Latest Articles by Sarah Canice Funke
After reading the comments on Biblical femininity at The Princess Diaries, I began thinking more about the examples of women that we find in the Bible. Granted, drawing application from narratives can be tricky, making the diadatic passages of Paul seem more "safe" for praxis. But I think we tend to lose the richness of the full breadth of Scriptures if we limit ourselves to one section of the whole.
One of the points from a sermon on Biblical femininity stated that women "long for the drama of rescue." In today's culture that may be true, since we are innundated with stories of rescue from Sleeping Beauty to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days--and it's hard not to feel the way we are told to feel--but why make it a Biblical universal?
And in almost every Biblical story involving women, we find them taking initiative, for both good AND evil. The example of Eve is often used to demonstrate what happens when women usurp authority, but so many counter-examples exist of women taking charge in order to produce positive results (Abigail, Ruth, Rahab, Esther...though the last woman acted under the guidance of her cousin Mordechai, she was the one who approached the king unannounced). And just to show that women are fallen creatures (and not the angelic guardians of morality), we also see Rebekah's deceitfulness, Jezebel's wickedness, Miriam's rebellion. The Bible just doesn't talk about women longing to be rescued; interestingly enough, psychological states of Biblical characters in general do not receive much attention and thus remain largely a mystery. Because of this silence, we can't say that women of the Bible did NOT long to be rescued (maybe they did). But then neither can we say that they did.