Women and the church through the centuries
Challenging Complementarianism: Part Four
The New Testament church was relatively enlightened in its view of women, with, as we saw in the last article, a number of women taking prominent roles from early on.
Despite this, the Christian establishment has not exactly won prizes for equality over the centuries.
So when did this change happen?
The New Testament church didn’t really have much in the way of hierarchy, which makes arguments about whether or not women should be in charge, or have positions of honour or power, a bit redundant. The aim was for no one to have such positions, regardless of gender. Which makes sense when you consider how much Jesus spoke about servanthood and the first being last and telling his followers not to be lording it over one another.
This is reflected in the language used by the New Testament writers. There is a perfectly good word in ancient Greek for ‘leader’. It’s the word ‘archon’. But the New Testament authors only ever use it for three things. To talk about Jewish religious authorities, Roman authority figures and demonic powers. They don’t use it at all to talk about the position of people within the early Christian community. They seem to go out of their way to avoid it. Instead, they speak about people fulfilling the roles of teachers, stewards, guardians, elders.
There are evidently people of particular influence in the New Testament church, particularly apostles, whose teaching is especially highly esteemed, but the aim is for equality. Think of Paul’s metaphor of the body and everyone playing a vital role. Their meetings allowed contributions from everyone, if Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians about how to hold a meeting well, are anything to go by, and their language emphasises a philosophy of equality. When our English translations use the word ‘leader’, they are taking one of these deliberately ‘not leader’ words and rendering it as ‘leader’. Which is an interesting move.
So in this new, non-hierarchical movement, women and men were equally viewed as qualified to take on a variety of roles within the newly forming Christian community. It was as the church became less organic and more organised and institutional that it also became patriarchal. Positions of authority started to appear and they were the province of men only.
Ordination and priesthood did not exist in the very early church. The concept of priesthood was used either to describe Christ:
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. Hebrews 4:14
or all believers:
…you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God…. 1 Peter 2:9
By the end of the second century, however, the practice of ordination had been established and if you were going to be a priest, you needed to be a man.
Since then, the Roman Catholic Church, the Coptic Church, the Orthodox Church, both Greek and Russian, have all maintained that ordination is something that is open only to men.
Then came the reformation in the 1500s. Martin Luther nailed his piece of paper to the door of a church in Wittenberg (at least in legend, if not in reality), the reformation began and the protestant church, in all its glorious variety, was born.
Interestingly, the Catholic and Orthodox churches object to the ordination of women on the basis that they believe priesthood to be exclusively male. Basically, Jesus was a man and so a priest representing Jesus needs also to be a man. Jesus was also dark skinned, born in Palestine and quite good at carpentry. But apparently it’s the maleness, rather than any other aspects of Christ’s humanity, that makes the difference if you’re choosing priests.
Protestants don’t hold with the idea of priesthood at all. They contend that the verse from Peter (above) makes it clear that all believers are priests. You’d think this would be excellent news for gender equality, wouldn’t you? Everyone is a priest, therefore we ought to be back to New Testament levels of gender equality.
As you might have noticed, this is not how things worked out. Although protestantism objected to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, it has in the main consisted of churches that are big on leadership and hierarchy and that leadership has tended to hold quite a lot of power and to be exclusively male. For “Biblical reasons”, you understand. Just different biblical reasons from the ones about priesthood. Instead of male priesthood, they tend to talk about male headship. And they take a very literal reading of passages about the roles of men and women from the writings of Paul, which, as we’ve seen, doesn’t really work if you look at them in the light of the cultural contexts in which they were written.
In large part, the view of women in the church, once we’re looking at prostestantism in particular, is very much influenced by the culture of the time. While the church has, on the whole, been pretty misogynistic, there are some interesting examples of where this has not been the case.
When Christianity first began to take hold in the British Isles, it did so from two directions. Celtic missionaries came via Ireland to the north of England, creating bases in places like Lindisfarne while Augustine, envoy of Gregory the Great, began his mission to Britain beginning in Kent.
The position of women within Celtic Christianity was one of equality with men. They had the same access to leadership roles within the church as the men and often played a significant role.
This was a consequence of women enjoying far greater equality with men in Celtic society than was the case in Roman society.
Ironically, it was a Celtic woman, Hild, who organised the council of Whitby. I say ironic because it was here that a significant step was taken in the Christianity practiced in the British Isles becoming Romanised. And, therefore, more patriarchal.
The Salvation Army has espoused equality from the beginning. Founders Catherine and William Booth ensured that the right of women to preach and to hold any office within the organisation, was enshrined in the Salvation Army constitution back in 1870.
The Quakers, too, espoused gender equality from the beginning. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, wrote, in 1674:
And some men say, “Men must have the Power and superiority over the woman, because God says, ‘The man must rule over his wife, and that man is not of woman, but the woman is of the man’” (Gen 3:16). Indeed, after man fell, that command was. But before man fell, there was no such command. For they were both meet-helps. They were both to have dominion over all that God made. . . And as man and woman are restored again, by Christ, up into the image of God, they both have dominion again in Righteousness and Holiness, and are helps-meet, as before they fell.
It was two women, Mary Faith and Ann Austin, who first took quakerism to the United States and quakers were active in the Suffragette movement.
I suppose that in a world dominated by patriarchy for millennia, it’s not a great surprise that gender equality has been the exception rather than the rule. But it’s still a bit disappointing.
Over the last century, things have shifted significantly. With the rise of gender equality in society generally, there has been an increase in consciousness around the issue in churches. When the whole of society is sexist, there is no imperative to question the fact that church operates along sexist lines. As that has changed, it has been natural for Christians to begin to ask some difficult questions about the lack of equality within church and more and more denominations have begun to ordain women and allow them to take leadership roles within their churches.
The truth is that women have been finding ways to minister, to teach, to serve God in the world, even when their organisations don’t really approve, from the beginning. The reality of what happens often makes a mockery of the carefully explained doctrine of patriarchal and complementarian churches.
Within the Catholic tradition, there have been some profoundly gifted and spiritual women teaching, writing and leading convents. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich, to name but three. Although their influence through the centuries has been enormous, it took a long time for official recognition to come. In 1970, the first two were named as doctors of the church, the title given to saints who, through their research or writing, have made a major contribution to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. The first time that women have been recognised in this way. In recent times, there has not been a more influential and revered Christian figure than Mother Teresa.
Churches that won’t have a woman in the pulpit, frequently citing this verse to support their position:
I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. 1 Timothy 2:12
will happily allow them to teach in Sunday school or go abroad and work as missionaries. In these settings, pragmatism seems to win out over doctrine.
In modern times, women with complementarian convictions often have a significant teaching role through the medium of the internet and through their writing.
The Gospel Coalition, an organisation at the centre of promoting complementarianism, speaks out firmly against women leading churches or preaching and vehemently asserts male headship. It has been hugely influential in persuading people to stick to a traditionally patriarchal view of the place of women. But even here, in what is virtually the headquarters of complementarianism, it seems it is not possible to avoid contradictions. There are articles by women in their blog, the TGC book awards for 2023 includes no fewer than nine female authors, and there are quite a lot of videos on their website of women preaching. These are women preaching at women’s conferences of course, but they are on line where men are completely free to access them and have a listen, should they so choose.
Throughout the history of the church, the ministry of women has played a significant role. Even in unexpected places, like the TGC and the Roman Catholic Church. A certain narrow reading of the Bible might enable you to make a logical theological argument against women leading or teaching men, but it’s not a position that organisations have been able to enact practically with any degree of consistency. Maybe that ought to be telling us something?
Next article in the series:
If you enjoyed this article, you might find these podcast conversations interesting:
To start this series at the beginning:
If you enjoyed this, you might like my Loved Called Gifted podcast, available on most podcast platforms, or you can find it here.
I offer spiritual direction and coaching. The Loved Called Gifted course, available online and in person, will help you to discover your life calling. Discover these things and other bits and pieces on my website.
You might be interested in these other series of articles:
