Book Review: My Brother's Keeper: What the Social Sciences Do & Don't Tell Us About Masculinity, by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

An intellectual yet readable book about what social sciences have gleaned about masculinity.  And of course it was written from a Christian world view, because it is published by Intervarsity Press.  I bought it at Urbana Missions Conference back in December 2003. 

I feel that I want to write an extended review.  Because I think it is unlikely that anyone else will read this book.  I'm not slamming it.  I just don't think you will find it in your bookstore or hear about it from anyone else.  So I shall summarize it for thee.  So I will write just a little at a time.

Chapter 2 - The Biblical Drama and the Gendered Powers

Van Leeuwen touched upon the issue of interpretation of the Bible - how some fundamentalists take things all too literally.  In this discussion, she is concerned about the Biblical teaching about gender of course.  

"In its extreme form, this approach turns the Bible into something like a dictionary or encyclopedia, where almost any reference to men and women is grist for a fixed set of gendered behaviors.  This tendency to treat the Bible as a "flat book" owes much to the legacy of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that arose in North America early in the twentieth century.  While claiming to challenge 'godless science' with a high view of Scripture, fundamentalists still let the positivest norms of modern science dictate the terms of the debate.  That is, they uncritically bought the notion that truth could be packaged only in scientifically or historically literal form, though they included in the latter category statements inspired by God and recorded in Scripture."

On the other side, the liberal theologians and some scientists also erred in their beliefs by incorrectly assuming that science is completely free of bias.  "To do effective science....you need to have some prior idea of what it is you are looking for and what it means"

The following excerpt is a slam dunk in favor of science from a Christian world view:

"...Other things being equal (such as native ability and good training) scholars in any discipline who view their subject through the lens of Christian faith are no less 'biased' or 'unscholarly' than ones who do so through the lens of a naturalistic or Marxist or any other worldview.  In fact, it is more honest and fruitful to do scholarship from the standpoint of an acknowledged worldview that can be candidly analyzed and discussed than to presume one is working from a position of impossible neutrality behind which a worldview will be operating anyway" 

Besides this discussion being interesting by itself, Van Leeuwen goes on to explain that the gospel message is that there is now equality between men and women, and all people.  And this is not promoting hegemony (I learned new words, by the way), which means men and women are the same, but just promoting equality.  Paul's statements in the New Testament that command women to keep quiet and in the background must be explained in the context of the Greco-Roman, which was very male dominated.  Van Leeuwen quotes from another book:

"Paul hoped to earn Christians protection from outside hostility by advising them to conform to the public honor codes of the Greco-Roman world.  At the same time he subverted this very world by developing ideas that led Christians to contradict this code in their private lives"

I was actually excited when I read this, because I feel that Scripture is sometimes hard to understand.  And when something is explained in the historical context in a way that makes sense, it kind of lifts a burden off of my shoulders.  So this was just the beginning, I will keep going later!