The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

by Beth Allison Barr

Biblical women are more than we have imagined them to be; they will not fit in

the mold complementarianism has decreed for them.

Moore, who has spent her life immersed in the Bible, realizes a disconnect between the construct of biblical womanhood and the real lives of women in the Bible.

Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world. Historically speaking, there is nothing surprising about biblical stories and passages riddled with patriarchal attitudes and actions. What is surprising is how many biblical passages and stories undermine, rather than support, patriarchy.

“For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 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.” This is what is radical. This is what makes Christianity so different from the rest of human history. This is what sets both men and women free.

evangelical church fears that recognizing women’s leadership will mean bowing to cultural peer pressure. But what if the church is bowing to cultural peer pressure by denying women’s leadership?

Paul shows us that gender discrimination is “a return to the ways of the world,” and we are called into the “new world of the Christ-crucified gospel.”

the wedding ring isn’t a symbol of the wife belonging to her husband—it is a reminder for wives to put God first.13

despite the evangelical obsession with male headship, Christians past and present have been less sure.

When read rightly, the household codes not only set women free, as Shi-Min Lu writes, but they set all the members of the household free from the “oppressive elements” of the Roman world.23 Paul wasn’t imposing Roman patriarchy on Christians; Paul was using a Jesus remix to tell Christians how the gospel set them free.

Paul is indeed quoting the Roman worldview to counter it with the Christian worldview, then his meaning is the exact opposite of what evangelical women have been taught.

As Romans 16 makes clear, the reality is that biblical women contradict modern ideas of biblical womanhood.

Most people who attend complementarian churches don’t realize that the ESV translation of Junia as “well known to the apostles” instead of “prominent among the apostles” was a deliberate move to keep women out of leadership (Romans 16:7). People believe that women were banned from leadership in the early church just as they are banned from leadership in the modern church. The church teaches what it believes to be true.

Except I knew the truth about Paul’s women. I knew the reality that women who are praised in the Bible—like Phoebe, Priscilla, and Junia—challenge the confines of modern biblical womanhood. As a historian, I knew that women were kept out of leadership roles in my own congregation because Roman patriarchy had seeped back into the early church. Instead of ditching pagan Rome and embracing Jesus, we had done the opposite—ditching the freedom of Christ and embracing the oppression of the ancient world.

I knew the problem wasn’t a lack of women leading in church history. The problem was simply that women’s leadership has been forgotten, because women’s stories throughout history have been covered up, neglected, or retold to recast women as less significant than they really were.

“No, the problem in the church is not strong women, but rather weak men who feel threatened by strong women, and have tried various means, even by dubious exegesis, to prohibit them from exercising their gifts and graces in the church.”26 Instead of following a clear and plain reading of the biblical text, the medieval world grafted their imported Roman patriarchy onto the gospel of Jesus.

Like the medieval Martha of Bethany, Brigit could be both a domestic goddess and a public religious leader.

Women had led in Christian history, and women could continue to lead—but it would be harder and mostly not in official positions. And the reason for this seemed to have less to do with women themselves and more to do with protecting the power of men, especially men in the church.

Christine de Pizan proclaimed these words in her early fifteenth-century defense of women against misogynistic literature: “What strong faith and deep love those women possess who did not forsake the Son of God who had been abandoned and deserted by all His Apostles. God has never reproached the love of women as weakness, as some

men contend, for He placed the spark of fervent love in the hearts of the blessed Magdalen and of other ladies, indeed His approval of this love is clearly to be seen.”

But that wasn’t true. I do know. I think it may be for the same reason that the medieval church pushed women out of leadership: to protect and enhance the authority of men.

Her very different perspective produces a very different story—a story of loss rather than a story of gain, of increased subordination rather than of liberation.

Women were encouraged to be chaste, modest, obedient, and passive, while men were encouraged to be aggressive, domineering, controlling, and active. “The heritage of Protestantism for women was deeply ambiguous,” writes Roper. While it could have affirmed women’s spiritual equality with men, the Reformation instead ushered in a “renewed patriarchalism” that placed married women firmly under the headship of their husbands.

the waning power of the Catholic priest was balanced by the waxing power of the Protestant husband.

Rather than always having serious consequences for women, Paul had less impact on attitudes toward women within late medieval English sermons. In the aftermath of the Reformation, however, Paul came to define Christian womanhood.

The historical reality is that social systems that invest some people with power over the lives of other people result in the destruction of people. Ed Stetzer recently observed that “the Venn diagram of reformed, complementarian, and misogynist has a pretty significant overlap.”