Paul, Writing for His Time or Ours? - 31
Could he have been a misogynist or hand-cuffed to his culture?
I think if you gave one of the Apostle Paul’s letters to the average non-Church-going college graduate, and asked him to read it as if it came directed to him in the mailbox this afternoon, he would scoff at it. He would feel imposed upon. He would ridicule the writer for being old fashioned or worse, a tyrant. Why? Because our society has abandoned a good handful of Paul’s biblical instructions.
Consider one of the previously mentioned portions; where Paul wrote, “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:11-12)
The graduate might ridicule the letter as being sexist or misogynistic. He would tell you that a woman is every bit as capable as a man in all fields. He might suggest that in the first century women were oppressed and treated like property. I imagine these rebukes against Paul would come fast and hot.
I’ll never forget one of the older ladies in our church proclaiming to me, “Paul was against women!” (My jaw almost dropped open.) I thought it quite brazen of her to speak against an Apostle and inspired writer of Scripture.
I can see how she came to believe this, for she was a child of the culture. She had raised three daughters and one son in the era of women’s liberation. Perhaps they spent evenings watching Norman Lear sitcoms.1 It was about all that was on the television for a couple decades. Whatever input she drew from modern culture, a resentment for the Apostle was the result, at least when it came to what he wrote about women.
Not all opposition to that Scripture text’s relevance is that condemnatory. A Christian, trying even to honor Paul might still reject his instruction for today’s woman.
Some have argued that Paul realized how uneducated women were throughout the Roman world and that he thought it would be best that they kept quiet and allow certain men to do the teaching, at least those men who had been educated. Though, as we will see, those are not the reasons Paul gives.
Another Christian might add that Paul’s instruction about women “not teaching” was geared to a first century reality in which women were sometimes treated like property or assumed she be under male headship, but that God’s ongoing design for the gospel and the church was to emancipate women from either. And, therefore, though women were not able to teach early on in the church, over the course of time they would be permitted. This approach to the text compares women’s liberation in the church to the abolition of slavery.2
Again, this argument is foreign to Paul’s reasons. More on that next time.
Norman Lear is a TV producer responsible for shows like: All in the Family, Sanford and Sons, Maude, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, and many more. Watch any one of them and you will quickly come away with an egalitarian (equal rights and equal opportunities) view of men and women.
This angle of interpretation, which shows some respect for Paul’s letter for the time it was written but believes that God had a higher ideal than was expected for the first century church, is called “trajectory hermeneutic” or “redemptive-movement hermeneutic.” A book to consider on the subject is, Women, Slaves, and the Gender Debate, by Benjamin Reaoch.