TOKENS PODCAST: S3E16
Conservative American Christianity has insisted that we must not let the wider culture determine what we think or do; and yet, Dr. Barr argues, it's precisely on the issue of the subordination of women that the conservative American church has been so deeply shaped by the broader culture of patriarchy. Then that patriarchy as been read back into the prescriptions of the New Testament, rather than seeing the profound critiques of patriarchy actually found in the New Testament. This and more, all playing off Dr. Barr’s book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Plus live satire from Tokens Show’s own Brother Preacher, aka Greg Lee.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Beth Allison Barr received her B.A. from Baylor University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses primarily on women and gender identity in late medieval England, how the advent of Protestantism affected women in Christianity, and medieval attitudes towards women in sermons across the Reformation era. Beth is the author of The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England, co-editor of The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centuries of Baptist Interpretation, and author of more than a dozen articles (published and forthcoming). She is currently working on her next book, Women in English Sermons, 1350-1700. She is also a regular contributor to The Anxious Bench, a religious history blog on Patheos which has also paved the way for her contributions in Christianity Today and The Washington Post. Beth has been very active in service to her discipline—serving as president of two historical societies (the Texas Medieval Association and the Conference on Faith and History), serving on the diversity committee and program committee for the American Society of Church History, serving on the sexual harassment committee for the Sixteenth Century Society, and serving as a board member for The Medieval Review (2015) and the Conference on Faith and History since 2013, as well as CFH program chair (2016) and Vice President (2016). Since receiving tenure in the History Department in 2014, Beth has served as Graduate Program Director in History (since 2016), received a Centennial Professor Award (2018), and received appointment (2018) as a Faculty-in-Residence for the LEAD Living & Learning Community in Allen/Dawson Residential Hall.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Beth: I grew up thinking that ingrained in the Bible was this idea of not only male headship as the background noise of the Bible, but that it was actually at the forefront of God's calling.
Lee: That's Dr. Beth Allison Barr, Professor of History and Associate Dean at Baylor University, and author of a new book entitled The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.
Beth: It wasn't until really my late college, probably early graduate years, that I began to realize that what I thought was distinctively Christian looked very much like the rest of the world.
Complementarianism is patriarchy. It's Christian patriarchy, but it's a new word for it.
Lee: Dr. Barr is making a provocative argument that I sum up this way: conservative American Christianity has insisted we must not let the wider culture determine what we think or do; and yet, she argues, it's done exactly that. It's precisely on the issue of the subordination of women that the conservative American Church has been so deeply shaped by the broader culture. Christians have then read patriarchy back into the prescriptions of the New Testament, when, in fact, the New Testament actually challenges patriarchal practices and assumptions. Or we might put it this way: in fighting the culture wars by advocating for the subordination of women as biblical truth, the patriarchy of the church is actually undercutting biblical Christianity, rather than defending it.
Beth: I believe as Christians, we are called to be different from the world, but in the way we treat women, we're not any different. Christianity isn't telling us to do what the world is doing in regards to women. It's telling us you know, to do it the way of Jesus.
Lee: It's a provocative and compelling argument. Our interview here will not, and cannot, answer all the questions you might have about particular biblical texts, though she addresses several in the interview. But she does provide a historical and cultural context out of which to ask different sorts of questions.
All this is coming right up.
Lee: Dr. Beth Allison Barr, is a Professor of History and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Baylor University, received her B.A. from Baylor and her M.A. and PhD in medieval history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Barr has been a contributor to The Anxious Bench, Christianity today, and The Washington post. Her research has focused on women and religion, especially in medieval and early modern England. Today we're discussing her newest book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Welcome Professor Barr.
Beth: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Lee: Yeah. So delighted to have you. Finishing up the end of the semester there in Waco.
Beth: Yes, we have graduations today, tomorrow and Saturday. So, busy time on campus.
Lee: Yes. Yes, indeed. Well, we're glad to spend some time with you at the end of the semester. But you know, coming off of final exam time. I thought it might be fun if I could start with you with giving you a pop quiz and asking you, um, because, because the number of, you know, I think your students might appreciate me doing this.
Um, but given that a number of people listening may not know some of the basic terms that we're going to be working with a lot. I think what I'd like to do is to start, if you would give us kind of, kind of quick replies to definitions of some terms, and then maybe give us one of your favorite historical examples of that and, or a contemporary example of that. So how's that pop quiz sound?
Beth: That sounds good. That sounds good. Let's see if I pass it.
Lee: All right. Okay. Let's see how you do. All right. First one, patriarchy. What is patriarchy?
Beth: Yeah, patriarchy is a system that values women as less than men. And it persists in almost every culture and every historical time period, although it persists in different ways. A good historical example of that is the wage gap. You know, we think about today, we think about how women make 70, 75 cents to the man's dollar for the same job. And this is actually something that has persisted throughout history. In fact, as far back as the 14th century, we know that the wage gap between what women were doing for the same jobs as men was exactly the same as it is today. So that is an example of the persistence of patriarchy, a system that undervalues women and values men's labor and men's work and men's contributions as more valuable than women's.
Lee: I'm going to ask you to expand also upon a second historical example, you give in the book, between the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, which you might want to tell folks briefly what that is. And women in Texas today.
Beth: Yeah, no, the Epic of Gilgamesh is a text that I teach in my world history classes. It's from ancient Sumeria, and it is one of the oldest stories that we have in existence. It is also a really famous story because it contains a flood narrative that's similar to what happened in Genesis. And one of the things that I talk about with the Epic of Gilgamesh is I talk about how the women in the Epic of Gilgamesh function in surprisingly similar ways to the way women are expected to function in complementarian churches, in patriarchal churches today. And what's surprising about this is ancient Sumeria is not a Christian culture. It is what we would probably consider to be a Pagan culture. It did not worship the Christian God and yet the way that it's expectations that it put on women, are what modern Christians claim, makes, you know, Christian women distinct. And so that's one of the things that I wanted to emphasize about it. It's also a really fun tale. I encourage you to read it if you never have before.
Lee: Yeah. It is a remarkable, remarkable story. All right. Question number two. Complementarianism.
Beth: Yes, I already used it once and realized we hadn't defined it. Complementarianism is patriarchy. It's Christian patriarchy, but it's a new word for it. Actually in the book I talk about where it really started emerging is in the early modern world, but it got picked up in the 1980s by people who are advocating for male headship and female subordination. Primarily those folk who are gravitating around the council for biblical manhood and womanhood. Anyway, involved in those theological debates, you can think about Wayne Grudem. You can think about Al Mohler. And the word complementarity was to describe what they argued was the distinctive that women and men are divinely ordained for distinct roles that compliment each other, but yet within them is an inherent suppression of women.
That women's distinct God-given role is to be under masculine authority. And so that's what complementarianism has become. There were a lot of notable advocates of male headship that actually didn't like the term complementarity, complementarianism is simply a pretty word for Christian patriarchy.
Lee: Egalitarianism number three.
Beth: Yeah, egalitarianism, you know, some people say that egalitarianism is the opposite of patriarchy, or the opposite of complementarianism, but that's actually not true. The opposite of complementarianism or patriarchy would be matriarchy, which is not what I'm advocating for. Um, egalitarianism, or neutrality, is simply the idea that women and men are made equally in the image of God, and that God gifts us equally. That it is not based upon our sex, that God gives us our callings in ministry or gives us our callings in life. And while there are distinct things that make us women and make us men, those aren't necessarily connected to the callings that God gives us. So God uses women as preachers, just like God uses men as preachers.
And God uses men as elementary school teachers as well as God uses women in these ways. So that's simply what egalitarian mutuality is. And it's also saying that in the marriage relationship that women and men are called to submit to each other as to the Lord. And it doesn't emphasize a hierarchy where one is always wielding authority over the other.
Lee: That seems to me to be a terribly important point. That one, you're not arguing for matriarchy that is, you're not arguing for any sort of hierarchy, but the alternative in scripture is a sort of mutual submission that is defined by the way of Christ.
Beth: That's exactly right.
Lee: So I was trying to think after reading your book which I've just found terribly helpful. And I think there were quite a number of the times where you just opened my eyes up to areas that I had been completely unaware. Many of the medieval texts that we'll talk about here in a bit being among them, as well as some alternative ways to interpret some of the Pauline texts that I had not yet come across.
I think that your whole thesis as well, the way you couch your argument, I think is particularly provocative. So let me see if I can give you a quick summary of what I hear you saying, because I think it’s a particularly provocative way you're posing your argument. Namely, that conservative Christianity has has argued we must not let the culture determine what we think or do. And yet you're arguing that with regard to this question that we've drunk so deeply of patriarchal assumptions, that we've been deeply shaped by the culture even while we were saying we should not be shaped by the culture around issues around patriarchy. Is that a fair way to summarize kind of a lot of what you're getting at?
Beth: That is an extremely fair way to summarize that. I believe as Christians, we are called to be different from the world, but in the way we treat women, we're not any different. So that's what I'm trying to get folk to recognize.
Lee: Yeah, so that's complementarianism, and so-called biblical womanhood, are themselves historical and cultural products of patriarchalism.
So the fact that you kind of give us so much historical material to work with, I think is particularly helpful in helping us see that. So will you talk to us a little bit about the ways in which you've learned through your historical study different possibilities than what we have presumed to be biblical.
Beth: Yes. That's a good question. So as I said, in many ways I grew up in a complementarian structure. I grew up with reading the texts the way that I, so many of my evangelical friends still read the text with thinking that ingrained in the Bible was this idea of not only male headship as the background noise of the Bible, but that it was actually at the forefront of God's calling. That God had gifted men in a way that was distinctly different from women and that women were not supposed to usurp those leadership roles. And I was taught that that was actually in the Bible. It wasn't until really my late college, probably early graduate years, that I began to realize that what I thought was distinctively Christian.
As I said, it looked very much like the rest of the world and it caused me to start thinking more critically about some of those texts that I had been told, you know, indicated that women were to be under the authority of men. And of course, one of the big ones is Paul and thinking about Paul and what Paul is writing about women and one early scholar in my life who had a great impact on me.
He's a former scholar at Baylor, he's now retired, but his name is Charles Talbert. And when I was a very young faculty member at Baylor. In fact, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the religion department at Baylor. And I had lunch with him and I was talking with him about how I'd been teaching in my church history class. And we'd been talking about the Roman world and I'd been talking about women's roles in the Greco Roman world. And I had been talking about the Oppian law.
Lee: Let me insert a bit of commentary here. She’s referring to the Oppian law which was passed about 215 BC. The Roman empire had recently been handed a grave defeat at the hand of the general hannibal. It had been their greatest military defeat to date. They were cash strapped, and in an effort to raise cash they did a number of things, one of which was passing the Oppian law. Women could no longer dress in luxurious clothes riding carriages in Rome, except on special occasions, or possess more than half an ounce of gold. They wanted the women not to extravagantly spend wealth, and instead spend it more on Rome. Rome won, came out of the war victorious. And then, a number of years later, the law had not been yet repealed. The women grew tired of the restrictions and they began to display that they had had enough. They protested, they blockaded the streets, even the pathways to the forum, demanding that the law be repealed...
Beth: I've been talking about women's resistance to various things. And so I was talking about the Oppian law and I told Charles Talbert. I said, you know, every time I read that passage, it reminds me of Paul and the passages, women don't talk out in public but ask your husbands privately at home. Women are to be silent in the churches. So that passage in 1 Corinthians 14, and it is very similar to what is said by a famous orator speaking against the women who were protesting the Oppian law in Rome. And he says, why are you running around in the streets? You need to be at home and asking your husbands at home, women are not supposed to lead or be out in public. And so I told Dr. Talbert. I said, every time I read that, it reminds me of Paul and he just looked at me and he said, do you know why that is?
And I thought about it. And I was like, you mean, is that a Corinthian quotation? Because what we know in Paul, what we know in Corinthians, especially that Paul has a strategy where he quotes the things that are happening in the world around him, and then he refutes them. And we see him doing this, especially in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7. And scholars mostly agree this is what he's doing in 6 and 7. And so it was this real epiphany to me, cause I was like, is that what Paul's doing in 1 Corinthians 14? And, so it was a way, you know, it changed because suddenly I realized that I might have not been entirely understanding what was going on in Paul. But it also made me see how there was a different way to read the text. It also helped me understand, because if you look at Paul as a whole, one of the things that always bothered me is Paul is always trying to get people to get over their sort of not important differences and work together. And it seemed to be that these passages, where he was calling women out, didn't flow with the rest of what Paul was trying to do, they seem somewhat, you know, opposed or estranged. And so suddenly I realized that if Paul is actually not telling women to be silent, but he's speaking against the Roman culture that actually fits much more with Paul himself.
And it, also, you know, as I said, helps make sense that Christianity isn't telling us to do what the world is doing in regards to women. It's telling us you know, to do it the way of Jesus. So it was a really remarkable moment for me when I realized that I could read the text differently.
Lee: Yes. I think that particular reading that you posed there of 1 Corinthians 14 was one I had not come across yet. And typically those who are pushing against complementarian or patriarchal readings of 1 Corinthians 14 will simply say in the cultural context, there were things going on in the church there that people are taking Paul so seriously with regard to equality between men and women, that the women are speaking out of turn and they need to be silent. But this notion that he's actually quoting a Roman law text or alluding to a Roman law text as the text he's setting up to argue against is a particularly helpful sort of possibility, I think in interpretation there.
Uh, have you gotten much critique from New Testament scholars on that particular reading?
Beth: Yeah. You know, that's kind of funny. I was terrified to write this Paul chapter because I'm not a New Testament scholar, I'm a historian. And so one of the things that I did is I got New
Testament scholars to read it early on. And you know, from the ones that I've had reading it, I haven't really gotten a lot of pushback on it. I mean, most scholars, biblical scholars agree that Paul's not telling women to be silent here for all time. I mean, that's pretty much, across the board by many, many scholars and something else is going on in the text. And the reason they say Paul can't be doing it is because we know Paul's allows women to speak.
You know, Romans 16 really blows up any notion that Paul is telling women that they have to be silent and that they cannot teach for all time in any of those passages. So most scholars agree that Paul is doing something else, and sort of the main theories on it is like what you said that Paul is addressing a particular group of women who are doing something that he's calling out, which is possible.
Another theory is that these blinds and this is, you know, favored by many folk is that somebody inserted these lines, that these are a Roman quotation that somebody inserted into the text to try to control women, because of the authority that they were exercising in the church.
Or, you know, as I said, that they are Roman quotations, that Paul's inserted the way that he does in several other places throughout Corinthians. So that theory makes the most sense to me. And when I've talked to people who even disagree with me, they're like, yeah, but you know, I might prefer the one where somebody else inserted this, but they all agree that these aren't Paul's words, that Paul is not telling women to be silent. So if that helps a little bit.
Lee: Yeah. Another significant section that you spend a fair amount of time discussing are the so-called household codes from Ephesians 5. So, give us a bit about your take, kind of summarize what's there and give us a bit of your take on how you suggest we read those.
Beth: Again, this is one of those illuminations that I had in my historical studies. And when I started studying women's history and I actually started off in the classical world and kind of moved up to the medieval world, my first goal was to become a classical scholar. And so I started reading quite a bit about women in the ancient world. And one of the first texts that I read was Aristotle, which I talk about in the making of biblical womanhood. And Aristotle has a very famous household code; he's of course from the fourth century BC. And in that household code where he talks about, you know, in household codes or how to govern your household and how to govern your household as somebody worthy of being involved in politics in the Greco-Roman world, somebody who is, you know, the way that they govern their household is a model of how the state works. And so it's all very critical. And I noticed with Aristotle that the emphasis in Aristotle's household codes is male authority. That's really what he's talking to men about men telling them why they have the right to lead their houses, why they have the right to be completely in charge over the women, children, slaves in their house.
And in fact, Aristotle says that the condition of men is to lead and the condition of women is to obey. And so it's this very, very patriarchal household code. And most of the household codes that we, you know, we find in many other Greco-Roman texts, they mimic this, this very patriarchal approach that we find in Aristotle. And then when you compare that to what we read in the Bible, I mean, it's just, it's really hard for me to see when I look at the harsh patriarchal texts of the Greco Roman world and compare them with the household code of the New Testament. It's just night and day. There are so many scholars who have commented on this, uh, Lucy Peppiatt is one of my favorite theologians. And you know, she's just like the grounding and Scott McKnight too, in this part, you know, the grounding of the New Testament household codes are not in masculine authority. They are in God and they are calling for all of the household to work together and it's just absolutely different from anything we find in the Greco-Roman world. And it doesn't emphasize male authority.
Lee: You also helpfully pointed to the fact that in the New Testament household codes, Ephesians 5, you have women and slaves given a sort of moral value. The fact that they are acknowledged and the fact that they are given instructions on how to behave is itself an alternative to the Aristotelian sort of household code as well.
Beth: Right. No, exactly. And I think that's one of the things that I think really makes it clear that the household codes are not emphasizing masculinity authority, because of how they bring women, children, slaves into the conversation. And so many scholars have also noted that if the household codes are read literally in regards to women, they also have to be read literally in regards to slaves.
And this is something that I think we would all react against. We would say that this is clearly not what's going on. And you know, we can even think about the case of an SMS, et cetera, who is treated very differently, you know, the way that he is brought into the household, even as a slave. And so, you know what Paul is doing is not trying to replicate the authority structure of the Roman world.
He's trying to show Christians how to live appropriately within the confines of their Roman world but doing it in the Jesus way. And so the Jesus way is that, yes, wives obey in Roman culture, but husbands are called to love their wives as Christ loves the church. And husbands are also called to be mutually submissive to their wives.
I mean, this is just absolutely radical. And you know, slaves and children even being spoken to in the Greco-Roman world, slaves and children would not be in the main assembly room, listening to instructions, being given to the male household head. They would not be included in that conversation yet God makes sure that they're included in the conversation of the Bible.
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
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Always love hearing from folks, and grateful for your feedback which you can send to podcast@tokensshow.com. This past week got some delightful correspondence from Dr. Andy Polk, Professor at Middle Tennessee State University; congratulations to him on his new book coming out from Cornell University Press entitled Faith in Freedom: Propaganda, Presidential Politics, and the Making of an American Religion.
You've been listening to our interview with Dr. Beth Allison Barr on her book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Coming up, we'll hear more from Beth about the ways in which our notions of Biblical interpretation may be challenged through the lens of egalitarianism; as well as some of her own personal experiences with the power of the patriarchy.
Part two in just a moment.
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Dr. Beth Allison Barr.
In addition to these alternative ways of reading these Pauline texts, and you give alternative possibilities with other texts as well. But you also point to the fact that we simply have ignored or not paid nearly as much attention to other texts. For example, you, you alluded to Roman 16 a moment ago, but talk to us a little bit more about important texts in your mind that we have not sufficiently paid attention to.
Beth: Yeah, that's great. So that's, uh, you know, sort of a basic interpretation. One of the things I think I say is, you know, consistency is a strategy that is encouraged when we think about interpreting the Bible. And when we think about women in the Bible, we have to realize that if Paul is allowing like in Roman 16, which I do think gets not the attention that it should. And I think a lot of that has to do with our English Bible translations today, that have worked really hard to deemphasize women's roles in the Roman 16. But if we actually look at the text and what it says, it puts women in all of the highest leadership roles in the early church. We have a woman called out as an apostle. We have a woman called out as a deacon. We have women as house church leaders. And so, you know, in fact, more women than men in Romans 16, are described by their ministry. And we have 10 women overall in Romans 16 that are called out by Paul as being significant leaders in the early church. You know, I was being instrumental in the spreading of the gospel. and we simply do not emphasize that. In many of our modern English Bible translations, even though Phoebe is described as a deacon that is often downplayed in our translations. We have footnotes that say, even though she's called a deacon, what that really means is that she's a servant and it doesn't give her the same leadership as the male deacons, that is something we read into the text. There's nothing in the text that suggests that she wasn't serving as a deacon, just like the male deacons. And in fact, Carolyn Osiek and Kevin Madigan tell us that she is the only named person serving in a diaconate role at a church. You know, there are other deacons that are mentioned, but they're not associated with the church. And so she's our first one that's associated with the Church of Cenchreae. So I mean that's a text that we just absolutely overlook.
We also overlook Junia as an apostle. You know, this has been a very problematic text for people who try to support male headship. This is Romans 16:7, and it's ironic to me because I think of Dorothy Patterson's words, where she says that people who try to argue for women to have leadership in the church, that they have to do strange things to the text and gymnastics. And I'm like, oh my gosh, they have had to do so many strange things to the text to try to write Junia out as an apostle. Because the text says Andronicus and Junia who are prominent among the apostles.
And so the two ways that we have tried to write them out, you, know, is first with Junia. We tried to change her name to Junius. We tried to make her a man and this happened in the 19th century primarily to minimize female leadership, because people are like, you know, she can't really be an apostle because women can't be apostles. So she's going to be Junius. There's no textual support for her name to be Junius, we don't even know the name Junius exists in the early Roman world, whereas there's a lot of Junias. So then when they kind of realized they couldn't do that anymore, they did what the ESV strategy is now and that's, they tried to change the preposition.
So instead of her being prominent among the apostles or noteworthy, she is now simply recognized by the apostle she's noteworthy to the apostles. And so by changing that preposition, they make her, instead of being one of the apostles, they make her just a woman that the apostles know.
And so that's the new strategy to try to write her out. It is also not texturally supported. The strategy didn't come about until they were trying to figure out how to minimize her role as a leader. So you know, I think Romans 16 by itself shows us that we cannot cut women out of leadership and teaching in the church because women were in leadership and teaching in the early church.
So that's one text. The minimization of it has had significant implications for women.
Lee: This conversation brings up something that here is a parenthetical, but I think it's a terribly important parenthetical question, observation. And that is that many times in debates about such issues, it's common to hear people say kind of, as you alluded to a moment ago, you know, I just want to read the Bible and get the plain sense of the meaning of the words. And yet what you're pointing to is that, that sort of perhaps well-intentioned desire is nonetheless a naive one that's refusing to realize the ways in which we're all constantly having to navigate cultural presuppositions in the reading of a text.
Beth: Right. No, I think that's great. And let me comment on it as a historian and a Christian. So one of the things that I find remarkable about the Bible is that its message, the gospel of Jesus, the story, how God came to save us from ourselves comes through. No matter what translation that we use.
It's a very consistent message. And even Bart Ehrman, of course, who was one of the major critics of the New Testament of the Bible itself. He says that most of the mistranslations as he calls them and the problems that have happened in the textual evidence. He says these don't affect what he calls the big story. They affect the little stories of the Bible. And so I think on the one hand we can have a lot of assurance in the integrity of the message of the gospel. Yet at the same time, we have to realize that the Bible is a historical artifact and it has been translated and it is spoken, you know, God used people to convey his message of salvation.
And so we have to realize that those people lived within certain cultures and that there are things that it's harder for us to understand because we are not in that culture. I use an example in the Bible. I talk about how in Corinthians that on the one hand, the story, we understand that there are problems in the Corinthian Church.
We understand that some people are saying that they're, you know, more important than other people, you know, there's problems going on within the church. And so we get that but since we are historical outsiders to it, some of the nuances about what those problems are or exactly what Paul is doing, we miss them. Now history helps us understand them better. So my point is not to say that ordinary people can't understand the Bible for themselves because I think they can. But I think we also have to realize that the Bible was written in a particular historical time period. And if we want to catch all of the nuances, if we want to have a complete understanding of better, you know, sort of understanding about what was really going on, we can't only say, what does the text say, to me today? But we have to say what did the text say to them at that time? Which requires more effort on our part. To go and to kind of try to figure out how it actually worked within that, you know, say the New Testament within that first century setting. And so I do think as Christians, we have become a little bit lazy.
Saying that I'm just doing exactly what the Bible says, can be a lazy reading, because it doesn't require much of ourselves. And it also means that we are ignoring the fact that we are reading the Bible through our modern cultural lens. All of us carry something to the text, all of us carry something to the text.
All historians carry something to the texts that they study, we have to realize what we carry with us. And so modern Christians, modern American Christians carry our modern American values to the Bible when we read it. But the world of the Bible was not a modern American world. It was a first century Greco Roman world.
So I think just being aware there's no such thing as a truly objective historian. It's just that we have to be aware of what we carry to the text. So I am trying to help Christians understand to be aware of what they carry with them when they read these passages about women.
Lee: Yeah. Let me point to this subtitle of your book; How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. And so, in laying out the history of patriarchy complementarianism you illustrate that this has not been merely an issue, but it has become a central facet according to some, that lies at the heart of the gospel. How does this, from a historical perspective, how does that happen?
Beth: Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So I think what has happened, when we look at history there has never been a golden age for women in history. There has never been a golden age for women in church history. So I think that's important to remember. I'm not advocating for the fact that patriarchy did not exist because as a historian, I know that patriarchy has always existed. I think it's a product of human civilization.
We have to be aware of that, but what we do see is that there has been a shift in how the church has understood patriarchy. And whereas, you know, in some sense, patriarchy was part like let's take the medieval world. One of the historians that I quote in the book, Nicola Bayrou, and she's a very good French medieval historian who works on medieval religious folk, including on sermons.
And she remarks how, you know, these medieval theologians knew the Pauline texts. They knew that women be silent passages, but they believed those passages applied only to wives. Because wives were legally under the authority of their husbands. And so women who were not wives, Paul didn't apply to.
I mean, it's really kind of an interesting concept if you think about it. And so we can see in that medieval worldview that female subordination was not considered to be part of the gospel. It was a condition for some women, it was a human condition of this life. So what happened in the modern evangelicalism, which is just absolutely fascinating from a scholarly perspective, is that this idea of female subordination got attached to the gospel itself.
And in fact, we can think about the words of people like Tim Keller who said that, even though he thinks that people who don't believe in male headship are still Christian, he says that he thinks that they have a looser understanding of the texts. That they've had to do something to the Bible, which makes them not as good Bible readers and not as faithful Christians as those who adhere to male headship. And so there's this idea that the truest sense of understanding the Bible, the truest sense of understanding the gospel is only for those who believe in male headship and female subordination. So where did this come from? How did this idea come from? I think it was born in the post reformation world.
You know, one of the things that the reformation theology did for women is that it really did elevate them from the medieval view in which women were seen as broken. There's something wrong with the female body in the medieval view, which is what they inherited from the Greco Roman view.
And the reformation says no. Women are made equally in the image of God. And I write in the book, you know, something that I honestly believe reformation theology should have set women free, but it didn't. Because the church allowed the patriarchy of culture to creep back in. So reformation theology says women are equal to men in the eyes of God that we are both made in the image of God.
But yet in the practice because of the practice of patriarchy, the church, you know, if you actually follow reformation theology, you can't write women out of leadership because you've said that they are equally created in the image of God, and equally called by God. So, what we see happening is we see a change in strategy to push women out of leadership roles.
And we see a increased emphasis on using the Pauline texts. Women be silent. Women cannot teach men to push women out of leadership roles is the post reformation thing. And then you could think about and you know, in the 19th century, when we have the rise of suffrage and we have women fighting to get the right to vote, to get the same legal, and economic rights as men.
It seems to me, it's no surprise that we also begin to see an emphasis in the church on trying to deemphasize women's leadership in the Bible. It's in the 19th century that we start to see Junia written out as Junius, and we start to see this great increase on the household codes and that women are to be always under the authority of their husbands.
And then in the 20th century, this takes two more important shifts I think, with the rise of the concept of an inerrancy. And inerrancy is such a loaded term, people get all upset about the term and as a historian I'm like, you know what inerrancy is not in the Bible. We created the term inerrancy. Inerrancy, if you think about, do you believe the Bible is trustworthy? I would say yes. The Bible is absolutely completely trustworthy. Do I believe that the Bible is completely perfect in every way, without any error as interpreted by an early 20th century group of men? No. And that's essentially what inerrancy is.
And, it says, if you don't interpret the Bible, the way I interpret the Bible, then you are not reading the Bible correctly. And that to me is a very dangerous argument. And with this inerrancy, was it was bundled up with that women have to be under the leadership of men. You cannot allow women to be in leadership positions. And inerrancy kind of explodes in the evangelical world in the post-World War II world, you know, when we definitely know there's a push to get women to get out of work, out of jobs, and back into the household. And this coincides with a push within the Christian Church for women to do the same.
And then of course it also gets connected during this time to what I call a revival of an old heresy of Arianism, which argues that Jesus is subordinate to God, the father. And we see this heresy reviving along the same time that we see biblical womanhood exploding in the 1970s and 80s.
And this heresy says that Jesus is always subordinate to God the father, which means that women should always be subordinate to men. And this is a dangerous heresy and it is shocking to me how you know, Christians who argue that you have to do something fast and loose with the text to allow women in leadership are doing something fast and loose with the Trinity to try to emphasize male headship.
Lee: Yeah. That's fascinating. So this is not a merely academic set of questions for you, as you indicate in the book. This personally, you indicate a very personal impact upon you and your husband because of your seeking to question some of this.
Beth: Yeah. This did become deeply personal and like everything in ministry, it was complicated and got messier than we ever intended. My husband and I have been in ministry together all the while that I've been in academia. We got married 10 days before he started seminary at Southeastern Baptist Theological. And I started a PhD program at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So we've walked this road together, all of our lives. We've been married now 24 years. So it was sort of gradual within our lives. As I began to have more of a disconnect between what I found being taught in my church about complementarian roles and what I began to see was not actually something in the Bible, but with something founded in history. And these were conversations, my husband and I started having, I think, you know, even though we both originally were complementarian, I would say we were probably pretty soft complementarians. You know, we kind of gave credence to male headship and, you know, senior pastor of a church, a man, but we, both of us agreed that women could teach and women can do all sorts of other things in the church. But what happened to us is as our ministry progressed, we began to see a tightening in the complementarian world on what women could do in the church.
We began to see sort of you, know, and you could see this with tracing rise of biblical manhood and womanhood with the council for biblical manhood and womanhood, the popularity of John Piper and Wayne Grudem's book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. What women could do in churches began to get smaller and smaller and smaller.
And this bothered both my husband and I. Of course, we were also in youth ministry and we had great concerns about telling 13 year old boys that there was something innate about them that allowed them to have teaching authority, over grown women. And, you know, there's something dangerous in that. You can say, you know, there's something innately about men that makes them able to have this.
So we began to be concerned about this as it grew in our ministry. And so mostly our strategy was to try to avoid it to not directly contradict the church, but to also not teach it or support it. And so that was sort of our strategy for a long time until it became more and more oppressive within our church.
And it was also when I sort of hit the wall where I was like, I just can't support this anymore. And my husband hit that wall with me. And so we made a really hard decision and it wasn't the only problem in the church, but it was part of it. And we made a really hard decision to try to push it, to try to push the conversation at our church, to see if we could get a woman to teach a high school Sunday school class. And that was the beginning of him being fired at that church. And it caused a lot of trauma within our life. And it also caused me to finally realize that I couldn't be silent anymore, that these teachings about women were not only not biblical, but they were harmful. They were harmful to the gospel of Christ.
Lee: Near the end of her book, Dr. Barr explores another way in which all this relates to her personally, in the rise of the churchtoo and metoo movements. She argues that we must no longer ignore the apparently increasing correlation between complementarian structures and abuse of women. Often this correlation, she suggested, is dismissed simply as an example of men within those systems as not acting appropriately within those systems. Yet, she argues, those systems do not give voice to women in the same ways as they give voice to men; women's concerns are therefore more likely dismissed. More she insists, when a system tells, for example, thirteen year old boys that they have an innate teaching authority over adult women, this inevitably leads to the conclusion that there is something preferred to male bodies than female bodies, and thus to all manner of problems.
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
This has been our episode with Dr. Beth Allison Barr, Professor of History and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Baylor University on her newest book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.
Lee Camp: This is our last episode of season three; but fear not, fear not. We've got some stellar material coming up in season four. Stay tuned, and we'll look forward to releasing new episodes soon. In the meanwhile, you'll have opportunity to get caught up on any of our episodes that you've missed.
If you've liked this particular podcast episode, you will likely also want to check out two other most downloaded episodes: our episode with my colleague Dr. Lauren Smelser White, with her crash-course on Christian feminism; and my interview with Dr. Kristin Kobez Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne.
All this talk of biblical interpretation reminds me of--well, who else, and perhaps you long time Tokens Show followers suspect who this reminds me of, none other than Brother Preacher, and one of his famed homilies on biblical marriage. A trigger warning: this last segment is not for you if satire is not your thing. You have been warned.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, Brad Perry, Tom Anderson, and Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White and Blue Dot Sessions. Live performance you're hearing here is by our Most Outstanding Horeb Mountain Boys featuring Buddy Greene, Bryan Sutton, Scott Mulvahill, Chris Brown, Andy Leftwich, and Jeff Taylor.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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