WHAT ABOUT WOMEN?

I recently had a friend post online, “Woman was made for man, not man for woman.”  I think that this philosophy is not only prevalent in our church culture today, but it can be an enormous stumbling block for people to come to Christ. 

How can we believe in a religion that hates women?  I would counter that God does not at all hate women.  Although the church has misinterpreted the scripture and abused it for their own evil gain, we should no longer be enslaved to ancient cultural understandings of gender which has been prolonged through misreadings of the scripture through time.  Let’s take the Bible for what it truly says!

First of all, let's look at the scripture from which this quote comes: 1 Corinthians 11:9. This passage is specifically addressing head coverings within the culture of the time. According to this passage, men should not be covered, and women should. However, you can't take this passage out of context, because he was specifically addressing a cultural issue during their time. 

In this book of the Bible, Paul is writing a letter to a specific church at a specific time (in this case, to the church at Corinth around the 50s AD).  This means that he is giving the church guidelines that will help them follow God while functioning within their society and their understandings of gender.  In addition, some scholars believe that the reasoning behind the head coverings was possibly because of prostitute practices in which prostituted women shaved their heads.  In order that all women would be viewed equally in Christ, women should wear head coverings. In this way, women recently prostituting themselves would not be judged for their past. 

Thus, we cannot run around taking cultural verses from scripture with their cultural biases and apply them to today. For example, we don’t have to apply the head coverings to our churches if we don’t have bald prostitutes to protect!  However, we should take the universal truth that we are all equal in Christ and treat all people alike, no matter our pasts.

Some people, however, think that we need to take all Bible very literally, so extremely that women truly should wear head coverings.  In addition, these literalists believe that women should not teach (even though women in that time were not educated and could not even read the letters of instruction that were provided in the churches).  If we take these Bible passages literally, you had better take all of 1Timothy 2:11-15 literally, and not just the part about women not able to teach! Notice the last verse mentioning that women will be saved through child-bearing.

If we take this within context, we see that in verse 12, Paul says that HE does not permit a woman to teach her husband.  We see that this was his own culture and his own ideas speaking.  We must not take his personal views completely literal from God or we should all be celibate, too (1 Corinthians 6)!  However, f we take this passage in context, we see that women not teaching was a cultural view.  Also, we see woman figuratively bringing salvation through childbirth, that Eve brought sin into the world, but the birth of Immanuel brought forgiveness, just as Romans 5 explains that one man (Adam) brought sin to the world and one man (Jesus) took it away.  Therefore, we must be careful how we read passages like 1 Corinthians 11 and Ephesians 5.  We must recognize cultural views, specific directions to the readers of the time, and how we can apply UNIVERSAL TRUTHS to our lives.  In this case, we see that humankind has fallen, but God has made a way of atonement for us.

What we must notice in the 1 Corinthians passage, however, is that Paul takes it a step further and gives a new understanding in contrast to their gender biases of that time (1 Corinthians 11:11-12): "Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God." In this day and age of little respect for women, this statement was revolutionary!  As a universal truth to take away from this passage, we learn that in Christ, we are equal. 

This agrees with the new understanding of humanity in general explained in Galatians 3:26-29. Galatians reads, "So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise."

Where are these principles coming from? Why would these authors be so counter-cultural in their time? It is because God loves women.  He loves them, even as they are downtrodden and mistreated, and he desires justice. 

Jesus spoke to women (John 4), went to their houses (Luke 10), and essentially treated them as equals as they were his disciples, too (Acts 9:36, Romans 16:7). Jesus treated women with respect and gave them authority.

Some non-egalitarian will use passages, like Ephesians 5:21-33, to say that women should be subjected to men.  However, the main emphasis of this passage is not at all that women should submit to men!  When we read the passage, we see wives submit to husbands like they submit to their God. At the same time, we see husbands submit to their wives like Christ submitted his life to the church. If we read vs 21, we see the key to this passage: "Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God." This is the emphasis.  Love one another.  Submit to one another.

Many non-egalitarians think there is a difference between the terms “submit” and “love.”  They think that women should “submit” and that men should “love.”  Does this mean women shouldn’t love and men shouldn’t submit?  They limit the meaning of the words and our callings to one another just because the two terms are used for the two different genders.  I’ve heard male pastors say, "The Bible doesn't say 'submit' to your wives! It says ‘love.’" I agree; it doesn't use the word "submit"! Nonetheless, the passage says that husbands should love their wives, "even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it." If you feel uncomfortable defining this kind of love as being a form of submission, you probably have a wrong definition of true love. What is love? "Christ died for us." In Philippians 2, Jesus “emptied himself,” “became nothing,” and became “obedient to death on a cross.”  If that's not submission, I don't know what is.

Again, if we are going to read Ephesians 5 and understand gender roles from it, let's take verse 21, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” and verse 33 “However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband” in marriage; don’t take one verse out of context and build your romantic partnership on that.

As we can see through these passages, woman was not made for man. Instead, a woman, named Eve, was made for a man, named Adam. If you're going to take that general principle to make an ideology that "woman was made for man," you had better accept the teaching of head coverings, refuse to believe in women preachers, and you'd better encourage all women to start bearing babies!  However, if you’re going to take this general principle through out-of-context readings and overly literal interpretations, don’t be surprised when your readings of Jesus and his experiences with women disprove every opinion you have on women and their worth.