“Response to Choi and Huff: Paul and Women’s Leadership in American Christianity in the Nineteenth Century”

Hogan, Pauline Nigh. “Response to Choi and Huff: Paul and Women’s Leadership in American Christianity in the Nineteenth Century,” pages 259-67 in Strangely Familiar: Protofeminist Interpretations of Patriarchal Biblical Texts. Edited by Nancy Calvert-Koyzis and Heather E. Weir. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009.

Choi’s and Huff’s chapters explore how two 19^th-century Christian women, Lucy Rider Meyer and Mary Baker Eddy respectively, interpreted Pauline and deutero-Pauline texts to validate women’s empowerment in the Church. Hogan then details striking similarities between Meyer’s and Eddy’s approaches to these texts, and that of many recent feminist and womanist scholars. For this reason, Hogan sees Eddy’s and Meyer’s interpretive stances as ahead of their time, calling them “prophetic” (266). For Eddy, her approach focused on selectively chosen passages that teach the core values of liberation and equality, while avoiding those texts used by her opponents, such as in Ephesians. Hogan’s examples that mirror Eddy’s method include a womanist and a South African feminist, both intentionally emphasizing the “emancipative elements” (265) in scripture in order to “shape our reading of the more difficult passages” (264). For example, Galatians 3:28 can be the lens to interpret Ephesians 5:21 as a call for mutual submission of all Christians to one another, not a coercive hierarchical mandate for a wife to submit to her husband. Both Eddy and Meyer focused in on a central message of liberation and empowerment “where generations of male scholarship had found only limitations on women’s roles” (266).

ISBN-10: 1589834534
ISBN-13 (Softcover): 978-1589834538
ISBN-13 (Hardcover): 978-9004177932

See also annotation:

“Mary Baker Eddy: Liberating Interpreter of the Pauline Corpus” in Strangely Familiar: Protofeminist Interpretations of Patriarchal Biblical Texts by Barry Huff