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Four Books to Put on Your Reading List
Recently four books have arrived on the scene that have me updating the reading I require for a course on women in ministry leadership. Some incredible historians and researchers have given us much to consider (recommendations do not necessarily mean full endorsement): Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination by William G. Witt. Witt teaches theology and ethics at Trinity School for Ministry, an institution in the Anglican tradition based in Pennsylvania. Protestants who oppose women’s ordination focus primarily on male authority; their Roman Catholic counterparts emphasize sacramental integrity. Yet both of these positions are new developments in the history of theology, as the church’s historic position…
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What It Means to Be a Woman (Not for Women Only)
In a seminary Sexual Ethics course I co-teach, my co-worker and I have students survey churches' curriculum relating to manhood and womanhood. Consistently these students find that evangelical curriculum writers have gone to biblical instruction directed to the "wife" or "husband" and extrapolated from the spouse-specific commands to support their ideas of gender. But wife and husband are only subsets of man and woman. So we need to start at a different place. In this episode of The Table Podcast, I talk with Darrell Bock and Kymberli Cook about that place as we discuss gender, sexuality, maleness, femaleness, masculinity, femininity, and how men and women need each other. We end…
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Biblical Womanhood, Part 2
Several weeks ago, I wrote about biblical womanhood. Afterward a theologian posed some good questions for clarification. So I’m using that conversation as a Q/A here to help further explain what it means to be a woman as God designed her. His statements are bold; my explanations follow: You say of woman that, “She is an image-bearer,” but then argue that because “she” is an image-bearer the female bears that image completely in and of herself. The underlying assumption is that an individual human being, whether male or female, carries the whole divine image. Woman is indeed an image bearer, completely in and of herself. But that does not mean…
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“Biblical Womanhood”: What is a Woman?
What a woman is. She is an image-bearer. It was the first day of a class I was teaching on the role of women in the home, church, and society. Driving in to the seminary where I teach, I thought through the material I planned to cover, and honestly I feared that some of what I’d prepared to say was too elementary for graduate-level students. Many of them were raised in church and have heard messages all their lives. Did they really need to hear again that Genesis 1:26–27 teaches that both male and female were made in the image of God? Nevertheless, I determined I’d better make sure. So I…
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“Act Like Men”: What Does Paul Mean?
A few weeks ago I received an announcement that an organization committed to teaching what the Bible says about being masculine and feminine had published an updated guide available for free. Because the history of ideas about gender, especially within Christendom, is one of my fields of academic study, I eagerly downloaded and began reading. But only a few pages into chapter one, “Being a Man and Acting Like It,” an alarm went off. Here’s what I read: “Paul writes to the leaders in the church at Corinth, ‘Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love’ (1…
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Is It Unfeminine to Be Strong?
Last month while doing some research in Italy, I went with my family to visit the catacombs in Rome. Much of what I saw moved me. But the most inspiring part of all was hearing a story about a strong woman. Our guide pointed to a sculpture memorializing Cecilia, whose bones had once rested in that place. Apparently Cecilia was born in Rome of wealthy parents about the year A.D. 200. She had such zeal for the Christian faith that when her parents coerced her into marriage with Valerian, Cecilia counseled her bridegroom on their wedding night to go to Bishop Urban to be baptized. Valerian converted, and shared the…
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What Does “Workers at Home” Really Mean?
I’ve been talking to some moms lately who wonder if it’s okay to contribute to the economics of their households. A few biblical passages come to mind… The Proverbs 31 woman had kids, and she sold belts and bought a vineyard from her own checkbook. Though well-to-do, she still contributed to the family income. Centuries later, when Paul described the ideal of older women teaching younger women “to be workers at home” (Titus 2), he was speaking to a culture in which about 85 percent of “industry” happened in the domicile. People knew no such thing as a factory worker and a stay-at-home mom. Both husband and wife shared the…
