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

"It [the revelation extending priesthood to all worthy males] is a tremendous thing. It came as a result of great effort and prayer, anxious seeking and pleading. Anyone who does not think that is a part of receiving revelation does not understand the process." -Gordon B. Hinckley, interview with Ed Kimball on July 12, 1978

Orson Pratt - Diligently Seeking the Gifts

This failure to realize all the blessings and powers of the Priesthood does not apply to the elders and lesser Priesthood only; but it applies to the higher quorums, and comes home to ourselves, who are Apostles of Jesus Christ. We are presented before the Church, and sustained as prophets, seers and revelators, and we have received oftentimes the gift of prophecy and revelation, and have received many great and glorious gifts. But have we received the fullness of the blessings to which we are entitled? No, we have not. Who, among the Apostles have become seers, and enjoy all the gifts and powers pertaining to that calling? And those who are called to perform special missions in opening up dispensations of the Gospel to the children of men, as Joseph and others were called of the Lord, He endows more fully with these gifts; but this does not hinder others from enjoying similar gifts according to His promises, and according to our faithfulness. And I have thought the reason why we have not enjoyed these gifts more fully is, because we have not sought for them as diligently as we ought. I speak for one, I have not sought as diligently as I might have done. More than forty years have passed away since these promises were made. I have been blessed with some revelations and prophecies, and with dreams of things that have come to pass; but as to seeing things as a seer, and beholding heavenly things in open vision, I have not attained to these things. And who is to blame for this? Not the Lord; not brother Joseph—they are not to blame. And so it is with the promises made to you in your confirmations and endowments, and by the patriarchs, in your patriarchal blessings; we do not live up to our privileges as saints of God and elders of Israel; for though we receive many blessings that are promised to us, we do not receive them in their fullness, because we do not seek for them as diligently and faithfully as we should.

-Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses 25:145-146