Nora looked back to the H’s for a serious attempt to establish the status quo of these stacks with biblical scholarship. But no, not even an influential champion of their own before 1985, like James B. Hurley’s Man and Woman in Biblical Perspective, was represented. Strange, thought Nora, that the “complementarian” position that separates equality of essence from equality of function should so often be referred to as the “traditional” view, for it is so utterly brand new.
1. Crabb, Fully Alive, 21.
Chapter 2
Receive my instruction, and not silver,
And knowledge rather than choice gold;
For wisdom is better than rubies,
And all the things one may desire cannot be compared with her.
—Proverbs 8:10–11
Having proven many times the stereotype of the absentminded professor by walking into someone else’s assembled classroom, Dr. Shaw checks her watch—almost ten o’clock, and the number on the door—206. She then pauses just a moment to invoke her heavenly teaching muse. “Please give me good questions; make me quick to ask and slow to tell.”
At 9:55 the Avery halls surge with the between-lecture swarms, the hive ashift. In six minutes those halls will be almost deserted, filled only with a distant buzz of merged professorial voices.
The classroom is about half full. The teacher sees the active, worker-students tuck into their desk-shaped cells poised to produce sweet knowledge, wisdom, and truth. The professor queen produces a variety of pheromone assignments, lectures, and discussions that regulate the behavior of the workers. But the workers choose her, and she is there only to serve their need for intellectual fertility; they generally respect and appreciate her for her service to them.
But occasionally, somewhere in the comb of desks, a passive, stingless drone-student merely occupies his or her waxen nest. These students serve the queen only, nothing higher, and that with as little work as possible. They have no function apart from service to her, and the queen is, therefore, always a tyrant to them. Believing grade A honey will fill them through the action of the queen, they idly avoid the discipline and thought that produce grade A honey, and consequently live in a perpetual and anxious state of cognitive dissonance. Wanting only the A and doing little to earn it, passive students have no joy in the relational or educational process and become mere desk-warmers, place-takers in an impersonal social system of geometrical purposelessness, grinding out an almost meaningless degree.
Workers serve the community in diverse ways according to many specializations and gifts; they ask interesting questions as they seek to bring the ideas in great literature to bear upon their own lives and understanding; they look for relevance and connections; they are drawn into conversation and relationships with peers and professors; their vast differences in background and personal temperament enrich their classrooms and turn those classrooms into microcosms of society. Workers believe in the existence of a state called ignorance which they want to avoid and in the existence, however nebulous, of a quality called wisdom which they want to absorb.
Drones are haploid, male only, unifunctional. Drones are careful never to learn anything that won’t be on the exam. They willingly accept an impersonal place in the educational mill and don’t mind becoming, with their degree, ground-out products for sale. Drones come to a university only to get prepared to earn a living in a way that deconstructs the abundant life. Lucky for the hive that workers far outnumber drones.
Nora Shaw opens her backpack, pulls out a stack of thirty-five reading quizzes on the Sumerian myth The Descent of Inanna, lays them on the table at the front of the classroom, and announces, “You may begin your quiz when you are ready to close your textbook.” The workers realize she’s giving them fifteen minutes to take a ten-minute quiz. They have extra time to think and craft articulate answers. They thankfully smile as they come forward to pick up their quizzes. Drones are always irritated when a professor begins before the top of the hour. The two drones see, but cannot hear, what is happening and keep their earbuds in.
At 10:04, breathless and sweaty from the jog from Walker Hall, Jason Critcher quietly slips into a desk near the door. The worker bee meets the queen’s eye with a genuine apologetic smile; she returns the smile with one of her own that reassures him that the tardy will not be recorded. She thinks, “The administration is correct; the hike from fourth-floor Walker to second-floor Avery can be made in ten minutes, but barely. If one has a long-winded calculus professor and both a calculus textbook and a world lit anthology in one’s backpack, it cannot be done.”
At 10:07, Andrew Mitchell, who asked to be called Drew, strolls casually and confidently across the front of the class, and takes a seat on the far side with a very polite and very disruptive greeting. The queen feels an undercurrent of disrespect in the drone’s surface chivalry. His tidy loafers, creased khakis, and buttoned-down collar do not bespeak hurry. As he sits down, he looks the queen squarely in the eye. She sees arrogant challenge rather than apology.
She ponders, “How does one write an attendance policy in a syllabus for Jasons and Andrews?” The usual strategy crafts a strict policy to protect the administration and the professor from the complaints of drones and then ignores the policy in the majority cases of cooperative workers. All students then note the irrelevance of the syllabus and don’t bother to read it. Getting a new syllabus is like getting an owner’s manual with a new hair dryer. One plugs it in and turns it on, not needing to read again that “electrical appliances should not be submerged or the plastic bags they come in slipped over the heads of toddlers.” It is only given to protect the manufacturer, not to help the user. Getting students to read the helpful parts of a syllabus is like a flight attendant getting passengers to “pay close attention” to their four thousandth lesson on how to buckle a seat belt. One is simply tuned out.
At 10:10 Dr. Shaw directs the class to “please pass your quiz to a classmate and pull out your green pen for editing.” Amid the now-rustling class, Rachel and Crystal exchange papers and rummage in backpacks for a green pen. Rachel is a nursing major who told her professor during an office visit that she wants to work in a developing country with a missionary organization. She is one of two very dissimilar homeschooled students in that section of ancient world lit. Although well-prepared for university work in terms of knowledge, Dr. Shaw suspects her imagination is semi-dormant and her critical sense unexercised. The professor thinks her family must be of the “Christ-against culture” mindset in which holiness means to retreat from the world and to circle the wagons in self-defense, rather than to go forth as salt and light into the world. Her demeanor is confident and her countenance open, but a yawning chasm exists between her and even her Christian women classmates. Her modest, comfortable jean skirt, long simple hairstyle, and cotton-print blouse advertise an utter indifference to fashion from which the more fashionable Christian girls seek to distance themselves. The professor approves her desire to live in a developing culture, for she is relationally handicapped in her own. In the mountains of Ecuador or the highlands of Kenya, nobody will notice she is clueless of her own culture, and her concern for them will prompt her to learn about their culture. Dr. Shaw especially likes Rachel and sees the potential that this course has to enrich her intellectual life.
If only Crystal had some of Rachel’s indifference to pop culture and some of her self-confidence. Crystal is poured into jeans two sizes too small. Some of her extra pounds billow out in the broad gap between her hip-huggers and the bottom of her tight tank top. To her teacher, Crystal seems desperate to conform to worldly expectations that are, according to Jean Kilbourne, “killing her softly.” Her immodesty advertises her need to be attractive to men. Her identity seems dominated by her sexual appeal. Dr. Shaw hopes the literature will draw Crystal, who is a worker, into new interests. Servat Kalpar, who sits next to Crystal, sympathizes with her classmate from inside her hijab; “These poor, loose American women have lost their self-respect.”