Truly, Paul is the fly in our evangelical ointment. Ecco homo, “behold the man” who demands that women remain silent in church. All would have been fine in the Church if he had just kept his trap shut: this man who apparently couldn’t get a date telling the rest of us how to keep women under our thumbs. Paul is the writer who presents us with the thorniest passages regarding women outside of the Old Testament.
This man, who, on careful study, was the best friend of women and a strong advocate, is accused of the worst misogyny by many women and, among men within the Church, has engendered an entire subspecies of He-man Woman Haters, the religiously motivated kind.
Where do we start with Paul? Will he take the fall for God’s command regarding women and men in the Church? Is he to become the poster child of domineering males? If, however, we accept the premise that all Scripture is inspired of God, then Paul must get an exemption from blame and the onus must fall upon God Himself. If you believe that Paul was writing independently of God’s authorship, then you have greater problems with the Bible than merely determining how women must minister in the Church.
Although Paul always expressed in his own words what was on his heart after personally assessing the situation in the various churches to which he wrote, he never wrote anything that was not the settled word of God. If all Scripture is God-breathed, then Paul is guilty of nothing; the blame, if there is blame, must rest fully upon God’s shoulders. Anyone with a clear understanding of inspiration of Scripture must accept the teachings of the contested Pauline passages as the intent of God, not simply an earthly writer telling it like he thought it was for his time and place. Paul was not trying to jury-rig a solution to a problem with problematic churches. Inspiration does not work that way.
What we must do is determine what was actually said. This rules out interpretations based upon speculating upon lengthy back-stories.
Some cannot bring themselves to blame Paul (or God) for his views and therefore give him the best whitewash, the best cover-up, known to guilty sinners. We exempt him from peccability as someone merely responding to a temporary cultural need that has long-since passed away. Such commentators add too much back story in order to set up Paul’s alibi, stating that Paul’s restrictions upon women were solely for the time and place in Corinth and Ephesus.[1] As a result of this type of interpretation, we are assured that we can safely disregard the restrictions upon women as mentioned by Paul: they do not apply to us today. To give Paul and God an alibi for their oppressive restrictions, these interpreters have stripped the passages of any transcultural implications. If we were to strip away the transcultural implications of every passage that we could not comfortably live with, we would have a very small section of the Bible to which we would have to pay attention; the balance discarded as mere historical oddities.
Actually, neither response (blame Paul or God, or excuse Paul or God) is required. Paul, it turns out, was as gracious and accommodating to women as was Jesus. The trick here is to demonstrate it. We will do this by walking through the Pauline corpus and demonstrating the various points he was trying to make at each step of the way.
Part of our problem in understanding Paul’s instructions regarding women is that we often miss a grammatical gimmick in the text that does not simply say that women are to be silent in church, but that wives are to reflect the relational nature between Jesus, the Bridegroom, and His Bride, the Church, according to Ephesians 5:22-33, by demonstrating their submission to their own husbands. All but one of the restraints upon women in the Church have their genesis in this concept. To get to this understanding, let us walk through the Pauline writings and build a foundation of practical, biblical theology as Paul lays it out. But that is for the next post.
[1] The two churches to whom Paul wrote placing the greatest restrictions upon women were Corinth (1 Corinthians) and Ephesus (Ephesians 5, and 1 Timothy 2).
