Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

Like most of you, I have quite a few Bibles.

I’m not into having a lot of stuff, not because I’m a liberal trying to live simply so that others may simply live, but because I don’t want or need much, and I don’t have a lot of space to fill with knick-knacks, quirky collectibles, or decorative accessories. Our house is small; the living room appears much smaller than it is because of the two huge 6-ft. tall bookcases that, groaning under the weight of the Emerine-Mix Family Library, Sections One and Two, flank the entry.

But I like having my Bibles close at hand, and I regularly cycle through about ten of them — enormous study Bibles with tiny print, “compact” Bibles easily tossed into a messenger bag or large purse, some text-only, others with concordances, maps, and translation notes. A few are personalized and all are leather, gender-accurate (TNIV, NLT, GWT, NRSV, NAB, and NET), and full of evidence of my belief that reading is a contact sport. (Here’s a hint: Use Crayola twist-up crayons as highlighter/underliners!). I could, in a pinch (or at gunpoint), pare my collection down to half a dozen, not including my Spanish-language Nueva Version Internacional large print OR my NIV/NVI parallel. It wouldn’t be impossible, but, if I were forced by some Bible-confiscating atheist street gang to turn over all but a few, I’d get a little twitchy. Who knows? I might need to compare the NAB with the NET before going with the NRSV, all to make Prevailing Winds as vibrant a read as I intend for it.

So, please, someone — if you spy a group of CHristopher Hitchens-adoring street thugs swaggering down Third Street, burlap bags in hand, do let me know.

It’s established, then, that I buy a lot of Bibles, even though I’ve been trying to cut back. But I’m going to confess right here that rather than whittle down my Bible library, as I’ve promised Jeff I’ll do, I’m forced to make room for just one more addition — the Women’s Study Bible, NLT, edited and with study notes and articles by Catherine Clark Kroeger and Mary Evans, published by Oxford University Press. I’ve already placed my order, and come Thursday afternoon, I’ll begin a marathon frenzy of reading, noting, highlighting, flagging, and otherwise diving in to a study I’ve waited years for. Pass the Visine, please.

But before I talk about the joys of finally having a complete Bible edited by Clark Kroeger, a pioneer in the small but vibrant world of evangelical egalitarianism (which calls, based on Scripture, for gender equality and mutuality in the home, Church, and society), I will beg your patience while I go on a rant about “women’s” Bibles. You may want to usher the little ones upstairs . . .

My dismay at the plethora of Women’s Study Bibles available to evangelical women, who seemingly will buy anything covered in the aesthetic tragedy of Lime ‘n Melon Duo-Tone or featuring a soft-focus coffee cup on it, is legendary. I’m saddened by the Church’s incessant need to model the first-century customs, like sex segregation, that Jesus turned upside down by relating to women in the freeing, radically cross-cultural ways that he did. While our Savior commended Mary for choosing the better thing, Christian publishers have been enormously successful in herding women away from their studious and curious brothers and back into a world defined by home and hearth — promoting a Church full of Marthas at a time when it is radiant with Marys and needs all of them it can get.

I’ve long believed that Christian women need to be less concerned with being ladies and more concerned with being genuine, something that an emphasis on “lady-likeness” and femininity can’t accomplish. The discipleship of women is enhanced when we study from a Bible that, ironically and unfortunately, presumes a male readership in its notes and commentaries and thus emphasizes doctrine and a dynamic Christian life of evangelism, service, and wise, enthusiastic, use of gifts — which, sadly, has often been thought of as qualities appropriate primarily, if not exclusively, for men. “Women’s Bibles,” on the other hand, emphasize relationships — a wonderful thing, but unfruitful until men are encouraged to live relationally as well — and encourage the Christian disciplines of waiting, supporting, and enduring. Important traits, these are, but they’ve been used to unfairly and unfortunately keep gifted women at home when the world outside needs them, while also reinforcing to men that head knowledge and “rubber hitting the road” are sufficient virtues whose presence excuses them from the things of the heart.

And, of course, the tendency of Bible publishers to put out study or devotional Bibles for women in gender-inaccurate language (for example, “Blessed is the man who walketh not . . .”) is one of those sad, shocking ironies that make life interesting but convict us all. It’s hard to see how women benefit from gender-specific Bibles that wrongly, I believe, use language that, in its plain reading, excludes her from the blessings and growth every Christian, male and female, desires and is called to.

So while Jesus radically taught women and men together, in public and in private, and lauded one woman’s insistence on learning at the feet of her Rabbi, the publishing arm of the Church has sought out ways to comfort Martha and convert Mary. Catherine Clark Kroeger and Mary Evans will have none of it.

Clark Kroeger is one of my heroes, an evangelical feminist scholar whose exegesis of difficult New Testament passages regarding women and the church have benefited me more than any other single source. She writes eloquently of women and history, and is passionate in her lament of the domestic violence as prevalent in the families that make up the Church as in the families it’s charged to reach for Christ. Her commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture, her unapologetic egalitarianism, and her pursuit, well into her 70s, of ways to reach men and women with Christ’s Gospel of reconciliation and liberation — from both the sins we commit, and from the sins others commit that hurt us — doesn’t make her a conservative or a liberal. They make her a giant of the faith, a disciple of Jesus whose effect on me has been remarkable. Her work would change your life, too. The Spirit works mightily through her.

I’m not as well acquainted with Mary Evans’ work, but Clark Kroeger’s NRSV New Testament for Women, which she edited and contributed to with British theologian Elaine Storkey, was a solid source of exegesis and instruction with nary a hazy picture of a coffee cup or slice-of-life anecdote about menopause. Evans, then, is in good company here, and Oxford University Press should be commended for commissioning the project. This isn’t a “women’s Bible” for any reason other than it speaks to women with the same voice and in the same way as our Lord, the One who saves us not by his maleness, but by his human-ness, his flesh ripped apart on the cross so that we, his people, might be knit together as His Body. Clark Kroeger’s work helps make that unity more attainable, to the praise and glory of God.

Let your life be changed. Buy this Bible and invite your sisters and brothers to study from it with you. I’d like to hear how the Lord touches you through Clark Kroeger’s work!