We offer a positive argument for why we think the Bible affirms the ongoing presence of women in church ministries. We will look at a variety of topics, including a quick sweep through the Bible to show how the Bible as Story informs our reading of these passages. Any discussion that defends women in church ministries can be responsible only if it examines in more detail the so-called silencing of women passages in Paul (1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:8–15). We will examine those two passages in our final chapters.
However, I must ask for your sympathy about one point: in this book it is impossible to discuss all the issues and all the counterarguments about this debated issue of women in church ministries. I will not even try to do this, nor will I sketch the views of those who are traditionalists in these matters. There are other books that do that. Our book is merely illustrating how we read the Bible—story, listen, discern—by offering women in church ministries as a test case. Could more be said? Yes. I am deeply aware of the many, many issues I would like to bring up, and maybe at a later time I will develop this discussion at more length; but for now I offer the next few chapters as an example of how to read the Bible as Story, learn to listen, and discern how to live the Bible in our world.
Once again, we need to locate women in the King and His Kingdom Story. This is the big idea: In Christ, Paul says, there is not only no longer slave and free but neither is there “male and female.” Paul does not erase embodied distinctions, but in Christ and in the church, gender no longer matters. In the final kingdom of God, one’s gender will not be a mark of status or lack of status. All will be equal, yet radically unique. But if we focus too much on the redemptive benefits, we may well say, “Women like men are totally equal before God in that each can be saved. But there are roles assigned to men that women can’t do.” That contradicts what Paul says in Galatians 3:28 and clearly contradicts what women did in the early churches.
Similar but Shifting Contexts
It is customary for those who favor women in church ministries to begin with an infamous prayer of the rabbis and then to make it clear that neither Jesus nor the early Christians saw women this way. They suggest that Jesus and Christianity “liberated” women from an oppressive Jewish world, feeling a little bit morally superior for the progress we have made.
I will include this prayer, but I emphasize that this rabbinic statement tells only part of the story of women in Judaism and the biblical world. We should not forget the Song of Songs when it comes to what women thought of men and men of women! Still, the social conditions giving rise to this prayer are a real part of the ancient world—the part that reveals that women were considered unequal and in some cases inferior to men.
R. Judah says, “A man must recite three benedictions every day:
Praised be Thou, O Lord, who did not make me a gentile;
Praised be Thou, O Lord, who did not make me a boor;
Praised be Thou, O Lord, who did not make me a woman.”
Why did the rabbis say this of women? Because “women are not obligated [to perform all] the commandments.”1 The budding rabbi is to give thanks to God because, as a male, he gets to observe all the commandments, while a woman, for a variety of reasons—not the least being menstruation—is not so privileged. I don’t believe this is what Jewish men thought of women in general. Some men? To be sure. All men? No. This prayer may have been a Jewish version of an ancient Greek saying. Thus, the Greek male is taught to be grateful “that I was born a human being and not a beast, next, a man and not a woman, thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian.”2
So, in general, what was it like for women in the Jewish world? Worse than today; sometimes much, much worse. Statements about women in the Bible, like the story of Jephthah and his daughter in Judges 11, may strike us today like a blue parakeet we’d like to tame, but we dare not. Instead, we must look these passages in the eye, let them be what they are, and embrace them as part of the Bible’s story. Only then can we learn that reading the Bible as the redemption offered in the King and His Kingdom Story enables us to see how these texts fit in an ongoing story of “that was then, but this is now.” So, a few points about the Bible and women.
He Who Writes the Story . . .
We must say something not often admitted by Bible-reading, God-loving Christians: He who writes the story controls the glory. What’s the point? The Bible was written by men, and the Bible tells stories from the angle of men. We admit this because we admit that God spoke in those days in those ways, and those days and those ways were male days and male ways. Mary J. Evans, a professor of Old Testament at the evangelical London Bible College, wrote the essays on “Women” in the evangelical dictionaries from InterVarsity Press called Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch and the Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books. After examining every reference about women in these books in the Old Testament, she admits that the Pentateuch’s world is “patriarchal” and that the culture of Israel was a “strongly masculine-dominated one.”3
Catherine Clark Kroeger, a widely accomplished and deeply respected evangelical, wrote the article on “Women” for the same publisher’s Dictionary of New Testament Background, where she opens up with this statement: “In the main, history is written by, for and about men.”4 Our Bible is like this. We can pretend it is not, but pretending leads us to an ironic commitment to our faith and into hidden secrets and despair. Why not, I sometimes ask myself, just admit it? Will the Bible lose its power? No.
Does the Bible at times transcend that masculine-shaped story? It does, and for that we can be profoundly grateful. Our Bible is shaped by a male perspective because God, in his wisdom, chose to speak in those days in those ways. Our God is a living God; our God spoke within history and shaped that history to move us into the world in which we now live.
In General
One of the most knowledgeable scholars about women and the ancient world is David Scholer. In a dictionary article in the same series of dictionaries mentioned above on women in the ministry of Jesus, David writes this: “In very general terms Jesus lived in social-cultural contexts (the Jewish context and the larger Greco-Roman society) in which the male view of women was usually negative and the place of women was understood to be limited for the most part to the domestic roles of wife and mother.”5 Here is a famous statement made by the Jewish historian Josephus, a contemporary of Jesus and the apostle Paul: “The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man.”6
In general, women were perceived as inferior. But there were plenty of exceptions, exceptions that reveal an undercurrent that would eventually alter the current itself. Let’s look at one woman in that undercurrent. A wonderful fictional story of liberation is told of a Jewish woman named Judith in the Old Testament Apocrypha. The story transcends even the drama of the stories of Deborah and Esther, two Old Testament women—one a judge and the other a beautiful, wise, and clever woman. Judith uses her rhetorical and sexual charms to deliver Israel from the Assyrians by intrigue, and then she decapitates the king with his own sword and carries off his head in her kosher bag! No one suggests we should follow her example, but it is not without some significance that we find here a female hero in the Jewish world, even if it is fiction.
Again, in general women were seen as inferior to men. The church, for any number of reasons, fossilized this tradition into a rigid distinction between men and women when it came to ministries in the church. A good example of this teaching can be found in Augustine, one of the most powerful theologians in the history of the church.7 Augustine thought women were companions for men in the sense that they were designed to be procreative partners. Though he believed women were human, he did not believe women are God’s image. Males are the image of God. A woman “bears” God’s image, but a man “is” God’s image. By marriage, Augustine taught, a woman can become the image of God. What should be noted is that culture itself gave rise to this view of women, and there was little incentive for Augustine to challenge it. I
have no desire to trash Augustine; we are deeply indebted to much good in his theology. But the culture surrounding him and the kind of theology that found its way in that culture were devastating to some passages in the Bible.
I am not saying the church had a uniformly negative view of women; it did not.8 But the widespread restriction of women from teaching and preaching ministries damaged the church’s witness, because for centuries this became the tradition through which the church read its Bible. More could be said, and more deserves to be said, but this is not a book on the history of women in the church.9 I use this example merely to illustrate the general view taken by the majority of the church. There were exceptions. The exceptions, however, were just that.
What Should We Do?
The question we need to ask today is this, and this question strikes to the heart of how we read the Bible: Do we seek to retrieve that cultural world and those cultural expressions, or do we live the same gospel in a different way in a different day? Is this a return and retrieve it all, a return and retrieve some, a reading of the Bible through tradition, or a reading of the Bible with tradition? Or, and I think this is the case, is this a tradition that needs to be challenged? How much conservation do we need and how much innovation do we need?
We could probably sketch out a dozen or so views of how Christians approach what the Bible says about women in church ministries, but many today are willing to eyeball it into three basic options.10 Two views are connected to what might be called the tradition (hard patriarchy and soft patriarchy), while one is more connected to a renew-and-renewing mind-set: mutuality (sometimes called evangelical egalitarianism).11
The hard patriarchy view believes the biblical context and its teachings are more or less God’s original and permanent design. A woman’s responsibility is to glorify God, to love God, to love others, and to love her husband and her children. That is, if she is married and has children (exceptions duly noted). More narrowly now, she must submit to her husband in all things, she must submit to male leadership in the church in all things, and she should also not find her way into leadership in society. For whatever reason, God ordained males to be leaders. The hard patriarchy view shapes life by a perception of the divine order in gender and roles; it believes these roles will create peace. Chrysostom wrote, “God’s purpose in ordering marriage is peace. One takes the husband’s role, one takes the wife’s role, one in guiding, one in supporting. If both had the very same roles, there would be no peace.”12
The soft patriarchy view believes the biblical context is cultural but the principles are permanent. We are called to find a living analogy in our twenty-first-century Western context to the teachings of the Bible, including the teaching of gender roles. A woman’s responsibility is to glorify God, to love God, to love others, and—if married—to love her husband and her children (if there are any). More narrowly now, while affirming the importance of submission and gender and roles, this view frees the woman to do more than the hard patriarchy view. She can work outside the home in any manner for which she is qualified and competent, always with her primary role being wife and mother. She can participate in an appropriate female manner at church, but this would not include being senior pastor or teaching men or leading men in any way.
I believe that both of the above views, to one degree or another, are stuck in the fall of humankind. We must remind ourselves over and over again that the Bible’s story is a story about the establishing of the Kingdom of God under King Jesus.
That story is a theocracy that unfolds into a monarchy that eventually becomes a Christocracy. In that kingdom of Christ, there is neither male nor female, for they are equal in Christ in all ways. In the kingdom of God women will not be in submission to men nor will men be hierarchically above women. In light of that we turn to the redemption that we discover in the King and His Kingdom Story that moves from:
God’s Trinitarian oneness, to
the Adam, who was one and alone, to
Adam and Eve, who were one and together, to
Adam and Eve and others, who through sin become others, to
Jesus Christ, who was the one God incarnate, to
becoming one (as in Eden) all over again in Christ, to
the consummation, when we will be one with God and others.
Whatever we say about women in church ministries, about women in marriages, or about women who are single must be connected to this story. I believe the next view, mutuality, makes the most sense of how women fit into the Bible’s story.
The mutuality view, which taps deeply into this redemptive “oneness-otherness-oneness” theme, also believes a woman’s responsibility is to glorify God, to love God, to love others, and—again if married and if with children—to love her husband and her children. More narrowly, a mutuality view liberates women from the tradition because it believes the biblical context is cultural and that even the biblical teachings reflect that culture. Even more importantly, it knows that reading the Bible through a long-established church tradition needs to be challenged. Why? Because tradition does not reflect the original innovation in the message about and practice of women in the Bible, most especially in the churches of the apostle Paul.
Instead of seeking to impose that outside culture and those culturally shaped teachings on women in a completely different world and culture, the mutuality view summons Christians to the Bible. It knows the story of the Bible is one in which Jesus Christ makes men and women one again, in Christ and in marriage. And, in conscious dependence on the Spirit in the context of a community of faith that seeks to live out that oneness, it gives women the freedom to discern what God has called them to do—whatever it might be, including preaching, teaching, and leading in the church. The conclusions are that women are encouraged by the so-called “exceptions” of the Bible—and there are more than most realize. These passages are not exceptions; they are common. Moreover, the ongoing guidance of the Spirit may lead women into ministries that break down the tradition with deeper innovations.
Jesus told us the Spirit would guide us. This book is an attempt to sketch how that guidance works itself out for many of us. Here are Jesus’s words, which I will quote before we look at the biblical exceptions that provide a map for our guidance: “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come” (John 16:13).
Do we believe this? I do. Do you? Believing this verse, we must have the confidence to strike out in conscious dependence on the Spirit and in organic ways bring the Bible’s kingdom vision into our world. We do so by mastering the plot and the redemption at work in the King and His Kingdom Story so that the path we take is the natural Spirit-led waterslide that will guide us to the waters in our world in our way. The intent of the next two chapters is to put the tradition in its (biblical) place.
CHAPTER 15
WHAT DID WOMEN DO IN THE OLD TESTAMENT?
Women in Church Ministries 2
Many of my friends, when a discussion arises about women in church ministries, gravitate to Paul’s two famous statements—that women should be silent in the churches:
Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. (1 Corinthians 14:34–35, emphasis added)
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. (1 Timothy 2:11–12, emphasis added)
Some of my friends are for and some are against women in leadership ministries. Both kinds of friends gravitate to these texts. For me, gravitating to these passages for this discussion is like asking about marriage in the Bible and gravitating toward the divorce texts. Talking marriage through the divorce texts is beyond short-sighted, if not distorting. The sa
me applies to women in ministry texts. Yes, I say, these statements by Paul about silence are important, and we will look at them in due time, but there is something else we should do first.
Know the Story of the Bible
The story of the Bible, that is the King and His Kingdom Story that is fulfilled in the elimination of gender hierarchies once and for all, tells us stories about women that I call stories of “WDWD.” Many of you know about the bracelet that some have worn since the mid-1990s with these letters on it: WWJD. Those letters stand for “What Would Jesus Do?” and they are a moral reminder of our renew-and-renewing approach to the Bible to live as Jesus would have us live in our day and in our way. My WDWD acronym is one we should consider when we think about women in church ministries: What Did Women Do? in Bible times. In classes I teach that deal with this topic I ask students to chart what many of the women in the Bible did, and as the class progresses, the charts get longer and the activities of women more obvious. You might try it on your own.
To name some of the more obvious women, think of Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah; think of Esther and Ruth and the woman in the Song of Songs; think of Priscilla, Junia, and Phoebe. Think (and this is hard to do for Protestants) of Mary, mother of Jesus, whose influence on Jesus, James, and some early Christians is largely ignored.1 Many more names could be added. Our point is that those of us who claim the Bible as the foundation of our faith need to ponder exactly what these women did.
The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Page 20