years old. Her Kittel’s New Testament dictionary was safely on the shelf in the new house because those ten volumes had filled a box of their own. She always found it difficult to consider her New Testament dictionary, especially when she had Galatians 3:28 on the back burner. Here was a brilliant man and a great scholar of the New Testament who could interpret Paul’s letter to the Galatians and enthusiastically and anti-Semitically support the Nazis. The text had not been the problem, but the cultural blind spot of the man. Dr. Schaeffer had several times reminded her that all of us have blind spots that we bring to the Scripture. But Nora prayed with all her heart that God would make her a Bonhoeffer—not a Kittel.
She missed the Keyword Study Bible that Luke had given her soon after Blythe was born, her old Greek and Hebrew Lexicons, and other basic tools. Hmmm . . . maybe she should start doing even more research online? Others felt they saved time, but she didn’t think she could. The lost books were places, not digital spaces, where she could immediately find what she needed. Books didn’t get viruses or glitches. They didn’t bombard one with advertising in the privacy of one’s own desk. One only had to learn to use them once. They didn’t suddenly disappear for a mysterious reason. She was very thankful for the convenience and vastness of the private academic databases on the library website, but she loved her books more. Why did she feel the loss of her books so much when research experiences in cyberspace were open to her? After all, her books could disappear from a moving van. Perhaps she was the technological stick-in-the-mud her children thought her?
Looking through her windshield, Nora explored her ambivalence to entering the store as she looked at the facade. It was a well-designed, timber frame, three-story, mountain style building with beautiful stonework, huge timbers and three-story-high open beams. Why didn’t she like going to these places? It contained many expressions of the gospel she loved. It encouraged and supported many local churches and promoted worship, concepts dear to her heart.
American culture seemed always to press faith into an isolated cubby entitled “Religion,” and this business, perhaps because it was a business, seemed to challenge that marginalization. If one’s child had been asking for a new puzzle, one might choose one of Jonah and the whale or Noah’s ark rather than SpongeBob Square Pants or a Disney character. The choice itself seemed to break down barriers between faith and daily life. Nevertheless, she knew the feeling of rejection she was likely to encounter. She anticipated that old feeling of being out of sync with the church, of somehow not belonging properly to Christ’s body, indeed, of not being seen as fully human.
Sure, there were cultural gaps. The store was far too upscale to reconcile with the poor church she loved in Kenya. It was too open for the persecuted church she loved in Uzbekistan. It was too individualistic for the liturgy and High-Church aesthetics she loved when she was working on her PhD in the Church of Wales. And no city the size of Poplar in Western Europe could financially support such a business with their tiny percentage of evangelical Christians. The irrelevance reached far deeper. For in these sorts of expressions of Christianity, she always felt rejected for who she was. She foresaw the oncoming dissonance between her identity and her spiritual community. She prepared herself for the nice, passive, silent onslaught with Galatians 3:28.
Last week Nora had read another “complementarian” defend the passage from “those evangelical feminists” who used it as a “panacea.” But the argument had seemed hopelessly weak. The more she studied the passage in context, the better it made her feel—nobody could deny that. It seemed to Nora a clarion call to unity with profoundly panacean tendencies, indeed, a cultural cure-all. She was a female person united to Christ, and that qualified her to claim the promises in the text and establish her unique place in the body of Christ. Something else about the passage could not be denied, and that was that it was a parallelism. Whatever the nature of the differences in the classes of people and its divisiveness in the church, it was the same for Jews and Gentiles, people on the low and high ends of the socioeconomic ladder, and men and women. If it was clearly wrong for one antonymic class of people, it would be wrong for all three. And if it was right for a contrasting class, it would be right for the other two.
After four more recitations of Galatians 3:28, she exited the four-wheeled confines of her personal space, clicked the padlock icon on her Subaru key, and entered the zeitgeist of Contemporary American Christianity and one milieu of her faith.
The dramatic wood and glass doors opened automatically into a three-story foyer toward the back of which ran a U-shaped service counter with several clerk stations. A broad oaken double staircase rose to the second floor from behind the counter. A middle-aged woman with excellent taste in clothes and make-up, greeted her with a friendly, “Good morning, may I help you find anything?”
“Perhaps you could point the way to your reference section?” asked Nora as she pulled a clipboard out of her backpack.
“Reference works are on the third floor at the back of the store. Another associate is up there. There is an elevator there if you prefer.” She motioned to an alcove behind and under the staircase.
Nora headed up the stairs with a simple, “Thank you.”
On her way up the stairs she noticed that the large room to the right of the foyer with many rows of stacks had a sign above its entrance that said, “Women.” So, when she got to the back of the third floor, she looked for a sign of the same design that said, “Bible Reference.”
Expecting a sign over the top of the doorway like “Women,” a few minutes passed before she found her objective. The sign was waist high because the reference section only covered the bottom three shelves of the small stack. Nora sighed with disappointment and stared at the miniscule collection. She sat down on the floor to see the one shelf of interest to her—the bottom shelf. Next to some Unger’s handbooks and dictionaries, she saw The New Strong’s Concordance with Vine’s Dictionary. As she was reaching for it, she heard steps approaching. They came to a halt beside her. She looked up. A tall, lean man of indeterminate middle age smiled down at her from above his clerical collar. But when he looked at the sign and its corresponding works, his smile fell off. “Oh, dear, I was expecting a better selection—it’s such a large store. This is rather scanty.”
Nora felt the tug of personal connection and agreed, “Positively meager.”
“Well,” he replied, “I need the new edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible, but apparently my choice is between Amazon, for which I’ll need to wait a week, and an e-book, which will have no friendly pages to turn . . . Oh, I see you’re thinking about the new Strong’s; I highly recommend it. Having Vine’s dictionary in the same volume is rather convenient.”
“We just lost a box of reference books in a move; this will replace two birds with one stone,” she remarked.
“Oh, dear,” he said with a genuine note of sympathy. “That would be a hard loss. My family and I also recently moved here, but without a serious mishap. Everything arrived, and only some trifles weren’t in one piece. What’s a thrift store crock pot and an old lamp compared to a concordance?”
Nora chuckled and asked herself why she had been so reluctant to enter this store. “Do you serve a church here in Poplar?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Are you a Catholic priest?”
“Wrong,” he said with a grin. “Guess again.”
“A Lutheran?” came the next query.
“No, I am an Anglican pastor.”
“Really, my husband and I have been looking for a church, and we hadn’t noticed that there was an Anglican church in Poplar. Are you with St. Mark’s Episcopal?”
