Stephen L. Young Profile picture
Oct 20, 2021 12 tweets 7 min read Read on X
🧵Seminary Thread🧵
Once upon a time I attended a conservative White Evangelical seminary, @WestminsterTS.

I have asked to be removed from mailings. No luck.

Their most recent offering is a toxically amusing opportunity to reflect on White conservative culture. Let's go! 1/12
The general theme of this thread about @WestminsterTS and White conservative patriarchy is "Tell me about yourself without telling me."

They start off quite strong with a conspicuously all-male TOC for a magazine about "Looking Ahead to Westminster's Future." Dang straight! 2/12
What about these contributions? Well Peter Lillback, @WestminsterTS President and founder of the explicitly #WhiteChristianNationalist @TheProvForum, wants more $$ even though, "by His grace" they've raised $33 million for his cathedral of polemical patriarchy. 3/12
The magazine continues telling us about the Future of @WestminsterTS with a contribution by David Garner, who like Lillback and a bunch of other faculty, is a dude and has his PhD from ... wait for it ... @WestminsterTS. 4/12
And while we're talking about the @WestminsterTS faculty, let's check on the magazine's Faculty News and Update page. Are we sensing a theme? 5/12
Perhaps my favorite section is an interview with "Dr. [DMin, btw] Harry Reeder III of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama."

Apparently the following action by the church Reeder pastors doesn't clash enough with @WestminsterTS vision? 6/12 npr.org/2019/06/20/734…
The magazine is sure to include a picture of Reeder chatting with Garner. There's some great @WestminsterTS energy here! 7/12
...and we're not done with this "two old dudes chatting" @WestminsterTS energy. Some really A+ work here in "Looking Ahead to Westminster's Future." 8/12
Still no contributions from women. But the magazine's editors did find SEVEN pages to feature an address from 55 years ago by one of @WestminsterTS's many White male presidents! 9/12
Oh cool. On the last page we finally get a contribution from a woman. It's a poem. And unlike every other contributor, Whitney Rivera is not pictured.

Serious voice: this is a fantastic representation of how conservative culture in the US does "inclusion of women." 10/12
For a final sense of @WestminsterTS consistency, let's check out how they addressed the envelope.

Aside from the patriarchy, I guess any resident will work for them? It's also Dr. Young, but nevermind that. 11/12
A friend once quipped that WTS slogan should be: "@WestminsterTS: Preparing Tomorrow's Pastor's for Yesterday."

But as with all White Conservative historical imagination, it's a "yesterday" that erases everyone else and authorizes only them. Same vision for the future! 12/12

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More from @SLYProfessor

May 16, 2023
I'll play! "Men who have sex with men" is a (bad) translation of οὔτε μαλακοὶ οὔτε ἀρσενοκοῖται. What ἀρσενοκοίτης means is debated, but μαλακός means soft or effeminate and can refer to a man who lets self be penetrated or a man who excessively penetrates too many women 1/
This is basic in the study of μαλακός in ancient Greek texts discussing moral stuff. As is common in ancient writings, it's a misogynist gendering of ethics that presumes being effeminate is bad, which is why Paul commands masculinization later in the letter (1 Cor 16:13). 2/ ImageImage
To clarify: this is the Patriarchy-Sexism equivalent to the longterm racist commonsense that (CONTENT WARNING) evaluated Black people based on how White they were behaving. It's a racist rubric for ethics just like effeminate-as-inferior is sexist trash 3/ amazon.com/White-Fright-S…
Read 8 tweets
May 2, 2023
🧵Folks often say 'It was central to Jesus to call God abba, which means daddy & reflects tender intimacy.' Ummm..

A) Mark 14:36 only time 'abba attributed to Jesus
B) GMark likely got it from Paul's letters
C) 'abba doesn't mean daddy
D) It's patriarchal & imperial ideology! 1/
Nerdy historical point first: To most folks it feels intuitive that the New Testament Gospels are a basic foundation for everything else about Jesus and early Christianity. After all, they appear first when you open a New Testament. They also have narratives about Jesus

BUT.. 2/
From historical and literary vantage point, the idea that the NT Gospels were foundational for everything else is precisely backwards.
-They're among the latest writings of the NT
-Paul's letters were earliest
-Writers of NT Gospels likely wrote in the literary shadows of Paul 3/
Read 18 tweets
Nov 3, 2022
It's ordinary in public spaces to hear folks who promote homophobia talk about 'What the Bible clearly says'

Though Bible should be irrelevant for deciding if homophobia is terrible (It is!), it's instructive to dissect such problematic chatter and what it hides.
Let's go! 🧵1/
Let's start with this everyday dudebro. He regurgitates 'Bible plainly says' chatter and makes accusations about 'changing' and 'twisting' Bible to make "the same talk" about "unnatural" gay sex in Jude 7 and Romans 1 vanish.

So what does "the Bible say" in these passages? 2/
Jude 7's ἀπελθοῦσαι ὀπίσω σαρκὸς ἑτέρας is not "unnatural desire," but something like 'pursued other flesh.'

Rom 1:27's language is οἱ ἄρσενες ἀφέντες τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν τῆς θηλείας: "The men gave up the natural use of women."

"Unnatural" is in neither. Oops. 3/
Read 15 tweets
Oct 31, 2022
🧵I am once again asking folks to stop pretending Paul's voice in 1 Corinthians 11:1-16 is liberative and egalitarian for women. This requires erasing its participation in violently misogynist ideals about men and women. Patriarchy reproduces itself by erasing its violence 1/4
Paul's logics are premised on making subordination & even inferiority of women seem "natural." Like many other contemporary texts, to extent he envisions legit women's leadership, it's only insofar as it aligns with patriarchal norms. This is really basic for study of gender. 2/4
There are great resources on 1 Cor 11's uses of wider patriarchal ideals.

See @ProfSMatthews's "'To Be One and the Same with the Woman Whose Head Is Shaven': Resisting the Violence of 1 Cor 11:2-16 from the Bottom of the Kyriarchal Pyramid" 3/4 amazon.com/Sexual-Violenc…
Read 5 tweets
Oct 16, 2022
🧵 If your normative approach is, "Assume I've misunderstood and keep looking until there's an interpretation that keeps the Bible inerrant," then accurate reading is subordinated to maintaining the Bible's reputation.

This makes you a cheerleader, not a 'truthful' reader. 1/5
It's worth noting that scholars have argued 1 Cor 14:33b-35 may be a later interpolation for reasons not related to inerrancy. The fact that Phil needed an inerrancy anxiety to think in different ways about the text tells us more about his issues, not academic reading methods 2/5
The reading strategies of Biblical Inerrancy are driven by reverence for Bible and its reputation.

As Bruce Lincoln argued in his infamous article, "Theses on Method" (MTSR 8 [1996]), within Religious Studies, "Reverence is a religious, and not a scholarly virtue." 3/5
Read 5 tweets
Oct 14, 2022
My turn...

People: "tHe bIBlE Is clEaR!"
The Bible: "No, I'm really not."
Jesus: "Hold my beer!"

More seriously: a 🧵🧵 about "The Clarity of Scripture" in Christian rhetoric. Let's go! 1/ ImageImage
While not the earliest articulation of clarity of Bible, the 17th century Westminster Confession of Faith 1.7 is incredibly influential in genealogies of Euro-US conserv Christianity. Note, as @jrdkirk has long joked, it commences emphatically with NON-clarity of Scripture 2/ Image
Similarly to WCF 1.7, most of the Confessional articulations of the Clarity (or, "Perspicuity") of Scripture emphasize (a) much of Bible not actually clear to all and (b) it's "the things which are necessary ... for salvation" that are "clear." Are we clear on this?! 3/
Read 21 tweets

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