Reconstructing 00.4: Women in the Church

The churches of Christ are, in my experience, almost universally complementarian. If you’re reading this and aren’t familiar with complementarianism, I suggest you do some reading before proceeding. If you don’t, the rest won’t make sense. If you do, it may still make no sense, but it will at least not be gibberish.

Broadly, complementarianism is the idea that women and men are equal in some sense, but hierarchical in other senses, with men (of course) on top. Different complementarians understand that in different ways. Here’s a list of ways this particular hair gets split. Is it scriptural for a woman to do any of the following?

• Preach a sermon with men present
• Lead singing with men present
• Read a scripture in worship with men present
• Say a prayer in worship with men present
• Teach a class with men present
• Is the class in the church building, or in a small group setting?
• Serve as an elder or deacon or priest or bishop or pastor or lead pastor or what have you?
• Pass a communion plate or collection basket
• Serve as church treasurer
• Ask questions in a class taught by men
• Be police officers or other jobs that involve having authority over men
• Write checks or make any financial decisions at home
  
• Hold jobs, at all

• As a sub-issue, how do we define “men”? Is there an age limit below which males don't count? Do non-believers count, or just believers? Baptized believers? Of your denomination? Of your congregation?

Shockingly to many people, the Bible is not a list of rules. You will not find many of those questions even remotely addressed, anywhere. Since the scriptural basis for the entire concept of complementarianism is, again, deeply ambiguous, every differing detailed implementation is totally man-made, and yet again we see people constantly elevating their understandings to the level of scripture, and attacking each other over their differing understandings. Something has clearly gone wrong, and we need to understand what it is.

Where does all this come from? Complementarians will say the male-female hierarchy is all throughout scripture. But being Christians, let's focus on the New Testament for a moment. The reality is that male-female hierarchy is almost entirely absent from the teachings of the New Testament. It's background information about the societies involved, sure, but Jesus and the writers spend almost no time on the subject. In fact, both Jesus and Paul treat women as equals to men in ways that were totally radical for their time and context.

The truth is, there are pretty much two short passages that make complementarianism fly at all. Without those two, the consistent message of the New Testament would be "women are equal to men, no hierarchy exists." Throughout the New Testament, we have women teachers, women deacons, women prophesying, even a woman who is (arguably) called an apostle, all without the slightest comment or concern. Yet because of those two passages, we end up twisting into a pretzel to justify this not-hierarchical-hierarchy.

 

So we had better make sure we understand those two passages, hadn't we? Now, keep in mind, I am not a scholar, and I am not here trying to argue for any specific understanding of the texts. My argument is, instead, that multiple understandings are reasonable and possible, and that the complementarian understanding is not the only one, or even the most reasonable one. If you want a more scholarly breakdown, check here and here.

 

Now, those texts:

1 Corinthians 14:34-35

the women  should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak. Rather, let them be in submission, as in fact the law says. If they want to find out about something, they should ask their husbands at home, because it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church.

1 Timothy 2:11-15

A woman must learn quietly with all submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. She must remain quiet. For Adam was formed first and then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, because she was fully deceived, fell into transgression. But she will be delivered through childbearing, if she continues in faith and love and holiness with self-control.

Okay, take those verses completely out of context, and they sure sound like Paul's telling women to keep their mouths shut. But we cannot take verses out of context and claim to understand them. Paul didn't write lists of tiny rules; he wrote complex letters, often in response to specific situations. You can't understand Paul's point in those verses unless you understand the entire letter they're part of.

Of course, that's hard, because Greek is hard, and because we don't have the matching letters back from Paul's correspondents. Again with the ambiguity, and the problems of being so certain in the face of it. But we can still come to some reasonable, if not completely certain, conclusions.

Let's start with Timothy, because it's easier. We have two letters to Timothy, both while Timothy is in Ephesus. You can read both of them at a sitting, and I recommend you do so. In summary, Paul is advising Timothy on how to deal with false teachers affecting the church there. We know from 2 Timothy that some of those false teachers were specifically targeting women. What the false teachings were, we don't rightly know, but we can make some suppositions.

Ephesus was known for being the center of worship for Artemis. Her temple there was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and in Acts, Paul is recorded as having had some difficulties there with the cult of Artemis. We don't know much about that cult, but it was probably dominated by women, and Artemis was the god a woman would appeal to to provide safety during childbirth. So it's a reasonable guess that the false teachings targeted at Christian women in Ephesus included things like "Christian women can still appeal to Artemis for safety during childbirth." Starting from that, let's pick Paul's response apart:

• Paul says to Timothy "A woman must learn." Forget the rest of the sentence for a moment; that statement is radical! Teach women!? In neither Jewish nor Grekko-Roman society were women educated, at all! Paul's solution to women being deceived by false teachers? Let the women learn! Teach them the scriptures, so they can't be deceived so easily. But women in that context were remedial students that needed to catch up, and obviously remedial students shouldn't be teaching. There's no reason from this to think an educated woman should not teach an uneducated man, and in fact, we see exactly that elsewhere in the New Testament. With this understanding, we get a much more coherent view of Paul and the early Church's attitude toward women.
  
• Paul says he does not allow a woman to "exercise authority over" a man. But the Greek word here isn't one ever used elsewhere in the New Testament. It's not the usual word for power or authority. It's the word for domination, mastery, enslavement, sometimes even murder. This word doesn't place some special restraint on women; Paul doesn't allow men to treat women that way either! Paul could very well be saying "The cult of Artemis has women dominating men, but that's not the way we're going."
• This stuff about Adam and Eve is totally opaque from a complementarian perspective, but it usually gets some hand-wave about "see, Adam made first, Eve deceived first, therefore Adam superior." Which is totally not in the text, of course, and it would be a bizarre conversational turn on Paul's part, since he never says anything else like that in his other writings. Instead, consider that Paul is pointing out the prime example of what can happen when a women is deceived by a false teacher. It's a serious problem, that needs to be addressed by letting women learn! Again, much more coherent.
  
• And finally, the bit about women being saved through childbirth. This is another totally opaque verse, until you understand Paul is arguing against the cult of Artemis, whose false teachers are offering women the illusion of safety. "If women want safety in childbirth, they should live right before YHWH God, not appeal to Artemis."

All of a sudden, even if we're missing some details, the passage as a whole makes perfect sense, both internally and as a part of Paul's overall writings. And as a side-effect of making perfect sense, it clearly says nothing at all about any sort of universal rule of female submission to men within the church. If anything, it says men should do everything they can to ensure that women can be equal partners in the work of the Kingdom of God.

So that leaves us with 1 Corinthians. This is a different letter with a different church and a different set of problems. What were those problems? Well, there were quite a few, and they appear to have written Paul a letter about them, which Paul is responding to. See 1 Corinthians 7:1, where Paul continues his letter "Now with regard to the issues you wrote about..."

The problem is, Greek doesn't have quotation marks, and we don't have the original letter from the Corinthians. There are points from chapter 7 on that Paul seems to be quoting the Corinthians back to them, then expressing his own thoughts, but we can only guess as to which parts they are! There are places where it's clearly Paul talking, but other times, it's ambiguous whether it's him or the Corinthians.

Consider 1 Corinthians 7:1, for example. The NIV renders it:

Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry.

But the NET has: 

Now with regard to the issues you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”

Those quotation marks give that verse totally different meanings! Clearly we have a very difficult problem trying to understand significant parts of 1 Corinthians!

Now, let's look back at 1 Corinthians 11. We have to have an understanding of the entire letter, remember? After a few chapters on idols and spiritual freedom, chapter 11 seems to be the beginning of a new topic. This passage is also pretty opaque, and I do not here intend to try to provide clarity, but it does contain one critical verse, 11:5. 11:2 is pretty clearly Paul talking, and 11:16 is also pretty clearly Paul talking, with no serious disagreement within those verses. So that implies it's either Paul talking in 11:5, or that he's quoting the Corinthians back on something he agrees with them on:

But any woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered disgraces her head, for it is one and the same thing as having a shaved head. 

(Ignore the head covering part for the purposes of this discussion.)

Now, prophesying is a public act. One does not prophesy in solitude! Paul expressly expects women to be speaking the word of God, in public, and from other parts of 1 Corinthians, he's talking about prophecy in a worship setting. There's no way that 14:34 means women should never talk in worship! Paul is one of the most organized writers you'll ever encounter. He does not contradict himself, much less within the same letter, three chapters apart.

So what, then, do we make of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35? One clear possibility is that this is a quote that Paul is then responding to. Verse 33 seems to end a topic, and verse 34 start a totally new one. Let me show you one way quotation marks can totally alter this verse, in a way that makes a lot of internal and external sense. Text from the RSV translation, quote marks mine.

"As in all the churches 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."

What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached? If any one thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. If any one does not recognize this, he is not recognized. 

Paul could very easily be commenting on the practices of the Corinthian church, and telling them this female-silence stuff is from the moon. One thing pointing this direction is that comment about "even as the law says." When, in any of his other writings, does Paul say "You should do this because the Jewish law says so!" That's totally not Paul's approach to the law, especially when he's talking to a gentile church!

But you know what else is interesting? The Jewish law says nothing like that, anywhere. (You could argue that he means "even as the complementarian pattern of the whole Old Testament says," but that's circular reasoning, since this is now our only verse that supports a complementarian reading of the Old Testament.) What law is being talked about here? It has to be civil law! Women were often not allowed to speak publicly in Roman and Greek society. Paul could be talking about women keeping silent to remain in obedience to the local secular powers. Again, this is not a universal prohibition.

Or, yet another related possibility, Paul could be referencing the same issue Timothy faced in Ephesus, that women in this historical context were often uneducated. This connects these two verses to the immediately previous about worship being orderly, for the strengthening of the church. Paul could be saying, "If the remedial students don't understand what's happening, don't be disorderly by interrupting the service. (Besides, a visitor could call the cops on us all if he's offended by a woman talking too much.) Instead, keep silent, and ask someone to explain it to you later."

So there are two or three different ways of understanding this passage, all of which are entirely believable from the text itself, and very consistent with Paul's other works and writings. Complementarianism ignores all those possibilities, and instead focuses on a narrow, context-free reading of two verses, then forces that reading to become the lens through which we view literally the entirety of scripture and Christian life.

I prefer to take Paul at his word. 

For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female – for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 

If you're interested in a deeper exploration of this topic, consider the podcast Almost Heretical. They did several episodes on it, which start here.