Among Christians there are two philosophies about the place of women in the church and in Christendom. The historical view has been complementarian—the belief that, in religious matters, men have the primary leadership role, and women have the primary support role. All are servants, but only men can be servant-leaders.
The trend in western society has been toward an egalitarian view—the belief that, apart from obvious biological differences, God considers men and women equal, and doesn’t limit our ability to lead or minister by gender. Any limitations are artificially imposed by our culture. Sometimes they’re based on cultural standards (“That’s man’s work, and too rough for delicate women; let’s protect them from that”) or prejudice (“Women aren’t bright enough or strong enough to do that”), or comfortability with the status quo (“He has his job, I have mine, and that’s best”). But if God empowers a woman to take a leadership role, who are we to keep her out of it?
While the egalitarian view has been applied to politics and the workforce, it’s not found in a lot of churches. The two largest churches, the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox, do actually have women in leadership, but limit where they can lead. That’s because, in those churches, they can’t perform sacraments. So they can take any role which doesn’t require sacraments as part of the job: They can’t be priests. But they can lead charities, schools, hospitals, missions, and so forth. Protestants believe differently about sacraments—that they don’t minister God’s grace directly; only God does that, whereas everything we do, not just sacraments, ministers God’s grace indirectly. But in function, conservative Protestants are agreed that women can’t be priests: They aren’t allowed to minister grace to others. Well, unless they’re other women. And maybe children. And sometimes not even that.
Egalitarianism is a growing trend. It’s been part of the Pentecostal movement since its beginning in the early 1900s. And in the mid-1900s mainline churches began to adopt that stance and ordain women as pastors. The often-conservative Pentecostals and the often-progressive mainliners came to their egalitarian views through different routes: Pentecostals took the view that God obviously empowered women to minister, so he must be okay with the idea. Mainliners, many of whom were influenced by a postmillennial view of the End, believed society ought to be progressive if we’re going to achieve the millennial Kingdom, and part of progressivism is egalitarianism.
Complementarian churches look at all of this as more evidence that Pentecostals are off their rockers, and that mainliners have adopted the attitudes of secular culture instead of the bible.
That briefly is the history. I’ll admit up front: I grew up in complementarian churches, but I’m egalitarian. I’ll try to present the complementarian side fairly (and correct me if you think I haven’t). But ultimately I don’t find it to be biblical.
The “women be silent” verses.
Let’s dive headfirst into the center of the controversy. There are two passages that complementarians point at to defend their view that women shouldn’t be in leadership, and they have to do with women not talking in the church. This is extrapolated to mean that they simply can’t teach Christianity to men. Since that’s a whole lot of a pastor’s job, they therefore can’t be pastors.
Women should be silent during the church meetings. It is not proper for them to speak. They should be submissive, just as the law says. If they have any questions, they should ask their husbands at home, for it is improper for women to speak in church meetings.
—Paul,
Women should learn quietly and submissively. I do not let women teach men or have authority over them. Let them listen quietly. For God made Adam first, and afterward he made Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived by Satan. The woman was deceived, and sin was the result. But women will be saved through childbearing, assuming they continue to live in faith, love, holiness, and modesty.
—Paul,
To understand why Paul would write such things, you gotta understand the layout of a first-century Christian synagogue. The earliest Christians were Jews, and borrowed the synagogue format for their churches: The teacher was seated up front, the men stood around him, and the women were in the women’s section in the back of the building. The Pharisees, who had invented the synagogue system, invented it for men. Women, whom they didn’t want ignorant of the Law, were permitted to be spectators, but not participants. They could attend, but they were expected to stay in the back, stay out of the way, and keep quiet.
So you can understand Paul’s exasperation with women shouting from the back of a synagogue, “What did he say?” or “What does that mean?” or “Wait; that’s wrong; this verse should be interpreted like so.” The problem with the early Christian synagogues—which is why Christians eventually did away with the synagogue setup—was that women couldn’t interact with the teacher. Not without disrupting the whole meeting. Paul’s statements reflect the attitude of a teacher who was trying to maintain order in the classroom. And that’s the context of both his letters to Corinth and to Timothy. He wanted these disruptions gone. The women needed to behave themselves, and not seize the floor from the teacher. If the teacher needed correcting, the proper place to do that was in private, later. Not from the Peanut Gallery in mid-service.
But do these passages mean women are banned from all teaching, from all preaching, from every instance where a woman might be in charge of men? Complementarians say yes; the rest of the scriptures have to be adjusted to suit the women-be-silent verses. Egalitarians say they can’t be; there are too many other scriptures that indicate women are expected to participate in their churches.
Complementarians point to the rest of Paul’s statement in 1 Timothy: “For God made Adam first, and afterward he made Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived by Satan. The woman was deceived, and sin was the result.” Their argument is that since the woman “was so easily deceived, she should not be trusted as a teacher.” (Expositors Bible Commentary) Therefore she should stay in her place: “But women will be saved through childbearing, assuming they continue to live in faith, love, holiness, and modesty.” Stay home, raise the kids, and leave all the spiritual heavy lifting to the menfolk.
Egalitarians point to the fact that Paul worked with women: Ministers like Priscilla, and deacons like Phoebe. Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians he presumes women will lead prayer, or prophesy to the church. Some of the more extreme egalitarians argue that, given these verses, Paul couldn’t have written these verses: They must’ve been added to the bible later by some chauvinistic copier. Me, I figure they haven’t tried hard enough to understand why Paul, if he’s an egalitarian, might write such things. The way you sort out seeming contradictions is by looking at the history, not by editing out the bothersome bits.
At this point in history, at Timothy’s church in Ephesus, a bunch of folks had recently left the local Artemis religion, and were trying to create a “Christian” group with some “Christian” teachings that actually had a lot of iffy Artemis teachings mixed in. It was cultlike and heretic, and manipulated a lot of the less-educated women in the church. Timothy needed to fight it. So it was these women that shouldn’t be permitted to teach; they’d just lead everyone astray. Corinth, by the way, had similar problems with refugees from the local Aphrodite religion. Hence Paul’s need to clamp down on women in the 1 Corinthians passage too.
This makes this an ad hoc teaching: It’s for the specific church it was written to. What we can learn from it is to keep order in our services: Keep the under-educated away from leadership until they’ve reached a certain maturity level. Until they’re ready for leadership, they can stick to other vital responsibilities (like child-rearing) that they can do.
The “women should submit” verses.
The other verses that get frequently trotted out by complementarians are the parts where wives are told to submit to their husbands. “Submit” (ypo-tásso) can mean “obey,” but more accurately it means “arrange under.” The idea is that you submit your life to other Christians, just like you’d submit a proposal to a boss for approval. You can have plans and goals and dreams, but you have to keep other people in mind. If you’re married, of course, you need to keep your spouse in mind. And if you’re a Christian, you need to keep Jesus in mind.
So okay, a wife needs to submit to her husband. But the part the complementarians tend to skim past is the verse where all Christians ought to submit to one another —which includes of course husbands submitting to their wives. Paul went into detail:
For wives, this means submit your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything.
For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. And we are members of his body.
—Paul,
If we’re comparing the spousal relationship to the Christ/church relationship, we do actually have inequality—but it’s in the wife’s favor, not the husband’s. You see, the wife only needs to submit her plans for her husband’s review. The husband needs to do likewise, but more than that, he needs to be willing to die for his wife. He must submit his entire existence to her needs, and work as hard as Jesus would towards his wife’s care and Christian growth.
In a Kingdom where leadership is really servanthood, the idea of a husband bossing around a wife is completely contrary to Jesus’s system. Whether that’s in the home, or as part of a church’s leadership structure, it’s unacceptable behavior.
The “no male or female in Christ” verse.
Yes, God created males and females, and made us biologically different. And that biology affects a whole lot of things, including the way we think. It’s naive to claim otherwise. But as far as the Kingdom is concerned, Jesus set it up without any of the social barriers that we put on masculinity or femininity.
For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.
—Paul,
Compare the layout of a synagogue with the story of Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet—right in the front of the room—while he was teaching. Not only did Jesus not shoo her to the back of the room, he rebuked her sister when she insisted that Mary stop getting an education and come help her with the “women’s work.” In fact, something you’re gonna notice about Jesus when you read about his interaction with women in the gospels: In every instance where Jesus dealt with women, he violated every social standard of his day. He kept treating them the same as men.
The movement of history has been in the direction of egalitarianism for a reason. When God first created humans, he created both men and women in his image. Women were created second to show us that men aren’t to do things alone, and that we need women. Not that women are subordinate because they were created second. You might notice that in the bible’s order of creation, later creations are actually more important.
Why, then, have women been treated as second-class citizens throughout history? It was one of the curses of sin. They have better places than many men in his Father’s house. And, because he empowers women with the same Holy Spirit, they often have the same duties, because he’s clearly given them the same abilities.
The very last place any of the curse of sin should be perpetuated is in Jesus’s churches. The fact that we find it even in the leadership of his churches, means that we have a lot of repenting and work to do.