The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth
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Saved by Lael Johnson and
The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth
Saved by Lael Johnson and
As women’s activities were redirected into the household, women became less “collective, visible, and active” in the late medieval parish.
The historical reality is that social systems that invest some people with power over the lives of other people result in the destruction of people. Ed Stetzer recently observed that “the Venn diagram of reformed, complementarian, and misogynist has a pretty significant overlap.”13 This sounds like what Gerda Lerner described in 1986—only her Venn
... See moreThe church teaches what it believes to be true.
I do not see a conflict between my feminist identity and my cooking skills. I don’t have a problem with women, or men, taking pride in domestic prowess. What I do have a problem with is how we continue to teach the cult of domesticity to modern Christian women.
From my experience as someone who grew up Southern Baptist and remained in conservative evangelical churches throughout most of my adult life, inerrancy creates an atmosphere of fear. Any question raised about biblical accuracy must be completely answered or completely rejected to prevent the fragile fabric of faith from unraveling.
What evangelicals have failed to realize, explains historian Randall Balmer, is that the “traditional concept of femininity” that we believe to be from the Bible is nothing more than “a nineteenth-century construct.”
The patriarchy that continues to appear in biblical text is a “mere accommodation to the reality of the times and culture; it is not a reflection of the divine ideal for humanity.”35 Patriarchy is created by people, not ordained by God.
Spacey’s character delivers a line I have never forgotten: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” I haven’t forgotten the line, because I disagree with it. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly.
Ironically, complementarian theology claims it is defending a plain and natural interpretation of the Bible while really defending an interpretation that has been corrupted by our sinful human drive to dominate others and build hierarchies of power and oppression. I can’t think of anything less Christlike than hierarchies like these.