The Androcentrism of Scripture

Biblical scholarship will never yield Bibles full of women. Nonetheless, closer scrutiny and improved methods in this expanding field have shown a remarkable and often overlooked tradition of female authority. Further, critical attention to the history of Biblical interpretation has revealed two and a half millennia of repeated efforts to suppress traditions of female authority and to present misogynistic readings as normative. Most modern appeals to biblical precedent on this subject fail to account and adjust for the cultural medium and biases by which that precedent was established. Reconstructing a world based on a thoroughly androcentric text produces a thoroughly androcentric world. Recognizing this, biblical scholars like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza have largely abandoned the attempt to recover a robustly egalitarian ministry between the pages of the text partly because it results in the misguided search for pristine origins that conform to the observer’s desired view of the future. Instead Schüssler Fiorenza focuses, as I will here, on possibilities opened by historical accounts in which the struggle between egalitarianism and hierarchy is visible, thereby revealing a past not so dissonant with the present. Attention to the implicit and explicit evidence of struggle within the text has the potential to inform current discourses.

-Cory Crawford, Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 48, No. 2

Lowell Bennion - On Institutionalism

There is always the danger that the fraternity will work to enhance itself rather than to serve its members; that the army will perpetuate itself and its own interest above service to the country...Religion does not always escape this limitation of institutions.  If leaders are not careful, the church becomes the end and the people the means of building and supporting it.

Lowell Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth pg. 95-96

Men have a perfect right to claim authority from God.  Granted his existence, there ar egood reasons to believet hat he would call and authorize men to be his servants on earth.  Authority implies a legal or rightful command without which orderly social action is quite impossible.  The principle of authoritarianism, by contrast, discounts man's ability to rule himself and advocates in principle the right of men to rule over their fellow men.  In this system of government authority is not looked upon as a necessary means of achieving desirable human goals, but rather as an end in itself.  In political science a dictatorshp is authoritarian; in religion any action that is carried out simply by reason of one's office and calling, with no regard for the value of that action in terms of religious purpose and principle, may be called authoritarian.

Lowell Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth pg. 116

Authority is not a way of discovering truth, but is a method of transmitting knowledge gained in other ways.  And no one has the right to be authoritative in any field of knowledge--in science, philosophy, or religion--who has not earned that right by having gained knowledge and insight through reason, experience, or revelation.

-Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (pg. 27)

Blind, submissive followers in any field, be it in government, science, or religion, lack the ability to discriminate between truth and error, good and evil, and between the weightier and lesser matters of the law.  They hardly have a soul to call their own.  This kind of discipleship is not befitting a Latter-day Saint.  He believes in giving loyalty and respect to political and religious authority; but at the same time, as a child of God endowed with free agency and the Holy Ghost, he senses his responsiblility to be a thoughtful and whole-souled disciple of Jesus Christ.  he will follow those who have earned the right to be his leaders.  And he will follow them with understanding and conviction, not with blindness or indifference.

-Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (pg. 27)

People who accept the truth simply on the authority of others are prone to shift full responsibility to such authority for their own thought and behavior...In religion some people prefer to follow blindly their leaders, who they believe will guarantee their salvation.

-Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (pg. 27)