Episode 6: A Willingness to Be Disturbed with Dr. Wil Gafney
Hosted by Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu
Featuring Dr. Wil Gafney
In this episode, famed Hebrew Bible scholar Dr. Wil Gafney offers us the opportunity to experience evolution in our interpretation of Scripture through the richness of Womanist biblical interpretation. Sarah and Jeff explore how an evolution of faith necessitates an evolution in our relationship with Scripture, learning how to integrate the harder stories of the Bible without explaining them away, welcoming other collaborators to our understanding of faith, and Sarah’s own evolution since writing “Jesus Feminist.”
P.S. One word of caution: Some of the themes in this talk could be triggering for some listeners as we discuss themes of rape, incest, and violence. Please use your discretion.
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Show Notes
The Evolving Faith Podcast After Party on Facebook - a place to discuss episodes and ideas with other listeners.
The Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney
All of Dr. Gafney’s publications can be found here.
Other mentions on the show:
Jesus Feminist by Sarah Bessey
Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans
Hadith Collection
You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Join our podcast community over on Facebook, The Evolving Faith Podcast After-Party.
You can find Jeff Chu on Instagram and Twitter. You can also subscribe to his newsletter Notes of a Make-Believer Farmer at jeffchu.substack.com.
You can find Sarah Bessey on Instagram and Twitter. You can also subscribe to her newsletter Field Notes at sarahbessey.substack.com. Learn more about her books here.
Special thanks to Audrey Assad and Wes Willison for the music on this episode. And thanks as always to our producer, Jordan Gass-Poore.
If you’d like to be featured on an upcoming episode, just call our voicemail inbox at +1 (616) 929-0409. Leave your first name and state or province and answer this question: How are you cultivating hope in the wilderness right now? It can be something small - a song, a poem, a practice - or something big. There are no wrong answers. Just please try to keep your answer to under a minute so we can feature a few of you every episode.
“What does womanism contribute to an evolving faith? An unflinching look at the Scriptures and a willingness to be disturbed by them, rejecting the pious platitudes of the past”
[IMAGE CONTENTS: Ten graphics with quotes from the episode. First graphic: Blue and Green illustrated flourishes with a photograph of Dr. Wil Gafney. Text reads: “A Willingness to be Disturbed with Dr. Wil Gafney Episode 6. Now Streaming. with The Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D..” Remaining graphics are white squares and all have the same illustration of blue, green, and maroon illustrated dots and a line drawing of an open book with a plant growing out of the pages. All quotes unless otherwise specified are from Dr. Wil Gafney. Text for the remaining graphics are as follows: 2. “A womanist is a Black woman whose feminism is so rich, so deep, so thick, so broad and wide that it moves beyond the mere self interest of paler feminisms to embrace the well being of the whole community.” 3. “Womanism talks back with one or two hands upon her hip.” 4. “What does womanism contribute to an evolving faith? an unflinching look at the Scriptures and a willingness to be disturbed by them, rejecting the pious platitudes of the past.” 5. “Sometimes the problem in biblical interpretation is not the interpretation. Sometimes it's the text.” 6. “God is also the God of Hagar, Sarah, Keturah. Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah.” 7. “The more complete truth, should disturb us and drive us to a deeper and more honest encounter with the Scriptures.” 8. “If we’re only reading the Bible in community with people who look like us and think like us and live like us, we’re missing the wide welcome of Scripture." - Sarah Bessey. 9. “You are depraved. And I don’t even believe in depravity!” - Sarah Bessey. 10. “Scripture doesn’t need us to defend it. I want to honor it, yes, but it has its own power. It can more than stand up to our faithful explorations.” - Jeff Chu.]
Transcript
SARAH: Hi, friends! I’m Sarah Bessey.
JEFF: And I'm Jeff Chu.
SARAH: Welcome back to The Evolving Faith Podcast.
JEFF: This is still a podcast for the wounded, the misfits, and the spiritual refugees to let you know you are not alone in the wilderness. We're all about hope, and we're here to point fellow wanderers to God. No matter where you are on your journey, no matter what your story is, you are welcome! We're listening - to God, to one another, and to the world.
SARAH: The story of God is bigger, wider, it’s more inclusive and welcoming, filled with more love, than we could ever imagine. There's room here for everyone.
JEFF: There's always room here for you.
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SARAH: All right, it’s Episode 6 of The Evolving Faith Podcast. I guess this is a thing we do now, Jeff? Like, we’re real podcasters.
JEFF: I mean, if that means that we’re recording a podcast, I guess we’re real?
SARAH: Sometime we should really take a picture of the pillow fort you record in and we should post that for people.
JEFF: Will do.
SARAH: But before we get started, I need to remind you all that tickets for Evolving Faith 2020 are now on sale. So our wilderness obviously looks a bit different this year and so we’ve shifted to a live virtual conference. Which means even more people will be able to join us and our international friends will be able to join us. It’s on October 2-3 - but you would have access to the videos on demand until April 1, 2021. We are welcoming incredible leaders this year: Barbara Brown Taylor, Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Jen Hatmaker, Sherrilyn Ifill, Propaganda, Nadia Bolz-Weber, so many more incredible leaders. So go to evolvingfaith.com for the full speaker lineup, all the information and to register now.
JEFF: We want to hear from you. If you would like to be featured in an upcoming episode of the Evolving Faith podcast, just call 616 929 0409 and tell us where you’re finding hope out here in the wilderness. That’s 616 929 0409. Sarah always makes me do the televangelist part.
SARAH: I have trauma. I do. I have televangelist trauma. Keep going.
JEFF: Then stick around to listen to some community members sharing their answers later in the show. We love hearing your voices.
SARAH: Absolutely. Today we are really excited to bring you a talk from Dr. Wil Gafney. Yes, THE Dr. Gafney, first of her name, long may she reign. If you don’t know Dr. Gafney’s work yet or if you are a long-time student at her feet, you are in for a treat today. This is a disruptive, dense, and deep talk. She can pack more into 15 minutes than I ever could in 15 hours. There is not one wasted word. So let me do a little bit of a bio here:
Dr. Gafney is an associate professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. She's an Episcopal priest, a former Army chaplain, and a congregational pastor in the AME Zion Church. Dr. Gafney describes her hermeneutical approach as “an outgrowth of her experience from pulpits viewed with the sanctified imagination of Black preaching.”
JEFF: She's also an expert on vampires, which is something I learned not too long ago. But she’s also the author of several books as well, including Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets and Ancient Israel, and Womanist Midrash: Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and of the Throne. Womanist Midrash is a fantastic, eye-opening book.
SARAH: That book really changed me profoundly. I remember, actually, when Rachel Held Evans was introducing Dr. Gafney, she said that it was her favorite book she read in 2018 and the one she most often recommended to people who study Scripture or had studied Scripture but want to fall back in love with it again. When Rachel was researching her last book, Inspired, she relied heavily on womanist interpretations as well as Jewish mythos. And Dr. Gafney also has an incredible Twitter presence. She’s funny and frank and wise. I really, really love it, I think because especially I am not in the academic world at all, I love it when academic types are gracious enough to bring their presence to Twitter and teach us via that medium. I have learned so much from her even just through that, and so I look forward to hearing from her.
JEFF: So one word of caution: some of the themes in this talk could be triggering for some listeners as Dr. Gafney discusses themes of rape, incest, and violence. So take care of yourselves and use your discretion.
Friends, we’re honored to bring you Dr. Wil Gafney, speaking at the first Evolving Faith gathering, in Montreat, North Carolina.
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WIL GAFNEY: I'd like to offer you the opportunity to experience evolution in your interpretation of Scripture through the riches of Womanist biblical interpretation. And then I'd like to invite you to speculate about what it would look like for you who are not Womanists or equipped to be Womanists to do the kind of biblical interpretation that is companion interpretation alongside Womanism. For those of you who do not know what it is to be Womanist, a Womanist is, in the definition of Karen Baker Fletcher, Womanist is a signifier of a radical and revolutionary movement in Black women's scholarship since the early 80s. Womanism began in the literary world with Alice Walker and expanded into theology with Katie Geneva Cannon and Delores Williams. And then it moved into biblical scholarship with Renita Weems in Hebrew Bible scholarship and Clarice Martin in New Testament scholarship. It extends further to a number of religious and non-religious disciplines.
Alice Walker's formative, generative definition of Womanist, in short, is a Black feminist or Womanist of color, and later she says Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. My definition of a Womanist is that a Womanist is a Black woman whose feminism is so rich, so deep, so thick, so broad and wide that it moves beyond the mere self interest of paler feminisms to embrace the well being of the whole community. Womanism is brash, it is bold and brazen, like the forehead of a whore. Womanism is womanish, and talks back with one or two hands upon her hip. But above all, Womanism emerges from the lived experience of Black women historically, and cannot be performed by anyone who is not Black and femme. So today we're talking about Womanist readings along with the ways in which you who are not equipped to be Womanists can read collaboratively with us. So I'm going to model what Womanist biblical interpretation looks like in one case. I'm going to start saying a phrase, and you're going to jump right in and finish the phrase.
God is the God of Abraham…. Isaac, and Jacob
Who is missing?And why? And how does that affect the ways in which we read, hear, interpret, teach and preach the text? Setting aside the why, who are the who? Calling the names of ancestors is the significant practice in African traditional practices and therefore a significant practice within the realm of Womanism. In saying God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, what is not being said is that God is the God of Hagar, Sarah, Keturah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpaa. And if you don't know all of these names, or they don't roll off your tongue without checking, why is that?
Sure, the Bible is androcentric, often patriarchal, sometimes misogynistic, but there are still 111ty women's names in the Hebrew Bible. And that doesn't count all of the female characters who have no names in the text. As a Womanist, I asked the question is God the God of Hagar, Sarah, Keturah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah? What might they say? Hagar is the African girl and slave to Sarah, who was raped by her husband Sarah orchestrated to provide herself with a son. Womanists read Hagar through our own histories, including 400 years of chattel slavery in the Atlantic basin, in which our foremothers were also raped to produce children and subject to the same kinds of physical and sexual violence that Sarah meted out to Hagar. I would argue that there can be no credible reading of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham in the Western world that does not address slavery in the Western world. So then, is God the God of Hagar? Is God the God… is the God of the folk who enslaved Hagar the God of Hagar?
Perhaps, surprisingly, Hagar stakes a claim on that very same God, the God of her enslavers. Perhaps that is not so surprising, considering how many enslaved Africans and their descendants also stake a claim on that God and chose the Christianity, if not of their enslavers, the name that their enslavers named. Is the God of Abraham the God of Sarah? The text is generally unconcerned with women's religious commitments, tending to lump them in with their menfolk. And Sarah seems to go along with the program. But let me say as a Womanist that I cannot move on from Sarah, without addressing her incestuous relationship with her brother husband, and the lack of preachers and pastors who name and deal with the incest or the pattern in their family and the consequences of it.
Keturah is the last woman in Abraham's life. She doesn't have even the tangential relationship to Abraham's God that Sarah has. What she does have his children by him, to whom he does not bequeath a share of his property, in spite of his great wealth. Womanism is intersectional, exploring the intersections of race, class, gender, ableism, orientation, gender presentation, and many others—not just the identities but the structural oppressions that result from the systems in which those identities and the consequences of those identities exist. So to be clear, because Keturah was a secondary or low status wife, Abraham was not required to provide for those children. But the text goes out of its way to tell us he's the wealthiest man in the East. What does it say about Abraham that when he had the resources, he chose not to provide for some of his children?
When I studied Keturah as when I studied Hagar, I also turn to Islam, to the Hadith, because neither are discussed in the Quran. I turned to the Hadith because Womanism is not located in any one religion, and I hear the voices of my sister scholars Imam Amina Wadud and Dr. Deborah Majeed, who helped me hear the story of Hug-ger, as her name is pronounced in Arabic, from the position of Muslim women, so I can't be a Womanist, and talk about reading from the margins, but not read from the margins when I'm not on those margins, right? Because that's not how it works. Rebecca seems the most likely candidate for whom it can be said that God is the God of Rebecca. She addresses God and receives a response from God in the matter of her difficult pregnancy.
Rachel represents the strongest evidence of not being in relationship with the God of the family into which she is married, which is also her family because of that whole incestuous-to-inbreeding thing; they’re on a spectrum. It's not a pretty spectrum. She liked her father Laban worships household deities. Their worship is so important to her that when she leaves with her husband, she steals them to take them with her. And she goes to quite some lengths to keep them hidden, hiding them in a piece of baggage sitting on them and telling her father she's menstruating, so that he will not search that area. That is a significant amount of devotion to those deities and doesn't indicate any devotion to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
One of the things that interest me about that story is that there is no rebuke from God in that context. Further, when she's desperate for children, she does not pray to God. She demands that her husband give her children. And later she's going to try to cure her own infertility, with mandrakes, using medicine. And so in none of the circumstances does she turn to the God of the family. When she does give birth, she names the child Dan, which means “God judges” but Elohim is sometimes a generic term. So there's a question as to who is the god she's given credit to in that situation.
When she finally— I'm sorry, Dan is not her child. Dan is the child she seized after the forced impregnation of her slave. When she does give birth herself, then, and only then, does she invoke the name of God in a way that makes it clear, she is calling on the God of her husband and father-in-law.
Now on the other hand, her sister Leah has a relationship with God that seems to be a reciprocal one, a tender one, and a caring one. The text says that when God saw that Leah was hated, God opened her womb. And then in return, Leah names her child in honor of God.
The story of Bilhah and Zilpah is where I'd like to spend the most of my time. It is like the story of Hagar and every other enslaved woman, child, and man in the Scriptures, troubling to me as a Womanist, and that includes the casual mentions of slavery and normative use of it by Jesus, and even his raising an enslaved boy, or young man, from the dead and returning him to his enslaver that that text gives me fits, because a so-called benevolent slave holder is still a slave holder. And given the lack of bodily, sexual and reproductive autonomy, the language of servant and slave is dishonest. I also think about that young man and wonder if he would have wanted to be raised, because my ancestors saying before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, and go home to my God, and be free.
So let's look at Bilhah and Zilpah, first enslaved to Laban, and then given like property to his daughters, Rachel and Leah, then handed over to be raped by Jacob into forcible pregnancies. Their bodies used to produce a third of the matriarchs or a third of the patriarchs of the 12 tribes— Dan and Naphtali by Bilhah, Gad and Asher by Zilpah. For Womanists, the claim that because consent functioned differently in the ancient world, we should not consider the impregnation of enslaved persons in Scripture as rape is as repugnant as calling Sally Hemings, the enslaved child that Thomas Jefferson repeatedly raped and impregnated, his mistress. Given that there is no woman in Laban's home, I must ask if he too used Bilhah and Zilpah sexually. Even after Jacob has two children with Bilhah for Rachel to claim, in addition to Leah's four children, he has more than an heir and a spare, he still forcibly impregnates Zilpah. Note the role of Sarah, Rachel, and Leah in the sexual abuse of other women. For Womanists there is a direct correlation to the physical and sexual abuse of enslaved African women by the white women who owned them, or who meted out violence upon them when they were raped and impregnated by their husbands because they could see the pregnancies and see the children.
Like many survivors of rape, contemporarily, Bilhah was eventually raped by a second perpetrator. This time a man who may well have been like a son to her: Reuben, Leah’s son. So then, is the God of their enslavers, the God of Bilhah and Zilpah? There's no evidence in the text. What might they have said? They, like Hagar, may have found their own way to the same God. But it is equally possible if not more than likely that they had their own gods or wanted nothing to do with the gods of their enslavers.
What does Womanism contribute to an evolving faith? An unflinching look at the Scriptures and a willingness to be disturbed by them, rejecting the pious platitudes of the past. Asking if or claiming that God is the God of Hagar, Sarah, Keturah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah is to tell a more complete truth than God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Because as soon as you put the list up together, the fact that the net number of names is not the same means that you have to talk about patriarchy and polygamy and polygyny. As soon as you put Abraham and Sarah's names up, you have to talk about incest. As soon as you put Hagar in the picture, you have to talk about slavery and rape. But if you just tell the patriarchal fairy tale—God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—you don't deal with any of the real, complex, human stuff in the text, stuff that is still going on, stuff that is enabled, inspired by, and attributed to the text.
Sometimes the problem in biblical interpretation is not the interpretation. Sometimes it's the text. The more complete truth should disturb us and drive us to a deeper and more honest encounter with the Scriptures. And so I invite you to think about how you will read the text against traditional readings, listening for the perspectives of the most powerless voices in solidarity with Womanists. What will that look like from your places of privilege? And what will that look like from your places of peril? I look forward to hearing from you.
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SARAH: So Dr. Gafney talks about an invitation to experience an evolution in how we read and interpret Scripture. And just from a behind the scenes perspective, that was actually a really key part of our initial dream or the start of the work at Evolving Faith then and now, and I think that might have been because Rachel was such a Bible nerd. Like, she loved the Bible.
And that isn’t something we necessarily shared— We didn’t share a similar history in terms of how we had been taught to read the Bible. I love my Bible and I’ve always been deeply informed and formed and transformed by Scripture. But I have to be honest, that I didn't do a lot of the uniquely American evangelical stuff. I mean, I think it's uniquely American, maybe it's not but the whole thing of like sword drills and quizzes and competitive memorizing and like that sort of thing, that forms you in a particular way to read the Bible. And I think that's why talking about the Bible was really important to her at this event. But it was also really clear to us that a lot of us, no matter what tradition we came from, or didn't come from, that we have kind of a tenuous and complicated relationship with Scripture. And so learning from biblical interpreters like Dr. Gafney is one more way that we have been given back our Bibles.
JEFF Yeah, I think one of the things Rachel and I had in common was we did have the sword drill. And that, I think it's a culturally a particular relationship with the Bible. But for all of us, no matter what our starting point was, an evolving faith means a change in that relationship. What I can't explain is why some of us ended up retaining our affection for Scripture, even if we read it differently now. And then there are others that can't even bear to read it. I acknowledge it's a complicated collection of documents. But the baggage we bring to it is no less complex. I guess I say that as prelude in some sense to an observation about one thing Dr. Gafney does. Okay, last time I saw her she said, “Call me Wil.” And that's still really, really hard for me because it was drilled into me that you honor your teachers by addressing them more formally. Anyway, one of the remarkable things about what she does, and maybe one of the things that makes her a great teacher, is that she doesn't resolve things neatly for us. Instead, she asks us what we see. And she challenges us to look past the facades we've been given. And sometimes that means sitting in the discomfort of difficult passages of Scripture.
SARAH: Yeah, exactly. I think that's one of the things that is maybe a hard realization, when you're in the wilderness or you are in a process of deconstruction, or even as part of spiritual formation. It isn't that you trade in one set of answers and certainty for this other nice, new set, you know, of answers and certainty, because it isn't actually about being more right. Right? And so, you know, she opens up the room to say, I'm not going to fix this for you and make the discomfort you're feeling go away. Right? That that discomfort is actually part of the story. It's our story too, right? We have to learn how to integrate that.
So I wanted to talk a little bit more, honestly, I guess about the womanist biblical interpretation because that has been a game changer for me in the last number of years. Learning to read Scripture through that lens collaboratively has made my experience with Scripture and even feminism more rich and deep and wonderful. It has been this tremendous gift, and not just Dr. Gafney’s books, which are brilliant, but this vast company of writers and thinkers who are doing that work. So, reading and living even collaboratively with Womanist interpretations has been really transformative for me. And I have slowly and really imperfectly been learning to read that way. My feminism since then has been really shaped by their voices. And I think that it would be— I need to be really frank here, maybe, even for a minute, about something that was a huge oversight of mine for a number of years. And that is this, right? Because I mean, for pity's sake, I wrote a book called Jesus Feminist, back in 2012 and never once talked about Womanism or intersectionality. Like, I was just completely ignorant. And there are a number of things, of course, I'd love to go back and rewrite or explore in that book, maybe, you know, if we end up doing some, you know, 10-year anniversary edition or something, we could take a run at that. But one of the shortcomings that grieves me the most is the fact that it's very much a brand of white feminism. And this is the danger in writing a book. It stands in a moment in time. And yet you keep evolving and learning, and it's like the literal worst. So if I could go back and do it again, I think that Jesus Feminist would be far more intersectional now, because how can we talk about women in the church and in the world without also honestly talking about race and class and ableism and orientation and all the ways that that intersects with our gender, right? God is not just the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but of Hagar too.
JEFF: Dr. Gafney gives us such a gift focusing on the God of Hagar, an Egyptian slave as she reminds us, right? And Hagar makes the claim on God. She claims God as hers. As far as I know, she's the only named person in Scripture who has the boldness to give God a new name: The One Who Sees Me—El-Roi. Yet we so often pay too little attention to the story of her relationship with God. Anyway, I appreciate what you're saying about needing that Womanist perspective. I've learned so much from it too. And one thing I want to emphasize is something I wrote down as I was listening to Dr. Gafney's talk: She is super clear about who a Womanist is, and that the rest of us are invited to a relationship of companionship and collaboration. But we don't all get to be Womanists. And what I hear here is an echo of something Austin said to us: Don't center yourself. Don't try to push your way into the middle of the story if it's not your story. And I think, for me, at least, that's a needed reminder.
SARAH: Oh, listen, that is a reminder that we need probably every single day, because she even one of the things that she talks about is, she asks a question, actually, that I've heard a couple of times and in a few different contexts that has really haunted me. And that is you look around the room or you look around, you know, the moment you're in and ask, Who's missing? Who's missing when we read the names and the ancestors and who we acknowledge and who is around the table making decisions? I think that for a long time, for too long, we have been taught to read Scripture with one particular lens, right? And it's usually a straight, white, male, Western, usually American or, or British lens. And that gives us a particular set of glasses for the text. And then she just blows the roof off that because she reads instead through the lens of Womanism, through the lens of Hagar and Bilhah, and even Rachel and Rebecca. And to me that just wildly opens Scripture, because then we get to read through these other lenses as well. Right? Because then all of a sudden, you've got things like, well, if you're reading it through a non-Western lens, perhaps then all of a sudden you've got this whole world of liberation theology open to you. Or a queer lens. And if we're only reading the Bible in community with people who look like us and think like us and live like us, we are missing the wide, welcoming table of Scripture. It makes me wonder, like, who do we think— who has been traditionally missing from our biblical interpretation?
JEFF: I'm so thankful that every single Evolving Faith gathering has had a session devoted to Bible and theology, and also that so many other speakers and other sessions have drawn on Scripture. And I'm thankful for that because tradition is to experience Scripture together in community. It wasn't, as I understand it, meant to be read in your quiet time, mainly by yourself. And I don't even think community has to be restricted to time and place. So if you aren't reading Wil Gafney, if she's not part of your community, why not? And how about Indigenous perspectives or East Asian perspectives or South Asian perspectives, since the Bible landed in India well over a millennium before the colonizers got to the Western Hemisphere? So I guess it depends on your social location. But the question on the table is, Who are the people you are least likely to interact with or listen to? Because their perspectives would probably enrich your understanding and my understanding of the Bible. And if our understandings of Scripture are so contextual, then surely we would be wise to seek out different perspectives, so that we can have a richer experience of the Bible.
One of my favorite classes in seminary focused on the work of South African theologians, whom I’d never read before. So reading Allan Boesak changed my view of the biblical call for justice forever. And reading Denise Ackermann changed how I read the story of Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem forever, because she focuses on the borrowed donkey, as she calls it. Anyway, I don't want to take us too far off the path for today, which is about the Womanist lens. But I thought it was important to ask: Who else is part of your community of reading and learning?
SARAH: That is a really, really good, I think, check and even invitation, right? There's an invitation in that. And I think that's a common theme for a lot of us, maybe. We lost the way that we used to read the Bible. You know, my traditional way in, you know, where, where I started from was very, If This, Then That—you know, a formulaic approach to Scripture. We had like 10 Bible verses we really liked and forgot about the rest. And you know, there was this prosperity gospel version right? And when that, for me, dissolved like sugar dissolves in water, I was left without a way to read and understand Scripture. And so what you said there resonates, because those perspectives and voices and interpretations gave me new language for Scripture and a new love for it to. In so many ways, they've given me back my Bible in all of its complexity, and I'm so grateful for that.
All right, so let's talk about this: Dr. Gafney asks what womanism can give to an evolving faith. And what she names is that it gives us an unflinching look at Scripture, a willingness to be disturbed, and a rejection of the pious platitudes of the past. And I think that's something that we don't do enough, right? We talk oftentimes about the comfort of Scripture, and that's real, right? I get a lot of comfort and a lot of reorientation from Scripture. But we don't really talk a whole lot about a willingness to be disturbed. It reminded me, actually, in Rachel's book Searching for Sunday, she wrote, “I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven't actually read it.” And that caused, you know, a bit of a pushback or some controversy there. But yet, it's true: like, unflinching truth-telling is part of reading Scripture. Dr. Gafney says even in this talk, right, that sometimes the problem in biblical interpretation is not the interpretation. Sometimes it's the text. Like, the more complete truth should disturb us. It should drive us into a deeper and more honest encounter with the Scriptures. And what does that look like now?
JEFF: in the churches of my childhood, because Scripture was so often read as prescriptive, you didn't want to mess around with some of these passages, because what would that say about what we're supposed to do? And what would that do in terms of instigating nightmares? So I'm really grateful for Dr. Gafney's push to be disturbed. It's an invitation, really. And this brings me to one of Sarah's favorite words, which is “depravity.”
SARAH: That is literally a lie. You— you are depraved. And I don't even believe in depravity.
JEFF: I am depraved. Thank you for naming the truth—the truth of my life and of Reformed theology. A lot of Scripture reminds me of humanity's depravity, the consistent habit we have of dehumanizing others, the repeated pattern we have of dishonoring God's good creation. And that's so humbling. At times, that's horrifying. And it's something we can't come fully to terms with, well, maybe ever, but especially if we're not engaging honestly with Scripture. We will keep erasing people and decontextualizing them and centering ourselves if we don't learn from these stories.
SARAH: That is, I think, one of the things that has been one of the greatest gifts of the last number of years and a joy to me is to realize how often I was wrong. And I know that that can be really scary for people, I think, especially when, you know, maybe you've been taught to read, you know, for instance, the story of David and Bathsheba in a certain way. And then all of a sudden you realize, like, wait a minute, that's not actually what this was. And it turns out Esther wasn't a beauty pageant. And, you know, Jesus maybe wasn't born alone in a manger in a barn. And you have all these kinds of moments through Scripture that have actually brought joy to me, because there's so much more to learn. There's so much more to be curious about. And the point isn't to gloss over it, but to let it— let it move us. Let it anger us. Let it disturb us. Because there can be a path there. And so, all right, to wrap up today. There's so much more we could talk about, but let's talk a little bit about what we have held onto since that talk. For me, it might seem like a really small takeaway, but ever since listening to this, this moment with Dr. Gafney, every time that I hear anyone or read anyone say, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, my mind does this little fill-in-the-blank of, like, Hagar, Rebecca, Rachel, Bilhah. Like, all those names, that means something to me now. And I find I do that in a lot of moments of Scripture. When I hear phrases like that, I'm looking for the fill-in-the-blank. And it's really changed how I read and understand the stories in the Bible. So how about you? What was something you haven't forgotten from this talk?
JEFF: We have talked about wide welcomes a lot in the context of Evolving Faith. Dr. Gafney models for us very wide welcome when it comes to all from whom she's willing to learn. She talks about reading the Hadith, from the Islamic tradition, and reading the work of Islamic scholars, for whom Hagar is also a significant character and understanding how they see her in their faith tradition. And it makes me interrogate my own willingness to learn. What am I afraid of? What are we afraid of? Does it really offend God to be in conversation with texts from other traditions? And I guess I've come to believe that Scripture doesn't need us to defend it. I want to honor it, yes. But Scripture has its own power and it can more than stand up to our faithful exploration.
((Music to transition))
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Hello, Sarah and Jeff, my name is Carrie. I'm from Tukwila, Washington. And what's giving me peace and joy as I walk through this journey of deconstruction is that I am walking it along with my adult daughter. I'm unlearning the doctrines and theology taught to me by my parents while she is unlearning the doctrines and theology that I passed on to her. And I will forever be grateful for her mercy and forgiveness as we deconstruct the fear-based ,exclusive faith that is our past, and embrace the love-filled, joy-infused, expansive inclusivity of who Jesus i, and what it means to follow him. I'm so grateful that she and I are going through this process together. And I'm so grateful for the work that you are doing in this podcast and in your conference and in the world. Thank you.
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SARAH: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Evolving Faith Podcast. As ever, you can find all of the links that were mentioned, info about Dr. Gafney, and a full transcript in our show notes at evolvingfaith.com. You can buy all of our speakers’ books on our new storefront at bookshop.org/shop/evolvingfaith. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @evolvfaith. You can also find me on Twitter as @sarahbessey, and same on Instagram.
JEFF: Find me on Twitter at @jeffchu and on Instagram at @byjeffchu. And you can find Dr. Gafney herself on Twitter where she is @wilgafney or check out her website, wilgafney.com, to find links to all of her work.
The Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with Jordan Gass-Poore. Thanks to Audrey Assad and Wes Willison for the music. And join us next week for an episode featuring the one and only and incomparableScience Mike. Yes, indeed, Mike McHargue is going to surprise you next week and his talk is only even more relevant today than it was on the day he preached it. Yes, we said preached it.
SARAH: And don’t forget - tickets for Evolving Faith 2020 are now on sale at evolvingfaith.com. We’ve set a big, rowdy table in the middle of the wilderness, and together, we are going to have a feast. We saved a spot for you. We’ll share stories and songs, wonder and curiosity, renewal and redemption too.
JEFF: If the Evolving Faith Podcast has meant something to you, please review it on Apple Podcasts in particular. It does make a huge difference. Your likes, your shares, your subscribes, your honest reviews will set up a candle for other people to find us out here in the wilderness. Thank you for taking the time to do that small thing for us, and it could make a world of difference for someone who is lonely out there.
SARAH: And until next time: Remember that you are loved.
