A question of… of Gender (part 2): A feminist trajectory in Scripture?

This blog springs off from last week’s one: ‘A Question of Gender (part 1): Gender, sex, and gender ideologies’. This week, I’ll talk about how I think the Bible can support one of the gender ideologies I discussed last week: a feminist/equality perspective. And in a future blog on ‘a question of inclusion’ I’ll talk more about transgender and intersex people and how Scripture can also support a ‘diversity’ perspective.

(BTW, I realise Scripture is only one source of Christian thinking, but to avoid having to divide this up into a fourth or fifth blog, I won’t go into what Christians learn from experience, using our God-given minds, etc. The Bible is enough for today!)

Christians traditionally believe the Bible is inspired by God, but it’s also a collection of human writings. These writings show influence from their human contexts, which were all patriarchal societies. They couldn’t read the latest gender theorists or sociological research on gender. The best science and philosophy available to them was by people who thought things like: male dominance is natural, hair is part of genitals, and women are incomplete men.

We could list many ways Scripture is influenced by patriarchy. I’m more interested in looking at how, within all the patriarchy, Scripture points to feminist/equality perspectives that were radical in the contexts.

From chapter one of the Bible, we see that all humans from male to female are created in ‘God’s image’. Most cultures only referred to powerful men like kings as being in the image of gods, but the Jewish/Christian tradition says all of us have that important status.

In the Old Testament, despite a lot of patriarchal content, we also see strong women stepping outside stereotypical ‘women’s roles’—Hagar (Genesis 16, 21), Tamar (Genesis 38), Shiphrah and Puah (Exodus 1), Miriam (Exodus 2, 15; Numbers 12), Deborah (Judges 4-5), Jael (Judges 4), Rahab (Joshua 2, 6), Ruth (Ruth), Abigail (1 Samuel 25), Huldah (2 Kings 22-23; 2 Chronicles 34), Esther (Esther), and the female lover in Song of Songs are all worth reading about (some of them specifically named in Jesus’ genealogy, Matthew 4).

Jesus’ mother Mary was a strong woman who influenced Jesus with her character and love of God and justice (e.g. Luke 1:26-56; John 2:1-12). Women were prominent among both the disciples (Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, Susanna, Joanna, etc.) and the early church (Phoebe, Prisca, Junia, etc.). Mary Magdalene and other women who stood firm with Jesus at his death were the first to witness his resurrection and preach this good news (described in all four gospels). Jesus treated women with respect and compassion. He saved a woman from a mob’s sexist execution of a woman who committed adultery (John 7). He affirmed that women should be involved in the theological discussions, not just the cooking (Luke 10; John 11). He had theological conversations and debates with women, often marginalised ‘impure’ women. He tasked one of them with preaching the gospel to her whole town (John 4) and arguably had his mind changed by another (Mark 7; Matthew 15).

After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, women like Prisca (or Priscilla) and Junia were church leaders, apostles, and respected teachers (Romans 16, Acts 18 and elsewhere). Phoebe, a deacon, was who Paul trusted to deliver his greatest letter to the Romans, which would have included interpreting it and answering questions about it (Romans 16).

Jesus was not a stereotypical ‘macho man’ and his teachings contained nothing that would ‘keep women in their place’. In the rest of the New Testament, e.g. the writings of Paul, it’s more complicated. Some of Paul’s quotes about women not having authority in churches sound very bad, especially out of context. He says some things I don’t agree with. Yet even these sexist comments are milder than standard Roman/Jewish sexism: perhaps something of a compromise with the mainstream patriarchy of his time. Paul also obviously didn’t ban female leaders in practice—he affirmed all those in the last paragraph.

Finally, it was Paul who made this amazing statement:

“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

The way that many biblical scholars make sense of the contradictory witness of Scripture on gender is to identify the way God seems to be guiding people to look beyond what was taken for granted in their contexts. This is called the ‘trajectory’, the vision that Scripture points to when taken as a whole. This statement in Galatians is one place where Paul expresses where the trajectory is going: a radical vision where human divisions and inequalities are broken down and made unimportant, as we are united and equal in Jesus. The vision is still in the process of being put into practice, and the church has often moved in the wrong direction on all these topics. In his own life and ministry, Paul went furthest in putting the ‘no Jew or Gentile’ part into practice. Others in the 19th century focused on ‘no longer slave or free’ and pushed for the abolition of slavery (having to fight against other Christians who quoted different Bible verses on slavery). And Christian feminists today are seeking to embody the ‘no longer male or female’ vision by seeking gender equality and abolition of patriarchal oppression.

This idea of a ‘trajectory’ in Scripture also helps us see that in many ways the Bible was many centuries ‘ahead’ of modern feminist movements in affirming gender equality, even if in many other ways the Bible was very much a product of its time. I believe God meets us where we are at, even in the midst of the world and its empires and idols of death and destruction. And she points to different ways of doing things that flip the oppressive ways of the world upside down. Just like Mary said.

Read about one of the women in the Bible mentioned above, and have a think about what we can learn from her.