EINSTEIN'S IRRITATING FACTS

“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” —ALBERT EINSTIEN

It was 1916 and Albert Einstein didn’t like where his calculations were leading him. If his theory of General Relativity was true, it meant that the universe was not eternal but had a beginning. Einstein’s calculations indeed were revealing a definite beginning to all time, all matter, and all space. This flew in the face of his belief that the universe was static and eternal.

Einstein later called his discovery “irritating.” He wanted the universe to be self-existent—not reliant on any outside cause—but the universe appeared to be one giant effect. In fact, Einstein so disliked the implications of General Relativity—a theory that is now proven accurate to five decimal places—that he introduced a cosmological constant (which some have since called a “fudge factor”) into his equations in order to show that the universe is static and to avoid an absolute beginning.

But Einstein’s fudge factor didn’t fudge for long. In 1919, British cosmologist Arthur Eddington conducted an experiment during a solar eclipse which confirmed that General Relativity was indeed true—the universe wasn’t static but had a beginning. Like Einstein, Eddington wasn’t happy with the implications. He later wrote, “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to me. . . . I should like to find a genuine loophole.”

By 1922, Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann had officially exposed Einstein’s fudge factor as an algebraic error. (Incredibly, in his quest to avoid a beginning, the great Einstein had divided by zero—something even schoolchildren know is a no-no!) Meanwhile, Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter had found that General Relativity required the universe to be expanding. And in 1927, the expanding of the universe was actually observed by astronomer Edwin Hubble (namesake of the space telescope).

Looking through the 100-inch telescope at California’s Mount Wilson Observatory, Hubble discovered a “red shift” in the light from every observable galaxy, which meant that those galaxies were moving away from us. In other words, General Relativity was again confirmed—the universe appears to be expanding from a single point in the distant past.

In 1929 Einstein made a pilgrimage to Mount Wilson to look through Hubble’s telescope for himself. What he saw was irrefutable. The observational evidence showed that the universe was indeed expanding as General Relativity had predicted. With his cosmological constant now completely crushed by the weight of the evidence against it, Einstein could no longer support his wish for an eternal universe. He subsequently described the cosmological constant as “the greatest blunder of my life,” and he redirected his efforts to find the box top to the puzzle of life. Einstein said that he wanted “to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thought, the rest are details.”

From I Don't Have Faith to Be an Atheist

The Biblical Case for Ordaining Women

N T Wright

THE QUESTION OF women’s ordination has become a defining issue for many people in the church today. There are several quite different reasons for this, in the theological and cultural pressures many find urging them to go ahead and the equal pressures many find urging them to resist this move. There are all kinds of things one could say about these pressures, but my task here is the more limited one of discussing some of the key biblical texts.

Bishop of Durham N T Wright

In this chapter I write not about the relation between the sexes in general, nor indeed about marriage, but about the ministry of women. That is a welcome limitation of my subject, and I’m going to limit it further, but I do want to set my remarks within a particular framework of biblical theology to do with Genesis 1. Many people have said, and I have often enough said it myself, that the creation of man and woman in their two genders is a vital part of what it means that humans are created in God’s image. I now regard that as a mistake. After all, not only the animal kingdom, as noted in Genesis itself, but also the plant kingdom, as noted by the reference to seed, have their male and female. The two-gender factor is not specific to human beings but runs right through a fair amount of the rest of creation.

This doesn’t mean it’s unimportant; indeed, it means if anything it’s all the more important. Being male and being female, and working out what that means, is something most of creation is called to do and be, and unless we are to collapse into a kind of gnosticism, where the way things are in creation is regarded as secondary and shabby compared to what we are now to do with it, we have to recognize, respect, and respond to this call of God to live in the world he has made and as the people he has made us. It’s just that we can’t use the argument that being male-plus-female is somehow what being God’s image bearers actually means. Which brings us nicely to Galatians 3:28, and I’d like to offer some reflections on it.

Women Are Part of the Family of God

The first thing to say is fairly obvious but needs saying anyway. Galatians 3 is not about ministry. Nor is it the only word Paul says about being male and female. Instead of taking texts in a vacuum and then arranging them in a hierarchy, for instance by quoting this verse and then saying that it trumps every other verse in a kind of fight to be the senior bull in the herd (what a very masculine way of approaching exegesis, by the way!), we need to do justice to what Paul is actually saying at this point.

The point Paul is making overall in this passage is that God has one family, not two, and that this family consists of all those who believe in Jesus; that this is the family God promised to Abraham, and that nothing in the Torah can stand in the way of this unity, which is now revealed through the faithfulness of the Messiah. This is not at all about how we relate to one another within this single family. It is about the fact, as we often say, that the ground is even at the foot of the cross.

Let me start with a note about translation and exegesis. This verse is often mistranslated such: “Neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.” That is precisely what Paul does not say; because it’s what we expect he’s going to say, we should note carefully what he has said instead, since he presumably means to make a point by doing so, a point that is missed when the translation is flattened out as in that version. What he says is that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no “male and female.” I think the reason he says “no male and female” rather than “neither male nor female” is that he is actually quoting Genesis 1, and that we should understand the phrase “male and female” as a quotation.

So does Paul mean that in Christ the created order itself is undone? Is he saying, as some have suggested, that we go back to a kind of chaos in which no orders of creation apply any longer? Or is he saying that we go on, like the gnostics, from the first rather shabby creation, in which silly things like gender differentiation apply, to a new world in which we can all live as hermaphrodites—which, again, some have suggested, and which has interesting possible ethical spin-offs? No. Paul is a theologian of new creation, and it is always the renewal and reaffirmation of the existing creation, never its denial, as not only Galatians 6:15–16 but also Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15 make so very clear. Indeed, Genesis 1–3 remains enormously important for Paul throughout his writings.

What, then, is he saying? Remember that he is controverting in particular those who wanted to enforce Jewish regulations, and indeed Jewish ethnicity, upon Gentile converts. Remember the synagogue prayer in which the man who prays thanks God that he has not made him a Gentile, a slave, or a woman—at which point the women in the congregation thank God “that you have made me according to your will.” I think Paul is deliberately marking out the family of Abraham reformed in the Messiah as a people who cannot pray that prayer, since within this family such distinctions are now irrelevant.

I think there is more. Remember that the presenting issue in Galatians is circumcision, male circumcision of course. We sometimes think of circumcision as a painful obstacle for converts, as indeed in some ways it was, but for those who embraced it, it was a matter of pride and privilege. It not only distinguished Jews from Gentiles; it marked them in a way that automatically privileged males. By contrast, imagine the thrill of equality brought about by baptism, an identical rite for Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.

And that’s not all. Though this is somewhat more speculative, the story of Abraham’s family privileged the male line of descent: Isaac, Jacob, and so on. What we find in Paul, both in Galatians 4 and in Romans 9, is the careful attention paid—rather like Matthew 1, in fact, though from a different angle—to the women in the story. If those in Christ are the true family of Abraham, which is the point of the whole story, then the manner of this identity and unity takes a quantum leap beyond the way first-century Judaism construed it, bringing male and female together as surely and as equally as Jew and Gentile. What Paul seems to be doing in this passage, then, is ruling out any attempt to back up the continuing male privilege in the structuring and demarcating of Abraham’s family by an appeal to Genesis 1, as though someone were to say, “But of course the male line is what matters, and of course male circumcision is what counts, because God made male and female.” No, says Paul, none of that counts when it comes to membership in the renewed people of Abraham.

But once we have grasped this point, we must take a step back and reflect on what Paul has not done as well as what he has done. In regard to the Jew/Gentile distinction, Paul’s fierce and uncompromising insistence on equality in Christ does not at all mean that we need pay no attention to the distinctions among those of different cultural backgrounds when it comes to living together in the church. Romans 14 and 15 are the best examples of this, but we can see it as well throughout Galatians, as Paul regularly says “we,” meaning Jewish Christians, and “you” or “they” in reference to Gentile Christians. They have come to an identical destination, but they have come by very different routes and retain very different cultural memories and imaginations. The differences between them are not obliterated, and pastoral practice needs to take note of this; they are merely irrelevant when it comes to belonging to Abraham’s family.

This applies, I suggest, mutatis mutandis, to Paul’s treatment of men and women within the Christian family. The difference is irrelevant for membership status and membership badges. But it is still to be noted when it comes to pastoral practice. We do not become hermaphrodites or for that matter genderless, sexless beings when we are baptized. Paul would have been the first to reject the gnostic suggestion that the original creation was a secondary, poor shot at making a world and that we have to discover ways of transcending that which, according to Genesis 1, God called “very good.”

This is the point at which we must issue a warning against the current fashion in some quarters, in America at least, for documents like the so-called Gospel of Mary, read both in a gnostic and a feminist light. That kind of option appears to present a shortcut right into a prowomen agenda, but it not only purchases that at a huge cost, historically and theologically, but also presents a two-edged blessing, granted the propensity in some branches of ancient gnosticism to flatten out the male/female distinction not by affirming both as equally important but by effectively turning women into men. The last saying in the so-called Gospel of Thomas suggests that “Mary will be saved if she makes herself male.” That presents a radically different agenda from what we find in the New Testament.

Women Leaders in the Early Church

Among the many things that need to be said about the Gospels is that we gain nothing by ignoring the fact that Jesus chose twelve male apostles. There were no doubt all kinds of reasons for this within both the symbolic world in which he was operating and the practical and cultural world within which they would have to live and work. But every time this point is made—and in my experience it is made quite frequently—we have to comment on how interesting it is that there comes a time in the story when the disciples all forsake Jesus and run away; at that point, long before the rehabilitation of Peter and the others, it is the women who come first to the tomb, who are the first to see the risen Jesus, and who are the first to be entrusted with the news that he has been raised from the dead.

This is of incalculable significance. Mary Magdalene and the others are the apostles to the apostles. We should not be surprised that Paul calls a woman named Junia an apostle in Romans 16:7. If an apostle is a witness to the resurrection, there were women who deserved that title before any of the men. (I note that there was a huge fuss in the translation and revision of the New International Version at the suggestion that Junia was a woman and not a single historical or exegetical argument was available to those who kept insisting, for obvious reasons, that she was Junias, a man.)

Nor is this promotion of women totally new with the resurrection. As in so many other ways, what happened then picked up hints and pinpoints from earlier in Jesus’s public career. I think in particular of the woman who anointed Jesus (without here going into the question of who it was and whether it happened more than once); as some have pointed out, this was a priestly action that Jesus accepted as such.

I think too of the remarkable story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10. Most of us grew up with the line that Martha was the active type and Mary the passive or contemplative type, and that Jesus is simply affirming the importance of both and even the priority of devotion to him. That devotion is undoubtedly part of the importance of the story, but far more obvious to any first-century reader, and to many readers in Turkey, the Middle East, and many other parts of the world to this day, would be the fact that Mary was sitting at Jesus’s feet in the male part of the house rather than being kept in the back rooms with the other women. This, I am pretty sure, is what really bothered Martha; no doubt she was cross at being left to do all the work, but the real problem behind that was that Mary had cut clean across one of the most basic social conventions. It is as though, in today’s world, you were to invite me to stay in your house and, when it came to bedtime, I were to put up a camp bed in your bedroom. We have our own clear but unstated rules about whose space is which. So did they, and Mary has just flouted them. And Jesus declares that she is right to do so. She “sat at the master’s feet,” a phrase that doesn’t mean what it would mean today—the adoring student gazing up in admiration and love at the wonderful teacher. As is clear from the use of the phrase elsewhere in the New Testament (for instance, Paul with Gamaliel), to sit at the teacher’s feet is a way of saying you are being a student and picking up the teacher’s wisdom and learning; in that very practical world, you wouldn’t do this just for the sake of informing your own mind and heart, but in order to become yourself a teacher, a rabbi.

Like much in the Gospels, this story is left cryptic as far as we at least are concerned, but I doubt if any first-century reader would have missed the point. That, no doubt, is at least part of the reason we find so many women in positions of leadership, initiative, and responsibility in the early church. I used to think Romans 16 was the most boring chapter in the letter, and now, as I study the names and think about them, I am struck by how powerfully they indicate the way the teaching both of Jesus and of Paul was being worked out in practice.

One other point, about Acts, an insight among many others that I gleaned from Ken Bailey on the basis of his long experience of working in the Middle East. It’s interesting that at the crucifixion the women were able to come and go and see what was happening without fear of the authorities. They were not regarded as a threat and did not expect to be so regarded. Bailey points out that this pattern is repeated to this day in the Middle East; at the height of the troubles in Lebanon, when men on all sides in the factional fighting were either hiding or going about with great caution, women were free to come and go, to do the shopping, to take children out, and so on. It’s fascinating, then, that when we turn to Acts and the persecution that arose against the church not least at the time of Stephen, we find that women are being targeted equally alongside the men. Saul of Tarsus was going to Damascus to catch women and men alike and haul them off into prison. Bailey points out on the basis of his cultural parallels that this only makes sense if the women too are seen as leaders, influential figures within the community.

Decoding the Challenging Passages in 1 Corinthians

An enormous amount of work has been done recently on the social and cultural context of 1 Corinthians, and I want to urge all those who are interested in finding out what Paul actually said and meant to study such work with great care. There are many things about first-century classical life that shed a great deal of light on the actual issues Paul is addressing, and they need to be taken carefully into account.

“The Women Should Keep Silence”

I want to home in at once on one of the two passages that have caused so much difficulty, the verses at the end of 1 Corinthians 14 in which Paul insists that women must keep silent in church. I am of two minds whether to agree with those who say this verse is a later and non-Pauline interpolation. One of the finest textual critics of our day, Gordon Fee, has argued strongly that it is, purely on the grounds of the way the manuscript tradition unfolds. I urge you to examine his arguments and make up your own mind.

But I have always been attracted, ever since I heard it, to the explanation offered by Ken Bailey. In the Middle East, he says, it was taken for granted that men and women would sit apart in church, as still happens today in some circles. Equally important, the service would be held (in Lebanon, say, or Syria, or Egypt) in formal or classical Arabic, which the men would all know but which many of the women would not, since the women would speak only a local dialect or patois. Again, we may disapprove of such an arrangement, but one of the things you learn in real pastoral work as opposed to ivory-tower academic theorizing is that you simply can’t take a community all the way from where it currently is to where you would ideally like it to be in a single flying leap.

Anyway, the result would be that during the sermon in particular, the women, not understanding what was going on, would begin to get bored and talk among themselves. As Bailey describes the scene in such a church, the level of talking from the women’s side would steadily rise in volume, until the minister would have to say loudly, “Will the women please be quiet!” whereupon the talking would die down but only for a few minutes. Then, at some point, the minister would again have to ask the women to be quiet, and he would often add that if they wanted to know what was being said, they should ask their husbands to explain it to them when they got home. I know other explanations are sometimes offered for this passage, some of them quite plausible; this is the one that has struck me for many years as having the strongest claim to provide a context for understanding what Paul is saying. After all, his central concern in 1 Corinthians 14 is for order and decency in the church’s worship. This would fit extremely well.

What the passage cannot possibly mean is that women had no part in leading public worship, speaking out loud as they did so. This positive point is proved at once by the other relevant Corinthian passage, 1 Corinthians 11:2–11, since there Paul gives instructions on how women are to dress while engaging in such activities, instructions that obviously wouldn’t be necessary if they had been silent in church all the time. But that is the one thing we can be sure of. In this passage, almost everything else seems to me remarkably difficult to nail down. What I want to do now is to offer you the explanation I tried out in Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians. There is more to be said, no doubt, but probably not less.

Paul’s Directive Regarding Head Coverings

Paul wasn’t, of course, addressing the social issues we know in our world. Visit a different culture, even today, and you will discover many subtle assumptions, pressures, and constraints in society, some of which appear in the way people dress and wear their hair. In Western culture, a man wouldn’t go to a dinner party wearing a bathing suit, nor would a woman attend a beach picnic wearing a wedding dress. Most Western churches have stopped putting pressure on women to wear hats in church (Western-style hats, in any case, were not what Paul was writing about here), but nobody thinks it odd that we are still strict about men not wearing hats in church.

In Paul’s day (as, in many ways, in ours), gender was marked by hair and clothing styles. We can tell from statues, vase paintings, and other artwork of the period how this worked out in practice. There was social pressure to maintain appropriate distinctions. But did not Paul himself teach that there was “no ‘male and female’; you are all one in the Messiah” (Galatians 3:28)? Perhaps, indeed, that was one of the traditions that he had taught the Corinthian church, where churchgoers needed to know that Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female were all equally welcome, equally valued, in the renewed people of God. Perhaps that had actually created the situation he addresses here; perhaps some of the Corinthian women had been taking him literally, so that when they prayed or prophesied aloud in church meetings (which Paul assumes they would do regularly; this tells us, as we’ve seen, something about how to understand 1 Corinthians 14:34–35), they had decided to remove their normal head covering, perhaps also unbraiding their hair, to show that in the Messiah they were free from the normal social conventions by which men and women were distinguished.

That’s a lot of perhapses. We can only guess at the dynamics of the situation—which is what historians always do. It’s just that here we are feeling our way in the dark more than usual. Perhaps to the Corinthians’ surprise, Paul doesn’t congratulate the women on this new expression of freedom. He insists on maintaining gender differentiation during worship.

Another dimension to the problem may well be that in the Corinth of his day the only women who appeared in public without some kind of head covering were prostitutes. This isn’t suggested directly here, but it may have been in the back of his mind. If the watching world discovered that the Christians were having meetings where women “let their hair down” in this fashion, it could have the same effect on their reputation as it would in the modern West if someone looked into a church and found the women all wearing bikinis.

The trouble is, of course, that Paul doesn’t say exactly this, and we run the risk of explaining him in terms that (perhaps) make sense to us while ignoring what he himself says. It’s tempting to do that, precisely because in today’s Western world we don’t like the implications of the differentiation he maintains in 1 Corinthians 3:11 the Messiah is the head of every man, a husband is the head of every woman, and the head of the Messiah is God. This seems to place man in a position of exactly that assumed superiority against which women have rebelled, often using Galatians 3:28 as their battle cry.

But what does Paul mean by head? He uses it here sometimes in a metaphorical sense, as in 1 Corinthians 3:11, and sometimes literally, as when he’s talking about what to do with actual human heads (verses 4–7 and 10). But the word can mean various things, and a good case can be made that in verse 3 he is referring not to headship in the sense of sovereignty but to headship in the sense of “source,” like the source or head of a river. In fact, in some of the key passages where he explains what he’s saying (verses 8, 9, and 12a), he refers explicitly to the creation story in Genesis 2, where woman was made from the side of man. I suspect, in fact, that this is quite a different use of the idea of headship from that in Ephesians 5, where it relates to husband and wife and a different point is being made. That doesn’t mean Paul couldn’t have written them both, only that he was freer than we sometimes imagine to modify his metaphors according to context.

The underlying point seems to be that in worship it is important for both men and women to be their truly created selves, to honor God by being what they are and not blurring the lines by pretending to be something else. One of the unspoken clues to this passage may be Paul’s assumption that in worship the creation is being restored, or perhaps that in worship we are anticipating its eventual restoration (15:27–28). God made humans male and female, and gave them authority over the world, as Ben-Sirach 17:3–4 puts it, summarizing Genesis 1:26–28 and echoing Psalm 8:4–8 (Ben-Sirach was written around 200 BC). And if humans are to reclaim this authority over the world, this will come about as they worship the true God, as they pray and prophesy in his name and are renewed in his image, in being what they were made to be, in celebrating the genders God has given them.

If this is Paul’s meaning, the critical move he makes is to argue that a man dishonors his head by covering it in worship and that a woman dishonors hers by not covering it. He argues this mainly on the basis that creation itself tends to give men shorter hair and women longer (1 Corinthians 11:5–6, 13–15); the fact that some cultures, and some people, offer apparent exceptions would probably not have worried him. His main point is that in worship men should follow the dress and hair codes that proclaim them to be male, and women the codes that proclaim them to be female.

Why then does he say that a woman “must have authority on her head because of the angels” (verse 10)? This is one of the most puzzling verses in a puzzling passage, but there is help of sorts in the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is it assumed that when God’s people meet for worship, the angels are there too (as many liturgies and theologians still affirm). For the scrolls, this means that the angels, being holy, must not be offended by any appearance of unholiness among the congregation. Paul shares the assumption that angels worship along with humans but may be making a different point.

When humans are renewed in the Messiah and raised from the dead, they will be set in authority over the angels (6:3). In worship, the church anticipates how things are going to be in that new day. When a woman prays or prophesies (perhaps in the language of angels, as in 13:1), she needs to be truly what she is, since it is to male and female alike, in their mutual interdependence as God’s image-bearing creatures, that the world, including the angels, is to be subject. God’s creation needs humans to be fully, gloriously, and truly human, which means fully and truly male and female. This and of course much else besides is to be glimpsed in worship.

The Corinthians, then, may have drawn the wrong conclusion from the tradition that Paul had taught them. Whether or not they followed his argument any better than we can, it seems clear that his main aim was that marks of difference between the sexes should not be set aside in worship. This is the best sense I can see in this admittedly difficult passage.

We face different issues, but making sure our worship is ordered appropriately, to honor God’s creation and anticipate its fulfillment in the new creation, is still a priority. There is no “perhaps” about that. When we apply this to the question of women’s ministry, it seems to me that we should certainly stress equality in the role of women but should be very careful about implying identity. This passage falls, for me at least, quite strongly on the side of those who see the ministry of women as significantly different from the ministry of men and therefore insists that we need both sexes to be themselves, rather than for one to try to become a clone of the other.

All this points us toward the final and hardest passage of all, 1 Timothy 2.

Decoding the Challenging Passages in 1 Timothy

So this is what I want: the men should pray in every place, lifting up holy hands, with no anger or disputing. In the same way the women, too, should clothe themselves decently, being modest and sensible about it. They should not go in for elaborate hairstyles, or gold, or pearls, or expensive clothes. Instead, as is appropriate for women who profess to be godly, they should adorn themselves with good works. They must study undisturbed, in full submission to God. I’m not saying that women should teach men, or try to dictate to them; rather, that they should be left undisturbed. Adam was created first, you see, and then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived, and fell into trespass. She will, however, be kept safe through the process of childbirth, if she continues in faith, love, and holiness with prudence. (1 Timothy 2:8–15)

I leave completely aside for today the question of who wrote 1 Timothy. It diverges more sharply from the rest of Paul than any of the other letters, including the other pastorals and 2 Thessalonians. But I do not discount it for that reason; many of us write in different styles according to the occasion and audience, and though that doesn’t remove all the problems, it ought to contextualize them. What matters, and matters vitally in a great many debates, is of course what the passage says. I don’t think I exaggerate when I suggest that this passage above all others has been the sheet anchor for those who want to deny women a place in the ordained ministry of the church, with full responsibilities for preaching, presiding at the Eucharist, and exercising leadership within congregations and indeed dioceses.

Once again the matter is vexed and much fought over, and I have not read more than a fraction of the enormous literature that has been produced on the passage. I simply give my opinion for what it is worth. And once again I draw here on what I have said in my recent popular-level commentary on the passage (Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Epistles). That commentary goes with and explains my translation of the passage, which draws out some ways in which the words can actually mean something significantly different from what has usually been assumed.

Women Teaching Men

When people say that the Bible enshrines patriarchal ideas and attitudes, this passage, particularly verse 12, is often held up as the prime example. Women mustn’t be teachers, the verse seems to say; they mustn’t hold authority over men; they must keep silent. That, at least, is how many translations put it. This is the main passage that people quote when they want to suggest that the New Testament forbids the ordination of women. I was once reading these verses in a church service when a woman near the front exploded in anger, to the consternation of the rest of the congregation (even though some agreed with her). The whole passage seems to say that women are second-class citizens at every level. They aren’t even allowed to dress attractively. They are the daughters of Eve, and she was the original troublemaker. The best thing for them to do is to get on and have children, to behave themselves and keep quiet.

Well, that’s how most people read the passage in our culture until quite recently. I fully acknowledge that the very different reading I’m going to suggest may sound initially as though I’m simply trying to make things easier, to tailor this bit of Paul to fit our culture. But there is good, solid scholarship behind what I say, and I genuinely believe it may be the right interpretation.

When you look at cartoon strips, B-grade movies, and Z-grade novels and poems, you pick up a standard view of how everyone imagines men and women behave. Men are macho, loud-mouthed, arrogant thugs, always fighting and wanting their own way. Women are simpering, empty-headed creatures, who think about nothing except clothes and jewelry. There are Christian versions of this, too: men must make the decisions, run the show, always be in the lead, telling everyone what to do; women must stay at home and bring up the children. If you start looking for a biblical backup for this view, well, what about Genesis 3? Adam would never have sinned if Eve hadn’t given in first. Eve has her punishment, and it’s pain in childbearing (Genesis 3:16).

You don’t have to embrace every aspect of the women’s liberation movement to find that interpretation hard to swallow. Not only does it stick in our throats as a way of treating half the human race; it doesn’t fit with what we see in the rest of the New Testament, in the passages we’ve already glanced at.

The key to the present passage, then, is to recognize that it commands that women, too, should be allowed to study and learn, and should not be restrained from doing so (verse 11). They are to be “in full submission”; this is often taken to mean “to the men” or “to their husbands,” but it is equally likely that it refers to the learner’s attitude of submission to God or to the gospel—which of course would also be true for men. Then the crucial verse 12 need not be read as “I do not allow a woman to teach or hold authority over a man”—the translation that has caused so much difficulty in recent years. It can equally mean (and in context this makes much more sense): “I don’t mean to imply that I’m now setting up women as the new authority over men in the same way that previously men held authority over women.” Why might Paul need to say this?

There are some signs in the letter that it was originally sent to Timothy while he was in Ephesus. And one of the main things we know about religion in Ephesus is that the main religion—the biggest temple, the most famous shrine—was a female-only cult. The Temple of Artemis (that’s her Greek name; the Romans called her Diana) was a massive structure that dominated the area. As befitted worshippers of a female deity, the priests were all women. They ruled the show and kept the men in their place.

Now, if you were writing a letter to someone in a small, new religious movement with a base in Ephesus, and you wanted to say that because of the gospel of Jesus the old ways of organizing male and female roles had to be rethought from top to bottom, with one feature being that women were to be encouraged to study and learn and take a leadership role, you might well want to avoid giving the wrong impression. Was the apostle saying, people might wonder, that women should be trained so that Christianity would gradually become a cult like that of Artemis, where women led and kept the men in line? That, it seems to me, is what verse 12 is denying. The word I’ve translated as “try to dictate to them” is unusual but has overtones of “being bossy” or “seizing control.” Paul is saying, like Jesus in Luke 10, that women must have the space and leisure to study and learn in their own way, not in order that they may muscle in and take over the leadership as in the Artemis cult, but so that men and women alike can develop whatever gifts of learning, teaching, and leadership God has given them.

What’s the point of the other bits of the passage, then? Verse 8 is clear: the men must give themselves to devout prayer and must not follow the normal stereotypes of male behavior: no anger or arguing. Then verses 9 and 10 make the same point about women: they must be set free from their stereotype, that of fussing all the time about hairdos, jewelry, and fancy clothes—but not to become dowdy, unobtrusive little mice but so that they can make a creative contribution to the wider society. The phrase “good works” in verse 10 sounds bland to us, but it’s one of the regular ways people used to refer to the social obligation to spend time and money on people less fortunate than oneself, to be a benefactor of the town through helping public works, the arts, and so on.

Why does Paul finish off with the explanation about Adam and Eve? Remember that his basic point is to insist that women, too, must be allowed to learn and study as Christians and not be kept in unlettered, uneducated boredom and drudgery. The story of Adam and Eve makes the point well: look what happened when Eve was deceived. Women need to learn just as much as men do. Adam, after all, sinned quite deliberately; he knew what he was doing and that it was wrong, and he went ahead. The Old Testament is stern about that kind of action.

And what of the bit about childbirth? Paul doesn’t see it as a punishment. Rather, he offers assurance that, though childbirth is indeed difficult, painful, and dangerous, often the most testing moment in a woman’s life, this is not a curse to be taken as a sign of God’s displeasure. God’s salvation is promised to all, women and men, who follow Jesus in faith, love, holiness, and prudence. And that salvation is promised to those who contribute to God’s creation through childbearing, just as it is to everyone else. Becoming a mother is hard enough, God knows, without pretending it’s somehow an evil thing. Let’s not leave any more unexploded bombs and mines for people to blow their minds with. Let’s read this text as I believe it was intended, as a way of building up God’s church, men and women, women and men alike. And just as Paul was concerned to apply this in one particular situation, so we must think and pray carefully about where our own cultures, prejudices, and angers are taking us, and make sure we conform not to the stereotypes the world offers but to the healing, liberating, humanizing message of the gospel of Jesus.

IT IS HIGH TIME to sum up. I think I have said enough to show you where I think the evidence points. I believe we have seriously misread the relevant passages in the New Testament, not least through a long process of assumption, tradition, and all kinds of postbiblical and subbiblical attitudes that have crept into Christianity. Just as I think we need to radically change our traditional pictures of the afterlife, away from medieval models and back to biblical ones, so we need to radically change our traditional pictures both of what men and women are and of how they relate to one another within the church, and indeed of what the Bible says on this subject. I do wonder, sometimes, if those who present radical challenges to Christianity have not been all the more eager to make out that the Bible says certain things about women as an excuse for claiming that Christianity in general is a wicked thing that should be abandoned. Of course, plenty of Christians have given outsiders enough chances to make that sort of comment. But perhaps in our generation we have an opportunity to take a large step back in the right direction.

 Buy the entire book, Surprised by Scripture

THE SPIRIT OF PURITANISM

I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder than the most fierce concentration of the intellect. A Puritan meant originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.

This is the essential Puritan idea, that God can only be praised by direct contemplation of Him.  You must praise God only with your brain; it is wicked to praise Him with your passions or your physical habits or your gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it is wicked to worship by singing or dancing or drinking sacramental wines or building beautiful churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep.  We must not worship by dancing, drinking, building or singing; we can only worship by thinking. Our heads can praise God, but never our hands and feet. That is the true and original impulse of the Puritans. ...

By the middle of the nineteenth century when Shaw was born this dim and barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilised mankind. ... And if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates should have three glasses of beer a day.  The Puritan cannot call that excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess he objects to, but the beer.

 Extract from George Bernard Shaw by G K Chesterton. Read the entire book here.

Chesterton on The Flimsy Theory of Races

Chesterton was pro-Irish independence (the book, Heretics, was published in 1905), but was no fan of the theory of races. He felt that the idea of races was watery and constantly and in flux, but that nations were real things, a ''spiritual product''.

''When a wealthy nation like the English discovers the perfectly patent fact that it is making a ludicrous mess of the government of a poorer nation like the Irish, it pauses for a moment in consternation, and then begins to talk about Celts and Teutons...
And England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on. All the most genuine Englishmen in history would have yawned or laughed in your face if you had begun to talk about Anglo-Saxons. If you had attempted to substitute the ideal of race for the ideal of nationality...
 The truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society; it is a product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are men in the modern world who would think anything and do anything rather than admit that anything could be a spiritual product... A nation, however, as it confronts the modern world, is a purely spiritual product...
 Who were the Celts? I defy anybody to say. Who are the Irish? I defy any one to be indifferent, or to pretend not to know...
The tendency of that argument is to represent the Irish or the Celts as a strange and separate race, as a tribe of eccentrics in the modern world immersed in dim legends and fruitless dreams. Its tendency is to exhibit the Irish as odd, because they see the fairies. Its trend is to make the Irish seem weird and wild because they sing old songs and join in strange dances. But this is quite an error; indeed, it is the opposite of the truth. It is the English who are odd because they do not see the fairies...
 Ireland has no need to play the silly game of the science of races; Ireland has no need to pretend to be a tribe of visionaries apart. In the matter of visions, Ireland is more than a nation, it is a model nation.''

Read the entire essay here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/heretics.xiii.html

The Trouble with X...

The Trouble with X...

---

Excerpt from God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis

I suppose I may assume that seven out of ten of those who read these lines are in some kind of difficulty about some other human being. Either at work or at home, either the people who employ you or those whom you employ, either those who share your house or those whose house you share, either your in-laws or parents or children, your wife or your husband, are making life harder for you than it need be even in these days. It is hoped that we do not often mention these difficulties (especially the domestic ones) to outsiders. But sometimes we do. An outside friend asks us why we are looking so glum, and the truth comes out.

On such occasions the outside friend usually says, "But why don't you tell them? Why don't you go to your wife (or husband, or father, or daughter, or boss, or landlady, or lodger) and have it all out? People are usually reasonable. All you've got to do is to make them see things in the right light. Explain it to them in a reasonable, quiet, friendly way." And we, whatever we say outwardly, think sadly to ourselves, "He doesn't know X." We do. We know how utterly hopeless it is to make X see reason. Either we've tried it over and over again--tried till we are sick of trying it--or else we've never tried because we saw from the beginning how useless it would be. We know that if we attempt to "have it all out with X" there will be a "scene", or else X will stare at us in blank amazement and say "I don't know what on earth you're talking about"; or else (which is perhaps worst of all) X will quite agree with us and promise to turn over a new leaf and put everything on a new footing--and then, twenty-four hours later, will be exactly the same as X has always been.

You know, in fact, that any attempt to talk things over with X will shipwreck on the old, fatal flaw in X's character. And you see, looking back, how all the plans you have ever made always have shipwrecked on that fatal flaw--on X's incurable jealousy, or laziness, or touchiness, or muddle-headedness, or bossiness, or ill temper, or changeableness. Up to a certain age you have perhaps had the illusion that some external stroke of good fortune--an improvement in health, a rise of salary, the end of the war--would solve your difficulty. But you know better now. The war is over, and you realize that even if the other things happened, X would still be X, and you would still be up against the same old problem. Even if you became a millionaire, your husband would still be a bully, or your wife would still nag, or your son would still drink, or you'd still have to have your mother-in-law live with you.

It is a great step forward to realize that this is so; to face up to the fact that even if all external things went right, real happiness would still depend on the character of the people you have to live with--and that you can't alter their characters. And now comes the point. When you have seen this you have, for the first time, had a glimpse of what it must be like for God. For of course, this is (in one way) just what God Himself is up against. He has provided a rich, beautiful world for people to live in. He has given them intelligence to show them how it ought to be used. He has contrived that the things they need for their biological life (food, drink, rest, sleep, exercise) should be positively delightful to them. And, having done all this, He then sees all His plans spoiled--just as our little plans are spoiled--by the crookedness of the people themselves. All the things He has given them to be happy with they turn into occasions for quarreling and jealousy, and excess and hoarding, and tomfoolery...

But... there are two respects in which God's view must be very different from ours. In the first place, He sees (like you) how all the people in your home or your job are in various degrees awkward or difficult; but when He looks into that home or factory or office He sees one more person of the same kind--the one you never do see. I mean, of course, yourself. That is the next great step in wisdom--to realize that you also are just that sort of person. You also have a fatal flaw in your character. All the hopes and plans of others have again and again shipwrecked on your character just as your hopes and plans have shipwrecked on theirs.

It is no good passing this over with some vague, general admission such as "Of course, I know I have my faults." It is important to realize that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives others the same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don't know about--like what the advertisements call "halitosis", which everyone notices except the person who has it. But why, you ask, don't the others tell me? Believe me, they have tried to tell you over and over and over again. And you just couldn't "take it". Perhaps a good deal of what you call their "nagging" or "bad temper"... are just their attempts to make you see the truth. And even the faults you do know you don't know fully. You say, "I admit I lost my temper last night"; but the others know that you always doing it, that you are a bad-tempered person. You say, "I admit I drank too much last Saturday"; but every one else know that you are a habitual drunkard.

This is one way in which God's view must differ from mine. He sees all the characters: I see all except my own. But the second difference is this. He loves the people in spite of their faults. He goes on loving. He does not let go. Don't say, "It's all very well for Him. He hasn't got to live with them." He has. He is inside them as well as outside them. He is with them far more intimately and closely and incessantly that we can ever be. Every vile thought within their minds (and ours), every moment of spite, envy, arrogance, greed, and self-conceit comes right up against His patient and longing love, and grieves His Spirit more than it grieves ours.

The more we can imitate God in both these respects, the more progress we shall make. We must love X more; and we must learn to see ourselves as a person of exactly the same kind. Some people say it is morbid to always be thinking of one's own faults. That would be all very well if most of us could stop thinking of our own without soon beginning to think about those of other people. For unfortunately we enjoy thinking about other people's faults: and in the proper sense of the word "morbid", that is the most morbid pleasure in the world.

We don't like rationing which is imposed upon us, but I suggest one form of rationing which we ought to impose on ourselves. Abstain from all thinking about other people's faults, unless you duties as a teacher or parent make it necessary to think about them. Whenever the thoughts come unnecessarily into one's mind, why not simply shove them away? And think of one's own faults instead? For there, with God's help, one can do something. Of all the awkward people in your house or job there is only one whom you can improve very much. That is the practical end at which to begin. And really, we'd better. The job has got to be tackled some day; and every day we put it off will make it harder to begin.

What, after all, is the alternative? You see clearly enough that nothing... can make X really happy as long as X remains envious, self-centered, and spiteful. Be sure that there is something inside you which, unless it is altered, will put it out of God's power to prevent your being eternally miserable. While that something remains, there can be no Heaven for you, just as there can be no sweet smells for a man with a cold in the nose, and no music for a man who is deaf. It's not a question of God "sending" us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once--this very day, this hour.

Evil and God -- C S Lewis

DR JOAD’S ARTICLE ON ‘GOD AND EVIL’ LAST WEEK SUGGESTS the interesting conclusion that since neither ‘mechanism’ nor ‘emergent evolution’ will hold water, we must choose in the long run between some monotheistic philosophy, like the Christian, and some such dualism as that of the Zoroastrians. I agree with Dr Joad in rejecting mechanism and emergent evolution. Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it? As for emergent evolution, if anyone insists on using the word God to mean ‘whatever the universe happens to be going to do next’, of course we cannot prevent him. But nobody would in fact so use it unless he had a secret belief that what is coming next will be an improvement. Such a belief, besides being unwarranted, presents peculiar difficulties to an emergent evolutionist. If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that process can approximate. There is no sense in talking of ‘becoming better’ if better means simply ‘what we are becoming’—it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining destination as ‘the place you have reached’. Mellontolatry, or the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion. We are left then to choose between monotheism and dualism—between a single, good, almighty source of being, and two equal, uncreated, antagonistic Powers, one good and the other bad. Dr Joad suggests that the latter view stands to gain from the ‘new urgency’ of the fact of evil. But what new urgency? Evil may seem more urgent to us than it did to the Victorian philosophers—favoured members of the happiest class in the happiest country in the world at the world’s happiest period. But it is no more urgent for us than for the great majority of monotheists all down the ages. The classic expositions of the doctrine that the world’s miseries are compatible with its creation and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison to be beaten to death and from St Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome. The present state of the world is normal; it was the last century that was the abnormality. This drives us to ask why so many generations rejected Dualism. Not, assuredly, because they were unfamiliar with suffering; and not because its obvious prima facie plausibility escaped them. It is more likely that they saw its two fatal difficulties, the one metaphysical, and the other moral. The metaphysical difficulty is this. The two Powers, the good and the evil, do not explain each other. Neither Ormuzd nor Ahriman can claim to be the Ultimate. More ultimate than either of them is the inexplicable fact of their being there together. Neither of them chose this tête-à-tête. Each of them, therefore, is conditioned—finds himself willy-nilly in a situation; and either that situation itself, or some unknown force which produced that situation, is the real Ultimate. Dualism has not yet reached the ground of being. You cannot accept two conditioned and mutually independent beings as the selfgrounded, self-comprehending Absolute. On the level of picture-thinking this difficulty is symbolised by our inability to think of Ormuzd and Ahriman without smuggling in the idea of a common space in which they can be together and thus confessing that we are not yet dealing with the source of the universe but only with two members contained in it. Dualism is a truncated metaphysic. The moral difficulty is that Dualism gives evil a positive, substantive, self-consistent nature, like that of good. If this were true, if Ahriman existed in his own right no less than Ormuzd, what could we mean by calling Ormuzd good except that we happened to prefer him. In what sense can the one party be said to be right and the other wrong? If evil has the same kind of reality as good, the same autonomy and completeness, our allegiance to good becomes the arbitrarily chosen loyalty of a partisan. A sound theory of value demands something different. It demands that good should be original and evil a mere perversion; that good should be the tree and evil the ivy; that good should be able to see all round evil (as when sane men understand lunacy) while evil cannot retaliate in kind; that good should be able to exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic in order to continue its parasitic existence. The consequences of neglecting this are serious. It means believing that bad men like badness as such, in the same way in which good men like goodness. At first this denial of any common nature between us and our enemies seems gratifying. We call them fiends and feel that we need not forgive them. But, in reality, along with the power to forgive, we have lost the power to condemn. If a taste for cruelty and a taste for kindness were equally ultimate and basic, by what common standard could the one reprove the other? In reality, cruelty does not come from desiring evil as such, but from perverted sexuality, inordinate resentment, or lawless ambition and avarice. That is precisely why it can be judged and condemned from the standpoint of innocent sexuality, righteous anger, and ordinate acquisitiveness. The master can correct a boy’s sums because they are blunders in arithmetic—in the same arithmetic which he does and does better. If they were not even attempts at arithmetic—if they were not in the arithmetical world at all—they could not be arithmetical mistakes. Good and evil, then, are not on all fours. Badness is not even bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Ormuzd and Ahriman cannot be equals. In the long run, Ormuzd must be original and Ahriman derivative. The first hazy idea of devil must, if we begin to think, be analysed into the more precise ideas of ‘fallen’ and ‘rebel’ angel. But only in the long run. Christianity can go much further with the Dualist than Dr Joad’s article seems to suggest. There was never any question of tracing all evil to man; in fact, the New Testament has a good deal more to say about dark superhuman powers than about the fall of Adam. As far as this world is concerned, a Christian can share most of the Zoroastrian outlook; we all live between the ‘fell, incensed points’ 2 of Michael and Satan. The difference between the Christian and the Dualist is that the Christian thinks one stage further and sees that if Michael is really in the right and Satan really in the wrong this must mean that they stand in two different relations to somebody or something far further back, to the ultimate ground of reality itself. All this, of course, has been watered down in modern times by the theologians who are afraid of ‘mythology’, but those who are prepared to reinstate Ormuzd and Ahriman are presumably not squeamish on that score. Dualism can be a manly creed. In the Norse form (‘The giants will beat the gods in the end, but I am on the side of the gods’) it is nobler by many degrees than most philosophies of the moment. But it is only a half-way house. Thinking along these lines you can avoid Monotheism, and remain a Dualist, only by refusing to follow your thoughts home. To revive Dualism would be a real step backwards and a bad omen (though not the worst possible) for civilization. 1 C. E. M. Joad, ‘Evil and God’, The Spectator, vol. CLXVI (31 January 1941), pp. 112–13. 2 Shakespeare, Hamlet, V, ii, 60.

Temperance is...

Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism. But in the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened 'Temperance', it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion. Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons -- marriage or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

One great piece of mischief has been done by the modem restriction of the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as 'intemperate' as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.

C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity, Bk. III, ch. 2

Be good sweet maid

Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing & what

is likely to come of it. Nowadays most people hardly think of Prudence as one of the 'virtues'. In fact, because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are 'good,' it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of 'prudence' about doing the things they are really interested in, & think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as St Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary. He told us to be not only 'as harmless as doves.' but also 'as wise as serpents.' He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, & teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, & in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. The fact that what you are thinking about is God Himself (for example, when you are praying) does not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you had when you were a 5-year-old. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. The proper motto is not 'Be good, sweet maid, & let who can be clever,' but 'Be good, sweet maid, & don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can.' God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you that you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains & all. But, fortunately, it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why, an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.’’ – Mere Christianity, C S Lewis