Theology in the Raw - Interpreting the Samaritan Woman (John 4) Post-#ChurchToo: Dr. Caryn Reeder

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Dr. Caryn Reeder (Ph.D. Cambridge) is professor of New Testament at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California. Her research focuses on questions of gender, the household, women's lives, slavery, and violence in the biblical worlds. In this podcast, we discuss her book The Samaritan Woman's Story: Reconsidering John 4 After #ChurchToo. Caryn offers a fresh and more historically accurate interpretation of John 4 and then we discuss the problem of abuse in the church. Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw

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forward slash theology raw. And I just want to thank the people that are already supporting the show. Thank you so much for keeping this show not only going, but also thriving. So patreon.com forward slash Theology in Raw. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in Raw. My guest today is the one and only Dr. Karen Reeder, who is professor of New Testament at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Her research focuses on questions of gender, the household, women's lives, slavery, and violence in the biblical worlds. She is the author of this book here that I'm holding up for you YouTubers, The Samaritan Woman's Story, Reconsidering John 4 After Church 2. That's the focus of our conversation. We do look at this kind of maybe a more historically accurate interpretation of the Samaritan woman. We talk about the abuse of power and abuse of

women in the church. So really appreciated Karen's voice. And even though I'm a little jealous of her job situation, which we begin our conversation where I tease out exactly what I mean by that. So please welcome to the show, the one and only Dr. Karen Reeder. Here we are, Vincent. It's Karen Reeder. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Yeah. And as promised, I have to tell this story. So in 2007, when I was finishing my PhD at Aberdeen University, I'm applying for jobs and I'm getting denied from every single job I applied for. As you know, the job market... It was so tight. It's insane. For every job I applied for, there was 250 other applicants, 200 with PhDs, 100 that have publications. Here I am, a PhD, just barely finished. But I got shortlisted at Westmont College. I was one of the final four. Congratulations. That's great.

And I remember, and I feel, I felt like I killed the interview. And then sure enough, two weeks later, I get an email. I think it was from Temper Longman saying, I'm sorry. We loved our interview. You're a great candidate, but we are going to give the job to a person named Karen Reeder, who has a PhD from Cambridge University. So thank you for taking my dream job at Westmoreland. I'm very sorry. If I had only known at the time.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. So you've been at Westmont now for over 15 years. How has your time been there? I mean, I have friends that have gone there. I know people that teach there. I just heard nothing but great things about it. Yeah. It's such a great community. It really is. Nothing but great things about it. Yeah, it's such a great community. It really is. It's been a very welcoming place for me. I think especially as a young scholar, I have found the community to be really nurturing and supportive. Of course, it's an institution, so there are always the spots that rub. But our students as well are what definitely have kept me here for so long.

And the weather, I have to admit. Oh, man. It's almost too, whenever I go to Santa Barbara, it's almost like this place is too good. I feel like I would just sit on a beach and waste my life if I was living there. I don't know. Obviously. It is a temptation. I always wonder because it is one of the most expensive places on earth.

How do you afford to live there? Because I assume faculty aren't making like $200,000 a year. No, no, indeed we are not. Yeah, learning how to budget very carefully around housing prices is important. People have found a lot of creative ways to make that work. I managed to get into the housing market before it started really climbing. So I was quite lucky in that respect. But yeah, no, it is very difficult.

And I think it's only getting more difficult. So I don't know. Thinking about the future, I think that's a really serious concern for those of us here. It is. When I lived in Simi Valley, whenever my wife and I would want to get away for a night, we'd always go up to Santa Barbara. And yeah, in fact, she goes out there every year with her daughters and they have like a girls weekend and they always want to go to Santa Barbara.

So yeah. Well, I want to talk about your book, The Samaritan Woman's Story, Reconsidering John 4 After Church 2. This book is, I mean, the exegesis and just your interpretation of the Samaritan woman, you know, is very, I think, compelling and convincing and thought provoking, but you weave it into just kind of our current situation in a church. So let's start with how should we understand Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman? And I just had Sandra Galan on the podcast a few weeks ago where we talked about it, but we can, I think you guys would come to the similar conclusions. I think so. Yeah. I think we're very similar. Yeah. But there's always space to talk about

the Samaritan woman more, I think. Yeah, this story is just an incredible element in John's gospel. I would say, first of all, the Samaritan woman is one of a series of really incredible women in John's gospel. John prioritizes and emphasizes women's participation in the story of Jesus. So this is, the Samaritan woman is the second woman we meet after Mary who kickstarts Jesus ministry in John 2. The Samaritan woman has the longest conversation with Jesus in John's gospel. And I think it's true to say the longest conversation in any of the gospels. in John especially, someone will start talking to Jesus and then it sort of morphs into a long sermon from Jesus where he's talking about himself generally. But the Samaritan woman holds her own through this conversation. It's so exciting that we have this entire chapter where a woman is participating in a conversation. She's asking theological questions. She's asking theological questions. Jesus is sharing incredible spiritual truths with her.

And at the end of the story, she goes to her village and tells everyone, hey, the Messiah is sitting at our village. Well, would you like to come meet him? And her entire village says, yeah, we believe because of your word. So the woman's word of witness is effective in her community. Yeah, the story really shows us, I think, the woman is represented as the ideal disciple and the model for disciples to follow in John. So you're supposed to listen to Jesus, ask questions, come to an understanding through that process of conversation, and then become an active witness yourself. So I think for readers of John's gospel, we are meant to take this woman as the model for how to be a follower of Jesus. Of course, that's not how the story has most often been interpreted.

So how has it been interpreted? And how would you consider that a misinterpretation of the Samaritan woman, specifically with all her husbands and the man she's not married to? So that part of the exchange where Jesus says, oh yeah, you're not married. You've had five husbands and now you live with someone who's not your husband. You've spoken truly. From the very earliest written interpretations from Tertullian onwards, that part of the conversation has become the lens for interpreting the whole story. So in part, there's an interpretation that says, well, if she's had so many marriages, clearly she is a sexual sinner. And that's what Jesus is doing by identifying her story, is accusing her of sin. That's what it's about. And if you take that as your center point, then the entire story becomes a narrative of a woman's sexual sin. Jesus only talks to her

because she needs to be called to account and brought to repentance and change her life. called to account and brought to repentance and change her life. That narrative then is used to teach the church, right? So it becomes a call to women to stop engaging in sexualism themselves. So one of the most explicit uses of that, I think, comes in the revivalist of the 19th century. So we get Charles Spurgeon and Dwight Moody using this story to preach to prostitutes and say, look at this American woman, take her as a model for how you two should change your life. And when you're focusing on that, then you miss all the rest of the narrative and the way that this woman models what good discipleship and evangelism looks like. Why does she have five husbands and why would she be living with a man who's not her husband?

How should we understand her past and present? Yeah, yeah. We have to understand what marriage looked like in the first century, I think, is our starting point. We have to set aside a lot of our modern assumptions of marriage to see that marriage in the first century was about economics and social connections between two households rather than a relationship between two individuals. So we have to sort of broaden our perspective to a more communal understanding of marriage. We also have to think of what women's role in marriage was. So when women were first married in the ancient world, they could be as young as 11 or 12.

Most women, probably 15, 16, somewhere in that range. But you imagine yourself at that age, right? You don't have a lot of autonomy, right? You're under your parents' authority. Your parents are the ones who are arranging these marriages for you. And you don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Husbands were generally significantly older than their wives. So in their 20s, at least sometime in their 30s, sometimes even older at the time of their first marriage. So there's an imbalance there as well. When you're reading ancient inscriptions and letters and documents, one thing that comes up pretty repeatedly is that these young women in their marriages will sometimes refer to their husbands as a second father because their husbands are sort of continuing to educate them and train them

and mold them. And that's even seen as a reason for marrying a very young woman from a man's perspective, because you can mold your wife into the person you want her to be. That makes me so, that's not, not something that, yeah. Okay. So Samaritan woman's first marriage, she was probably young, maybe 15 years old, let's say. Maybe her first husband died, right? That happened pretty frequently in the ancient world. Injury or illness could very quickly turn deadly with poor healthcare. Maybe it's possible that she lost more than one husband in that way. We don't know. It doesn't tell us. Divorce was also pretty common in the ancient world, and divorce could happen for many reasons. So I think for interpreters of John 4,

the reason for divorce has often been assumed to be adultery, but that's definitely not the only reason that someone would be divorced in the ancient world. We find people being divorced because their parents think, oh, we connected you with this family, but now there's this other family that would be a better connection for us. So we actually want to change your marriage partner. We find that from both sides, both the parents of the bride and the husband's family making those choices. Real quick, could the wife's family initiate a divorce? Because a woman rarely, I mean, I know there's meager evidence, I think from Crete or something

where a woman initiated divorce. Extremely rare. Yeah, it's very rare. But the woman's family could? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, right? Things that you don't think about. Yeah. And then there are some cases where divorce came about because of abuse. So there's actually one case from Egypt where a woman does seem to go through the court process to get divorced from her husband. And one of the reasons she cites in those documents is

abuse. He also stole her dowry from her. So that's probably more of the reason that she would have been able to proceed. So divorce is certainly possible for a variety of reasons there. Living with a man who's not her husband, there were a lot of reasons here as well that we could see what the situation might have been without assuming that the woman is sinning or living in sin, as it's often put. often put. So marriage, the right to marry was actually pretty tightly controlled in the first century. So within Judaism and probably also for Samaritans, if you were from a priestly family, you could only marry legally someone from another priestly family. But we know from stories and judges, right, that a priest might have a common law wife rather than an official wife if that situation arose. We also see that the Roman Empire did not allow Roman citizens to marry non-citizens. Roman soldiers were not legally allowed to marry. But we see those people having relationships with local women in the places where they're stationed around the empire.

It was not considered immoral the way that we would judge sort of morality in these situations. It did put the women in a problematic position because they wouldn't have any rights to claim financial support from their husbands. to claim financial support from their husbands. But you can also imagine that that could be tempting for a woman's family to say, well, we know this isn't ideal, but if we have an alliance with the soldier or local government official, that might bring benefits for our household as a whole. And it could simply be if a woman had no other options that she might find herself in that kind of situation. It was also the case that for people who were older, they might choose not to have a legal marriage so that there wouldn't be the problem of dividing an inheritance among multiple heirs. So we do find that for some wealthier families in the Roman empire. So we don't know what the woman's situation is, but there's no reason to jump immediately

to sin. Well, so it seems like the whole, that whole part of the story, Jesus is like, she has been a victim on some level, not a perpetrator. Is that like, he's, he's not looking at her like, you know, you have had five husbands and now, you know, it's more like, yes, you have been through hell really. And you've been perhaps, yeah, been a victim of, you know, a male dominated culture or maybe, you know, a desperate attempt to survive by living with a guy who's not your husband. Maybe, you know, again, we don't know too much about that situation, but it seems like the five married to five husbands, that has been a really kind of horrific situation, whether she was divorced or she was, you know, her husband dies. And even if she had multiple husbands that did die, wouldn't she have the stigma too of like,

this woman's curse, you know, like we, we do find that for some people. Yeah. I'm thinking about her as a survivor rather than as a sinner, I think is really powerful here. And if that's the case, then how incredible that Jesus is recognizing that and naming that as a part of her life. Do most scholars now interpret it that way? Because I know in like preaching and the popular kind of reading, it's still she's immoral or whatever but like do most johannine scholars that we call johannine yes yeah yeah okay yeah i do think so um you do still find maybe in commentaries from the 2000s you still find the interpretation that she's a sinner but i think more recently it's been a pretty much a switch to say, we've been reading this wrong. Okay. Because culturally, if you have any knowledge of the cultural background, it just, it immediately erases kind of the older interpretation. Yeah, for sure. Through the history of the church though, was she always interpreted or usually as

this sexual sinner? Almost always. Yeah. The one strand of interpretation, well, I would say two strands of interpretation that go against that trend. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition So that's a totally different tradition that emphasizes her work as an evangelist in her community. And then you have a string of women interpreters starting in sort of the Reformation era, particularly among Protestant women. They were identifying the Samaritan woman as a preacher and using her story to justify their own preaching in the church. So we find that with Marie Dentier and John Calvin's Geneva, she was known to go out in the streets preaching and she called the Samaritan woman, the greatest preacher ever. And that, yeah, yeah. It's really incredible.

Calvin was down. Yeah. Calvin was down with that. Oh, okay. Yeah, he refers to Marie in some pretty derogatory ways. Okay, so what led you to write this book, given the title, and was not just to reinterpret, not reinterpret, to interpret John 4 correctly, but the subtitle is Reconsidering John

4 After Church 2. So tell me about your maybe what led you to want to write this book in terms of what you're seeing in the church today? Yeah. So as the Me Too movement was breaking, I was just heartbroken and so angry as I was reading stories, listening to women and some men tell about the abuse they had experienced in various places. And I was particularly caught by the women who began sharing their stories of being abused in Christian spaces. I remember going to the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting that fall, it was at 2017, and it feels so long ago now. I went up to a friend of mine, another woman biblical scholar, and said, what are we going to do? We have to do something. We have to

help the church respond to this crisis. So I had that lingering in my head for several years. What can I do? I'm just a biblical scholar. I can't speak into the church practices today. I can't really, I'm not qualified to do the sort of analysis of what went wrong in the church. But then I was thinking one summer, thinking one summer, actually, how we interpret women's stories in the Bible really does matter for how we view women in the church. And there's a connection that I could address and speak into and help us see how our work of biblical interpretation does not just matter for our understanding of the Bible, but it matters for how we treat each other in the church and how, particularly for my purposes, what kinds of practices could have contributed to a space where women are being abused with horrific regularity. I mean, I think

once is too much, but the sort of the flood of stories that's come out and continues to come out is, is so horrifying. It's absolutely horrifying. I, I, yeah, I mean, growing up in a conservative evangelical environment as a guy, like most people, I just oblivious to it, you know, until, you know until you get married and have three daughters and you start to hear from people extremely close to you kind of what the world is like out there. It's one thing for the world out there, but it's another thing for the world in here and the walls of the church. And that's where I'm horrified at all the stuff that's coming out. Do you think that it's been a growing problem or is it just now there's more exposure to the problem that's always been there? Do you have an opinion on that? I mean, it's hard to... Yeah. Yeah. My sense is that it's exposure of a problem that's always

been there that we just hadn't been paying attention to or because of the shame that gets attached to assault and abuse. And I would say as well, a natural tendency to try and protect the institution, but that is often at the expense of the individual. I think that that's a pretty significant pattern as well in the way that the church has addressed these issues. But I remember writing earlier drafts of this book, The Samaritan Woman, and thinking about some of the stories from the church fathers, the desert fathers and mothers, where they are explicitly talking about the problem of assault. So I remember there's one story about a young woman who, I mean, of course, these are all very legendary and it's hard to sort of separate out what's historical and what's part of the legend that grew up around it. But the legend

goes that this young woman, her uncle was a monk and they had a house together, but she lived in a sort of walled off space. So she was protected from the outside world and the dangers of the world. talks to her through the wall, seduces her, and she crawls out her window and is assaulted by him. And then her response in the story is, of course, to run off to a brothel because she can't be part of the convent anymore. She can't be pure and holy anymore. So she might as well go to the other extreme. And then her uncle leaves his Waldorf enclosure to seek her out and eventually bring her home. And I think, okay, if people could imagine that happening in the 5th century, maybe it actually was happening in the 5th century. And maybe this is, yeah, an eternal problem for the church that we have been hiding and turning away from and ignoring for way too long. And it's only now that we have more access to social media and other ways of communicating that these stories can be heard. The hard thing too is just the underreporting, right? And the

sometimes very difficult situation that would surround a case of abuse. For one, the woman has to come forward, typically expose, challenge somebody that is very likely somebody close to her, somebody known, somebody that people may or may not believe. You risk his story being believed over your story. You risk so much just to come forward. And then just even legally, this is what gets me is if a woman even reports the abuse, I mean, she's required to go stand in court, testify, go through, relive the experience, have the person sitting right there, possibly risk like the judge believing him over. I mean, there's so, it would take so much. And then, so, I mean, please tell me if I'm

on the right track. I mean, if all that goes to a woman's mind, they're like, you know what? It's not worth it. Yeah. Not worth it. Like what? That's, it's so broken, but I don't know the, what's the other solution, you know? Like what, what can the church's so broken, but I don't know the, what's the other solution, you know, like what, what can the church do in this situation? Yeah, let me solve it all. You know, I think that Rachel Dunhollander and her work in bringing awareness to the gymnastics, Larry Nassar crisis, I think that's a real model for what the church could do.

And of course, Rachel Dunhollander has been a vociferous advocate for women in churches. Um, the way that in her story, she shows how they were able to bring the women who had been victimized together. So you weren't going through it alone. So you had a community with you. The strength of the voices then becomes harder to ignore. experience, who can come alongside her, who can help support her through that process, who can speak for her and with her in the church community. I do think that we're getting better. I hope, maybe this is a hope. I think that we are getting better at listening to women's stories as it becomes more and more obvious that it is not one or two women. This is not one or two people who are lying or misinterpreting situations. This is an endemic issue. I hope that we're better at hearing that and listening to that and placing it

in the, in the larger framework. And then you have, I mean, you have the explicit cases of a clear abuse, but then you have just the abuse of power, emotional manipulation, or even just, have just the abuse of power, emotional manipulation, or even just men doing things that make women feel uncomfortable.

This is what I hear a lot. I don't know a single woman, I think, that hasn't had that experience where they just felt like that person is making me feel uncomfortable. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And even that can, for various reasons, and maybe it's well-intended, maybe it's the, you know, or, or it's not, maybe it's no, this person is abusing their power. They know it and they're getting away with it. And yeah,

but we sort of gaslight ourselves into thinking, Oh, it's not a big deal. I'm being too sensitive. Yeah, no, I've had that experience of having someone who was an authority figure in a community I was part of. Be careful not to name any names here. But this person, this man would come up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders and touch me and like, I don't know you that well. This is so uncomfortable. But, but I was immediately thinking, well, he's just being him. This is just his style. And, um, looking back, I wish I had spoken up and said, no, this is inappropriate. I don't feel comfortable here because how much has that happened for other people as well? What are some other things that met, like, let's, let's maybe dwell a bit in the unintentional abuse of power where men that they're not, if you can crack open their soul, like they're, they're not trying to, and if they knew they were doing something,

they would, they would be like, Oh gosh, okay. I won't do that. Like what are some things that men do there that needs to be addressed? Oh gosh. I mean, that would be one physical contact that isn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even like giving hugs. Well, here's the hard thing for me.

And maybe this is a second question after, but like, you know, I'm being told to like throw away Billy Graham rule. You know, that's a, that just makes women feel like sexual objects, just a walking temptation, like just treat women the same way we treat men. It's like, I give guys big hugs and we do this but you don't like it right and like i don't know but like well no wait a minute so in a sense there's this fine line of like not being so standoffish where you make that makes people feel uncomfortable but then also not being too intimate for lack of better terms with somebody that hasn't invited that so i don't know help me this is the tension that i constantly feel i think a good practice is just to ask right

to have that conversation to say i consider you a good friend when i'm meeting a good friend i like to give hugs are you okay with that and just put it on the table that way right so we don't have to sort of dance around issues and wonder or be too cautious in ways that are maybe not necessary. I think having conversations is a good thing in many ways. Sort of, we talk a lot about, especially on a college campus, the issue of consent. What if we broaden that out beyond just sex to other concerns, other ways that we interact with each other and just talk about how do you like to be greeted? Would you be comfortable with this? Yeah, I think that's an easy first step to make. I would also say I was talking recently with

two women pastors who are part of a local church here where the way that they describe their church community, it's really the ideal of male-female partnership in preaching the gospel. And listening to them talk about how we just don't make it weird, right? We don't worry about the Billy Graham rule. We don't worry, have special rules set up about men and women driving together or doing other things together. And by not making those rules, it takes away the weirdness of breaking those rules. They clearly, they have really strong relationships in their church community, very strong relationships among the leaders in their community. And they've been able to navigate that particularly well, I think.

And yeah, it makes me a little jealous listening to them talk about how wonderful they've found the ability to be partners in the work of the church without some of the gender weirdness that happens in other spaces. So talking about it. Yeah, yeah. Good place to start. Because I can imagine even going back to your scenario where if I say, hey, we give hugs here. Would you mind if we give you a hug?

I can even imagine there some women would feel like. Right, the pressure to agree. I'll make it awkward if I say no. So I'll just say, but if it's just as a free flowing open conversation, then where women feel the freedom to express, hey, I'm uncomfortable with this or that, you know. And I think that people pick up on cues, right? Then maybe someone's going to feel a bit more freedom to be honest and say, actually, I'm not really comfortable with that. we are more blind to that kind of shuts down

female contribution, even in settings where it's on paper, it's equal? Yeah. Yeah. One thing that I have experienced several times is being in a room, making a contribution of a particular idea or question that I think is important being completely ignored. And then a man says the same thing and suddenly it is the solution to all of our woes. I think, yes, yes. So avoiding things like that, actually listening when women speak and taking their words seriously. Um, I somehow that is just something that we continue to struggle with. One thing that I know, I think this actually came out of the Obama White House was that women would have a practice of affirming what another woman said. Like so and so said, I agree. This is a good path forward

until it was finally heard. And I have a few colleagues who have tried to do that here as well to make sure that women's voices are being heard. To where a man can verbally affirm something that a woman says just so that everybody knows I heard her. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. So that's a practice, I think. Here's another thing that I have experienced several times. How to put this? I was in a prayer gathering once with faculty and staff right before chapel. And the chapel speaker that day was going to be talking about marriage and how important and valuable marriage is. I and one of the other faculty there are single. I and one of the other faculty there are single and having to sit through this prayer meeting where we were praying that our students would hear the importance of marriage and know that

that's their path in life. So maybe let's not assume that everyone must be married. And that's true for men and women, right? Marriage is not always the path. But when marriage is the primary sort of lens for categorizing people and a primary topic of conversation when you are gathered in official meetings, maybe think about that a little bit more. Think about who's there and who's participating. What's it like? So I guess maybe it doesn't matter. I don't know if I knew before you were single. Maybe I did. What's it like? So I, I guess maybe it, not that it matters. I don't know if I knew before you were single. Maybe I did. Uh, what, what's it like being a single woman of marital age in a Christian environment, both the Christian college and in the church? You probably have a, that could probably take the rest of our time. I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I will say that

I have found singles ministries tend to be code for get people married ministries. And there is definitely an absence of a positive perception of how someone can be single and fully God's image and fully mature and fully a member of the body of Christ. And that's, I've come to peace with it now, I think, but it's been painful at different parts of my life to feel that struggle and to feel that I'm being viewed as maybe not quite a full person or quite a full participant. Yeah. person or quite a full participant. Um, yeah, my current church is great at recognizing everyone's equal contribution. So I've appreciated that. Do you go to Sandy, the church that Sandy Richter goes to? No. I would imagine being a single female too, from what I hear is this extra, your voice is looked down upon. I mean, yeah. Extra. I mean, yeah, yeah. I have a friend from grad school who have an ongoing argument with over whether I'm being selfish for staying single,

rather than being married and dedicated to my family. I don't Yes. Yes. And I don't know if I think it started as a very serious concern. I don't know if it still is a serious concern or if it's sort of turned into a more of a joking concern, but come on. There are other ways to be part of the body of Christ. Sometimes you wonder if Jesus. Exactly. Yes. Or Paul. wonder if Jesus could look down upon. It's funny to see your voice, having a PhD from Cambridge University isn't enough for your voice to be fully credible in some settings. That's the world we live in. Do you see the problem of abuse and here I, you know, physical, sexual, emotional, or even the abuse of power? Because it does pose me to, and church to, it seems like it's being addressed more and more and more. Do you see progress happening?

Progress and then also steps backwards, right? So I think Southern Baptist Convention, for instance, started really strong and recognizing the issue, bringing it to the forefront, but then they seem to be sort of pulling back from that a bit, which has been sad to see. I do think there's much more awareness now. It's harder to ignore, and that's a good thing. That's a very positive sign. I think there are a lot more resources now for women in this situation. So there are so many excellent books and podcasts and other resources. And there's ways for churches to be more aware and to set up better policies. So that's a really encouraging sign as well. I know for my church, I'm involved with, so I'm Episcopalian, so liturgy is very important. And I participate

in the liturgy as part of the serving the Eucharist on Sundays. And now we're also being required as those participants in that part of the church to go through training for recognizing abuse and working against it. So I think that's a great way for people in churches involved in church life to just be more aware to get better education on these issues. Yeah, so I think that there are good signs of progress. I just think we have to keep at it. And we can't, we can't stop because if you stop, then you forget and you move on to the next crisis. And then this just gets pushed back on the shelf. Would you say that's the first step a church should make?

Like get training for all of its leaders and what to look for, what to do, how to just to create an atmosphere? Yes. Yes. Okay. And I think as well, setting up really clear frameworks for non-interpretation, sorry. Framework of interpretation is so often what I say. So frameworks for reporting is what I meant to say. Yeah. Just so that the leaders, but also the congregants know what to do if they have a concern and how to bring that

to attention and who's going to be part of that process so that it's clear that it's not just one person. It's not just the person who may be the source of the problem who's going to hear it, but it will be taken seriously by the community. You mentioned policies. Are there some clear policies that you would say a church should have to prevent or reduce abuse? I don't want to speak too much on that because I'm not an expert in that respect. Okay, that's fair. I think there are some good things, good practices in general of making sure that two people aren't completely alone in a church building, right? So that you have safety in numbers, you have people who are around. And we do that at my church with children's ministries, for instance, you always have to have two adults in the room at all time,

just as a way to protect against anything potentially happening. You know, one thing I think would be really helpful, um, is I'm reading a great book by Julia Sadesky. She's a psychologist and, um, wrote a book. Uh, I think it's a, how to talk to your kids about sex and it's for kids like zero to adolescence. And then she's coming out with this part two with like adolescent. Um, and in the book, she talks a lot about you cultivating an awareness in kids as as young as possible that they of of boundaries physical emotional sexual boundaries so that the kid knows immediately if somebody is yes violating their space and that

because that the stuff and the stuff she was saying, I'm like, I haven't thought about that before. It's just stuff that well-intended parents just need to be kind of alerted. Like, hey, you should help your kid. Even something she brings up, that you should never demand that your kid gives hugs, even to close family members. Yes. Yeah, that one, when I first heard that, I thought, what? No, come on. I want to hug my nieces and nephew. But then thinking about it more seriously, yeah, that is a sense that this is your body. And if you feel uncomfortable, you should have the freedom to speak up. Or if you just don't want to be touched right then, you should have the freedom to speak up. And when we don't give people that freedom or that power over themselves, then I could see very easily how that could lead to real problems later in life. women have experienced some kind of unwanted sexual behavior, usually from an unexpected close family member. So as much as you think it's not you, not your family, whatever it's

could be. And so if your kid feels very uncomfortable with so-and-so again, 80%, it's probably fine. 20%, it's not fine at all. And to identify that early on, you know, so yeah, that, you know, so all that to say, I wonder if churches, even like offering training, parental training or something so that parents can learn how to have these conversations with their kids that can help at least reduce abuse. Yeah. reduce abuse. Yeah. And that as well really flips the script on purity culture, which so often tells women it's their responsibility to guard and police their own bodies in ways that create a lot of shame and a lot of fear. And yes, I think flipping that to say, no, you have power over your own body is really valuable and really important.

And coming back to our earlier conversation of what men can do, men should need to start policing themselves, right? And taking seriously that when Jesus talks about stumbling blocks, it's your own eyes, your own hands, right? It's not the other person you're looking at. Yeah. Do you think, yeah, well, are we coming? Yeah, we're coming out of purity culture. I hope so. At least in the spaces I typically run in, when you hear, the name purity culture is

like, ew, let's move beyond that. The name purity culture is like, ew, let's move beyond that. But then I've heard that it's still very much alive and well in many churches. I think it is. I hear it from my students a lot. A couple of weeks ago, I was at a special gathering with some students who had really big questions about patriarchy and the Bible and how does that affect life in the church and their own lives. And they had a lot of stories of ways that they felt quite excluded from church communities and purity culture is still lingering there and maybe not as explicitly

stated as it used to be, but the effects are still felt. I think given how, so thinking a lot about college student age people, that's my life. The demographics for church attendance among our students right now are shifting. So historically, it's always been the case that women have significantly been more involved in church than men have. And now it's becoming more equal, but not because fruit that we are reaping from the ways that we have taught women and devalued women in our communities. That's so backwards because the church grew in the first few hundred years because of its countercultural value of women, right? And so what are some other changes? So you've been at Westmont for 15 years-ish, a little longer. What are some changes, differences you see in students from the first year you're teaching to now? I mean, you've gone through the whole social media revolution.

I think the smartphone probably came out your first year. Yes. And social media now is a thing. Yeah. So many changes. I think it used to be the case that if you had a break in the middle of class, everyone would be chatting and talking and it was so hard to rein them back in to start class again. But now as soon as you have a break, everyone's on their phone and just engaged in that way and not talking to each other, which is distressing. It is so sad. Yes.

I mean, I don't want to be the old fogey like in our day. Yeah, I know, right? You know, we... Right. Yeah, in our day, we talk to people face to face, you know? But I just... Yeah, so that's a big change. Okay. One that is much more consequential for my teaching on the New Testament, I cannot assume

students know anything about the Bible anymore. Even students who have grown up going to church, their biblical knowledge is really low. I don't know. How is that? Yeah. Churches don't seem to be emphasizing Bible study as much, or maybe youth ministry isn't emphasizing Bible study. Somehow they're just not picking up on the big narratives or the characters or how it all fits together. So I remember coming back from sabbatical. So you're out of the classroom for a year thinking about other things. I came back and in my class that fall about near the end of

the semester, one of the students stopped after class to say, you know, you keep talking about this Paul person. Who is that? Like, yes. So the past 10 years, I would say have just been a constant, how can I introduce everything and help students get a handle on this material? Yeah. This is the odd thing though. I mean, in the last 10 years, we have tons of, I mean, just instant access. We have the Bibles in our pockets now in multiple versions. We have the Bible project. We have podcasts. We have way more access to Bible education for free than ever before. And the biblical literacy, because what you're saying, I've heard that from every single college professor in a similar situation that you can,

I just can't assume anything anymore. That that's. Yeah. Something is not clicking. The information is there, but no one's taking it up. I don't know. It's, I mean, in some ways it's exciting. You have a completely blank slate to start with, but it's overwhelming then for the students to get a handle on anything. You don't have to deconstruct as much. No, no. Do they have theological strong opinions still? Some of them do.

Maybe political opinions? Yes, yes. Yeah, some of them certainly come in with very firm perspectives that, that they want to hold on to. Um, but others are really, I Westmont does have a growing percentage of students who are coming from coming in without a strong church background. So certainly for them, it's just all new and all exciting to see. Um, maybe they've heard a few stories, but they have no idea what they actually say. I'll let you go in a second. What are you currently working on right now?

Yes, I am starting a new book project, another one I've been thinking about for a few years and decided it's definitely time. Slavery in the New Testament world, connection, particularly with gender and masculinity. So today we think a lot about a gender binary between male and female, but I'd actually argue in the first century, it's a binary between masculinity and enslavement in terms of the way. And enslavement. Yeah. Yeah. Because masculinity was really defined around power, power over your own body and power over other people. Women could be more or less masculine, right? So women were, especially if you were sort of a wealthy elite woman, you were supposed to emulate masculine values and characteristics. but enslaved people were disempowered they had no power over themselves or others and so in many ways we see masculinity and enslavement as as the opposite ends of the spectrum in the first century and thinking about that then brings me back to when jesus says oh you want to be the

first you want to be the greatest of the disciples you have to become the last you have to be the first, you want to be the greatest of the disciples. You have to become the last, you have to become the slave of all or Paul and Philippians to calling the body of Christ to take the mind of Jesus who became a slave. And what does that do to our understandings of what it means to be human? What gender means? What power means? That's great. That's an exciting project. Yeah. I'm excited about it. Yeah.

Yeah. In my work on sexuality, I did a lot of Greco-Roman stuff. And yeah, I saw that like masculinity and femininity. And this is why you can have a, like a male having sex with another male of a lower social status, a slave. And it was, in some cases it could have been, you know, an outflow of an attraction, but in many cases it was simply a way of dominating power. And he wasn't even considered like, he would be considered male or masculine as long as he's the active partner in that relationship. But if he's passive, he'd be considered a woman or feminine, you know?

So yeah, interesting categories. Um, yeah. Well, thank you, Karen, for your time. I know you got to run, but, uh, appreciate your work and, uh, thanks for being a guest on Theology Raw. It's good to finally meet you. Yes. Nice to meet you as well. Thanks for the invitation to be part of the Converge Podcast Network.