We've had extensive conversations on this blog on the issue of women in
ministry. The topic comprises the last third of Scot's book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible
But this is an issue that we cannot avoid - not in the context of "Christian Virtue": and not in the context of "Missional Campus Ministry." One of the most potent criticisms of the church within the academy is directed at the view of women presented by some who purpose to speak for the church - for God - on this matter. As a Christian, a scientist, an academic, and a woman - I find this conflict particularly troubling. I have been asked how I can be a thinking woman and a Christian much more often than I have been asked how I can be a scientist and a Christian.
A few weeks ago Scot posted a series in Chris Armstrong's book Patron Saints for Postmoderns: Ten from the Past Who Speak to Our Future
There is a short volume Are Women Human? containing two essays by Sayers on this very topic. Anyone who reads both this book and her novel Gaudy Night will immediately recognize the coherence of her overall view.
I am going to put up a few posts on this book over the next week or so, focused on some of Sayers' key points. Today I would like to put forward a brief excerpt from this book and open the floor for discussion.
We are all human. The first premise of Dorothy Sayers in these essays is quite simple. We are all human first and deserve to be taken first and foremost as individual human beings. Depending on context male or female may, or may not, be the most important secondary descriptor. Sayers' view is grounded in her self understanding, her experience, and her view of both Jesus and God.
Toward the end of her essay The Human-Not-Quite-Human Sayers gives an interesting view of Jesus (and a quite harsh view of the Church). This is where I would like to start the discussion.
God, of course, may have his own opinion, but the Church is reluctant to endorse it. I think that I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, somewhere, to explain away its text. Mary's of course was the better part - the Lord said so and we must not precisely contradict Him. But we will be careful not to despise Martha. No doubt He approved of her too. We could not get on without her, and indeed (having paid lip-service to God's opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her. For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow.
Perhaps it is no wonder that women were the first at the Cradle and the last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words or deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.
But we might easily deduce it from his contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day. Women are not human; nobody shall persuade that they are human; let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead. (p. 46-47 from 1981 printing)
Wow - quite a no-holds-barred statement. As Sayers sees it the Jesus of the gospels, the divine Son of God, treats women as first, foremost, and solely human. No qualifiers, no caveats. The Church got it wrong.
What do you think of Sayers' description of Jesus and his view of and approach toward women? Does she get it right?
If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.
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In Pelikan's commentary on Acts, he notes that the term "brother" could have been one of filial affection -- e.g., the way we might say "our brother James says something interesting in comment #51...". It seems implausible to me, but I understand the approach.
i think that the reason everyone is so hung up on gender is because if we define gender then "someone" gets to decide who gets to do what and who should rule whom.
Men and women are capable in doing many things. We adapt. We learn. We grow. the discussion on equality is irrelevant. The discussion on what a woman or a man is, is irrelevant.
We should have the freedom to do what we are able to do and what God calls us to do. The anxiety over it all is because the norms are ruffled.
Women are fully human, different but not incapable of leadership and a number of other vocations.
I too want to get back to the point that Jesus treated women not as something to label--is she a complementarian, is she an equalitarian, is she a virgin, is she a whore, is she the adored, is she the bad mother, does she have too much sex with or not enough and of course, the biggie, is she ugly or good looking--but as human beings. I wonder why it is so hard just to accept women as humans. It seems so simple. We're more than a relationship to a man and we're more than virginity/sex and we're more than mothers and we're more than looks. We are sacred beings with an intelligence and grace.
RJS, what "got into me" was probably the tone I "heard" in your response to dopderbeck that probably came more from all the things I have heard from other Protestants than from anything you intended. But what I did get from your comment was a rejection of dopderbeck's point. And that bugged me because it was personal and his point was absolutely valid.
I was well into adulthood and a long distance from her when my mother converted to Catholicism. However, in combination with a lot of other things, my mother has found more healing and strength in her faith than she had found in her life before then. And her devotion to Mary and other female saints as well as the support that receives within the Church has been a huge part of that healing. There is something very real there. Mary is not a something other than fully human to my mother. Rather, Mary is a woman who understands the full depth of both the pain and the joy of women.
Yes, there are things that the Roman Catholic Church has made dogma that they should not have. But being ever-virgin is not one of them. Women (and men) throughout Church history through to the present have chosen such lives. Further, there is no historical basis for the low-church Protestant rejection of that belief. Not that low-church Protestants seem to require any sort of basis beyond their own inclinations to reject or accept any belief. There is no point I can find in Church history that Mary was not greatly honored and there is no place I've ever found her virginity questioned until the last couple of hundred years. And that was not on the basis of any new evidence, but simply because people didn't like it. Period. So they decided to believe something different about Mary.
But being a woman is in no way tied to having sex or multiple children. Mary can be a virgin and still fully be a woman. Or do you not believe that? I do know the woman I've seen healed by Mary (at least in part) is the same woman that shaped me in the way that utterly rejects the patriarchal view of men and women -- to the point that I'm appalled that I somehow let that perspective shape my own children in any way.
How is requiring a woman to have sex in order to relate to "real" women any different than requiring a woman to be virgin in order to be "pure"? Aren't those two sides of the same coin? What, exactly, is wrong with accepting and honoring Mary as the Church has always done? (OK. We can leave off the relatively recently added dogmas of Immaculate Conception and Assumption. Those are specific (as dogmas) to the modern Roman Catholic Church.) Why do we need to change her story to make it more palatable to us? And does that really say something about Mary or about women in general? Or about us?
Scott Morizot,
Of course Mary, or any other woman, can be a virgin and still fully be a woman. This isn't the issue.
My point isn't that virginity is wrong but that the "church" assumed that Mary had to be virgin - and made it so. "Ideal woman" in Mary became defined by ideals of the day. And the ideal of the day was that virginity was pure and relations between man and wife were not.
Perpetual virginity was a "relatively" late invention - after the dating of the NT - with the earliest document attesting it the protoevangelium of James (ca. 150 or so). The protoevangelium is universally believed to be apochryphal and pseudographical. The style of the entire text is unbelievable - and completely different from the canonical books. The issue was still open for discussion through the first several centuries of the church. Tertullian (ca. 200) did not hold to Mary as ever-virgin and was used as an example by Helvidus when he argued against perpetual virginity in the middle to late 300's. Jerome was vitriolic in his defense of perpetual virginity.
I don't think that perpetual virginity is consistent with the text of scripture, such an assumption requires gymnastics with selected historical passages in the gospels, and was developed by the church for reasons other than historical fact.
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