.S. Some think the sheep being watched in the Bible story were those specially destined for sacrifice. The source of this information was a rabbinic Jewish scholar who converted to Christianity. But his idea has been further vetted. And comments in the link of this post address the details. Based on this research, I’m no longer inclined to think so. Nevertheless, the child who was born, the Good Shepherd, was indeed the lamb who was slain.  

Photo “Rebecka” by Dikla Laor at DiklaLaor.Photography. Used with permission.

Men and Women in Ministry Together

Recently some colleagues and I were featured on The Table podcast talking about men and women in ministry together. Let us know your thoughts. It's not about pushing women forward, it's about partnering forward.... 

Hear My Story on the ReStory Podcast Today

Thanks to my friend Mary DeMuth for hosting me on her ReStory podcast. Today I'm telling my story there. Check it out.

A Question Mark Over My Head?

Last year in San Diego at the national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), I agreed to be interviewed about my experience as a female who belongs to a society that has only 6% women in its membership. That number even includes student members. And who knows what percentage of the female members actually attend the annual meeting. All I can say is that when I go, I felt quite conscious of my femaleness, let me tell you. (Kudos to our friends at IFL who invest in their female employees by sending them.)I asked that my remarks be connected with a pseudonym—and as a journalist I almost never make someone keep my comments off the record. Does that tell you anything?A year later, the results are in, and the report evoked a lot of conversation in Atlanta. The opinions have been quite mixed, with some insisting that anecdotal evidence/stories don't count in research. (For people who say such silly things about narrative being an illegitimate source of info, I recommend epistemological therapy with Dr. Esther Meek.)I attended ETS the week before Thanksgiving—presented two papers, moderated a marriage panel, and also went to the American Academy of Religion national meeting, because my nominee for the Arts and Religion Award—Marilynne Robinson—was selected and honored. In between all that, I had many conversations over meals and coffees and in the hallways about the research and the responses to it. Some women I know have attended once and never want to return. (The same is true of one of my dearest male Latino friends. The absence of a minority presence is deeply troubling.)Here's a link to the final report, "A Question Mark Over My Head?" which resulted from  more than thirty-five interviews with a broad spectrum of people. It's not short, but it's thorough.I'm glad to report that some of my male colleagues have been appropriately distressed by the findings and have been vocal  in their responses. I'd love to know what you think.

Is God More Male Than Female? Why Was Messiah a Male?

Is God more male than female?Of course not. Nor is he more female than male. God is spirit (John 4:24), so God has no sex. Father and Son are metaphors, not sexual identities.The early church never depicted the Father as a male human. But later...well...consider the Sistine Chapel’s “The Creation of Adam.” Michelangelo painted the Father as an old man with white hair and a long beard. But in earlier centuries, it was considered heretical to portray the Father in human form at all. Only Jesus could be depicted in art, because he did indeed come in human flesh. Matt Milliner, assistant professor of art history at Wheaton College spoke about this at Gordon College in 2013 in his presentation, ”Visual Heresy: Imaging God the Father in the History of Art.”In earlier Christian art, the Father’s presence might be depicted by gold that covers the entire interior of the ceiling (e.g., St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice), or by an empty throne or a hand. People thus thought of God the Father as spirit—invisible—rather than as male.About the time we began depicting the Father as a male human, we removed the Virgin Mary from our art. Many Protestants think Mary appeared all over pre-Protestant art because Roman Catholics worshiped Mary. But that is inaccurate. Pictures of the Madonna and Child were pre-literate (think “flannelgraph”) ways of representing the incarnation. This is why often the face of Christ in Madonna-and-Child images is not the face of a newborn, but of a more mature male. And often Mary was and is depicted as gesturing toward her Son, pointing to her redeemer.Mary had to be physically larger because she was an adult woman when the Spirit overshadowed her. But bigger is not necessarily meant to represent “preeminent.”All this is to say that we tend to imagine God as we have seen him in visual art. So once the Protestant church lost the Mary-and Jesus visual reminders of the incarnation, and we also incorporated male human images of the Father, we ended up imagining God as more male than female.Something similar happened when our knowledge of women in Church history disappeared. The Church in pre-Protestant times also set aside days for remembering the holy men and women from ages past. We still know and even celebrate a few of these…St. Valentine’s Day on February 14; St. Patrick’s Day on March 17; the feast of Stephen on which Good King Wenceslas looked out on December 26…. But in the past, people knew about Felicity and Perpetua and Catherine of Siena and Catherine of Alexandra and many other holy women, whom they remembered every year on their “days.” With the loss of these annual reminders, as Protestants emphasized that all Christians are “saints,” we lost even more of the female images in the Church.In Scripture, God is depicted as both male and female. Through metaphor and simile we get ideas about what the invisible God is like. “He” is a pronoun of personhood, not of sex identification—which is why we do not refer to God as “it,” even though he is spirit and not male human.In the pages of the Word, then, we see “him” depicted as a weaning mother (Ps. 131:2); as a woman looking for a lost coin (Luke 15:8ff); and as one who gives birth from above (John 3:3). Even as early as Genesis 1:2, we have the reference to the Spirit “hovering” over creation in Genesis 1:2—metaphorical language that calls to mind a mother bird incubating and nurturing her creation. In Exodus, God speaks of bearing his children on eagles’ wings (19:4). In Isaiah, he hovers like a bird on a nest (31:5). And both Matthew and Luke record Jesus telling Jerusalem he wanted to gather the city to himself like a mother hen.Why did the Messiah have to be a man?The text does not say. But think about it…. The Scriptures tell us Jesus was conceived by virgin birth through the power of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 1:18). So genetically, he had a human mother but not a human father. If the offspring of the divine/human union had been a female, the redeemer of all humanity would have been a female with only a human mother. Where would that have left men? Unrepresented! The virgin birth that resulted in a male Messiah involves the perfect participation of male and female in the redemption of all males and females. All humanity. Brilliant!

The Manhood Crisis

A guest post from Carolyn Custis James. I have an advance copy of her new book, which releases today. I know my readers will love it!Trouble arrived in the mail today. And the truth is, I’ve been looking for it.UPS dropped off the envelope containing the advance copy of my new book. Malestrom: Manhood Swept into the Currents of a Changing World is my sixth and possibly the most provocative book I’ve written. After five books that focus on women, this book pulled me out of my comfort zone to understand what is happening to men and boys globally. My study led me to examine patriarchy—a social system which many evangelicals have a vested interest in maintaining.The timing couldn’t have been more apropos. Last night Frank and I watched the documentary on Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s new book—A Path Appears—about domestic violence against women, appalling poverty, the sexual abuse of little girls, and the battle to educate girls.At points it was unbearable to watch.At every turn, patriarchy was the root cause of what was happening. It was a painful reminder of the importance of what I've been learning about men.While it is widely recognized that patriarchy is demeaning of females in particular, the truth of the matter is, patriarchy is a devastating male issue as well. Men and boys are victims every bit as much as women.I’m not the first to raise the alarm about patriarchy. But Malestrom raises the alarm about how patriarchy is not only bad for women, it’s bad for men and boys. This book takes the unusual approach to examine the pressures patriarchy brings to bear on men in which they lose their God-given identity and purpose.I have no interest in stirring up controversy. But I cannot stand silent in the face of this egregious disparagement of men and denial of their true identity.Ironically, writing about women was what convinced me to take up the subject of men and the manhood crisis. When the title of my latest book about women contained the word "half," it was hard to escape the fact that I had more work to do. Until men are included in the gender conversation—not merely as interested observers, but as subjects who are facing a crisis of their own—any discussion about gender is woefully incomplete.Once I started researching, it didn't take me long to discover the malestrom and to realize men are in desperate trouble too."It isn’t overstating things to say there isn’t a man or boy alive who isn’t a target. The malestrom’s global currents can be violent and overt, but also come in subtle, even benign forms that catch men unawares. The malestrom is the particular ways in which the fall impacts the male of the human species—causing a man to lose himself, his identity and purpose as a man, and above all to lose sight of God’s original vision for his sons. The repercussions of such devastating personal losses are not merely disastrous for the men themselves, but catastrophic globally."Malestrom raises issues as serious as anything I've written about women. I am not exaggerating when I say it has me every bit as concerned about men and boys as I have ever been about women and girls. What's at stake is far more serious than subjects that occupy the church such as who leads and who follows or which roles are for men and which are for women. Issues surrounding concepts of manhood and masculinity are driving the violence in today's headlines—including wars, terrorism, brutal ISIS executions, the radicalization of young men, shootings on American streets—and the violence that takes place behind closed doors.As I researched the various currents that converge to form the malestrom, it didn't seem to matter which current I considered—the father wound, the rise of women, the marginalization of men, gender role reversals—every current ultimately led to patriarchy. It's not a subject I could afford to ignore. The stakes are simply too high for both men and women. So Malestrom puts patriarchy on the table for an honest, healthy discussion. My hope is for a civil discourse on this most significant issue.The conversation that Malestrom invites couldn't be more timely, more urgent for both men and women, and (I hasten to add) more hopeful too for it centers on the imago dei and gets to the heart of Jesus’ gospel. 

9 Qualities of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

It's my week to post on the Engage (bible.org) women's leadership blog. Here's my entry for yesterday:More than 35 years ago when I started dating a guy named Gary Glahn, he liked to grow bonsai trees and cacti. For my high school graduation, he sewed us matching down vests—that we still wear—from a kit. During my freshman year of college, he drew me a rose and shaded it perfectly with colored pencils. I hung it on the wall in my dorm. His plant growing, his sewing skills, and his drawing all got him labeled as a sissy.One of my introverted male students told of a time when he visited a church for the first time. He wanted to sit back, observe, and get a feel for whether this place might be a good fit for his gifts. During the adult Bible fellowship, the larger group divided up into smaller groups, and he ended up as the lone male with a few women who were regular attenders. These women handed him the teaching guide and expected him to lead the discussion. He was mortified that they deemed adhering to strict gender roles more important than making him feel welcome and comfortable as a guest–not to mention checking out his theology.A former fellow employee is a single guy who’s an artist. An introvert, he dislikes sports and prefers to create. People ask him if he’s gay. He’s not.When my husband goes to Kenya, he sees women thatching the roofs of huts. In parts of Africa, thatching rooftops is “women’s work.” But in America, people often describe a female roofer as “doing a man’s job.”Among American married couples, the husband may drive the car because he’s the guy taking the lead. In some countries, the wife drives because she’s taking on the servant’s role.Some years back, a deacon at a church we attended filed for bankruptcy. This man had a nice pool in his yard. The leaders told him they didn’t want him to file. Instead, they wanted to take up an offering, organize garage sales, and come up with all manner of creative ways to help him pay his debts so that the name of Christ would not be slandered. He refused. So the church asked him to step down until he could get a grip on his finances. He argued, “If a guy can’t lead, there’s nowhere for him to serve.” So he left.I sit on the fence between introvert and extravert. One of my spiritual gifts is teaching. But my husband is definitely an introvert, and his gifts lie in administration. I usually find myself in front of a crowd; he heads for the accounting office. In the first years of our marriage, people assumed we suffered from role reversal…that I “wore the pants in the family.” After all, they reasoned, he was supposed to be visible, and I was supposed to be invisible.Each of these anecdotes reflects a distorted view of gender. What people (especially middle-class, American evangelicals) have failed to take into account in each case is that when we put men and women in boxes according to narrowly defined definitions of masculinity and femininity, we deny the full and dynamic range of the personhood God created. Yes, men and women are different. But the moment we insist on how our sex differences must work themselves out socially—saying things like “women are more emotional,” “men are more detached,” “women need love,” and “men need respect”—we stuff people into boxes. Our theology should be broad enough to consider normal the relatively unemotional woman and the man who desires affection more than respect —or any cultural variation of gender role outside the USA. If it’s biblical, it’s global.The way to become our most fully flourishing male and female selves is not for women to wear frilly clothes and men to fart, grill steaks, rescue damsels, kill Bambi, and retreat to their man-caves—despite what Christian books on gender might suggest.Interestingly, the Bible never outlines what feminine and masculine behavior looks like. Jesus cooks; Jael wields a tent peg; Paul weeps; Miriam prophesies. Indeed, the Bible includes no exhortations to pursue manhood and womanhood. Rather, the apostles and prophets focus on something else: the fruit of the Spirit 1– love; 2–joy; 3–peace; 4–patience; 5–goodness; 6–kindness; 7–gentleness; 8–faithfulness; and 9–self-control. And experience tells me that the more someone pursues Christlikeness, the more fully he or she flourishes as a man or as a woman.Our fully actualized masculine and feminine selves develop as by-products of our spiritually developing selves. If we make it our goal to be masculine or feminine, we miss Christlikeness. If we set our focus on being like Christ, we discover to our delight that we become the men and women God created us to be.

Does Paul Really Think Women are Gossips and Busybodies?

My post for this week at bible.org:In his first letter to Timothy, Paul told his protégé, “As I urged you upon my departure for Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God which is by faith (1 Tim. 1:3, NASB, emphasis mine).English-speaking evangelicals are three to four times more likely than the population at large to use male wording when the original author had “people” in mind. And 1 Timothy 1:3 is an example of an instance in which it hurts us to do so. While we know the word “men” can really mean “people,” we still tend to read the word “men” in 1 Timothy 1:3 as “males.” And that leaves us thinking that males were the ones doing all the teaching, including falsehood, in Ephesus.Yet the word rendered “men” in 1 Timothy 1:3 is indeed the neuter pronoun tisin. Tisin carries no suggestion of male or female (as the NET Bible’s rendering, “people,” correctly suggests). So Timothy was to teach certain people not to teach strange doctrines.We know that some of the younger widows were teaching false doctrine, because two chapters later, Paul writes the following description of them: “And besides that, going around from house to house they learn to be lazy, and they are not only lazy, but also gossips and busybodies, talking about things they should not” (1 Tim. 5:13).When we read that women were “going from house to house,” we usually envision girlfriends hanging out at each others’ abodes and telling tales. But the phrase “house to house” is similar to how Luke describes the church meeting “from house to house” in Acts 2:46 and 5:42. And if we understand “house” here as a church gathering, that affects how we later read that some Ephesian heretics were worming their way “into homes” (2 Tim 3:6). Consider the possibility that young widows were teaching heresy from church gathering to church gathering.Now, the consensus of contemporary translators has been to describe these women as the stereotypically charged “gossips and busybodies,” suggesting that the content of their speech is people’s personal business that is none of their own. But interestingly, the same phrase rendered “gossips and busybodies” could instead be rendered as “those who practice magic.”[1]And there are two good reasons to go with this latter option. First, Paul’s follow-up epistle to Timothy actually mentions two magicians by name. Paul wrote, “Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are people of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected” (2 Tim. 3:8). The scriptures never mention Jannes and Jambres elsewhere. But we do find these two men in extra-biblical works. And in such contexts the men are among the Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses.The second reason for going with “those who practice magic” is that it fits the context better. We know one of the major false teachings in Ephesus at the time related to magic. Indeed, Ephesus was Magic Central in the Roman Empire at the time of the earliest Christians.In the Book of Acts, written presumably by Luke after he spent time in Ephesus, we find a story about magicians in Ephesus who converted to Christianity, and in that context the same word (the one translated in 1 Timothy as “busybodies”) appears (Acts 19:19). The former magicians, upon trusting in Christ, brought out the expensive books of their trade and created a conflagration—the original Bonfire of the Vanities, if you will.According to Clinton E. Arnold in Power and Magic: The Concept of Power in Ephesians, magicians in Ephesus charged exorbitant prices for love potions. People would also pay large sums to create curses using a combination of what was known as the “Ephesian letters”—probably a set of individual letters that people would throw like dice and to create combinations for magical spells.[2]Magic was actually looked down on in Rome—so much so that in 16 B.C. Rome had expelled all magicians from the city. Years later Vespasian (ruled AD 69–79) outlawed astrology, too. Yet because of his friendship with a famous Ephesian astrologer named Balbillus, Vespasian let Ephesus continue holding “sacred” games in Balbillus’s honor. Apparently the one place where Rome went easy on magic was Ephesus.Putting all this together we see that Paul is likely warning Timothy about young widows who are going from church to church teaching about magic—something they should not speak about.Because we’ve come to the text with the preconceived notion that women don’t teach, and certainly not in house churches, we’ve reasoned that Paul can’t be talking about women when he refers to false teachers. And because we tend to think of gossip as a particularly female vice, our stereotype affects both our translation and our interpretation options. We think that men taught false doctrine at church, while women were busybodies in living rooms.But both men and women were guilty of teaching false doctrine. And both men and women were guilty of believing it. The same is true today. Paul says as much in 2 Corinthians 11:3 when he tells the entire church that he is concerned that, as Eve was deceived, so they all might also be.The text of 1 Timothy suggests that women were doing more than privately slandering. They were probably going from “house to house” teaching spiritual content that was false. And Paul left Timothy in Ephesus to instruct some people, including them, that they must stop (1 Tim. 1:3).Some think the Bible teaches that women are more likely to gossip than men. They think women are more likely to stick their noses in others’ business than men. And they base such thinking on Paul. Paul gets a reputation for being no friend of women when, in fact, he truly was. It is our own stereotypes, not Paul’s, that have led us to misunderstand him.Does Paul think women are more prone than men to gossip? Nothing in the text suggests such an idea. Indeed, gossip is not a female weakness; it is a human one. Sticking our noses into others’ business is not a female weakness; it is a human one. And teaching false doctrine is not a male weakness; it is a human one. Let us be careful to avoid projecting gender stereotypes onto the Scriptures. Otherwise, we may fail to hear warnings intended for us all.[1] See Lloyd K. Pietersen, “Women as gossips and busybodies? Another look at 1 Timothy 5:13,” Lexington Theological Quarterly 42 no 1, Spr 2007: 19–35, for a full treatment of this option.[2]Arnold, C. E. Ephesians: Power and Magic. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1992.

On Gender and Bible Translation

The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Douglas Moo at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Diego last November. Title: We Still Don’t Get It: Evangelicals and Bible Translation Fifty Years after James Barr. Dr. Moo has graciously granted permission to reprint it.Knowing that the decisions we would make about translating biblical gender forms into English would be critical, CBT [Committee on Bible translation for the NIV] commissioned Collins dictionaries to pose some key questions to its database of English—the largest in the world, with over 4.4 billion words, gathered from several English-speaking countries and including both spoken and written English.We CBT members had our own ideas about whether, for instance, “man” was still good English for the human race or whether “he” still carried clear generic significance. But we did not agree on every point; and standard resources gave conflicting opinions. So we asked the Collins computational linguists to query their database on these points and others.The results revealed that the most popular words to describe the human race in modern U.S. English were “humanity,” “man,” and “mankind.” CBT then used this data in the updated NIV, choosing from among these three words (and occasionally others also) depending on the context. We also asked the Collins experts to determine which singular pronouns referring to human beings were most often used in a variety of constructions.Consider, for example, Mark 8:36, which reads in the KJV “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The Greek, using anthrôpos, clearly refers to a human being without regard to gender. How to say that in modern English? Moving to plural forms is one option, as does the CEB. Shifting to the second person, whose pronouns are not gender specific is another: the NLT goes this route.Another option is to retain the words “man,” “he,” and “his” of the KJV, as do the ESV and HCSB. But do these words continue to function as true generics in modern English? On CBT, we did not think they did. We were pretty sure that “man” no longer had a true generic sense, a conclusion borne out by modern style guides and indirectly attested by other modern translations: the ESV, for instance, replaces hundreds of occurrences of “man” in the RSV with other locutions.But we were uncertain about the pronoun to use as the follow-up. We also wanted to see if there might be some way to retain the third-person singular form of the original. In brief, we needed data about the current state of English pronouns to guide our translation decisions. And so we requested the Collins linguists to search their database to determine what pronouns were being used in modern English to refer back to indefinite pronouns (such as “each,” “one,” and “someone”) and to non-gender specific nouns (such as “person”). They constructed what they call an “anaphora resolution grammar” to resolve the matter. To return to Mark 8:36, then, CBT tentatively decided to render anthrôpos as “someone.”The Collins data revealed that over 90% of English speakers and writers were using plural or neutral pronouns to refer back to “someone”: mainly the pronoun “they.” Based on these data, then, CBT translated Mark 8:36 as “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Now at this point some of you are hearing the voice of your seventh-grade English teacher, insisting that one cannot use an apparently plural pronoun such as “their” to refer to the singular pronoun “someone.” But here is where we need to invoke again the fundamental linguistic principle of descriptiveness. What determines “correct” English is not some nineteenth or twentieth-century style manual or the English we were taught in grade school, but the English that people are actually speaking and writing today.And the data are very clear: modern English has latched on to the so-called “singular they,” which has been part of English for a long time, as the preferred way to follow up generic nouns and pronouns. *   *   *Dr. Moo refers to the Collins Research Report, and the specifics in that report relating to male pronouns have profound implications for those of us who seek to lose “Christianese” in our speech. We now have solid data that tells us how unique our speech is to our subculture when it comes to male pronouns. Note references below to “Evangelical English”:The committee initiated a relationship with Collins Dictionaries to use the Collins Bank of English, one of the world’s foremost English language research tools, to conduct a major new study of changes in gender language. The Bank of English is a database of more than 4.4 billion words drawn from text publications and spoken-word recordings from all over the world.The study examined gender language in English concentrating on three specific areas of usage over a 20-year period from 1990 to 2009.

1. Generic pronouns and determiners

This part of the study considered the types of pronouns and determiners that are used to refer to indefinite pronouns (such as someone, everybody and one) and non-gender specific nouns (such as a person, each child and any teacher):

• masculine (he, his, himself, etc.);
• feminine (she, her, herself, etc.);
• plural/gender-neutral (they, them, one, themselves, etc.);
• alternative forms (s/he, him or her, his/her, etc.)In all the varieties of English analyzed, plural/neutral pronouns and determiners account for the majority of usages.  Between 1990 and 2009, instances of masculine generic pronouns and determiners, expressed as a percentage of total generic pronoun usage in general written English, fell from 22% to 8%.

In all the varieties of English analyzed, plural/neutral pronouns and determiners account for the majority of usages.  Between 1990 and 2009, instances of masculine generic pronouns and determiners, expressed as a percentage of total generic pronoun usage in general written English, fell from 22% to 8%. e.g. ‘…when a person accepts unconditional responsibility, he denies himself the privilege of “complaining” and “finding faults.”’Instances of ‘alternative’ generic pronouns and determiners fell from 12% to 8%. e.g. ‘Any citizen who wants to educate himself or herself has plenty of sources from which to do so.’Instances of plural/neutral generic pronouns and determiners rose from 65% to 84%. e.g. ‘If you can identify an individual who metabolizes nicotine faster you can treat them more effectively.’Figures for the other corpora analyzed in the study are broadly comparable with figures from the general written English corpus both in overall magnitude and in the general trend over time.

2. Mankind, man and synonyms

This part of the study considered the use of the terms man, mankind, humankind, humanity, humans, human beings, the human race and people when used to refer either to all humans or to smaller subsets of humanity.  In all the corpora analyzed except Evangelical English, when all instances are considered, “people” is by far the most frequent synonym, followed by “humans.” People and humans, however, are much looser synonyms when the focus narrows to references to the human species as a whole. In these instances, man, mankind, humankind, humanity, the human race and human beings are more precise.Of these more precise alternatives, man, humanity and mankind are the most frequent synonyms in the general written English, general spoken English, US written English and US spoken English corpora. Man accounts for between 22.8% and 30.3% of relevant citations, humanity accounts for between 21.8% and 32.7% of relevant citations, and mankind accounts for between 15.9% and 17.8% of relevant citations Humankind, Human beings and the human race are comparatively infrequent.In Evangelical English, “man” is the synonym that occurs most frequently, accounting for more than half of all genuinely collective occurrences. Mankind accounts for 14.2% of genuinely collective occurrences and humanity accounts for 11.3% of genuinely collective occurrences. Humankind, human beings and the human race are, as in the other corpora, relatively infrequent.In all the corpora except Evangelical English, man and mankind have become steadily less frequent (with some fluctuations) over the 20-year course of the study, tapering off to very similar levels in current usage (approximately 3 citations per million words for man, and approximately 2 citations per million words for mankind.)In the Evangelical corpus, the frequency with which all of the synonyms tracked in this part of the study occur is markedly higher than it is in the other corpora, most likely due to the nature of the subject matter addressed in Evangelical books and sermons.When man, mankind and their synonyms occur with follow-on pronouns (e.g. ‘Clinical ecology shows us how to restore the balance between man and his environment’, ‘When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language…’), man is almost invariably followed by the pronoun he, humanity is typically followed by the pronoun it, and mankind — on the rare occasions where it is used with a follow-on pronoun — is generally followed by the pronouns it or they.

3. Forefather, ancestor and father

This part of the study considered the use of the terms forefather(s), ancestor(s) and father(s) in the sense ‘a person/people from whom one is descended’ or ‘the founder(s) of a movement/nation etc.’  Frequencies have fluctuated, but it is evident that ancestor is significantly more frequent than forefather in each corpus and each period. The frequency of forefather is higher in Evangelical English than in the other corpora, but still much less frequent than ancestor. 

Update

I returned today from Anaheim, where I attended the Evangelical Press Association's national conference. While there, I roomed with my friend Diane McDougall, who works for Journey Group in Virginia. (She was one of my Israel buddies, a two-time Calvin Festival co-attendee, and is the editor in chief of Ethiopian Airlines' inflight magazine.) The big take-aways from this conference came from idea swaps about what resources people are using. Did you know you can get free photos off the UN photo site?

I sat next to Sarah Drew ("Grey's Anatomy") at dinner Sunday night. She seemed pretty reserved…until I asked her about Christianity and the arts. After that, it was as if I'd hit her DVD's "play" button. She has much to say about how we interact. Lots of room for improvement. One thing we both love: The film "Lars and the Real Girl" and its portrayal of community.

Later in the evening, I watched a preview of her forthcoming film, "Mom's Night Out." It was LOL funny, and her acting was fab. But the flick disturbed me in its portrayal of male/female division of labor. (Dads babysit, moms parent.) I expect you'll hear more from me on that one soon.

This is commencement weekend at DTS, so I have five events coming up, not counting the bridal shower tomorrow night. Then I teach Creative Writing in May. I'd still love to have one more student in there. Might that student be you?

One more movie recommendation. Have you see "The Lady"? It's a true story. One of my sharp students recommended it to me. Based on real events, it's a narrative about Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma's fight for democracy reform. She was held under house arrest for fifteen years while her English husband labored for her release. I watched it twice. The video art makes it look like a "B" movie, but don't let that fool you. The film is quite well done.

Happy Spring!

My Chapel Message: Following the Son of Man(ly)

God's wisdom elevates complementary male and female partnerships in ministry.

ETS: Adventures in Baltimore

I just returned from a four-day trip to Baltimore, where Imostly attended the annual Evangelical Theological Society's (ETS) national meeting. Iused to go annually, but I have skipped the past few years to focus onwriting/editing/finishing my dissertation.

This year I had the joy of staying with my niece and herfamily in their new-to-them home in accommodations that overlooked a treeablaze with red leaves. She and her husband, a faculty member at Loyola, havethree small boys who loved scaring and tackling “Aunt Sandi.” The family iscommitted to going car-free as much as possible, so I used publictransportation every morning to get to the convention center, and I took cabshome at night. All in all, I spent about 1/3 of what I would have done on arental car, and I avoided the hassles of traffic and convention-center parking.My relatives also had a delightful houseguest who’s a don at Cambridge, so our little Anglican-Episcopalian-evangelical group spent the last night at their dining table spread with Girl Scout cookies andhome-brewed ale discussing everything from the new pope to the filioque clause to salted caramel icecream to sweater-knitting. What a lovely family we have, and I mean that inboth senses.

ETS itself, which requires a minimum ThM to join, iscomprised of 7% women. I’m told that only 1% of the presenters this year were female. One man asked me where my husband was. Another,upon seeing a few of us females returning from dinner one night, joked, “I’m going to tellyour husbands you were out picking up men.” Never mind that one, in hersixties, has never been married.  

I came away wondering this: If we believe in the complementary relationship of men andwomen, why don’t we see more men and women partnering to do theology? I pickedup a brochure from an organization that claims to emphasize this very thing.Yet the photos of their board indicated it was comprised of all “pale males.”An organization that has in its very name the word “womanhood” has no women onthe board?

If women were in the minority, it seemed that ethnicminorities were even more scarce. Considering that the future of Christianityis in the southern hemisphere, this struck me as a serious divide.#roomforimprovement   

Despite these deficiencies, I heard some greatpresentations, including one that traced how Luke in his Gospel contrasted menand women to make a point. One speaker looked at whether the quote about Jesusas a worker of miracles was original to Josephus. Another considered how wechange our hermeneutic to accommodate science, sometimes forgetting thatscience can be subjective, too (Freud’s theories on women came to mind). Onelooked at how Christians can grow in our interaction with art beyond critiquingthe worldview behind each piece. And one looked at the strengths and weaknessesof online education and how to compensate for the lack of embodiment (amongother things, require a local in-the-flesh mentor).

A former student, Caroline, looked at radical feminism andProcess Theology. She started late in the academic world because she raised herkids first. This came up during her Q/A time afterward, when a woman in theaudience went off about how we should be emphasizing to women to raise theirkids and focus on the home. Caroline graciously pointed out that she, too,valued children, which is why she waited to complete her education—but thatchildrearing is only a season of life, and that for a limited number of women. The anti-woman-in-education bias comes from both sexes. 

I attended a number of other presentations on gender. Onewas from a psychologist who studied 50,000 (!) marriages. His team concludedthat partnerships in which both spouses feel they both “speak up,” (husband feels thatboth he and wife do so and wife feels that both he and she do so) were most“satisfying” by quite a high margin as compared to more traditionalmarriages. (If a husband is dominant, both she and he were less satisfied.)

In a talk on gender differences, it was noted that as Barbie’swaist measurement has shrunk, Ken’s biceps have increased. This is the sort of importantinfo we get at theology conferences. Ha! (The workshop was actually quitegood.)

DTS had a big alumni breakfast one morning, and I had funreconnecting with old college connections. I tried to attend as many DTS faculty and student presentations as possible, but I was also staying up past midnight talking with my niece.

Lunches and dinners with colleagues, male and female, were ahighlight. Over Maryland crab soup and Puerto Rican rice, we enjoyed about ayear’s worth of relationship-building in three days. In a workshop onmentoring, I learned that in Southern California (where people are crazy busy),the best times for mentoring are said to be in the car, over coffee, and overdinner. That is true of fellowship, too, don’t you think?

Yesterday morning, I blew off academics (I attended ETS at my own expense), saw the harbor, and toured the BaltimoreAquarium with my niece and the boys. We ended our time with a Pot Belly’s lunchand a romp in the park before I went off to hear about whether an embryo has personhood and "The Future of Women inETS," while they caught their bus. 

When I arrived back in Dallas, I told my husband to expect word that I was outpicking up men. He said he looked forward to the call.

A Podcast in Which I Spout Off about Feminism, Sexism, and Gender

This week I was the guest of Game On Girl for their weekly podcast. And I would describe the experience as nothing short of a supreme blast. 

I first joined these women on episode 17, where hosts Dr. Regina McMenomy and Rhonda Oglesby andI talked about the origins and evolution of gender stereotypes. We return tothe basics of feminism, revisiting the differences between sex and gender, acommon conflation we've all noticed recently. We discuss other topics includingsexism in mainstream media, harassment, and yes, M. Cyrus. I consider the question, "Is she giving woman a bad name?" 

I also joined the hosts as they wrapped upthe week talking about what they're (we're) reading, watching on TV, and what gameswe're playing.  

To listen, go here. 

Courage Is for Humans

 Today was my day topost over at Tapestry. Here's what I wrote:

A class I teach includes an overview of women in churchhistory. In addition to reading accounts of women martyrs, students watch thefilm “Iron Jawed Angels.” Most people don’t realize that Alice Paul, a keyleader in the fight for suffrage in the USA, was a Quaker.

Driven by her conviction that God made man and woman equal,Alice Paul worked tirelessly for a constitutional amendment giving women thevote. After viewing the film, one of my students wrote this to me: “All was welluntil completing the reading for class today and seeing Iron Jawed Angels. Themovie had an enormous impact on me. I've realized that all throughout the lastfew months the word that keeps coming up both within and outside of me is‘courage.’”

She went on to say that she had always thought of courage asa manly quality rather than a human quality. But as a result of her Spirit-led,film-inspired clarity, she realized courage was for women, too. Consequently,her plans shifted from spending a summer in comfort to pursuing a ministryopportunity in Ethiopia. And that summer in Africa has led to a lifetime ofservice planned as a missionary living overseas.

I’ve mentioned this story in the past, and I tell it againbecause I continue to encounter people who associate courage with manhood,which is all well and good, until they disassociated it from womanhood. Ifcourage is manly, they think, then “a woman who acts courageously is actingagainst her gender. Men were made to rescue, but women were made to berescued.” 

As many conservative churches focus on biblical manhood andbiblical womanhood, teaching in some of these contexts at times borders onmentoring in Christian subculture norms rather than the Bible. How can aChristian female roofer in America risk being labeled as  “unfeminine,” but a female Christian rooferin Kenya is “doing women’s work”? Aren’t biblical norms supposed to beuniversal and timeless?

I am all for being masculine and feminine. Truly. But whenthe labels prohibit us from experiencing our full dynamic range of personhood,and when our churches teach conformity to these labels, aren’t we missingsomething? Why not focus instead on pursuing Christ and the fruit of the Spiritembodied as a woman or embodied as a man? After all, Jesus cooked fish, Jacobcooked stew, and the deacons in Acts 6 served the widows their food. If weteach service to one another, our applications might even challenge gendernorms at times in the name of love and service.

I would argue that courage is for males. But it is also forfemales. Are not all believers told throughout scripture to “have courage”? Andwhat is “fear not” but a reminder to put off fear and put on courage? More tothe point, what was Queen Esther, if not courageous in the face of death? Didshe wait for Mordecai to come rescue her? No, she rose up and rescued not onlyherself, but an entire people group.

And what about Jesus? According to the story in Matthew 9,our Lord encounters a woman with a “female” problem. And notice what Herequires of her: “But a woman who had been suffering from a hemorrhage fortwelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. For she keptsaying to herself, ‘If only I touch his cloak, I will be healed.’ But whenJesus turned and saw her, he said, ‘Have courage, daughter! Your faith has madeyou well.’ And the woman was healed from that hour.”

His only imperative was, “Have courage, daughter”?

She was made to be courageous! 

  

Gaming and Gender

Are you a gamer? If you play WordsWithFriends, Bejeweled, Pac Man, or Angry Birds, you qualify. 

Recently Gameongirl, which specializes in conversations about gaming, hosted me on a guest podcast talking about the cultural differences of gender stereotypes, how they've changed andnot changed over the years, and about our personal experiences in bucking against gendered expectations. 

Because Gameongirl focuses on gaming, we also touched on the use offemale images in the marketing of E3,as well as casual vs. hardcore definitions of gaming. 

You can have a listen to the hour-long podcast here. 

You can read some of the feedback here. 

Gender Difference: Lose the Boxes

Look up “gender” in the dictionary, and you may find “sex” as its definition. As if the words were interchangeable.In the not-so-distant past, “gender” referred only to grammatical fields. But in 1955, a sexologist suggested that we distinguish between biological sex and gender as a way of distinguishing between male and female. Another fifteen to twenty years passed before his idea caught on. In the 1970s, the field of gender studies emerged, and we began to define “gender” as the social construction of biological difference, or what we consider masculine and feminine behavior.The distinction between sex as biological and gender as the social construction of sex difference was to give us language to explore the dynamic behind why, when a woman in Kenya puts a roof on a house, she’s doing women’s work, but in America, most would consider a female roofer “unfeminine.” In ancient Rome, yellow was the “girl” color; in America, it’spink; in Kenya all colors are gender-neutral. In America the husband usually drives the family; in India the wife is more likely to serve her husband by driving. These examples suggest there’s a fluidity to how we define masculine and feminine behavior, and how we socially construct our ideals.  It was the influences behind these behaviors and the desire to study them that led to the differing definitions of “sex” and “gender.”In the past few years I’ve seen a rise in the number of Christian small groups and curricula designed around discovering gender differences, and especially the associated question, “What is biblical masculinity and femininity”? More to the point, what social differences did God design to flow from our sex differences?It appears that Christians are unified in the assertion that God made men and women different by design. The problem that comes in, however, is when we assume those biological differences lead to clear and set social differences that we should pursue in order to become our true selves. None of us can agree on what those differences are. I would argue that they are as mysterious as God Himself, and as soon as we assign them clear categories, such as "men are initiators," and "women are followers," we create boxes that confine us in ways God did not intend.For example, he gave both man and woman dominion and he gave both man and woman the command to multiply. But we tend to put the dominion only with the man, and multiplication only with the woman. And in doing so we miss the emphasis God puts on men and women partnering. We start thinking stuff like, "Kids need to be with their moms more than with their dads." And that men were made for empire-building, but women were made for homemaking—making our singles feel especially unfulfilled.Here is how Piper/Grudem’s book defines masculinity and femininity:

• At the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for, and protect womenin ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships.
• At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength andleadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships

Their definitions raise some serious questions. First, and most significant, and ironic: what is their basis for authority? Second, if they are correct, does this mean men and women find their true womanhood and manhood only when theyare together? If I am alone, do I lose my femininity because I have no man to affirm, receive, and nurture? Am I less of a “woman” during girls’ night out? And when my husband is playing basketball only with guys, does he lose his masculinity because there is no woman to lead, protect, and provide for? Why do we define our gender only in relationship to another human, and one of the opposite sex, no less?What we conclude about masculine and feminine behavior in the Bible usually comes from picking and choosing our narratives. What if we notice that Jacob cooked stew, Jesus cooked fish (in his resurrected body, no less), and the deacons served tables for widows? Shouldn’t we conclude that cooking and serving tables is really masculine work?Why do we gloss over the observations that woman are part of the priesthood of all believers, called to take up the shield of faith and fight (we have “a battle to fight” too)? What about the fact that Proverbs 31 is filled with “war” words, with “valor” being the first. We tend to translate that word as “noble” or “excellence” but it’s the same word used for David’s mighty warrior-men. Men are told to nurture their wives (Eph 5). But according to Piper/Grudem, isn’t nurturing more of awoman’s activity than a man's? I had a student two years ago who was astounded to discover that courage was not a male quality, but rather a human one.I believe pursuing femininity and masculinity is like pursuing happiness. The best way to attain it is to pursue something else. In this case, we find our true selves, become the men and women God intended us to be, as we pursue Jesus Christ, walk in the Spirit, and demonstrate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Sometimes doing so may even, at times, look un-macho and unfeminine to others, while God’s assessment may be “What a woman!” or “What a man!” We are not called to imitate the culture, even the Christian sub-culture. Followers of Christ are called to imitate Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Identity

Lately some of my friends and I have been talking about identity and integrity. Is identity fluid, and if so, where do we draw the lines? Is it okay to text or IM passing yourself as someone else? Is it okay to have an alternate identity on Facebook? Is there ever a legitimate reason to have a sex change? Is it okay to change your name if you dislike the one you have? Is it okay to use a male avatar for yourself if you're a female or vice versa? Is gender really an identity?

As part of this discussion, my friend Rhonda send me this clip from "Friends." Ha!

Thinking about History, Gender and Race

The latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine has a couple of fascinating articles. One on Madame Curie profiles this fascinating character in the context of her times, providing an interesting picture of gender, history and physics. Another celebrates 50 years since the publication of Black Like Me.

Remember Enron?

Often the most powerful sermons don’t come from the pulpit. Case in point: This weekend my hubby and I watched a flick that was the best example I think I’ve ever seen of how somebody can “gain the whole world but lose his own soul.” The DVD was a 2005 documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” Talk about hubris.

The film took a behind-the-scenes look at the arrogant, largely unregulated principals in the company that started the economic earthquake. The producers pieced together TV news clips, Enron company footage, pithy interviews, and even some psych research on how humans compromise ethics, and in doing so they created a fascinating look at a primo example of how “pride goeth before a fall.” Netflix described the film as “a serious lesson in the potential trappings of dishonesty and unethical behavior dogging corporate America.” Somehow those words don't even seem strong enough.

As I watched the guys in this "men's club" engaging in life-risking entertainments like extreme dirt-biking, I was struck by how little male-female partnership was going on here, and how a high-testosterone view of leadership played into the men's thinking. "How the Gentiles love to lord it..." The gender of the courageous whistle-blowers was also interesting. I'm not saying women are in any way more moral than men. But I do think one of the unexplored factors in the economic mess Enron helped to create is the relationship between the kinds of stuff they did and a certain kind of thinking on gender.

Worth watching.

Oh, and I finished exam one in my comps. Next one starts Tuesday, 10 AM. Three to go.