The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Her additional title of patron, helper, or protector—all translations of prostatis—implies that she was a woman of substance capable of providing necessary assistance to Paul and to many others. Like Lydia, she probably had a house large enough to accommodate a house/church, and a social position superior to that of Paul and most of his colleagues. One commentator goes so far as to suggest that Paul’s relationship to her was one of client to sponsor.

  Phoebe was thus no minor figure, and she clearly had a responsible position, which Paul himself took seriously. All of this comes to mind when I remember the debates of my youth in my local Baptist church, when the question of women was first raised. Deacons were by definition in our polity and tradition men of spiritual substance and authority who ruled with the pastor in all spiritual matters of the church and had explicit responsibility for sound doctrine and the relief of the poor. On Communion Sundays they sat in great state with the pastor at the Lord’s Table, and they had charge of the sacraments, the admission of members, and their discipline. Deacons often were elected for life, and their office was the highest the church could offer a person not ordained. In some instances, deacons were even ordained to their office.

  Deaconesses, however, were of another order, and first were merely the wives of deacons. Their job was to provide for the care of the Lord’s Table, and to be devoted to acts of charity and kindness, but unlike their husbands, they were not to “bear rule” in the church. To make a woman a deacon was to go against both nature and the New Testament, but more important, it was also to go against the customs of the church and the culture of interpretation. My own mother, a Baptist preacher’s daughter and a woman of strong convictions, not easily intimidated by men and not overly fond of the clergy, had no use for the idea of women deacons. She found the idea unscriptural, and while not lacking in self-confidence, she was not necessarily prepared to submit to the spiritual jurisdiction of women, especially those whom she know so well in her own church. She knew her Bible, but clearly she didn’t know all that she needed to know about her sister Phoebe. In this uninformed prejudice she was not, and even today is not, alone.

  There are other women whom Paul takes seriously in his correspondence. After speaking of Phoebe, in the same chapter of Romans he writes, “Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I but also all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks; greet also the church in their house.” (Romans 16:3–5)

  Prisca, also known as Priscilla, is accounted “the most prominent woman of the New Testament,” who, with her husband, Aquila. preached Christianity in at least one of the Roman synagogues and caused such a tumult among the Roman Jews that the Roman civil authorities expelled them, among others, from the city. They moved on to Corinth, where Paul first encountered them. (I Corinthians 16:19) They then moved on to Ephesus, where they formed a house/church and were active with Paul as fellow missionaries among the Ephesians, and it was probably here that they “risked their necks” for Paul, earning his commendation and the undying gratitude of which we read in Romans.

  Some have argued that because Prisca’s name precedes that of her artisan husband, she was of superior social rank to him, and it would not be unusual, as we have noted in our discussion of Lydia, that women of high rank were attracted to the Christian gospel and served with Paul. Others argue that her name precedes that of her husband not out of social distinction but because she was the more renowned Christian leader of the two. Such an honorific to distinguish spiritual precedence would be typical of Paul. We know that they returned to Rome after the death of the Emperor Claudius, and between Paul’s writing of I Corinthians and Romans, perhaps as a vanguard of Paul’s own visit to Rome, and they may in fact have delivered the letter to the Romans. This may well be why he commends them to his correspondents; we know that they established a house/church in Rome, and that their prominence as Christian leaders and colleagues of Paul was well known and well established.

  Lydia, Phoebe, Priscilla: These were names to reckon with in the formative days of early Christianity, and well attested to in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles of Paul. The presence of women in the circle of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, is of equal significance. In the rush to tell the story of the birth of Jesus, the significance of Mary, especially for Protestants, is often lost, but in the Greek Church she has always borne the most exalted of all titles: Theotokos, “Bearer of God.” The role of the holy women—Anna, the prophetess who, along with the aged Simeon, longed for the coming of the Lord, and Elizabeth, cousin of Mary and mother of John the Baptist—is well recorded. And in the genealogy of Jesus as recorded in Matthew, a list to which too little attention is paid in providing a context for Jesus, we find among his female ancestors three women of ambiguous sexual morality: Rahab the Harlot; Bathsheba the Adulteress; and Ruth, who slept with Boaz without benefit of marriage.

  Although we know that Jesus did not have women among his twelve disciples, we know of his encounters with women throughout his ministry. Women were among the marginal peoples he healed: lepers, the blind, demoniacs, the afflicted and possessed. His long discourse with the Samaritan woman at the well, in John’s gospel, makes of her something of an evangelist, and she has the same function as witness and disciple as John the Baptist, Andrew, and Philip. John 4:42 tells it all. We know as well of Mary Magdalene, who in the same gospel has the unnerving privilege of being the first to see the risen Lord, and thus is the first apostle of the resurrection; indeed she is the first apostle. We know as well of the social and spiritual intercourse that Jesus shared with Mary and Martha, both of whom can be described as strong women.

  Given what we know of both the secular and the religious culture of the period of Jesus and the earliest generations of the forming Christian community, we also know that the attention paid to women, their proximity to Jesus, and their precedence and participation in the earliest Christian communities is nothing less than revolutionary in its time, and still astonishing to us in ours. Yet we know as well that the debate attending the appropriate role of women in the Christian church continues to be a vexed and divisive one, equal perhaps in moral and political ferocity only to that of slavery. If the New Testament had possessed even a small percentage of the positive testimonial to the role of slaves in the Christian community that it bears toward women, the biblical case against slavery, while it would still have to contend with enormous cultural prejudice, probably could have been made with the immense authority of its own transforming examples to carry the day. Such, however, as we know, was not the case. Ironically, the case against women’s authoritative participation in the church is made on the basis of biblical principles clearly subordinated to much of biblical practice. The examples of Lydia, Phoebe, and Priscilla, to name only a few of the New Testament women, are subordinated to later biblical and cultural practices that repudiate the transformative character of the gospel and reinforce the prevailing habits and customs of a culture fearful of too much change. These liberating examples are silenced by a culture of male interpretation, and that silence has been maintained until very recently. The greatest irony is that the case against the role of women in the churches is made on appeal to the New Testament, as if Lydia, Phoebe, and Priscilla were not in it. Hence, the Bible is called to testify against the Bible, in the matter of women.

  What Does the Bible Say About Women?

  The Bible has a great deal to say about women, and the Old Testament is filled with a wide variety of female personalities and voices. There is Eve, the mother of all living. There are Sarah, Abraham’s conniving wife; Hannah, the mother of Samuel; Jezebel, the foreign-born wife of Ahab; Delilah, who wormed Samson’s secret from him; Ruth and Rahab, ancestresses of Jesus, and many more. In the wisdom literature, wisdom is herself feminine, and in certain of the prophetic books, Israel is feminine, and the land is fecund and maternal. The images in Hebrew scripture are many and varied, and the presence of women in these
holy books has never been an issue. When Christians speak about “what the Bible says” with regard to women, however, invariably they mean the New Testament, and so is it here that we will look.

  As in all the church of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

  (I Corinthians 14:34–35)

  Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.

  (I Timothy 2:11–12)

  Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.

  (John 20:18)

  For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

  (Galatians 3:27–29)

  Those four passages from the New Testament represent the tension between the New Testament’s principle of transformation and renewal in Christ, by which the old and established order is overturned and transcended, and the apostolic government of the early church, where explicit rules of conduct and patterns of relationship for specific situation are seen to be normative and definitive for Christian conduct and order in the church. For many the problem of the New Testament and women is the reconciliation of the so-called “hard passages,” with the gospel principle of participation and equality. The problem is compounded by the fact that both principles are expressed in practice, and both thereby share in the authority and primacy accorded scripture. The secular cynics may dismiss the whole dilemma with the often quoted notion that you can find any verse in the Bible to support any view you wish. The fact that this is more true than untrue does not dismiss the problem, but only compounds it for persons of goodwill who genuinely seek “the mind of scripture” in the ordering of their affairs. As we discovered in the discussion of slavery, the more seriously one takes scripture, the more difficult becomes the problem of its several, often contradictory, voices, and therefore the more urgent becomes the development of a persuasive principle of interpretation by which the differences are reconciled, the authority of scripture maintained, and the moral and theological life developed from its teachings affirmed. As the Protestant Reformation introduced as normative the principle of sola scriptura, fidelity to scripture has become the normative principle for the faith and practice of most Protestant churches. For many churches of this inheritance, a case is made or lost on how one “reads” scripture.

  “Reading scripture,” however, is not as simple as most Protestants would like to believe. Reading is a transaction, and by no means a neutral transaction. A text does not simply “say what it says,” despite the rational good intentions of a sensible reader like Alice in Wonderland. We read more like Humpty-Dumpty than we would care to admit, for in reading it is a matter not only of what is written there but what we expect to find there, what we bring to the text, and what we take away from it. Reading, then, is hardly a clinical or neutral affair. There is that bewildering battery of text, context, subtext, and pretext with which we must contend, which we in fact do automatically and subconsciously. The scanning of these interests is so automatic and instantaneous that we are as unaware of it as we are unaware of the infinite number of physical motions and electrical impulses that it takes for us to turn the handle of a doorknob. When that simple action is reduced to slow motion and recorded, or when we find that some injury or ailment makes it difficult or impossible to do, then, and perhaps only then, do we realize the complexity that is camouflaged by the apparent natural ease with which we have performed the function before we were required to take notice of it.

  Reading is such a function, and particularly the reading of scripture. The reading of contentious or difficult passages involves both an encounter with the text and an extra-textual consciousness by which we are enabled to make sense and reconcile the foreign and contrary with the familiar and accepted. This context, as opposed to the historical and literary context of the text itself, I call the culture or climate of interpretation. For most readers of scripture, or of anything else, this is the only context that counts. The very notion, for example, of “hard passages” in a discussion of women and the Bible does not necessarily presuppose that there is a “problem” with the biblical context, although there may be. The problem that makes these passages hard is that what they appear to say is at odds with what we now think. In other words, the text is out of sync with our climate or culture of interpretation. Thus, in order to make sense of what the text says, it must in some sense be made to conform to our climate of interpretation. With all due respect to the pieties addressed to the mind of scripture and to its context, as in most things our context is the only one that really counts.

  Remember how our temperance friends “read” those accounts of the scriptural use of wine, which clearly did not coincide with the moral content of their contemporary climate of interpretation? It was scripture that was made to conform. In the matter of slavery each side adapted the context and content of the biblical writings on slavery to suit the moral purposes of their own contemporary climate of interpretation, and that battle was settled not by an exegetical consensus but by might of arms.

  The readings of scripture in the debates about the role of women in the church today tell us as much, if not more, about the climate of interpretation within which we are willing to undertake the reading in the first place as it tells us about the content, context, and “clear meaning of scripture.”

  For those for whom the writings in Corinthians and in Timothy are not hard, and who take them as normative practice for the church in all places and at all times, the problem is no problem. Why? Because the texts as they read them, and the climate of interpretation within which they read them, are not in conflict—at least, they do not believe them to be. The pope is not anxious to know if scripture and his reading of scripture are at odds on the matter of women priests. He has said over and over again that the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood is settled by the fact that Jesus did not call women to serve as his disciples. The practice and principle of scripture in the mind of the pope are consistent with his reading and interpretation of it. In this view he is joined by many conservative Protestants, with what is called a high view of scripture.

  There is a substantial and growing body of Christians in all communions, however, for whom the biblical texts in question and the climate of interpretation are in fact out of sync. Many of these would argue that the texts themselves are out of sync within their own context, both of the gospel and of the particular message and example of Paul himself. It is this range of interests and views, stimulated by the larger cultural revolution by which women have determined to overcome their marginalization and cultural disenfranchisement, that has generated the theological revolution in interpretation of which we have spoken earlier with profound and massive implications for the ways in which we read and understand scripture. The most interesting, creative, and demanding scholarship in the field of biblical interpretation since the translations of the Bible into English has been generated in the last twenty-five years by what may be called the feminist initiative.

  This frightens people—the very notion of a feminist initiative in the interpretation of scripture—in much the same way that good Christians of varied opinions were frightened by the abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Many have been and will be put off by the sense of an aggressive set of special interests that are brought to the interpretation of scripture with destabilizing consequences to the authority of the scripture, the order of the church, and the structure of society and of civilization itself. As we have pointed out before, howeve
r, it is not just feminists who have an interest in the way in which the Bible is read these days. In their fight for the Bible and the right both to take it and themselves seriously, feminist interpreters of scripture have much to teach us, and we ignore these lessons to the peril of scripture and of the church.

  It has become a habit on the part of some evangelicals and religious conservatives to dismiss the mountain of female scholarship on the Bible with the taint of the most extreme and deconstructive dimensions of that scholarship, suggesting pagans and goddesses under every hermeneutical bed. Any challenge to the language of patriarchy or the thousand years of male interpretation is understood to be a challenge to the full wealth of conviction and part of a “liberal,” “feminist,” or “radical” conspiracy to subvert the faith once delivered to the saints. As in politics, there is clearly a paranoid style in much of the response to the new scholarship of women on the Bible. Of course, as in physics, every action generates a reaction. When feminist scholarship concludes that it is no longer appropriate to pray to “Our Father,” and such masculine titles as “Lord” and “King” are excluded both from the text and from worship, the instinctual reaction of those who feel thus deprived of the familiar and useful language of piety is to reject the possibility that any helpful insights can be provided from such scholarship.