Book Briefs: October 4, 1993

New Light On Paul And Women?

Paul, Women, and Wives: Marriage and Women’s Ministry in the Letters of Paul,by Craig S. Keener (Hendrickson, 350 pp.; $14.95, paper).I Suffer Not a Woman: Rethinking 1 Timothy 2:11–15 in Light of Ancient Evidence,by Richard Clark Kroeger and Catherine Clark Kroeger (Baker, 253 pp.; $12.95, paper). Reviewed by Robert Yarbrough, associate professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, Saint Louis.

In 1992, CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s readers chose Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood as Book of the Year. This pair of new studies is sure to send some of Recovering’s contributors scurrying back to the drawing board.

The Kroeger’s work is admittedly light- to welterweight compared to Keener’s. The Kroegers argue that in 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.”) Paul was not laying down transcultural truth. Rather, he was opposing a local, false doctrine of gnostic flavor that “acclaimed motherhood as the ultimate reality.”

In other words, say the Kroegers, Paul prohibited women from teaching this particular doctrine only, not from informed ministry of sound Christian doctrine in general. They argue that Paul allowed—indeed, encouraged—women’s involvement in full parity with men in the apostolic, pastoral, and prophetic offices of the church. And churches should do no less today.

It is Keener who puts his finger on a fundamental problem with this. He points out that the Kroegers’ central thesis is based on evidence dating from well after the New Testament era. There is no sure proof that the gnostic myth Paul allegedly opposed even existed when he wrote 1 Timothy.

Since the general thrust of Keener’s arguments puts him in the Kroegers’ ideological camp, it is significant that he is reluctant to endorse either the basis or specific outcome of their study.

A question of context

While the Kroegers’ work is comparable to Keener’s in length and scholarly appearance, it pales by comparison in substance. Keener, a young New Testament scholar, sets a high standard on a number of counts.

The specialist will marvel at the sheer range of ancient and modern literature he has incorporated. And his interaction with both primary and secondary material is both informed and illuminating. Despite such erudition, the discussion is eminently readable.

Keener’s independent judgment and distinctive tone are no less commendable. He declines to follow evangelical doyens like F. F. Bruce and Gordon Fee who argue that 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 is non-Pauline. He upholds Paul’s authorship of the Pastoral Epistles. His discussions often crackle with a desire to edify, not just haggle, and he seeks to be fair to opposing views in dealing with subject matter that commonly tempts writers into one-sided advocacy rather than even-handed investigation.

Keener’s thesis is that four key New Testament texts used to repress women in the church need to be interpreted more carefully in light of ancient culture. One of these texts is the same passage treated by the Kroegers (1 Tim. 2); the others are from 1 Corinthians (11:1–16; 14:34–35) and Ephesians 5.

When ancient cultural conventions are rightly understood, seemingly patriarchal Pauline texts take on more nuanced meanings.

The difficult head-covering passage in 1 Corinthians 11, for example, meant that women should not bring reproach on the gospel or their family; that they should not “destroy symbolic gender distinctions by pioneering unisex clothing”; and that they should be sensitive to local custom lest they cause others to stumble. For the modern setting, 1 Corinthians says “nothing” (Keener’s emphasis) that “suggests wives’ subordination.”

The book concludes with a poignant appeal for mutual submission in marriage. It also argues that a more egalitarian profile is essential for the integrity of the church’s witness to a secular world increasingly hostile to traditional understandings of sex roles in marriage and ordained ministry.

Who speaks for Paul?

Although presented with grace and verve, Keener’s study resembles other recent treatments of Paul in downplaying the church’s studied opinion over two millennia of its history. Keener fails to account for how, if he is right, everyone else can have been so wrong. This is especially true in light of earlier centuries’ relative nearness to the New Testament’s linguistic world and cultural point of view.

Keener also accepts the perennial U.S. myth of its own social progress. In his euphoria over women’s recent gains in personal and social autonomy—gains he wants to see replicated in church practice—he fails to weigh how much has been lost as well. Social scientists are recognizing that family breakdown is now at crisis proportions and that recent “gains” in adult self-determination and alternative family structure carry a high price tag—particularly for women and children. Today’s egalitarian social ideal, for which Keener seeks to find support in the New Testament, may on closer scrutiny mean less “justice” and “equality” than Keener assumes.

Among disputable exegetical moves is Keener’s repeated recourse to the claim that Paul used arguments whose substance he did not necessarily endorse. Paul’s desire was to communicate and persuade within the parameters of his audience’s outlook, Keener suggests, not necessarily to convey truth as he saw it. But who determines, if Paul’s own words do not, when Paul is arguing as the inspired apostle and when as an audience-accommodating diplomat? In rare cases, we may be forced to supply meaning for opaque Pauline allusions (1 Cor. 15:29, perhaps), but such passages are less common than Keener suggests.

These criticisms ought not disparage but rather promote interaction with Keener’s well-argued and formidably documented claims. His work dignifies the tone and clarifies the substance of a debate that often verges on the bitter—and that is far from settled.

Shedding The Dunce Cap Of Relativism

Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong: Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education,by William Kilpatrick (Touchstone, 366 pp.; $11, paper). Reviewed by Doug LeBlanc, who writes about popular culture and education for World magazine.

William Kilpatrick has declared war on trendy education. Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong begins with a cannon blast—“Educational fads come and go, but some stay long enough to do substantial harm”—and keeps firing.

Kilpatrick, a Catholic layman and professor of education at Boston College, is a crucial leader as evangelicals and Catholics jointly fight the common enemy of relativism. He has already attacked cultural relativism in his books Psychological Seduction and The Emperor’s New Clothes, but Why Johnny could be his most influential work.

The book demolishes the idiocies that have prevailed in moral education since the 1960s. Kilpatrick demonstrates why a “nondirective method” of moral education—which urges students to make their own equally valid choices in a jungle of relativism—has actually encouraged youths to experiment with drugs, sex, and lawlessness.

Ct Talks To

William Kilpatrick

Has character education fallen out of favor because it Is more demanding work for teachers, students, and parents?

I certainly think that’s one of the reasons. In the late sixties and early seventies, educators convinced themselves that there was an easier method, which I call the decision-making method: students would make up their own minds about right and wrong. The important thing that got left out was the whole business of habit formation, which is essential to character formation. Moral education is not just a matter of talking or having discussion or debate; it’s a matter of practice and habit.

Might television be a more dangerous threat than education fads because it commands so much devotion from American families?

It’s already done a great deal of damage, in my estimation. The thing about television is that, unlike the schools, the television set is omnipresent. It’s like Big Brother in 1984-you just can’t get away from it. And because of its pervasiveness, it shapes the way we think and alters the way we perceive reality.

Does a character-education reform movement rest with parents finding the courage to be countercultural about TV and music?

Definitely, because they certainly can’t wait for the entertainment industry to reform itself. That could happen over time with enough pressure, but in the meantime, you’ve got to worry about your own children. That means turning the television set off, going to the library, bringing back some books, and instituting the practice of family reading. That means parents choose the models and morals that come into the home, rather than some distant scriptwriter.

Kilpatrick clarifies the difference between morality and vague Values Clarification models: “A value is essentially what you like or love to do. It is not an ought-to but a want-to.”

Kilpatrick does more, however, than demonstrate the failures of value-free moral education. He advocates character education, a superior model that worked for generations and has gained renewed respect.

In the classroom, Kilpatrick writes, character education involves “a conscious effort to teach specific virtues and character traits such as courage, justice, self-control, honesty, responsibility, charity, obedience to lawful authority, and so on. These concepts are introduced and explained and then illustrated by memorable examples from history, literature, and current events. The teacher expresses a strong belief in the importance of these virtues and encourages his/her students to practice them in their lives.”

According to Kilpatrick, character education involves telling stories that convey morality implicitly, not explicitly. “Imagination rules reason, and not the other way around,” he writes. Hence, the key to character education is to help young readers feel affection for virtues. At Boston College, for example, he contrasts “The Lifeboat Exercise” of Values Clarification—in which students decide who must die among a group of sketchily drawn characters—with the personal stories in A Night to Remember, a film about the human drama on a sinking ship.

“I’ve watched students struggle with the lifeboat dilemma, but the struggle is mainly an intellectual one—like doing a crossword puzzle. The characters in the exercise are, after all, only hypothetical,” Kilpatrick explains. “When they watch the film, however, these normally blasé college students behave differently. Many of them cry.… What does the story do that the exercise doesn’t? Very simply, it moves them deeply and profoundly. This is what art is supposed to do.”

Because art can have such a powerful effect on its audience, Kilpatrick urges parents to be aware of the stories shaping their children today. He observes that movies, rock music, and television have replaced parents and teachers as character educators.

Here Kilpatrick makes one of his most radical proposals: that parents read aloud to their children as a warm family ritual. He provides a 114-item “Guide to Great Books for Children and Teens,” ranging from Beauty and the Beast (“just the right antidote to our modern obsession with looks, surface charm, and casual sex”) to several novels by Charles Dickens. His list is free of ideology and suffocating political correctness: Harriet Tubman, Mark Twain, and Anne Frank all find a welcoming from Kilpatrick. He does not fit People for the American Way’s stereotype of Christians as book burners.

Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong will scare parents whose children are the guinea pigs for eduational trends. If that fear inspires any parents to replace “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” with family readings from 1984 (another book Kilpatrick recommends), we may still have a chance to shed the dunce cap of relativism.

A Shame That Heals—And Wounds

Shame and Grace: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve,by Lewis B. Smedes (HarperSanFrancisco/Zondervan, 170 pp.; $16, hardcover). Reviewed by Donald McCullough, pastor of Solana Beach Presbyterian Church in San Diego and author of Finding Happiness in the Most Unlikely Places (InterVarsity).

Perhaps it’s the preacher in me, but I expect a book, like a good sermon, not only to say something but to do something. Hence, a book about judgment should lead to repentance. And a book about grace should lift the reader into the joy of God’s acceptance. By this standard, Lewis Smedes’s Shame and Grace is a good book. Writing with both an informing clarity and a healing graciousness, his style aims at a broad audience, but his years of disciplined thinking as a scholar reveal themselves in helpful definitions and important distinctions.

What is shame? According to Smedes, it is not guilt, embarrassment, or depression; rather, it is “a feeling that we do not measure up and maybe never will measure up to the sorts of persons we were meant to be.”

This feeling presently enjoys notoriety, and around it has grown a cottage industry of pop psychology eager to release us from its destructive clutches. But not all shame is bad, offers Smedes. “A healthy sense of shame is perhaps the surest sign of our divine origin and our human dignity.… We are closest to health when we let ourselves feel the pain of it and be led by the pain to do something about it.”

The burden of Smedes’s concern, however, is with unhealthy shame: the undeserved shame that is a “false message from our false self.” Our false self, he explains, is an image of what we ought to be that is concocted out of false ideals imposed on us by others.

The healing of our shame begins with the experience of grace. “The surest cure for the feeling of being an unacceptable person is the discovery that we are accepted by the grace of One whose acceptance matters most.” Smedes describes grace with a winsomeness that helps us to experience that acceptance.

Part of Smedes’s effectiveness may be attributed to the fact that he deals only with the experience of grace rather than the doctrine itself. “Describing the reality of grace,” he contends, “is like explaining quantum physics in a paragraph or shrinking Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to the length of a sound bite.” Thus he declines to speak of “theories or doctrines of atonement.”

Yet, is it enough to speak only of the experience of grace? Do we not need a more objective grounding? Feelings of being accepted may indeed be liberating, but feelings are fickle.

Smedes does stress, albeit briefly, that the most outstanding demonstration of grace is found in the work of Christ. But one wishes he would say more about the solid foundation on which feelings of acceptance can be built: We are saved (healed!), finally, not by feeling but by faith.

Nevertheless, this shortcoming does not overshadow Smedes’s extraordinary gift of translating complex theological ideas into understandable language. Most books today fall into one of two categories: either they are written by scholars for other scholars, or they are written by pastors and laity for a general audience. Few scholars attempt to bridge the gap between learned reflection and practical help for ordinary people. Smedes not only attempts this work of translation, but he succeeds in a way that moves readers toward a personal application.

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