Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Carolyn 0:00
What I've come to understand from my study of the Bible is that we have taken patriarchy as the Bible's message. And I think, and I've written about this in a book called Maelstrom, that the Bible dismantles patriarchy and it starts early on by doing that. When you look at Genesis one and two, God creates male and female to rule creation, to rule and subdue all of creation. He's entrusting his creation to them, for them to be his agents as his image bearers, and he's calling them to do it together and he blesses this arrangement. And so the rule is outward toward creation for flourishing.
Seth Price 1:22
Hi, welcome back to the Can I Say This At Church podcast, I am Seth and I am excited that you're listening. So we have teetered off at 75 reviews on iTunes, as of recording this towards the central part of March but we need to bust that to 100. I don't know why but 75 just feels…ehh…so if you have not yet done so please rate and review the show on iTunes. I would appreciate it. I love reading those. It's it's one of the it's one of the many forms of feedback that I really like. Which leads me to my next point. If you have not yet leave me a comment on the show, on Facebook or on Twitter or by email at CanISayThisAtChurch@gmail.com, I really love reading those, even if I don't necessarily agree with them or when you don't necessarily agree with the content of the show, I really enjoy the intentionality behind that. And I would encourage more of you to do so just let me know what you think what you want to hear even quite a few of the future guests that are currently being booked are a direct result from recommendations from the Patreon community and so, so thankful for that. If you haven't supported the show in that way. I would encourage you to do so find the links to that at Can I Say This At Church.com just click the big support button in the top right.
These past few years have just been different for me. I as many of you that listen know I have three kids, but two of them are just you know, young women and I'm terrified to mess up. I'm terrified to embrace a roll of patriarchy that is unhelpful and that is not truthful and that perpetuates a system where my daughters aren't allowed to be something just because they were born female. I don't believe it in any way, shape or form. But that leaves a lot of questions for me, you know, what's the role of man? Is that a role that even matters? How do we deal with that with intersex, stuff like that? There's just so many questions there and so it is a huge nugget to tackle. And so I sat down with Carolyn Custis James, and we talked a bit about patriarchy, and manhood and womanhood, and what it looks like to live in partnership together. And what that should look like in community with one another. I love this conversation. Very much so. So I can't wait for you to hear it. Here we go. Carolyn custis James.
Seth Price 4:11
Carolyn Custis James, welcome to the show. I'm excited that we could make this work. I'm excited that you said yes. One of the big lacking things in all of last year was I just don't have enough female voices. But what I find often in my life is female voices sound a lot more like the God that I want to worship, then the dad voice in me. And so I'm glad to have you on and I'm glad that you're here. Welcome.
Carolyn 4:37
Thank you. Well, I'm really pleased to be on your program.
Seth Price 4:42
Well good. There will probably be a bunch of people that are unfamiliar with you. And so if you could just in a nutshell over the handful of minutes, say, you know this is what makes Carolyn…Carolyn, kind of your upbringing and kind of theologically how you got to where you're at today for some context?
Carolyn 4:59
Okay. Well, I'm a PK (pastors kid). My father was a pastor. So I grew up in the church, I grew up on the Bible, and had a very specific idea of who I was as a female and what God's plan was for me. That I would marry after college, that I would become a mom that I would build my life around my husband and God's calling on his life. And what happened to me after college was really, I think all of my work ultimately has come out of the decade that followed college because I didn't get married. There wasn't anyone I wanted to marry. And at first it was, well, this is maybe a lull in the plan, that when as it stretched on it became more and more of a struggle of you know has God abandoned me because I thought everybody else stories moving forward and mine was going nowhere. And it also became a struggle with what it means to be a woman and what is God's calling on me is this something I can miss? Or, you know, as the the longer I was in this, the bigger the questions got them, you know, because I would see women who's, who got married in and couldn't have kids or who got married and their family fell apart, there was a divorce or something their (like) husband died, you know, and just the contingencies of life we're hitting all kinds of, you know, changing all kinds of stories. So the questions got bigger and bigger for me, and I ended up going to seminary during those years. And just had a hunger to go deeper. I was very frustrated with a lot of things that were written for women because I felt like we need we need more meat in our stories. I mean, I was I was finding that my understanding of God was not enough, and that I had a lot of false things that I believed about him that, you know, he would abandon me. Or that, you know, my story wouldn't matter as much as somebody else's to him.
And so that's where my work came from, you know, going back to the Scriptures and saying, okay, what is the Bible's message for women? And is it big enough for all of us? And does it begin when we begin or is it just a certain season of life that it covers? And does it go the full stretch to our last breath? And does it include every woman everywhere in the world no matter who she is or what she sees in the rearview mirror, what her circumstances are-and will it hold up, is it indestructible?
So my work really came out of that. It's centered on Biblical Studies. I go, you know, that's the heart of what I do, I want to know what, you know, God has said, I want to know what the vision is for us. And it has been an amazing adventure for me. And I actually ended up doing the same thing for men because the more I studied women, the more I realized that men ask the same questions, you know, is God's calling for me as a man something I can lose or ruin or be stolen from me?
Seth Price 8:30
Well, I can say we definitely have the same questions. We're just not…a lot of us just aren't public about it. And I find that the view of manhood is entirely informed less by the Bible and less by religion and theology and more by capitalism, and a measurement of me versus the neighbor, or me versus Tom Brady, because I don't have that many Super Bowl rings, or you know, me versus someone else. As opposed to me just being what I'm supposed to be—the best version of me.
Carolyn 9:05
There's no freedom in that there's no freedom in that.
Seth Price 9:08
No because I'm never gonna play in the Superbowl ever.
Carolyn 9:11
Yeah, well are you know who only one guy gets the Sexiest Man Alive every year.
Seth Price 9:18
..and they gave it to Blake Shelton, which is just awful. Have you seen it…doesn't matter. This isn't about Blake, I saw that I was like, this is this is a joke.
Carolyn 9:25
(Laughter) Seriously
Seth Price 9:26
You said something. Well, he does sing. Well, you said something just in there. You said, you know, does God's calling for women begin when we do? What do you mean, when you say that does it begin when we do?
Carolyn 9:37
Are we born with it? Because we look at you know, for me as a call as a young woman. I saw God's purpose for me as something that was down the road. So you look at a little girl. And you think well, you know, I wonder what God's purpose is for us? We're all looking for God's purpose, you know, but it's something that is future. And you know, there are little girls that don't live to be adults. And they're a little girls who are doing awesome things, who have a sense of God's hand on them. And, you know, sometimes they open their mouths and say things that shake us up spiritually.
You know, God all in the Bible, he's working through children. And we don't think like that, you know, I didn't grow up thinking that. I knew I needed to live as a Christian. But as far as you know, purpose and calling, it was future, and it's dependent on somebody else showing up and not on that God called me as me and my whole journey as part of his purposes for me. So it became very big, it's very, I spent a lot of time in Genesis 1 and 2 it's very empowering for women, it's wonderful good news for men. It's not swinging the pendulum at all. It's about that, you know, what God's calling in, on all of us as individuals but also together.
So I think my books break new ground in terms of how we talk about who we are as God's children. And I mean, it's been life changing. For me, I'll say that.
Seth Price 11:32
I've never written a book but I can say just the process of doing this having to constantly engage in new ideas has been life changing. For me, if anything, having to constantly wrestle with new ideas, to be able to talk to people like yourself, stretches me in ways that I'm uncomfortable with but I will say this, I'm no longer concerned with being stretched and that's probably a bad metaphor. Not that I like the stretching. It just used to really be uncomfortable and now it's more of a status quo. Maybe I'm more, I don't know, that slime that the kids make maybe I'm getting to look more like that and less like a like a rigid mold.
So one of the things I like to do is ask smarter people than me for good questions to other people that are smarter than me. And so we'll put you on that list. So I asked someone this morning I said, Hey, if I'm talking with Carolyn Custis James, what would you ask? And so I want to verbatim read her question that this is someone that has very similar degrees with you.
So they have a degree in sociology and an Indian and they have divinity training and Biblical Studies training. And so she wanted to know,
how do you believe that your study in sociology influences the way that you understand God and the Bible?
Like how has that sociological training either changed or helped inform or help remove how you read Scripture?
Carolyn 12:49
You know, I think we have too narrow of a discussion of Scripture. That we need to bring people into the conversation from all different kinds of background we need to bring artists in, we need to bring medical people in, we need to bring laborers in, we need to bring people who are cooking meals. And you know, and for me, Sociology and Anthropology are huge in terms of understanding Scripture.
I think that one of the things that I always say and that I always remind myself of when I open the Bible is that I am not reading an American book. And if I only look at the Bible as an American, through an American Western lens, I'm going to abuse the text. I'm going to miss the message. I will at least diminish it. I may distort it completely. But I won't understand the power of that message. Because I am foreign to the world of the Bible.
So to understand the sociology, you know how the culture works, how men and women were viewed in the culture, what were the operational mores that govern their lives? I'm going to, I'm going to make a hash out of it. And we've done that out of so many stories. Let me give you a really simple example. You know, the story of Jesus and Mary of Bethany, where she's sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus, it's an expression that defines her as a Rabbinical student. And we hear sermons on that text that talk about we need to have quiet time, we need to not be so busy. You know it's hard to be impressed with what's going on in that text.
But after 9/11, we learned that in Afghanistan, girls celebrated their 8th birthday by having their education ended. And we hear stories of Malala from Pakistan, and how she was shot going to school, and being an advocate for education for girls. If you took the story of Jesus and Mary of Bethany into those cultures and told them that story, they would tell you what it means. And it would be completely different! I mean, they would absolutely love Jesus, because he is saying that women and girls need to learn. And above all, they need to learn about who God is and who Jesus is but they need to use their minds just the same as the man. She was in a room full of men when she was doing this and her sister comes in the room and you've got juxtapose the place that women belong in, which is preparing the meal for the man who are going to eat without the women in that culture. And her sister who is sitting there learning and I think what the interaction in that story is Jesus appealing to Martha to join her sister.
And there's evidence in conversations she has afterwards, Martha has afterwards with Jesus, that she did exactly that. But we don't get that, you know, because we're not in a culture, you know, our culture women are getting graduate degrees and becoming professors. So understanding the sociological anthropological context of that of that narrative, changes the whole story. And it does it over and over and over again in the Bible.
Seth Price 16:54
One of the biggest themes in a lot of your writing is the role of patriarchy and I don't want to say matriarchy, because I don't really know how to define either one of those. But patriarchy for me has always been just the implicit of, I'm the head of my house and so what I say, is the rules. But that may have just been the way that I was raised. And so I would be a fool. And I think I said this in the email, I'd be a fool not to discuss patriarchy with you, specifically, on ways that we have done it poorly.
I feel like there's a lot of resources on ways to do it well, but I felt like to talk about ways that we do it well, without making the status of you know, here's what we have done in the past will be hard to move forward or hard to at least agree upon. A here's what we do now. And here's why that is dangerous. I think dangerous is the right word. And I only say that because I have two small girls. And I'm really afraid, Carolyn, of doing it wrong. I'm afraid of modeling what a man should be. And do it wrong in a way that impacts you know, their marriages and their relationships. Their relationship with me their relationships with boys that they go to school with. So, how would you define patriarchy as a status quo now, how are we doing it wrong currently?
Carolyn 18:11
Let me dig deeper than that.
Seth Price 18:13
Okay.
Carolyn 18:15
Okay.
Because what I've come to understand from my study of the Bible is that we have taken patriarchy as the Bible's message. And I think and I've written about this in a book called Maelstrom, that the Bible dismantles patriarchy, and it starts early on by doing that, when you look at Genesis 1&2, God creates male and female to rule creation, to rule and subdue all creation. He's entrusting his creation to them, for them to be his agents as his imagebearers, and he's calling them to do it together. And he blesses this arrangement.
And so the rule is outward toward creation for flourishing. All right, it's not about power, the power is God's power and he's entrusting that to us to serve His purposes. You only have the rule over after the fall. After the fall, that's where I think patriarchy begins where, you know, in God's judgment and in the Curse, in the consequences of the fall. It is that the man who is typically stronger is going to rule rule over the woman. And that takes all sorts of all sorts of forms.
You know, in our culture, if we understand and this is how, the kinder, gentler, version of patriarchy is portrayed. That the man is the head of the home, that he's the leader in the home, that the woman's role is to submit to Him. And, you know, when you're a single woman like I was for 10 years, you have to step up, you know, you have to be able to be the breadwinner, you have to be able to protect yourself. You have to be able to make decisions and assert yourself in various situations. What the instinct is from that is that when you get married, you're going to pull back, you're going to pull back. What happened to me, I was single for 10 years and I thought that was the way things were supposed to work. So I felt like I didn't really have a story the story was supposed to show up in the form of a husband and we were going to do him.
And what happened when we were first married, I married a man who was raised by a single mom. And he didn't come at any sense of the traditional marriage, although he was, you know, Biblical scholar. He was in seminary, he's got two doctorates. So you know, he's not somebody who's just winging it. But when we were first married, he said to me, “You need to find out what your gifts are, and what God is calling you to do with your life. And I'm not the answer to that question”. And he has pushed me to find out what God wants me to do. And it has been life changing for me that I have a husband who is going to champion me and I'm going to invest in him with heart and soul everything about him and his career. I, you know, a lot of the work I did was to finance his education and we were a team in that. But it was an eye opener for me to not to feel like okay, now, what matter are his gifts and what God's called him to be and do because, you know, it happens to women all the time. A husband goes out jogging and drops dead in the road and where she? She's lost her story. She's, you know, who is she headless? What are we talking about?
You know, and for me, I think, you know, God's purposes for his sons and daughters, call us to be all in in what he is doing in the world, that each of us has responsibility for stewardship of the gifts that he's entrusted to us. And that it's not a competition. It's not, you know, which way is the pendulum gonna swing it’s that we're in it together. And I want to be the strongest champion for my husband, I want to be his strongest advocate, I want to watch his back I want to you know, I want him to walk with God and and if he's headed down the wrong path, I want to be the first roadblock he encounters. You know, because both of us are fully engaged in what God is doing. And it has been life saving for me because life has twists and turns.
You know, my husband has moved from different jobs that he's had. And it I haven't lost my identity, you know, because his job description changed. You know, so it's, for me, it's much bigger than we let it be. When we come up with these rules. I think what what patriarchy does to us is it makes us define ourselves horizontally, instead of defining ourselves by, you know, I'm God's image bear. And I'm going to live this out as a single woman, or I'm going to live this out as a single man, or I'm going to live this out as a child, or an elderly person with an empty nest and maybe widowed or, you know, who knows? That it's this way that Genesis 1&2 defines us, but it calls us to need each other in profound ways.
And so you know, I think the patriarchal model makes men look for women who will submit. They're not they're not looking for somebody who's going to be fully engaged with them, somebody who's going to be a strong spiritual influence in their life, a real sounding board for them, they're going to look for somebody who will lead who they can somebody they can lead. And there are times in a marriage relationship when you know, the woman will lead. And there are situations in the Bible where you have a woman stepping up and leading, and she's not breaking the rules and she's not feminizing a man or emasculating him. She's doing what God's calling her to do!
And so I think we make rules that limit what we're going to do in terms of stewarding the opportunities and the gifts that God has given us. You know, you have little girls and there are treasures inside of them that you God has placed there that you want to see flourish and you don’t want to see some guy come into their life that's going to make them shut that down. You'd like to see a man come into their lives who would say this is treasure that we need to release for God's purposes in the world and that will be blessed and empowered himself by having that kind of a life.
Seth Price 27:00
So I want to build on that. I feel well, I don’t really, usually get person on the show, but we're talking about my daughters. And so I will. So I have my oldest is a boy. And then the other two are daughters. And so I feel like I often do a very piss poor job of modeling what a good father should be. Because I, everybody loses their anger or everyone has an issue and I don't model it well. And so what are for people listening some practical ways. And I don't honestly even care because I know there are people that aren't Christian that listen as well. So what are some practical ways to model…What I don't want is this, what I don't want is in 40 years, my daughter decides to run for Congress, and we celebrate with the small handclap that there's now finally 35 new members of Congress and they happen to be women. I don't want that to be Let's celebrate that but because of new ideas, let's not celebrate it because of gender.
So I don't…I don't know how to model that well. I don't know how to connect with a part for me that can either display what they should be looking for, if that's even the right question to ask. And I also don't really know what to say, to foster conversation around it. Because it's not the inherent…it's not how I was taught to, quote unquote, do things, nothing against the way I was taught to do things. It made me what I am today, but I want to do better. And I know that I'm not. So how can I and other fathers and mothers listening do that? What are some practical ways to do it?
Carolyn 28:36
For their daughter?
Seth Price 28:38
Yeah, even for my son, because if I do it wrong, I'll exacerbate the problem for an entire other generation.
Carolyn 28:44
Yeah, well, and all of us do it wrong in some ways, you know, because a lot of the things I've learned subsequent to, you know, our daughter being a little girl. One of the things that I think is very powerful is when you look at Genesis 2 and the creation of the female. When we look at Genesis 2, we think in terms of marriage, that's what the sermons talk about, you know, this is the creation of marriage, but it's not it's the creation of male and female. And, and we sort of trivialize it and make jokes about it. But, you know, that's where I went to find out is this talking to me, I'm a single woman, you know, and the language that she used in there only talks about marriage at the very end of the of the chapter. God has created ADAM and he has just named the animals and you know, when we look at the creation of the man, the first human he's created at the climax of God's history of God's creative activity. So we're looking at a masterpiece. We're not looking at something that's there's something wrong with him, if God is teaching us about male female relationships, and he looks at the man and he says it's not good for him to be alone, and this is what he needs.
And he uses two words to describe the woman; it’s the Hebrew word Ezer which we just translated as “helper”. And the Hebrew word, kenegdô , which is to say she is his match.
The word Ezer, what scholars typically do when they come across a word like that, this is a word for the woman, the female. They do an inventory and see how it's used in the Bible and this word is use 21 times in the Old Testament, it's used twice for the woman in Genesis it's used three times for countries where Israel is asking them to send their armies. They're asking for military aid, because they're under attack and they're being overpowered; send your armies. The remaining 16 times it's used for God as the helper of his people. So when that was discovered, they upgraded helper to strong helper. And what I did is I went and looked up all of those verses and there started to be a pattern where it's military language is used all around the word Ezer. So you know, since your armies for the three nations, it's very clear what their wanting. When it's used for God in every single passage there’s military language God is better than chariots and horses. He's our shield and defense. He stands century watch over his people, he the kind of help he's bringing his people is monumental. Then we go back to the Garden of Eden, which we've talked about is paradise.
But when you look at it closely, Eden is a warzone. There's an enemy getting ready to attack. God commands the man to guard the garden and the male and female are created to rule and subdue, which means even in an unfallen world, there will be resistance to their efforts. And I believe that the Ezer is a warrior, that she brings her full strength to the purposes of God that she stands alongside the man that he needs everything she can bring to the battle. And that it's a battle for good, and it's a battle for God's purposes. Little girls are Ezers. I've met with little girls, there was a group of little girls here, they were middle school girls, and they had read through my book, Lost Women of the Bible, where I talked about the Ezer and I show how women in the Bible, live that out. And I wanted to meet them when I heard that they had gone through this book together.
And it was incredible to meet with these little sixth, seventh, eighth grade girls who were absolutely on fire. And they want to serve God and and they wanted to live him and everything matters about their story, it's not down the road, it's here and now, you know, so I think in parenting, we need to have a big vision. It's not to put pressure on them, but to open doors and let them explore, you know, what are their gifts? Is this child an artist is this child an athlete? Is this child interested in science or math or, you know, to cheer them on? And, you know, to see them blossom and give them a sense of God's purpose for you as now and you're out there with your friends. You're in situations nobody else is in how are you a light there? How are you bringing God's good purposes into your friendships?
You know, it's just, it's, it's very big. And, you know, I think we should have that kind of a vision instead of saying “You know, someday your prince will come, you know, someday somebody is going to come along who's going to support you”. You know that doesn't happen to everybody. And so and in our culture, you know, we have, we have more freedoms than women do in other cultures than women did in the cultures of the Biblical times. And so they, you know, our girls can go further and do more than girls can in other cultures and I think that we have responsibility for the opportunities that and the blessings that we have.
Seth Price 34:43
So as a father, if I do that, and I do it well, and I allow her, them, to either succeed or fail without stepping in and helicopter parenting, when I model that, it's usually I feel like I'm giving up a power that I had before. Really, I just assumed I didn't really have it. I just flexed it from birth and so it's mine. And so what a men do, what's a good what's a good posture for men as we're allowing females in our, in our realm of influence in our circle, to do things that may be in past generations, you'll see this a lot of Thanksgiving, you know, people judging whose wife does on what, and people judging, you know, my mom, you know, they always would bring me this, or they would do this or do that.
So as men begin to cede power, to allow females to actually be helpers to allow them to do what they're called to do for now. How do we sit with that tension? As a man, how would you advise someone as myself like, don't take it personal? Like it's, it's okay, you, I don't really know how to voice it. Well, hopefully, you know what I'm trying to say…
Carolyn 35:46
I mean, I think that's a great question to ask because a lot, a lot of men feel that way. I don't think you're ceding power. I think you're using your power. I mean, what my husband did for me he could do because he had power. And I, you know, I see, you know, male power and privilege are realities in our culture. And I don't see God calling you to become weak or less. I see him calling you to use that power. I mean, you have no idea what it means to a woman when a man speaks into her story and says, I believe in you. And you can do more or you have gifts and you need to find out what God wants you to do with those gifts.
The best example that I find in the Old Testament for this is the story of Ruth and Boaz. Because she comes into the story, in today's world we would call her an Arab, we would call her an immigrant, we would call her undocumented. You know, and she's on welfare, she goes on welfare to feed her mother in law and herself. And she has ideas because she's got a different point of view coming from that side of things.
And so she's on the hungry side of the law. And she makes these initiatives with him where they're discussing Mosaic law, and she's got a bigger vision of, you know the law says, “Let them gleam”, that's the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law says to feed them.
And she and Boaz have these conversations where, according to the culture, he shouldn't even talk to her. He should, you know, throw her out of his field for being so forward and in making a proposal like that which is actually can be understood as a critique of how he's doing things. But he's a big enough man to listen to her. And he uses his male power and privilege in the most extraordinary and sacrificial ways to empower her to succeed in what she's fighting to do for her mother in law. So he is not diminished at all by what he does; he's using his power not for himself. Although if it causes him to stand taller, I think way taller than he did even before, but he uses it to cause the flourishing of others. And what happens is that there is a ripple effect to what happens here that it impacts the whole village. It impacts the future of the nation it impacts the future of the world.m because ultimately it leads to Jesus. But I think it's a big mistake to say I'm called to be less, if I call my daughters or my wife to be more. And, I think, you know, it's if you've got somebody stronger by your side, you're going to be stronger in the battles of life.
You know, you don't have to solo this. You've got a team. You know, you're Tom Brady, you are, you know, you've got a team and the team, you can empower that team. And, you know, I feel like that's what my husband did for me. It was a shock. Because I thought, okay, now I know what the rules are here. You know, and so I headed for the kitchen and I knew I needed to get a job to help him finish his seminary education that might be plan was to stop. And, you know, that just was bewildering to him that I would, you know, back off once he got his degree. He wanted me to use all my gifts and to go beyond my comfort zone and he celebrates all of that. And we're not in a competition. You know, I want the same for him when he walks in the door at night. I want to know how his day went, I want to know if he's struggling. I want to know, if he's, you know, got a big opportunity and I want to be cheering him on. And that's, I think the mistake that we make. I think the vision in Genesis 1&2 is that we are better when we work together. And we are better when we bring our full strength.
One of the stories that I tell is that back in 2006, there was in the national news, a story about three climbers who were lost on Mount Hood in Oregon. And the story captivated the media for a solid week. And three of them were lost. There were terrible storms going on that week on the mountain and there were a lot of other climbers, rescue workers are headed for the mountain when this happened. One of those climbers was my husband's younger brother. And at the end of the week, they were all Christians, all three of these guys it was an incredible week. I mean, my husband was on all the networks being interviewed about what was going on and being the point person for the three families.
But I have to tell you, that as a member of the family, it did not matter to us who reached those climbers, whether it was a man or a woman, and there were male and female rescue workers, we just wanted them home alive. You know, and we lost all three of them in the end, but I'm just saying, you know, when we look at our mission, the mission that God has entrusted to his image bearers in the world, we can't afford for anybody to hold back. And, as a man, you are in a position to make a huge difference, to have a have a ripple effect by how you become a champion for all of your kids, your son, and your daughters, and your wife, and the people you encounter.
And I think that the patriarchal model forces men to look at themselves and “am I making the decisions” or “am I being strong enough” or isn't everybody looking to me for decision and leadership and provision and protection. You know, if something happened to you where you were disabled or you, you know, couldn't keep a job or, you know, the economy crashed or something. You you suffer as a man because you couldn't be and do the kinds of things that patriarchy tells you you should be doing. Instead of saying, here's a new battle, how are we going to engage this new battle together? And, you know, trusting God that he's sovereign over everything, and that he moves us into different circumstances, but that we are here to be for one another.
And, you know, the stories that come out of this, you know, I hear men talking about, you know, how this bless their lives and caused them to flourish more. But I've read books that, you know, say, you know, God is calling us to be weak as men, you know that as men, we need to…you can't shed your male power and privilege, you know, the culture gives it to you. It is what you do with it that matters, you know, if you do it to guard yourself in your own position, and to feel like somebody else's success is a threat, you know, then it's going to be a different story than if you have the freedom to say, you know, God has entrusted me with these gifts of power and privilege and what am I going to do?
Seth Price 44:39
Hmm, Carolyn, I had so many more questions, but that is a beautiful spot to end because it's a call to action, not just for men, it's called action, just period. I may if you're willing, sometime in the future, I'd like to have you back on because I want to talk about Ruth specifically because she continues to pop up over and over and over again recently-and either that's because I'm paying attention like I bought a Honda Odyssey and so now all I see is Honda Odysseys or it's something new, I don't know which so if you're willing, sometime in the future, I'd love to have you back on to talk about that. But I want to be respectful of both of our times. Thank you so much for coming on. I've thoroughly enjoyed this.
Carolyn 45:18
Oh you are welcome. You are welcome it’s a pleasure.
Seth Price 45:35
The music featured in today's episode is from artists Tina Boonstra. You can find more of her music in the show notes. And as always, you will find the tracks listed in today's show. On the Can I Say This At Church Spotify playlist.
Seth Price 46:06
This was so fun of a conversation to have. I'm so thankful to have so many brilliant minds come on the show, and Carolyn is among them. So after recording, she gave me a few books that I know my church has begun using. And my daughter came home after one Sunday evening of being engaged with it and was like, did you know about Miriam as they're going through the story of Moses? And I'll be honest, I didn't.
And the feedback that I've gotten just locally or from adults even and from, you know, the pastors that are church and whatnot has just been amazing. And so I will link some of the texts that she had said, Hey, for people like you Seth that are dealing with, you know, how do we talk about biblical women in the Bible in a way that has a different lens. And so after the fact she gave me some of that information, and I will share that with you and I will challenge you. Men and women alike, listening to this we can be better within the terms of a generation we can make the world something better, something more loving. And something that stretches us both equally and pushes everyone to succeed better.
I can't wait to see what that world looks like and I hope I'm still alive when we get some form of closer to it. I wish you all well, talk to you next week.