Amy Peeler on Reading the Bible as a White Woman

Amy Peeler is a New Testament professor at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and an associate priest at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Geneva, Illinois. Her recent books include Ordinary Time: The Season of Growth (IVP Formation, January 2026), Hebrews (Eerdmans, 2024) and Women and the Gender of God (Eerdmans, 2022). She co-edited The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary (IVP Academic, 2024). In this edited conversation, she discusses how gender and race affect the way people read and understand the Bible.

In what ways might reading the Bible as a woman differ from reading the Bible as a man?

For centuries, biblical interpreters, seminarians, and preachers were taught to check their identities and experiences at the door as they studied the scriptures. They thought, as Kathy Smith said at the 2025 Calvin Symposium on Worship, that setting aside our own experiences when interpreting the Bible would help us arrive at a “‘pure’ understanding untouched by bias.” More recently, scholars such as Ekaputra Tupamahu have documented how this “pure understanding” of the Bible is strongly shaped by Euro-American white men.

People are beginning to realize that it’s important to learn from people different from ourselves. We are all shaped by our social location—our ethnicity, language, culture, family, economics, gender, ability, and more. Discussions about our diversity are exciting, but also scary, because we worry about saying the wrong thing. It is only in the last three years or so that I’ve become more comfortable about bringing my own embodiment into the pulpit. Sometimes it is in what I say, other times it is simply the tone or pathos in how I communicate God’s word.

Can you give an example?

I used my gender as a lens for preaching on the feast of presentation, when Mary and Joseph took their forty-day-old son to the temple. I had been struck by the Luke 2 account of how, when the Holy Spirit revealed the Messiah to Simeon, he took the baby from his parents’ arms. In an act of imaginative reading, I wondered about the gut level fear—“No, don’t take my baby!”—they might have felt about someone who was a stranger to them. Then I realized that Simeon would’ve given the baby back when he needed breastfeeding.

The lectionary in my tradition joins the Luke 2 text with a Hebrews 2 text about how all of humanity fears death. But Christ entered and defeated death for us. I used that as a platform to think about our fear of dying and the fear of losing a child to death or a life that’s not worth living. Afterward, an older woman remarked, ‘Only a mother could have preached that sermon.’” Male commentators don’t normally talk about the fascinating embodied reality of breastfeeding. But my lens as a mother and parent revealed a commonality that many of us identify with.

Why did you write your book Women and the Gender of God?

Most Christian theologians hold that God is not gendered. Yet picturing God the Father as male is part and parcel of traditional Christianity. The words and actions of a shocking number of followers of the Christian God have not displayed a robust esteem for women, to say the least. I show that God the Father is not male in the way that sexed created beings are male. This is important, because if you believe the false idea that men are more like God than women are, then it is easier to devalue and mistreat women.

I write about Mary, the mother of God, to address where women fit in the family of God. The incarnation was not sexual. Rather, God honored and granted agency to Mary by inviting her to bear God the Son. She said yes and changed the fabric of the universe. God chose to be enfleshed in a woman’s body. Jesus is a male like no other because his Father was not a created being. The fact that God chose to have a mother proves the audacious claim that God does indeed value—and work through—women.

What do you say to people who believe that the New Testament values men more than women?

Based on the prominence of men in the Bible and how Paul has been interpreted, students sometimes ask whether God values men more than women. In our “Gender in the New Testament” essay in The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary (NTIC), Lisa M. Bowens and I write with conviction and joy that the Bible is a good word for all, including women.

The virginal conception proclaims that God became human and did so by considering the body and life of a woman worthy of the presence of God. The story of Mary and Martha shows that, for Jesus, a woman’s place is first and foremost as a disciple. That the resurrected Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene and other women shows that Mary and the other women became the evangelists to the evangelists. If God was truly opposed to women telling the good news to men, Jesus would not have appeared to them first. At the first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit fell on men and women. Paul’s epistles reveal that he wanted women to be educated, knew that Corinthian women were prophesying and praying in worship, and praised the work of female disciples like Priscilla, Phoebe, and Junia.

How can Christians best talk about God speaking through women?

Christians with many different views on gender roles can affirm the points of agreement I just mentioned. The affirmations create common ground on which all can stand and then respectfully dialogue about different applications of these principles. I only hope that all my work encourages people to read the Bible more and more closely. When they do, I am completely confident that they will discover that the Bible portrays God as transcendent (and therefore not a sexed created being) and that God delights to work through both men and women.

Christians can best talk about God speaking through women by proclaiming the passages of the Bible in which that happens as well as by listening to contemporary women who are speaking prophetically. I also hope readers will notice that many biblical examples, chiefly in the life of Jesus, free men from the bondage of an oppressive masculinity. Strength is expressed not in domination, but in confident humility and service.

How does being a woman who is also white affect the way you read the Bible?

I thought about Whiteness a lot while co-editing NTIC. White privilege can obscure biblical truths. Maybe we need to be liberated from our sense of self-sufficiency. Maybe if you are doing well, you might not think you need the incarnation and resurrection. But people from cultures affected by poverty and racism remind us that we all need Jesus to get through the day. Jordan R. Cruz Ryan’s chapter on Acts taught me that no English word captures the biblical concept of koinōnia, but the Filipino word bayanihan does. I also very much appreciate the Indigenous perspective that calls attention to natural and creational elements in the New Testament that I had missed. This came through in the NTIC Turtle Island biblical interpretation essay by T. Christopher Hoklotubbe (Choctaw) and H. Daniel Zacharias (Cree-Anishinaabe) and Zacharias’s chapter on Matthew.

At the 2025 Calvin Symposium on Worship, a white female preacher mentioned that she uses lots of slides in sermons but never includes “white Jesus.” She wondered whether that’s a good approach. I replied that I can imagine people of majority cultures wanting to lift up only quotes from other cultures. But remember that it is important to share your own voice too. Your community is called to hear the voice of the Spirit through you.This means examining the bruises and the gifts of our particularities, as we own and feel comfort in our own selves.

What did you learn about Whiteness while co-writing your NTIC essay with Lisa M. Bowens?

Lisa teaches New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her books include African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation (Eerdmans, 2020) and Do Black Lives Matter?: How Christian Scriptures Speak to Black Empowerment (Cascade, 2023), written with Dennis R. Edwards. I am annoyingly positive and wanted to rush too quickly into how the New Testament is good news for women. Lisa made me slow down, interpret with sobriety, and immerse myself in the grit of what women experience. This slowing down helped me realize that women are often oppressed not just because of gender or class but also because of race.

Lisa made our essay better by explaining that, in a time when Americans debated whether Black people had souls and thought of enslaved African Americans as property, nineteenth-century Black women accepted God’s invitation to lead. Preachers such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote grasped the importance of women in the New Testament and in the early church. By doing so, they seized the significance of these narratives for themselves. Lisa’s brief profiles of these preachers illustrate how the biblical text shaped their identity, their call, and their relationship with God and society.

What else did you learn from co-editing The New Testament in Color?

My friend, colleague, and neighbor Esau McCaulley came up with the idea for NTIC. I remember him telling me that many commentaries by minority scholars are single volumes or monographs. When biblical interpreters of color are invited to be part of a commentary volume or series, they’re often pushed not to mention race or how Whiteness affects biblical interpretation. Esau said NTIC needed a white editor and white contributors to proclaim with clarity that we are all ethnicities. In other words, there is not one given (white) and then everyone else is different. That is white supremacy. I agreed with him.

But when he asked me to be the white editor, I worried about saying the wrong thing. Then I realized that trusted friends, many of whom were part of NTIC, would correct me. We started NTIC never realizing that it would be birthed into a world where the very idea of diversity is under attack. It brings many voices into one volume and celebrates theological convictions we share. But it doesn’t pretend to come to this unity in Christ by squishing down our differences or pretending that we are color blind or gender blind. We name the differences honestly so that we can learn from each other. We need the voices of interpreters from many times, places, and perspectives because there is still more that God desires to reveal through thoughtful engagement with biblical texts.