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

by Beth Allison Barr

While the blame for abuse lies primarily with the abuser, those who stand by and do nothing share in the blame too. Silent Christians like me have allowed both misogyny and abuse to run rampant in the church. We have allowed teachings to remain intact that oppress women and stand contrary to everything Jesus did and taught.

It cannot be peeled off suit coats like a name tag as evangelical men move from denying women’s leadership at church to accepting the authority of women at work or women in the classroom.

But I had concerns even then. Christians were called to be radically different in how we uphold the dignity of all people, including women. That semester I had come to realize how historically unremarkable Christian gender ideals were. Instead of looking different in how we treated women, Christians looked just like everyone else.

Women thus “continued to commit the sin of Eve when they submitted to men, rather than to God.” Patriarchy, for Bushnell, was not just a result of the curse; it was embedded in the fall itself. Adam’s rebellion was claiming God’s authority for himself, and Eve’s rebellion was submitting to Adam in place of God.37

When we rightly understand that biblical passages discussing slavery must be framed within their historical context and that, through the lens of this historical context, we can better see slavery as an ungodly system that stands contrary to the gospel of Christ, how can we not then apply the same standards to biblical texts about women?

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. Even John Piper admitted in 1984 that he can’t figure out what to do with Deborah and Huldah.53 The most difficult passages in the Bible to explain, historically speaking, are those like Galatians 3:26–28: “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.

The 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?

Mirk does not declare that the wife should obey her husband. In fact, his sermon emphasizes that what got Eve into trouble was loving her husband too much, and so 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

As modern Christians, we immediately hear masculine authority. Wives, be subject to your husband. Yet as first-century Christians, Paul’s original audience would have immediately heard the opposite. Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. The focus of the Christian household codes isn’t the same today as it was in the Roman world. Take

Do you hear the differences? Aristotle is writing specifically to men about how they should rule and why they have the right to rule. He does not include inferiors within the conversation. Household governance is the domain of the Roman man—as master, father, and husband. The conversation is directed to men alone. By contrast, the Christian household codes address all the people in the house church—men, women, children, and slaves. Everyone is included in the conversation. Theologian Lucy Peppiatt writes that this is “key” to the Christian subversion of Roman patriarchy. Because the Christian household codes are directed to all members of the Roman household, instead of presuming the guardianship of the male head, they “contain within them the overturning of accepted positions accorded to men, women, slaves, and children, and the expectations placed upon them.”25 Instead of endowing authority to a man who speaks and acts for those within his household, the Christian household codes offer each member of the shared community—knit together by their faith in Christ—the right to hear and act for themselves. This is radically different from the Roman patriarchal structure. The Christian structure of the house church resists the patriarchal world of the Roman Empire.

Instead, Paul emphasizes that wives should be subject as fitting in the Lord (not because they are inferior) and that husbands should love their wives and not treat them harshly. “Instead of grounding the instruction to the wife in her husband’s authority, power, leadership or status in a hierarchy,” McKnight writes, “the grounding is radically otherwise: it is grounded in the Lord’s way of life.”26 Jesus, not the Roman paterfamilias, is in charge of the Christian household.

Paul describes himself—a male apostle—as a pregnant mother, a mother giving birth, and even a nursing mother. Not only does Paul consider the female body valuable, but he is willing to “hand over the authority of a patriarch in favor of a role that will bring him shame, the shame of a female-identified male.”34 How beautiful, how radical is Paul’s message! I can’t even imagine how welcome his words would have been to women in first-century churches. What made female bodies weak in the Roman world made them strong in the writings of Paul. By taking on the literary guise of a woman, Paul embodied the radical claim of his own words in Galatians 3:28 that, in Christ, “there is no longer male and female.”

Instead of justifying male authority on account of female inferiority, the Christian household codes affirm women as having equal worth to men. Instead of focusing on wifely submission (everyone was doing that), the Christian household codes demand that the husband do exactly the opposite of what Roman law allowed: sacrificing his life for his wife instead of exercising power over her life. This, writes Peppiatt, is the “Christian revolution.”41 This is what makes Christians different from the world around us. Could we have gotten Paul exactly backward? What if his focus was never male headship and female submission? What if his vision was bigger than we have imagined? What if instead of replicating an ancient gender hierarchy, Paul was showing us how the Christian gospel sets even the Roman household free?

Paul’s purpose seems clear: to distinguish what the Corinthians were doing (“women be silent”) and to clarify that Christians should not be following the Corinthian practice (“What!”). While I cannot guarantee this is what Paul was doing, it makes a lot of (historical) sense.

Could it be that, instead of telling women to be silent like the Roman world did, Paul was actually telling men that, in the world of Jesus, women were allowed to speak? Could we have missed Paul’s point (again)? Instead of heeding his rebuke and freeing women to speak, are we continuing the very patriarchal practices that Paul was condemning?

Paul is not making a blanket decree for women to be silent; he allows women to speak throughout his letters (1 Corinthians 11:1–6 is a case in point). Paul is not limiting women’s leadership; he tells us with his own hand that women lead in the early church and that he supports their ministries (I will discuss Romans 16 in the next section). Maintaining a rigid gender hierarchy just isn’t Paul’s point. As

a roomful of women were being told that their highest calling as Christian women was to be wives and mothers—which implied that women who found meaning or calling apart from being wives and mothers were defying God’s call for them. Yet I knew medieval women who were told the exact opposite—women’s primary calling was to serve God first, which for some meant eschewing traditional family life and for others meant working around it.

Mary Magdalene carried the news of the gospel to the disbelieving disciples. In a world that didn’t accept the word of a woman as a valid witness, Jesus chose women as witnesses for his resurrection. In a world that gave husbands power over the very lives of their wives, Paul told husbands to do the opposite—to give up their lives for their wives. In a world that saw women as biologically deformed men, monstrous even, Paul declared that men were just like women in Christ.

“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.

it’s also true that patriarchal beliefs about the inferiority and impurity of female bodies made it more difficult for women to exercise these spiritual gifts. 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.

Could it be that another building block for modern biblical womanhood is simply that evangelicals have rewritten Christian history?

the roots of this gender hierarchy had more to do with politics and economics than with divine order.