Our assumptions about what the Bible is impact how we read it and why. The central challenge for mainstream feminist Biblical interpretation is the Bible’s traditional status as the authoritative Word of God: that men’s words become God’s law and patriarchy gets the divine stamp of approval. Many feminists therefore reject the Bible’s status as the Word of God, considering it simply the “words of men.” Against the tide of mainstream feminist biblical scholarship, I argue that it is precisely the Bible’s status as the Word of God that opens the possibility for it to become a powerful and positive force for women’s liberation.
Mainstream feminist interpretation goes wrong when it assumes a competitive relationship between the human and divine in Scripture: it is simply assumed that if the Bible is the words of men then it is not the Word of God. But to view the Bible as the Word of God is to acknowledge it as simultaneously a human creation and as the medium through which God speaks: human and divine, or transcendent and historical in non-competitive relationship. Feminist readings which participate in the either/or preclude the possibility of hearing God in the text of Scripture, but in doing so undercut their objection to it. Acceptance of a competitive relationship between divine and human in Scripture represents a misunderstanding of the traditional Doctrine of Scripture. Therefore, interpretations based on this misunderstanding cannot function as objections to the doctrine, understood rightly.
On the other hand, a traditional understanding of the Bible as Scripture grants the interpreter access to a suite of hermeneutical resources which are not available to interpreters who reject any sort of theological unity in the Bible: canonical criticism, theological interpretation, Christological reading, the rule of faith, or Augustine’s rule of love, for example. To embrace a non-competitive relationship between the human and the divine in Scripture means we are not forced to choose between rejecting the Bible’s status as the Word of God altogether due to its creatureliness, or submitting to the creaturely as though divine. Therefore I contend that feminist interpreters might choose to embrace an understanding of the Bible as the Word of God rather than reject it. For to do so is not to elevate the creaturely to the status of the divine, or to find oneself bound by the “words of men,” it is to open up the possibility that God’s speaking in Scripture is more than the “words of men.”