The conventional wisdom about Paul is that he is a super-Jew who, after his conversion on the road to Damascus, becomes a super-Christian. He repudiates his Jewish past and wants his fellow Jews to join him now in his Christian faith, and when they decline the opportunity he turns the full force of his polemic against them. It is possible that this is too bald a cartoon of the knowledge of Paul on the part of the average Christian, but, in paraphrase of H. L. Mencken, one would not lose too much money in underestimating the theological knowledge of the average Christian in the late twentieth century.
What we learn from contemporary scholarship on Romans reminds us once again of the context in which Paul writes.5 He repudiates neither Judaism nor God’s special relationship with the Jews. Indeed, the Torah of the Jews was, and remains, the way of salvation for them. Paul’s argument is that the cross of Jesus is to Gentiles what the Torah is to Jews, and that both are means of salvation and righteousness. In other words, Jews need not become Christians to obtain the promises—in the Torah they already have the promises as Jews. By the same token, Gentiles need not become Jews and subscribe to the law, for Gentiles cannot do so and because of the cross of Jesus do not need to do so. Paul’s argument is for an inclusive God who has provided for both Jews and Gentiles through the cross. God’s promises, the radical nature of those promises, is that they are for both Jew and Gentile. What the Jew now has and has never lost is, according to Paul, now also available to the Gentiles, to whom he is an apostle. Contrary to popular perception, Paul never argues in Romans that the Gentile church has displaced Israel, nor does he argue that the Jews must embrace Christ. He does argue that as God spoke to the Jews through the law, he now speaks to those outside the law, the Gentiles, through Christ. Jews are meant to embrace the good news of Christ, which is that he is the means for non-Jews to know God. The gospel for Paul is not simply “Christ crucified”; it is rather that through Christ crucified the Gospel has been extended to the Gentiles.
These insights are the result of the fruitful work of Sidney G. Hill in his 1993 book Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul’s Theology, in which he reminds us, “The church has missed Paul’s assumption that the good news belongs to the Jewish people. The good news is discovered by Gentiles apart from the law through Christ. Paul’s good news was never intended to be bad news for Jewish people, but because the church failed to see Paul’s basic assumption, the good news for the Gentiles has become bad news for Jews.” Paul never doubts the inclusion of the Jews in the providence of God, and he is inclusive of Jews without requiring them to become Christians, that is, to put their faith in Christ. “For Paul,” says Sidney Hill, “Jews experience the righteousness of God through faith grounded in the living Torah, which includes the Abrahamic promise. Gentiles experience the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Christ.”
The notion of Israel’s co-status before God, a Pauline concept so radical in the historic context of the Christian denigration of Judaism as inferior or superseded, is rooted in the irrevocable promises of God. Just as God did not abandon the children of Israel in the time of the wilderness, but led them through to the promises, neither, according to Paul, has he abandoned them now. The promises of God are sure, and so too ought to be the status of those to whom the promises are made. In the matter of election the mind of God does not change; if it did, Christians would have much to fear. “For Paul, the Jewish people are beloved for the sake of their ancestors. Their acceptance as God’s elect is a present reality for Paul, whether or not they themselves are inclusive of Paul’s gospel. For the gifts and call of God are irrevocable.”
If So, So What?
If all of this is true, or even plausible, how is it that we have not heard this before, and what are the methods by which we hear it now? Fair question and fair comment. We did not see or hear this before because we had very little problem with what we did see and hear. Paul, the Jew-cum-Gentile, made sense in a biblical worldview where Jews were of little if any account at all. Jews were bit players upon the New Testament stage, present to drive the major argument that demonstrated that Christianity had succeeded where Judaism had failed, that God had chosen a new people, and that as a result of our win/lose mentality, present if not articulated in the history of Christian interpretation, we, that is, the Christians, won, and they, that is, the Jews, lost. History, we are told, even biblical history, is written by the winners. We do not ask questions about what isn’t there.
But what isn’t there is the fact that Paul was a Jew who embraced Jews as Jews and not as potential Christians, and that Paul embraced a God who also embraced both Jews and Gentiles, providing Torah for the one and Christ for the other. In ridding the New Testament of its Jewishness, that is, of the tensions of change and continuity within the Jewish religious community and its consequences for the Gentiles, it soon became permissible to rid the world of the Jews. If they had a place in the Christian cosmology, it was, as Augustine and many others would point out, to be reminded of how far they had fallen from God, and that the only way back was to cease to be Jews and to become Christians.
By this reading of Romans, and of much of the rest of the Pauline writings, Paul would be appalled at Bailey Smith or with anyone else who said that the prayers of a Jew did not reach the ears of God. What utterly silly and profoundly unbiblical nonsense, and what terrible consequences have come from such unsound and dangerous readings of the New Testament. It does matter what the New Testament writers meant and wrote, and it matters even more that we understand, as clearly as our God-given minds permit, what they said, what they meant, to whom they said it, the context in which they said it, and the degree to which what they said and what they meant is now normative or situational. It simply will not do, it is a cultural luxury that we can no longer afford, if ever we could, for any Christian on the whims of an uninformed and culturally driven piety to read the Bible and to pronounce upon its meaning with any less effort than these questions require. The Bible is too important to be left solely in the hands of the ignorant and the powerful, and after Auschwitz we should know better than to do so.
Chapter 7
The Bible and Women: The Conflicts of Inclusion
IN 1971, in my second year as assistant minister in The Memorial Church, I drew duty on the October Sunday when the first woman invited to preach in the church’s pulpit was due to appear. That woman was Professor Mary Daly,1 a Roman Catholic theologian from neighboring Boston College. In my ignorance I was unaware that she was a rising power in the rising tide of feminist theology, and that to many she was a symbol of all that needed to be said about women, the Bible, and the church, that hadn’t yet been heard. My ignorance was nearly complete in that I had had no idea that I was to be witness to one of the defining moments in women’s religious history in the United States.
Her sermon was titled “Beyond God the Father,” which would also become the title of one of her most influential books; the essence of her message on that autumn morning was that women had outlived patriarchy and the need of a patriarchal church. She had come to tell us that. Much more of the sermon I cannot recall, but 1 do recall that she led a walkout, and from the pulpit invited women and sympathetic men to join her. Many had come to The Memorial Church that morning in order to do just that and at her invitation did so. The rest of us remained, sang the final hymn, “Love divine, all loves excelling,” and wondered what had happened.
In the era of sit-ins, teach-ins, be-ins, and act-ins of all sorts, we should not have been surprised at a walkout. A few years before, James Forman, on behalf of a coalition of radical black activists, had walked in upon a service in New York’s Riverside Church and demanded the payment of “reparations.” Church services then were literally sitting targets for various forms of social protest aimed at the Christian conscience. The greater the sense of grievance, the more provocative the level of confrontation. This, however, had not seemed like a confrontation, it had seemed more like a recessional; and what did it mean? Were these wo
men walking out of the Christian church for good? Were they just walking out of this service? Would they leave in order to return? Under what circumstances would they return? How widespread was the intensity of these feelings as articulated by Mary Daly?
The aftermath varied. Some people were annoyed that the stately liturgy of The Memorial Church had been interrupted. A Roman Catholic woman of middle age, interested in the historical aspects of the first woman preaching at Harvard, and a Roman Catholic woman from Boston College at that, was angry, saying, “She was so rude she gave us all a bad name, a terrible abuse of hospitality.” Certain undergraduates thought it had all been orchestrated as a rather theatrical ploy to get their attention and prove that the church was “with it.” Some applauded the action as a much needed and long-delayed shot across the bow of the institutional church. Some, recognizing the truly revolutionary nature of her presence, were glad that she left and hoped devoutly that she and her ideas would never be heard again. Most were quietly confused, mildly interested, and basically eager to get on with whatever thoughts Mary Daly’s exodus had interrupted. I felt that we had had a narrow escape, but that we had not heard the last of these matters, or from Mary Daly, and I was right.
In the quarter of a century since 1971, the liturgical, theological, and biblical agenda of the Christian church has been set by the concerns and issues of women who are determined that their experiences, hitherto repressed or marginalized, be taken into account and given priority within the church. No denomination has been spared wide-ranging and often deeply divisive debates about the appropriate place of women. An entirely new field of scholarship has emerged in which women have taken the critical tools once used to interpret them out of the picture and inserted themselves back in, creating academic programs and institutes where there were none, and bringing a fully matured generation of new feminist scholars into the academy. The largest section in any divinity school bookstore these days is the section on women. They have claimed the attention of every field and discipline, and they have stimulated creative work, and not all of it reactive, in all of these fields on the part of men as well.
The effect of this stupendous achievement can be witnessed on every hand. “Gender issues,” once the private frustration and preserve of an inner circle of feminist scholarship, is now a generic concern. “Inclusive language,” a concept once exclusive to this same circle, now generates the language of liturgy, scholarship, hymnody, and even the language of Holy Scripture itself. It is not simply language that is to be inclusive, however, it is to be concepts as well. Few and far between are the places today where one can speak of Christian brotherhood, the Fatherhood of God, or mankind, without a wince, an apology, a hiss, and usually all three. The very geography of our discourse has been changed without a single shot being fired or a single piece of national legislation being filed and passed. Add to these fundamental conceptual changes the increased presence and influence of women among the ordained clergy in many denominations, including most recently the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in Scotland, and the fact that even the pope, mightily opposed to women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church, has given attention to the status of women within that communion, and we realize that we have been witness to one of the great revolutions—paradigm shifts, as the chattering classes would say—in the Western world. We have perhaps seen nothing like it since the Reformation.
What’s All the Fuss About?
The issue of women in the churches would seem to have been settled long ago. Anyone who has spent any time in any of the churches would recognize that in most of them the dominant force is one of women. The congregations have women in the majority, the program for most churches is managed and supplied by women, initiatives in religious education and works of charity have long been the special province of women, and the moral and religious influences of home life have historically been shaped by women. In the African-American Protestant church tradition, women held places of great public honor and private influence, and were particularly influential in missionary movements both at home and abroad. Mothers of the Church, a derivative of the ancient title of Mothers in Israel, was a title of great esteem accorded to venerable women in certain traditions of the African-American church. The title implied both spiritual dignity and temporal influence, and pastors ignored that dignity and influence often at their peril. There were sample role models from the Bible as well, to affirm the presence and influence of women in the religious life of the churches. In the precedent and practice of the New Testament, the images are clear and the examples plentiful. We know that women took large and active parts in the work and worship of the Pauline church. Saint Paul’s first convert in Europe, we discover in Acts 16, is a woman, and a professional businesswoman at that, Lydia.
One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, seller of purple goods, who was a worshipper of God. The Lord opened her heart to give heed to what was said by Paul. And when she was baptized, with her household, she besought us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay.” And she prevailed upon us. (Acts 16:14–15)
We know her to be a devout Jew, as she is described as a “worshipper of God,” and as she is worshiping on the Sabbath with other women outside the gate of the city and at the riverside, we can suppose that there were not enough men within the city to form a proper synagogue. As women could not be the founders of synagogues, what is impossible for Lydia as a devout Jewish woman becomes possible for her upon her conversion to the religion of Paul, and she is described as the founding member of the Christian community, which begins to meet in her house. Lydia behaves contrary to the social customs of the day. A Jewish woman, even as substantial a woman as was Lydia, ordinarily did not engage in theological discourse with men, and certainly not with strange men. Lydia has a conversation with Paul, and responds to that encounter by receiving baptism; and then she opens her household to Paul and his colleagues, a rather gutsy enterprise. As the first European convert of Paul and the founder of her own house/church, Lydia is taken seriously by the author of Acts, and is meant to be taken seriously by all who read about her; and in her house/church we can assume that she did more than merely provide refreshments and sit at the apostles’ feet.
There are other women given prominence in Acts, which leads various commentators to suppose a special interest in women and the Christian church on the part of Luke-Acts. Sapphira, the wife of Ananias, is a woman of property and financial acumen, qualities that are not used to her spiritual advantage when with her husband she conspires to hold back some of their wealth from the common property of the church. The judgment upon her and her husband is swift and fatal, as we read in one of the more chilling passages in Acts 5:1–11. Ananias and Sapphira are often used to illustrate less than complete integrity in the apostolic church, but the point often missed is that as a woman she is given equal billing with her husband and shares equally in his dismal fate. Then there is Tabitha, described in Acts 9:36–41 as a woman “full of good works and charity,” who is raised from the dead by Peter.
In Acts we are reminded that Paul was determined, in his preconversion zeal, to imprison both “men and women” who were members of the Christian communities subject to his persecution, and both men and women are baptized in response to the preaching of Philip in Samaria. We read of this in Acts 8. Women are frequently mentioned as responding to the effects of Paul’s preaching, and three instances alone in Acts 17 attest to this:
Some were persuaded, and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.
(Acts 17:4)
Many therefore believed, and not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men.
(Acts 17:12)
But some men joined him and believed…and a woman named Damaris and others with them.
(Acts 17:34)
In his account of his own ministry, Paul indicates that women were not only among his
converts but were his colleagues in the work of the gospel. In Romans 16:1–2, he cites Phoebe: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the Church at Cenchreae, that you may receive her in the Lord as befits the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a helper of many, and of myself as well.”
We must linger here a bit with Phoebe. In the Greek text, Paul uses three titles to describe Phoebe: adelphe, “sister,” diakonos, “deacon,” and prostatis, “patroness.” These are not terms of endearment or descriptions of qualities or attributes, but rather titles of functions and roles that are ascribed to Phoebe by Paul. These titles have caused much discussion, and the second one, “deacon,” the most controversy. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible translated diakonos as “deaconess,” but most contemporary commentaries regard that as an incorrect translation. The term “deaconess” implies a Greek word not known to have been used in first century Greece, and it further implies a later usage in which a deaconess ministered almost exclusively to women and was in a subordinate role to men, who were deacons. Paul’s clear use of the term “deacon” in reference to Phoebe implies no such restrictions. He applies the term to her in the same way he applies it to himself and to other colleagues in his ministry who preached and taught. Her activity may have been located in the church at Cenchrae, for she is described as a “deacon of the Church at Cenchreae,” but her function, and the title she bears that reflects it, are equivalent to those of Paul and his male colleagues.
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