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WHEN LIFE AND BELIEFS COLLIDE:
How Knowing God Makes a Difference
Carolyn Custis James
Zondervan, 224 pages, $15.99

Carolyn Custis James wants women to be theologians—passionate, unabashed, and learned theologians, regardless of their official title. Her book When Life and Beliefs Collide encourages bake-sale supervisors to do this as much as academics. James is so audacious, that she wants every single Christian woman in the world to appropriate theology as a way of life, a discipline, a relationship, and a spirituality. And she wants men to recognize this desire as being in conformity with the will of God.

James, a seminary-trained conference speaker, describes resistance to women engaging theology, ranging from an assumption that "God didn't wire women that way" to some women's fears of spiritually superceding their husbands and pastors, sponsoring an insurrection in the church, or overstepping the bounds of "women's ministries." The question here, as James wisely insists, is not primarily about power or ordination. It is about whether and to what extent women ought to know their Savior and their Scriptures.

The Scriptures, unsurprisingly, have been a battleground regarding women's involvement in theology, and it is precisely on this territory that James endeavors to win women back. She is disgusted, and rightly so, with the false dichotomy between Marys and Marthas. The former, it is assumed, live in their heads and neglect proper service projects, while the latter more comfortably settle into a hospitality role without a care in the world for useless theological abstractions.

Thus the structure of James's book is an exegetical analysis of the stories about Mary of Bethany, whom she portrays as the first theologian of the New Testament. This Mary is the model for all her sisters in the faith: to sit and learn at the feet of Jesus, to call upon him in suffering (as at the death of Lazarus), and to accept the way of the Cross in the anointing of oil. Yet no less important is her sister Martha, who—for all her interest in kitchen matters—recognized even before Mary that Jesus was the promised Messiah.

Here is a charge to engage theology, learning about God, which Christian women ignore at their peril. James sees no conflict between Mary's story and other New Testament passages about the role of women, even those suggesting submission to men. In fact, they fit together beautifully: "Christ (the standard of true submission for all Christians) never modeled a passive, unthinking submission to his Father, and Mary did not offer that kind of submission to him. She had applied her mind and heart to understand what God required of Jesus and wholeheartedly threw herself, as well as her resources, into embracing and promoting Jesus' obedience to the Father."

It is clear that James's manifesto is no self-seeking plea to get a greater diversity of voices heard in the church for the sheer arbitrary sake of diversity. Her call to women is for the sake of the gospel and for the lives of the women (and men) who follow it.

James's work is hobbled by poor marketing; nothing on the jacket or in the boringly vague title gives the reader the slightest indication what is to be found therein. It markets like a self-help book for Christians having a theodicy crisis. Perhaps it is safer this way. A book that proclaimed itself openly as an invitation for women to participate in theology might be overlooked by the very people it intended to reach.

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October 22 2001, Vol. 45, No. 13