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CURRENTLY IN BOOKS
A Mennonite-feminist look at Mark

Tim Geddert

Obedience, Suspicion and the Gospel Of Mark: A Mennonite-Feminist Exploration Of Biblical Authority
Lydia Neufeld Harder. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998.

What do anabaptism and feminism have in common? Too little, claims Lydia Neufeld Harder. Each can learn from the other. While anabaptism adopts authority structures too uncritically, feminism is too uncritically suspicious of these. In dialogue with each other, these two perspectives could embrace aspects of the other’s and thus avoid significant dangers and abuses. This challenging book calls for dialogue and the creation of a hermeneutical community that can wrestle with theological approaches beyond our own comfort zones.

Harder, who calls her work an “experiment in feminist thought,” writes, “My involvement in a particular tradition that stressed obedience to biblical authority seemed to clash directly with a developing feminist consciousness that looked with suspicion on this very same authority. This study took on the character of a wrestling with God as I sought to clarify the significant connections [and] major distinctions between a hermeneutics of obedience and a hermeneutics of suspicion.”

Alongside “obedience” and “suspicion,” this book is about Mark’s Gospel. Harder’s “Mennonite-Feminist” reading of Mark illuminates some of Mark’s interesting paradoxical features, especially those relating to power and weakness, authority and servanthood, and conflict with and submission to those who abuse power.

Harder claims Mark wrote for a community that “probably experienced the misuse of power both from within and from without. Both the unmasking of personal power and the subversion of structures of power point to the need in the community for a deeper understanding and experience of God’s power.”

This book is for those willing to have their assumptions challenged and their minds (and theological vocabulary) stretched.

Tim Geddert is Associate Professor of New Testament at MB Biblical Seminary, Fresno, Calif.

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Last modified October 13, 1999.

© 1999 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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