Gender Constructions and Biblical Exegesis: Lessons from a Divinity School Seminar

Abstract

The 2000 US Census reports that approximately 83 percent of people who acknowledged their religious affiliation identified themselves as Christian. 1 While Christians in the United States represent a heterogeneous group of people, they share the belief that the Bible is the normative text for defining the religion’s ethics (Balmer, 2000; Hays, 1996; Porter and Clarke, 1997). Passages within the Bible itself promote its authority and usefulness. The author of 2 Timothy writes, ‘All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work’ (3:16–17). 2 Indeed, many passages in the Bible describe principles, practices, and roles for Christian believers. Yet, despite explicit moral directives in biblical texts, Christians do not promulgate a uniform code of behavior. For when Christians look to the Bible for guidance, they are confronted with a collection of texts that were written by many different authors in different historical and socio-cultural contexts (Berlinerblau, 2005). Thus, although the Bible offers explicit directives, many of these statements, written by different authors with different agendas, directly contradict one another. Additionally, less explicit directives may be vague, confusing, or context dependent. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.