I always like to know a little something about an author before I sit down and open up his or her book. Today, I’m excited to interview Kathleen Nielson, someone I admire and enjoy so much. Her newest book, Women and God: Hard Questions, Beautiful Truths, is an excellent and needed resource for the church. Kathleen proficiently unpacks difficult passages of Scripture that we sometimes want to avoid. On every page, she helps us wrestle with complex questions, while inviting us to embrace this beautiful truth: God is good to women. Women and God is available this week—I highly recommend it for both men and women.
- Can you tell us a little bit about yourself
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?Thanks, Melissa! I’m grateful for all the wonderful connecting you do with so many different women. Some of your readers might know me through my role as TGC’s director of women’s initiatives from 2010 to 2017; now I’m enjoying serving TGC in an editorial/advisory capacity. I’m 62 and relishing this stage of life, as God keeps lighting up the path ahead. My husband, Niel, and I have the joy of spending a lot of time in Indonesia, where God’s hand is evident on all sides. Niel is working with a group of Indonesian believers who are planting Christian schools throughout that country. We love time there, time with children and grandchildren at home in the Chicago area, and regular time also with my mother, who lives in Pennsylvania. I’m always working away on various writing/speaking projects and preparations, mostly in the context of teaching and training women in the Scriptures.
When did you first start writing? What do you enjoy about it?
I always loved reading and writing, and I’m grateful for parents and other people in my life who consistently encouraged those interests. My dad read the Bible out loud to us every night, which I think shaped my love of words and the Word. A few wonderful teachers along the way helped awaken me to the delight of words well put together; one high-school English teacher with a beautiful British accent changed my life by reading lines of poetry out loud, slowly, again and again. (People often mention those key teachers in their lives—so here’s a plug for the crucial vocation of teaching, especially teaching a love for and care with words!) There’s just nothing quite like the satisfaction of “a word fitly spoken” (Prov. 25:11).
Is writing ever difficult for you? How so?
Yes! Writing is almost always hard work. I don’t think too many writers live out that myth of seeing beautiful words just flow onto the page. The most challenging part is starting anything—whether a book or a chapter or an article. Once you start, and once you’ve labored long enough to get clear on what you really want to say, then momentum tends to build, and the process gets a bit easier and more fun. I always try to break at a place where the next sentence is ready and bursting, so that when I return it’s easier to keep going. But then of course there’s the challenge of going back to edit and discovering at least half of it needs a redo. (And, for me, the word count usually needs to be cut in half!)
What led you to write Women and God?
When The Good Book Company asked me to write a book about God’s view of women, I surprised myself by saying yes. Much of my writing has been in the area of expositional Bible study—and that area remains my passion. This topic, however, is one that comes knocking at all of our doors, and it’s crucial to think it through, to be ready to talk about it, and not just to accept but to celebrate God’s goodness to women. Of course, if we try to approach this topic apart from ongoing study of the Scriptures, book by book, we’ll get nowhere. However, in the context of such study, this topic lights up. The trajectory of the Bible’s themes about God’s female image bearers is amazing and beautiful. I’m glad I said yes to exploring them in this book.
What’s the central message you hope readers will take away from your book?
I hope readers will gain an even deeper conviction of God’s goodness in his creation and care of his female image-bearers. The world is full of voices that question this goodness, in all sorts of ways. How important to look directly into God’s inspired Word to discern his heart and mind in relation to women. This is not a “how to” book, but it’s a “see and celebrate” book: it points to God’s own revelation of his redeeming love in Christ for the human beings he created.
Many women I talk with are wondering how to explain from the Scriptures the goodness of God toward women. Some doubt this goodness. Others almost despair at the thought of passing on the Bible’s teaching about male and female to a younger generation seemingly so unprepared to listen or to call the teaching good. We might wish we could distill it all into an attractive formula.
This book gets at God’s goodness to women by watching it unfold through the biblical story from beginning to end. It’s tempting these days to imagine we can address hard questions with short, sound-byte answers. But the premise of Women and God is that biblical light on difficult issues breaks through as we take in the revelation of Scripture’s whole story of redemption, starting in Genesis with one man and one woman and culminating in the new heaven and earth with the church as the bride of Christ. The book only just scratches the surface of the story—but I hope by God’s grace I’ve scratched the surface in a way that will encourage many to dive down deep.
How has writing this book affected your own life/changed your own practice/made you think or act differently about your topic?
Here’s a rather random smattering of my takeaways:
* We all know the first three chapters of Genesis are foundational to our understanding of everything. But I think I had forgotten how absolutely magnificent they are! I went back to find the argument, and I rediscovered a narrative of the most amazing order and beauty.
* I came away grateful for every little bit of past Bible study that contributed to my work on this topic, but longing for more—longing to be richer in the stores of Scripture we need to interpret Scripture.
* Deborah is amazing. For some reason I’d seen her from a distance. She shines even brighter when you get close and really hear her sing.
* The topic of gender roles in the church is not self-contained. And it doesn’t just need cultural context and cross-references, although those help. It ultimately needs to be not an argument but a God-provided resolution to the revelation that began in Genesis 1.
* I know this even better now, and I want to know it better: the gender-related questions we struggle with all land right at Jesus’ sfeet. How Jesus loves me, how he loves his church, and how we love him is at the heart of all the Bible’s teachings on male and female, the church, singleness and marriage, and on and on. This book gets into a lot of practical issues, but the issue that makes the life-and-death difference is that of believing and trusting Jesus our Redeemer and our Lord.
For a sneak peak, here’s a quote from the book:
The subject of women and God is not just theoretically crucial; it’s personally crucial, for both women and men. I deal with it all the time, both privately and publicly—in my family and church life, in ministry as a Bible teacher, and regularly in conversations with other women:
What does it mean for me that every human being is created in the image of God? How should I process those Old Testament passages where women are so mistreated? Why should I or shouldn’t I teach this church class, or take this course of study? How do I deal with the charge that teaching submission leads to abuse of women? What does my faith have to do with my longing for children, or my having children, or my losing children…?
This book does not ask or answer all the possible questions; it does seek to address some of the hardest ones, by pointing us to listen well to God’s voice.
Here’s what others are saying about Women and God:
Warm, engaging, inviting, articulate, and convincing, Women and God: Hard Questions, Beautiful Truth models how Christians can face this world’s hard questions about gender and sexuality with the gospel’s beautiful truths. Reading this book feels like a long conversation with a safe friend, steaming mug of tea in hand. Kathleen proclaims gospel light without erasing her readers’ diverse points of view or lived experiences. You will find no platitudes, no clichés, no tired defenses of priggish moralism. Instead, you will find Jesus, the Word made flesh, arms open. As we face a new post-Christian world, we need this book. — Rosaria Butterfield
I hope that many readers . . . will take the time and invest the energy to listen carefully and respectfully to Kathleen, a woman who has a keen mind, a heart devoted to Scripture, and the courtesy to treat other viewpoints fairly even while she marshals the evidence that supports her understanding of key passages and themes. She does not duck the “hard questions,” and she is swayed by “beautiful truth.” — D. A. Carson
If you had an afternoon to do whatever you’d like, where would we find you?
Talking with a friend over coffee or tea . . . out walking . . . playing with granddaughters . . . reading a novel that I don’t usually have time for!
Kathleen Nielson (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is an author and speaker who loves working with women in studying the Scriptures. After directing The Gospel Coalition’s women’s initiatives 2010–2017, she now serves as senior adviser and book editor for TGC. She and her husband, Niel, make their home partly in Wheaton, Illinois, and partly in Jakarta, Indonesia, where Niel leads a network of Christian schools and universities. They have three sons, two daughters-in-law, and five granddaughters.
