Resources for Further Study:

• Confronting Christianity podcast
• Confronting Christianity by Dr. McLaughlin
• Jesus Through the Eyes of Women by Dr. McLaughlin
• The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry

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The Questioning Belief podcast explores objections to Christianity through in-depth discussions with experts. Drawing from her background as a former atheist and her experience in apologetics, Dr. Kathleen Noller invites you to explore thoughtful responses to serious questions about faith. Learn more.

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Explore written reflections from Dr. Kathleen Noller and get in touch with her through her Substack, The Reformed Gadfly.

Transcript

Welcome to the Kathleen Noller podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Noller, former atheist turned Christian. Let's dive into Christianity together and see if it can withstand some of our toughest objections. So, today's objection is a hefty one.

Kathleen Noller: In the modern Western world, Christianity is often leveled with the criticism that it subjugates women. Jesus seems to interact respectfully and lovingly with women of all sorts in the New Testament, and yet wives are still told to be subject to their husbands, restrictions are placed on female service and religious leadership hierarchies, and so on. What's worse, many church fathers have referred to women in seemingly unsavory ways. Tertullian referred to women as, quote, the devil's gateway, referencing the fall. St. Augustine described women as being of, quote, small intelligence and Calvin wrote about Corinthians that women are, quote, inferior in conference in consequence to the superiority of the male sex. So how is the modern woman to look upon these men, among many others, who have greatly defined Western theology and not be concerned about the subjugation of women within Christianity. And what did Jesus really think about these women? So, to answer these objections and some more today, we have our guest who holds a PhD in English literature from Cambridge and a theology degree from Oak Hill College in London.

Dr. McLaughlin is a pro prolific Christian apologist and writer. You may know her book, Confronting Christianity, Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion. which was named Book of the Year by Christianity Today. She also wrote, among many others, Jesus Through the Eyes of Women, which we will be discussing today, Jesus' revolutionary treatment of women in the New Testament. Dr. McLaughlin also holds hosts a podcast titled Confronting Christianity, where she explores hard questions faithfully.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Rebecca: Thanks for having me.

Kathleen Noller: So, let's address the church father's quotes that I mentioned in the objection. How should a Christian respond to the blatant and frequent language about the inferiority of a woman's moral strength or intellect in such quotes? One of the interesting things you'll notice if you look back through the history of theology in the West is that especially in our earlier centuries, and there's been a significant influence on the thinking of leading Christian thinkers from pre-Christian Western thinkers.

Rebecca: So, the especially Greek philosophers, near Plato, Aristotle, et cetera. And there's a kind of preloaded perception of women from that tradition that gets unfortunately kind of tied in with Christian theology. again, in in some of the sort of earlier centuries of the Christian thought in the West. And so, the first thing it's important for us to do is to look at what the Bible does and doesn't say, and to kind of disassociate that from some of our pre-Christian, pagan, Western sort of ancestors in terms of history of thought. And one of the revolutionary and radical things that the Bible says to us about women is that women are in fact, you know from the very beginning, made equally in God's image. So we see in the very first words that we read about human beings in in Genesis , that God creates humans in his image and he creates them male and female, and that both men and women are equally in God's image, which again, in both the ancient Near East into which Genesis was first written and in the kind of pagan West that Christianity was born into, that was a radical statement and in the first place.

And even as we see in Genesis, the creation of the man and the woman, we don’t see a creation of a sort of inferior or kind of lesser being in the woman when it when it when she relates to the man. What we see is the creation of someone who and Genesis, that are more literally described, describes as alike and opposite the man. Now, the woman is described as the man's helper, famously. And at first, when we hear that language, we kind of immediately think inferior. But if you look at how that same Hebrew word is used throughout the Old Testament, it's most often used to refer to God in relation to us. So, in fact, it isn't preloaded with this sense of inferiority. And we see the man and the woman and from the beginning, both being charged to and fill the earth and subdue it and to rule over God's creation together. So, there's this sense of equality and parity. There's a strong sense that and both the man and the woman are different from the animals and like one another under God. Now, again, they're sort of opposite. So, there are opposites within the sort of the sex binary that are vital for the propagation of the species but there's this sense of equality and both sort of bearing the image of God from the first.

Kathleen Noller: Okay.

Rebecca: And then as we look through the rest of the Bible, you know, we'll see an overarching story of God's people from the first people sort of called by God from Abram onwards and then in and Jesus as the sort of embodiment of God's people in the New Testament and launching this kind of new age of God's people. And there again, we see extraordinary for the time and for even around the world today and in many kinds of cultural contexts, an extraordinary sense of equality for women. We see in, and we can go and more into this, we see in a large majority of cases, both men and women call to the very same things. And we see in certain contexts, men and women called to different roles. but none of it is founded on female inferiority.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you very much for that. And I think that'll help our listeners very much. I want to go and touch back on two things that you mentioned. The first is influence of the sort of pagan influences, pre-Christian influences in some of these Western church fathers. Could you take us through what some of those dominant influences might be for those who are perhaps reading the church fathers and want to keep an eye out for that? And then the second question related to that is sort of, if those have influenced somebody such as St. Augustine, who's such a you know critical figure to the development of theology in the West, how can we be confident that we don't have elements of sexism or whatever you want to call it lingering in our modern day Western Christianity?

Rebecca: Yes, that's a great question. And one of the really helpful things about reading theologians, and both from a different culture in terms of time, so from perhaps our same culture bit in the past, and also reading theologians from different parts of the world today who might be coming from different cultural places, is that we will be able to see their blind spots much more clearly because you know it's much easier to see other people's blind spots than our own and within our own cultures but they will also help us see at best some of our own blind spots so I think there's real value in reading especially you know some of the church fathers and the people who've shaped theology through the ages but one of the things you'll notice as you do this is you're reading both human beings who are profoundly flawed and sinful themselves and we need to recognize that and you know they would be the first to acknowledge that and sort of broad brush, but we need to recognize that as well. We're not, you know, but we're not reading the very words of Jesus. For example, when we read St. Augustine, and we're reading the words of a, know, a sinful man who was saved by grace like you and like me.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Rebecca: And that there are going to be many helpful things that they're going to say, and there are going to be other things that are in fact not helpful. And we need to evaluate what they're saying relative to the Bible itself. And I think we have the exact same principles as we evaluate the work of theologians today. And as we notice that often, often people today are going be very shaped by their culture, and whether that's the broader culture around us or even the culture within the church, which especially when it comes to the roles of women and women's identity is often shaped by things that aren't biblical. There can be a kind of Christian understanding of sort of in inverted commas of what women, are for example, are meant to be like sort of psychologically.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you

Rebecca: and what women's roles are, which isn't always tethered to what the Bible says. So, you know, one example of this would be, you're often hearing Christian circles, that a woman's like highest calling, and perhaps even a sort of primary purpose is to get married and have children and raise them in the Lord. And that yes, the ideal Christian woman is you know fully focused on her biological children, and on taking care of her husband. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a wife and a mother and being a wife and a mother are both wonderful callings for Christian women, just as being a husband and a father, wonderful callings for Christian men. And sort of part of and my discipleship as a wife and a mother is seeking to obey God's word when it comes to how I relate to my husband and how I relate to my children. But you would really struggle. And looking at either the Old Testament, but in this especially at the New Testament, you would really struggle to make the argument that a woman's primary calling and central role is, in fact, being a wife and a mother. Now, why do I say that? A little dip into the Old Testament, there’s a famous passage at the end of the book Proverbs, which describes the sort of wife of noble character or the ideal wife. And one of the striking things there is in the whole description, which is many, many verses long, there's only one reference to her children.

It says her children will rise and call her blessed. You know great. But like that that's the only line. There are several references for her doing things which in today's terms would be called working outside the home. So, she's sort making things and selling them. She's trading. She's doing you know buying a field and buying it. She sorts offing sort of oft of things which in many Christian contexts today would be sort of frowned on as, i oh, this woman, you know, she should be focusing on her children. And instead, she's sorting out there earning money. And this is sort of questionable and in some people's minds. She's commended for her strength. Now, we can go into this in a little while. I think it's important for us to recognize, especially in today's sort of cultural context, that women are biologically less physically strong than men. and that's an important thing for us to note when it comes to women's interests and women's protections. But she is kind of commended for her, her strength clearly in the way that she's sort of exercising her abilities. And the punchline of the whole description of this woman is at the end, it says, and charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting. But a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. As you have this sort of focus on a woman fearing the Lord, not on a woman's sort of attention to her own appearance, which It can be something I think is certainly something that in our broader culture gets overemphasized, you know, the expectations on women men to be very focused on their appearances. You know, you don't have to look far around our culture to see that influence.

Kathleen Noller: Sure.

Rebecca: I think it can also honestly translate into church contexts where women are kind of, I think, overly encouraged to focus on their appearance, whether it's usually not sort of explicitly, but that's usually can be a kind of implicit context suggestion that actually women married or otherwise should be very focused on their appearance and you know whether it's pleasing their husbands or finding a husband, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on that.

Kathleen Noller: Sure

Rebecca: And yes, we have a strong caution in the New Testament as well from Peter's letter, and first letter to wives to not be focused on their appearance, but to be focused on their inner beauty before the Lord. So we have you know this sense even from the Old Testament of a woman having a pretty well-rounded and sense of vocation, including, I should have mentioned this when I mentioned that the wife the normal character, but she's caring for the poor is  is a really important part of what she's doing as well, providing her a household, caring for the poor. In the New Testament, it's really striking that many, many, many of the women we encounter, we don't even know if they're married or not. You know, it sort of seems to be almost beside the point. So, for example, Mary Magdalene, and became the most famous of Jesus's female disciples. And we don't know what her marital status was. Or Mary and Martha of Bethany, two of Jesus's close female disciples, and famously sisters of Lazarus.

We read about them in Luke's gospel; we read about them in John's gospel. We don't know if they're married or not. And there'll be there'd be some women who we are told whether they're married, you know, for example, the Samaritan woman at the well who had five husbands and is now living with a man she's not married to. And you know she's one of the people Jesus especially seeks out for a theological conversation, has with her the longest theological conversation he has with anybody that's recorded in any of the gospels. And then sends her back, you know she goes back as a missionary to her town, a kind of unlikely missionary and in in some ways. And we see in the New Testament, commendation of marriage and a very high view of marriage, which we should talk about in a minute. We also see a very strong commendation of singleness, which again, I think is underestimated and underemphasized in a lot of our Christian conversations, because Paul himself as a single man says, I wish you were all as I am, you know, probably something of an exaggeration. I think Paul's saying, in fact, I know Paul isn't saying every Christian shouldn't be married and because on other occasions he encourages k Christians to get married. But he says and that there's a particular opportunity for wholehearted devotion to the Lord and for single people, both, and he applies this to both men and to women. And he thinks this is a wonderful thing because the great calling of Christians in the New Testament is not to get married and have children, wonderful as they think they are, it's to make disciples. So, this sort of calling at the very beginning of the Bible and human beings to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and to subdue it that's kind of adjusted in the New Testament to making disciples of all nations, sort of going out as Christians, both men and women, and looking to and to have sort of but  not just biological children, but actually spiritual children, people who are  coming into the kingdom of God, and that you can be a very effective spiritual mother or father as a single person.

Kathleen Noller: And I like that you touched on both the elevation of marriage, but also the elevation of the role of the single person and the role that person can play in the church. Do you think that the, would say, just modern Protestant, maybe fundamentalist emphasis that you sort of hinted out of women must get married and all women should be married and sort of seeing marriage for women as a mandate, and perhaps for men as well in the culture do you see that as sort of a reaction to monasticism because i just see in you know Catholicism and orthodoxy there's just such a respect of course for the piety of somebody who is single and we don't really get to appreciate that as much in Protestantism why and why do you think that is.

Rebecca: Yes, I think for sure at the time of the Reformation, there was a and a needed correction, but perhaps an overcorrection when it came to singleness versus marriage. So, as you mentioned, you know in a Catholic tradition, there'll be a strong emphasis on singleness as almost a sort of higher state spiritually. And a requirement on priests, etc. to be unmarried and that there was you know lot a lot of kind of talk of this being somehow a sort of better spiritual state to be in. And so, you know quite naturally the reformers came in and sort of shifted I think perhaps too far in the other direction to say no, marriage is a good thing and there is no sort of inferiority to being a Christian married person and within that actual sex is a good gift from God. It's not a kind of violation, you know, in the right context, it's not at all a violation or sort of diminution of ye, any kind of sinful behavior on the part of people participating as part of the marriage covenant.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

Rebecca: But I think within that, there's then easy to kind of lose sight of the high view of singleness that that the New Testament gives us as well. And I think we're still living downstream of that. I think we're also and struggling in Christian circles today sometimes to differentiate between or we sort of tend to set up singleness as the opposite of marriage rather than sexual immorality as a sort of counterpoint because in the New Testament we see a very clear um naming of sinful sexual immorality

Kathleen Noller: Yes

Rebecca: And we see both marriage and singleness, faithful marriage and faithful singleness as sort of good ways for Christians to live. And so, some of the energy, the New Testament energy, sort fire that's trained against sexual immorality, which is any form of sex outside male-female marriage, then in Christian circles can get sort of trained almost on singleness to say, okay, we've got to have everybody getting married and presenting singleness as selfishness or as you know, a failure of responsibility or a failure to kind of grow up.

Kathleen Noller: Yes. Absolutely.

Rebecca: and Which certainly it can be. And we you know, we see plenty of examples of that around us in the world of people sort of using singleness that way.

Kathleen Noller: ye absolutely

Rebecca: Frankly, marriage can be the same. You can get married and pursue sort of selfishness and self-indulgence. So, we need to be careful not to set singleness as the opposite of marriage and in the sense of sort of marriage being the good and faithful thing for Christians to do in singleness, being and the sort of inadequate or underdeveloped Christian life. Because you know really struggle to justify that in the New Testament, where not only is Jesus unmarried and there's life on Earth, and but you know the Apostle Paul, who wrote a large portion of the New Testament, also unmarried. So, you're really going to struggle to defend the view that every Christian should be married in that kind of context.

Kathleen Noller: Absolutely. I wanted to go back a little bit to one of your earlier comments as well, where you said that in Genesis, it talks about the creation of man and woman and that they're said to be opposites. They’re said to be opposite. It's a sort of funny; it reads strangely in Hebrew. I think that's on purpose. Because the woman is kind of like opposite the man.

Rebecca: And a lot of the narrative in Genesis, you know, for example, when the first man meets the first woman, he says, this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. Like, this is somebody like me, what he's saying. And the point of him, you know, God famously sort of parades the various animals in front of the man and among the animals, there wasn't a helper fit for him. Now it's not because the Lord thought, oh, you know, maybe it'll be a dog. Maybe it'll be a monkey. You know, it wasn't that this wasn't a process of sort of trying to figure it out. The Lord knew from the first, there was not a helper fit for the man among the animals. The point of the narrative is to show us that the woman is like the man and not like the animals. And so, there's this strong emphasis on likeness, on similarity, and that both male and female are made in in God's image. Again, going back to Genesis. But there's also that difference, that complementarity, that enables man and woman together to be fruitful and multiply. So, we have both the alike and the opposite.

Kathleen Noller: Do you think it's mostly a physical difference in terms of reproductive ability? And you mentioned the difference in physical strength as well between, say, an average man and average woman or do you think it can have some other perhaps spiritual differences? know the big five personality traits get cited a lot as being different for, again, average men and women or just the distributions differ for things like extroversion, introversion, etc. openness to experience traits like that. What do you what do you think and I know it's hard to tell what God’s initial design and Eden was right versus what we have today. But how do you see that like opposite playing out practically.

Rebecca: Yes, fabulous question. And I think so many starts to make sense when we get our hands around what kinds of differences we see in in men and women. So first we see the fundamental biological differences, which are you know one of which is a sexual binary of like you're either male or female. Now, for sure there are people who have disorders of sexual development. I have people there in my own life and who have disorders of sexual development, just like any other body part, you know, our reproductive organs, we can be born with and atypical or disordered situations in in those respects. But that doesn't take away from the fact that there is a binary of male and female, and that you need the sex binary for human beings to be created. So, there's this there's this strong sort of binary difference between men and women in that respect. There are then biologically average differences that are also you know significant. So, i think it was Louise Perry, a British journalist who wrote The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, who summarized it as almost any man could kill almost any woman with his bare hands. That was sort of a brutal way of putting it.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Rebecca: But that it's not just that men are a little bit stronger than women, but men are a lot, like even so sort of relatively weak men is a lot stronger than even relatively strong women. And there'll be you know some exceptions, but there's a strong biological difference once we've been through puberty between men and women.

Kathleen Noller: Yes

Rebecca: And that's one of the reasons why. Sports really need to be sort of men’s and women's sports. It's just it's very, it's exceedingly unfair on women to allow biological males to compete in in women's sports. So, we have sort of that biological difference as well. Now, when we start to look at sort of psychological differences between men and women, they are much more like the statement that men are taller than women, by which we know we mean the average man is taller than the average woman, not that you know I’m for example, I'm five foot eight. I know plenty of men who are shorter than I am. Doesn't make them any less than a man or me any less than a woman. But it's just, it's on average, women are all shorter than men. and likewise, if we look at psychological traits, for instance, aggression or competitiveness or nurturing or whatever, you know you name it, any psychological trait that's often associated with men or with women, we'll find their average differences, but we won't find sort of binary differences. And I find this super interesting because to paint with a somewhat broad brush, but I think it's i think it's helpful in general, people coming from a liberal perspective have said there are no average sort of psychological differences between men and women. It's all pure social socialization. So, it's just because we treat little girls and little boys differently that little girls grow up to be more like this and little boys be more like that sort of psychologically. Conversely, conservatives have tended to say there is a sort of binary difference between men and women psychologically, and we've tried to kind of mask this with socialization and it doesn't really work. In fact, there are average differences between men and women psychologically, and that's useful information to have, but it's also not determinative of my maleness or your femaleness. And sort of ironically, the thinking behind trans identities is it ends up being the same as the thinking behind sort of conservative understandings of male and female psychology, because it sort of says, you know, there's a man's brain and a woman's brain, and there's a binary difference between them to where actually, you know, the fact that I have a woman's body to determine what my brain is like. And so, you know from a perspective of trans ideology, if I find my psychology doesn't line up with what women are meant to be like, then maybe I'm not a woman. ye, It's sort of this ironic convergence.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Rebecca: And I think from a biblical perspective, we can see, as you read through the scriptures, you will find exceedingly little on what men and women are like psychologically. You will find a lot about how Christians should act and think. You know you’ll find a sort of list of virtues. It's not divided between masculine virtues and feminine virtues, and We're all called to and all the things, including gentleness and love and all but sort of virtues that could be sorted between the sexes. We are called to both as men and women. But then we also see each other in certain contexts, so marriage is a core example. Men and women are called to different roles. It's not actually based on their psychology. It's based on theology.

Kathleen Noller: That's a very important distinction. And so, I'd love to dive more into some of the specifics of some of these women that you've discussed in your book, Jesus through the eyes of women, and look at the New Testament. But before we do that, I want to make sure we have our definition straight so that we know what objector we're responding to. So, I mentioned in the objection that Christianity is often accused of subjugating women. So, I think nowadays, of course, our cultural definition of sexism is very different than it was years ago, than it is in other countries other than America. So, when we want to, you know, if we're going to have this discussion and try to say, well, Jesus is not sexist, what are we really saying?

Rebecca: Yes, that's a great question. So, I think probably the most helpful place I can start is by explaining more of what Christians believe about marriage or what the Bible teaches about marriage. Because I think that's a place where a lot of these questions come from. And I think it's also a place where lot of these questions can be answered if we read the text themselves and see what what's happening in context. So, there's famous passage in Paul's letter to the Ephesians, to a sort first century church that he was writing to, where he talks about Christian marriage. And he starts by saying, wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church.

Now, I remember reading that as a year-old college student and really struggling with it because I'd been to an all-girls school. it was highly academic and I have very much been taught and strongly believed that women were more just as capable of all sorts of things as men were and so it was hard for me to hear, wives, submit to your husbands as the Lord. I mean, that sounds like a kind of mandate for subjugation, right? If you read on Paul's, you know, in in that letter, if you just kind of continue even a few verses, what Paul then says is husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. So, let's think about that for a minute. What Paul is saying is that husbands and wives are to relate to one another based on Jesus's relationship with his church, with his people. And so, the wife is kind of playing the role of the church and the husband is playing the role of Jesus. I was talking to my kids about this yesterday and my son who's seven, said, it's kind of like we're acting in a play. And I was like, ye, it is kind like you're acting in a play.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, it is.

Rebecca: So, you know, if I was going to play Juliet and Romeo and Juliet, I would say her lines. I wouldn't say whatever lines I felt like saying because, you know, I'm taking a role. And a call on husbands, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Well, how did Christ love the church and give himself up for her? By dying on the cross. You know Jesus was executed, tortured, naked and bleeding on the Roman cross. That is to characterize how Christian husbands are to love with their wives. yes, Paul doesn't say wives submit to your husbands; husbands lead your wives. He doesn't say wives submit to your husbands; husbands dominate your wives. He doesn't say wives submit husbands, husbands make your wives submit to you. He says husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up there. And yes, as we read in that passage, we see Paul talking more about how husbands are to love their wives. And then he kind of lands the plane by quoting from Genesis , after the creation of the man or woman and woman and the bringing of the first man and woman together, where in Genesis  it says, therefore a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Paul quotes that and he says, this is a profound mystery, and I'm saying that it refers to Christ and the church. So, Paul's saying that from the very beginning, from when God created human beings, male and female, from when he brought one man and one woman together in marriage, it's always about Jesus and his people. And if we then follow that thread from Genesis through to Ephesians, and it continues to the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible, we follow that thread. What we'll see is that throughout the Old Testament, God is compared to a husband, a loving, faithful husband, and Israel to an all too often unfaithful wife. And this marriage is continually in crisis because God's people keep on cheating on him with other sort of idols, the sort of fake gods of the ancient world. And by the end of the Old Testament, it's like they're headed for divorce. I mean, it's hard to see how this marriage is going to survive. And then Jesus comes along. And one of the strange claims he makes about himself is that he is the bridegroom. There's an odd claim to make because Jesus never married in his life on earth. So, what's he talking about? Well, it's one of the ways in which he's stepping into the shoes of the creator God of the Old Testament. He's saying, “I’m the husband.

I've come to claim God's people for myself so, Paul is picking up on all these threads and he's saying, yes, marriage was always from the first meant to be about Jesus and his people. and in marriage, a Christian man and woman come together in one flesh union, which is meant to sort of help those involved and the rest of us understand what it means when Jesus died on the cross for us and when we can become one with him. and the sort of strong language of us being united with Christ in New Testament, that's sort of at the heart of the Christian claim, is that Jesus died on the cross for us to pay for our sin, And that we, if we trust in him, we become united with him like a husband and a wife or like a head and a body. And Paul kind of pulls both of those metaphors together in his sort of treatise on marriage in Ephesians. And so, you know, the fact that I share, you know, all my finances with my husband and he with me, we have sort of shared bank account. yes, that’s one manifestation of the one flesh union that we have and of the union that each of us has with Jesus as members of his church that like Jesus's righteous riches have accredited to my account, right? Like I’m showing I share a bank account with Jesus spiritually. All my sin has been my debt has been paid for by him, and all his righteousness has kind of overwhelmed my debt. and so, when we look at marriage, as Christians, we are living in a sort of mimicry of Jesus's relationship with people and both parties in a marriage play and incredibly vulnerable roles. Because if I'm going to submit to my husband as the Lord, then that's huge. I’m putting my life roles If he's going to love me as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that's also huge. I mean, he is also literally putting his life on the line here. Like this is this is him pouring himself out in sacrificial love for me. And what's got what's got twisted often in how these passages have been taught and how they've been kind of applied in Christian contexts is that we've sort of, we've failed to listen to the second part of what Paul is saying. So, there's often been a sort of emphasis on wives who made their husbands. And sometimes our husband’s kind is leading their wives. We haven't really emphasized necessarily husbands loving their wives sacrificially. And once you put that other piece in place,

Christian marriage becomes the absolute opposite of an opportunity for oppression of women. And it's, if anything, and it's an interesting thought experiment to do. Imagine if Paul had said, wives, love your husbands as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. I mean, that like, gosh, that is that's rough. and Paul doesn't Paul doesn't say that. He says to the physically stronger party, to the husband, you've got to give up your life for your wife. So, it doesn't mean a woman's role in marriage is to care for her husband's needs and subjugate her interest to him and follow his career in every direction that he wants to go. What it means is the husbands should think first of their wives and care careful and prioritize their wives' interests and seek sort of sacrificially love their wives in every way they can as followers of Jesus. So, I think it's so important to kind of get those two pieces in place. Now, having said all of that, one of the basic and shocking pieces of Christian ethics, and it was even more shocking in the ancient world into which this belief system was born, is that none of us enter God's kingdom with all our rights in our hands. Like the only way to come to Jesus is flat on your face. and like recognizing your complete neediness and sinfulness and brokenness before him and Jesus in return or even preemptively gives up his life for us. So, there's this fascinating, beautiful, powerful moment in the Gospels when Jesus has just explained to his disciples that he's going to die. He's going die on cross. And they start arguing about which of them is the more important, which of us is greatest. I mean, it's so embarrassing. And Jesus calls his disciples together says, listen, I know that in the world out there, sort of among the Gentiles, among people outside of God's people, those who are sort of more important, higher status, that kick down to those below them. And he says, it's not to be like that among you. He says, instead, whoever we want to be first among you must be your servant. And whoever wants to be great among you must be slave to all. Why? Because even Jesus, the son of man, and he calls himself, didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So, as you look at the, whether you're a man or a woman, as you look at the roles that you're called to, you put your trust in Jesus, you will have to set your pride aside. You will have to put everything on the table, and you will have to recognize that mimicking Jesus, your job is to be a servant of other people. I mean, Paul and some of the other leaders in the first century church would refer to themselves as slave of Christ. like not holding onto my own rights, not doing my own thing, not preserving my own ego and holding onto my pride. I belong to Jesus. I am his servant. I'm a slave. That’s my job and I'm delighted to have it. Now in this radical humility, we meet Jesus because that's where he is as well. But it's sort of counter-cultural and it's even as we think about questions of like women's roles in church or women's roles in marriage, et cetera, we need to know that every follower of Jesus is sort of coming in on the bottom level because that's the only that's the only way to enter the kingdom of God.

Kathleen Noller: Yes. I would like to touch on this word countercultural that you've used a few times as well because you touched on that in your book. So, you teach us in this book that women can write play multiple roles. They can be prophetic voices in the New Testament. They can be disciples of Jesus. Jesus provides spiritual and emotional nourishment to them. He heals them. and He offers forgiveness to them. So, you mentioned the kind countercultural piece. So how does this treatment of women that we see in your book in the New Testament, how does that differ from how, say, a typical woman would have been treated in Galilee or Judea or other regions where Jesus's ministry took place prior to the establishment of Christianity?

Rebecca: Yes, that's interesting because and Jesus in the Gospels is most often relating to fellow Jews, so both men and women, not always, but sometimes Gentile’s kind of come across this path as well. And so, there'll be specific circumstances there.  Paul is most often speaking to the concerns of Gentiles sort of within the Greco-Roman Empire. And so, the broad kind of cultural context into which New Testament is written is one less dominated by Jewish thinking and more dominated by kind of Greco-Roman thinking. And one of the interesting things, well, interesting is maybe the wrong word. If you look back at the understanding of women in the Greco-Roman empire, what you'll find is that some women count and other women don't count. So, women who were freeborn, so not slaves, not prostitutes, not foreigners, but like freeborn Greek and Roman women, they counted in the sense that their bodily integrity was to be respected. They were sexually to belong to their husbands. And you know if somebody else, if somebody tried to have sex with them against their will, like but they that would be defined as rape. Then there was this huge category of women who just didn't count. So, whether they were enslaved or whether they were prostitutes, and there was a lot of overlap between those categories. It was fine for a freeborn Greek or Roman man to have sex with a slave or a prostitute. Nobody even asked if they consented, because it wasn't even a court, like, you would no longer ask a chair if it consented to be sat on kind of thing. And so, one of things, one of the impacts of Christianity is that Christianity birthed this whole idea of sexual consent for women. And not just for certain women, you know, high born women, but for every woman. And this isn't something, you don't take my word for it There’s a non-Christian historian called Kyle Harper who wrote a book called From Shame to Sin about how Christianity changed how sex was thought about and, in the Greco, -Ramon Empire. And he makes this argument that it's actually Christian ideas of free will that produce what we now think of as sexual consent, which is one of the one of the basic kinds of moral beliefs that we'll share regardless today of whether we identify as Christian, atheist, agnostic, Jewish, Muslim, whatever.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Rebecca: It's come from Christianity in the first place. And it wasn't an assumption in the Western world before for Christianity. And this this idea that everybody counts, be they male female, be they enslaved or free, be they young or old, be they you know Jewish, Greek, Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, all the different kind of categories in the ancient world. This comes straight out of the teaching of Jesus. So he teaches and he treats people from all these different categories with the same kind of love and care and you know I mentioned earlier the woman who had five husbands was now living in a man who she wasn't married to and This woman was also a Samaritan who from a Jewish perspective in Jesus' day, the Samaritans were the people that Jews hated. I mean, it was like they hated racial and religious enemies. So, if we know anything about Samaritans, we know that they're good because of Jesus' famous story, the good Samaritan and but if Jews of Jesus' day knew anything about Samaritans, they knew they were bad. And so, Jesus' is conversation with this woman who is not only a woman who, you know, why was he talking to this woman in the first place as a respectable Jewish rabbi? Why would he bother with this woman? Well, he's not she's not only a woman, she's also a Samaritan.

Jesus had nothing to do with Samaritans, what was he doing talking to her? But she’s a woman who is a Samaritan and she's had five husbands and is now living with someone she's not married to, and this is the kind of woman who Jesus chooses to spend his time with. And to she's the first woman in John's Gospel who reveals himself to you as the Christ, as God's sort of promised king. And so, we see in Jesus's relationships with women, and he will often be defending and upholding the very women those around him would have looked down on. It's another beautiful example in in Luke's Gospel where Luke tells us that Jesus having dinner i with a Jewish religious guy, a Pharisee called Simon, and Luke says, a woman of the city who is a sinner came in. And she makes a complete scene. and She starts weeping on Jesus' feet and washing them with her tears and wiping them with her hair and pouring out on them. And this religious guy, Simon, is absolutely appalled. He says, you know, if Jesus was a prophet, he would know what sort of woman was touching him and She's most likely a prostitute, known for her sin. And Jesus then tells a story that basically shames Simon and this woman as an example of love. And he said he said to Simon, look, she's done all the things for me that you should have done. Like if Simon knew who Jesus was and if he knew how much he needed forgiveness, he would have acted like this woman is acting.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Rebecca: And Jesus kind of defends her against Simon. We see this sort of pattern again, in the Gospels of Jesus defending women who are recognizing who he is and coming to him appropriately, sort on their knees from self-righteous men who can't see who he is.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, many examples of that. And you go through that. very well in your book. I wish we had time to go through more of those as well. You noted also in your book that i think one of your children asked you, why didn't Jesus have any female disciples? I'd like to ask you, why didn't Jesus have female apostles? You go through very well that he had a lot of female disciples who contributed to his ministry why not Why apostles? And is there something Are their certain tasks or positions which women were just not permitted to take on, even if they were included as disciples and why?

Rebecca: Yes, great question, so within his large group of disciples or followers, those who are learning from him, traveling around with him seeing what he did, listening to what he said, large group of both men and women and Luke gives us named witnesses among the women in Luke chapter  verses  to  if people are interested to look that up you see some three women and named there as eyewitnesses of Jesus' ministry among his disciples and but Jesus chose  Jewish men to be his what was sometimes called apostles so they had a very sort of specific role And one of one of the pieces of that seems to have been that they were like  a restart for God's kingdom. So, in the Old Testament, and the tribes of Israel, people might have heard of, start with Jewish brothers. And so, when Jesus chooses Jewish men as his kind of group for the relaunch, as it were, of God's people, in his own ministry, then there are Jewish men. So, there's sort of echoing going on there. and now than when we look at the New Testament texts and what they say about the roles of men and women in church, we'll find an interesting combination of things. So, the apostle Paul, for instance, in his first letter to the Corinthians, he talks at one point about how men and women should pray and prophesy in church. And he says, you know women should be covering their heads and men shouldn't be covering their heads when they do these things.

And that's a whole other conversation about you know what that means and how that applies in our cultural contexts today. But sort of TLDR, those women covering their heads would have been seen as a sort of culturally appropriate expression then in a way that you know today is, it would be sort of modest dress, but not to the signal about that in our culture so at one point in first Corinthians talking about how women should pray and prophesy another point he's saying he's saying that women should be silent in in churches in and it's in the context of a  longer passage that's looking at orderliness in worship a few verses earlier he said that somebody who has a kind of prophetic word or a tongue should be silent if there isn't an interpreter or if there's somebody else who needs to so of speak. So, it's not only women who are to be silent in these contexts. But there's, again, as a kind of TLDR, my understanding, as best I can kind of piece together the different pieces of data and evidence, my best understanding is that whereas both men and women are called to and all the basics of Christian life and ministry and evangelism, et cetera, that within the church, leadership and preaching pastoring is reserved for a certain  sort of small number of qualified men.

Now again, qualified is important and that the list of qualifications to be an elder or a pastor and in church according to New Testament are mostly character qualifications, funnily enough rather than sort of talent qualifications. So, you know, large proportion of Christian men aren't going to be called to that. But that, again, but sort of my position is that, for example, i wouldn't feel like I was qualified to be a pastor or an elder. I think it is a position reserved for certain qualified men. Now, again, if we look at Jesus's teaching about leadership in his kingdom, that isn't saying that you know passes pastoring is a position of kind of power and privilege and women should be kept out of that. because leading in God's kingdom is about service and sacrifice, not power and privilege. And so, we sort of need to make sure we have Jesus's like lenses firmly in place as we even think about leadership in the church. And are we seeing in our church leaders, people who are exhibiting like true service? Are we seeing people who are saying I want to follow Jesus when he says, whoever wants to be great among you must be slave of all And so, ye, we need to make sure we don't have a kind of anti-Christian paradigm, even as we look at church leadership and start sort of thinking in terms of status and privilege when actually the New Testament, Jesus' own life and teachings kind of turns that upside down.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, absolutely. I think in our current world of not only the drive for equality, sexual equality, but equity, I think that's going to be a challenge. And I think any position that's associated with status is going to be a desired one, whether you're the one dying on the cross, right, in our very extreme example. For those who maybe are listening and are acknowledging, okay, so whether it's the man in the headship role in the marriage or whether it's the man who's the pastor of the church, that's actually a very weighty role that takes on a lot of responsibility, requires a lot of humility, and they acknowledge all of those things that those men are you know of good character and are not there to just demean women and hold things over them. But nonetheless, they try to go back in the Bible and see why is it the men that were chosen for that? Is there some sort of natural law argument or some sort of deeper reason other than they're men that we could point to? Or is it just sort of that is there That is their sex, and that is what God designed them for. And just like he designed humans for certain things and animals for certain things, he designed men for certain things and women for certain things. How would you explain that to somebody who's struggling to find a reason other than it's because the Bible says that that's the way that it is?

Rebecca: yes it's really interesting i think we we're always kind of wanting to know a why beyond the bible says and don't think that's wrong in and of itself however i would caution against that only because for a couple of reasons actually one is if we only do what the Bible teaches when we also fully understand why, we're not necessarily submitting to God's authority and if we If we only obey God when we say, do you know what I agree. That's a great idea, Lord. like if I was making the decision, I would have made the exact same one. If we're only submitting to God under those circumstances, are we submitting to God? That would be a question that I would want to ask myself. I think another challenge that we have, and I'm going to go back to the example of marriage here when it comes to natural law, is if you look at Paul's call to husbands, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. I don't think, I've never heard anybody argue that husbands are by nature more loving and therefore the Bible tells husbands, you know, that men are by nature more loving and therefore the Bible tells husbands to love their wives as their primary call. So, I'm always just a little bit circumspect when people try to say, well, it's because X, Y, or Z. It's okay to speculate, but I'd always be kept cautious about tethering anything too much to that. So, my speculation as to why God has called the physically stronger sex or certain members of the physically stronger sex to leadership in the church is that leadership the church is exceedingly hard and vulnerable. You know, the first Christians were living in a context where leadership in church could mean being hauled to prison and or executed. And many Christians around the world are living in the exact same circumstances. And in that context, that makes some sense to say, the physically strong are the ones who need to be standing up first to kind of take the hit.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Rebecca: so Honestly, that would be me and my kind of natural law take on that. Paul does, interestingly, and I don't claim to fully understand this. i mean, I don't claim to fully understand Ephesians either, but and Paul anchors what he says about men and women in marriage on Christ and the church in Ephesians. Paul then actually anchors women's roles in the church on Adam being created before Eve, which is sort of interesting because It's sort of slightly hard to know why that would be,  possibly because God was and god gave you Adam the command to not eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil before he was created. So, he was sort of entrusted with the message or a kind of commandment, of what a negative commandment, I guess, which he then presumably needed to pass on to Eve. And then Eve was the one who first listened to the serpent sort of playing the role of Satan there. But then Adam immediately jumped on board. So, you know, I can imagine ways in which it makes sense for the Genesis narrative sort of to translate or to kind of ground our understanding of men and women's roles and leadership in the church it's not intuitive. I think there are various ways you could take that. I think when it comes to Christian sexual ethics more broadly, and it's super interesting, I mentioned Louise Perry earlier, who wrote The Coast Against the Sexual Revolution, she wrote it as a non-Christian, has recently become a Christian.

Kathleen Noller: She is now a Christian. Yes, I saw.

Rebecca: because she's, or at least significantly, because she sorts of realized, oh, i was kind of taught to believe that Christian sexual ethic is oppressive to women. I've realized it's the best deal for women world has ever seen. I mean, the reality of male-female sexual difference is that if the sort of concept of free love or commitment-free sex plays out very differently for men and for women. And the idea that Christian marriage means that a man is limited to having sex only with his wife was a shocking idea in the ancient world.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Rebecca: I mean, Roman husbands, good they didn't have to be faithful to their wives. They could sleep with their slaves and prostitutes if they weren't sleeping with other people's wives. was fine but so the idea that men had to be faithful and that that women weren't kind of being vulnerable to having sexual relationships with multiple men who then, you know, they could get pregnant and have their baby and be completely abandoned by the man, the father of the child. You know, that's a very, that's a very real thing and it's something that, if we go back to sort of questions of male versus female psychology, even if technologically we can separate sex from the possibility of pregnancy, which we know most of human history we haven't really been able to do. And even so, women are on average, sort of deeply programmed to see sex as something that they want commitment around. And men sort of much less so you can read report after report, you know whether it’s looking at like actual data and surveys or whether it's sort of anecdotal reports of how commitment-free sex just ends up striking men and women very differently. And so, our modern sort of Western secular culture, which says you kind of need to be fine with sex without commitment, and it’s kind of weird. If you're a woman who would want real meaningful commitment from a man to have sex with him, like, what is wrong with you? It turns out that that turns out to be quite misogynistic, it’s against women's actual... and interests and on average how women are kind of psychologically wired and it basically creates a world in which men and get what they at least think that they want.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Rebecca: Now over time I think men are also it's demonstrably the case that men do much better in monogamous relationships than in kind of commitment free sex which ultimately needs everybody lonely and miserable but that it's particularly hard on women. So, I would say rather than Christianity being this great oppressor of women, I think truly sort biblical Christianity is well, i' I'll go and I'll put it another way, Jesus is the best thing that ever happened for women.

Kathleen Noller: yes

Rebecca: And I think I would believe that even if I was not a Christian, just from looking at the data.

Kathleen Noller: so I love the way that you phrase that so to wrap up because we're almost at the end of the hour I'd love to ask you if we took out the bits about women from the gospels what would we be missing people often will say well the you know the those stories about the women in the new testament they don't really they're not they're not really the main characters other than maybe you know virgin Mary of course But if we took their stories out, what would we miss about the big picture?

Rebecca: I mean, we've missed significant portions of what we know about Jesus. So, to begin with, we would miss knowing about Jesus's origins and in the sort of in terms of his conception and birth, because we have the account of the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, presumably from Mary. And we have both Mary and her relative who was John the Baptist's mother, and a prophetess named Anna, who Luke calls a prophetess, kind of prophesying about who Jesus was going to be from the very beginning. So, we we'd miss significant insights about Jesus' conception and birth. We'd miss significant stories along the way, and revelations of Jesus from Jesus himself, for example, when He tells Martha of Bethany, I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me, even though he dies, will live. And whoever believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? and Those were words spoken just to Martha. Some of the most beautiful and powerful words out of Jesus' mouth. and We would miss the first accounts of the resurrection because in all four Gospels, women who Jesus first revealed himself to, and it's really interesting in John's gospel, it's clear that Jesus could have re revealed himself to some of his male apostles if he wanted to first, because they're around, like they sort of show up. But instead, he reveals himself to Mary Magdalene and some of the other women. So, we have missed some significant pieces of the story and things which are profoundly relevant, not just to women, but to men as well.

Kathleen Noller: Absolutely. Well, thank you for our discussion today. We will see you next time.

Thank you very much for listening to the Kathleen Noller podcast at the C.S. Lewis Institute.