18 Biblical Truths Our Church Fathers Missed: Part 2
When I first began to question God’s view of women in Scripture, I was primarily seeking answers to soothe the aching inferiority I felt from the double sexual standards and insulting treatment of women in many passages. While their degradation in the Old Testament was deeply disturbing, the New Testament left me confused. Some scriptures were comforting, but others felt like a slap in the face. The Gospels were the only portion of God’s Word that felt truly safe. The rest of the New Testament was a land mine for me, with random passages telling women, in effect, to go to the back of the bus. I kept wondering, did Jesus come to raise the status of women on one hand, but keep them in their place with the other?
What I did not understand at that point was not only how women had been degraded by patriarchy but also how the church had been affected by it. Because women played a very minor role in the translation and interpretation of Scripture, my understanding of God and his Word was imparted through a male lens. In addition to skewing my personal identity as a female, I came to see how this imbalance had also slanted the moral compass of the church, diminished our understanding of the gospel, and impeded the function of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, the truths I discovered in the New Testament, coupled with insights from the Old, not only set me free from my dilemma but gave me a whole new understanding of the gospel and a voice to proclaim it with greater clarity, authority, and vision. My prayer is that many others will also be set free by these glorious truths.
10. All Scripture is to be read through the lens of God’s ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ (John 1:14).
All of Scripture is centered around the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. From the first three chapters of Genesis, which reveal God’s original creation and the fall of humanity into sin, the whole Old Testament points forward to the coming Messiah. The Gospels reveal his incarnation, teachings, sacrificial death, and resurrection—and the rest of the New Testament points back to him. Any doctrine that makes Scripture an instrument of oppression is not based on this Christocentric hermeneutic.(182-185)
*As in Part 1, page numbers from The Ultimate Reformation are included for further reading on each point.
11. Through his example, teachings, and sacrificial death, Jesus undermined patriarchal values and set a new standard for human relationships.
In every way, Jesus modeled and taught the opposite of a patriarchal value system. He repeatedly confronted those who were vying for power and elevated the oppressed. In his interactions with women, he never treated them as subordinates and freely violated cultural taboos against their receiving religious instruction or having a public voice. He exposed the hypocrisy of the double sexual standard (John 8:1-11) and made men accountable for their infidelity and lust (Matt. 5:27-28; Mark 10:11). He declared love for God and one another as the greatest commandments on which all others are based (Matt. 22:37-40) and established the Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12), with no gender distinctions in his standards of discipleship. Finally, in submitting himself to the ultimate form of public degradation, torture, and defeat, and forfeiting all of his divine power on the cross, he inverted the world’s patriarchal power dynamics and revealed the way back to a restored relationship with our Creator and with one another. (92-100, 155-158)
12. Women’s testimonies are embedded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s conception, life, death, and resurrection.
Considering that women had no public speaking rights and were not accepted as reliable witnesses in court, the deliberate inclusion of women’s eyewitness testimonies in the Gospels signals a divine affirmation of the female voice. Who could have revealed the specific details of Jesus’s conception, the baby leaping in Elizabeth’s womb, and Mary’s meeting with Elizabeth other than the women who experienced these events (Luke 1:26-56)? Female disciples accompanied Jesus during his ministry, witnessed his actions, and heard his teachings along with the men (Luke 8:1-3). It was the women in his life who were consistently present to witness all the events of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, and in their humble status, they were commissioned to go and tell the men (Matt. 28:5-10; John 20:17-18). Thus, God ordered events so that women were the first witnesses of the most important events in Jesus’s life, and men were left to corroborate their testimony. (99, 175-176)
13. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was given freely to all believers, with no distinctions of gender, race, or class (Acts 2:17-18), and it is the Spirit who determines each person’s gifts and callings (1 Cor. 12:11).
The events of Acts 1 and 2, including Christ’s final commission to his disciples to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth” and the universal outpouring of the Holy Spirit, left no room for patriarchy to thrive in his kingdom. The Christian gospel formed the basis for a radically new social ethic, where there was “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). All believers are joined as one body—growing in unity, truth, and love to become the full manifestation of Christ, as each part does its work (Eph. 4:11-16). Within this context, women are frequently mentioned in the New Testament, serving as Paul’s coworkers in leadership capacities that would have offended Roman and Jewish norms (Rom. 16), and they were severely persecuted along with the men (Acts 8:3; 9:2; 22:4). (100, 175-178, 225-226)
14. Any limitations placed on women in the New Testament would have been an adaptation to their oppressed status and cultural issues facing the early church.
In 1 Peter 3:1-7, wives are told to submit to their husbands “in the same way” as slaves are to submit to their masters in the preceding passage, “like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord.” They are not to “give way to fear,” while husbands are to treat their wives “with respect as the weaker partner” so that nothing would hinder their prayers. Thus, the New Testament recognizes female subordination as a cultural norm and generally counsels believers to be in submission to established authority structures, including slave-masters and tyrants, rather than rebelling against them (1 Pet. 2:13-21). They were to live such good lives in a pagan world that unbelievers would not be able to discredit their witness. Rather than placing a divine affirmation on these oppressive social systems, however, the gospel worked from the inside out at a grassroots level, bringing cultural transformation through its life-changing impact on the human soul. (92-96, 159-174)
15. God’s original marriage ordinance is a reflection of Christ and the church, and as husbands gave up their social privilege to love their wives properly, they would also build up the church (Eph. 5:21-33).
In light of women’s oppressed status, Ephesians 5 presents a radical idea. The one-flesh unity that God intended in marriage, with the husband joined to his wife, reflected the one-body relationship between Christ and the church. Cultural norms of female subordination were now under the umbrella of Christ’s lordship as believers learned to submit to one another. Rather than retaining a position of superiority, a Christian husband was to model Christ’s sacrificial love for the church in loving his wife as his own body, building her up until, like the church, she became a radiant, thriving version of her true self. By applying the Golden Rule in this way, husbands would emulate Christ’s redemptive love in restoring the church to an intimate relationship with him. Thus, in Christ, the fallen male/female hierarchy of Genesis 3:16 gives way to the mutual dignity and equality established in Genesis 2:24. As the image and intent of God is restored in both sexes, the bride of Christ will also thrive and “become a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish but holy and blameless.” (158-162,206-210)
16. God is not limited to either gender and is represented by both sexes in the Trinity (John 3:5-8).
Only females give birth, and Jesus makes being “born of the Spirit” a requirement for anyone who wants to enter the kingdom of God. In the New Testament, the children of God are repeatedly identified as those who have been “born of God” (John 1:13; 1 John 3:9). This clearly portrays God in a maternal role, and there are many female metaphors for God in Scripture. Though God will always be the Father in relation to the Son, to ascribe only a male identity to the great “I AM” (Ex. 3:14) of Holy Scripture reduces God to a male-dominant representation and discounts the divine image in the other half of humanity. (186-188)
17. The life-giving maternal role of the Holy Spirit cannot be diminished without distorting the gospel.
The Holy Spirit is so fundamental to the New Testament gospel that any version of it that does not set people free to walk by the Spirit is a counterfeit (Rom. 8:14; Gal. 5:25). Through spiritual rebirth, those in Christ are a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), and “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ” (Rom. 8:9). Jesus described the presence of the Spirit as “rivers of living water” flowing within a believer (John 7:38).
When Bible verses that subordinate women are isolated and incorporated into church doctrines, God is represented as a patriarchal being whose fundamental nature is revealed through a chain of authority rather than the renewing presence of the Holy Spirit. Instead of empowering believers to live according to the Spirit rather than the flesh, they are subjected to a stunted version of the gospel that places male privilege above their restored identity as God’s children (Rom. 8:1-17). Like the Galatian heresy mixing works of the law with faith in Christ, this is a “different gospel” than the one Paul preached (Gal. 1:6-7), and it lacks the power to build a victorious church. (115-132, 203-208)
18. Christ’s true church, united and empowered by the Spirit, is destined to be a clear witness to the world of the pure gospel before he returns in glory (Matt. 24:14).
If the serpent’s head will be crushed by the woman’s seed, and all who belong to Jesus are included in that prophecy, then the church will ultimately triumph over all of Satan’s schemes. As Christ’s body, his followers are destined to grow into “the fullness of him who fills everything in every way” (Eph. 1:23) and to spread his gospel throughout the whole world (Matt. 28:18-20). This is a church that looks and acts like Jesus.
According to Jesus, the world will recognize his disciples by their love for one another and unity with him (John 13:35; 17:20-26). They will operate in the Spirit’s power and do the things he did—including supernatural works (John 14:11-14). They will treat people like he did and proclaim a message of “good news” for the poor and oppressed (Luke 4:18-19). They will hate hypocrisy and will love “justice, mercy and faithfulness” (Matt. 23:23). They will seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matt. 6:33). Ultimately, they will be victorious over sin, Satan, and the world (1 John 5:4-5; Rev. 21:7). This is why patriarchal theology cannot endure among the followers of Jesus. (221-228)
Questions to ponder:
• Which points align with your current understanding of the Bible? Are there any that you question? How do they affect your interpretation of other scriptures relating to gender status?
• Do you recognize ways that the male point of view is still equated with objective truth in the church? Without women’s experiences and insights to offset men’s, can you see why some scriptures have been ignored or interpreted in ways that reinforce male privilege?
• Without biblical boundaries to secure women’s unique place in God’s creation and plan of redemption, who determines whether they get a voice and what roles they play?
• What does the church need to do to protect its female members from the ever-changing winds of culture and whims of those in power?