Elizabeth Pinborough > Elizabeth's Quotes

“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.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“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.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Beliefs about female inferiority haunted Christianity from the beginning, influencing early church fathers like Clement of Alexandria and Jerome to characterize spiritual maturity for women as a progression to manliness. “As long as a woman is for birth and children, she is as different from man as body is from soul,” explained Jerome. “But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.”34 If women are imperfect men, then only by becoming men can women achieve spiritual equality.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“It’s true that historical memory about female leadership empowered later women like Margery Kempe to preach, teach, and lead. But 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.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Women have always been wives and mothers, but it wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation that being a wife and a mother became the “ideological touchstone of holiness” for women.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Virginity empowered them. Women became nuns and took religious vows, and some, like Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen, found their voices rang with the authority of men.7 Indeed, the further removed medieval women were from the married state, the closer they were to God. After the Reformation, the opposite became true for Protestant women. The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers, the godlier they became.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Some of the evangelical scholars and pastors who are most vocal about male headship and female submission argue that the relationship between husband and wife models the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Wives follow the leadership of their husbands, just as Jesus follows the leadership of the Father. The marriage hierarchy, like marriage itself, they argue, is embedded in the imago Dei.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“I use my own interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s phrase “a room of one’s own” to explain historical differences within the continuity of women’s lives.19 Women, throughout history, live within the confines of patriarchy. Bennett describes this as the patriarchal equilibrium. Regardless of how much freedom women have, they always have less than men. Yet the patriarchal equilibrium is a continuum, not a fixed standard. The boundaries of patriarchy wax and wane; the size of a woman’s room—the space where she is able to make her own choices—changes. Some women have bigger rooms, such as wealthy women with husbands and fathers among the highest social classes. Some women have smaller rooms, such as poorer women from families with little political and social influence. Historical circumstances, such as the aftermath of the Black Death in Europe, temporarily expanded women’s rooms by increasing their independence as wage earners, while other historical circumstances, such as Athenian democracy, made women’s rooms smaller.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“If we look at the broad sweep of history, we find some interesting patterns regarding the size of women’s rooms. When political and social structures are less centralized and less clearly defined, women often experience greater agency; their rooms are bigger. It is no accident that the stories of the most authoritative women in Christian history stem from the fourth century through the tenth century, when the authority structures of Christianity—not to mention the political structures to which Christianity became attached—were more fluid. It is also no accident that, after the ecclesiastical hierarchy became more centralized and more powerful during the central Middle Ages, women’s ability to exercise formal authority diminished; women’s rooms became smaller. There are always exceptions, of course, but these general patterns are clear.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Medieval women had to transcend their sex to gain authority in the medieval church. But Protestant women didn’t have to do this—their bodies were not a spiritual problem”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“For example, Katherine Zell, wife of the Strasbourg reformer Matthew Zell, demanded that she be judged “not according to the standards of a woman, but according to the standards of one whom God has filled with the Holy Spirit.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“The woman saved through childbearing as an exemplar of the sanctification process for all Christians was more important to medieval theology than tethering the salvation of literal women to their reproductive capabilities.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Early modern preachers also knew their Paul. But unlike their medieval counterparts, they preached Paul to enforce women’s subordinate role within the household. Early modern sermons emphasize godly behavior as reflective of spiritual status. Adherence to the Pauline prescriptions became a barometer for the spiritual health of families, and women as models of submission and domesticity became critical exemplars for Protestant theology. This was a departure from sermons of the medieval world.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“She should be of the property of the Snail, still at home.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“In a tired and decadent world where such beliefs had become fatally attenuated, or where they had devolved to pro forma exercises in religious tradition, Bonhoeffer believed them utterly. And he saw that the failure on the part of the German church to believe these things made the way for the river of blood that was National Socialism. So as a result of what Bonhoeffer saw and others didn’t, he was a prophet in his time and is a prophet in ours too. Few in his day could hear what he had to say. Can we?”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“That’s because it communicates something to us that we had hardly dared to hope even in our secret hearts: that living the Christian life does not mean we must become dead-eyed zealots whose sole purpose is to avoid committing sins, and who in this abnegating endeavor limit our activities to the merely religious, making our own pinched personal piety the goal of our self-obsessed existence. Quite the contrary. To live our lives for others and in obedience to God is not at all what we had feared. Indeed, it is real freedom and true humanity”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“So, in many of his writings and in his life, Bonhoeffer raged against the idea that faith is some passive assent to intellectual theological ideas. You cannot claim you believe something if you don’t live like you believe it. God is not fooled by our claiming to believe the words of some well-crafted statement of faith—or by our dutiful church attendance—any more than your neighbors are fooled by it, or the devil is fooled by it. Bonhoeffer knew that by entering here and now into the life God calls us to live—by faith in him and obedience to him—we have already begun living eternally and are truly free. But if we try to escape the reality of human life here and now via cheap religious escapism, or via some pious action when another kind of action is what God is actually asking of us, we fail. Putting it another way, if we try on Friday to leapfrog over the cross, hoping to land safely on the turf of Easter Sunday, we will fall instead into the sepulchral abyss of Saturday, which perhaps we had forgotten about.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“But making the greater mistake of being paralyzed to inaction—for fear of making a mistake—for fear of stepping outside some false religious boundary, is something else. For that kind of inaction reveals what we really think of God, that he is a legalistic moral policeman waiting for us to slip up just so that he can make his arrest quota for the day.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy