The Women's Bible

I am not inspired to write much at the moment, but I can offer this informative post by April DeConick on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Kurk Gayle adds this important citation from Elizabeth Cady Stanton,

It does not occur to them that men learned in the languages have revised the book many times, but made no change in woman's position. Though familiar with 'the designs of God,' trained in Biblical research and higher criticism, interpreters of signs and symbols and Egyptian hieroglyphics, learned astronomers and astrologers, yet they cannot twist out of the Old or New Testaments a message of justice, liberty or equality from God to the women of the nineteenth century!

But it was another blogger who first recommended that I read the Women's Bible, a few years ago. Thank you.

I think the tensions remain today, as they were then between Stanton and Anthony. There are women forging a biblical feminism out of a literalist approach to the Bible. And then there are others who reject the Bible entirely. My only concern is that the true equality of women, as those who bear authority on par with men, not be compromised. In Greek, the word exousia is related to not only authority, but also rights, permission and liberty. If women are denied equal authority, they are also deprived of equal rights, equal permission, and equal liberty.