Wrestling with Paul

Frances Taylor Gench, professor of biblical interpretation at Union Pres­byterian Seminary, tackles a conundrum: “The Bible is a profoundly liberating document” that contains “deeply problematic texts” which have “legitimated the right of some to exercise unjust power or control over others.” How then are we to read faithfully and canonically without turning a blind eye to forms of oppression legitimated by the text? Can we wrest redemption out of these threatening passages?

Invoking the Genesis account of Jacob wrestling an angel at the river Jabbok, Gench commends the advice of biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, “Do not abandon the Bible to the bashers and the thumpers. Take back the text. Do not let go until it blesses you.” Here Gench wrestles with six controversial texts concerning women that were written by or have been attributed to the apostle Paul. She shows that not only are these texts capable of inflicting deep and lasting wounds, but, in the hands of tyrannous interpreters, they do indeed cause such harm.

These are the texts that some of us pray will not come up in the lectionary; they are the ones we teachers tend to avoid placing on the course syllabus. In her unflinching self-reflection (a strong point of the book), Gench confesses having the impulse to take scissors to the offending lines. She relies on a certain empathy with this impulse from the reader, an empathy that requires both a serious commitment to the text—to what feminist theologian Letty Russell called “the story of God’s love affair with the world”—and discomfort with its undeniably patriarchal context and its mixed messages of liberation and subordination, especially where women are concerned.