Money Well Spent

Men and women are different in so many ways I’m not sure they’ve all been quantified.

Of course, these differences exist on a spectrum. There are logical women and emotional men and, in between, every permutation and combination of character qualities, personality quirks, family patterns unconsciously assimilated, and cultural affectations. Nevertheless, no matter how you slice it, men polarize at one end of the spectrum and women at the other. Those of both sexes who hew closer to the middle than the extremes, often through no fault of their own, may find life more difficult in certain respects.

The Sexes and Their Responsibilities

Scripture takes these differences between the sexes into account even if our modern society does not, assigning responsibilities to believers with each biological package accordingly. We may think all human beings have most features in common. The Creator does not, and he should know. One of the ways this comes out in the Bible is that husbands have an obligation to lead and wives an obligation to follow. Another is that women are not permitted to teach or to exercise authority over men in church gatherings. Both these rules come with explanations that take us all the way back to the creation order. They are based on differences in the way God made us.

The first of these instructions concerns the interpersonal dynamic between husbands and wives. The scriptures on the subject of Christian marriage are not difficult to understand, but these days they play out of sync with the cultural zeitgeist, and are often disobeyed in so-called Christian homes both in letter and, even more frequently, in spirit. Evangelical church leaders rarely intervene in spiritually dysfunctional marriages except by request of the parties, which I think is probably as it should be. To our own master we stand or fall. Nevertheless, many modern Christian marriages are out of order by New Testament standards, and all involved suffer for it.

The second set of instructions has to do with order in the gatherings of the saints. Again, there is nothing nebulous about the relevant passages, but the spirit of the age is not fond of the apostle Paul, and so there are entire denominations within evangelicalism and outside it that have embraced or capitulated to anti-biblical roles for women in their churches, notwithstanding the lack of ambiguity in what the apostle wrote about them. A variety of ingenious devices are used to explain away Paul’s teaching, but it is notable that for the best part of two thousand years of church history, few, if any, found a cultural argument for dismissing traditional roles compelling. Upping the frequency with which we hear it and the shrillness with which it is delivered hasn’t made it any truer, even if its rate of acceptance has increased.

Am I Allowed to Read This?

Perhaps in response to this falling away within the evangelical community, some of our more conservative fellow Christians have opted to go beyond the letter of the New Testament, suggesting that the principle of women’s silent participation in church gatherings extends to teaching of other sorts, barring them from penning what we choose to read in privacy. I have actually seen cautious Christian men check with their elders whether it’s okay to buy a commentary written by a woman.

Personally, I don’t have an issue with a woman writing a commentary or a man reading it. When Apollos’s doctrine required correction, both Priscilla and Aquila explained to him the way of God more accurately, though Luke makes sure to let us know it didn’t happen in a church meeting; they “took him aside” to do it. I have it on good authority that the Greek verb used there allows for the possibility that both husband and wife were involved in the process. I have learned a great deal from Christian women over the years in non-church settings, and no small number of them are quite adept in interpreting the word of God and articulating what it says for others.

Still, I don’t own a single commentary written by a woman.

Really? Not a Single Woman?

Partly, this is because significantly fewer women than men write commentaries.

The reasons for this may be historical or preferential. For many years, women didn’t do that sort of thing, and trends in Christendom tend to persist unless there is a major pushback in the opposite direction. Pushbacks to include minorities of any sort in the interest of “equality” are notoriously artificial, and usually result in the promotion and elevation of new and untested names well beyond their comparative worth. If there are excellent commentaries out there written by women, I have yet to come across them.

Then again, I don’t buy a lot of commentaries. The ones I have are mostly decades old, and many were written by brothers in Christ I have listened to in person and whose reliability I can judge from experience. I’m hardly likely to shell out $40 for a commentary written by a woman I have never heard of just to “balance” my library’s sexual demographics, and I have no biblical way to evaluate any woman’s ability to accurately interpret scripture, since she is restricted from demonstrating her gift in my local church.

It’s also quite possible there may be no significant bias against commentary writing by women in evangelical publishing. Maybe the competent and compelling Christian women who write books are more interested in exploring specific subjects unrelated to sequential interpretation, usually with an emphasis on the topical, relevant, personal and practical. If that’s their choice, let them have at it, I say.

But I don’t own any of those books either. Touchy-feely stuff just doesn’t appeal to me, whether it’s written by women or men, and I can do my own application, thank you.

A Detectable Pattern of Purchasing

Men and women are different in so many ways I’m not sure they’ve all been quantified. I don’t own any novels or non-fiction books by women, though I have read many. This is not because I dislike women in the slightest. I have almost as many close female friends as male, and enjoy their company immensely. I can walk away from an uninteresting or undesirable conversation with a man in mid-sentence without a twinge of conscience, but I would never cut off a woman abruptly even in the throes of an annoying tirade. And I’m always fascinated to observe the differences between the sexes and even enjoy them, much as they baffle me.

Of the hundreds of novels written by women I have read throughout my lifetime, few stayed around for a second reading or inspired me to purchase the hardcover. The works of Patricia Cornwell, a former ward of the late Ruth Bell Graham, Billy’s wife, were a rare exception, though I don’t own any today. I did read some of these twice, but probably not for reasons you might imagine.

My inordinate interest in Cornwell’s writing was not because she is a great action writer or unusually clever with plots. Most of her books conclude with all the satisfying denouement of the Gospel of Mark. Bang, done, that’s it.

Emotions Dialed Up to Eleven

No, Cornwell is all about character, and to a fault. She’s every female novelist I’ve ever read, except with the emotions dialed up to eleven, hammered into maximum overdrive and driven like a tent peg between your eyeballs. Her microscope-level exploration of the modern, Western female psyche — all its hopes, fears, fantasies, insecurities, second guessing, pettiness, grudge-holding, torturous decision-making and contrived and unnecessary drama — is the most truly alarming exploration of womanhood the average man will ever read, assuming he doesn’t just flip the pages in frantic search of the next helicopter crash, autopsy or gunfight.

Cornwell’s prose is a remarkably effective marriage deterrent for men, ideal as a curative for any budding romance you are eager to prevent. She can take what appears to be a straightforward exchange of information between two people and turn it into a mental chess match three pages long in which nobody says a single thing they actually mean and almost nothing is ever resolved. When she tries to write men, it rings entirely false, hinting at a comprehensive misunderstanding of the male psyche.

And if I ever wanted to know why highly intelligent career women in the West are among the most miserable human beings alive, this answered it once and for all. (In her favor, Cornwell does write spectacular descriptions of food. She could turn me into a glutton single-handedly.) All in all, reading Cornwell was most instructive, and in a couple of cases I did it twice, mostly because I couldn’t believe anyone could so effectively normalize thought processes that are unnecessarily complicated and confrontational, or draw characters who erect a greater abundance of superfluous defenses against the world.

Is this the type of woman whose Bible commentary would interest you? Probably not.

Vive la Différence

The self-absorption of Patricia Cornwell’s characters is exaggerated to the point of caricature, but reading her helped me identify what it is about most female writers I don’t enjoy and have learned, perhaps unreasonably, to anticipate even from believers: solipsism, a frame of reference to which most Christian men cannot remotely relate, and which is only of interest to us insofar as it reveals things about the fairer sex we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams. The one self-styled female theologian with whom I have occasionally engaged online is a more subdued version of Patricia Cornwell. Her subject matter of choice may be the meaning of the scriptures, but what she takes from them is always laser-focused on the potential implications for her own sex. If she ever sees beyond the issues of the day to the greater themes of God’s word, I am unaware of it.

Scanning my sister’s bookshelves during a recent visit, I realized she is me in reverse. Like me, she is a voracious reader. Like me, she instinctively prefers books written by her own sex. Maybe we are all that way.

Break My Stereotype!

So, could a Christian woman write an excellent Bible commentary, and would I be interested in reading it? Certainly. Nothing in the New Testament forbids me to do so, and if the gift is there, perhaps some quality output could result from it. But the essence of a good Bible commentary is that it is not about the writer’s experience, opinions or feelings about what has been written in the word of God. It’s about the meaning of the text, and getting to it as deeply and comprehensively as possible.

Many Christian men have reason to believe women are hard pressed to talk about anything that is not immediately relevant to their own personal experience. Ladies, by all means, please prove us wrong.

I’ll be the first to shell out that $40. It would be money well spent.