Redbrickbear said:
J.B.Katz said:
Redbrickbear said:
J.B.Katz said:
Porteroso said:
Interesting article, probably an interesting book. Many denominations teach women should submit to the authority of men. If you don't know about that you haven't been paying attention.
The idea of a woman in the Bible is interesting, women having contributed either next to nothing, or nothing, to the text. Entirely from a man's point of view. It's not surprising that women are often taught that they have less of a role in the church than men. Certainly it was like that in both old and new testaments.
It is a rather newfangled thing that society is striving for actual equality. It has happened before in a few places, but never on this scale. Given the role of women in the Bible, and most religions, not surprising.
Appreciate your actually dealing with the subject of this article.
This is a religion and politics board and I had hoped for a substantive discussion than didn't immediately descend into bashing women or crude jokes about gender uncertainty, which maybe afflicts 2 percent of the population, some of whom are born with both male and female features. Those poor kids face enough of a challenge w/out *******s implying they're freaks for a developmental abnormality they can't help. How that kind of nastiness and filth comes from the mouth of anyone who purports to love Christ is a mystery to me.
Christianity was radical at the time it began because women did take leadership roles. Subsequent teachings, especially after the Catholic church became the established power in Christendom, and possibly the selection of books to include in the biblical canon diminished that role, but it's clear from the book of Acts and some epistles.
There are also two creation stories, one much older than the other. The older story has males and females created at the same time and doesn't imply that women are relegated to a companion or helpmate role. The first story says God created people and that they were the last thing he created. The second says God create man first then everything else and then a woman. Ppl whose faith is hinged on Biblical inerrancy are thus foiled in the first two chapters of Genesis.
I started grad school at a time when women were still new to professional schools that didn't involve nursing or teaching-they only made up a 4th of law students and fewer business students and still had lesser job prospects (although not as bad as Sandra Day O'Connor, who graduated third in her class at Stanford Law and netted only a marriage proposal from William Rehnquist, who was first in the class, and couldn't get a job except as a legal secretary). My children can't imagine a time when women weren't admitted to colleges and graduate programs in equal numbers. Evangelicals are fighting an uphill battle on the role of women in society. They've also made the same mistake as the Catholics by disregarding reports of domestic abuse or rape or blaming women b/c the power dynamic made that possible. If Barr's book doesn't spark a discussion and examination of how evangelical churches treat women--and from this thread, it looks like it won't, at least among hard-liner men--at least it can serve as a beacon to women that they shouldn't and don't have to tolerate that treatment.
You are hitting alot of different points in this post.
1. No one is bashing women on this thread. Not even close.
2. The massive push to normalize transgenderism comes after the equality massive top down media/capitalist/neo-liberal successful push to legitimize and normalize homosexuality. Those efforts were successful. If you don't think normalizing transgenderism, especially Male to Female transgenderism, won't have enormous effects on regular women in the future you are gravely mistaken.
3. You are correct that most people can barely remember a time when women were not fully integrated into the work force and modern capitalist society. If fact today they dominate the modern university campus. The vast majority of graduates today are women and not men. Of course the massive entrance of women to the working world has more to do with Wall St. and the capitalistic system wanting more workers than it does anything to do with "making women happy". But that is a subject for another day.
The treatment of women in evangelical churches has absolutely nothing to do with transgenderism. Go fish.
Well that was a slight digression from the main topic.
So lets stick to the topic.
Where is your evidence that "women were taught that they mattered less to God than men did" heresy is actually being taught in the majority of evangelical churches?
Yes, let's.
Barr's article questions the orthodoxy explained in this article, which also shows some of the weaknesses of the orthodoxy and how far you have to stretch to get to the rigid 1950s roles evangelicals want to claim the Bible supports.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2018/09/21/what-draws-women-religion-that-says-men-should-be-charge/NEW ORLEANS Growing up in rural Mississippi, Gracie Robinson decided early on that she would never get married.
In her Baptist church, she heard the preaching: The Bible orders women to be submissive to their husbands. Robinson didn't want to be submissive.
This summer, 26 and unmarried and enrolled in a seminary 300 miles from the dusty backwater she describes growing up in, she's holding court, ranting over garlic fries and gumbo that she'll never let a man control her.
"Every time I think about it, it just burns me up!" she says, as the other female seminarians laugh and clap.
And then Robinson's tone changes. Matter-of-fact, she says about a husband: "True enough, he is the head of the household. And he is the spiritual leader."
And her friends wholeheartedly agree to that, too.
This is the challenge and the contradiction of being an evangelical woman today: Embracing the beliefs of a community that teaches it's the will of God for men alone to lead churches and families, while also fiercely arguing for women's equal worth.
That complex position has exploded into public view over the past several months. The evangelical Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, has faced a string of #MeToo scandals the head of the denomination's executive committee and the pastor grandson of its most famous evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, both resigned over inappropriate sexual relationships; a Memphis church's handling of pastor Andy Savage's sexual encounter with a teenager was condemned in nationwide headlines; revered denominational leader Paul Pressler was accused of sexual assault.
But by far the scandal that has rattled the community the most is that of Paige Patterson. A towering Southern Baptist leader, Patterson was fired from his job leading one of the denomination's six seminaries when it came to light that he had not reported two women's allegations of rape to the police. When Patterson returned to the pulpit last week, he made comments about a woman's body and questioned the validity of some sexual assault allegations.Women were instrumental in Patterson's downfall, signing a petition against him by the thousands. But women also continue to rally around him. "I'm a Southern Baptist lady," said a pastor's widow who took the microphone at the denomination's annual meeting. "I am not a #MeToo." When angry donors sent a letter after the meeting protesting Patterson's firing, 14 of the 25 signers were women.At the denomination's seminaries, intellectual centers of evangelical Christianity, female students who cannot be ordained as pastors are wrestling with what exactly draws them to a faith that preaches their own ineligibility for leadership."Seeing something as God's divine order, there's a clarity to that. I think there's also a strong dislike in many quarters of feminism and what some of these women believe feminism stands for an anti-child or anti-family emphasis they perceive in feminism," said R. Marie Griffith, who was raised Southern Baptist and who directs Washington University in St. Louis's Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. "For many women, they do believe that's God's order. . . . The preferred mode would be: Okay, men will be the spiritual leaders."
Southern Baptist seminaries enrolled 12 percent more women from 2012-2016, following more than two decades of gradual growth in women's enrollment. Over those same decades, the denomination led by Patterson and Pressler doubled down on a theology of gender that emphasizes male leadership.
At New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, a summer intensive just for women taught these same conservative principles while students explored just where the boundaries lie.
"God created men and women equal in worth and value, but different in role and function. Different is just different. Different isn't bad," teaches Rhonda Kelley, the wife of the seminary's president and the head of its women's ministry program. "Our biblically assigned role is to submit to men that God placed in authority over our lives."
She says that women who don't obey this plan end up dissatisfied with their lives; on her PowerPoint presentation, bold letters describe it as a "sure path to destruction for home and family."
Reading the Bible in Kelley's class, students learn to scour passages for evidence of this biblical plan for women. For instance
, after reading the story of Deborah the judge who led Israel for a time, including commanding troops on the battlefield one student acknowledged that some readers see the story as the Bible condoning an example of a woman in power.The student said she was searching for another interpretation: "What I settled on in my heart is Deborah did it in reverence for the leadership God intended men to have, in humility rather than saying, 'I know what to do. I'm going to lead this battle,'" she concluded.
After the students read passages about the prophet Huldah, the judge Deborah, the prophet Miriam, and the queen Esther, Kelley put up a slide that concluded: "There is not a biblical pattern of women in positions of spiritual leadership (i.e. prophet or judge)."
Her students, like the women who spoke out against Patterson, express their concerns as women even while pledging their adherence to tradition. When the class reads a book suggesting a wife should follow her husband if he wants to move for his job, many of them search for a way to reject that guidance, saying their own careers should be important, too.
"I agree with the Christian view. And I agree with, yes, woman as helper. But it's the implications," one says.
Nickolee Roberts chimes in. "I'm like yes, you're right, this is biblical. Then I get to the practical applications and I'm like, no, I don't agree with you. Let me throw the book out the window."
That's what seems to be quietly happening in some evangelical circles throwing some older practices out the window, without throwing out the interpretation of the Bible at its core.
The shake-up around gender in the Southern Baptist Convention caused some subtle ripples in the classroom here. Jill Nash, studying for her Master's in Divinity, sat down on the first day of her Christian Ethics class and found, not unusually for a seminary class, that she was the only woman out of seven students. (Kelley, who runs the program of women-specific courses, calls the core courses required of all M.Div. students, male and female, "the boy classes.")
What was unusual was the greeting the professor offered: "Obviously Jill is the only female here. We should treat her like a sister in Christ," he said, to Nash's great surprise. She thinks Patterson was on the instructor's mind.
Nash, who works for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, didn't marry until she was 42, so in the last few years, she's given a lot of thought to the questions now bubbling up in the convention about what female submission means. "Sub it means to come under a mission. If you see the direction someone's going that you're dating as something you've got to really come under can I come under that? Can I support that?" she said to friends at dinner that night, after that Christian Ethics class. "That husband is to love you as Christ loves the Church. And who doesn't want to submit to that? I want to cook dinner for him every night. I want to wash his clothes."
Milly Horsley, 26, agreed: "Who doesn't want to submit to that kind of love?"
Horsley is no stranger to male-dominated professions not only is she a seminary student, but she also patrols the campus with a firearm in the wee hours of the night, as the only female officer of the campus police. She said she has felt frustrated that Southern Baptist men don't always listen when women try to tell them about important issues, including sexual abuse in the church.
But she doesn't think the solution is opening more jobs to women. "I've never met a Southern Baptist lady who said, 'I'm doing all this. I wish I could be a pastor.' If I really wanted to be a pastor, I would change denominations. But I believe we're the closest to the Bible. If I disagreed with it, then I wouldn't be here," she said. "Scripture says a man shouldn't be constantly under the headship of a woman. That has to be our model above all."
Jade Perkins is also getting a master's degree at the seminary but agrees women shouldn't be pastors. First, she's not sure a woman could handle the criticism: "Women are more emotional than men. People in the church can be harsh. A woman can break down emotionally more."
And second, there's the wardrobe: "Men, Sunday after Sunday, have to preach in front of their congregations, and they're going to wear a suit. A woman instead would have to make sure her outfit looks good, she's modest, her hair looks good, her makeup looks good. A woman's going to be pulled apart about what she looks like."
Perkins said she takes these stumbling blocks as a sign from God that women really don't belong in that pulpit.
But all the same, she's frustrated with the career opportunities available to her and to her fellow female seminary graduates. "Especially in the Southern Baptist realm, you're not going to have a woman as the pastor. Or the associate pastor, typically. Rarely the youth pastor. So if you're a woman, you have to be the children's pastor," she said. And then she pointed out that most churches don't have the budget for a fourth pastor, so that means a woman won't get hired for a ministry job at all. "Usually, women are secretaries."
This is the push-and-pull of the evangelical woman: Believing in the basic rightness of a hierarchy that puts men at the top of the church and family; pushing at every boundary for more opportunities as a modern woman.
In the classroom, Kelley passed out a list of 83 different roles of authority in a church, from church treasurer, to writer of biblical commentary, to singer in the choir, to greeter at the door. Wayne Grudem, the prominent conservative theologian who wrote the list, argued that 14 out of the 83 jobs should be for men only including serving as a deacon or elder of the church, serving on the governing board of a denomination, presiding over a baptism, teaching theology in a seminary, preaching regularly to the church, and being ordained as a pastor.
Students skimmed the fine-printed list. They thought of each role they play in their own churches, where they teach and babysit and lead committees and organize events and preach and counsel and befriend and console.
Silently, they pondered whether the Bible meant for them to do it all.