Category Archives: Women & the Church

The Martyrdom of Perpetua: read the earliest Christian writing by a female

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Perpetua-21In my last post in our series on Women and the Church, I mentioned a young girl named Perpetua, who was martyred in Carthage in about 202 or 203 CE. Her prison diary, written in the days leading to her public and violent death, is still the earliest known piece of Christian writing we have by a female. She was 22-years old when she died.

And so, as we head into Palm Sunday weekend, I thought I’d share this work of hers with you. It is a stunning, beautiful, and passionate work.

The bulk of her diary consists of her father trying to convince her to abandon Christianity, as well as her visions and dreams she has to encourage the other prisoners around her. As she is sent off to die, she entrusts the diary to an unnamed individual who picks up the story from there and describes her dramatic death. This individual also added a brief introductory paragraph.

I hope and pray that the example and visions of Perpetua will speak deeply to us, in the midst of our own pain, weakness, and sorrow.

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Women & Church History: The Bad Reformation & the Good News {pt.3}

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Silencing-Women-duct-tapeThis is a post in an on-going series on Women in the Church.

The past couple of days, we’ve been talking about the historical development of this whole “Women in Church Leadership” idea. in the first post, we talked about why this is so important, and in the second post, we discussed where this change in ideas concerning ordained female leadership happened. Today, let’s talk Reformation and concluding thoughts.

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Women & Church History: the century we’re still recovering from {pt.2}

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Dubay-lizglass-eyeThis is a post in an on-going series on Women in the Church.

Yesterday, I began talking about the history of Women in the early Church. Up front, I gave my primary source for information, this issue of Christian History Institute Magazine on “Women in the Early Church”, which I will quote from in this post. If you need more information, you can go there.

I also gave a brief sketch of my view: women were quite active in leadership in the first two-centuries of the Church, but come the 200s, some radical things began to change in the Church–things that still effect us today, especially as it pertains to women in ministry.

(Most of this material is comes from the excellent article “The Early Controversies Over Female Leadership” by Dr. Karen J. Torjesen.)
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Church History: Where have the female leaders been? {pt1}

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sandorfi-quo-vadis[This is a continuation of our on-going series on Women in the Church]

Update: Part 2 is now up.

First off, one of the main limitations of writing is the necessity of producing summary titles for what you write. This post should, more precisely, have the title “Where have all of the ordained, teaching, preaching, and leading female leaders in Church History been?” But I can only put so much in the title before it becomes absurd.

I say that because even complementarians (who don’t think women should be ordained) will freely acknowledge the valuable place women (in general) have had in the Church over the years. They simply think that, in spite of gifting or value, God has placed limits on who should lead his church in ordained, official ways. So…sorry for any confusion.

When it comes to the Bible and the contemporary benefits women in Church leadership could offer, I’m pretty comfortable, confident, and secure in my egalitarianism. I think it is a faithful, consistent, practical, and edifying view to hold, and I see evidence for it written and displayed all over the place.

And yet, I’m in the extreme minority, relative to Church History.
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Let the Female Pastor Reformation begin!

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luther-95theses-humor-memeOn this blog, I currently have two running series I’m doing: “Reflections on Repentance” and “Women & the Church“. For these series, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research on those topics.

For the Women in Ministry series, I’ve been researching what, for me, is the biggest thing that gives me pause in my own egalitarian view in support of female pastors: the complete dearth of women leaders throughout the history of the whole Christian church. With a couple thousand years now of godly men (and women) looking at the same Scriptures I am, why have the vast majority of them come to the same view limiting women’s role?

Well, that’s another post for another time, but rest assured, as I’ve been researching this, I feel I’ve satisfied my concerns in this area. But that’s not what this (mostly tongue-in-cheek) post is about.

For my research for the repentance series, I keep ending up at the Reformation and its leaders. This got me thinking, and doing some math…

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Ash Wednesday Egalitarianism, or “Why do female preachers suck?”

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paul-schrott-ash-wednesday-bwYes, that’s me in that picture. I love that picture. It’s been used in a few posts since it was taken a couple of years ago. This isn’t (just) because of some weird sense of narcissism that loves to see my face on my blog posts. Rather, this picture is a very meaningful reminder of one of the most formative nights in my Christian life.

I said in the beginning of this series on Women in the Church that for most of my life, I had been one of the staunchest defenders of male-led church leadership. I knew all the arguments, I believed the caricatures of the other side, and importantly, I had experienced that women made terrible preachers of sermons.

Now remember: this was “pre-conversion” Paul that was thinking these things. But still, as I had visited friend’s churches, listened to audio, and seen female televangelists, it was hard not to notice that I had never heard a “good” sermon offered by a woman. It seemed clear to me, then, that this unique “anointing” and “gifting” to preach was reserved for men.

Don’t get me wrong. I had received incredible guidance, teaching, and wisdom from women. But these had been in the contexts of schools, lectures, books, blogs, campus ministers, podcasts, and the wider world–not church sermons.

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Women’s Ordination is indeed the end of the world

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Delaunay-City-ParisWe’ve spent a few weeks focusing on Genesis—the beginning of our story as Christians—and seeing what cues we can draw from it regarding our continuing discussion of women’s roles in churches. Having done that, I thought it might now be helpful to check out what implications the end of our story might hold for us.

After a few generations of bad (or incomplete) teaching, Western churches are, I think, reconnecting with the accurate Christian doctrine of heaven. The sense I get is that more and more of us are regaining the belief that the final heaven is not some abstract, ethereal, disembodied existence, but rather this material earth and these physical bodies renewed and re-imagined.
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Male-Only Church Leadership: Blessing or Curse?

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michaelangelo-adam-eve-eden-fall

In these discussions on women’s roles in church leadership, a favorite little one-off argument by Egalitarians (and a pretty darn good sound bite) is that the very idea of exclusive male headship is part of the curse laid upon humans in the Genesis Eden story. In Genesis 3, this is what God speaks over the woman as a curse in response to her sin:

“I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t done the research on the Hebrew or scholarship on those lines to know exactly what these lines really might mean.

Honestly, both sides could use them. Conservatives could say that the curse is that women will desire the authority that God rightfully gave men. Egalitarians would say that man’s “rule” over women is the curse.
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Women & the Church: What’s Adam & Eve got to do with it? [2]

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blake-creation-eveYesterday, in our on-going series on women in leadership roles in the church, we began looking at an argument often given by conservative complementarians when presented with the cultural context behind 1 Timothy, some of the most seemingly clear verses in scripture that limit a woman’s role in the church. Oftentimes, egalitarians offer the cultural context to show that these woman-limiting verses are in fact speaking to specific things going on at the time (as I did), rather than some eternal prohibition for all churches at all times.

The conservative response that we began looking at is when they say that the cultural context is all well and fine, but Paul’s foundation for what he says does not appear to be the immediate context at the time, but rather the very structure of creation itself. We looked at those verses to try and argue that this is not at all what Paul is doing in the text.
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Women & the Church: What’s Adam & Eve got to do with it? [1]

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durer-bw-adam-eveAs I’ve been looking into these “Women in Ministry” discussions for this on-going series, they usually follow a similar pattern. Conservatives will point to some Bible verses, Egalitarians will point to the context (as I did in our last post), and then, at some point, the conservatives bring up this simple, yet logical and reasoned argument:

Yes, you can point to the cultural context all you want, but at the end of the day, Paul’s reason for what he says, is not the cultural context, but the very structure of pre-sin creation in which God created Adam first. This is something that’s true no matter the context.

Now, I’ve said repeatedly that my egalitarian beliefs come not from desire to move away from the Bible, but my attempts to be all the more obedient to it. And so, I want to take this argument as seriously as possible. I’ll attempt to do that in these posts.

As I started writing up the problems I had with this “creation-order” argument, it became so long, that I had to break it up into two posts. Today, we’ll focus on the particular Timothy passage in question and other related things that Paul writes. Tomorrow we’ll focus on the Genesis story itself to see what it might say to this.
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On Women Leaders in the Church: Timothy’s cultural context

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artemis-greek-urnWhen last we left our on-going series on women in the church (a long, long time ago), we had just talked about the text and translation of 1 Timothy 2:8-14. This is one of the first texts appealed to as a basis for many Christians’ belief that women are not to be ordained, authoritatively teach in churches, or hold formal leadership church offices.

In that post, we looked at just the text itself. We pointed out that there is a history of mistranslating these verses, and that what seems like the best and most consistent translation of these verses offers us a different picture than the traditional one. We then did a brief walk-through of the contents of the book as a whole.

Today, we’re going to pull back from the text itself to look at the culture and context behind the letter.
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Herman Bavinck on the Advent Election of Mary [QUOTE]

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In a comment on yesterday’s post on Mary, occasional blog contributor Austin Ricketts posted this quote, another gem by Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck:

[the] entire preparation of the incarnation in the preceding centuries is concentrated, as it were, and completed in the election and favoring of Mary as mother of Jesus. Mary is the blessed one among women. She received an honor bestowed to no other creature. In the undeserved favor granted her, she far exceeds all other people and all other angels. Rome was right in maintaining this; those who deny it are not taking the incarnation of God seriously…Among all Protestants who confess the incarnation of the Word, Mary is held in high esteem. She was chosen and prepared by God to be the mother of his Son. She was the favored one among women. Christ himself desired her to be his mother, who conceived him by the Holy Spirit, who carried him beneath her heart, who nursed him at her breast, who instructed him in the Scriptures, in whom, in a word, the preparation of the incarnation was completed.

–Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 3, pp. 274; 281-282

Advent & Mary: Ordained as Prophetess, Priestess, & Queen

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Tanner-the-anunciation-mary

This Advent season, we’re seeing how the Advent event affects parts of our lives that we usually don’t associate with it. You can follow the series here. This post is also filed in the series “Catholics Aren’t Crazy” and “Women Leading Stuff in Churches“.

If a woman is revered by the church for giving the faithful their savior, then surely women are good enough for leadership roles in the church to save it. –Vishwanath Ayengar

I ran across that quote in some letters to the editor of Newsweek a couple of years back. It was a response to a cover story that more or less said that if there were women ordained as priests in the Catholic Church, then there wouldn’t have been any sex abuse scandal. I don’t know if that’s true, but the quote is insightful and (hopefully) thought-provoking.

I can hear conservatives now: Well, God used a donkey to speak! He used Caiaphas the high priest to unknowingly prophesy about Jesus before sentencing him to death! He used Judas to bring about Christ’s crucifixion and therefore our salvation! It doesn’t mean that they were fit to be ordained pastors!

Yeah, yeah, I get it. This post isn’t necessarily meant as a “proof” or “defense” of women’s place in ministry (though it’s a part of my on-going series on the topic). I just want to revel a little bit in some divine mystery. Can we all just put our swords down and marvel?
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N.T. Wright: Egalitarianism isn’t “progressive”; it’s biblical. Others object. {8}

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The Rt Revd N T (Tom) Wright delivering the Ja...Alas, due to my obsessive commitment to not let blogging get in the way of the relationships in my life, my promised post on the historical context of 1 Timothy will not be coming today (and may have to wait until next week). Instead, as part of this ongoing series, today I’d like to offer to all of you an excellent Op-ed that biblical scholar N.T. Wright posted in The Times of London (copublished here).

Last week, the Church of England voted not to allow any female bishops (though they have, for some time, allowed female priests). Prime Minister David Cameron bemoaned this, telling the Church they needed to “get with the programme” and ordain women bishops because that’s just where the world is right now, apparently. (This issue is also causing other political problems for the Church.)

Wright, who supports female bishops wrote the Op-Ed blasting Cameron for encouraging the Church to “get with the times”, saying that that is never a reason why the Church should do anything. He continues, blasting the idea of naive “progressivism” that has dominated monder thought.

Instead, he says, the Church should ordain female bishops because it’s biblical, not because it’s “cool” or “progressive”. He goes on to say that appealing to the culture does damage to the truth that it is biblical, and reinforces the patently false idea that those that oppose female ordination are the ones reading Scripture “literally” and “faithfully” while egalitarians are only listening to “culture”.

The Op-ed is brief, snarky, and powerful. Needless to say, it garned some thoughts from conservatives on this side of the pond. Doug Wilson did not just one, but two posts on it, and Denny Burke also wrote against it. The Internet Monk then brilliantly deconstructed their responses.

And so, I give you these men (why is it always men!) to read and discuss in the space below. Have fun.

On Women Leading Stuff in the Church: 1 Timothy 2:8-12 {7a}

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Anyone that’s actually been following this series on women in the church knows that I haven’t done what most people do when approaching this topic: jump to the proof-texts. I felt that doing it the way I have done was necessary because there were far deeper things that affect how we interpret these texts that needed to be dealt with before we even opened the Bible. In Systematic Theology, this process is called Prolegomena (Greek for, roughly, “things that need to be said first”). It’s a long-standing theological principle, and there’s nothing demeaning to the Bible in approaching theology this way.

how we’ll do this

But it wasn’t until I started writing this post that I realized another reason for my delay. This has been a really hard post to write. Not for content or conviction, mind you. The main issue has been this: for much of my readership (or at least those I would be most interested in changing their minds–those men in higher places in entrenched and influential places that already disagree with me on this), I don’t know that I can say anything different than they have already heard. Further, what can I offer that a simple Google search won’t? I don’t like feeling like feeling like I’m contributing to the noise.
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