Debbie Blue, a Lutheran minister and one of the founders of House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minn., highlights what she calls “wild and provocative” women in the Bible—Hagar, Esther, and Mary, and explores the intersections of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in her new book, Consider the Women (Eerdmans, Mar.).
Why did you write this book?
There were two things that drove me. First: a mounting sense that the relationships between the Abrahamic faiths have been so destructive. We haven’t gotten along very well; we’ve rarely been good siblings. There’s so much Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, I thought practitioners really need to do something, and maybe if I had skills to organize I’d do that, but I read the Bible. In the face of racism and demagogy, how we tell our stories really matters. So I think we need to read and re-read our common narratives. The old ones aren’t going away, but they’re contributing to cruelty and violence and we need to change how we read them.
And of course it’s the women. I feel like their stories lead us down different paths. They’re more subversive than they are subservient— it messes with the dominant paradigm and I think we really need that now. Women’s narratives are coalescing in #MeToo and all these new women in Congress, [and it’s] important to hear them. I think women are leading in a way that we need to go.
What is one reason women have been misrepresented and/or underrepresented in biblical interpretations for so long?
I think because in the history of Christianity—or most of it anyway—interpreters and keepers of the Bible have been men. When women started to become preachers and scholars, things started to really change, but it took a long while for that to happen. Once it started, people had questions that hadn’t been asked before. We uncovered assumptions that were really questionable; like that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. There’s nothing in the text that confirms that assumption at all. I can just imagine some of these old church fathers being uncomfortable with women and bodies–definitely with sensuality– and making assumptions that became part of a tradition that is reductive and oppressive at times, and that hasn’t been good for women.
How do believers react to your interpretations—that “a matriarch is on par with the patriarch?”
People seem really ready for it and grateful, especially women. It does depend on how tied people are to traditional interpretations—if they’re willing to look at old things in a new way. Even the most conservative Christians will say that the Bible is a living word, and that it speaks to different things in different times. Some say, "Finally, we are reading the text differently."
What is the most important thing you want readers to learn from your book?
For me, I knew very little about Islam before writing this book. I learned, by talking to these women, about an openness to the beauty of things other people believe. The other thing is, of course, we need to pay attention to women’s stories and let women lead sometimes, and we need to see where it goes when we focus on them.
