Introduction
Because the question of Paul’s teachings on women’s roles has been debated on several levels of discourse, this book is likewise written on several levels. Whereas the following chapters are devoted primarily to a serious investigation of Paul’s teaching using the relevant historical and cultural tools, the introduction, conclusion, and some of the arguments address or presuppose some of the more popular concerns raised by this issue today. The extensive documentation is for those who wish to consult it, but the text itself is written to be useful to the general reader as well as to the biblical scholar.
Besides its academic contribution, I hope that this book will help Christian spouses to serve one another better, and that it will benefit the body of Christ as a whole by encouraging it to raise up more laborers for the harvest. This nontechnical introduction is directed especially toward those who share my convictions about the Bible’s authority but who are still struggling with whether the Bible really advocates the full equality of men and women.
MY INTEREST IN PAUL’S VIEW OF WOMEN’S ROLES
It could be suggested that since I am a man I have nothing to gain or lose by taking a position on the issue of women’s roles in the church. But while such a suggestion could be offered either to challenge my commitment to the subject or to praise my objectivity, it would actually only underline the wrong thinking that has dominated discussion of the issue in recent years. As members of the body of Christ, we are all called to look out for one another’s interests, and if certain ministries are denied to half (or over half) of God’s people, then that should concern all of us, for the ministry of the entire body of Christ will surely suffer from this denial.
Since my conversion, much of my Christian life has been spent in fellowship with charismatic and Pentecostal circles which do not oppose women in ministry. Indeed, many of the pioneers in the Pentecostal and Holiness movements were women, and denominations such as the Assemblies of God have repeatedly affirmed the right of women to ordination.[1]
I am ordained by the National Baptist Convention, a traditional black denomination in which women have played an active role since its earliest days.[2] Although the issue of women’s ordination does not command a consensus,[3] the local association in which I was ordained supports it and hosts many effective women ministers who command our utmost respect. AME Zion, another black denomination, was the first Methodist communion to ordain women, and it began to do so twenty-six years before women received the right to vote in the United States.[4] The black church has been traditionally ahead of American culture in this regard in part because free black women in the antebellum North nearly always had to work outside the home so their families could survive.[5] Another factor, however, may be the black church’s sensitivity to the injustice of discrimination; interestingly, many of the black abolitionists also spoke up for the emancipation of women.[6]
I have thus never been a part of a movement that excludes women from ministry, and consequently I do not feel as though I am engaging in polemic in writing this book; for much of contemporary Christianity, including my own evangelical Christianity, this book will only confirm what its readers have already believed or suspected.
At the same time, it is common knowledge that a significant stream of Christianity severely limits the roles of women in the home and the church. Indeed, even in the less restrictive circles, some ordained women have complained about the unofficial restrictions many of their brothers in Christ place on them. These sisters have begun to sensitize many of the rest of us to the importance of the issue and to the need to address the proof-texts that are often marshalled to support women’s subordination or to restrict them from teaching Scripture.
I did not always hold the views I hold now. When I began my undergraduate theological education about fifteen years ago, I was listening to some very traditional friends. They had warned me that some women teachers would argue for their right to teach the Bible, that my Greek teachers might think that other Bible translations besides the KJV could be accurate, and that I might meet people who liked contemporary Christian music. Like many others who hold to wholesale theological positions without having time to investigate their points, I thought it safer to stand on the more conservative side—which at the time I thought meant the more “traditional” side—until I could know for certain. I was, of course, mistaken; it would simply have been better for me not to have taken a stand at all until I could know for certain.
Not everyone who opposes women teachers is equally restrictive or traditional in all areas; indeed, my own feelings on some issues would still be considered at least “conservative” and perhaps even “restrictive.” Yet some people hold many views simply because these views are part of a “conservative” package. It is precarious, however, to interpret the Bible by simply assuming the more “conservative” or traditional interpretation to be correct—given the variety of traditions in the body of Christ, interpreting the Bible on the basis of traditions would surely lead to the impossibility of dialogue between different Christian groups! (Unfortunately, it sometimes has.) Thus, to be conservative in some evangelical circles is to oppose women’s ordination; in some other equally evangelical circles (such as my own), it is conservative to defend it.
What is ultimately at issue for those who regard the apostolic tradition as normative is not what subsequent traditions teach, but what the writers of the Bible teach. Yet understanding what the Bible means is not always a simple matter; certain passages in the Bible might appear as though women are excluded from teaching the Bible (if interpreted consistently, from teaching Sunday School as well as from explaining Scripture from the pulpit).[7] Those with the more restrictive view must then read the passages in the Bible about women who taught or prophesied as exceptions that prove the rule, if exceptions actually do that.
Inclined as I once was toward the more traditional restrictive view, I encountered two main problems: (1) I kept meeting committed women who were sure that God had called them, and I did not have sufficient conviction to tell them that they had to be mistaken. I would have to be pretty sure of my position before I used it to judge another person’s call, because if I made her stumble, it was none other than God to whom I would have to answer. And if I as a male minister could question the sincerity of her call, how could any of us men argue that we were certain that we had been called to ministry?[8]
(2) An initially less pressing problem was the response most students gave to my view, the same response they gave to Paul’s admonition that women cover their heads in church: “That’s just cultural.” “But it’s part of the Bible!” I protested. “If you throw this part out, you have to throw everything else out, too.” I cannot recall anyone having a good response to my objection, but even as a freshman I knew very well that if I were consistent in my stance against using culture to interpret the Bible, I would have to advocate women’s head coverings in church, the practice of holy kisses, and parentally arranged marriages. (I admittedly did not inform my parents of my questions concerning the last-mentioned view.)
Sooner or later I had to come to terms with the claims of the biblical texts themselves. If Paul says in 1 Corinthians that he is writing a letter to the Corinthians, am I not disrespecting his words if I ignore Paul’s own claim that this is what he is doing? I had to come to grips with how the Bible itself invites us to interpret it. It became clear as I continued to immerse myself in Scripture that most of the books of the Bible were originally written to different audiences, and that the Bible’s original readers would have to have read each book by itself. The Corinthians, for example, would read Paul’s letter to them as a letter addressing their own situation, and they could not cross-reference to Romans or Revelation to figure out what Paul meant. In other words, at the very least, there has to be enough in 1 Corinthians, in the situation it addresses, and in the Old Testament, to tell me what it means without my taking recourse to other texts unavailable to the Corinthian Christians.
Few biblically informed readers would try to take all the symbols in Revelation “literally,” without accounting for the historical context Revelation addresses. We recognize that the book of Revelation belongs to a certain literary genre called prophetic or apocalyptic literature. But Paul’s letters belong to a distinct literary genre no less: they are letters. And letters also nearly always address specific situations. To apply what Paul said to his churches to our own circumstances today requires more than simply reading the words on a translated page of the Bible; it requires understanding the principles those words were meant to evoke for the first readers. This is the only proper way to respect the author’s inspired message, as opposed to constructing an entirely new meaning based on a naïve modern reading of an ancient text.
In time, I came to the costly conclusion which I had long resisted, namely, that I was going to have to start learning the culture and history of the biblical world if I were to be faithful to my call. I decided that I would thus need to spend time reading a book besides the Bible that would give me all the necessary background. Unfortunately, no one book seemed adequate or trustworthy, so I had to start reading several. Then I discovered that these books sometimes contradicted one another. Only at this point did I begin to realize that accepting the validity of cultural-historical context for biblical interpretation had started me on a very long road. If I were to expound the Scriptures adequately, I would have to know the culture. I hoped one day to be able to produce books that would keep others in my situation from having to do all the same work. Those undergraduate questions eventually led me through a Ph.D. and a detailed study of the milieu in which the New Testament was written.
I had not been at such research long before I came to realize that a lot of what Paul wrote about women (not just concerning their head coverings) had to address a specific congregational or cultural situation. While I insisted that whatever principles Paul applied to that situation were transcultural, I had to acknowledge that those principles would have to be reapplied in different ways in different cultural settings: all biblical passages may be for all time, but all biblical passages are not for all circumstances. I later learned, particularly in my missions courses in seminary, that this approach—called “contextualization”—is standard practice for missionaries and Bible translators. What I learned the hard way, many people already knew; but I am all too aware that many Christians have not yet discovered this approach to reading the Bible.[9]
BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION OR FEMINIST AGENDA?
On the one hand, many people today claim to follow the Bible, yet prejudice their interpretation of the Bible by merely using it to legitimize their own prior agendas. On the other hand, many other people claim to follow the Bible, and yet fail to apply its principles to our own situations today. While Christians should not read their agendas into the Bible, we should ask how the Bible relates to the culture in which we live.
Since this book deals only with Paul’s teachings on women’s roles in ministry and in the home, it is not meant to address modern feminism or most of the issues associated with that movement. Because it advocates full equality in the church and home for women and men, however, many will place this book in an ideological category called biblical feminism. The complication with placing this book in such a category, of course, is that not everyone defines either “biblical” or “feminism” in the same way, so it would not contribute anything to the discussion to embrace the tide without defining what sort of issues this book addresses and what sorts of issues it does not address.
Whether readers consider themselves “feminists” or not, most will agree with at least some concerns often characterized as feminist, while questioning other such concerns. Many ideas that have been advocated in the name of the women’s movement are not only in harmony with Christian principles, but demand the support of all Christians: for instance, opposition to rape, other forms of sexual and physical abuse, sexual harassment, and pornographic exploitation. Some other ideas that have often been associated with the modern women’s movement, such as “abortion rights,” or much less often associated with it, such as worship of a “mother goddess,” are far less agreeable to most evangelicals, including myself.
If our allegiance is to biblical teaching, we do not need to accept or reject uncritically everything associated with any particular movement. For instance, the women’s movement in the 1800s, originally initiated and dominated by evangelical Christians,[10] largely opposed abortion.[11] There are also prolife feminists today (such as a group known as “Feminists for Life”). A polarization between defending women and defending the unborn, or between equality of the genders and peace in the home, may be a polarization the world around us accepts, but Christians need not buy into such forced-choice logic. Why can we not support both?
There are issues where most biblically conservative Christians, including myself, disagree with prominent elements in the feminist movement (as do some elements of the feminist movement itself). But there are other concerns which nearly all Christians, including myself, and nearly the whole women’s movement plainly share. All of us would call for justice against the oppression of women that takes place in the world today. All of us oppose the exploitation of tens of thousands of female (as well as male) children who run away from home each year in our country, many of whom end up selling their bodies to survive on the street. All of us oppose young men getting their girlfriends pregnant then leaving them to raise the children alone.
Of course, agendas of justice on behalf of women cannot be narrowly limited to the questions traditionally entertained among many North American feminists, as African-American writers and writers from the Two-Thirds World often remind us.[12] But here again Christians would find much common ground with other women’s movements, objecting to the oppression many women face around the world. Although “bride-burning” is now illegal in India, it still happens frequently; a bride whose dowry is insufficient may be burned to death so that her husband can find a new partner. There is no investigation, of course, because it is said that she simply poured cooking oil over herself and set herself on fire accidentally.[13] Whereas in my church my sisters complain that there are not enough men to go around, in India the situation for marital prospects is reversed: discrimination against women extends even to the womb, and at one hospital there, 7,999 of the 8,000 abortions reported were of female fetuses.[14]
In lands like Afghanistan and Bangladesh, women are denied educational opportunities on the basis of their gender; in the former, they must leave school at ten or eleven to begin weaving carpets. Although it is reported that two thirds of the world’s food is produced by women, they have little control over the products of their labors. In rural Uganda, for instance, women do the hardest physical work in the fields, besides caring for the children, and also grow up expecting beatings from their future husbands.[15] As in most parts of rural Africa, a woman labors from 5 A.M. till 9:30 P.M.[16] It is reported that women own less than 1% of the world’s property, and though they work over 60% of all hours worked, they only receive 10% of the world’s income.[17]
Lest we think that discrimination against women is limited to Islamic and other non-Western societies, however, we should note that the first nation to grant women the right to vote was New Zealand—in 1893. Women did not receive the right to vote in the United States or Canada until 1920, in Great Britain and Germany until 1928, and in France until 1945. As late as 1970, women still could not vote in the European nations of Switzerland, Portugal, or Liechtenstein.[18]
It should be remembered that long after the slaves had been freed and black American men were allowed to vote, black women, like their white counterparts, were still denied this right. As Sojourner Truth, a black abolitionist woman, warned in 1867, “if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”[19] It was the young women’s movement, backed by many Christians with their roots solidly planted in evangelical revivalism, that pushed for women to have the right to vote.
A Rhode Island Rape Crisis Center Study of 1700 teenagers, cited in a 1990 InterVarsity magazine, reported that 65% of the boys and 47% of the girls in seventh through ninth grades say that a man may force a woman to have sex with him if they’ve been dating for more than six months. Eighty-seven per cent of the boys and 79% of the girls responded that rape was acceptable if the couple was married. This thinking warns us where our culture is headed, incited by commercials that exploit human sexuality and movies that glamorize violent death, especially of women as sex objects. It is not hard to understand why “date rape” has become common and why rape concerns all of us, men as well as women; it threatens men’s sisters, girlfriends, wives, or daughters. In a survey conducted at Duke University, 13% of the women students said that someone had tried to rape them, and 80% said that they knew their assailants.[20]
Wife-beating seems to have been a well-established practice in many patriarchal families of the 1800s.[21] This should not surprise us, given how common it remains today; sometimes it even occurs in professedly Christian homes.[22] (Indeed, it has sometimes been practiced under the supposed sanction of biblical passages about wives’ submission,[23] although not even the most traditional interpreters of those passages believe that this is what they mean.) Court officials, neighbors, and pastors have sometimes suggested that the wife must have done something to provoke the abuse, which only adds to the cruel oppression these women face.[24] This is a far cry from the New Testament teaching about loving one’s wife as Christ loved his church and gave himself for her. Those of us who stand aloof from their pain are also a far cry from the biblical teaching about loving one’s neighbor as oneself.
But while some Christians may have once been content to cite proof-texts about women’s subordination to justify their ignoring this sort of oppression, virtually all of us would today recognize that oppression and exploitation of any sort are sinful violations of Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves and to love fellow-Christians as Christ loved us. Nor is protest against women’s oppression a new phenomenon in Christian circles; biblical Christians led much of the fight for women’s rights in this country:
The feminist movement is not new—nor is its connection with biblical principles. The first U.S. women’s rights convention, held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, was an outgrowth of both the religious revivalist and abolitionist movements. Many of these women had a renewed desire to study Scripture and were quick to see the parallels between slavery and female subordination.[25]
Wherever Christians come down on the issue of women in the pastorate or women’s place in the home, no Christians would advocate beatings, ridicule, or sexual exploitation. All Christians must affirm the equal humanity of men and women, that they are both made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26–27), and that women should be treated with respect and honor by their husbands. Since I do not know any Christians (or non-Christians, for that matter), who would today oppose women attending college or voting, I suppose that all Christians would acknowledge the intellectual as well as spiritual equality of women and men. Even the people I know who believe that a mother’s role is mainly to care for the children at home (contrast Prov. 31:10–31) would not for that reason deny women a place in the work force.
While we may disagree on the flexibility of roles mentioned in the Bible, the secular generalization that Christians (both men and women) who respect the Bible oppose women’s rights is an inaccurate caricature of these Christians—a caricature into which a few traditional Christians themselves have unfortunately bought. And the view that some conservative Christians hold of the women’s movement as concerned only with advocating abortion or destroying the home[26] is likewise a caricature that ignores the common ground that exists between biblical Christianity and the women’s movement on a number of issues.
In the broadest sense of the term “feminism” (regarding women and men as equal and actively opposing women’s oppression), then, perhaps all Christians should consider themselves biblical feminists. But the phrase “biblical feminist” usually applies to a much more specific set of questions than those listed above. The issue is not just whether women should be respected and treated with dignity; the issue is also whether they should properly fill the same roles as men. This then is the question with which this book will deal. The biblical argument of this book is that, in fact, women are as capable of filling those roles as men are. This is indeed a question of women’s rights, too, but in addressing the differences of opinion among Christians on this issue,[27] it is important not to overlook the large area where all Christians agree and can work together for women’s (and others’) rights in the world. Given that large area of agreement, it is the area on which we disagree—smaller but large enough to dramatically affect every phase of our church and home life—which this book addresses.
Equal treatment for women (or, indeed, for any people made in God’s image) is not, as some would argue, an agenda borrowed from the secular world. The subordination of women, on the contrary, is an idea practiced (often in brutal ways) by most non-Christian cultures in history.[28] It could thus be easily argued that the subordination of women in Christian history was borrowed from the “secular world,” and that it tells us more about the societies in which those Christian rules were formulated than about God’s eternal purposes. As I hope this book will help to demonstrate, treating women as men’s equals was far closer to the spirit of Paul than making them subordinate. This is significant, since it is to Paul that the alleged repression of women in the New Testament is most often attributed.
THE NATURE OF THIS BOOK
Those who advocate the subordination of women traditionally appeal to a limited number of passages to support their position;[29] those of us who advocate women’s equality do the same, except, of course, with different passages. This book does not devote much space to arguments for women’s equality in the Bible, except where those arguments touch briefly on the subject of our study.
The sole purpose of this book is to examine four passages in Pauline literature which have traditionally been used to argue for the subordination of women. Two of these texts address women’s roles in family relationships, and two address women’s speaking in the church. One of each is in a letter universally accepted as written by Paul; the other two are from letters whose authorship is questioned in varying degrees by different scholars, but which I accept as Pauline.
This book, like my last one, And Marries Another,[30] attempts to combine the scholarly and popular genres in a manner that will be most useful to pastors and others familiar with the biblical texts we are addressing. For this reason, I do not discuss extensively the proposed date of sources I cite, or evaluate in detail the references in the notes. But the notes should be helpful to those who wish to pursue these issues further.[31]
Not all this book’s conclusions will appear to be of equal exegetical weight to those who do not accept the importance of cultural context for understanding the Bible. On the one hand, for instance, that the God of the Bible calls women to teach the Scriptures is, in my opinion, beyond dispute, supported by clear biblical evidence and challenged only by the interpretation of several comparatively ambiguous texts. On the other hand, this book’s arguments concerning the submission of wives to their husbands involve the question of application. There, if my models of going from interpretation of the text to modern application were to prove flawed, my application would suffer correspondingly, as some of my students (women as well as men) have delighted to point out to me. This requires me to demonstrate that those who disagree with my method of interpretation on this issue in practice accept the same method elsewhere. The sixth chapter of this book thus calls for a method of application on which most Christians today would agree with regard to Paul’s teaching about slavery.
I trust that this book is exegetically sound, and I hope that it is persuasive. But even if some readers are only partly persuaded, I hope that my suggestions will in practice be equally useful for the nonoppressive traditionalist and the loving egalitarian: mutual submission means that we should look out for one another’s interests, and that is a difficult enough call in itself to demand our dependence on the Holy Spirit. Mutual submission does not reduce the wife’s responsibility articulated in the traditional position; it merely reminds the husband that he, too, must submit to his wife as a fellow-heir of the grace of life.
While I do not expect everyone to agree with my conclusions, I do hope that those who disagree will honestly address the issues raised in this book and not repeat the sort of accusations a few writers have leveled against equally evangelical colleagues. I hope that those who disagree will challenge my interpretations, rather than question my commitment to the authority of Scripture because my interpretation is different from theirs. My relationship with Jesus Christ is the most important thing in my life; my call is to expound his message faithfully. I have been beaten and had my life threatened for sharing Christ on the streets, and I do not doubt that it will happen again. I try to live simply according to what I believe the Bible says about possessions, and take a lot of other Scriptures more literally than do many of those who might wish to attack those who disagree with their interpretation which subordinates women.
That I should need to defend myself in advance on these points reflects the unfortunate level of discourse on which discussions of this issue have sometimes been conducted in recent years. But what I offer in this book I offer in love, believing that this is an important issue that affects how over half the body of Christ is being treated.