TWO HERMENEUTICAL TENSIONS IN EVANGELICAL FEMINISM

This article shows that there are at least two key hermeneutical tensions in evangelical feminist interpretation of the Bible. The first hermeneutical tension concern the issue of readers' prejudices. Feminists remind us that readers are always disposed to read texts against the background of their own expectations, customs, and world views. And the second hermeneutical tension, namely the tension over the nature of the actual practices of the first century church. Evangelical feminists have tended to give different answers depending on the passage that they are interpreting. In sum, feminism in its hermeneutical principles alerts us to the role of reader prejudice and social background in understanding texts. KEYWORDS: Hermeneutic, feminist, prejudice, Christian

Gender, Race, and Twentieth-Century Dissenting Traditions

This chapter bases its analysis of rapid changes in conceptions of race and gender in the contextual shifts in authority, autonomy, and demography within Dissenting Protestantism around the world, particularly between the bureaucratized, wealthy global North and the poor, mostly non-white and female churches in the global South. The chapter ‘embraces the intersection’ of categories of race and gender to avoid overlooking lived, embodied experiences of people as both ‘gendered and raced’. Subjects covered include Pentecostalism’s fresh expressions of gender and conceptions of race, women’s work in the international missionary movement and the social gospel, new dissenting Christianities and expressions of racial identities in a context of decolonization and the rise of independent churches; the civil rights movement in the USA and the rise of second-wave feminism; conservative reactions to evangelical feminism, ‘complementarian’ gender roles, and the demographic shift in (D)issenting Protestantism—the rise of the global South.