What a Woman is Not!

Sometimes we’ve misunderstood some scriptural references that refer to woman. So maybe it would also help if we clarified what woman is not. Mahatma Gandhi  once said; “The real ornament of woman is her character, her purity.”

Woman is not made to be a baby factory. The original command to be fruitful and multiply was given to woman and man. And the purpose of multiplying was to fill the earth with worshipers. Children are important—sometimes the world diminishes the important job of parenting. But the danger is not only that we will devalue mothering and the home. There is also a danger that we will (1) assume all women must marry and (2) miss what women bring to the church and society. Consider these realities:

• Motherhood is not a woman’s highest calling—being conformed to Christ is.
• Every Christian woman, even one with kids, has a spiritual gift given to her to exercise for the benefit of the entire body of Christ, not just the nuclear family.
• Every woman is part of the call to glorify God in all she does, whether at home or at work, at church or at play. The woman in Proverbs 31 sold belts and bought real estate. She was operating in the marketplace.
• The woman in Proverbs 31 not only contributes to economics of her home, but she teaches kindness, stretches forth her hand to the needy. 

A woman does not innately lean toward deceiving—or being deceived. All humans are sinners, but that does not mean that the ways in which our first parents transgressed serves as a prototype illustrating gendered actions for all men and women for all time. So all men are not bald-faced rebellers, and all women are not easily deceived. Genesis emphasized how crafty the serpent was precisely because he had a tough job deceiving the woman whom God made. What is significant about the man and woman in the story is that they both rebelled, not that each demonstrated precisely the approach all men or all women have to sin. Some women seduce, and so do some men. Being seduced by evil is a human thing, not a woman thing—as Paul mentions when warning the Corinthians (2 Cor 11:3). The Bible does not teach that because Eve was deceived, all women are more easily deceived than men. Nor does the Scripture teach that all women excel at seducing and deceiving (these ideas are contradictions, anyway—one cannot be a master of deception while also being easily duped).

“Woman” is not synonymous with “submit.” All humans are made to live in submission to our creator God, as Christ submitted himself to the Father’s will. So in that sense, submission is a human word.
Some people teach that because wives are told to submit to their husbands, ergo at a female’s core she is made for submission to a man—in a way that a man is not made to serve a woman. Where do they get this stuff? Why don’t the same people teach that at a man’s core he is made for sacrificial love in a way that a woman is not—since “love” (actually, not lead) is the corresponding verb given to husbands? Nor do such teachers read Paul’s observation that men in Ephesus needed to stop being angry (1 Tim. 2:8) and assume therefore that all men are innately angry while women are not.
When Paul tells wives to submit, he makes clear that he wants them to do so with their own husbands, not all men, precisely because he is speaking in the context of a role she may take on (wife) and not something innate (woman). The Taliban teaches that all females must submit to all males, but the Old and New Testaments teach nothing of the sort. Submission is always choosing to serve another in the context of a relationship, not a quality that's innate in woman. Once again, as has happened with Genesis 1, we have tended to “extrapolate.” So we’ve taken Paul’s admonition to wives to submit and made that mean women were made for submission. That’s what we call a logical fallacy.

Every women is not created ideally to have a quiet personality. We read in 1 Peter 3 about wives married to disobedient husbands in a world in which these wives cannot go to a woman’s shelter if they are abused. Peter advises such women to refrain from preaching the gospel using words, and instead he counsels them to lean into their silent witness. He speaks of having a gentle, quiet spirit that is so precious to God. But a quiet spirit is precious to God not because it is a female quality, but because it is a character quality—evidence that the soul is at rest. And Paul is certainly not idealizing a quiet personality. Rather, he is talking about a Spirit-directed character trait demonstrated in the face of injustice. To be an outgoing, extraverted woman is not to be un-womanly in God’s eyes; it is un-womanly only in the eyes of the misinformed.

All these truths about what a woman is and is not have ramifications for how we talk about women, treat women, and create partnerships of men and women in the church, home, at work, in society:

We must treat every person, male and female, with dignity because they bear God’s image and are precious to him.

We must treat others as we would want to be treated—the second Great Commandment. In fact, we are told to treat them as if they were Christ: “I was hungry and you fed me…naked and you clothed me….”

We must treat people with respect for their God-given dignity at every stage of life. The imago Dei is why so many Christians are pro-life—because every life, even unborn life, is made in the image of God. But sometimes we fail to see the ramifications of the imago Dei at other stages of life…how we handle domestic violence, homelessness, poverty, bullying, human trafficking, sexual abuse, euthanasia, and so much more. 

We must stop teaching stereotypes as if they are based in scripture. Jacob cooked stew. Jesus cooked fish. The male deacons—not the women’s ministry—served food to the Greek widows. Paul let himself be beat up in Philippi, and Jesus allowed himself to be stripped and spit on—great insults to manhood. Mary of Bethany sat in the traditional pose of a male seminary student as she studied Torah at Jesus’s feet—and Jesus told the woman who expected her to stay in the kitchen to back off. All these and more suggest that we must always rank following Christ and spiritual priorities higher that conforming to cultural gender norms—even if that culture is the Christian bubble.

We must seek to create male/female partnerships instead of segregating everything. Some see involvement of women as a man-fail, but male-and-female partnerships are essential to “subduing the earth” and imago-Dei-ing together. Does your women’s ministry seek male input on the studies you choose? Do all the committees at your church have both men and women providing input? When you invite people to come to the front of the sanctuary for prayer, do you make sure you have both men and women ready to welcome them? (Imagine if a sexually abused woman fears men. Seeing a female to whom she can talk knocks down an unnecessary barrier.)  

In a world in which #MeToo and #ChurchToo remind us that brokenness has infiltrated every part of society including the church, the Bible’s truths are absolutely relevant. When God brought woman to man, he called their partnership “very good.” Let us show by our words and actions that we believe his words to be true.

Source: Bible.org