1. Introduction
The main concern in this paper will be to explain the place of women in Christian ministry. This subject is not new but it assumes new significance in the light of the unprecedented attention given in the last three decades to women’s issues, such as the centuries of their discrimination and subordination to men and failure in acknowledging their invaluable contribution to the family, church and society. The notion that women could be involved in Christian ministry is not contested as many women in the history of Christianity and in the Bible did involve in God’s work in various ways. The more sensitive question, however, is whether women could be leaders just as men in Christian ministry and whether similar opportunities and training for leadership be given to them. The question becomes even sharper in the light of the raging commotion among radical as well as biblical feminists who argue for equal rights and opportunities for women in ministry, and for their equal value and dignity as complete humans. Evangelicals in general have approved traditional roles for men and women arguing from the Bible that women must be silent in the church and subordinate to men, and be excluded from its ordained ministry. The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, and many traditional Protestant Churches still follow this teaching. In what follows I shall attempt a brief survey of the developments leading to the modern debate in order that we keep the whole in its proper perspective.
2. A Brief Historical Survey
This survey is attempted in order that women might be encouraged to know that it was not easy for those who had gone before in order to make their voice heard or gain respect for their views as women. For centuries the traditional roles of men and women and their spheres of activities are taken for granted and theology and biblical studies have justified such roles on the basis of certain biblical texts that seem to have affirmed the existing social norms of patriarchy and male domination. With the rise of the women’s liberation movement in the mid-twentieth century and the concomitant ‘feminist critical consciousness’, these traditional norms have been challenged. But the roots of ‘feminism’ are normally traced to the production of the Woman’s Bible in two volumes during 1895-98 in America by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Stanton, cited in Bass 1982: 10, 11.), although this label was not known at that time. Her background tells it all. Being the daughter of a Judge, she expressed her views during the first women’s convention in 1848 to bring about changes in the legal system where women in Britain had no rights to property until 1882, no rights to vote or hold public office until 1918 (until 1920 in America) and no right to divorce until 1937.
But she was not alone who felt the similar pain in regard to women’s status in the society. Matilda Joslyn Gage with her, Women, Church, and the State in 1893, seem to have joined forces with Stanton and they quickly recognized the connection between discriminatory attitudes of the society toward women and the general portrayal of women in the Bible and its interpretations in the church. Stanton felt that the best way to address the issue was to ‘revise’ the Bible, a thought that was prompted by the recently produced ‘Revised Version’ of the KJV (1881, 1885). She formed a ‘Revising Committee’ of like-minded women, but none of them seemed to have had any expertise in biblical languages or interpretation. Their only aim was to show that the Bible and its interpretation in the Church were responsible for the suppression of women. Although their goals appeared to be worthy their efforts were seen more as reactionary and radical than any systematic argument against the traditional views held in regard to the status of women. Therefore, not many have taken them seriously and on the other hand the Woman’s Bible was criticised severely. Nevertheless, it made many intelligent and educated women think seriously about male domination and its supposed religious sanction.
However, it must be noted here that from the time of the Reformation the ideas of personal salvation, priesthood of all believers, and their freedom to interpret the Bible for themselves were disseminated far and wide and many educated and intelligent women took advantage of them. During the 17th and 18th centuries many women had asserted their right to preach and teach the Scriptures as they discerned God’s call to do so. But some of them, like Ann Hutchinson (1591-1643), were excommunicated and Mary Dyer was executed in 1660 by the Puritans (Selwidge 1996). But this did not stop others continue their efforts to advance women’s cause. Margaret Fell Fox’s exposition from Genesis to Revelation in Women’s Speaking Justified (1667) gave a biblical basis for women to appeal for their role in Church’s ministry, and the Great Awakening in the 18th century resulting from the revivals of Charles Finney seemed to have further encouraged women’s free participation in Church’s worship, teaching and preaching. In the early and mid-nineteenth century women who felt God’s call to defend their right to equality continued to voice their views.
Interestingly, the first woman who voiced her views for gender equality was a black intellectual, Maria Stewart (1830), who argued for both racial and gender equality (Russell and Clarkson 1996: 316). Following this Sara Grimke produced her Letters on the Equality of Sexes in 1838, and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first woman ever ordained, presented her exegetical essay on 1 Cor. 14:34-35 and 1 Tim. 2:11-12 in 1949 in a seminary. The school published her essay but refused to graduate her because she argued that Paul’s injunctions in these passages applied to the specific situation in the text and not to universal contexts (Philips 1999: 389-90). In 1859 the black woman, Sojourner Truth, in her speech ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ fiercely defended against the racial and gender attacks of the white males. She argued that women have a right to leadership in both the Church and the society because a woman was God’s instrument to bring forth the Saviour of the world. She was rightly considered as one of the founders of the black feminist movement. Following her footsteps, Anna Cooper, another black feminist, articulated Truth’s views further, with a moving description of black American voices ‘as “one muffled strain” and as “a jarring cadenza” that startled those who heard it. Within that chord, the “one mute and voiceless note” was that of the “sadly expectant Black woman”’ (Baker-Fletcher 1994: 132-50, 189-9).
As early as early as 1875, M. Baker Eddy appealed to the androgynous nature of God in order to emphasise women’s equal status in the Church, while K.C. Bushnell argued from biblical passages that men and women are equal heirs in salvation. Frances Willard, founder of Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in her Women in the Pulpit (1888) argued for women’s suffrage and equal rights. And in Germany H. Janow, alongside with H. Gunkel, gained respect as a woman biblical scholar with her work on Israelite laments, although she had to be satisfied with only an honorary doctorate, the highest degree then available for women. She was known for her views on women’s equality especially in academia (Philips 1999: 390). Interestingly, such enthusiasm for women’s rights was dampened once women won their voting rights in the US in 1919 and was not recovered until after the UN declared the year 1975 as the International Women’s Year. Not satisfied with this, the women at a UN sponsored conference in Mexico City pressed the UN to declare the whole decade (1975-85) as ‘Women’s Decade’. Then followed a succession of international women’s conferences in Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and in Beijing (1995) that boosted not only their morale but also their solidarity as women having common concerns, and facilitated in sharing resources, information and networking (May 2001: 302-3).
Along with such immense benefits, these conferences have also revealed certain uncomfortable differences about the nature of their solidarity. So far the feminist thinking has been dominated by the few well educated, white, middle class, urban women and few pro-feminist men who had little or no idea of the struggles of the Third World. Even a cursory glance at the composition of women at international gatherings such as these would have revealed that their concerns are as diverse as their backgrounds. The issue of gender is felt more acutely in the West than in the Third World, where this has been more tolerable than the poverty, illiteracy, corruption and the daily struggles for survival. But the women from the West were ill-prepared, if not unaware of the problems, to raise these issues or the economic inequality between the developed and underdeveloped, and the related issues of globalisation and free trade by the Multinational and Transnational corporations who exploit the cheap labour of the poorer nations and lend to them through the World Bank and World Trade Organization only to get it back with interest which some of the poor countries have been paying for decades in the form of interest alone. So the issue was not just gender but the larger issues of justice and human dignity and this is not just for the elite but for all. Again for the African women gender issues are more tolerable than racial issues.
Thus the international gatherings brought new challenges so that the problems of gender discrimination are not to be seen uniformly but to be addressed from their varied contexts. And probably this gave rise to a multi-disciplinary approach to the issues of gender resulting in not a single feminist theology but in many feminist theologies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America besides varied flavours within the European feminism. Today feminist studies embrace a wide variety of disciplines because of their conviction that women’s experience is complex and the forces of their oppression are varied in different contexts. It is not just a religious issue, but philosophical, theological, anthropological, psychological, legal, literary and historical, economic, political issues that play part in the discrimination and oppression of women. Therefore, it is the intention of the feminist thinkers to provide a critique of every oppressive force and deliver justice to the oppressed (Brock 1996: 116-17).
The developments until the 1960s are to be considered as precursors to the ‘feminist critical consciousness’ that began to emerge in the late sixties and became almost an identifiable entity by the eighties. Its influence is so phenomenal during this period that, according to certain social sciences research, half the theological students in mainline seminaries in the US were women and the number of ordained women was doubled ‘from 2.1% in 1950 to 4.2% in 1980’ (Neitz 1998: 184-86). Several factors contributed to it, not least the ‘women’s liberation’ movement that arose in the mid-fifties, but the real breakthrough came as women scholars in academy, and women’s social and political movements elsewhere began responding to various forms of discrimination, marginalisation and oppression of women in different societal structures, such as religion, culture, politics, language, media, art, architecture and so forth. It is not easy to summarise those responses in any authentic or rigid way, but it is important for us to identify certain patterns among them in order that we might know where we stand or how we formulate our own views in regard to women in ministry. At least three broad patterns of women’s response may be identified among Western women in the academy, allowing at the same time significant differences within some of them (Russell 1982: 67-71).
First is the ‘rejectionist’ or radical response that identifies patriarchy, androcentrism, being the chief culprit for the discrimination and oppression of women. It is so pervasive in all our socio-religious structures that the only proper response to it is a radical rejection. The chief advocates of them, Mary Daly (Mary Daly 1968) and Adrienne Rich, argue that sexism and misogyny are so deep seated in the society and religious structures that there is no point in wasting time to ‘reform’ the society, but to develop an alternative or counter-culture that forms a basis not only to evaluate the traditional sources of authority which are hopelessly infected by sexism but more importantly to celebrate the ‘essential female nature’.
Secondly, the ‘reformist’ position which argues for ‘equality of sexes’ and abolition of all oppressive structures that devalue and dehumanize women, and at the same time this group, unlike the rejectionist or separatist, is committed to remain within Christianity and strive to bring structural changes from within. They aim at ‘equality’ and full humanity of women, and while keeping subjugation of women as its central focus, strive for ‘renewed humanity’ through reconciliation between the oppressed and the oppressor, but the way they achieve this purpose by a critical and selective reading of the Bible (Reuther 1975: 29-31). This means that Bible is not the authoritative word of God and biblical passages in the Old Testament and of the apostle Paul which seem to support male leadership and women’s submission must be interpreted by reason and modern critical scholarly consensus.
Thirdly, evangelical response: I must say that evangelical response to patriarchy has not been recognized or brought into the mainstream feminist academic discourse because first, the evangelical women have generally accepted the status quo and the hierarchical system in family, church and society. Therefore, naturally you would not expect them reacting to patriarchy. Secondly, they believed that the general hierarchical attitude to women in the church, being seen as part of the church’s teaching, was an extension of the teaching of the Bible, therefore challenging patriarchy would have meant challenging the biblical teaching. Thirdly, those women who responded to patriarchy have defended biblical authority but were divided between hierarchical and egalitarian positions, while rejecting the mainstream feminist position which rejected biblical authority on this matter.
Now the question for the evangelicals is, ‘which camp do I belong, hierarchical (that is man is the head and leader while woman is to submit to male authority and be silent in the churches), or egalitarian (that is man and woman are equal in creation and salvation and are to be given equal opportunities in the church’s ministry according to their gifts and talents). Our chief model and standard is the Lord Jesus Christ. How did he deal with women in his ministry and what do we gather from his treatment of women in the gospels? To this we shall now turn.
3. The Gospels
There is no sustained argument for or against women’s equality with men, but in contrast to the prevailing Jewish or Greco-Roman culture the Gospels portray that in Jesus’ ministry the foundations for women’s equality have been firmly laid.
Jewish rabbis during the time of Jesus usually advised their followers that they must not talk much to the women folk, that a man must be saved first when a man and a woman were in danger of death; they also taught men that they must thank God that they had not been created as Gentiles, as women, or as illiterate people, and that the words of the Torah are better burned than handed to a woman (Talmud). The Jewish historian Josephus sums it all up: ‘The woman is in all things inferior to the man’ (Apion 2: 201). Of course there were some exceptions where women were taught Torah, and were allowed limited participation in worship, but this only proves the rule (Witherington III 1990: 3-9).
However, Jesus broke the rabbinic practice of having only men disciples. Although the inner circle of the twelve was men, which was inevitable in the cultural context of his time, he had a wider circle of disciples that included many women with different backgrounds. He openly declared such an inclusive principle when he compared his natural family with his disciples saying that his ‘mother, brother and sister’ are those who hear God’s word and do accordingly (Matt. 12: 48-50; Mk 3: 33-35; Lk. 8: 19-21). They were not just those who passively received his healing and pastoral care but those who were engaged in serious theological dialogue (Matt. 15: 21-28; Jn 4: 7-29), who chose to sit at his feet like a ‘rabbinic (male) disciple’ in contrast to Martha’s traditional stereotypes of a woman (Lk. 10: 38-42), who chose to become his travelling companions and active supporters of his ministry (Lk. 8: 1-3). This last text suggests that Jesus’ inner circle includes some women just like the twelve (cf. Mk 3: 14;France 1995: 77).
This would have been certainly unusual, ‘if not potentially scandalous, in the light of rabbinic practice’ that viewed women as property of men, second-class citizens, and a source of sexual temptations. But Jesus valued women and related to them as real people of independent worth and personality. No wonder they played a significant role in the movement that arose out of his public ministry. This became glaringly clear when Jesus’ ministry came to a climax on the cross. While the inner circle denied Jesus or disappeared from the scene, the women disciples followed him to the cross, witnessed his burial, prepared spices for his body, and thus they became not only to be the first witnesses to his resurrection but also were commissioned to bear witness to the empty tomb, in a society where women were legally unacceptable as witnesses (Lk. 24: 10-11). Thus the Gospels set the tone for considering women as equals which led to its logical developments in the rest of the New Testament (France 1995: 78).
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