In the introduction to her new book “Memories of God,” church historian Roberta Bondi explains how she “finally accepted that the theological work of telling one another our stories, of talking about the ways in which our concrete and particular experiences intersected with the great Christian doctrines, was not private work, or work done only on behalf of us as individuals. It was a common work, real theology done in order to find a way to claim for our own time and our own generation what it means to be a Christian.” That recognition was a long time coming, because in the academic world into which she was initiated, “serious theology concerned itself only with what was universally true. It did not waste its time addressing the personal and the ‘subjective.’ Certainly, there was no room in theology to raise any of the kinds of questions I had, especially those connected with my experience as a female human being.”
The world of the university was populated by a whole society of people prepared to induct me into the ethos of “the life of the mind.” I was taught in my classes that reason and emotion were enemies. Where reason was objective, and universally verifiable, emotion was dangerously subjective, leading its sufferers to see the world through their own personal, particular experience.
It was only as I could strip away my own emotional responses to particular people or problems that I could arrive at what was rational. That my own emotions and experience so often stood in opposition to the conclusions of reason did not mean that those conclusions should be re-examined. It meant that my emotions and experience were to be discounted.
At the same time, I was taught to think about the moral life in these same terms. According to Philosophy 101, to be a moral person meant to lay aside the distorting private pulls of pity, preference, and the particular for the sake of the rational and austere sternness of universal law. Ethics was about justice, and justice, like the rationality of which it was an expression, was blind to individual need. Kant, I learned, had said that a person of principle never lied, even in order to save the life of an innocent person, for to fail to tell the truth in every situation meant to open the floodgates of social distrust and chaos.
Soon, in the ethos of the seminary, I would learn how God fit into all this, that is, cleanly, unambiguously, and at a civilized distance. There, it would be suggested to me that God, as the source of the structures of reality, was Universal Reason. God was “the ground of our being” who “accepted us in spite of our unacceptability.” But God was not interested in the sins or sufferings of individuals. God’s concern was with the human race, and that concern was for social justice. God would no more break the laws of nature for the sake of the inner or outer pain of individuals than would Kant. Intercessory prayer might do good for the person praying, but it did not move God at all. In fact, intercessory prayer was superstitious, anthropomorphic, and even selfish. God would not miraculously heal people of cancer or help children find lost dogs.
As for Jesus, he was a far cry from the “personal Lord and Savior” I had met as a girl in the Pond Fork Baptist Church when we visited my grandmother in Kentucky: a Jesus who died to make me believe as I was told. The Jesus of the seminary was Lord, yes, insofar as he showed forth the kingdom and gave us a perfect example of how to live into it by sharing with us in all significant human experience. But he was only a man. The Virgin Birth, the miracle stories, the Resurrection—all this was merely the mythological language of the early church, from which we needed to extract the universal truth.
One of the most paralyzingly painful things about this ethos was the way all the claims of objective rationality intertwined with explicit and implicit judgments about what it meant to be female. I began to learn this at the end of the first day of my freshman History of Civilization course. The affable and witty instructor had finished explaining that the course was to be structured around a study of the economic forces that had created the rise and fall of the world’s great empires. The insect sounds of early fall came peacefully through the open windows of the sunny room. Now he stood relaxed, waiting for questions, his pipe in his mouth. A show-off student asked a question about Marx; another asked about factors contributing to Napoleon’s downfall. In spite of suffering from elementary school fears of speaking in class, I raised my hand. My stomach hurt. The instructor nodded in my direction.
I tried to articulate my question. “Are we going to study what everyday life was like for ordinary people in each period? I would like to know what they thought about and how they felt about things. Will we be studying that, too?”
The instructor, who was by this time sitting on top of his desk, took his pipe out of his mouth, removed his left ankle from his right knee, looked at me, and laughed.
“Just like a woman!” he said. “No wonder women can’t think! Women are never interested in the Big Picture; they are so subjective. All they are interested in is feelings! If you want to learn about feelings, go read a women’s magazine!” The class laughed.
“Next?” he asked, putting his pipe back in his mouth.
What became increasingly clear in college and seminary was the way the whole scheme of rationality depended upon a hierarchical division of the human race into the “thinkers” and the “feelers.” Men were the thinkers, the powerful ones, the objective carriers of the higher powers who thought about the big issues. Women were the feelers, the carriers of emotion, the enemy of rationality, the ones who lived in the realm of everyday, particular experience. What happened in my first history course was repeated in nearly every class in college I took. To the questions I increasingly tried not to ask, I received a variant on the same answer: “What kind of a question is that? Women are so subjective!”
Women were not taken seriously because they couldn’t think. As for women who wanted to think, who could not help thinking, these women were contemptible. It was the age of the popularization of Freud. We were told both in university classes and in popular women’s magazines that it was the indisputable scientific conclusion of modern psychology that women who thought were unnatural. Smart women made bad mothers. Smart women, like women who were good at sports, threatened, even hurt, men.
All this raised two questions: What could I do once I began to suspect that as a woman I would never be more than tolerated in the university and seminary world of rational thought? And even more fundamentally, why in the world had I gone to seminary at all?
From childhood, I had read stories to comfort myself over the messiness of the world. Stories from the Old Testament had given me models of resourceful, independent children God approved of, like Joseph in Egypt, or Ruth. In college I was an English major. Now, recalling my childhood pleasure in Old Testament stories, I hit upon the idea of writing a graduate dissertation on the use of Old Testament imagery in the English metaphysical poets. In preparation for this work, I decided one morning to use the summer of 1963 before I began graduate work to learn some Hebrew at the seminary on campus. That afternoon I bought a copy of “Learning Hebrew by the Inductive Method” and a Hebrew Bible.
The next morning I had my coffee, took my books out of their bag, and laid them on my desk under the window. I studied chapter 1 of the grammar carefully. After that, I had another cup of coffee, and I laid the Hebrew Bible in front of me, opening it, as you do all Hebrew Bibles, back to front.
Then, as I stumbled through the first words of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” I had an epiphany. Why this was so, I do not know, but I still recall the way the shape of the Hebrew letters and the look of the light falling on the creamy paper were mixed up with what I can only call a sense of cosmic goodness and joy in all created things I had never encountered before. It was as though the page itself were alive and the jots and tittles on the letters little flames. For the first time I could recall, life itself seemed all of a piece and trustworthy, and there was a place for me in it. In that instant I knew that God delighted in creation, in light, in water and mountains, in fruit-bearing trees and grasses, in water creatures and bugs, in wild animals and tame, in men and, most important for me, in women like me.
I decided at that very moment to leave off graduate work in English to do a graduate degree in Hebrew. Within the next few weeks, I applied to seminary for this purpose, and I was given a scholarship. I began second-year Hebrew that fall, and I loved it. The next two years I took as many Old Testament and Hebrew courses as I could.
At the same time, the relationship between my study of Hebrew and my understanding and experience of God was far from straightforward. Of course, I was not able to stop believing in God as I had known God until then, because what we know of God is always wrapped up in who we are, in our ways of feeling, thinking, and perceiving, as we have been shaped by our personal experience, and by our larger culture. In fact, it was as though I now knew and believed simultaneously in three mutually contradictory Gods.
There was the Christian God I knew from the Calvinistic Sunday schools and Baptist revivals of my childhood, who continued to grip my guilty imagination with threats of love, images of judgment, and demands of belief.
Then, there was the liberal God of the world of the university and the seminary: the civilized, distant God of Universal Reason, to whom any attempt to pray in personal terms or for personal reasons was an act of intellectual dishonesty. God in this guise was the very embodiment of all the supposedly male virtues academics, including myself, admired: rationality, unemotionality, justice, and impartiality. Unfortunately, however, he was at the same time the supreme rejection of “female” emotionality, particularity, partiality, spirituality. (“A fine paper,” my seminary teachers would say; “you think like a man.”) Belief in this God necessarily entailed the repudiation of myself as female.
Finally, there was the almost secret, private God whom I did not yet know but whom I had first encountered on that summer day in the first pages of my Hebrew Bible.
How was I to live with all this theological mutual contradictoriness? I handled the tension in the way I had been trained in the university: I declared to myself that I was not and would never be a Christian. I simply would choose, rationally, to avoid Christianity. I would not take courses in church history, or New Testament, or theology. Women couldn’t think, anyway. I would not grieve for any God I could not please and I could not have. I would spend my life studying Semitic languages, and for two years this is what I did.
Then I went off to Oxford in England to do graduate work in Semitic studies. I thought I had entirely made my escape from my old problems. Oxford, with its women’s colleges, took it for granted that women could be scholars. The Oxford program suited me almost perfectly. We wrote Hebrew compositions, both prose and poetry. We studied Semitic philology. We read Hebrew texts, and we read few secondary sources. On the other hand, we were not to raise questions about what the texts we studied might really be about.
“Could we take just a few minutes to talk about the meaning of the Book of Job?” I asked the last week of a three-term course on the Hebrew text of that book. Embarrassed, the students looked at the table top and shuffled their feet. The Scottish professor drew himself up. “My dear madam,” he replied, affronted, “that is something to ask your tutor in the privacy of your own tutorial!” It was at that moment, I believe, that I decided to leave the pain of the present by retreating forever into the romantic dust of the ancient world.
The first warning that things were not ultimately going to work out as I imagined came at the end of my first term. I was sitting tensely in my tutor’s office waiting for what came next in his evaluation of my first term’s work. He was a small, neat, elderly English Baptist, and he was sitting in meditative silence.
“Well, my dear,” he said at last, steepling his tidy fingers and looking at me with bright eyes. “If you are going to take your examinations in two years, you will need to start your second Semitic language now. Syriac will be just the thing.”
“Syriac?” I said, stupidly.
“Yes,” he replied. “You will enjoy it. A wonderful language, and all the surviving texts are from the early church!”
I gave him 20 reasons, none of them the real ones, why Syriac, with its Christian texts, was impossible. In the end, I lost.
I lost badly. Two years later, I discovered that I was actually going to have to do a dissertation in the area of theology of the early church. The beginning of the search for a topic was truly awful. I spent one anxious week after another in the Bodleian Library reading in Greek and Syriac texts, which soon all ran together in my mind into one.
Even apart from the gloom with which these Christian works filled me, I could not get the hang of the way their authors thought. They proved the truth of Christianity by pointing to Jesus’ miracles; at the same time, they declared that the image of God in human beings resided in human rationality. In their talk about God the Logos, they seemed to combine in a particularly depressing manner the painfully oppressive language, imagery, and demands of both the God of Pond Fork Baptist Church and the super-rational God of seminary I had tried to escape.
The beginning of my way out of this morass came about six months into my general reading for a dissertation topic. I had learned that the Christological controversies of the fifth century were regarded as central to patristic thought, and that many of these texts were in Syriac. I had begun, therefore, to focus my attention on the writings of the monophysites, one of the major parties in the ancient Christological debates. One autumn morning, as I sat in the Bodleian Library surrounded by tall piles of nineteenth-century volumes of these monophysite authors, I picked up and opened to the middle of one of these books, The Thirteen Ascetical Homilies of Philoxenus of Mabbug.
The homily I opened to that morning was not, however, a Christological text. Rather, it was a sermon on the Christian life written in the tradition of the great early founders of Egyptian and Syrian monasticism. It was an exhortation to those early monks not to criticize or judge one another, but rather, to treat one another with the gentleness of God, who especially loves the ones the world despises, and who is always so much more willing than human beings to make allowances for sin, because it is God alone who sees the whole of who we are and who we have been, who understands the depths of our temptations and the extent of our sufferings.
In the reading of those words I was given a second epiphany. I felt my eyes fill with tears of astonishment, gratitude, and hope. Knowing as I did nothing of early monasticism, within five minutes Philoxenus of Mabbug had conveyed to me not only the early monastic vision of God, he carried to my alienated and fearful heart the very God of whom he spoke. I had come once again face to face with the elusive God I had met five years earlier in the Hebrew text of Genesis, and for the first time, this God was wearing an unmistakably Christian face.
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Adapted from “Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life,” by Roberta Bondi. Copyright 1995 by Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission. This book can be purchased by calling 1-800/672-1789 and requesting ISBN 0-687-03892-8.
Two fresh and provocative books grew out of Roberta Bondi’s encounter with early monasticism: “To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church” (Fortress, 111 pp.; $10, paper) and “To Pray and to Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church” (Fortress, 151 pp.; $10, paper). “Many of us who call ourselves Christians long to be what we call ourselves,” Bondi writes in “To Love as God Loves,” “but we cannot see how to do it, granted our culture’s basic assumptions about what it means to be a human being.” In dialogue with men and women of the early church, she finds encouragement and guidance for the practice of a countercultural Christianity.
Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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