Liberation Theology And The Church in Africa
a limited pacifism, and now find myself wondering once again if total pacifism isn't the right response. I think this, I suppose, because I recognize that violence has never really bought or gained freedom, though I can clearly see the virtue of going to war against an evil like the Rwandan government during the 1994 genocide.
LIBERATION AND FEMINISM AND VIOLENCE
Many years ago, when I was ensconced in the evangelical Christian world, I spent a few months in Australia listening to rather rabid lay theologians suggest how we should view the world. I was at the beginning of what would become the unraveling of my faith, and I was hurting over my place, as a woman, in the church I loved.
There had been several arguments with a gentleman who was a fellow student, and he had told me that Scripture is quite clear about women's inferiority. We were the "lesser sex" and that meant, he said, intellectually, spiritually, physically, and emotionally.
I asked directly: "You mean to tell me that even though I know I'm smarter than many men"-including you, I wanted to say, but didn't-"and I can prove that empirically, I am still inferior to them intellectually?"
"Yes," he said. "That's what the Bible says."
(As an aside, I don't know where my hurt came from. Certainly, the men in my family-my father, brothers, uncles-treated me and other women as equals. But I still had a chip on my shoulder, and it had partly to do with the incongruities between treating a woman as equal but insisting that she couldn't be a pastor and that she had to be "submissive" to her husband.)
Later that day, or the next day, I listened to one speaker say he was tired of people claiming that God didn't love women as much as he loved men because, after all, who had he chosen to carry his son for nine months, and who had he entrusted with the raising of his son, and if that didn't prove exactly how high God placed women in the spectrum of humankind, what did? And later, I thought exactly how stupid of a comment that was because even if you accept that Mary was impregnated by some divine event, and the entire story of Jesus is miraculous, who else was God going to choose but a woman? I guess he could have chosen a man. Why not? Now that would
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