On Women and a Short Introduction to the Epistles

I saw this movie a long time ago called, Yentl. Barbara Streisand plays this Orthodox Jewish girl from Poland who wanted to learn and study the Talmud. But according to the rules of her Jewish community she wasn’t allowed to learn the Talmud because she was a girl. Her Rabbi father taught her against the cultural norms of his day, and she loved it. After his death, she cut her hair and pretended to be a boy. It’s a great movie.

Those rules about girls learning were the rules the apostle Paul lived with his whole life, and Peter and John, and also James. Girls were not allowed to learn. They weren’t supposed to study the Torah the way the boys did. In fact, there were a lot of rules about who could learn and who did or did not belong. So you might imagine the scandalous revolution that ensued when this guy showed up, also known as the Savior of the world, and changes all the rules. He ate with sinners, talked to the religious with an authority that came from another place altogether, healed people by touching them, the very ones no one ever touches, hung out with the misfits, and shockingly depended on women for financial provision. He died on a cross, rose from the dead, and then sent his Holy Spirit in power to ALL the people, and changed all the rules.

“Behold,” He says, ” I am making all things new.”

In that upper room, when the Holy Spirit came upon the people, the Spirit didn’t just fall on the men. The Holy Spirit fell on the women, too. Old and young. Then, a little later in the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit doesn’t just fall on the Jews, the Holy Spirit fell on ALL the people, Jew and non Jew, rich and poor, slave and free, even home owners and apartment renter.

Right around that time, sheets start falling from the sky in visions. Rules about what was unclean and clean started getting reordered, rules about who needed to get circumcised, or who didn’t need to get circumcised made their way around the churches, outcasts who were never included somehow found they belonged, holy and profane got redefined. Jesus literally turned all the rules upside down. 

When Phillip baptized the Ethiopian Eunuch in the early part of Acts, we are reading the out-workings of a new theology taking form. We are reading the manifestation of this radical new faith. In the Old Testament law, a Eunuch was unclean, kept out of the inner fellowship of the religious community. Not only was a Eunuch unclean, a Eunuch didn’t belong. They were un-gendered. De-sexed. Outsider in every way possible. However, in Christ, the outcast is welcomed, even baptized, which of course, required that Phillip touch him, and the Eunuch finally belongs. The Eunuch belonged with and to the people of God. This is a remarkable thing to consider.

The letters Paul and the other apostles wrote to the early churches weren’t rule books, they weren’t law — they were helpful letters of instruction as the early church, people from all different places, figured out how to walk by faith in the power of the Spirit as they followed in the footsteps fo Jesus. Many of the epistles were written to very specific people, and sometimes about very specific problems. Problems that must be looked at inside their specific cultural context.

The epistles are surely overflowing with rich theology. Paul was working out his Christian theology and writing to the churches as he came to understand the implications of the gospel.

There are a couple of things worth noting about the Christian Epistles. First, we don’t have all of them. What we have in the canon of Scripture is a collection of some of them. We know there were other letters.

Secondly, while there was a typical Hellenistic way of writing letters, the early church epistles don’t fit neatly into the Hellenistic literary style. According to Paul Achtemeier, Marianne Meye Thompson, and Joel Green in the Introduction to the New Testament, they fell somewhere in between Hellenistic cultural norms and the Jewish subculture of the time period. They were also written in the more “common speech of the less educated people.”

Interestingly they reveal an egalitarian mindset, even in their very form:

“Although the letter-openings of the NT letters are thus expanded beyond the normal extent of Hellenistic letters, the form in which the greetings are cast, with the sender named first and then the recipients shows that they fall in the category of familiar rather than formal letters. Formally, therefore, writer and readers are acknowledged to have the same status, reflecting socially the kind of contact typical between friends or members of the same family rather than the status of suppliants to a superior or the giver of instructions to an inferior. The equality among all Christians, formally expressed by Paul in Gal 3:28 (cf. 1 Cor 12:13 Col 3:11) is thus embodied in the very form of the letters that contain that message”(279).

When Paul said, slaves obey your masters … Paul was not saying anything out of the ordinary. That was a given. Slaves knew they had to obey their master. However, when Paul said, masters treat your slaves with respect and remember you have the same Lord — that’s where Paul flipped everything all over, up and around. In Roman hierarchy it was absolute nonsense for the master of a household to respect and remember his slaves, or the children, or even his wife. In fact, that kind of talk was the kind of thing that made Christians outcasts. They were disrupting the cultural norms of the day. They were disrupting the very thing that made the Roman Empire the Roman Empire. 

Today, in 2019 we know that slavery is wrong. We wouldn’t dream of reading Paul’s instructions as a mandate that we should go out and buy slaves so that we can treat them with respect. We don’t say… ah, Paul defended slavery, that must mean it’s okay to own people. 

We read those verses and put them in their context. We recognize that at the time, during the Roman Empire slavery was a reality. There was not much the early Christians could do to change that. After all, many of them were the slaves. That said, it is also true that in the early church period, their treatment of slaves and their egalitarian love for one another startled the Roman Empire and threatened it.

It is important to remember that two hundred years ago, certain Christians did use those verses as an excuse to keep slaves. In America, the slave holding Christians of the south believed that if they treated their slaves with “kindness” they were upholding Scripture. It took a few radical abolitionists who looked at the whole of Scripture — the beginning to the end — to recognize that the love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ overturns the notion that slavery is acceptable. However, the majority of slave holding Christians at the time, loved their money more than the God of their faith, and used specific verses concerning slavery to defend their right to own slaves.

We can read about slavery in the New Testament and recognize that although the Apostle Paul taught about slavery inside the Roman Empire, and encouraged slaves to respect their masters, it doesn’t mean that God upholds the right for people to own slaves. If we can do that, we can and must apply the same logic of biblical interpretation to the equality and role of women in the church.

That is to say, it is absolutely possible to read Scripture, extract a few verses, teach them as stand alone doctrine and do great harm, misrepresenting the heart of the Bible, and even more, misrepresenting the God of the Bible. It happens all the time.

I believe the Epistles are God-breathed. They are useful for teaching, for training in right living, and for admonition to us today. However, in order for them to be useful, we must read them inside their cultural setting, through the lens of the Gospels and the book of Acts, and through the narrative arc of the whole story of the people of God.

The authors of all the epistles were writing to the first century church as they figured out how to become the people of God inside the goodness and reality of a New Covenant. To suggest they do not have to be taken into the cultural context of their day, would be to misunderstand and misrepresent them.

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