Tag: Rebecca McLaughlin

The Surprising Elevation of Women in the Bible

The Bible was written by men during times in which men dominated thought and culture

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I am reminded again in my daily reading of Scripture of the prominence of women in the life and ministry of Jesus. Every time I read through the Gospels, I see it. As I read through the Old Testament with eyes sensitized by the Gospels, I see the theme there also. This theme is somewhat, hidden, however.

We have only committed to the idea that women should be equals of men in very modern times, and that idea is still not universal around the world. A cultural revolution was required in the western world to change ancient paradigms. The change has been slow, difficult, and filled with tension.

Christianity was influential in bringing about that change, but many Christians have also resisted it. This is true even while the roots of that cultural revolution are embedded in Judeo-Christian Scripture.

Tom Holland, in his epic book, Dominion, traced modern, secular humanist values back to a surprising root. He had no idea where the values he took for granted came from: gender equality, racial equality, individual freedoms, civil rights, etc. When he searched for them, he for found them in Genesis, in the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and in the letters of Paul, the apostle.

Rebecca McLaughlin writes about the prominence of women in the Gospel accounts of Jesus in her 2021 article, Jesus Changed Everything for Women. She quotes Holland to remind us of the cultural context in which those accounts were written:

In Greco–Roman thinking, men were superior to women and sex was a way to prove it. “As captured cities were to the swords of the legions, so the bodies of those used sexually were to the Roman man,” Holland wrote. “To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior.”

In Rome, “men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet.” The idea that every woman had the right to choose what happened to her body was laughable.

Jesus chantged Everything

Jesus didn’t introduce the these radical notions, however. They go all the way back to Genesis, where we read that God made men and women, together, in His image. (More on that below)

Modern westerners have learned to reject and even to despise the paternalism of most of the history of mankind (pun intended), so it’s easy to miss the way the Bible elevates women. After all, the Bible was written by many men many centuries ago, before anyone in the west (or anywhere else) got the notion that women should be treated as equals.

Let that sink in a moment: the Bible was written by men.

As much as modern westerners like to recoil from the idea of men treating women as second class citizens, the 1st Century Roman world thought nothing of it. Aristotle taught that women are “defective men”. He believed that “women were fit only to be the subjects of male rule“, and “they are born to be ruled by men”. Aristotle and most men for millennia thought that the inferiority of women was obvious, stemming from their nature as the “weaker gender”.

Nowhere, perhaps, were women more objectified and diminished in value than the Roman world. (See ‘Christianity gave women a dignity that no previous sexual dispensation had offered’: Tom Holland, by Shoaib Daniyal, Feb. 23, 2020.)

Given that context, the “clues” we find “hidden” in the Bible of a different narrative about women is remarkable. Though the Bible was written, literally, by men, Christians like myself maintain that it was inspired by God, and a divinely inspired narrative shines through it. This is true despite the obvious cultural influences we see on the face of it.

The Bible was written by men during times in which men dominated thought and culture. it is no wonder that the Bible is often criticized for being backward and paternalistic, but that view can only be sustained on a cursory, shallow reading of the Bible. A closer reading belies a very different narrative!

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Loneliness, Singleness and the Church Family

Some values evident in the original church family have been lost over the years in western culture

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Rebecca McLaughlin, in her book, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion, made an observation that inspires my article today. I am indebted to Rebecca McLaughlin and to the many serious Christian thinkers who have plowed ground that make it easy for me to walk the paths after them.

In this book, about a third of the way into the ninth chapter (Isn’t Christianity Homophobic?), McLaughlin talks about loneliness and singleness in the church. She digs up some some nuggets that seem to have gotten lost in our modern culture.

It seems that we have developed traditions over the years in the west that have plowed under values that once informed the early church. A tradition of rugged individualism and self-determination that is, perhaps, unrivaled anywhere in the world, is inbred into our American culture. Our suburban lifestyle is uniquely American, with our manicured lawns separated from our neighbors by fences and hedges. These are, perhaps, the gentrified remnants of farmstead claims staked by American pioneers against predators, weather, enemies and neighbors alike.

We circle the wagons today around the family unit that has come under “attack” from secular constructs of village-raised children and re-imagined, more inclusive, family structures designed to fit changing societal mores. These changes have caused conservatives and Christians to double down on the traditional, American family construct.

Traditional, though, is normative, and norms change. Not more than 150 years ago families looked different than they do today. In fact, they looked a little more like the modern family than the average person might realize.

Not long after the first generations of immigrants reached the shore of the New World, families and communities of families began to migrate across the country, south, west and sometimes north, clearing areas for homesteads. The fluidity of family compositions can be traced from one decennial census to the next. Not may households remained static from one 10-year census to the next.

My father, who researches genealogies, shines some historical light on the norms of the frontier movement in writing books about those migrations. From census to census to census, stories are told of dynamic changes in family structures.

Family units were ever changing in the combination of husbands, wives, children (both minors and adults), extended family and sometimes even strangers. Family often included a grandparent, niece or nephew, neighbor or border.

Children were born; children died; children moved away and moved back. Spouses died. New spouses moved in, or neighbors moved in who helped with the children and then became spouses… or not. Extended family members, neighbors and strangers, too, moved in and out of family units.

Census records reveal the consistency of flux as frontiers were blazed across this country. One of the many challenges of doing genealogical research through the 19th Century is determining the relationships of all the people in those households from one decennial census to another and tracing the changes from decade to decade. 

The end of trailblazing and the Industrial Revolution, however, began to affect the composition of family units. Trailblazing gave way to communities, and factories grew up in those communities.

Workers migrated to the fixed location of a factory, and they became grounded and less mobile in their vocations. Family structures became more static and defined in the process. These and other influences formed the mold of the “traditional” American family.

What we assume to be the traditional family unit today is of relatively recent vintage. The Little House on the Prairie is more of a sentimental, re-imagining of the way it was than raw history reveals.

Even then, we get a hint of an interdependence of community that was much more intimate in generations past than our anemic sense of community today. This is true even with more distance separating homesteads than a thin veil of fences and hedges separating suburban lots.

The distance that separates people in modern western life, however, might as well be miles. We live as if we don’t need our neighbors, and we largely don’t even know them. Those fences and hedges might as well be walls.

In that sense, McLaughlin digs up the back-filled soil of modern western culture to uncover an ancient value that has been plowed under by the progress of western development. When St. Paul spoke about the virtue of singleness, he did so in a culture and time when family and community were quite unlike our own – values that we have relatively recently lost.

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