Let's Hear It for The Girl

The earliest record I have of one of my ancestors converting to Christianity comes from two centuries ago near the French town of Strasbourg. “Papa” Oberlin—as my father’s people called their pastor—brought the gospel to villagers subsisting on grass soaked in milk. Along with the gospel came instruction on agricultural practices such that today the same valley is one of the richest foodie destinations in the world.

Two centuries before the arrival of Pastor Oberlin—for whom Oberlin College is named—Strasbourg, which France and Germany passed back and forth, was home of another wonderful Protestant, Katherine Zell. A sixteenth-century German, Zell promoted the Reformation and supported gender equality. She also published a collection of congregational hymns, cared for the sick and imprisoned, and reached out to refugees displaced by religious warfare.

Zell’s husband, Matthew, was among Strasbourg’s reforming pastors. When the Church excommunicated him for marrying her, she published a letter to the bishop in defense of clerical marriage. Considering literacy rates along with women’s lack of social power, Katherine’s actions amounted to no small feat of skill and courage.

She also published tracts. One she wrote for the consolation of wives whose husbands were exiled for their faith. In it she cited Isaiah 49:15 in which the prophet describes God as as a mother who cannot forget a nursing child. Another consolation tract was for the city magistrate who was quarantined. A meditation on the Lord's prayer, it included these thoughts: “Our Father, who art in heaven. He is called not Lord or judge, but Father. And since through his Son we are born again we may call him grandfather, too. He may be likened also to a mother who has known the pangs of birth and the joy of giving suck.”

In saying this Zell was no radical writing about God as female. Rather, she was a godly, theologically sound woman living long before Second Wave feminism. She, like many before her such as Lady Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century, found comfort in the biblical mothering metaphors used to reveal God.

In visiting prisoners, caring for the sick, and arranging care for floods of refugees, Zell encouraged many in the faith at a time when Protestants faced severe persecution.

March is Women’s History Month. And now it's your turn. Name a woman who inspires you. (She does not have to be famous.)