As I wander life's path I share my rambling thoughts...
The Role of Women in the Church?
There are many things in the Christian religion that, as I have grown in my understanding and relationship with God, I have begun to question. One thing which I think is helpful is to ask the question “What if these scriptures don’t mean what I have always been told they mean?” This question will be one which recurs in my blog posts, as there are numerous scriptures that I, in my own upbringing, have been told mean a certain thing, but as I have grown and questioned I have discovered may not be so straight forward, or even mean what I was first told. Some years ago when Dr John Stott died I read a story about him visiting a college to speak. At the end of the talk he was accosted by a passionate student who accused him of hypocrisy. When Dr Stott questioned the student it became apparent that the student had recently read a book by Dr Stott which stated things that seemed to contradict what Dr Stott had said that night. When asked which book the student had been reading, Dr Stott realised that it was quite an old book. ‘Arh yes,’ Dr Stott said, ‘when I wrote that book, that is what I thought, but by the grace of God he had not finished working on me, and now I disagree!’ (see here for an example of a book by Dr Stott). This is an important thing to understand, that as we grow ‘more and more like God’ as the Divine Spirit works in us, we change and develop, this includes our understanding of scripture and theology. Thomas Merton, the 20th century contemplative monk, once said something along the lines of “if the me of 5 years ago does not think the me of today a heretic in at least some things, I have not grown properly”. So this is a ‘What if’ blog, hoping it will draw you to question and go to contemplate more...
This ‘what if’ blog in particular is about the role of women in the church, something which I have always struggled with, as I was born into a family which went to a fairly strict conservative ex-Brethren church where women weren’t allowed to do anything really, not without a hat at least! And certainly were not allowed to preach!
This subject has been one of the on-going debates within the church for hundreds and hundreds of years, and still goes on in many places. It is something that I have specifically looked into as it is a subject which never sat comfortably with me.
As I researched and studied the early church of Britain - the Celtic church (see my blog post ‘Does Celtic Christianity Exist?’), and studied and learned more about Hebraic culture, the Jewish faith, its scriptures (the Christian Old Testament), and the Jewishness of Jesus (see here for a good place to start) and the first Apostles – including Paul, the more I found that the verses which refer to the role of women in the church, if they mean what I was brought up to think they mean, contradicted what I was learning about the Celtic church and the Jewish faith, of which Christianity is an extension; and also some actions and statements of Paul himself in other places in scripture (see for example who Paul chose to first preach the book/letter to the Romans – Romans 16v1 – the letter which many scholars feel is his most significant letter. Look up the word Paul uses to describe her role – don’t just take the English translation at face value).
In the Celtic church prominent women, such as Brigid, Æbbe, and Hilda, held roles of significance in leadership; and in the Jewish scriptures there were similar life stories, see the position of Deborah for example, who held a role of not only physical, but also spiritual authority over the nation of Israel.
So how could all these testimonies, which come not only from our own Christian heritage, but from scripture as well, be true, if women were not allowed, scripturally, to hold these positions? As I am sure scripture does not contradict itself it was obvious to me that there was perhaps more to these scriptures than was seen at first glance, so I delved deeper.
There is much that can be said on this subject (indeed I have hours’ worth of teaching material and books which I have gathered), so this is just a brief look for a blog post...
Many problems within church history, especially modern church history, lie in taking the wording of the English translation literally. We need to remember, even without thinking that there may be cultural understandings to consider, that the bible was not written in English, and whenever anything is translated from one language to another, it loses something in translation. This is why we need to ensure that we understand what scripture means, and not just know what scripture says, as these are two very different things.
There are two main hurdles which many churches seem to get stuck on when it comes to the subject of the role of women in the church.
The first, to me, shows a lack of knowledge of the Hebraic culture in which Jesus and Paul lived, and the understanding within the Jewish faith (still) of the difference between the home and the place of gathered worship (which from here on I will call ‘the church’). When Jesus taught, and when Paul taught and wrote to churches, they both understood this difference, as they were both, according to scripture, devout Jews. The home and the church were never understood to be linked in relation to the roles that men and women played in each of them, they were two very distinct, very different places. So, if we are to expresses our understanding of what scripture means, as opposed to just knowing what it says, then we cannot put any reference to the roles of men and women in the home in a statement about the roles of men and women in the church. This, therefore, negates the use of verses such as Colossians 3v18-21, and 1Peter 3v1-7 from this discussion. The second hurdle comes purely from understanding the meaning of words and the cultural surroundings of the letters Paul wrote.
Even though all of Paul's letters were written for specific churches at a specific time, usually over a specific issue (or more than one!), the fact is that when God guided the monks as they developed the ‘Cannon’ of scripture, these letters became books in our bible, and so, irrespective of the ‘specifics’ mentioned above, God knew that they would be relevant to us as we desire to walk in a right relationship with him in a post Messianic era of history, and in our modern setting.
However, we do need to take into account the cultural surroundings of the churches to which the letters were written. We need to know what was happening in the places that Paul wrote to, so we can understand why Paul wrote what he did, what it really means, and how it is relevant to us today.
Before we get to that, however, I would like to point something out that could be seen as hypocrisy in many modern churches when they use the following scripture to refer to the role of women in the church: If you are going to use the passage from 1Corinthians 11v1-16 as a basis for taking the stand that women cannot preach in the church, and are going to take the meaning of the English translation literally, then you have to either take the whole section in that way, or none of it. I refer particularly to verses 5, 6 & 13.
Having been in many churches, and having been involved in Sunday morning services, I know that women often freely pray out loud in the gathered worship times without their heads covered/wearing hats in churches which do not allow women to lead or preach. If this passage is going to be used as an example of the place of women within the church, and the literality of the English is to be used, then all women should be made to wear hats, or at least cover their heads, when they pray or prophecy. It has to be all (wrong?) or nothing!
Most modern churches, however, hold this view as archaic, and as ‘progress’ in the church, women are no longer expected to wear hats. Personally I do not believe that women need to wear hats or cover their heads at all when they pray or prophesy in modern churches, but that this whole section of scripture, including the three aforementioned verses, has a deeper meaning than what the English wording suggests. Therefore, if women are not going to be made to wear hats (or have their heads shaved!), we must put aside this passage on the subject of the role of women in the church until it has been studied more deeply and we gain a full understand of what it truly means (which we cannot do here).
Another passage from scripture is 1Timothy 2v8-15, and it is worth mentioning here that there is an almost identical parallel teaching in 1Corinthians 14v33b-35.
The ‘sticky’ verses in this section from 1Timothy are verses 11 & 12. To gain a proper understanding of their meaning, we need to both know the cultural setting and the original wording in Paul’s letter to Timothy (and the church in Corinth, which were quite similar with respect to these sections of Paul’s two letters).
We will start our look at these scriptures with the teaching that ‘women should stay silent in church’. If this phrase is to be taken literally, the English translation seems to state that women are not to speak in church, to not make any noise. If this is so then Paul here contradicts himself, and in the case of the letter to the church in Corinth, he does so within the space of 3 chapters. If we go back to the passage in 1Corinthians 11, in verse 5 Paul says ‘every woman who prays or prophecies’. How can a woman pray (out loud) or prophecy in church, if they are to keep silent, if ‘to keep silent’ means not to speak? So if, as I stated before, the bible, and Paul himself, does not contradict itself, then there must be more to these passages than first meets the eye when reading the English translation.
I have heard it taught that Paul’s meaning here is that women should not shout out across the church (synagogue) as they were seated in a raised balcony or separate area and the men were seated in the main section. However, archaeology shows that the synagogue was not designed like that until Hellenistic dualism and Greek philosophy influenced the Jewish faith, which was not for around another 200 years from when Paul lived. So this is not what Paul is teaching.
To gain a proper understanding of the ‘keeping silent’ of women we need to look at the actual wording, and expand this into cultural understanding. The word for ‘silent’ used in 1Timothy2v12 in Greek is ‘hesychia’, but ‘silent’ is not a very helpful translation. A better translation in this context and the literal meaning of the word is ‘lack of disturbance’. Paul here teaches that a woman should not cause a disturbance in the church service. But why would Paul single out women in the church with this statement? To understand that, and about a woman’s ‘authority’ within the church, we need to understand what was happening in the church and town it was in at the time Paul wrote the letter. For this we can go to Acts 19, where Paul first goes to Ephesus (where Timothy was – see 1Timothy1v3).
In Acts 19v23-29 we find a great opposition to the Gospel of Christ coming to Ephesus by men who created the statues and idols to the goddess ‘Artemis’ (v24). Artemis was the multi-breasted Pagan goddess of fertility. The temples of Artemis were overseen by Priestesses. The largest temple to Artemis in the world at this time was in Ephesus, in fact it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The second largest temple to Artemis in the world at that time was in, you’ve guessed it, Corinth! And they weren't too far away from one another either (see here). In these larger temples there could be anywhere up to 1,000 priestesses serving Artemis at one time. The ‘worship’ of this goddess, and the way it was believed that you gained ‘oneness’ with this goddess, the goddess of fertility, was to have sex with the priestesses.
As part of the ‘worship ceremony’, the priestesses were renowned for their loud shrieks and sudden outbursts. What was happening in Corinth and Ephesus was perhaps that some of these priestesses were coming to know Jesus Christ as their God and saviour, but were bringing their old practices into the church. Perhaps then Paul here, in this passage, is not teaching about women in church, as a modern reading might suggest, but instead teaching about the dangers of bringing Pagan practices into the church, like sudden shrieks and outbursts causing a disturbance during worship. The way the priestesses worked in the temple of Artemis also meant that they dominated the men, as the men submitted to the goddess through the priestess, and would subdue them as part of their worship, and the men would allow themselves to be lorded over by the women of the temple of Artemis. This then brings us to 1Timothy 2v12, where Paul refers to women ‘having authority over’ men. Where Paul says women should not ‘have authority over a man’ perhaps he is referring to the way in which the priestesses would ‘lord it over’ the men in the temple of Artemis, and how this was not how it was to be in the church. This is quite a similar instruction, actually, to Peters instruction to the church elders in 1Peter 5v3.
This is just a brief glance at some of the verses in scripture which speak on this subject, but with this understanding of the wording used, and the cultural surroundings of the time, and all that I have said of the other verses, perhaps scripture does not teach what we may have first thought it did when it comes to the role of woman in the church.
