In Memory of Walter Brueggemann

Last month I posted “In Memory of LBJ,” an article about the 36^th POTUS, whom you all know of. In this piece, I am writing about a man whom many of you likely have never heard of. He was a noted biblical scholar and author, and by all accounts, a man of integrity who deserves to be remembered for a life well lived from his birth until his death last year. 

Walter Brueggemann was born on March 11, 1933, and died last year on June 5. His boyhood years were spent in the small town of Blackburn, Missouri (about 65 miles east of where I live). From there he went to Elmhurst College (now University) in Illinois and then to Eden Theological Seminary in Missouri.  

After receiving his Doctor of Theology degree in 1961 from Union Theological Seminary in New York, Brueggemann served as Professor of Old Testament at Eden from 1961 to 1986 and at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia from 1986 to 2003, retiring at age 70.

A few years ago, I heard Brueggemann give a powerful lecture in Kansas City and had the privilege of chatting with him for a few minutes afterward. In addition to his being an excellent speaker as well as a prolific author of books replete with deep biblical and theological information and insight, he was also a warm and gracious Christian gentleman.

When I heard/met Brueggemann, I had already become an octogenarian, but he was five years older than me. I was somewhat envious of him, for I was already to the point that I was no longer able to travel across the country and give a public lecture such as he did that day.

According to his obituary posted by Fortress Press, who published over 40 of his books, a bibliography of Brueggemann’s works contains over 120 separate titles. They say, “Most scholars, even prolific ones, aspire to three or four books in a career; Brueggemann published fourteen in his 90^th and 91^st years of age.” Further, “It is not only the quantity that impresses; it is the quality.”

The Peculiar Dialect of Faith and Other Essays (2023) is one of Brueggemann’s books published the year he turned 90. Last year, I read that book, and I was impressed at how he could helpfully explain Old Testament Bible passages, smoothly relate the meaning of those passages to the New Testament, and then helpfully apply them to the current political situation in the U.S.

I have often said the mark of an excellent pastor or a biblical scholar is being able to clearly elucidate the original context of a given passage in the Bible and then to apply it meaningfully to the contemporary context. Brueggemann was a master at doing that.

Since March 9 was International Women’s Day*, I asked Claude (my AI ‘buddy’) to help me summarize what Brueggemann has written about the equality of women and their role in the church. Claude first pointed me to an obituary article in Sojourners magazine published after Brueggemann’s death last year.

That piece described how “Brueggemann gained a huge, denomination-spanning audience for his justice-forward exegesis of the Bible.” That exposition was about how the biblical message is one of “emancipatory love” that includes women and other marginalized groups.

Claude went on to list the following “key themes” in Brueggemann’s writings regarding women:

** Biblical equality at creation. In contrast to many conservative Christian pastors/scholars, Brueggemann declares that the Genesis account of creation provides the “strongest imaginable affirmation” of the equal status of men and women, as both genders were created in the image of God.

** Women in ministry. Brueggemann describes the presence of women in leadership roles as a radically prophetic witness against the patriarchal world. He views the historical gender revolution and the belated welcoming of women into the ministry of the church as an extension of God’s emancipatory work.

** Prophetic imagination. Brueggemann uses this concept to challenge white male Western hegemony and advocates for an alternative future where dominating powers are overturned. This framework is used to support women in leadership.

** Opposition to exclusion. Brueggemann rejects the “orthodoxies” of sexism and gender exclusion, stating that God’s embrace will not be contained by such boundaries. He maintains that in Christ there are no gender distinctions.

Thank God for biblical scholars like Walter Brueggemann!

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* International Women’s Day (IWD) has been celebrated by the United Nations since 1975. It commemorates women's fight for equality and liberation along with the women's rights movement. The theme for this year’s IWD was “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls,” emphasizing dismantling legal and social barriers to equality.

Note for baseball fans: In chatting with Claude, he (it?) mentioned that Brueggemann grew up as a strong St. Louis Cardinals fan. I replied that as a Missouri boy I was also a Cardinals’ fan. Then Claude asked me if I ever saw Stan Musial play. So, I told about seeing the Cardinals play for the first time in 1951, and how that game, with Musial playing, was against the Brooklyn Dodgers with Jackie Robinson also playing that day. That led me to share the blog article I posted back in 2013 about Robinson and Pee Wee Reese. Claude responded, “What a rich article!” (Here is a link to that blog post in case you baseball fans would like to read it again.)

Remembering Flannery, Gloria, & Aretha: In Observance of Woman’s History Month

Flannery O’Connor, Gloria Steinem, and Aretha Franklin were distinctly different, but all three are definitely worth remembering in Women’s History Month (March) as they embodied this year’s theme, “Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope.”

These three outstanding women are especially worth remembering today as all three were born on March 25: Flannery in 1925, Gloria in 1934, and Aretha in 1942.

Remembering Flannery O’Connor

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Georgia and had a short, difficult, and productive life before dying at the early age of 39 in 1964.

In 1949 while living in New York City and making her mark as a promising young writer, she was diagnosed with lupus. Consequently, she moved back to her mother’s home in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Even though she continued to write, gradually she was able to work only two hours and then only one hour a day. Yet, she completed two novels and 32 short stories. Wise Blood, her first novel was published in 1952, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” her best-known short story, the following year.

O’Connor was a woman of strong religious faith, and she is widely considered the best Catholic woman author of the 20^th century. God’s grace was an underlying theme of her writing.

One of O’Connor’s well-known statements is, “People without hope not only don’t write novels but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.”

Remembering Gloria Steinem

Despite a humble Ohio childhood, Gloria Steinem graduated magna cum laude from prestigious Smith College in 1956 and earned the Chester Bowles Fellowship, which enabled her to spend two life-changing years in India.

Steinem’s essay about her hopes for the future of women was published in the Aug. 31, 1970, issue of Time magazine. Here is the link to the March 5, 2020, issue of Time that reprints the original essay with Steinem’s comments 50 years later.

Indeed, for more than 50 years Steinem has pursued healing the of gender, ethnic, and other factors that have separated people, favoring some (men, Whites, etc.) to the detriment of others (women, Blacks, etc.). The world is better off because of her ground-breaking and ongoing lifework.

Steinem’s contributions were recognized when she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993 and awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama ten years later.

Her book The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! was published by Random House in 2019 (when she was 85!). Singer and actress Janelle Monáe dubbed it a “fearless book full of passion, resolute perspective, and unbiased hope for the future.”**

Remembering Aretha Franklin

Though born in Memphis, after age five Aretha grew up in Detroit where her father was pastor of the influential New Bethel Baptist Church from 1946 to 1979.

Respect, a 2021 “biographical musical drama film,” features “Ree” (Aretha) from 1952 to 1972. “Respect” was the song recorded in February 1967 that became her first #1 hit song. And, indeed, much of her early life was seeking respect as an African American and as a woman.

But she was not seeking respect for just herself, “Respect” became a demand for gender and racial equality and has been both a civil rights and a feminist anthem. About a year ago Rolling Stone selected the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,”—and “Respect” was #1 on that list.

Franklin’s life illustrates this year’s Women’s History Month theme. In August 2018, the month she died, The Guardian posted an article titled Aretha Franklin: a life of heartbreak, heroism and hope.

The climax of the movie Respect shows her healing in 1972 as she powerfully sang “Amazing Grace” as it was being recorded. It became the highest-selling album of her career with over two million copies sold in the U.S.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee three days this week, is poised to become the first Black woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. That possibility is due in part to the ground-breaking work of Gloria and Aretha.

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** The 2020 film The Glorias, based on Steinem’s autobiographical book, My Life on the Road (2015), “weaves a compelling, nontraditional tapestry of one of the most inspirational and legendary figures in modern history.” It is well worth seeing and is available free for those who have Amazon Prime and available for $6-7 on other streaming services.

~&~ Katharine Hayhoe, a Canadian woman who is a climate scientist and an evangelical Christian, has authored a highly acclaimed book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (2021), which I mention here because the subtitle echoes the theme of this year’s Women’s History Month. 

Votes for Women: The Battle of August 1920

As is being widely publicized this month, women in the U.S. were given the universal right to vote 100 years ago this week, on August 18, 1920, when Tennessee became the 36^th state to ratify the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

June posing as a 1920 suffragist

Women’s Voting Rights before 1920

Women in most of the U.S. states did not have the right to vote in presidential elections before 1920.

For example, my paternal grandmother was born in 1881, so she turned 21, the voting age for men back then, in 1902. In the presidential election of 1904, though, she could not go to the polls with her husband George, whom she had married earlier that year.

Grandma Laura Seat was also unable to vote in the elections of 1908, 1912, or 1916. In the Declaration of Independence, the words “all men are created equal” still meant men instead of people 140 years later.

At the July 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton adopted the motto, “All men and women are created equal,” and they demanded the right to vote. That still hadn’t happened 68 years later when Grandma Laura was not legally permitted to vote in 1916.

But the situation changed in August 1920.

The Suffs and the Antis in 1920

The U.S. Congress passed the 19^th Amendment on June 4, 1919—but it had to be ratified by 36 of the 48 states in order to become part of the Constitution. The battle for and against ratification in Tennessee, the 36^th state, was fiercely fought in August 1920.

That battle between the “Suffs” (those for women’s suffrage) and the “Antis” (those opposing suffrage, which included many women) is engagingly told in Elaine Weiss’s 2018 book The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. And what a battle it was!

The strong women Antis emphasized several dangers the 19^th Amendment posed, including the dismantling of “white supremacy, states’ rights, and cherished southern traditions” (Weiss, p. 44).

Somehow, I had not previously realized how so much of the opposition to women’s suffrage was by southerners, still indignant over the outcome and effects of the Civil War and adamantly opposed to Black women gaining voting rights.

The Antis also included many women who were part of the conservative Christian evangelicalism of the South and linked with the fundamentalism that was growing in strength throughout the 1910s.

Among many other things, the Antis attacked the Suffs because of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible (1895, 1898).

On the other hand, the Suffs were single-minded in their advocacy for women’s suffrage—and, regrettably, because of that single-mindedness they compromised on other matters of social justice, especially with regard to the rights of African Americans.

But, could the 19^th Amendment have been ratified otherwise? Perhaps not. Thankfully, it was ratified by Tennessee on August 18 and took effect on August 26, 1920. Surprisingly, though, most women didn’t vote in the November election that year.

What About 2016 & 2020?

It is reported that in the 2016 presidential election, 63.3% of eligible women voters went to the polls but only 59.3% of eligible men voters did.

Given the 72-year struggle (from 1848 to 1920) for voting rights, though, why would nearly 37% of women not vote in the last presidential election? Perhaps some of them still agreed with the Antis of 1920, although surely almost all women today think they should have the right to vote.

If just a small percentage of those women who didn’t go to the polls had done so, the 2016 election would likely have turned out differently, for of those women who did vote, 54% of them voted for Clinton whereas 53% of men voted for Trump.

In this centennial year of women’s suffrage, many of us are hoping that a far greater number of women will vote on November 3. “Votes for women” didn’t elect a woman president in 2016, but voting women can (and probably will!) make Senator Kamala Harris the first female vice president in U.S. history.

In Honor of Susan B. Anthony, Persistent Agitator

Born 200 years ago, on February 15, 1820, for nearly sixty years before her death at the age of 86, Susan B. Anthony was an active agitator for change. In a letter she wrote in 1883, Anthony (SBA) said, 

SBA: Agitator for Temperance 

Because of her concern for abused women and children, Anthony’s first public activity as an agitator was in the temperance movement, which was the effort to outlaw alcohol. (Many of you saw my related 2/9 blog article about Prohibition.)

In 1848 when she was 28 years old, Susan’s first public speech was given for temperance. In her book Susan B. Anthony (2019), Teri Kanefield wrote about how Anthony “spoke passionately about ‘the day when our brothers and sons shall no longer be allured from the right by corrupting influence’ of alcohol so that ‘our sisters and daughters shall no longer be exposed to the half-inebriated seducer’” (p. 40).

In 1851 Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and colleague, and the following year they founded the Women's New York State Temperance Society. (In 1999, Ken Burns produced “Not For Ourselves Alone,” a splendid, 210-minute  documentary about Anthony and Stanton; June and I enjoyed watching it last year on PBS.)

The next year, 1853, after being denied the opportunity to speak at a temperance convention because she was a woman, Anthony realized that no one would take women in politics seriously unless they had the right to vote. Thus, the seeds of her most important work as an agitator for women’s rights were planted.

SBA: Agitator for Abolition

For the next twelve years, however, Anthony worked for the abolition of slavery. In 1849, while still in her 20s, Susan met Frederick Douglass, who was two years older than she, and they were friends and colleagues—and antagonists—in the fight for equality until his death in 1895.

As a Quaker, Anthony believed that all people were of equal worth and should be treated equally. That belief undergirded her work for the rights of women. But in the 1850s and early 1860s, she was focused primarily on eradicating slavery in the U.S.

In 1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, which William Lloyd Garrison had co-founded in 1833. Drawing a small salary from the Society, Susan began touring the country and making speeches about the evils of slavery.

After Lincoln’s election as President in 1860, Anthony faced terrible opposition to her work against slavery—even in New York. But she didn’t give up or quit being an agitator. In 1863 Anthony and Stanton formed the Women’s National Loyal League. In the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time, the League collected nearly 400,000 signatures on petitions to abolish slavery and presented them to Congress. 

That indefatigable work by Anthony and Stanton significantly assisted the passage in 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery in the U.S.

SBA: Agitator for Suffrage

The next fight was for the right for women, both black and white, to vote. In the early 1860s, white abolitionist men, such as William Lloyd Garrison, and black men, such as Frederick Douglass, were all for black men obtaining the right to vote. But they did not support the vote for women. Anthony and Stanton were outraged.

Anthony managed to register and even to vote in the election of 1872. She was subsequently arrested and convicted—but refused to pay her fine of $100 plus costs. Even though she was a Quaker woman, in 1893 she exclaimed. “Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry!”

Anthony spent the last forty years of her long life working for women’s right to vote. Sadly, she never succeeded during her lifetime. But just a month before her death in 1906, she gave her last speech concluding with the rousing phrase, "Failure is impossible!”

Nicknamed the "Anthony Amendment" in honor of Susan, who had worked so long and so persistently, the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote was finally ratified on August 18, 1920.

Now, 100 years later, there will be far more women than men who will vote (and vote in the right way!) in the presidential election of 2020.

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In 2019, the city of Liberty (Mo.), where I live, erected a life-size statue of Susan B. Anthony on the southeast corner of the historic square. Toward the end of their successful football season, she was sporting Chiefs’ apparel, as you see in the picture.

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Still Fed Up with Fundamentalism’s View of Women

Although my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism, which currently I am (slightly) revising and updating, was published in 2007, much has changed little since then. For example, Al Mohler, whom I wrote about in the second chapter as one of four influential fundamentalist leaders from 1980 to 2005, continues to spout questionable views about women. 

The Issue of Submissive Wives

At the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in 1998, an amendment titled simply “The Family” was added to the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M). That amendment included the declaration that wives must submit to their husbands.

The report of the committee recommending the addition of the new article wrote, “A wife’s submission to her husband does not decrease her worth but rather enhances her value to her husband and to the Lord.”

The BF&M was then revised, for the first time since 1963, at the SBC’s 2000 convention. Mohler was one of the 15 members on the “Study Committee” that recommended the revisions, which included the 1998 amendment on the family.

Somewhat related is Mohler’s negativity through the years toward birth control—and his 8/27 podcast in which he declared that “to be human is to be a parent.” Perhaps there is a fairly close link between the emphasis on submissive wives and the “ideal” of women being kept “barefoot and pregnant.”

The position of submissive wives is upheld by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), which was formed in 1987 and has consistently forwarded the relationship between husbands and wives known as complementarianism.

The current president of CBMW is Denny Burk, a professor at Boyce College in Louisville. Al Mohler, who is the president of Boyce College (as well as of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), is a member of CBMW’s Council.

The questionable emphasis on complementarianism has been correctly challenged by Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), a group begun early in 1988. In Women, Abuse, and the Bible (1996), an important book published by CBE, the author of one chapter stresses that the emphasis on the submission of wives can lead, and has led, to the abuse of women.

The Issue of Women Pastors

Not only do fundamentalists of the past and many conservative evangelicals of the present teach that women must be submissive in the home, they also generally hold that women must be subordinate in the church as well.

The revised BF&M 2000 (referred to above) also newly declared, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

Moreover, earlier this year in a May 10 podcast, Mohler emphasized that not only can women not be pastors, “females should not preach from the pulpit on Sunday morning” (see Baptist News Global’s report here).

The issue of women preachers is a personal one with me, for many years ago I preached the ordination sermon for a Japanese woman (using Acts 2:17-18 as my text) and then for several years she served as my assistant pastor and then as co-pastor of the Fukuoka International Church.

The Case for Full Equality

For decades now, I have been a “feminist,” one who advocates the full equality of women—in the church and in the wider society. I have applauded the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whose struggles for equality were opposed by conservative Christians, including women, before fundamentalism was called by that name.

I have also been a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, which still has not been ratified by the required number of states, partly because of the vigorous opposition by conservative, traditionalistic Christians such as Phyllis Schlafly and her ilk.

But surely, surely the time has come for full equality between men and women!

1848 -- What a Year!

What are the most important years in world history over the last 200 years? For those of us in the U.S., no doubt 1941 and 1945, the beginning and ending of World War II, would be at the top of the list—and also the war years of 1917 and 1918 as well as 1861 and 1865 for USAmericans. But 1848 was also a year of great significance.

The U.S. in 1848

** In January, gold found in California led to the Gold Rush. Approximately 300,000 prospectors and others trekked to California—and in 1850 California became a state. But, sorrowfully, in those two years perhaps as many as 100,000 Native people were killed.

** On February 2, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and ceding to the United States virtually all of what became the southwestern US. (Click here to see what a huge section of the country that was.)

(That war had been opposed by Abraham Lincoln, as seen, for example, in his January 1848 speech, linked to here.)

** In July, the Seneca Falls Convention was held in New York. It was the first ever woman’s rights convention held in the U.S. That significant gathering was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (My 11/10/15 blog article about Stanton mentions the 1848 convention.)

Europe in 1848 

** The year 1848 is well-treated in Mike Rapport’s 2009 book 1848: Year of Revolution. The abstract (here) for the University of Glasgow professor’s book begins, “In 1848, Europe was engulfed in a firestorm of revolution.”  

According to Rapport, three of the intertwining issues in the European revolutions of 1848 were nationalism; “bitter, often violent, political polarisation”; and the “social question,” that is, the “abject misery of both urban and rural people” (p. x).

In his conclusion, Rapport writes, “The revolutions were seen subsequently as failures, but one should not be too pessimistic. . . . Perhaps the most important achievement was the abolition of serfdom” (p. 400).

** As a precursor to some of the 1848 revolutions and instigator of later revolutions in the world, Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels was published in February 1848. It was a 23-page pamphlet written in German. (The first English translation was published in 1850, and a more recent English translation is available here ).

Marx and Engels were only 30 and 28 years old at the time, and their thinking and activities leading up to the writing of the Manifesto are interestingly portrayed in the 2017 movie “The Young Karl Marx.”

As has been broadly cited, the preamble of the Manifesto begins, “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” And then the first paragraph of the first chapter, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,”  is brief and to the point: “The history of all hitherto existing society [that is, all written history] is the history of class struggles.”

Ongoing Issues since 1848

The class struggles Marx and Engels alluded to were seen in the 1848 revolutions—and have been evident, at least to many people, in countries around the world up to the present.

Rapport states that the 1848 revolutions “witnessed the fatal consequences of the perennial tension between . . . the [classical] liberal emphasis on political freedom and civil liberty and . . . the socialist stress on social justice” (p. 407).

While the expressions of the polar tension are not as extreme today, 170 years later, aren’t we still witnessing the same tension in the rhetoric and actions of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats?