Cochran's Evangelical Feminism—Yet Once More

by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

Response to the discussion of Pamela Cochran's book, Evangelical Feminism: A History (New York University Press, 2005), featured in the Fall, 2005 issue of EEWC Update.

What does it mean to say that the Bible is “inerrant” and therefore holds “transcendent authority” over our lives?  It is easy enough to make the fundamentalist declaration that the Bible was inerrant in its original autographs because that requires nothing from us: nobody has ever seen the original autographs, and after all these centuries it is doubtful that anyone ever will.

But how can it be true that “the more traditionalist evangelical feminists” (i.e., Christians for Biblical Equality [CBE]) have “based [their theory] on a ‘preestablished, external moral order’” (Cochran, p. 5)?  When lying closed on a shelf, the Bible could theoretically be described as “transcendent,” containing a “preestablished, external moral order.” But the minute anyone opens it, reads it, and expresses moral judgments based upon that reading, the “transcendence” becomes limited by a human point of view. The “preestablished” is modified by the reader’s life experience, and the “external” is channeled through the hopes and desires of the reader.

The more naïve the reader is about hermeneutics, the more likely that the resulting interpretation will be private, wildly divergent from the central themes of Scripture. The reason for consciously acknowledging respected principles of interpretation is to limit the human tendency toward eisegesis (reading one’s own preconceptions and biases into the text) and to facilitate exegesis (noticing the context and details of the text, including those that might force a person to change his or her assumptions).

So when Pamela Cochran speaks of “a shift from inerrancy to hermeneutics” (p. 2), she is writing nonsense. Whether or not one believes in inerrancy, and whether or not one acknowledges any particular hermeneutic strategy, everybody interprets what they read. The questions become, how accurate is this interpretation (does it accord with verifiable facts?), and how compassionate is it? If it ignores certain details of the text, such as the word therefore in Romans 2:1 that connects it firmly to Romans 1:18-32, the reader is in danger of falsifying the meaning. If the interpretation is harsh, when reading contextually would offer a kinder interpretation, the reader is violating the Golden Rule, which threads throughout the Hebrew and Christian Testaments as the most basic of hermeneutic principles.

Since Pamela Cochran seems to view me as the most non-evangelical member of EEWC, I would like for the record to assert that I agree with all of David Scholer’s guidelines for determining the cultural relativity of a Bible passage (summarized by Cochran on pp. 167-169). Furthermore, I practice them, and they are what led Letha Scanzoni and me to the interpretations we published in Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?  If these are, as Cochran suggests, the “Evangelical Principles of Interpretation” (p. 165), then I must be evangelical, whether or not the traditional evangelical community likes the conclusions I have reached. (I will not speak for Letha, because I know she is uncomfortable with some of my theological conclusions).

Despite Cochran’s implication that my thoughts govern the thoughts of everybody in EEWC, the truth is that EEWC members are very bright and perfectly capable of thinking for themselves—and that is what they do. I admit that I do my best to convince everybody of what I believe, because I have formed my convictions through serious Bible study. But I can enjoy sisterhood with people whose belief systems differ from my own, as long as they are committed to doing love and justice. Contrary to Cochran, I do not see love and justice as “a more abstract measure. . . [to] determine what is [morally] normative” than “following strictly outlined methods” that become abstract when they are applied to cultures and situations unknown to those who drew up these “strict outlines” in the first place. Having felt the pain of being forced into limited roles defined by “strict outlines” crafted by white men, we feminist women should not inflict such pain upon others.

Toward the end of her book, Cochran affirms some of what I’ve been saying: “Scripture may be called authoritative, but it is the individual reader, perhaps with the help of his or her favorite preacher or author, who determines what the scripture says and means” (p. 187). And the evangelical community’s “language emphasizes the authority of the  scripture, but in practice, the individual has the authority to reject any interpretation or community with which he or she disagrees” (p. 188). But then she goes right back to asserting that “the strength of American evangelicalism lies in its adherence to exclusive truth claims and transcendent authority” (p. 189).

Ladies and gentlemen, this is doublespeak.And it is made all the more serious because Cochran’s major contrast between EEWC and CBE is based on EEWC’s “pluralism” and CBE’s greater adherence to “exclusive truth claims” and “transcendent authority.” According to Cochran, all of evangelicalism has experienced “inroads. . .of modern ideals of pluralism and individualism” (p. 189), but EEWC much more than CBE.  Does Cochran mean that EEWC acknowledges the truth about biblical interpretation, while CBE joins evangelicalism as a whole in maintaining a position of denial? I doubt that she meant any such thing, but doublespeak of these proportions can be very confusing. The only solid distinction Cochran makes is that EEWC welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, whereas CBE does not.

At the Harvard Conference on Religion and the Feminist Movement (2002), CBE leaders Roberta Hestenes and Catherine Kroeger individually went out of their way to tell me how much they appreciated my 1975 keynote speech at EWC’s first national conference.  The thing is, though, that I have continued to utilize the very same hermeneutical principles  ever since. Although Cochran claims that I have “switched” to liberationist hermeneutics, I see my progression as based on a gradually deepening grasp of what the Bible is all about. For instance, it is true that I am panentheistic (not to be confused with pantheistic), but not because of secular inroads. Ephesians 4:6 is not biblically unique in its statement that God is “above all, and through all, and in you all.” If that is true, and I believe it is, then the proper name for it is panentheism (although transcendence combined with immanence, or omnipresence, would also be accurate enough).

When I have asked my evangelical critics what they make of such passages, they sidestep and refuse to answer me. Could that be the real reason “evangelical theologians no longer bother to discourse publicly with Mollenkott or other feminists in the  Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus” (p. 188)?

More doublespeak occurs when Cochran asserts that I said “some of Paul’s pronouncements were simply wrong” (p. 45), but ten pages later admits that I “did not like to call Paul’s contradictions ‘errors’” (p. 55).

I marvel that nobody at NYU Press helped Cochran achieve greater consistency!  She also asserts that I “had had very little exposure to institutional evangelicalism” because my “background was fundamentalism” (p. 72), as if she did not know that contemporary evangelicalism grew out of fundamentalism. Yet, on p. 17 she reports, accurately, that “In the early 1970s, evangelicals were not far removed from their fundamentalist heritage.” The Plymouth Brethren of my childhood and young adulthood, my Southern Presbyterian high school, my undergraduate college (Bob Jones), and the two Christian colleges where I taught for twelve years (Shelton and Nyack Missionary College) would be stunned to hear themselves dismissed from evangelicalism because they were fundamentalist in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And by the early 1970s, I was teaching at a state college and had authored my first three books, Adamant and Stone Chips, In Search of Balance, and Adam Among the Television Trees, all with Word, an evangelical publisher. I also had several articles published in Christianity Today. If this amounts to “little exposure to institutional evangelicalism,” make the most of it!

Nancy Hardesty did a good job of pointing out some of Cochran’s factual errors (EEWC Update, Fall, 2005), but there were plenty more that neither she nor I have mentioned. There were even several places where Cochran had changed her sentence structure, yet remnants of both choices were printed together, rendering the structure incoherent. (Example: “Descriptive passages should to be related to normative teaching in order to be authoritative” (p. 168 [italics supplied]). In fact, because I earned my Ph.D. at New York University, I am downright embarrassed that NYU Press would release such a sloppy publication.

To my sister Pamela Cochran I make this offer: if you decide to bring out a more accurate edition of  Evangelical Feminism and get in touch with me, I will read and correct the page-proofs for you free of charge.

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Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is one of EEWC's founding members and author or coauthor of 13 books. Her web site is http://virginiarameymollenkott.com.

© 2006 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus