The Bible on your shelf doesn’t actually exist. No exact original of it is to be found in Greek, Syriac, or any other ancient language. It is, instead, the product of hundreds of compiled parchments and papyri, containing big blocks of text or little bits of it, some ancient, some more recent, some ancient but recently discovered. Along the way they got copied into uncials and minuscules, dubbed with names to inspire novels (Codex Sinaiticus; Philoxeniana), and now are signified in the clearinghouse Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece as Raise Them to Know Peace Jamie Calloway-Hanauer
Let’s be clear from the start: this is not just about Toya Graham.
Toya Graham is the woman captured on video physically disciplining her son for throwing rocks at police officers during the Baltimore protests, hitting him several times in the face and head, forcefully removing his hoodie, and pushing him away from the crowd while swearing and yelling at him.
The clip went viral, and Graham was quickly labeled “Mother of the Year.” Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts praised her actions, saying, “I wish I had more parents that took charge of their kids out there tonight.” Some on my Facebook feed applauded her actions, quoting Scripture as support: Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
But after the video made its rounds on social media and news sites like CBS, other opinions began to emerge. Graham was branded a child abuser and a prime example of violence begetting violence. Calls of “racist” were directed from and to both camps of opinion, rendering discipline an issue of race, class, and cultural norms.
But this is not about judging actions Graham took in a situation I—though once a poor, single mother myself—could never fully understand. If there’s anything to call into question, it’s the supportive public response she received. Those applauding Graham generally failed to acknowledge that physically removing a child from harm’s way can be accomplished without hitting that child in the face. Even when using corporal punishment as correction, it’s up to parents to use the least forceful means of discipline that will result in the same effect.
I don’t deny that some situations call for harsher correction than others. But when race and class become the factors defining acceptable methods of parental discipline, I worry that people begin to see certain children as deserving harsher punishment and somehow less valuable than children in other circumstances. (I wonder: If the video had shown a father hitting a daughter, or a white father hitting his black son, would the response have been the same?)
After working with abused children and their families across races and socioeconomic statuses, I believe there is a universal truth regarding treatment of children. While not all physical discipline is abhorrent, there are sharp lines of distinction. Hitting children out of anger is violence, not discipline. Hitting a child on the face or head as a means of discipline is an intolerable use of force.
Those who use race and class to blur these distinctions miss the larger point: we are all God’s children and image-bearers. And those who quote Scripture as support for boundary-crossing forms of corporal punishment fail to see the irony behind their words: If we use rage instead of controlled discipline to train up a child, then that is the way he or she shall go, and shall not depart from it. Not without years of hard work, prayer, and time spent learning self-control, anyway.
But more importantly, if we use peace to train up child, then peace is the way he or she shall go. Peace is much harder to unlearn than violence.
That this conversation about parental discipline arose from the Baltimore protests makes it a subject even more fraught with heated emotions than it otherwise would be. Commentators are using race, socioeconomics, and the extreme circumstance of the protests—as well as the extreme desire of a mother to keep her son safe—to make this issue one of situational rationalism.
It’s much easier to cry “you just wouldn’t understand,” and “spare the rod, spoil the child!” than it is to have a discussion that recognizes we can congratulate parents for the love and concern that drives them to certain actions, without congratulating actions that deny our corporate responsibility to protect all of God’s children, without reference to race, class, or situations that are outside the realm of our everyday norm.
Jamie Calloway-Hanauer is an attorney, writer, and child advocate who has worked with abused children and their families since 1995. She will begin working on her master of divinity at Fuller Theological Seminary this summer.
Let Parents Do What Works Gail Dudley
As an African American woman, wife, and mother—and someone who works with women and youth as an ordained pastor—I can relate to the response of one Baltimore mom who spotted her son with hood, mask, and rock during last week’s protests.
I can’t separate my thoughts on Toya Graham from my experience raising my own children. My 29-year-old son has graduated college, secured a job at a major corporation, and serves as a licensed minister in his church. My daughter, 21 and a rising senior at Howard University, is preparing to apply to law school. I’m a proud mother, but I wonder what if things would have turned out differently. What if I hadn’t disciplined them the best way I knew how?
Like the family I was raised in and many African American families across this country, I believe in parents having a right to use discipline, including spankings, as a means to teach respect. I was raised to reply, “yes ma’am and no ma’am” or “yes sir and no sir,” and I raised my children to do the same. We say, yes and no instead of yeah and nah. That’s the tone we set in our family—through the way we talked to our kids, issuing time-outs and other punishments, and, when those did not change their behavior, spanking.
My kids could also relate to the Toya Graham video. While they couldn’t imagine us cursing at them, both said they could see their parents confronting them forcefully in public if their behavior merited it, me grabbing them up and Dad giving them the look. These tactics are not designed to instill fear in our children, but to remind them that their actions affect us too.
When they misbehave, they disrespect the family and the family name. Similarly, when they act with manners and respect, that reflects back well on us. I will never tire of hearing people tell me that my kids are considerate and polite. These things don’t just happen though; this is how they were raised.
This element of parental authority and respect has been overlooked in much of the coverage and commentary exploring Graham’s response and the approach to discipline in black communities.
Salon ran an article declaring the hypocrisy of white Americans who would criticize violent protesters but applaud a mom who slaps at her son in public. It read:
Most black people debating the issue acknowledge that the desperate public beating came from centuries of black parents knowing they have to discipline their children harshly, or else white society will do it for them—and they may not survive it.
Graham’s message to America is: I will teach my black son not to resist white supremacy so he can live… The beatings originated with white supremacy, a history of cultural and physical violence that devalues black life at every turn. From slavery through Jim Crow, from the school-to-prison pipeline, the innocence and protection of black children has always been a dream deferred.
Those factors did not cross my mind while disciplining my children, who grew up in College Park, Georgia, and Columbus, Ohio. My discipline was not about racial injustice, discrimination, slavery, Jim Crow, the school-to-prison pipeline, or even black children everywhere. It was about my children and our family.
Discipline begins at home, and I believe in parents having a right to exercise discipline based upon what works for their culture and community. I grew up as one of five children raised by two parents. If we didn’t return home on time, spoke back to an elder, or disobeyed our parents, we could be spanked. Not beaten, not abused, not manipulated or harmed, but spanked. We knew the expectations our parents had for us, and we knew the consequences of not meeting those expectations. “Honor thy mother and father” was not optional or conditional.
Disparaging the use of physical punishment in the home, or criminalizing all spanking as child abuse, dismisses the wisdom generations of no-nonsense parents who effectively used these methods to raise well-behaved and well-mannered children. I look at my siblings and my children and think, “Well, we haven’t departed from our training.” It worked.
Tough love can make us uncomfortable, particularly when we see on the news parents whose discipline was only tough and violent and not loving at all. But God himself practices tough love, too. He knows to discipline us to train us, even when it seems harsh. Hebrews 12 explains how discipline and rebuke from the Lord is a sign of God treating us as his children: “For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (v. 6).
The passage goes on to say how our earthly fathers also use discipline to build respect, and that “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (v. 11). It is through discipline that I hope to bring about in my children and community a peaceful sense of respect.
Gail Dudley serves as an ordained pastor alongside her husband in a church plant in Columbus, Ohio. She is CEO and publisher of READY, a quarterly publication, and an author of seven books. She is also a member of Redbud Writers Guild, and an accomplished international speaker equipping and motivating women. Raise Them to Know Peace Jamie Calloway-Hanauer
Let’s be clear from the start: this is not just about Toya Graham.
Toya Graham is the woman captured on video physically disciplining her son for throwing rocks at police officers during the Baltimore protests, hitting him several times in the face and head, forcefully removing his hoodie, and pushing him away from the crowd while swearing and yelling at him.
The clip went viral, and Graham was quickly labeled “Mother of the Year.” Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts praised her actions, saying, “I wish I had more parents that took charge of their kids out there tonight.” Some on my Facebook feed applauded her actions, quoting Scripture as support: Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
But after the video made its rounds on social media and news sites like CBS, other opinions began to emerge. Graham was branded a child abuser and a prime example of violence begetting violence. Calls of “racist” were directed from and to both camps of opinion, rendering discipline an issue of race, class, and cultural norms.
But this is not about judging actions Graham took in a situation I—though once a poor, single mother myself—could never fully understand. If there’s anything to call into question, it’s the supportive public response she received. Those applauding Graham generally failed to acknowledge that physically removing a child from harm’s way can be accomplished without hitting that child in the face. Even when using corporal punishment as correction, it’s up to parents to use the least forceful means of discipline that will result in the same effect.
I don’t deny that some situations call for harsher correction than others. But when race and class become the factors defining acceptable methods of parental discipline, I worry that people begin to see certain children as deserving harsher punishment and somehow less valuable than children in other circumstances. (I wonder: If the video had shown a father hitting a daughter, or a white father hitting his black son, would the response have been the same?)
After working with abused children and their families across races and socioeconomic statuses, I believe there is a universal truth regarding treatment of children. While not all physical discipline is abhorrent, there are sharp lines of distinction. Hitting children out of anger is violence, not discipline. Hitting a child on the face or head as a means of discipline is an intolerable use of force.
Those who use race and class to blur these distinctions miss the larger point: we are all God’s children and image-bearers. And those who quote Scripture as support for boundary-crossing forms of corporal punishment fail to see the irony behind their words: If we use rage instead of controlled discipline to train up a child, then that is the way he or she shall go, and shall not depart from it. Not without years of hard work, prayer, and time spent learning self-control, anyway.
But more importantly, if we use peace to train up child, then peace is the way he or she shall go. Peace is much harder to unlearn than violence.
That this conversation about parental discipline arose from the Baltimore protests makes it a subject even more fraught with heated emotions than it otherwise would be. Commentators are using race, socioeconomics, and the extreme circumstance of the protests—as well as the extreme desire of a mother to keep her son safe—to make this issue one of situational rationalism.
It’s much easier to cry “you just wouldn’t understand,” and “spare the rod, spoil the child!” than it is to have a discussion that recognizes we can congratulate parents for the love and concern that drives them to certain actions, without congratulating actions that deny our corporate responsibility to protect all of God’s children, without reference to race, class, or situations that are outside the realm of our everyday norm.
Jamie Calloway-Hanauer is an attorney, writer, and child advocate who has worked with abused children and their families since 1995. She will begin working on her master of divinity at Fuller Theological Seminary this summer.
Let Parents Do What Works Gail Dudley
As an African American woman, wife, and mother—and someone who works with women and youth as an ordained pastor—I can relate to the response of one Baltimore mom who spotted her son with hood, mask, and rock during last week’s protests.
I can’t separate my thoughts on Toya Graham from my experience raising my own children. My 29-year-old son has graduated college, secured a job at a major corporation, and serves as a licensed minister in his church. My daughter, 21 and a rising senior at Howard University, is preparing to apply to law school. I’m a proud mother, but I wonder what if things would have turned out differently. What if I hadn’t disciplined them the best way I knew how?
Like the family I was raised in and many African American families across this country, I believe in parents having a right to use discipline, including spankings, as a means to teach respect. I was raised to reply, “yes ma’am and no ma’am” or “yes sir and no sir,” and I raised my children to do the same. We say, yes and no instead of yeah and nah. That’s the tone we set in our family—through the way we talked to our kids, issuing time-outs and other punishments, and, when those did not change their behavior, spanking.
My kids could also relate to the Toya Graham video. While they couldn’t imagine us cursing at them, both said they could see their parents confronting them forcefully in public if their behavior merited it, me grabbing them up and Dad giving them the look. These tactics are not designed to instill fear in our children, but to remind them that their actions affect us too.
When they misbehave, they disrespect the family and the family name. Similarly, when they act with manners and respect, that reflects back well on us. I will never tire of hearing people tell me that my kids are considerate and polite. These things don’t just happen though; this is how they were raised.
This element of parental authority and respect has been overlooked in much of the coverage and commentary exploring Graham’s response and the approach to discipline in black communities.
Salon ran an article declaring the hypocrisy of white Americans who would criticize violent protesters but applaud a mom who slaps at her son in public. It read:
Most black people debating the issue acknowledge that the desperate public beating came from centuries of black parents knowing they have to discipline their children harshly, or else white society will do it for them—and they may not survive it.
Graham’s message to America is: I will teach my black son not to resist white supremacy so he can live… The beatings originated with white supremacy, a history of cultural and physical violence that devalues black life at every turn. From slavery through Jim Crow, from the school-to-prison pipeline, the innocence and protection of black children has always been a dream deferred.
Those factors did not cross my mind while disciplining my children, who grew up in College Park, Georgia, and Columbus, Ohio. My discipline was not about racial injustice, discrimination, slavery, Jim Crow, the school-to-prison pipeline, or even black children everywhere. It was about my children and our family.
Discipline begins at home, and I believe in parents having a right to exercise discipline based upon what works for their culture and community. I grew up as one of five children raised by two parents. If we didn’t return home on time, spoke back to an elder, or disobeyed our parents, we could be spanked. Not beaten, not abused, not manipulated or harmed, but spanked. We knew the expectations our parents had for us, and we knew the consequences of not meeting those expectations. “Honor thy mother and father” was not optional or conditional.
Disparaging the use of physical punishment in the home, or criminalizing all spanking as child abuse, dismisses the wisdom generations of no-nonsense parents who effectively used these methods to raise well-behaved and well-mannered children. I look at my siblings and my children and think, “Well, we haven’t departed from our training.” It worked.
Tough love can make us uncomfortable, particularly when we see on the news parents whose discipline was only tough and violent and not loving at all. But God himself practices tough love, too. He knows to discipline us to train us, even when it seems harsh. Hebrews 12 explains how discipline and rebuke from the Lord is a sign of God treating us as his children: “For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (v. 6).
The passage goes on to say how our earthly fathers also use discipline to build respect, and that “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (v. 11). It is through discipline that I hope to bring about in my children and community a peaceful sense of respect.
Gail Dudley serves as an ordained pastor alongside her husband in a church plant in Columbus, Ohio. She is CEO and publisher of READY, a quarterly publication, and an author of seven books. She is also a member of Redbud Writers Guild, and an accomplished international speaker equipping and motivating women.
It would seem to be a straightforward work of science to sort, date, and judge each of the texts, and in many ways it is. There are rules for comparing scraps of majuscules and scraped palimpsests. The scriptural scholars of bygone eras help contemporary ones through their own questions scrawled in the margins of their Bibles. And it’s not too hard to recognize and correct the ever-so-slightly incorrect transcriptions of some sleepy monk in a tomb-cold scriptorium. But the letter is not copied alone; so is the spirit and the meaning. Text critics are inevitably exegetes, and aspiring exegetes must also be text critics. This is Eldon Jay Epp’s basic principle for biblical studies.
Which brings us to Romans 16:7, embedded in the oft-overlooked collection of greetings to various Christian luminaries at Rome. Here Paul hails his “relatives who were in prison” with him, “prominent among the apostles” and “in Christ before” he was. This impressive pair is Andronicus and his coworker. The latter is sometimes called Junia—thus the KJV, every other English translation up till the 1830s, and nowadays the NRSV. The lion’s share of recent English Bibles, though, give the name Junias, with the –s on the end. The RSV specifies Andronicus and Junias as “my kinsmen” and “men of note among the apostles”; the Good News generously adds a footnote after Junias suggesting the name “June”; the NIV—most widely read of all contemporary versions—offers no footnoted alternative to Junias at all. The matter at stake in the choice of names is the simple question asked of everyone upon entry into this world: Is it a boy or a girl?
Until about a hundred years ago, the consensus was universal. Junia was a woman. Every church father, without exception, thought so. Even John Chrysostom, not exactly famous for positive thoughts about the female sex, commented, “How great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle.” However, in a curious twist of fate, the church a millennium and a half later concluded not that her wisdom was so great, but that, if she was indeed worthy of the title of apostle, then she wasn’t a she at all. The very liberal vanguard that exalted the historical-critical study of the Bible found the leadership of a woman unthinkable, and so made Junia into Junias, a man—even though there is not a single record of the name Junias anywhere in ancient Rome.
The switcheroo from female to male was possible, in the first place, because the apostle’s name appears only once, in the accusative form “Junian.” (Exegetes need to be not only text critics, but first-rate grammarians as well.) The suffix –n is found on both masculine and feminine nouns. The one textual clue to help choose between them, in this case, is an accent mark. A CBS News It was religion scholar Joseph Campbell who pulled back the curtain on more or less every book and movie in the Western canon. Campbell demonstrated the common shapes and themes of our great stories, from Star Wars to Great Expectations to Paddington Bear.
In Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” an unlikely suspect gets called on some sort of mission. After some equivocation, he agrees to the task, endures a series of setbacks, and ultimately achieves his goal. Along the way, the experience transforms him; he grows up and becomes a hero.
We see the same narrative at work in real life. It’s what we suspect when we hear that someone has survived cancer. It’s what we hope for in the face of tragedy. It’s the narrative that pops up on the evening news.
Yet I wonder how many young women realized they are also embarking on a hero’s journey when they become mothers.
Not just mothers with exceptional challenges—I’m talking about run-of-the-mill mothers with typical children, the soccer moms and stay-at-home moms and full-time working moms alike. Every one of them has the makings of a hero.
For a long time, I didn’t believe it. I had lived the dramatic version of the hero story. Our oldest daughter Penny was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after birth, and it took me a year to wrestle through my doubt and fear and sadness. And yes, I came out on the other side transformed, with a deeper appreciation of the gift of each human life and with a deeper recognition that intellect does not determine human value.
Then our son William was born, and a few years later his sister Marilee, and ordinary parenting posed challenges of its own. Moreover, the doubt and fear and sadness I experienced from parenting typical kids seemed shameful. After Penny’s birth, people brought meals and prayed for us and they understood if I didn’t return their phone calls or failed to show up at church on Sunday morning. With typical kids, no one was going to bring me a baked chicken just because my son wouldn’t sleep through the night. I worried no one would understand if I couldn’t manage to volunteer at preschool or reply to an email or meet a writing deadline.
But now that our kids are out of the early years of diapers and naptimes, out of the constant cycle of ear infections and throw-up bugs, out of car seats and high chairs and strollers—I see that the journey into typical motherhood offered its own narrative of change and growth, of breaking me apart, only to transform me yet again. It offered a call to sacrifice, even if it was simply a sacrifice of time and physical endurance. Sacrifice is always a form of hardship, and yet when it emerges out of love, it has the power to make us new.
In the beginning of my life as the mom of three, I tried to keep going as though nothing had changed. I tried to keep up my workout routine and volunteer activities. I tried to work for four scheduled hours every day. I tried to pray regularly and systematically. I tried to ignore the words I heard from older moms, that there were seasons of life, and perhaps this season of early childhood was a time for slowing down, for not trying so hard. I guess I saw slowing down as a sign of defeat, as anything but heroic, as the opposite of “leaning in” to the opportunities I had been given as an educated American with financial and marital stability. I guess I had a hard time believing that the gifts God was asking me to steward could be limited to these three kids.
I tried to hold on to it all—professional goals, physical and spiritual discipline, community participation. Finally, between snow days and sick days and sleepless nights, in the midst of the very ordinary demands of very ordinary parenting, I had to let go. It wasn’t the letting go of joyful release, of opening a handful of dandelion seeds and watching them glint and scatter in the wind with music playing in the background. It was the letting go of collapse, of buckling under the weight of it all and watching as everything crashed to the ground and bounced haphazardly around me. Still, once I had finally let go of all that trying, I found myself with my hands open.
The ordinary hardships that don’t make for a dramatic storyline—of changing wet sheets and watching yet another episode of Caillou with a sick kid, of listening to belabored piano practice and cajoling yet another hour of soccer playing—helped me understand the nature of love, the nature of grace.
In the Gospels, Jesus keeps insisting that his disciples turn to God as their Father. It’s not just the Lord’s Prayer—it’s in Jesus’ parables and his one-liners. This familial language shows up when he calls the bleeding woman “daughter” (Mark 5:34) and his disciples “little ones” as he sends them out to minister to others (Matt. 18). He wants his followers to understand God as their Father, and also understand themselves as little kids. He even makes the arresting statement: “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never inherit the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).
Funnily enough, it’s having kids that’s helped me know myself as a child of God. When I couldn’t hold it all together, when I needed help in the midst of ordinary and tedious daily hardships, I began to understand God’s compassion and care for me: like a father who cheers for his child’s attempt to take her first step without any condemnation when she topples over; like a mother who says no out of love, not out of disappointment with the request; like a good parent whose love knows no bounds.
Every parent who loves a child with sacrificial love will be broken. And in the midst of that brokenness, we can be built back up, like the classic hero of Joseph Campbell’s journey, encountering one obstacle after another, doubting ourselves and the one who had commissioned us for this adventure, falling apart, and, ultimately, learning something entirely new about life and love, being made new along the way.
Amy Julia Becker is the author, most recently, of Small Talk: Learning from My Children about What Matters Most (Zondervan, 2014). She lives in Western Connecticut with her husband and three children. do start inserting accent marks in their fresh copies, they always choose the acute and never the circumflex. The only variant that they display is to the name Julia. Even this mistake is telling: Julia is another woman’s name (in fact, the most popular Roman name for women), and probably first appeared when one of those notoriously sleepy scribes skipped ahead to Romans 16:15 and borrowed the name from there. The grammatical and even accidental choices of the medieval copyists reveal the whole interpretive tradition behind them.
And yet—masculine constructions of It was religion scholar Joseph Campbell who pulled back the curtain on more or less every book and movie in the Western canon. Campbell demonstrated the common shapes and themes of our great stories, from Star Wars to Great Expectations to Paddington Bear.
In Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” an unlikely suspect gets called on some sort of mission. After some equivocation, he agrees to the task, endures a series of setbacks, and ultimately achieves his goal. Along the way, the experience transforms him; he grows up and becomes a hero.
We see the same narrative at work in real life. It’s what we suspect when we hear that someone has survived cancer. It’s what we hope for in the face of tragedy. It’s the narrative that pops up on the evening news.
Yet I wonder how many young women realized they are also embarking on a hero’s journey when they become mothers.
Not just mothers with exceptional challenges—I’m talking about run-of-the-mill mothers with typical children, the soccer moms and stay-at-home moms and full-time working moms alike. Every one of them has the makings of a hero.
For a long time, I didn’t believe it. I had lived the dramatic version of the hero story. Our oldest daughter Penny was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after birth, and it took me a year to wrestle through my doubt and fear and sadness. And yes, I came out on the other side transformed, with a deeper appreciation of the gift of each human life and with a deeper recognition that intellect does not determine human value.
Then our son William was born, and a few years later his sister Marilee, and ordinary parenting posed challenges of its own. Moreover, the doubt and fear and sadness I experienced from parenting typical kids seemed shameful. After Penny’s birth, people brought meals and prayed for us and they understood if I didn’t return their phone calls or failed to show up at church on Sunday morning. With typical kids, no one was going to bring me a baked chicken just because my son wouldn’t sleep through the night. I worried no one would understand if I couldn’t manage to volunteer at preschool or reply to an email or meet a writing deadline.
But now that our kids are out of the early years of diapers and naptimes, out of the constant cycle of ear infections and throw-up bugs, out of car seats and high chairs and strollers—I see that the journey into typical motherhood offered its own narrative of change and growth, of breaking me apart, only to transform me yet again. It offered a call to sacrifice, even if it was simply a sacrifice of time and physical endurance. Sacrifice is always a form of hardship, and yet when it emerges out of love, it has the power to make us new.
In the beginning of my life as the mom of three, I tried to keep going as though nothing had changed. I tried to keep up my workout routine and volunteer activities. I tried to work for four scheduled hours every day. I tried to pray regularly and systematically. I tried to ignore the words I heard from older moms, that there were seasons of life, and perhaps this season of early childhood was a time for slowing down, for not trying so hard. I guess I saw slowing down as a sign of defeat, as anything but heroic, as the opposite of “leaning in” to the opportunities I had been given as an educated American with financial and marital stability. I guess I had a hard time believing that the gifts God was asking me to steward could be limited to these three kids.
I tried to hold on to it all—professional goals, physical and spiritual discipline, community participation. Finally, between snow days and sick days and sleepless nights, in the midst of the very ordinary demands of very ordinary parenting, I had to let go. It wasn’t the letting go of joyful release, of opening a handful of dandelion seeds and watching them glint and scatter in the wind with music playing in the background. It was the letting go of collapse, of buckling under the weight of it all and watching as everything crashed to the ground and bounced haphazardly around me. Still, once I had finally let go of all that trying, I found myself with my hands open.
The ordinary hardships that don’t make for a dramatic storyline—of changing wet sheets and watching yet another episode of Caillou with a sick kid, of listening to belabored piano practice and cajoling yet another hour of soccer playing—helped me understand the nature of love, the nature of grace.
In the Gospels, Jesus keeps insisting that his disciples turn to God as their Father. It’s not just the Lord’s Prayer—it’s in Jesus’ parables and his one-liners. This familial language shows up when he calls the bleeding woman “daughter” (Mark 5:34) and his disciples “little ones” as he sends them out to minister to others (Matt. 18). He wants his followers to understand God as their Father, and also understand themselves as little kids. He even makes the arresting statement: “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never inherit the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).
Funnily enough, it’s having kids that’s helped me know myself as a child of God. When I couldn’t hold it all together, when I needed help in the midst of ordinary and tedious daily hardships, I began to understand God’s compassion and care for me: like a father who cheers for his child’s attempt to take her first step without any condemnation when she topples over; like a mother who says no out of love, not out of disappointment with the request; like a good parent whose love knows no bounds.
Every parent who loves a child with sacrificial love will be broken. And in the midst of that brokenness, we can be built back up, like the classic hero of Joseph Campbell’s journey, encountering one obstacle after another, doubting ourselves and the one who had commissioned us for this adventure, falling apart, and, ultimately, learning something entirely new about life and love, being made new along the way.
Amy Julia Becker is the author, most recently, of Small Talk: Learning from My Children about What Matters Most (Zondervan, 2014). She lives in Western Connecticut with her husband and three children. must be a man, together begat great scholarly ingenuity. Sometimes Roman surnames were contracted to shorter forms; an example is Patrobas in Romans 16:14, which is short for Patrobios. Junias, then, was proposed as a contraction of the attested Roman surname Junianus. There isn’t the slighest shred of evidence that this is what happened, yet somewhere along the way the contracted-Junianus theory turned into a sure thing. Epp documents how the idea grew from conjecture to certainty in its own kind of scribal-transmission error. It culminated in the 1927 Nestle Greek New Testament, where the distinctly masculine version of the name, complete with circumflex, was offered as the definitive and undisputed reading—even claiming the oldest unaccented texts in its defense! Only in 1998 did the standard Nestle-Aland and United Bible Society editions replace the masculine with the feminine name. Accordingly, few English translations reflect the correction.
Is it really possible that plain textual evidence could be so obscured by plain bias? If John Chrysostom, of all people, allowed that Junia could be a woman and an apostle at the same time, could the progressive leaders of the twentieth century be guilty of such blatant prejudice? Epp cites the report of Bruce Metzger’s Textual Commentary to the UBS (2nd. ed.), from as recently as 1994, explaining the dispute about the name:
Some members, considering it unlikely that a woman would be among those styled “apostles,” understood the name to be masculine futurestreet / FlickrWörterbuch, pp. 70f.). Others, however, were impressed by the facts that (1) the female Latin name Junia occurs more than 250 times in Greek and Latin inscriptions found in Rome alone, whereas the male name Junias is unattested anywhere, and (2) when Greek manuscripts began to be accented, scribes wrote the feminine When I read about the art director who wore the same outfit to work every day to simplify her life, I immediately thought: I should try that. I don’t typically hop aboard trends, but I liked the idea of reducing stress by rethinking my daily habits.
Matilda Kahl went with a black and white color palette, rotating through 15 of the same blouse, pants, and jacket. I chose black pants, a yellow tunic, and a cotton blazer—only one of each since it’d just be a week. The next week, I picked a different outfit.
Before I launched my experiment, some friends raised eyebrows. One asked if I’d have to do laundry every night. A coworker thought it would get boring. But when I showed up at work wearing the same outfit for five days in a row, nobody said a thing. Nobody even noticed until I pointed it out.
Turns out, social pressure is often an excuse for the pressure we put on ourselves.
A Today Show/AOL survey found that 78 percent of women spend almost an hour on their appearance every day. Kahl started wearing her “work uniform” to save time and money, but also to alleviate the pressure of having to choose an outfit each day. She told AdAge:
I no longer spend time on choosing clothes nor do I get self-conscious in meetings, which would happen occasionally before. I just keep on with my day without my mind wandering, thinking about if my skirt is too short or my t-shirt too casual. To me, that is empowering.
Kahl wrote in Harper’s Bazaar that she felt her “male colleagues were taken seriously no matter what they wore.” I’m not sure that’s true, but women do seem to worry about it more. According to the Today Show survey, two-thirds of women worry about their appearance at least once a week, more than they worry about finances, health, family/relationships, or professional success. I know that I’d rather be working on my career or relationships or even my health than picking outfits. (In fairness, some take more pleasure in a well-chosen skirt or scarf than I do; I prefer functional clothes that fit well, look professional, and get me through the day in relative comfort.)
Kahl’s decision points to a bigger trend: to simplify our lives, and our closets. Through “kondo-ing,” best-selling author and lifestyle guru Marie Kondo encourages readers to clear out the clutter, to determine whether or not to keep their clothes, books, or other belongings by asking of each item, “Does this spark joy?” Other minimalist fashionistas advocate capsule wardrobes, with a fixed number items selected to mix-and-match for each season.
Cause-oriented campaigns like No-Makeup Month and International Justice Mission’s Dressember have also prompted women to reconsider their habits and to rethink their attention to their appearance.
Our clothes (and our possessions) are an extension of ourselves. When we begin to reevaluate our stuff and the lifestyle we’ve built around it, often a level of discontent lies at the root; Kondo reported that in evaluating what brought her joy, one client discarded not just her shirts and old papers, but also her husband.
So in the middle of a move and a health battle, it makes sense to evaluate my habits, like choosing a new outfit every morning. Is that really necessary to the life I want to lead?
But I need to also ask myself some questions: Like, has this give me “extra” time? To some degree. I reached my running goal for the week. I had less laundry to haul to the basement on the weekend. Those are both things that make me happier than fresh shirts every day.
The bigger question, for me, is: Am I making self-evaluation a pursuit of honesty rather than image-curating? Am I trying to merely make a statement about how little I care about my fashion? Of course I care at some level. But choosing to repeat an outfit all week allows me the convenience of spending just Sunday night or Monday morning deliberating what to wear. (In the words of Matthew 6:28: And why do you worry about clothes?)
When I sorted through my closet afterwards, I evaluated many items by asking: “Would I wear this for five days straight?” I ended up giving plenty of things away that I previously felt pressure to keep solely for the sake of variety in my wardrobe.
The most important thing I’ve discovered in this experiment is that self-evaluation cannot be the goal; the fruit of it is.
Rather than seek out simplicity for simplicity’s sake, it’s up to me to examine what I’ll do with more time, fewer distractions, and less clutter. Will my quest for simplicity free me up to obey God, serve others, pursue a calling? Without a goal or purpose, we risk just adding more stress by anxiously looking for the next way to “simplify” our lives.
In other words, the Junia reading had textual evidence on its side; the Junias reading had none; yet until less than a decade ago, the latter still won the day.
Could Paul have called a woman an apostle? He certainly did not use the term lightly. He was compelled to defend his own apostolicity, as the last and untimely born, to the disciples of Jesus, whose friendship with the Lord automatically granted them apostolic status. It can only be the highest of Pauline praise to call Andronicus and Junia prominent among the apostles.
That he was capable of applying this praise to a woman is suggested not only by the textual evidence but by the context of Romans 16 as well. A woman and deacon by the name of Phoebe is entrusted with the letter itself. Seventeen men are greeted along with eight women (omitting Junia), but of the twenty-five, seven of the women are described as contributing the most to the churches, while only five men receive that distinction. Prisca is listed ahead of her husband Aquila, and in two places (vv. 6 and 12) four of the women are said to have “worked very hard,” the same verb Paul uses to describe his own apostolic ministry in 1 Cor. 4:12, Gal. 4:11, and Phil. 2:16.
The early church thought that Junia the woman was an apostle, yet remained indifferent to the implications of her status. The modern church disbelieved the apostolicity of any woman, and so ignored the hard evidence. Between the textual and contextual witnesses, in the interplay of exegesis and grammar, Epp draws the reasonable conclusion that there was indeed a female apostle named Junia. But, he notes, “human beings carry out not only textual criticism and interpretation, but implementation as well, and that makes all the difference.”
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is a doctoral student in systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary.
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