Reading: Christianity and Women

Christianity and Women

By David Feddes

Paganism and women

• As a 12-year-old girl, you can be sold by your father to the highest bidder.

• Patria potestas: A man’s wife and children are legally his property. He has absolute power of life and death over you.

• Husband can kill you for adultery; but he can have mistresses, prostitutes, temple orgies.

• He can divorce you; you can’t divorce him.

• Wives can’t eat with male guests.

• If born female, you might live only a few hours, abandoned to weather and animals.

• Live males outnumbered females by 30% (Today in China, India, and other places with a history of minimal Christian influence, many parents abort girls.)

• Some men valued women—as precious property. A woman who produced strong, healthy children could be loaned to a friend to have kids for him too.

Wisdom of intellectuals

• Greek philosopher Aristotle: “Females are malformed males conceived under the harmful influence of a moist south wind.”

• Greek politician Demosthenes: “The prostitutes are for our amusement; our slave women are for our personal service, and our wives are to bear us children.”

Christians were different

• Didn’t kill baby girls; adopted castaways

• Didn’t allow men to have prostitutes or mistresses; insisted on life-long faithfulness

• Told husbands to love their wives and sacrifice for them, not to be harsh with them.

• Told fathers not to provoke children

• Didn’t hide women’s faces in public

• Didn’t withhold teaching from girls; wanted girls and women to know the greatest truths.

As women flourish, so do men.

• Pagan Celsus said any religion that attracted so many women must be wrong.

• Christian men found that being in a loving, faithful, one-woman marriage was better than promiscuity.

• A joyful, intelligent, active wife turned out to be much better than a doormat with stifled talents and a stunted personality.

• A pagan writer exclaimed: “What women these Christians have!”

Spreading Change

• Patria potestas was repealed shortly after Christianity was accepted in the Roman Empire. No longer lawful to harm or kill wife or children.

• Women could own property have custody

• Fewer child brides; Christians married later.

• More choice of spouse. Christian parents did some matchmaking, but didn’t force a marriage. Everywhere progress in free choice of a spouse accompanied progress in the spread of Christianity.

The Turning Point

• Expert scholar: “The birth of Jesus was the turning point in the history of women.”

• The gospel has been the turning for women in various cultures reached by missions.

• Still some cultures have child brides, female genital mutilation, require veils, deny education to girls

• Women’s situation has improved most where Christianity’s impact has been greatest.

Female-friendly Bible

• A non-Christian woman said to a Christian: "Surely your Bible was written by a woman!”

• When the Christian asked why she said this, the woman replied, "Because the Bible says so many kind things for women. Our teachers never refer to us except in reproach."

• The Bible says God created women as well as men in his image, paid with his blood to purchase women for himself, sent his Spirit to live in women, enlisted women in his mission, and loves women with an immeasurable love.

Jesus vs. common attitudes

• OT revealed God’s image in women, no adultery, rights of widows, priceless wife

• Rabbis: “Let the words of the Law be burned rather than committed to a woman ... If a man teaches his daughter the Law, it is as though he taught her lechery.”

• Rabbis: “He who talks with a woman [in public] brings evil upon himself.” “One is not so much as to greet a woman.”

• Jesus disciples were shocked that he talked with the Samaritan woman at the well.

Jesus, friend of women

• Jesus spoke against adultery, lustful looking, and legal but groundless divorce.

• Jesus healed women, drove out their demons, and gave them a new future.

• Jesus taught women and made them partners in mission. (Luke 8:1-3)

• Jesus made women the first witnesses of his resurrection, even though rabbis banned women from testifying in court.

Paul, friend of women

• Paul honored single women (1 Cor 7)

• Paul’s letters greeted female “co-laborers”

• Lydia and Priscilla hosted home churches planted by Paul.

• Phoebe: delivered the epistle to the Romans

• Paul and Peter called on each husband to love, nourish, sacrifice, and be considerate toward his wife. A husband was to treat his wife as Christ treats His church.

Women spread Christianity

• Some Christians were too influenced by anti-woman attitudes around them, but the overall impact was to dignify and empower women.

• Churches in homes: hospitality of godly women

• Not official preaching or rule, but women could speak and prophecy with proper decorum

• Evangelism, childbearing instead of abortion or infanticide, large well-taught families.

• Didn’t dump girl babies, so church had more woman and out-reproduced pagans

• Jesus blessed women; women blessed mission.

Widows in Hinduism

• suttee: Hindu burning of widows.

• Christian missionaries led opposition.

• Some Hindu leaders complained, “The foundations of Hindu society would be shaken if widows were not burned alive.”

• Hindu saying: “If her husband is happy, she should be happy; if he is sad, she should be sad; and if he is dead, she should also die.”

• Other widow killing: Native Americans, China, Maori, Africa, Scandinavia, Eskimo.

Widows in Christianity

• Jesus helped widows and rebuked mistreatment of them.

• 88 times the Bible speaks of widows

• A defender of widows is God in his holy dwelling. (Psalm 68:5).

• Religion that God the Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after … widows in their distress. (James 1:27).

• Younger widows: not death but remarriage

• Relatives care for her, or church will.

• Valuable workers (1 Tim 5). Church helps widow, and widow helps church.

• Valuing a widow proves that women matter even without husbands or children.

• Polycarp, a century after Jesus, preached, “Let not the widows be neglected. Be thou, after the Lord, their protector and friend.”

Muhammad and women

• Married friend’s wife as gift from Allah

• Married a beauty who had just seen her husband, father, and brother beheaded

• Consummated marriage with 9-year-old

• Muhammad had at least 14 wives

• Muhammad struck his favorite wife when she left the house without his permission.

• The Koran tells husbands to beat wives who don’t obey. (4:34, 38:44)

Abundant life for women

• Beware of multicultural claim that every culture or religion is equally good.

• Beware of radical feminist claim to liberate women by promoting abortion and making women like bad men who are career crazed and promiscuous.

• Jesus: “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)