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.

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