Last week a reader pointed something out to me: all my “Best of 2015” awards went to women. At the time, I honestly hadn’t noticed. But it got me thinking. What is it about this past year that should have caused me to gravitate so strongly towards a female perspective on the gospel? I read plenty of male writers and bloggers. Why was it all the women’s voices that had stuck with me come January?
Malnutrition: leaving something out
For the past three years, my wife and I had been going to a small church, there are two full-time pastors, and they’re both men, so if most of the teaching is done by men, that’s only natural. So I thought! But then as the months went by, and one guest speaker after another were all men as well, it slowly dawned on me, like the Blues Brothers playing at Bob’s Country Bunker: “I don’t think so, man: those lights are off on purpose.”
I grew up in the Presbyterian church, which has been ordaining women since the 1890s, so these are literally the first three years of my life that I have gone more than a month without hearing a woman preach. (Being honest, the idea of all-male teaching had never even occurred to me before.) The pastors at our recent church were, and are, devout men of God, with passionate hearts to serve and a profound desire to provide a weekly diet of wholesome scriptural teaching. And yet, it occurred to me: I am starving.
Think of the British Navy, c. 1750. Wholesome food for their sailors— leading to good health and high morale that were advantageous in battle— was a major concern of the British Admiralty. And yet malnutrition was the greatest enemy of the fleet; it killed more British sailors than enemy action. The chief culprit was scurvy, caused by a lack of fresh fruit. In their profound desire to nourish their crews, the Admiralty were unwittingly poisoning them instead, simply by leaving something out.
How not to read scripture
So it is with me. Many cite 1 Timothy 2:12 as “proof text” that no woman should preach, ever. For the moment, let us leave aside the questions of legalism that would require slavish obedience to this particular “law” while simultaneously living in freedom from hundreds of others— the fundamental question here is, was a lasting injunction for all times and all places even Paul’s intent to begin with?
I dropped out of seminary, but one thing I did learn there: Biblical inerrancy does not mean you can simply open the Bible to any page, choose any verse, and apply what you find there directly to your life. For example, this is from Gordon Fee’s classic text on scriptural analysis, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth:
But if the plain meaning is what interpretation is all about, then why interpret? Why not just read? Like Christ, the Bible is both human and divine. Every book in the Bible is conditioned by the language, time, and culture in which it was originally written. Interpretation is demanded by the “tension” between its eternal relevance and its historical particularity. (emphasis original)
This is doubly true with Paul’s epistles. They are full of sections that can have direct literal application only to the original readers: greetings to particular persons and seasonal travel advice. As we read letters like that, we are in constant peril of mixing up what Paul intended for the immediate situation with what he intended for all time. I am second to none in my reverence for scripture, and I think Paul— as the original advocate of adapting to culture— would be horrified by the way his intent is being misapplied under circumstances vastly different from those in which he wrote.
Why I need women’s voices
Paul and Timothy lived in a world much like modern-day Saudi Arabia. Nearly all of their public interactions were with other men. In fact, the Christian church, which had just begun to accept women into their ranks, was the first place in that society where men might regularly encounter women who were not family members. That was enough of a stretch. Paul knew it would be a bridge too far, culturally, for those men to also find that, at church, they were suddenly asked to submit to a woman’s authority as well. They simply wouldn’t go.
My world isn’t like that. I interact with women in every capacity all day every day—as supervisors, as subordinates, as grocers and bankers and doctors. The notion that I am not to learn anything from women is ludicrous in our society: everything I know about women, and much of what I know about the world, has been learned from female family members, friends, teachers, and professors over the entire course of my life.
As a Christian, all of that worldly knowledge pales in importance to the insights of the gospel. Yet that one most important area is the only one where some would keep me in ignorance, leave my understanding incomplete, leave me bereft of any insight as to a woman’s perspective and how it might complement my own.
If I lived in a society of all men, that gap in my knowledge wouldn’t have any adverse effect on my life. But I don’t, and it does. I believe that, in general, there are some real differences between men and women. And as such, a man who is called to be the light of Christ may likely be “spiritually dark” to every woman he meets if he does not understand the gospel from her perspective. So I am all the more thankful for those Godly women’s voices in the blogosphere— to provide that Bible-focused perspective in my manifold daily interactions with women— for the times I can’t get it at church.
Photo credit: Schlesinger Library, RIAS, Harvard University via Foter.com / No known copyright restrictions