What About "Women Be Silent in the Church"?

So far on this blog I have addressed nearly every Bible verse used to restrict women or keep them under male authority-- except 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 The passage states:

The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

The main reason I have left this verse alone is that I'm not completely sure how best to interpret it myself.  There are so many different positions about it, among complementarians and egalitarians alike.  The position of many complementarians is similar to the one presented in Got Questions.Org: that since 1 Corinthians 11:5 expects women to pray and prophesy aloud in church, the verse cannot require complete silence by women in church-- but that the verse should be interpreted through the lens of 1 Timothy 2:12, in which Paul's words "I do not permit a woman to teach or assume authority over a man" are interpreted to mean "God forbids any woman to ever teach or exercise any sort of authority over any man in church." Thus,  in this view,1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is read closely with its immediate context of receiving and interpreting gifts of tongues and prophecy:

1 Corinthians 14:34 is not commanding women to be absolutely silent in the church all the time. It is only saying that women should not participate when tongues and/or prophecy is being interpreted and tested (1 Thessalonians 5:19-22;1 John 4:1). This is in agreement with 1 Timothy 2:11-12 which says that women should not teach or have authority over men. If women were involved in deciding whether a prophecy was truly from God, they would be disobeying what the Bible says in 1 Timothy 2:11-12. Therefore, Paul tells women to be silent when tongues and prophecy are being interpreted so that they will not be disobeying God’s Word.


Another complementarian viewpoint is that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is to be read as virtually synonymous with 1 Timothy 2:12 -- that it forbids women only from authoritative or pastoral speaking in church.  Wayne Jackson's article in The Christian Courier states:

This does not demand that a woman be absolutely silent at church. Rather, in harmony with what the apostle taught elsewhere (1 Tim. 2:12), the woman is not to speak or teach in any way that violates her gender role. She is not to occupy the position of a public teacher,in such a capacity as to stand before the church and function as the teacher (or co-teacher) of a group containing adult men. In assuming this official capacity, she has stepped beyond her authorized sphere, and she violates scripture.

Both of these interpretations aim for consistency between 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.  However, they both tend to gloss over the fact that 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 really aren't talking about the same things.  The Greek words for "silence" are different in the two texts, for instance:  the Timothy verse is about women "learning" with quiet hearts and minds, while the Corinthians verse says nothing about learning and uses a word for "silence" which really does mean "shut up."  They also ignore the fact that the word used for "authority" in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is not used anywhere in the New Testament to mean the normal exercise of legitimate authority, such as would be used to test prophecies or teach publicly.*  Additionally, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians was written many years before his first letter to Timothy, so how could he expect the Corinthians to use 1 Timothy in order to understand what he meant?

Hard complementarians/patriarchalists are much stricter.  They conclude that the reference to women's prayer and prophecy in 1 Corinthians 11:5 must be interpreted in light of "women be silent" in 14:34-35, and not the other way around.  Thus, women can speak aloud in small-group meetings or prayer meetings, but are not to speak aloud in a regular Sunday meeting of the church at all-- not even, apparently, to make a prayer request or give an announcement.  M.Div. Steve Atkerson at the NTRF website states:

[W]omen are to remain silent with respect to speaking to the assembled church. The context is clear about what is being regulated: situations where only one person is up addressing the whole church (“one at a time,” 14:27 & “in turn,” 14:31). . . that which is being prohibited is public speaking intended for the whole church to hear. . . In God’s household, it is disgraceful for a woman to speak to the gathering of the church. . . . Women may evidently pray in prayer meetings and speak or prophesy at evangelistic events. However, during the regular, weekly, Lord’s Day meetings of the whole church they are not to speak out publicly.

He does, however, give this qualifier:

The silence requirement would therefore not apply to congregational singing, whispered comments not intended for the whole church, laughing, playing an instrument, chatting during the fellowship of the Lord’s Supper, etc.

These views all agree that women are to be restricted from speaking to some degree.  However, they cannot agree on the extent of the restriction.  To some extent, though, all of the above interpretations forbid women's full participation in the ministries and giftings of the church.

On the egalitarian side there are three basic camps.  The first is that since Paul's context here is order in church services, he enjoins silence upon women because they were disrupting the service in some way: possibly by asking questions aloud which interrupted the speaker, which would be why he asks wives to wait and "ask their husbands at home."  This is the position taken by Rev. Dr. Christopher R. Smith
in his blog The New Creation and the Ministry of Women.  He says:

But the word Paul uses for “remain silent” is sigaō, and . . . we can now make better sense of Paul’s statement in its context.

This part of 1 Corinthians is about maintaining good order in worship: “Everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way.” And so Paul says about those who would speak in tongues, “If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet (sigaō) in the church and speak to himself and to God.” Rather than confuse the group with unintelligible speech, would-be speakers should refrain from saying what they otherwise might. . .

We should understand Paul’s comments about women speakers in this light. It’s not that Paul is calling for “silence,” the absence of speech or sound, but rather for propriety and good order. Apparently there is something the women in Corinth would otherwise “want to inquire about.” (We’ll explore in our next post what this might have been.) But the community gathering is not the time or the place for this, so the women should refrain from questioning or challenging the speaker. Instead, Paul says, “let them ask their husbands at home”—a third-person imperative, granting them permission to do something that was not typical in this culture. In other words, rather than this being a restriction on women, it’s actually an empowerment of them.

This view allows women's full participation in the church on the basis that the New Testament passage reflects a temporary, situational restriction that need not continue now that the specific situation has ceased.

A second egalitarian position is that these two verses were actually not in the original text.  This is the view held by Dr. Philip B. Payne, who has online articles here showing his detailed textual scholarship.  The fact is that our earliest dated manuscripts of this portion of the New Testament date after 300 AD.  All of these contain verses 34-35, but several manuscripts omit them from just after verse 33 and insert them at the end of verse 40.  This would indicate that they probably were written in the margin at some point after the original text was written.  Theologian Todd Derstine (who is actually a complementarian!) of America's Prophetic Destiny endorses Philip Payne's position that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is actually an interpolation:

The hypothesis that that these verses were not in Paul’s original letter helps to explain why none of the Apostolic Fathers—Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Polycrates—or Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Shepherd of Hermas, the Gnostic Gospels or second century pseudepigraphae, Tatian, or Clement of Alexandria or Hippolytus ever make reference to them. Clement of Alexandria has it in his head that both men and women should “embrace silence” at church, but extols Miriam as Moses’ associate in commanding the host of Israel as a prophetess, which together implies his text of I Cor 14 did not have vv. 34-35. Tertullian (Bap. 15.17) [early 3rd century], then, is our first Christian writer to clearly show his awareness, not to mention wholeheartedly acceptance of, this pseudo-Pauline policy of feminine silence. . . 

It is as if whoever invented these verses wanted the church of God to disqualify the role of women in the church and reinterpret the inclusiveness implied in 14.5, 14.18, 14.24, and 14.31. We are led to ask the question, “What part of all didn’t he understand?” If v. 34’s unqualified silencing of women were true, then the “all” and “every one of you” in vv. 5, 18, 24, and 31 force us to understand Paul’s letters as being only addressed to the men in the congregation, which is ludicrous in the extreme and contrary to the prominence given to women throughout his epistles and in the book of Acts written by Paul’s most faithful companion, Luke. Ironically, it reflects the same kind of thinking towards women reflected in Talmudic literature which had its inception during the second century, that women were somehow not endowed by their Creator with the same ability as men to appreciate the Torah or truth in general. And frankly, the church fathers, beginning with Tertullian and culminating with Jerome, display this very same kind of perverse marginalization of gender, sex, marriage, and women characteristic of all false religiosity.

This view says we needn't take this passage into account because it wasn't in the original text, and thus reflects a rule that God did not intend to be there.

The third egalitarian position is that verses 34-35 were actually Paul's quotation of words written or said to him by the Corinthians themselves, which he then decisively refutes.  This view is explained beautifully by Pastor Wade Burleson of Istoria Ministries Blog, as follows:

Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians in Greek. The written Greek language does not use "italics" like we do in our English to identify a quote. To know that something is a quotation: (a). The author must identify that what he is writing is a quotation (something Paul does elsewhere), or (b). the quotation must be so familiar to the audience that no identification of the quote is necessary, or (c). the author uses a Greek eta after the quotation to then refute it. I believe the latter two ways are precisely how the Apostle Paul identifies he is quoting someone else in I Corinthians 14:34-35. . . 

The quotation in I Corinthians 14:34-35 is consistent to the law of the Jews in Corinth, but it is absolutely contrary to the teaching and the practice of the Apostle Paul.

Paul REFUTES the Jewish quotation in I Corinthians 14:34-35 twice in the very next verse (v. 36) by using the Greek letter eta. Go look in your interlinear Greek/English Bible and find the stand alone Greek letter eta in v. 36. You will see the eta twice in that one verse. It looks like this: η The Greek eta has two possible markings that cause it to be translated with either the English word "or," or with the English equilavent of what we mean when we make a sound with our mouths like "PFFFFFFFFFFFFT!" This means "That's ridiculous!" or "Are you kidding me?" or "Nonsense!" This latter meaning, in my opinion, is precisely what Paul is saying (twice) in I Corinthians 14:36 in response to the Jewish quotation he has just given I Corinthians 14:35-36. The original Greek text has no markings, so the translation of η must be made by translators based on other facts than the markings of the Greek letter. I believe the context, the culture of Corinth, and the radical nature of New Covenant worship taught by Paul (and resisted by the Corinthian Jews zealous for the Law) demands the η be translated with a "PFFFFFFFFFFFT!" instead of "or" (as is done in the NAS).

M.Div. Dennis J. Preato, whose article on the God's Word to Women website does an excellent job of summarizing the various positions on this verse, also holds to the quotation viewpoint.  He explains why the textual variant of the verses having been moved in some manuscripts might be compatible with this view:

David W. Odell-Scott, Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University, offers a possible solution to the interpolation debate. He suggests that the editors of the Western manuscripts deleted the verses from their normal location between verses 33 and 36, and moved them in order to shield the verses from Paul's rebuke that begins in verse 36. He suspects "the editors shrewdly manipulated the text to serve their purposes," and that they "sought to render the text in such a way that it would be consistent with what the editors expected to find in scripture," meaning that the editors of the Western text did not view Paul's rebuke of the silence and subordination of women as a "viable possibility" given the historical culture and society's norm of that day. Odell-Scott actually views verses 34-35 as a quotation that Paul repeats word for word in order to rebuke. . . .

A substantial body of internal and external evidence exists to conclude that verses 34-35 could not have been authored by Paul. Internally, there is not one verse in the Old Testament that Paul could quote to support such a declaration. Nor is Paul alluding to any general Genesis passage to support a view opposite from his stated declaration in 1 Corinthians that women can pray and prophesy in church.

As previously discussed, Paul is quite specific when referring to the Old Testament to prove his point. The extensive, eternal evidence points to the fact that Paul is quoting a saying from the Oral Law of the Jews that prohibited women from speaking in the synagogue.

Oral Jewish laws do not constitute Scripture and are not authoritative for the body of Christ. Scholars also point out that Paul never appeals to the "law" as guidance for the Christian Church. Scripture tells us that God calls and uses anyone to minister regardless of gender. Paul has just finished telling the Corinthians that women can pray and prophesy in church. In verse 36, Paul corrects the Judaizers' error. Therefore, interpreting verses 34-35 as a quotation with an immediate rebuke remains a contextually viable and the preferred option.

This view shows that the rule need not be followed because Paul never intended to make the rule at all, but instead intended to refute it.

Each of these positions has reasons why they disagree with the others.  The hard-complementarian/patriarchal NTRF site linked above has extensive material attempting to show why all of the other positions, including those of softer complementarians, are wrong; you're welcome to review his material further if you like.  But all of these views, as far as I can see, have one thing in common:  they accept (at least for purposes of argument) that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 should be read as some sort of rule that the New Testament sets forth, which either needs to be either followed in whatever sense it was intended, or dismissed as unintended.

For me, the fact that there is no actual place anywhere in the Old Testament that Paul could have cited as "law" where God commands women to be submissive to their husbands or forbids women to speak publicly; that Anna spoke publicly in the Temple on the occasion of Christ's infancy dedication, and was not rebuked for doing so (Luke 2:36); that women such as Phoebe (Romans 16:1) would have had to speak publicly in the church in order to read Paul's letter aloud to the church at Rome (and probably authoritatively answer questions about what Paul meant!); and that the words of Mary, Mother of Christ, are included in our New Testaments as definite speech that we receive as God-inspired and therefore authoritative-- all do seem to indicate that Paul could not have intended to forbid women from speaking in church, and with teaching authority.

Another issue is that when we read these verses, we somehow miss what is happening in terms of the reason being set forth for the supposed rule.  But the passage actually says "FOR [the reason that] it is shameful [or disgraceful] for a woman to speak in church."  And due to our historical and global distance from the passage, we tend to miss what was really being said.  The Middle East at the time of Paul was an honor-shame culture, and by definition, this meant that behavior was viewed in terms of "the opinions and norms of one's group" rather than according to our more individualistic ideals of right and wrong.  No matter who wrote the words in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 into our Bibles, these phrases actually reflect a very real fact of the time/place in which they were written: it was actually considered shameful in the ancient Middle-Eastern honor-shame culture, for a woman to speak in a public place so that anyone but her husband or other immediate family members could hear her.

David A. DeSilva's book Honor, Shame, Patronage & Purity examines 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 in light of this misunderstood dynamic: 

Readers living in the United States or Western Europe may recognize immediately that we live at some distance from the honor culture of the first-century Greco-Roman world (including the Semitic peoples in the East). . . Typically we do not talk about honor and shame much. . .

[W]e should mention the ways in which gender roles impinge on conceptions of honorable behavior. In the ancient world, as in many traditional cultures today, women and men have different arenas for the preservation and acquisition of honor, and different standards for honorable activity. Men occupy the public spaces, while women are generally directed toward the private spaces of home and
hearth. When they leave the home, they are careful to avoid conversation with other men. . . [W]e do find a good deal of space given over to promoting (or simply reflecting) the larger society’s view of female honor within the pages of the New Testament.

[Passages like 1 Cor. 14:34-35] continue to be the topic of endless debate, but relevant for our concern here is the fact that they reflect the same conviction articulated by Plutarch, namely that a woman’s words are for her husband’s ears, not for the public ear.

I would consider it likely that the passages limiting women’s public voice and presence are introduced as part of the early church leaders’ attempts to show outsiders that the Christian movement is not subversive but inculcates the same “family values” (with regard to women, children and slaves in the household) as the dominant, non-Christian culture. The reason for this is first to diminish the slander against the Christian group (namely that it “turned the world upside down” and was a source of instability and trouble for “good” people), and second, to make the group more attractive to the people around it.

The fact is that in modern Western cultures such as that of the United States, it cannot be said by any stretch of the imagination that it is actually "shameful" or "disgraceful" (which again are by definition references to human social values, not to moral standards, whether divine or human) for women to speak in church! Even in Christian subcultures like evangelicalism, we may have some sense from the text that a woman standing up in church to speak may be breaking some sort of divine rule-- but we have no deep-seated, culturally inbred sense of human shame or disgrace-- no feeling that something dishonorable in the sight of society is happening.   In fact, what really brings shame on the church in the eyes of the surrounding culture today is when women are forbidden to speak.   Christians in fact often feel defensive or protective of women-silencing traditions precisely because we know how bad these practices look to outsiders. Our sense of shame, as far as it goes in our non-honor/shame society, works against silencing women, not for silencing them.

When the reason for a rule ceases, what does/should that mean for the rule?  If whoever wrote these words was trying to prevent cultural shame and disgrace upon the church, should they now be used as a reason for the church to incur shame and disgrace?

So I don't think this verse should be read as restricting or silencing women today.  But the real issue for me goes even deeper than this.  The fact is that not even the strictest hard complementarian reads this verse as forbidding women to say anything in church at all.  And yet this is what the "plain sense" of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 does in fact say.  Women are to "keep silent" for they are "not permitted to speak."  Not "not permitted to speak publicly."  Not "not to participate in the interpretation of tongues."  Not "not to speak as a teacher of adult men."  Not to speak.  That's what it says.

Apparently even hard complementarians today recognize the dehumanization and disenfranchisement from their own centers of worship and Christian community which women would experience if they were required to be completely mute from the time they walked into the church meeting until the time they walked out again.  So-- no one takes this verse at its "plain sense."  Everyone decides that that can't be what it means.  Everyone allows some compassion, some feeling for women, some sense of Jesus' commandment "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (Luke 6:31) to soften the absolute prohibition set forth in the "plain sense" of these verses.  In short, we allow ourselves to be guided by a sense of right and wrong, as Jesus Himself taught right and wrong, in our reading of these verses-- no matter what the actual words say about what is shameful.  Because the fact is that though Jesus often ignored His society's assessment of what was shameful-- from the woman at the well to the woman who cried on His feet, He did it to affirm women and lift them up, not to silence them.

So here's what it boils down to for me.  Did Paul, in writing his letters, really intend to impose a new, much stricter Law on the people of the New Covenant-- particularly with regards to the behavior of women-- than ever was pronounced by Moses to the people of the Old Covenant?  And if all of us find a particular supposed "law" to be so harsh/unjust in its literal understanding that we find some way to soften it and make it at least a little more equitable-- could obedience to law really be what the New Covenant is about?

Should we even be reading the New Testament in this way? 

Christian author and minister Frank Viola probably says it best:

The New Testament should never be handled as a manual of floatable doctrines and isolated teachings. The New Testament is a whole. It’s essentially a story. What is written in the letters of Paul and others is part of that story. The New Testament story contains a consistent message. It’s the message of the New Covenant. This covenant is not an updating of the Old Covenant. It doesn’t include a new set of rules to replace the old set of rules. . . 

In short, the New Covenant erases all social and class distinctions. And it has afforded all to receive the Spirit and serve as priests in God’s house. That includes women. . . [W]hatever the “limiting passages” mean, they cannot in any way overturn the New Covenant. Neither can they contradict the entire thrust of the New Testament. Hence, the idea that women are excluded from speaking in God’s house is a catastrophic breach of the New Covenant.

Isn't Christianity supposed to be about following Jesus?  Jesus said, "A new commandment I give you: Love one another.  As I have loved you, you are also to love one another."  John 13:34.  And then He showed how He loved us-- by going to the Cross.  Not by making restrictive rules to silence women.  In fact, His first act in the New Creation He had inaugurated with His Resurrection, was to commission women to testify of Him.

His commandments are not burdensome, because they are about love, not law.  His yoke is easy-- because it's about love, not law.  Who were the ones who tied up heavy burdens for others to carry?  The Pharisees.  Not Jesus.

"Women be silent in church" is a heavy burden.

So how can it be from Christ?

Therefore, I will take my stand here in the same place I took in my post "But That's What the Bible Says":

[T]here's something wrong with the way we look at the Bible, when we read a small set of texts in ways that jar with its overarching truths. There's something wrong with holding the nature or treatment of women, or the character of God, hostage to a verse.  There's something wrong with righteously standing on obedience to the Bible while treating fellow human beings less than righteously.

Women shouldn't have to "keep silent in church."  It's contrary to "righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." (Romans 14:17).  And it's contrary to "love one another, as I have loved you."

For me, that's all there is to it.


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*For my own take on 1 Timothy 2:12, see my four-part series beginning here.

What About Divorce?

"It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement; but I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication causeth her to commit adultery, and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery." 

Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:30-31.

Many versions of fundamentalist Christianity seem to teach that if you just follow their formula for the perfect marriage, divorce need never be an issue.  But being a Christian isn't a formula, and one person's actions can't guarantee the response of another person.  Each person has his or her own choices to make, and ultimately, they are that person’s choices alone.  The fact is that even if you do everything you can, to the best of your ability, to make your marriage happy and healthy, it simply won't be everything it should be unless your spouse is doing their best too.  This isn't a perfect world, as the cliche goes.  So, given that sometimes marriages do fail, a burning question for many Christians is, when should divorce be an option? 

Now, I have to confess that I'm taking on this subject from a certain level of personal ignorance.  I have had a pretty happy marriage for almost 25 years now, and I'll freely admit that this is because my spouse and I do our best to put one another first and defer to one another in love, as well as to take responsibility for changes we need to make in our own lives.  So, while I don't think divorce should be considered a too-easy escape just because  "it isn't working out," I'm in no position to judge anyone whose marriage actually isn't working out.  I think it's important that each person follow their own conscience, seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit, regarding what to do in their own difficult marriages.

Christianity has traditionally taught that divorce for any reason other than adultery is unacceptable. This is based on several passages of teachings by Jesus (including the one quoted above), and one by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:10-16, that essentially maintain that marriage is the joining of two people into "one flesh" which should not be separated (though Paul apparently expanded acceptable divorce to situations where a non-Christian spouse abandons his or her Christian spouse).  It must be noted, though, that some Christians sects don't allow divorce for any reason, saying that Christian spouses ought to forgive "seventy times seven" times even in these situations.  And the problem also arises that these two exceptions just don't seem to adequately address some of the other reasons why, many of us feel instinctively, people really ought to be able to end marriage-- such as physical, emotional or financial abuse or neglect.  

I don't think either Jesus or Paul intended the New Covenant kingdom to be merely a stricter version of the Old Covenant, with its laws and regulations.  The New Covenant is supposed to be about a living relationship with God, a leading by the Holy Spirit into a life of love.  I believe Jesus' teachings, and Paul's, should be viewed in those terms.  So there came a time when I had to ask the question: would Jesus-- the Jesus I have come to know-- really tell a spouse who was being used and abused that she/he had to stay in that marriage?  I had to answer, "no."  And this led me to the question I have asked in an earlier blog post:  Is there something we're missing, or misunderstanding, about the "no divorce" texts?  Some assumptions that we're making which they wouldn't have made?  Or vice versa?

So, using a question-and-answer format, I'm going to look at marriage and divorce as it would have been seen in Jesus' day, and Paul's.  

How are marriage and divorce viewed in the Bible? 

Both Old and New Testaments view marriage as a solemn contract, or covenant.  A covenant is a kind of treaty between two parties, characterized by promises that need to be kept.  When a covenant has been violated-- when one of the parties breaks the covenant promises so frequently, callously or heinously that the wronged party must consider it irrevocably broken-- there are ways for the one who has been wronged to end the covenant.  Marriage is no different.  In Jeremiah 3, Israel’s covenant with God is pictured as a marriage contract.  God had kept His covenant promises, but Israel had continually broken them without repentance or any attempt to right the wrongs.  In verse 8 God says, “And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce. . . .”  Divorce, in and of itself, is not inherently evil.  God describes Himself here as the wronged party in a marriage covenant.  The promises of the covenant had been broken beyond repair-- not by God, but by Israel.  God’s divorce of Israel did not break the covenant; it merely acknowledged that the covenant had been broken.  But God nevertheless described Himself as getting a divorce.  Since God would never sin, it could not have been wrong for Him to get a divorce-- because He was not the one who broke the covenant.   Covenant-breaking is a wrong that we must avoid; but when the other party has irretrievably broken the covenant, the wronged party is not obligated to pretend that the covenant is intact.  It is up to the wronged party to decide when enough is enough.  Forgiveness is important, but forgiveness alone will not restore a broken covenant.  The party who broke the covenant must repent and bear the fruit of repentance, showing a real desire to change his or her ways and beginning to honor the covenant again.  Israel refused to do so in Jeremiah 3, and the Bible gives us a picture of God finally deciding that enough was enough, and withdrawing from His covenant with Israel. 

But doesn’t God say, “I hate divorce” in the Book of Malachi?  And didn’t Jesus say, “what God has joined together, let not man separate”?

We will examine more closely what Jesus said shortly, after examining the shared understandings He and His audience would have been working under, that we today may be missing  But here is what Malachi 3:11-16 actually says: 

“Judah hath dealt treacherously. . . and hath married the daughter of a strange god. . . Because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously; yet she is thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant. . . Therefore take heed your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.  For the Lord, the God of Israel saith that he hateth putting away, for one covereth violence with his garment. . .”

God was angry because in this case, the divorce itself was a breaking of the marriage covenant, because the women who were being divorced had done no wrong.  Instead, it was the men divorcing their wives without cause who were doing wrong, committing treachery against the covenant by marrying other women.  It was the breaking of the covenant that God hated, for He looked at it as tantamount to committing violence and then covering it over. When the marriage covenant has not been broken, then divorce itself breaks the covenant and is therefore wrong.  But in the case where the covenant is already broken, divorce could not be wrong, or God would not have spoken of Himself as initiating a divorce.

But isn’t it true that what’s wrong for the creature is not necessarily wrong for the Creator, because as Creator He has rights and powers over His handiwork that the creatures don’t?

Yes, and that would apply when God is spoken of, or speaks of Himself, in the Bible as Creator or Lord.  But when God speaks of Himself as a husband, He is applying a human metaphor to Himself, and the rules that would apply to humans in that relationship would apply to Himself in the metaphor He uses.  God would not speak of Himself doing something in a metaphorical marriage covenant, that would be wrong in a real marriage covenant.  

So when Jesus taught about the marriage covenant, how did He understand it?

The marriage covenant, as understood in the Bible, included basic promises that the parties had to fulfill.  These are set forth in the Old Testament law, and it was Old Testament law that Jesus referred to when He talked about marriage.  It’s important to understand that Old Testament law, as understood by the rabbis of Jesus’ day (Jesus Himself, of course, also being a rabbi) was of two different kinds.  There were the general laws, such as the Ten Commandments.  These were basic, overarching laws that applied to a variety of specific situations.  These are similar to today’s statutory law, which is made by governments and codified into books of statutes and rules.  But there were also the specific laws, and these were understood very much the way we understand case law today: when a specific case regarding a specific situation, is judged by a court, and the court’s judgment is then applied to similar situations.  

We can see this type of interpretation in Paul’s discussion of the law, “muzzle not the ox” in 1 Corinthians 9:9-14.  Paul understood a specific law about oxen to apply generally to every situation where a worker deserved payment for work done.  Paul, too, was a rabbi, and he demonstrates here the way rabbis understood the specific case laws of the Old Testament-- that whatever principle was set forth in the specific situation detailed in a law, applied generally to other, similar cases.

Turning, then, to the Old Testament marriage laws as Jesus and His original audience would have understood them: “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was statutory-type law.  But a law such as Deuteronomy 24:1-4 was case law.  It referred to a specific situation:  a man who has married a woman and found “some uncleanness [that is, sexual immorality]” in her.  It says that her husband can give her a bill of divorce, and she is then allowed to go and be another man’s wife, but she may not return to her first husband.  This is the law that formed the basis of God’s divorce as described in Jeremiah 3:8.  The principle of this law was that sexual immorality was grounds for divorce, and that there was to be a legal procedure for ending the marriage when the covenant had thus been broken.

Another marriage law in the Old Testament was even more specific:  Exodus 21:8-11.  “If [a maidservant] please not her master who hath betrothed her to himself. . . If he take him another wife: her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage shall he not diminish.  And if he does not do these three unto her, then she shall go out free.”  This law referred specifically to one particular case: a man who has married a maidservant and then taken another wife, and has ceased to fulfill his marital obligations of food, clothing and marital love to the first wife.  Jewish rabbis interpreted this as a principle that the obligations of marriage included giving marital love to the married partner, as well as the duty to meet the partner’s physical needs.  As it was understood in Jesus’ day, laws such as this one were not exclusively for maidservants in a particular situation, but for all married people.  To refuse to bring home food, or to prepare meals, or to turn away again and again from any other marital obligation, was to break the covenant.  And this Exodus law clearly gave the right to “go free” from a broken marriage covenant, to wronged wives.   (It’s important to note that a valid divorce, as Jesus and His audience would have understood it, included the right to remarry.  That was just part of what it meant to be divorced). 

So what was going on when Jesus said anyone who got divorced, except for adultery, was himself committing adultery?  Was He annulling the law of Exodus 21:8-11?  

To understand this, we must dig a little deeper into the historical situation in Israel in AD 30, when Jesus was preaching.   David Instone-Brewer, one of today’s foremost scholars on first-century Judaism, summarizes it very well:

[U]ntil about the time of Jesus’ birth . . . both Jewish men and women could divorce partners who broke their marriage obligations, as defined in the Old Testament.  These grounds for divorce (based on Exodus 21:10-11) were in use until about A.D. 70, but by the time that Jesus was preaching, in about A.D. 30, they were being used only rarely.  During Jesus’ lifetime [a] new, groundless divorce gradually grew in popularity, until by about the end of the first century, it had totally replaced divorces based on Old Testament grounds.  This new type of divorce was invented by a rabbi called Hillel, who lived a few decades before Jesus, and was called the “Any Cause” divorce.  The phrase that inspired it is in Deuteronomy 24:1, where a man divorces his wife for [as it read in their text] “a cause of sexual immorality.”  . . . Hillel asked, why did Moses use the phrase, “a cause of sexual immorality,” when he could simply have said “sexual immorality”?  Hillel reasoned that the seemingly superfluous word “cause” must refer to another, different ground for divorce, and since this ground is simply called “a cause,” he concluded that it meant any cause.  

Hillel therefore thought that two types of divorce were taught in Deuteronomy 24:1:  one for sexual immorality (adultery) and one they named “Any Cause.”  The Hillel rabbis . . . concluded that an “Any Cause“ divorce could be carried out only by men . . . and that it could be used for any cause-- such as the wife burning a meal-- so . . . this fault could be such a small thing that it was, in effect, a groundless divorce.

Very soon the “Any Cause” divorce had almost completely replaced the traditional Old Testament types of divorce. . . .

Not everyone accepted this new type of divorce.  The disciples of Shimmai, a rival of Hillel who often disagreed with him, said that Hillel had interpreted the Scriptures wrongly and that the whole phrase, “a cause of sexual immorality,” meant nothing more than the ground of sexual immorality; it did not mean two grounds, “sexual immorality” and “Any Cause.”

David Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage in the Church, IVP Books 2003, pp. 55-57.

This internal conflict in early first-century Judaism was huge, and had been going on for some time by the time Jesus began His public ministry.  Deuteronomy 24:1 and its meaning were what everyone was talking about.  But the other just-cause divorce law of Exodus 21:10-11 was never in dispute, and thus was not a topic of discussion; indeed, it was gradually being forgotten because of the prevalence of the “Any Cause” divorce and the dissent over it between the two rabbinical groups.  When someone spoke against divorce in Jesus’ day, they were assumed to be talking about a Deuteronomy 24:1 “any cause” divorce (just as today, if someone speaks against “drinking,” they are assumed to be speaking of alcoholic beverages, because the drinking of non-alcoholic beverages is not in dispute and is simply assumed to be ok).   Similarly, for anyone hearing or reading about a discussion on divorce in Jesus’ day, the Hillel/Shimmai dispute over Deuteronomy 24:1 would be at the front of their minds.  Exodus 21:8-11 divorces were simply unquestioned and assumed valid.

Jesus often didn't mention matters that were unquestioned and assumed, such as the worship of one God.  There was no need to address understandings that needed no changing.  Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount  was largely Christ’s correction of certain passages from the Law that were being misinterpreted or misapplied, or where the letter was being focused on to the point of ignoring the spirit of the passage.  Matthew 5:31-32, then, shows Jesus’ correction of  the Hillelite reading of Deuteronomy 24:1.   Jesus was saying that a Deuteronomy 24:1 divorce could only be for sexual immorality (’fornication“ in the KJV, but this was a word referring to all forms of sexual immorality).  A divorce under Deuteronomy 24:1 for “any cause” was not a valid divorce in God’s eyes, and therefore the divorcing person could not marry again without committing adultery. 

Both Matthew and Mark also record a conversation Jesus had with a group of Pharisees about this very issue (Mark 10:2-9, Matthew 19:3-9).   The Gospel of Matthew, with its more in-depth detail of Jesus’ teachings and its emphasis on showing the links between Jesus’ life and teachings and the Old Testament (see Eerdman’s Handbook to the Bible, Lion Publishing, 1973), mentions the “any cause” divorce by name.  The King James Version translates it as “every cause,” (Matt. 19:3), but the Greek words are “any cause” as used as a legal term to refer to this kind of divorce, which is documented by Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (A.D. 37-circa 100) in  Antiquities of the Jews 4:253.  The Hillelite explanation of their interpretation of Deuteronomy 24:1 is found in their rabbinic commentary Sifre Deuteronomy 269. 

Matthew 19:3 reads as follows:  “The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every [any] cause?”   Jesus responds that God created marriage and that humans should not “put asunder” what God had put together.  But as the passage in Jeremiah 3 shows us, it is the one who breaks the marriage covenant who has “put asunder” the marriage.   Because sexual immorality is a breaking of the covenant, Jesus says in verse 9 that it is a valid reason for divorce, so that a person divorcing for sexual immorality would be able to remarry without adultery.

The Pharisees then asked (Matthew 19:17):  “Why did Moses then command to give her a writing of divorcement and to put her away?”  Jesus answered (verse 8), “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.”  “Hardheartedness” was also a word that had particular significance in Jesus’ day.  It meant “stubborn unrepentance,” and was a special word used in the ancient Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, which was not used in ordinary, conversational Greek  The Pharisees would have known, then, that Jesus was quoting the Septuagint-- and probably the one place the word “hardheartedness” appeared in the Septuagint with reference to divorce: the same passage where God speaks of Himself as divorcing Israel.  Jeremiah 4:4, continuing the story of His divorce from chapter 3, warns Judah to “circumcise your hardheartedness” lest God divorce Judah as He had divorced Israel. 

Jesus, in saying “your hardheartedness” to the Pharisees, is not talking about just the Pharisees, but the whole nation, just as He spoke to the whole nation in Jeremiah 3 and 4.  Because of the tendency of God’s people to be stubbornly unrepentant, God permitted divorce for sexual immorality in Deuteronomy 24:1.  The idea is that divorce should be a last resort; even as God divorced Israel only after repeated attempts to restore the covenant.  But when the partner breaking the covenant continues to break it and will not truly repent (which is turning from wrongdoing and changing one’s ways), then the wronged party may declare the marriage to be at an end.  Exodus 21:10-11 and Jeremiah 3-4 show this; and Jesus never said otherwise.   

But what if the wronged spouse still doesn't want to leave?  Didn't Paul say that if we leave a marriage, we must either remain single or be reconciled to our spouse?

Divorce is an option, not a requirement, when the marriage covenant is broken.  And the existence of this option can be very important to the marriage.  One result of understanding marriage as a covenant which can be broken, is that the wronged party has the power to end a broken marriage covenant.  This changes the power dynamics of the marriage.  If your covenant-breaking spouse understands that you have a scriptural right to say “enough is enough,” it may be that this knowledge will be enough for your spouse to begin considering you worthy of respect in the relationship, and to really change his or her ways.  But as long as she/he knows you will stay no matter how much you and the children are suffering, your spouse may not have enough incentive to face his or her own errors and take responsibility for changing them.

But if you do come to the place where you must leave your spouse, it’s important to understand exactly what Paul intended to say, as his original audience would have understood it-- because that was the message that was inspired by God.

Paul’s words on marriage are contained in the seventh chapter of his letter to Corinthians.  The church at Corinth was subject to the laws of ancient Rome-- and Rome’s divorce laws were even easier than the Jewish “Any Cause” divorce.  Rome had what was called “divorce by separation.”  That is, any man or woman who wanted a divorce, for any reason at all, could get legally divorced simply by walking out of the marriage.  Whoever owned the home could simply throw out the non-homeowner, and the non-homeowner could simply take his or her possessions and move out.  They were then free to marry anyone else they wanted.

It is in this context that we must understand Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 7:10-11: “And unto the married I command, yet not I but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband.  But if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband; and let not the husband put away his wife.”  Paul is saying that a Christian must not do a divorce-by-separation for any and every reason, because in the eyes of the Lord, a groundless divorce is not a divorce at all.  Therefore, a person who has already had one of these divorces should either remain unmarried, or be reconciled.

But does this mean Paul is opposed to divorces where there are valid grounds, such as adultery, desertion or neglect?  Here is what he says regarding a Christian whose spouse has left them:  “But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart.  A brother or sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God has called us to peace.”  1 Cor. 7:13.  “Under bondage” here is the Greek word “douloo,” meaning “to be enslaved.”  It is the same word used six times in Galatians to speak of being in bondage to rules and regulations, as opposed to being free in Christ (see, for instance, Gal. 5:1).  Paul is saying that having to stay married to someone who has deserted or abandoned us is a form of legalistic bondage, contrary to the freedom of Christ.

But Paul was not saying a person who was divorced for good cause could not remarry.  He uses another word, “deo,” for being “bound” or under obligation to just law, in 1 Cor. 7:26-27 and again in 7:39.  The first says that Paul “supposed” that under the “present distress“ (referring to a period of famine and hardship in Corinth, it was better to remain in one‘s current condition, at least for the time being. “Art thou bound unto a wife?  Seek not to be loosed.”  In verse 39 he uses it regarding widows:  “The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth, but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord.”  Read together, these verses are saying that being “loosed” (as the opposite of “bound”) means being free to remarry.  Paul is not saying there can be no such thing as valid divorce and remarriage, or he would not imply that it is possible, when not under “the present distress” to be “loosed.”  (Note:  Verse 39 was written specifically for widows and should not be construed as a special binding of women only, to be unable to be released from marriage except by the husband’s death-- because this reading would directly contradict verse 13.) 

Again, his original audience, understanding Roman divorce laws as we do not, would have grasped Paul’s meaning without all this explanation.  Just as with the “Any Cause” divorce with the Jews, the “divorce by separation” would have been the default kind of divorce that Paul’s Roman audience would have understood him to be talking about.  But when Paul speaks of desertion by an unbelieving partner, his audience would also have understood Rome’s other law of divorce-for-cause.  As David Instone-Brewer puts it in Divorce and Remarriage in the Church:

[T]hese grounds for divorce [neglecting/refusing to meet the needs for food, clothing or marital love, per Exodus 21:8-11] had . . . spread through the whole known world via the Babylonian and then the Persian empires [influenced by assimilation of the Jews during the captivity in Babylon], to Greek culture and eventually to Roman law.  These three grounds for divorce were written into both Jewish and Greco-Roman marriage documents.  This meant that if you were suffering neglect from your husband or wife, you could present your case in any court-- Roman, rabbinic, Egyptian, or, as far as we know, any of the other provincial legal systems of the first-century civilized world.

David Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage in the Church, IVP Books 2003, p. 99.

Paul’s discussion of marriage in 1 Cor. 7 speaks specifically in terms of these commonly understood marital obligations, in that he discusses marital love and “due benevolence” in verses 3-5, and the meeting of physical needs (by mentioning that it’s better not to marry during a time of “distress”) in  verses 26-27 and 32-35 (“carefulness” towards “the things of this world” being an inevitable condition of marriage in needing to “please” one’s spouse).  In our own marriage vows today, we usually promise to ‘love, honor and cherish.”  These vows come from Ephesians 5:28-29 (where Paul tells husbands that they must love, nourish and cherish their wives), and reflect the marital obligations shown in 1 Corinthians 7, which ultimately came from Exodus 21:8-11.  To chronically refuse or neglect to meet these obligations has always been considered a breaking of the marriage covenant, which gives grounds for a just-cause divorce.  God is a God of covenant, and it is covenant-breaking which God is against. 

But if all this is true, why have most Christians never heard it before?  How could we all have gotten it so wrong for so long?

The main thing to remember is that after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, Christianity became divorced from its Jewish roots.  Jews blamed Christians for deserting Jerusalem at the time of its destruction.  Christians blamed Jews for the death of Christ rather than recognizing the universal nature of Christ’s death for all sin.  Jews and Christians regarded one another as enemies.  Also, at the same time, the early church (reacting against the decadence of Rome), began to overemphasize celibacy and virginity, which gradually affected its understanding of marriage and remarriage.  The doctrines which arose out of this became the traditional Christian understandings, which continued to be passed down.  Christianity became a Greco-Roman religion, and then a European one, and its access to its own history, including the underpinnings of Jewish rabbinical scholarship, was broken.  In the past 150 years, however, events such as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls have greatly increased our understanding of how the original hearers of these messages would have understood them. 

We can’t know how many misunderstandings might have been avoided had the developing Church truly practiced Jesus’ command to “love our enemies and do good to them.”  We might have been able to help more of the Jews and their scholars survive the Roman destruction, and thus held onto more of the original understandings of first-century Christian teachings.  But we have always had access to Jesus’ teachings that to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves, are the central commands, and let our understanding of these simple truths govern our understandings of all other rules, laws and regulations Christians have imposed on themselves through the ages.  It is not according to love to force a victim of marital abuse, neglect or desertion to stay in marriage covenant that has been irreparably broken and has become nothing more than a prison-- or to force one’s children to stay in a home where they are being harmed. 

God has graciously provided for the victims of broken covenants, that they may be set free and not enslaved or under bondage.   Both Jesus and Paul understood just-cause divorce to be allowed by the Scriptures, and neither Jesus nor Paul ever spoke against just-cause divorce.  If you are in a situation where your marriage covenant is broken and your marriage and family life have become intolerable, God’s merciful provision is for you and your children.

Remember, God’s goal in the New Covenant is to restore marriage to what He intended for it from the beginning.  In order to do that, both parties must have the ability to enforce the marriage covenant and hold the other accountable.  If that fails, just-cause divorce is the last resort-- but if that last resort is needed, it is available to His children. His love and grace are ours always. 

***************

Note: The ideas in this article were not written by a licensed marriage counselor and are not intended to replace licensed, professional counseling.

This topic is discussed in greater detail in David Instone-Brewer‘s 211-page book Divorce and Remarriage in the Church, IVP Books 2003, and in more scholarly detail in his larger work, Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible, Eerdman‘s, 2002.  Also see the website http://www.divorce-remarriage.com/ for answers to frequently-asked questions.

The Message of God's Kingdom: Foundational Equality

Luke 3:4-6 tells of how the ministry of Jesus began with the appearance of John the Baptist, preaching a message from Isaiah 40:4:

A voice of one calling in the desert,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked roads shall become straight,
the rough ways smooth.
And all mankind will see God’s salvation.'

This passage speaks in terms of land, roads and paths as a metaphor for God's salvation. God will fill up the low places and bring down the high places, straighten the crooked and smooth the rough. It envisions the coming God's salvation (the coming of the Messiah which John was proclaiming) in terms of a great leveling. Applying the metaphor to humanity, then:  the message is that human differences in status, one higher and one lower, will no longer matter. Paul speaks of the same sort of thing in 1 Corinthians 1:26-29: "Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him."

And this isn't just about everyone being the same in what we call "spiritual salvation" -- being saved by grace through faith. Joel prophesied this in Joel 2:28-29 (which Peter then preached in Acts 2:16-21 as having been fulfilled):

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your old men will dream dreams,
your young men will see visions.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days.

Not just in salvation, but in the pouring out of the Spirit, God promises to bless all His people.  "There is no favoritism with God," says Ephesians 6:9 (which, as Retha over at Biblical Personhood so beautifully points out, is the concluding sentence of Paul's household codes in Ephesians, showing us that Paul was teaching his readers how to work within a human system of favoritism, not God's).

In the Old Covenant, God set aside one people, then one family out of one tribe of those people for priesthood, and another family out of another tribe of those people for kingship.  But now we are in the New Covenant.  Members of every tribe and language and people and nation are made into "a kingdom and priests to serve our God."  Revelation 5:9-10.  Peter said in Acts 10:34, after God had poured out His Spirit on Gentiles, "I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts those from every nation who fear him and do what is right."

Paul states this as a foundational truth of the Kingdom of God in 2 Corinthians 5:16-17: "So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view [other translations say, "according to the flesh"].  Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.  Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.  The old is gone, the new is here!"  Paul tells the Galatians that he "opposed [Peter] to his face. . . for before certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles.  But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles. . . ." (Galatians 2:11-12).  Peter was regarding both the Gentiles and himself from a worldly point of view, or according to the flesh.

But Paul explains later in the same letter, "So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. . . there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. . . . [W]hen the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship."  Galatians 3:28-4:5  A footnote in my Bible adds, "The Greek word for adoption to sonship is a legal term referring to the full legal standing of an adopted male heir in Roman culture."  Paul is saying that all who are in Christ Jesus-- Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female-- have received the same promise of the adoption to sonship.  No one who has faith in Christ has any lesser legal standing, powers or privileges than anyone else. 

This is why Paul counsels the believers in Philippians 2:3, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.  Rather, in humility value others above yourselves." Jesus had taught in Matthew 18:2-4, Mark 10:15 and Luke 18:7 that everyone who wants to enter the Kingdom of God must do it as a little child.  Little children had no status, powers or privileges in that day, so Jesus' words amounted to a statement that we all must lay down our earthly status, powers and privileges in order to enter the new creation Kingdom.

The essence of the Kingdom message is this:  "Stop looking at yourself in terms of status, or lack thereof.  Stop regarding others in terms of their power or position.  Stop expecting to be treated with respect based on your status in the world, and learn to treat all others with respect-- regardless of their status in the world." Paul made it especially clear that he understood this when he refused to have followers who said, "I am of Paul," stating that those who insisted on distinguishing leaders or having jealousy of place or position were "mere infants" and "still worldly."  This idea is so pervasive throughout the entire New Testament that it must be regarded as one of its foundational teachings.

But many Christians believe that God, universally and timelessly, has chosen men to have leadership authority in the church and home, and women to be followers under that authority.   Some even consider it an essential tenet of Christianity that men are meant to lead and women are meant to follow-- so much so that they question whether those who disagree are truly committed to biblical Christianity.  They base this doctrine on a few short texts: 1 Timothy 2:12-15, 1 Corinthians 11:3, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, Ephesians 5:22-23, Colossians 3:18, Titus 2:4-5 and 1 Peter 3:1-6.  They believe these seven texts create an exception to the Kingdom message of no favoritism: that in this one area, we are to view certain believers according to the flesh.   They say that Galatians 3:28 refers only to spiritual salvation.  They say that Joel 2:28-29 and Acts 2:16-21 restrict the outpouring of the Spirit to only what is mentioned in those verses: prophecy, visions and dreams.  They say that God does not and will not pour out any spiritual leadership gifts upon women, except so that they may lead other women.

Apparently the idea is that though we must become as little children to enter the Kingdom, the Kingdom itself then confers upon men, based on their maleness alone, new powers, privileges and status that women cannot have.

What we tend to forget is that we're in a completely different situation than the original readers of the New Testament.  We live in a society where men no longer are considered to have primacy and power, and where women are no longer relegated to the home and children.   It's easy, therefore, to read these verses as if they were against the mutuality of our culture: as if they were counter-cultural statements about God's divine plan for the Kingdom-- statements that place male authority firmly within the Kingdom, to be held against all modern cultural changes.

But how would these passages read if you had always lived in a society where women were required to be not just submissive, but obedient to their husbands?  Where freeborn little boys grew up knowing they would one day become masters of their homes, wives, children and slaves?  Where women were not only forbidden to teach (except in the temples of their goddesses), but viewed as less than fully virtuous if they spoke in public at all?

I think if we lived in those days, it would be much clearer that in light of the Kingdom principle that all believers have the same status before God, the New Testament writers were teaching believers to make necessary concessions for the sake of the church's reputation in the cultures they lived in, and yet without compromising new-creation mutuality.   If you were a new believer in the early 1st century, might you not be saying, "My husband/master has become a believer and has laid down his earthly status.  Does this mean I still have to follow the Emperor's law and obey him?"  Peter's words in 1 Peter 2:12-13 encapsulate the New Testament response: "Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds. . . Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human authority."  

As I look back upon history, it seems to me that the Kingdom principle of the equality of believers has had a profound effect, over time, on the notion of the equality of all human beings.  It is not that our modern culture, by insisting on the full, functional equality of women, has somehow corrupted the Kingdom message as it should be understood in the church.  On the contrary-- the church, ever since the passing of the first Apostles, has been finding ways to exclude women from Kingdom equality.  But our Western cultures today, having imbibed deeply of the Kingdom teaching of equality and applied it to all humanity, are now calling out the church on her hypocrisy.

Maybe it's time we listened.

Why Did Jesus Choose Twelve Men?

One of the main arguments used against the full participation of women in church leadership is that the twelve Apostles were all male. Jesus chose twelve males, it is said, because Jesus intended that the leaders of the church should be male.

But could there be other reasons why Jesus chose twelve male apostles?

Kay Bonikowsky, on her blog “The Happy Surprise,” has written a very good piece about the symbolic nature of Jesus’ choice: not just that they were male, but that there were twelve of them and that they were all Jews. Pointing out that Jesus’ choice was a fulfillment of Isaiah 1:26: “I will restore your judges as of days of old, your rulers as at the beginning,” she writes:

As twelve Jewish males, they were symbolic for the twelve tribes and their patriarchal heads. In this role, their number and gender is not an example for the new church to follow, but indicative of the closure of the Old Covenant.

Matthew 19:28 and Luke 22:30 show that Jesus did this deliberately, so that the twelve Apostles were to “sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” This was the fulfillment of the Old Covenant even as it looked forward to the New Covenant. Jesus was not saying all church leaders afterwards had to be male any more than He was saying all church leaders afterwards had to be Jewish.

But there was also a very practical dynamic that we can easily overlook from our modern mindset. The twelve were the main witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In the Ancient Near East and Roman cultures, the testimony of women was considered invalid. It was not accepted in court; it was not legally binding in any way. The world was simply not going to listen to women, and Jesus knew it.

So here’s what He did. His very first act upon Resurrection was to appear to the women. In fact, John tells us that though Peter and John ran ahead of Mary Magdalene on the way to the tomb, they saw nothing. Then after they left, Mary Magdalene was the first to see the Resurrected Christ. John 20:3-14. Other women also saw Him shortly afterwards– but no male saw the Lord, revealed for who He was, until that evening, eight hours or more afterwards. He walked with the disciples on their way to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-32), but they did not know that He was Jesus. Only Mary Magdalene and the other women knew.

The significance of this would not have been lost on the male disciples in that patriarchal culture. They knew that they themselves had refused to believe the women’s testimony that morning. Then when Jesus appeared to them, they realized the women had been telling the truth.

Jesus was communicating this very clearly (the fact that we miss it today is a product of our culture): “The world will not accept the testimony of your sisters, but I have just forced you to listen to it. My kingdom is to be different from the world. You are to listen to your women and allow them to testify of Me.”

And that’s just what they did. That’s why when Saul began persecuting the church, he “dragged away men and women” to prison. Acts 8:3. At the Crucifixion, the women were safe. They knew they didn’t need to hide like the male disciples, because the authorities considered them negligible. But what women began doing after the Resurrection proved they were no longer to be considered negligible. That’s why they began to be persecuted as well.

The world still did not believe the testimony of women. This shows clearly in the oral tradition that began to circulate immediately after the Resurrection, which Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred at the same time. . . .” The appearance of Jesus to 500 witnesses together was the evidence the disciples gave publicly, to prove Jesus was indeed risen. But they didn’t mention that He had appeared to the female disciples first. This would, in the eyes of the world of that time, have detracted from the weight of the message rather than added to it. In fact, there was only one reason why the writers of the Gospels would have put this embarrassing detail into their accounts: that it actually happened that way. This is one of the points that textual critics use to determine whether a story is factual or not: if it includes embarrassing details that would not have been put into a story if it were fictional. The appearance of Jesus to the women first, was an embarrassing detail in a factual account, which had to be included in the written text because that was what had happened.

But because Jesus had in fact appeared first to the women, the apostles simply could not just tell the women to be quiet, go home and serve their families. Jesus had made them witnesses, and so witnesses they had to be. The acceptance by the male apostles of the testimony of women, allowing them to actually preach (and to become a threat that persecutors took into account), was one of the first steps in the elevation of women that Jesus intended in His church.

Jesus chose twelve men as the fulfillment of the Old Covenant. But Jesus’ death and resurrection inaugurated the New Covenant, in which “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is not male and female.” Gal. 3:28. If we are going to give weight to the maleness of the twelve Apostles, we must also give weight to the femaleness of the first witnesses. And we have to look at it the way the original readers would have seen it, in order to understand how very important that simple fact was.

The Bible and Human Authority, Part 3: The Great Chain of Being

In Parts 1 and 2 we examined what the Bible actually teaches about human authority. God in the Old Testament simply does not appear to be interested in setting up human authority structures, but rather prefers to raise up individual, Spirit-led leaders who act in God’s authority, not as part of a top-down chain of command. And though the New Testament teaches submission to earthly institutions of human authority, its focus is on the new kingdom of God, in which hierarchies of human authority are eliminated in favor of equal brother-sister relationships.

So where did the idea come from, that there is top-down chain of command from God, both in earthly and in spiritual relationships, with human authority structures in every area of life?

Plato (429-347 BC) was possibly the greatest of the Greek philosophers. He conceived of the nature of reality to consist first of ideal “Forms,” and then objects/beings which were types of each ideal. Plato conceived of the Form of Absolute Good as the ultimate, universal object of human desire, and this Idea of the Good became synonymous with God in the writings of his student, Aristotle. In order to be the ultimate Good, God would, in Absolute generosity, also give existence to every other possible good thing. Aristotle then arranged all creatures into a graded scale according to how closely they approached “perfection.” The Neo-Platonists, a group of Greek philosophers in the 3rd-5th centuries AD, who expanded Plato and Aristotle’s ideas, particularly in terms of religion and spirituality, developed this notion further. Macrobius, a Neo-Platonist writing in the early fifth century AD, wrote:

“[T]he attentive observer will discover a connection of parts, from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break. And this is Homer’s golden chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth.” (Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Harper & Brothers (1936) p. 63.)

This idea of a graded, hierarchical creation came to be known as the “Great Chain of Being.” Alan Myatt, in his paper “On the Compatibility of Ontological Equality, Hierarchy and Functional Distinctions,” writes:

“As Greek philosophical notions were appropriated by early Christian apologists in their defense of the faith, it [the idea of the Great Chain of Being] eventually became entwined with the theology of the church and set the agenda for its theory of society. . . In the Middle Ages, this concept translated into the division of society into ‘Three Estates,’ each stratified according to the Chain of Being. The first estate consisted of church officials beginning with the pope. . . The second estate included the ruling classes of kings, nobility and knights, while the peasants and merchants made up the third estate. Any violation of the established authority within each estate was seen as a threat to the creation order, and subversive to the state and to the stability of Christian culture. Any attempt to leave one’s place in the chain was therefore an act of rebellion. It is critical to note that in the family, there was a hierarchical ordering of husband, wife, children and servants. Each was subordinate to the previous due to their immutable places in the Chain of Being.”

By Elizabethan times (1500s), the Chain of Being had become “one of those accepted commonplaces, more often hinted at or taken for granted than set forth.” (Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, Vintage Books, page 26.) The Elizabethan philosophers and theologians envisioned not just a hierarchical gradation of beings, but a “primacy” within each specific class of beings, such as “the dolphin among fishes, the eagle among birds, the lion among beasts, the emperor among men.” Ibid, p. 29-30. This conception of hierarchy among the animals is never hinted at in the biblical creation story— but it became part of Christian/Western thought through the infusion of pagan philosophy. Even now we still think of the lion as “the king of beasts.”

Another “commonplace” assumption of Elizabethan times was that “the order in the state duplicates the order of the macrocosm.” Ibid, p. 88. The Homily of Obedience written in 1547 stated,

“In the earth God has assigned kings, princes with other governors under them, all in good and necessary order. The water above is kept and raineth down in due time and season. The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightening, clouds, and all birds of the air do keep their order.” Ibid, p. 88.

Thus, building upon Greek pagan thought, the idea of a hierarchical order of authority in every strata of human relations, based upon the order of creation, became infused with Christianity to the point where no one even thought to question it. This legacy became part of our Western conception of the universe, which still exists today. Alan Myatt notes that a hierarchical understanding of the universe is the tendency in eastern systems of thought as well, “so universal in human society that it could be said to be the default mode of human existence.” He adds that in our churches today, “Traditional hierarchical biblical interpretation has been filtered through the lens of a cultural vision of human relations compromised by a pagan worldview [which] effectively blinded it to the egalitarian implications of the biblical text.” In other words, hierarchical thinking is so natural for humans, and so much a part of our Western mentality, that we have been reading it back into the biblical texts ever since the end of the Age of the Apostles.

With regards, then, to Jesus’ submission to the Father as a justification for hierarchy in human relationships (and particularly in marriage)— it seems apparent that the notion of the Trinity as a hierarchy of authority between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a continuation of this notion of the Great Chain of Being into the Godhead Itself. But is this the way the Bible actually describes the submission of the Son to the Father? Or to put it another way, is the submission of the Son to the authority of the Father shown by the Bible to be an eternal, divine absolute? Or was the submission of the Son to the Father a temporary matter, tied to the Son’s taking on of human nature and walking on earth as an example of human obedience? Is Jesus’ submission to the Father’s authority human and temporal, or divine and eternal?

Philippians 2:6-9 says that Jesus was “in the form of God, [and] thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” And Hebrews 2:9 says, “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.”

These verses show that Jesus laid down His complete equality with the Father in order to take on human nature and become an obedient servant. There is no indication that Jesus was subject to the Father, or under the Father’s authority, prior to this event, or that it continued after He had “tasted death” and then been “crowned with glory and honor.” It was only for a little while, during His time on earth, that He was made “ a little lower than the angels,” which according to Hebrews 2:6-7 is the nature of humanity. The state of the Son now, according to Phil. 2:9, is that “God hath highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name.” There is no indication that a state of authority and subordination continues to exist at the present time between the Father and the Son.

In fact, the very idea of authority and subordination within the Godhead in Its eternal divinity is actually incoherent. The triune God is One—three Persons, distinguishable but not divisible, Who in eternity are completely of one Will. Authority makes no sense unless there is a need for obedience; and there can be no need for obedience when there is no difference in wills. The Father did not want to send the Son to earth more than the Son wanted to go. The only time during which the wills of the Father and the Son could diverge, was when the human needs and desires of the incarnated, human Christ conflicted with His divine purpose. This is why Hebrews 5:8 says He “learned obedience by the things which he suffered.” Obedience was something the Son needed to learn on earth, because it could not have had any existence or meaning in the divine eternity of the Trinity, where there was nothing the Son wanted that the Father and the Spirit did not also want.

Even during Jesus’ time on earth we see incidents where Their divine mutuality shows. When soldiers come to arrest Jesus in Matthew 26:53, Jesus says, “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently [at once] give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be [that the Christ must die]?” Jesus was confident that the Father would do whatever Jesus wanted— but Jesus Himself was choosing to do what needed to be done.

In John 5:19, Jesus explains, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do.” He does not say that the Son does what the Father tells Him to do, but what He sees the Father doing. The Son is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) and “the express image of his person” (Heb. 1:3). This is an aspect of the divine mystery of the Trinity, and because of this, it isn’t really a good idea to try to compare human relationships, such as husbands and wives, to the interrelationships of the infinite Godhead. In any event, this comparison seems largely to be done as a justification of male authority over the female in marriage, rather than because the Bible itself makes any such comparison.

What, then can we say about 1 Cor 11:3: “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God”? As I have explained in detail elsewhere, the context surrounding 1 Corinthians 11:3 leads to understanding the word “head” in that verse as meaning “origin” or “source.” And what the passage actually says is that God is the “head” of “Christ,” not of “the Son.” “Christ means “the Anointed One/Messiah,” and refers specifically to the Son in His relations to humanity. He is the “Lamb, slain from the Foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8), which means that since the Creation Jesus has, first by anticipation and then by actuality, been the “Christ.” “God is the head [origin] of Christ” because it was from God that Christ came into the world. “Christ is the head [origin] of man” because, according to 1 Cor. 8:6 and Col 1:15, all things, including man, were created by and through Christ. “Man is the head [origin] of woman” because the first woman was taken out of the man’s side; but Paul goes on to say that even as the woman came from the man (at creation), so man comes from woman (in childbirth), and all things come from God (1 Cor. 11:12). This passage is not setting up a hierarchy: God-Christ-man-woman— because it is not stated in that order; instead, it is given in chronological order according to when each came into the world: the man, created by and through Christ; then the woman, taken out of the man; then the Christ, sent by God.

The last passage to address is 1 Cor. 15:28, the main passage used to support the idea that the Son is meant to be eternally, divinely under the authority of the Father: “And when all things shall be subdued to him [the Christ], then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” The context of this passage is the final redemption of the creation and the resurrection of the dead. Christ, being the first resurrected, is called the “firstfruits” of the resurrection (verse 20). Verse 21 points out that the verse is specifically about Christ as “man,” undoing the death that came through the first man, Adam, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (verse 22). Verse 24 says that the end will be consummated when Christ “delivers up the kingdom to God, even the Father.” Verses 26 and 27 speak of how “all things” (the entire creation) shall be put under Christ’s feet, with death the last enemy to be conquered. This shows a dynamic movement of authority between the Father and Jesus as the Christ, so that it is Christ, being Himself part of the creation in His humanity, who is in authority over the creation at this present time. The Father is not under Christ’s authority (“he is excepted, which did put all things under him”), but neither is the Father in authority over the creation: He has given that to Christ. In the end, then, Christ, now spoken of as “the Son” shall “also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him.” If anything, this speaks against the idea of eternal, divine subordination of the Son, for if there is going to come a time when the Son becomes subject to the Father, the fact is that He is not subject now, or there would be no point of speaking of a future time.

Greek scholar Philip Payne, in his book Man and Woman, One in Christ, points out that a distinction is being made between “God the Father" in verse 24, and “God” (“the God” in the original language, with definite article “the”) in verse 28. Verse 24 speaks of Christ as Man, Himself partaking of the nature of created things, Who will as the Ruler of the creation, give it up to the Father at the end. Verse 28 then says that as the Son, he will be subjected (or possibly, "subject Himself”) to the Father, that “the God” will be “all in all.” As Payne says, “Accordingly, 1 Cor 15:28 . . . may be better translated, ‘so that the Godhead may be all in all.’” The form of future tense used for “will be subject” does not, according to Payne, indicate that the thing being done “will be the condition forever thereafter.” (Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ, Zondervan (2009), p. 134-135.) If it did, it would contradict Ephesians 1:21, which says that God has placed Christ above all rule and power and “every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in the one to come.” (Emphasis added.) Rather, this passage may be seen as a one-time event at the end of this creation, that lays to rest the issue of authority as it exists in this creation, by placing it all under the Christ as Man (a Creature of this creation)— and then Jesus as the Son, with all the rule and authority He has as Christ-Man, placed under the Father, that the divine Godhead (Father, Son and Spirit) may be “all in all.”

In other words, the New Testament shows God the Father and God the Son sharing authority over the creation, so that it moves back and forth between them depending on times and circumstances. Authority of the Father over the Son only makes sense within the human nature of the Son, not in His divine eternity with the Father and the Spirit. We cannot, then, use the submission of the Son to the Father at certain times and events as an indication that the nature of the Godhead is a divine hierarchy. In fact, if we view the Trinity as a permanent hierarchy within Its divine essence, then we must view the nature of the Father as essentially different from that of the Son, in that the Father is eternally suited to rule the Son and the Son is eternally suited to be ruled by the Father. However, for the Persons of the Trinity to be different in essence, contradicts the very nature of the Trinity, rendering them separate gods instead of One God.

To sum up, then: The Bible does not actually teach that God has a divine plan for authority such that there is a hierarchically ordered chain of command in every area of life, extending top-down from a hierarchical Trinity. The Bible teaches that in the New Creation, equality of status is the plan of God, with servanthood replacing authority, and those who lead, leading by example rather than by right. Jesus was quite accurate when He said that hierarchies of authority and rule were of the “Gentiles” in Matthew 20:25, because the concept known as the “Great Chain of Being” was formed in Greek thought and was never taught by our Savior. We are Gentiles also, and we have taken hierarchy for granted, missing the impact of Christ’s words that it is to be “not so among you,” for too long.