Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep968: The Making of Biblical Womanhood: Dr. Beth Allison Barr

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

Dr. Beth Allison Barr is Professor History and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Baylor University. She received her B.A. from Baylor University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses primarily on women and gender identity in late medieval England, how the advent of Protestantism affected women in Christianity, and medieval attitudes towards women in sermons across the Reformation era. Beth is the author of several books including her most recent highly acclaimed book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Womanhood Became Gospel Truth, which is the focus of our conversation.  https://bethallisonbarr.com/about/ –––––– PROMOS Save 10% on courses with Kairos Classroom using code TITR at kairosclassroom.com! –––––– Sign up with Faithful Counseling today to save 10% off of your first month at the link:  faithfulcounseling.com/titr or use code TITR at faithfulcounseling.com –––––– Save 30% at SeminaryNow.com by using code TITR –––––– Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review. www.theologyintheraw.com

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is the one and only Dr. Beth Allison Barr. Dr. Barr received her MA and PhD in medieval history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses primarily on women and gender identity in late medieval England and how the advent of Protestantism affected women in Christianity. She is the author of the very provocative and very well-selling book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. I just got done reading this book, and I was so excited to talk to Beth. Really enjoyed this conversation. There's a lot to mull over. Beth was a delight to talk to,

and her book is quite provocative. So I hope you've read the book. If not, pick up your copy. The link is in the show notes. And without further ado, please welcome to the show, the one and only Dr. Beth Allison Barr. All right. Hey, friends. I'm here with Beth Allison Barr. I'm so excited about this podcast. We scheduled this several months ago. And when I scheduled the podcast, I had your book on my desk because I've been wanting to read it. And then I scheduled it. I'm like, all right, now I have to read it. I'm so glad I did. Your book is killing it. I mean, it's really created some waves, right? I mean. Yes, it has been a surprise.

This week is the one year anniversary of the release of the book. And it's just really wild to think about what life was like a year ago versus what life is like now. So it's been, I just actually released the postscript. I don't know if you've seen that. I just saw it on Twitter that you released it, yeah. Yeah, I released it yesterday. But it's, you know, I'm so glad the book is doing, you know, everybody wants to be read. But more importantly, this book was a book that I felt really called to write.

So I'm really glad people are reading it. I did not expect them to start reading it so quickly in such large numbers. Yeah. So that's really true. I don't do it a lot. But every now and then, you know, I always check, you know, how are my books doing? And so I go to the rankings, like the gender and sexuality or whatever it is. And your book is always beating mine.

So I don't always know how that translates in the numbers, but yours is always like top five in that category. And yeah, like one of these days, I'm going to beat Beth, but we'll see. No, you know, it's funny. I go to Amazon all the time and it always comes up because I, anyway, various things.

And so often it'll come up and I'll see it in there. So it's funny. But anyway, it's not something I expected. It's not something I could have planned for either. Well, as an academic to an academic, like, it's really exciting to see a book that has a lot of, I mean, this isn't just like some self-help book, like, but I mean, it is very easy to read, very fluid, very personal, which again, you know, as we move into the book, that's one of my favorite things is that you were so raw and vulnerable. And it was just an easy, exciting book to read. Even if you disagree with like 99% of it, you should still say like, ah, that's a good book. Like I wanted to wake up in the morning and read it.

Oh, that's nice. Thank you. I'm going to wake up in the morning and read it. Oh, that's nice. Thank you. But it was still very – you're talking about medieval history and going deep into various things throughout. So I'm excited to see a book that went deep to be well-read. So that's awesome.

We need more of those. Yeah, it is. Well, I do hope one of the things that – in part of this getting into public scholarship as an academic, it's one of the things I've really been encouraging other academics to do. I'm like, we know this stuff, and it's just not translating to the church. And so we've got to get in there, and we've got to write our research in a way that the church will read it. So I'm really happy to be able to be a part of those conversations. Because I think, I think more academics need to do this. Yeah, if they can write well, not every academic can write in a way that is going to resonate with a popular audience. Like you got to know how to say, all right, enough content, tell a story, you know, write in a fluid way, don't go deeper than

you have to, you know, it's not easy. It's hard. It was challenging. You know, one of the two hardest chapters for me, I tell people all the time, were the Paul chapter, because that one I was, you know, everyone's going to go after me for the Paul chapter, and the Reformation chapter, because the Reformation chapter is in the heart of my field, and I know it so well. I know the debates, but so many of those I couldn't really go into. I had to, through figuring out how to tell enough without telling everything my academic self wanted to say, that was hard. It was a hard balance. The Reformation chapter, I rewrote a lot. Really? There's so much in that field, right? I mean, it's just endless.

I guess same with Paul. Yeah, no, it is. The Reformation one probably made me more nervous because those are my friends that I go to academic conferences with. And so I was the first person who read the manuscript was actually a medieval early modern historian that I respect really well. And I was just like, I need your eyes on this first. So I felt a lot better after that. So did you pass it? I mean, cause that's, that's how I write. I pass it through tons of just people first draft, second draft,

third draft, like constantly getting, especially experts, especially people if I think they might disagree with me, I'm like, all right, give me their best pushbacks. You know, um, does that, was that what you did as well? You were sending the manuscript out to different people and getting feedback. And I, you know, a lot of it, the book was born on the anxious bench, which is the blog on Patheos that I've been writing on for a long time. It's the religious history, um, group blog that we've had. And that's where I kind of learned how to write to reach an audience. But, um, so the good news about doing that is that I'd already gotten a lot of pushback. So I kind of knew that helped me in thinking about how to tailor it. But no, but I also sent it out to people. I was sending out chapters very early on, getting feedback on it because I knew I had to get it right. Or at least the things I got wrong couldn't be important things. Let's go back a little bit and tell us about maybe just a quick snapshot.

Who are you? And I want to know how you got into being a medieval historian. Again, that's not even – it's not like there's a lot of people clamoring to go in that field. I would assume. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. No, it was actually when I got my PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And I remember there was – my advisor only took one student every three years.

So there was a very small number of us. There was a very small – there was like five or six of us in the cohort in medieval history. And I remember seeing the, my, the friends who had come in to work in classics and I would see them like sitting in the hallway lined up outside their advisor's door because there were so many of them. And you know, me, it was, my experience was very different because I was a medievalist. So, um, so it is a field that I think doesn't attract as many people. I hope maybe that's changing in the future. But how did I get into it?

I actually got into it through classics. So as an undergraduate, I was a classics minor at Baylor where I was a student a long time ago. And so I was history and classics. And I started working on women. I got interested in women very early on. As an undergrad, I was always interested in women very early on as an undergrad. I was always interested in women's history. And I realized in classics that there weren't any sources.

If you wanted to do women's history in the classical world, either you worked with the very small number of texts that were available, or you also became an archaeologist, which had its appeal. That is definitely true. It had its appeal. But definitely true it had its appeal but um i'm always been more text-based i like i like i like reading i like um written sources so i decided to move up into the medieval world a little bit um so that i would have more sources to work with because i was interested in ordinary people um and then the advisor that i applied to at chapel hill ordinary people. And then the advisor that I applied to at Chapel Hill did women in late medieval England. And so I was very happy to move up to the 15th century. And I've been a very happy 15th century person ever since. Tell me, when you say medieval, what's the exact time period there?

I mean, I know the Baldwin period. Yeah, roughly 500 to 1500 is when you think about, so that thousand year period between when the Roman Empire is no longer what it has faded into something else. If you think about, you know, in the Western world for the end of the fifth century is when we think about sort of the end, the classic end of Rome, and then up through the Reformation. end, the classic end of Rome, and then up through the Reformation. Although really, if you think about medieval theology and what's going on in the church, I would push that it's not really till the end of the 16th century that we might be leaving the medieval world and moving in to the early modern world. So it's a slower transition than 1617. That's a huge time period. Golly. It is. I know, And nobody knows anything about it. Yeah. Would you say, I mean, that's not, that's not just an assumption on my part. Like that's

like, there's been less studied in that area than any other. You know, scholarship in the medieval world is extremely strong. It also is an area medieval. You know, one of the things that the medieval world can claim, the medieval field can claim is that it was one of the earliest to have women become prominent members of the guild. So in the early 20th century, women were becoming were earning their doctorates in medieval history and were starting to become well known in the field. So it's a very early field for women to be involved in. So very strong. But it's when you think about what the broader public knows, then, yes, there is a significant gap, especially when you think about the modern American church, the evangelical church. the evangelical church. Usually we go up through Augustine of Hippo, and then we might pick up Thomas Aquinas somewhere along the way. We think Thomas Aquinas is really important. And then we jump straight to the Reformation stuff, and that's it. That's pretty much what

we know about the medieval world. My father-in-law did his PhD in pre-Reformation reforms in France. I want to say 14th century. There was so... And I remember talking to him. He's all these... I never heard of a single name he listed. Talked about all this stuff going on. I'm like, the 1400s is like a beehive of theological activity and ecclesiological activity in France. And even now, I can't even remember the guy you study. I don't know. It never heard of him, you know, but he's like, this guy basically was Martin Luther. It's just wrong place at the wrong time. Didn't have the kind of sociological perfect storm happening,

but he was doing everything that Luther was doing, you know, I don't even know his name. Well, it was very theologically rich. That is the time they are. And it's much more. In fact, one of the things we did on my recent trip there, I took the students to see Julian of Norwich. We went to Norwich, and we went can go and see the original site. But she's probably, her theology is just incredible, and it definitely reflects a lot of what we see going on in the late 14th, early 15th century. But if you look at the, you know, theology textbooks, in fact, a very famous example is the Cambridge History of Medieval Theology, and it doesn't mention, it just has no women in it. It doesn't mention Julian of Norwich at all.

I mean, it's really, so I mean, even there are these huge holes, and not only what scholars talk about, but then especially what the church knows. church notes. And so I think that's one of the reasons why my book got a lot of appeal is because I brought sort of a world back that people didn't realize was part of our history. Yeah. I mean, that clearly is the highlight of your book. When I was reading that, and I knew going in that that was your wheelhouse. And when I got into medieval stuff, I'm like, oh, yeah, you're just swinging for the fences. It's so fun. And yeah, to my shame, I don't think I recognize a single name you mentioned. Yeah, no, it's common. I think back in my, well, I mean, my theological upbringing is very similar to the stuff you talk about in your book.

You know, I had, what, two church history classes, maybe three, but you highlight, you know, all the... Do you remember what textbook you used? We used Gonzalez. We used Gonzalez. So, I mean, he, I mean, and you know, you said his is probably the best. One of the best ones. Yeah. Yeah.

And so it was there, but I mean, that part of it too, is just me, you know, reading really fast to get the Martin Luther too. It's kind of like, ah, that's just, all this is just kind of like pregame stuff until the real thing, you know? I mean, um, and we didn't, I mean, we didn thing. And we didn't talk about black theologians or liberation theology. None of that was on the radar. But that's not... It's almost like, looking back, like, of course it wasn't.

It's not shocking anymore. Yeah, no. Well, and one of the things too, one of the continual complaints that I have is working with seminaries. If you go and you look, I mean, I'm a fan of seminaries. I think pastors need theological education and need training. But at the same time, most of the people teaching their history are not actually historians. They're mostly people who came through seminaries and were trained in sort of that broad-based theology. You know, maybe at best, they're theological historians, sort of at best, but they're not approaching it from what I would consider to be the more mainstream academic discipline of history, if you think about it.

And so it's a different field. So seminaries don't hire historians. That's a good point. Some of them do. Princeton does. Some of the ones that have become more academic, Princeton, Duke, Harvard, you see a lot. But those are also the ones that evangelical people aren't going to. So if you think about the sort of more popular, like a Baptist, if you think, I mean, just go look and see where people got their PhDs from who are teaching history.

And it's not that they're not good scholars. Right. It's just that they're trained differently. And I think that shows up in how we understand church history. Yeah, and that's an important distinction. A scholar that is knowledgeable of history, but somebody actually being a historian, the methodology is different, your purpose is different. I mean, so my degree is in New Testament, but I did a ton of early Jewish history. Yeah. used to New Testament scholars thinking they know early Jewish history and they can know the facts, but they come at it as like background material to enlighten the New Testament and they don't

understand it in its own context. It's always like has an ulterior motive for understanding the history rather than just understanding the history, you know, or making the history say something you want it to say. It's just, that's a temptation we're all going to have. And that's just, that's bad history. Well, it's just, it's just being aware of your biases, and so people approach it with different biases. So you're exactly right. It's not that New Testament scholars aren't good with Jewish history. It's just that that's not their original – that's not their goal. Their goal is the New Testament, and so it is background, where somebody who is simply a first century Jewish scholar has a different perspective,

because their goal is the Jewish history. They read Paul as one of many Jewish contributions to the first century, which is really interesting, like reading Paul as Greco-Roman literature, you know? Yes. It changes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it changes things. And so, I mean, that's one of the, when, you know, my whole Paul chapter really is my lectures and my women's history class. Okay. And when we read Paul, that's actually what we do is we read him part of a broader conversation that's going on because we're talking through women's history.

So we're not just talking about the Christian, we're talking about all the women. And so we read it as this broader, you know, something that's going on in the first century, and it changes how you look at it. Yeah. Well, let's dive into your book. Can you give us, for somebody who hasn't read it yet, give us what led to writing it? You kind of touched on it a little bit, and then maybe just give us an overview of what it's about, how your argument kind of unfolds. Sure. So I really didn't mean to write this book. I am an academic. You know, you asked how did I get into medieval history. One of the things I will say is you don't go into medieval history if you like being in the public spotlight. You know, I spend a lot of my time in the archives. I work on 15th century medieval sermons,

which is not something I ever expected to get a great deal of attention. So this type of book was not something that really was ever something that I thought of until almost 2019. Very, very late in the game in 2018 when the idea was presented to me about writing a book like this. So the reason was really kind of act of desperation. This is this last ditch effort, because I had been teaching women's history since 2008. And as a Christian, I knew all of this stuff about women's roles in the church and all of the things that we carried to reading the biblical text that made our understanding, evangelical understandings of women's roles in the church look really different. And I had becoming increasingly silent about this in my own church because I knew every time I heard people preach on it or talk about it or anything

at all, my internal voice is like, that's not right. I know why that is wrong, but I couldn't tell anyone. And so in 2016, when my husband got fired, which was a traumatic event for our family, sort of in the aftermath of that, I realized I had to tell people what I knew, not just for us, but for, you know, I knew this had to change. And so I began speaking out on my blog writing, and that is what led to folk reaching out to me and saying, have you thought about doing a book on this? And so that was my first thought about doing something like this at all. So it's been really quite a surprise that it has gone so well since it wasn't something I intended. that it has gone so well since it wasn't something I intended. But the book in a nutshell just argues that biblical womanhood, the way we understand it in the evangelical world, that women are called to follow the headship of men in home as well as in leadership in the church.

My argument is that that is actually not biblical in the sense that it is not something that God has ordained. And that the reason we think that is true is because we are so embroiled in the culture of the world to use, you know, the world, the term we often use. And so instead of looking like the world Jesus has made possible, we are following into the old trap of subjugating women. And that's actually the pattern of a sinful world and not the pattern that, or the vision that God calls us to. So I'm sure people are going to immediately want to hear, how do you deal with the passages that seem to not say that?

The first Corinthians 11, Ephesians 5, and, you know, there's, the 1 Corinthians 14 one, I don't know, that one, I don't know too many complementarians

that even say, yes, this is categorically what Paul's trying to say. It's just such a weird passage. It's the one where Paul says, I cannot permit a woman to speak in church.

Like, all right, so literally don't pray, give announcements, like, don't open your mouth, don't tell your, you know, like that's just such a, really? And I thought your take on that was really compelling. But like the other, the ones were like Ephesians 5, 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul seems to root male-female relations in, you know.

Yeah. So, you know, one of the things, I mean, I'll tell you the truth. I really want to write the Paul chapter because I was just so tired of this, you know, really the stalemate that I've seen over these conversations. And I was like, you know, the problem I said, what we've got to do is we've got to help people realize that these texts that we go to, you know, these texts of terrorists, Phyllis Tribble calls them, for women, these texts that we automatically go to, that we have blown these texts out of proportion. Most of church history has not gone to these texts in this way. This is a very particular phenomenon that we can date since the 19th century. And so, I mean, if you look back at the pattern of church history, I mean, it's very, very clear. We don't see these texts, you know, sort of explode in our face until after the Reformation, really starting in the 17th century and picking up full steam in the late 19th century, which is also at the time of suffrage. Also, when we see Junia being transformed into Junius, which works quite well when, you know, fighting against women's suffrage, saying women shouldn't lead. Oh, of course, there's not a female leader in the Bible.

That's a mistranslation. It's actually a man. biblical text, what you see, I mean, what you can understand is how, why our focus, why we become so hyper-focused on these texts of Paul about women. And they correspond with what's going on in the 20th century, the push to keep women out of leadership, the push in after World War II, when we're trying to get women out of men's jobs, you know, trying to return to normalcy. I mean, all of this fits in place. So I didn't want to write the Paul chapter because I just wanted people to see the history of how we got to reading the Paul chapters, the Paul sections, the way we do. And my husband was like, you know, Beth, it's just not going to work. He said, unless you get them to pause and just consider they might have been reading these texts wrong. He said,

they're not going to follow you. He said, because they're going to say, well, that's history, but this is the Bible. And he was right. He convinced me to do it. He was right. So what I attempted to do in the Paul chapter was not convince people that I was completely right. I just wanted to disrupt their thinking. I wanted them to stop and be like, whoa, differently? What does it mean if Paul says in Timothy that women are to be silent and not teach men? But then I've never looked at that in conjunction with Romans 16. And so it's like, well, if Paul tells women to be silent and not to speak, not to teach men, So it's like, well, if Paul tells women to be silent and not to speak, not to teach men, then what does that mean for Romans 16?

Is, you know, and for evangelical Christians, they're not going to go with the argument that Timothy was written by somebody else and that it's a later sort of trying to push one. They're not going to go with that. So what they're going to go with is that these are both written by Paul. And so is Paul contradicting himself? No. So what's going on? Do we, I mean, so simply, it's not so simple to say women be silent. We've got to see something else is going on. Which is why I brought in that, you know, the first Corinthians 14 text, because it is so, the history behind it just so clearly shows that you've got to pause and look at it differently. And so that was really sort of my goal. Also with Ephesians, I've been thinking about putting it, Lucy Pepiot has just done this so beautifully, and Scott McKnight, you know, wonderful in putting the household codes within the context of what's going on in the first century Rome,

and also just flipping the narrative on the, you know, inserting the fact that all of the Christians are together in the room, and that, you know, this isn't a conversation by men to men about men. This is a conversation to women, to children, to slaves, which already is flipping the Roman narrative. And so just getting people to think about that. And then that, you know, husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loves the church, which, you know, I know, as I said in the book, instead of in the Roman world where husbands have the power of life and death over their wife, now they are required to give up their life for their wife. And I mean, and that is just an amazing, amazing difference. And then of course, you know, the verse before, submit to one another as to the Lord, which then follows up, you know, we separate that in our translations.

But they're really, you know, I mean, there's a lot of new, I'm sure you've been in some of those debates that some of the early manuscripts have a little break in between. In Ephesians there, and some people say that's a, you know, it doesn't really, even if there is a break there in the earliest manuscripts, it doesn't mean that the call for wives and husbands to submit to each other doesn't frame that entire passage about husbands loving their wives. explanation for every text. It was just to get people to pause and be like, what if I'm reading these? What if there's another way to read these texts that still allows me to be faithful to the Bible? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Ephesians 5, I mean, I remember preaching a sermon on it years ago. It was a sign to me, and I hadn't really done a lot of study on it. But I did a deep dive study and started reading other ancient household codes and everything. And I'm like, oh my word, you cannot understand this passage without reading Aristotle, without reading other Breckhoven writers. This is a well-known genre, these household codes.

And Paul is clearly, the scaffolding is there. He's repeating a similar thing, but man, he's gutting it from the inside out. Like just, I mean, somebody pointed out that, you know, well, you said, I don't want to repeat what you said, but I mean, that most cases it's husbands dominate your women, keep your kids in line. The authors of the household codes never ascribed agency to women, children, or even, you know, slaves. And I know that's such a sensitive topic, but it's like Paul spends more ink addressing the women specifically, which in our day and age, it's kind of lost on us. But it's like that, that's a huge, bold statement to say, women,

here's how you need to behave rather than telling the women to just control their, or telling the husbands to control their wives. And there's never does Paul root it in inferior, telling the husbands to control their wives. And never does Paul root it in being inferior, where Aristotle does. Women are like half-human or something, whatever he says. Yeah, no. I mean, that's the narrative. The narrative is that wives, that women are not as smart, that they're weaker, their bodies are weaker, and that they are simply not able to, that they are created as less than men. And that's what roots the household code in the Roman world. With the submission, I mean, and I'm still working through all of these questions. And, you know, I was raised, I was raised in the brand of complementarianism that you

address in your book. Times a couple, okay? And I'm definitely no longer there. But I still have that, you know, there's exegetical questions. Like, you know, the mutual submission passage, 521, clearly that's the main verb. The main verb in 522 when it says wives to your husbands, it's dependent upon 521. So to me, I don't... And maybe I'm missing something. I don't see how we can begin that passage in 522, wives submit. It doesn't say wives submit. The word submit's not even there.

It's dependent upon the mutual submission in 521. But the question I have though is like, submission in 521. But the question I have, though, is like, yes, mutual submission is a general Christian principle, but there's no evidence that Paul says or anybody says, husbands submit to your wives or children submit to your parents, but we don't know where to say parents submit to your children. In my mind, and maybe I'm missing it. It seems like there still is a specific kind of submission going on here that could be argued for from Paul. Now that there's other ways to even deal with that. But to just say it's mutual submission, period. It's like, so parents are supposed to submit to their two year old, like just because they're both human? Like, I don't know.

Oh, no. And I'm not making that. That's a horrible analogy. I'm not making the analogy. I'm just following Paul. Oh, no. And I'm not making that. That's a horrible analogy. I'm not making the analogy. I'm just following Paul. Oh, my gosh. I'm going to get emails about that one. What's funny about, what's interesting about that analogy, though, is that that is often

the, you know, if you think up into the early modern world, this is how women get the legal rights of children is because of this, because they put it within that context. And so, I mean, that's, you know, but if we get to the end of the 19th century, women, once they're married, literally do not own anything, and it all because they have the legal status of children. And so, I mean, that's part of that framework that it works from. So, I mean, I think this is where history really matters when we think about Paul, and when we think about how we read these texts, and what we have to understand is that Paul is working within a cultural framework. And he is clearly, I mean, one of his primary messages within this framework is he is not, he is calling the Christians to work together, to be in the body of Christ, to not place anybody over each other, not to think anyone's better. I mean, that's sort of the, he's calling us to be a body and to all work together. And he's calling us also to do this

within the context of the Roman empire, where people will not get, you know, I mean, it makes it, you've got to live within the constraints of the world around you. And so I think what Paul is doing is he's taking what is, what people are living in, and he says, let's think about doing this the Jesus way, and let's do this. What does this mean? So legally, Roman women are required to be under the authority of their husbands, and Paul's like, well, let's talk about what that means, and what that means is that husbands are called to love their wives as Christ loves the church. They are not to exercise this power of life and death over them. And whereas wives are called, yes, legally wives are called to submit to their husbands,

but husbands are called to submit to their wives and give their lives up for them. And so it just, it's taking it like, this is the world in which we live. Now let's do it the Jesus way. And I think that's just really, really powerful. My mom was my Bible study teacher and forever. She still is my favorite Bible study teacher. And I remember her always saying that you've got to use scripture. You have to read scripture in context, but you also have to read it within the framework of all scripture and put it in the overarching picture. and put it in the overarching picture. And so if you take those texts and you put them in the overarching picture of what we see God doing with women in the Bible, I do not know how you walk away with the idea that God is calling women to ascribe to the patriarchy of the world around

them. That he is not calling. I mean, if you think about even in the Old Testament, the amount of times that he lifts women up, you know, one of my favorite stories is Hagar. And it is so powerful that this is one of the earliest stories that we get. And it's a story and, you know, and God, you know, this woman who has been raped, who has been essentially abused by the people God has called to become the nation, to bring Jesus into the world. These people treat her so badly. And when she is out in the desert, God comes to her and she names God. She says, you are a God who sees. And you just follow that thread that God sees women,

and God always lifts women up. And I mean, it's just the world, the biblical world is steeped in patriarchy, because that's the world of human society. But God is always lifting people out of that. And, you know, as a historian, it's amazing to me how rarely women in the Bible are actually referenced by their husbands. This is a huge, I mean, they aren't, you know, most women in the Bible, you know, there's a few, we have Sarah and Abraham, of course, and, you know, there's a few others, but there are so many women in the Bible who we know their names and we don't know anything about the male figures around them. And that, to me, tells me something as a historian, because in the ancient world, women were identified by the men around them. consistent pattern in biblical text is that God calls women out as individuals and he empowers them and uses them without their husbands. So anyway, I could talk a lot. I'll stop.

Oh, this is so, it's so funny what you said, identified by their husbands. Cause like, I remember growing up or like when I first got married and stuff, I would get letters from my older relatives and they addressed it, Mr. and Mrs. Preston Sprinkle. Yep. Was that a thing? Was that normal? Yeah, so my mother-in-law,

my grandmother-in-law, I have to be careful, my grandmother-in-law, she would, even after I got my PhD, she would address letters to me as Miss Reverend James Barr. And she wouldn't even acknowledge, you know. So I just kind of lived with it.

But yeah, no. I mean, that's a late 19th century custom. I was wondering where that came from. It's so, like, looking back at 2022, I'm like, oh, my word. That was like a few years ago. And people are still doing it on their own. And so this idea that women do not have a legal identity is such, you know, it's a consistent part of history, but at the same time, it's the 19th century into the early 20th century. As I said, it's around the same time that we see suffrage and lots of things that are going on there. But we see sort of a crackdown in Western Europe and in the U.S.,

and we see women's legal identities subsumed under their husbands. And this is so making sense now. So is it correct to say we shouldn't view it as a straight linear line of misogyny until like the late mid-20th century? You're saying the medieval period had a – we were on the right track towards viewing women maybe as equal or whatever, but then it went downhill from the Reformation? It's not just a straight linear line of like – Right. No, you're correct. It's not a straight linear line.

One of the concepts that – but it also doesn't mean that the medieval world treated women better. They just treated them badly in different ways. I mean, that's the thing is that patriarchy has always been a constant, but it's never been changed, the same constant, because it changes according to culture. So in the medieval world, what I talk about with my students is that there was actually a spiritual loophole for women that went away with the Reformation. And that spiritual loophole empowered women in the medieval world in a way that they are unable to be empowered after the Reformation. So it's not that the medieval world was the golden age for women, but according to medieval theology, what kept women from the priesthood, et cetera, was their bodies. Their bodies were flawed. And so there was something innate about their bodies, but their spirits, their souls

could escape their bodies. And so women who forsake what made them a woman, who forsake, and you also think about the Augustan idea that original sin is rooted in sex. And you also think about the Augustan idea that original sin is rooted in sex. And so women who forsook that, who forsook marital relations, had to forsake sex, or at least they were supposed to after the central middle ages. That's a whole other story. But nonetheless, so women who did this, the further they moved away from being like a traditional woman in the sense of getting married and having children, the closer to God they became. And they were able to speak and have the authority of men. And so this is why we get women like, you know, Hildegard of Bingen, who goes on preaching tours.

And because she has, and in fact, one of the 15th century sermons that I just read again when I was over there last week, it says, women and God be men. And so women by, you know, they are able to gain that spiritual authority by forsaking marriage. The Reformation world elevates marriage. You know, I mean, I tell my students in the medieval world, the lowest spiritual rung on the ladder was married women. And, you know, the second best was to be a widow who has dedicated yourself to God and not remarried. But the best thing you could be was a holy virgin.

The Reformation world flips that. The best thing you could be was a married mother with children. The next thing under that was to be a widow. And the worst thing you could be was an unmarried woman, a spinster. That's where we start getting that language and that negative language. And so what that sort of does is that elevates marriage for women, which is good. It's a good thing. But at the same time, it removes that ability for women to be outside of male authority. And so now, and so if you think about the early modern world where we have a hardening of laws about women and marriage and property, you know, think about Jane Austen.

We talk about Jane, let's just think about, you know, she's always complaining about women who aren't married. You know, they have no property, they have no life, there's nothing that they're able to do. And so you think about that in the context of Christianity. And so women who are married are now always under the authority of men. There's no way to escape that. And so women are not able to wield that spiritual authority the way they could in the medieval world. And that's because in the medieval world, they're valued virginity, but largely maybe because of maybe an anthropology that we wouldn't necessarily sign off on, but for whatever reason,

their vow of celibacy was able to free them from kind of male headship. So as I said, it gave them a loophole. I'm not saying, no, it was still not a great way to view women. No, yeah,

yeah. But at the same time, it did give them a loophole that went away after the Reformation. That's super helpful. All right. I got a few questions I want to get clarity on. I got a bunch of tags here. I see all those. I love that.

Oh, man. Yeah. And I mean, I've got so many notes on your book. I always do like an index in the back where I'll have a topic, um, that I want to see where you address it. And then so I can kind of go back and compare different statements and stuff. Um, I want to, so this, there's a statement about St. Paula. Um, you're going to know everything I'm talking about. My audience might not know. Um, St. Paula was, well, uh, give us a, why don't you do it? I'm just going to either read your book or have you just explain who is St. Paula. So Paula is one of those women that we

don't know about. And she is, and we know about her counterpart. We know about Jerome. Jerome, of course, is the translator of the Bible in the fourth century, fourth, fifth century into Latin, which became the primary biblical text of the medieval world. He, though, didn't do this on his own. You know, this is sort of a concept that you can even think about today, like with our idea of soul authorship, we're all about, we're the ones who wrote it. In the medieval and the ancient world, that concept didn't really exist. People wrote together a lot more than we would be comfortable with today. So Jerome didn't do any of this on his own. And he actually sort of employed a group of wealthy, well-trained, educated women from Rome

that sort of started, if you know the story of Marcella, who was this, she essentially had this salon in her house where she trained women in biblical languages. And Paula was one of those. And Paula met Jerome through Marcella. And Jerome invited her, as well as one of her older daughters, to come with him to the Holy Land for the purpose of finding biblical texts and translating them. for the purpose of finding biblical texts and translating them. And so Paula went with him and became sort of helped. I often describe her as she was the money behind Jerome. She went around the antiquities dealer. She bought a lot of the ancient texts.

And then she learned the biblical languages, and she helped translate them. So she was one of the translators of the Bible into the Vulgate. So that was, I have two questions. Thank you for that. That's a lot more than you said in the book. So that's, wow. It is. They made me cut so much, you know, I can't. Well, I was so fascinated with this. I started doing a little research, you know, looked at a couple articles and I was like, yeah, she's, she funded his thing, right? She was wealthy. And he, well, I have three questions. First of all, Jerome's kind of a sex thing, right? She was wealthy. Well, I have three questions. First of all, Jerome's kind of a sex addict, right? Why does he have all these women?

Should we read into that? Here's a guy who clearly struggles with lust. He's beating himself up. I mean, this guy's like a few shades short of 50 shades. So he devotes his life to celibacy, like he's, um, so, you know, devotes his life to celibacy, but he has all his women all around him. Like he, Billy Graham would not be okay with this, right? So, no, he wouldn't.

But I think that's also thinking about how we view male-female relationships is different. Um, and it wasn't with the, you know, Jerome did dedicate himself, um, to celibacy and he also began a campaign to try to get women to not get married. I mean, he has these really horrible texts where he talks about why would you want to get married? You know, your body is going to change. I won't be graphic, but you're going to become ugly, you know, and you have these crying babies all the time. Why do you want that when you could be with God, you know, and you could go off and do all these intellectual things? And so he has this sort of pitch that he gives for women.

He's like, why would you choose that when you could choose this? And so I think for Jerome, we also see this, that he has convinced himself of this narrative. But he also is, you know, I mean, if you think about the world of the early, sort of these early Christian martyrs, And, you know, I mean, if you think about the world of the early, sort of these early Christian martyrs, which is kind of what they, a lot of them were aspiring to, is we want to dedicate our lives to God. We want to live in this sort of martyrdom that we can't be killed anymore, but we can live as if we were killed. Our bodies were denied, you know, that's where asceticism comes from, this idea. And so we can, so we can make our lives worth living. And so I think maybe part of it for Jerome is it may be part of his, you know, he surrounds himself with women that he does not have access to. And so that's part of him sacrificing his flesh. But then also,

I mean, women and men could be friends. And we see this a lot in the monastic world. We see a lot of connections between women and men and them working together in these types of ways. Also, Jerome needed their money. You know, I mean, that's really, these were the wealthy widows and they could help fund his campaign. And so he used them, but he didn't just use them.

I mean, he worked with them. He taught them biblical languages, and they worked together. So it's really fascinating. In the little that I dabbled, I saw clear evidence that she funded his stuff, started a monastery or a nunnery or whatever you call it. Yeah, she did. But to be specifically involved in the translating, I didn't come across that. That's pretty solid. Yeah, no, they all were.

In fact, I can't remember now. She actually proofed correction for Jerome. And so she and her daughter, Eustochium, I don't remember what Old Testament text it was. I could find it for you and send it to you. But they were part of that. Old Testament text it was. I could find it for you and send it to you, but they were part of that. So they, you know, this, Jerome had a lot of people working on this for him. So I mean, it's often when we think about like Paul too, we think about Paul authoring these letters. He has people who are writing with him and working and then sending them out. You know,

it's not just him. So it's that type of framework that we see here. Here's a statement, though, that I have questions about. You say, well, it's in the context of like people promoting biblical womanhood, being mothers and wives and everything. But you said St. Paula, who abandoned her children for the higher purposes of following God's call in her life. And she left three of her children alone crying on the shore. Maybe the speaker would have claimed that Paula was not following biblical womanhood. And I like how you set it up, but part of me is like, I don't,

leave aside the gender part here. That's just, to me, bad parenting. If we flip the gender script and I said, if I said, okay, as a single father, my wife died and my children need me, but I'm going to leave them crying on the shore because God's calling me to ministry. Like I know a lot of men who have treated ministry kind of that way. And I would call them bad parents. Like I'm like, that's, that's, so I, and you didn't quite say, therefore she's a hero to lift up, but it kind of sounds like that. But I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if I would appraise her for abandoning their children, crying on the shore. I don't know. I don't know if I would appraise her for abandoning their children, crying on the shore.

So this is part of what I was trying to do with my book was disrupt. Disrupt the way that we think about things. And one of the things that we think about women is that women's primary calling is to be a mother. I mean, that's really it. That fulfills, that makes you. Again, we can go, we can, I mean, if we think about that, you know, that's what saves us in childbearing, right? That's the famous, that's often misinterpreted. Yep, that's misinterpreted so often. But it, so that's what we think about a woman's highest calling is, but that has not always how the church has perceived a woman's highest calling.

So it's not that I'm not lifting people up. I'm not saying we should do this over other people. What I'm saying is that the church has not always thought about this in the same way, and that in the ancient world and in the early part of Christianity, the highest calling for a woman was to follow God, was to follow God. I mean, that was it. I mean, you think about Perpetua and Felicity, their highest calling was to follow God, and they did. They gave up, you know, they gave up their families, and actually much more so than Paula did. Paula's son was, Paula's son and one of her daughters who actually dies later on is sick and dies. But they were very upset by her leaving, but they're also older children. I mean, this is not

like she's abandoning toddlers on the beach, which is why it was really funny to me when the council for biblical manhood and womanhood went after me for this and showed the picture of the toddlers on the beach. And it was so funny. Oh yeah, it's a really, you should go. It's a, a picture speaks a thousand words. It's really funny. But it's, they were, they were older. They were fine. But at the same time, what is being highlighted in that text is that Paula is following what God has called her to do. It's not that she left her children without anything to take care of them, but she followed God. And that was actually considered the right thing to do, even in this early world of Christian martyrs. So we might object to it.

We might be like, oh, my gosh, that's horrible. But we're also in a very different world than they were. We're in a world where a woman's highest calling is their children. That was not always the case. It wasn't that children were abandoned or anything else. It's just that the role of an individual parent was not always more important than the role of the community. So you can think about the old African proverb, take the village. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, I purposely didn't read a single review on your book.

So I didn't know. So I don't even know what people are saying about it. There's all sorts of fun things. Okay, yeah. I don't like to be – I want to read it for myself and not take somebody else's like, oh, yeah, I don't... You know, whatever.

So you're not... In a sense, you're not making a moral evaluation. You're just saying, this is what happened. This is a very different view of womanhood than we have today. The church has diversity of... Okay, yeah. So you're not saying...

Okay, that's helpful. I do assure my children are both fine and well. So would you, and I don't, from my vantage point, so I 100%, one of my favorite parts about the book was kind of critiquing the idolatry of marriage and motherhood from like, and I'm huge on that. I preach it all the time when it comes to people

who are not married. If they're married, again, let's leave the gender question aside. As a Christian writer, podcaster, husband, father, my priority as a father is still to my family. If my ministry is getting in the way of my family, I'm going to focus on my family. So if somebody is married, male or female, I don't see a... And I realize the history here. There's a history of maybe overemphasizing it. Maybe that's what you're pushing back on. But I would say it's not. It's a beautiful thing for a mother to say, no, my identity as a mother and as a wife comes before

whatever ministry I'm in. And I say that because I would say the same thing for a father. I wouldn't say, no, men get a free pass. I would say, no, you pastor, no, you're primarily supposed to care for your family. Would you agree with that? Well, I feel very strongly that the evangelical world, the way that we create ministry has been harmful to families. I mean, I see this all the time. And I've been a pastor's wife for 25 years. I mean, I see this all the time. And I've been a pastor's wife for 25 years. So all my academic world and most of my adult life, I've been a pastor's wife. So I know exactly that I know what ministry does to families with the way that we have envisioned ministry today.

But at the same time, I think we have to be careful about how we think about this, because I would still argue that my primary calling is to God and that I, you know, that is my primary identity. God gave me my family. He gave me my children. My family and my children do not come before my relationship with God. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm not a good mother. It doesn't mean that I don't love my children more than anything else in the world. But which also is why Paula is making the ultimate sacrifice here that she feel. I mean, so, I mean, you know, it's Jesus says, if you're going to follow me, you're going to give up your wives, your family, your children. up your wives, your family, your children. And Paul says it's better, you know, that it's better to stay single because the Christian life costs. Yeah. And it calls you to give up things that we don't want to give up. And so I think there's a tension there and we have to be careful not to

put, I mean, you think about women, women all the time give up their callings by God because they feel, because every, the pressure that is put on us to make sure that our children are put first, but in such an excessive way that women are unable to do other things. And, you know, unable to do other things. And, you know, culturally, we also live in a world that doesn't make room for us to do multiple things. I mean, we live in a world that's very unfriendly to women in the workplace in the US, especially. I mean, it's just, it's not, it's not really a Christian thing. I think it's a cultural thing. But I do want to say that I think we are called to steward our families and to love our families if we have committed to that. That's what we commit to.

But at the same time, there's a tension because Jesus says we put our following him first. Yeah. No, that's helpful. It's hard. And I would imagine you're probably, I don't know if he quite said, maybe, I don't think he actually said it, but I would imagine you're probably pushing back against the inconsistency. Like, you know, male pastors working 70 hours a week, traveling the world are praised, you know. But if a wife did that, they'd be like, dude like dude you gotta take care of your family so yeah

so for me i'm more critical but i'm just like no i think yeah like you said like ministry even the language of calling that i would still say like god's calling if you chose to get married and had sex and have offspring that is a primary but at the same time like i make side travel i do stuff there's times when i've i've left my kids crying you know at home saying daddy you know you're traveling again whatever and i've had to navigate that so um it is a hard and and teaching our kids too that like yeah like life does involve sacrifice you can't just have your mom and dad at your side every waking minute that you want you know you know so i don't know it's hard it's really hard i'm a college i'm a college professor and i think it's really good for kids to not to realize that they're not the center of the world that you know that there are

i think that's really um i think that's important i think for women too uh a lot of women lose their identities when their children leave the home because that's what they've been geared to and it causes so i mean just we we tend to go too far one way or the other and i think god calls us to hold a better tension in the middle that makes us uncomfortable sometimes and so anyway yeah are you doing okay on time we just reached an hour. Yeah, I'm okay. You're okay? Okay. Okay. Yeah, you can go a little bit longer. Okay. Okay. Just let me just wave a hand or something. If you're like, I gotta wrap this up. Mary Magdalene, I guess I wasn't, you know, used her and others have done this, not you, but as an example of female leaders, because she,

and you're drawing on somebody else here, another Carolyn Musig. Oh, Carolyn Musig, yeah. She's a wonderful scholar. Okay. She announced the good news to the apostles that Jesus was raised from the dead. And then, didn't you kind of use her as an example, that's preaching. I just, I don't know. Like, I don't, I mean, like, say we're at a very

complementarian church here in town. And so all the women are secretaries, right? And then the Pope happens to visit downtown Boise. I live in Boise and the women were down at the coffee shop and like, oh my gosh, the Pope's here. And they race back to the church and say, hey, you guys, the Pope's in, you know, that's the best analogy you can come up with. My Catholic friends are going to love this. But I don't think the pastor is going to say, how dare thou women preach at us? You know, it's like, what if you just informed us that somebody's here? Like, is that an example of preaching? And then preaching means preaching behind a pulpit at a church, you know, as an authoritative

voice. Like, to me, that just, I don't know. Like, I don't, as much as I agree that Mary Magdalene and all the women being the ones to inform, that does elevate women as proof that female leaders in a church, I just, I don't know. I think that's a bit of a stretch. Yeah. So here's the thing too. This is something I'll ask you to think about. We think about, we have our own definition of preaching today. And one of, as my primary area is 15th century sermons. That's my, so I work on, I'm a historian of sermons and preaching. So one of the things we have to think about is that the way we understand preaching today is very different than the way it has been understood in the past. Even like one of

the projects that I did, I went around looking at the insertion, what happens in medieval churches when pulpits begin to be inserted into them. And pulpits move from being against the wall, sort of being out of the way, to taking the place of the altar, where that preaching then becomes, I mean, that's what happened, is that the altar got moved, and the pulpit got put there, which is mostly, you know, and even in the 17th century, a lot of the pulpits are actually on the walls. They're still not there in the center. They're to one side or the other. But as we move into the 19th, 18th and 19th century, we see that pulpit move and it moves into the center of the congregation. And that becomes the focus and preaching takes on a different connotation than it ever has before.

And if we think about preaching, like in, you know, what is Mary Magdalene doing? She is a public witness. And this is what is, and that's also what the apostles, you know, they were the public witness. And what we see happening with Mary Magdalene's voice is that her voice is accepted as a public witness in a world that doesn't accept women's testimony as valid. And here we see Jesus entrusts a woman with this testimony. She takes it. And the early church interpreted that as preaching. Oh, they did.

And what we see in the early sermons and so forth, Mary Magdalene is called the apostle to the apostles. And she is, it's intentionally when she is talked about doing this, the word that is associated with her is preached. P-R-E-C-H-E-D, preached is often what I see in the medieval sermons. And in fact, they also invent a whole backstory to her and Martha. It's really lovely. invent a whole backstory to her and Martha. It's really lovely. But they become these preachers where they go off and there's this one lovely story with Mary Magdalene that is apocryphal. I do not ascribe it to being accurate, but medieval people believed it was accurate. And it tells how this couple went and found Mary Magdalene and she was preaching. And there's this

whole story. And then they go back to Rome, and they find Peter, and they tell Peter what Mary Magdalene is doing, and Peter affirms her as a preacher. He says she is called, you know, that she is preaching the Word of God. And so there's this long history in the medieval world that the first preacher was Mary Magdalene. And that idea of Mary Magdalene disappears. There's a really great book written by a historian named Catherine Jansen on Mary Magdalene that sort of talks about what happens to her. And so it's not just me saying that I interpret this passage as Mary Magdalene preaching. I'm saying that the early Christian and the medieval church, the way that they saw this testimony entrusted to a woman, became interpreted as preaching.

And we have lost that. And part of our story of losing that is because what we have done to the preacher and the sermon. And we have, if you think about idolatry, we shoved the altar out of the way and put the pastor and that pulpit in its place. So anyway. This is so fun to be able to talk to the author because, I mean, you spend like two pages on it, but all of that, that's so helpful. So you're not even really making a strict exegetical, this is what the New Testament is saying or isn't. You're saying this is how history has valued women, which has been buried in post-reform. That's so helpful.

Exactly right. So from an exegetical perspective, I would say, because there's another place where you say, you know, women are described as teaching, but not preaching. And you say, it's almost like you view teaching as less authoritative. From an exegetical standpoint, though, I would say it's the opposite. The Greek word karuso is announcing the gospel. It's just basically evangelism, which I don't, you can take the most complimentary and complimentary, like women can evangelize, tell people about Jesus. Which is so funny.

That's, but teaching is, didaskalos is the more authoritative one. So historically, though, you're saying that those two kind of broad categories are almost flipped. Women could be allowed to teach, but not preaching is kind of the big thing now. This is a new thing. I tell my students all the time, there's no lead pastors in the Bible. There is no separate, there's no preaching pastors versus ministry pastors. If we think about what the early church did, we think about the leaders in the early church, we think about the apostles, and we think about the deacons, and we think about the teachers. And those are really that, and we see women in all three of those categories in the ancient church. And we see women continue in those categories.

I mean, in the medieval period is a period from the 8th century to the 12th century where we begin to see women pushed out of those type of like the deaconate, et cetera. That's what happens. And I talked a little bit about the history behind that, but not very much. So anyway, so we can trace how women got shoved out of those positions. And then we reinterpreted those positions in a way that women could not hold. And that's where that has gotten us to where we are the way. So yeah, history matters. I want the first version of your book.

That's my mantra. I want the first version of your book that was like 300 pages longer. Well, I'll tell you tomorrow. this podcast won't air till after then so tomorrow we're announcing um my um my next book projects and so um i'm turning the making of biblical womanhood into a trilogy oh my word and the next book will be um called becoming the pastor's wife and it's going to talk about what happened to female ordination and how part of its disappearance was because of the rise of the role of the pastor's wife.

And so I'm going to tell that history. And then my third part of the trilogy will be Losing Our Medieval Religion, where I'll talk about the cost of evangelicals forgetting all of this stuff. Move over, C.S. Lewis. So you'll get those 300 pages. That's fantastic, Beth.

Congratulations on that. That shows a lot the publisher is behind your work for them to invest in that. This one's kind of minor, but I'm here. Is it Yusto Gonzalez? Is that how you say his name? Yusto, is that? My Spanish is not Yusto.

Yeah, although don't ever ask me about pronunciation. I'm way too... You know, you were critiquing kind of modern, you know, church histories, and his is the best among the ones you critique. You say he only lists, you know, 32 women in the index. And then you say, you know, he's one of texts that they discuss some noteworthy women in church history, but the male-female ratio of the indexes suggest that their narrative focuses more on men. But wouldn't that always, even if we identify every single woman who played a prominent role in church history, wouldn't it still, wouldn't the male-female ratio still be heavily in terms of the male,

for good or for ill? I mean, I don't know. It just seemed a little unfair to critique him. I mean, you were, again, you said kind words about him. He's the best of the stuff that's out there, but I'm like, ah, he, I don't know. Did he still do? This is a perennial problem in women's history is what do we do? Women are left out of the narrative. They're so written out. Most of our history books follow a 19th century model, which just didn't include women at all. So the question is, is how do we tell history that actually includes women in the ways that they have, they actually were? Do we completely throw out the old narrative, the old framework, or do we do what, you know,

some scholars have argued, we do the add and stir, where we try to sprinkle women in to the picture that everybody sort of understands and try to kind of move the public perception that way. So when you do that, when you take the narrative that mostly focuses on men and follows a male trajectory and you just start throwing women in, then yeah, there's always going to be an imbalance. But if you're able to actually move away from that male perspective on how this works, and you shift out and include also what the women are doing as equally significant, then no, we're going to find women in, you know, the, so it, but it's really hard to do that. How, you know, I, you know, one of my favorite historians who kind of tried this, who threw out the male framework, was a woman named Lisa Battelle, or is Lisa Battelle.

And she's a scholar at University of Southern California. And she's written one of my favorite books on women in the early medieval world. in the early medieval world. And she starts off, I always use it with my students, because when we think about the early medieval world, we often think about a world of movement. We have all these barbarians running around. We have the fall of the Roman Empire. Everybody's moving.

And she starts off with a chapter, and we think about it from the perspective of women. It's a history of standing still, because the women aren't moving. The women are staying in these places and the men are coming through and around them, but women are the ones that are actually keeping the culture and are, and then as men come into it, they're creating the men to fit into their world. That's it.

So it's this whole, yeah, it's flipping this narrative. And so our history textbooks are written from the perspective of 19th century white European men. That's it. Like what if in the section on Jerome, you started with St. Paula, her upbringing, she inherited this wealth, here's her little, and then hey, she ends up meeting this guy named Jerome. Even frame it that way. Even frame it that way would be exciting. It changes it. So it's how we tell the story.

And that's what I really wanted to get that across to people is that it's not changing history. It's shifting our perspective. And when we shift it, and even in the Bible, if we read the Bible from the perspective of women, it dramatically changes how we see it and how we see what God is doing. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's super helpful. That's absolutely helpful. One more real quick. The Trinity and the eternal subordination section. So I've only dabbled in that. I didn't follow it. In fact, I didn't even know about Amy bird's big thing until I had her on the podcast. Like,

Oh wow. No, I didn't even follow that. I just haven't been in these debates very much. Um, from the, from the little I know going on with that. Yeah.

Yeah. From the little I know, I mean, I think what Bruce Ware and, and, and Wayne Grudem do like explicitly advocate for it. And they, they've said some things that even like Michael Byrd

and others have said, this is, does sound semi-Aryan. Like I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. And I don't know if you quite said it, but well, let me ask you the question. Like, are you saying that like complementarianism as a system with its diverse expressions is like arian if you said i would say well there's a i mean tom schreiner is explicitly said that is not we're saying you have statements of chrysostom back um whenever he lived um that basically says you know uh equal in

ontology or whatever but different roles and, the son submits to the father. It doesn't, and it doesn't need to be eternally submissive. It could be like more incarnational or whatever, which I don't know. It seems to be what Philippians two and others are saying. I don't know enough about the debate to say, here's what I think is going on, but I do know there's a lot of diversity within complementarianism on that

perspective. There is a great deal of diversity within complementarianism. Most complementarians, I would say, well, okay, so here's the thing. I would say that most modern Christians are, most modern American Christians are very poorly versed in Trinitarian theology. I'll go out on a limb and say that. And so on the one hand, so we don't really understand what the Trinity means. The Trinity is very complex, And it's also a mystery.

I mean, that's, you know, our Augustinian, we can always boot to Augustine and say it's a mystery, which is what I often do. You know, the complexity of God. And so we misunderstand it a lot. And so what we see throughout church history is them trying to clamp down on sort of the worst excesses of like, okay, we don't quite understand it, but no, salvation doesn't work if Jesus is subordinate to God the Father, because that, I mean, that completely changes. Salvation does not work. I mean, that was sort of the understanding in the medieval world, that if you do that, the medieval world and the early Christian world does accept that when Jesus became human, that Jesus submitted to the Godhead, the will of the Godhead, because that's why,

but only in that human form, that Jesus is not eternally subordinate. I mean, that's the thing where we insert this hierarchical understanding into the Trinity in a way that the ancient and the medieval world did not. Now, there are always people running around on the fringe. People come up with their own ideas, and so I'm not saying that no one at all ever came up with this. You can kind of trace. Kevin Giles does a great job kind of tracing some of the history of Arianism. There's some other scholars that have done this. You can kind of trace, Kevin Giles does a great job kind of tracing some of the history of Arianism. There's some other, you know, scholars that have done this. I'm also using Arianism in the big brush. You know, you can debate and you can go and say, well, that's, you know, there's, that's only semi-Arianism, et cetera. But I'm sort of using it in the broad brush that if you argue

that Jesus is eternally subordinate to God the Father, then that does smack of what we saw in those early debates with Arius, because what you're essentially arguing is that Jesus is a created being, that Jesus is not God, that he is different from God the Father. And that was the pivotal moment of sort of that debate. But most complementarians, I think, if they really realized what was being taught about that by some of these, you know, by Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware, I think they would balk at it. I just think that they don't, that they haven't caught it. copy of Bruce Ware's book, Big Ideas for Little Minds or something, you know, about explaining God to children. And they gave it to me as a baby present for my daughter. And I started reading it and I got, and it teaches eternal subordination of the son within it. And I mean, it just was, I actually, that part got cut. I had the story about that in the book too, and that got cut out in favor of the one where I did almost drop my coffee during that church service where I heard it preached from the pulpit.

But I would say that most Christians, most evangelical Christians, if they were confronted with this idea, they'd be like, no, that's not what I believe. Right. believe, but yet complementarian teachings in order to, I mean, when you tie female subordination into the created order, which they have done, they have gone back and read it into Genesis, whereas most of Christian history, patriarchy was seen as a product of the fall. It's because we have sinned. But their argument is that it's ordained by God, so you've got to make it before the fall. So how do you do that? You write it into the Trinity. And so they have gone backwards and read that back in. Ben Witherington says, you know, the tail wags the dog when we think about this complementarian theology. So it is an extreme, but it is very dangerous.

One of my favorite women writers, Rachel Green Miller, who is still a complementarian, but she was the one who blew the whistle on this theology at the end, and she and Amy Bird, I mean, their story is amazing. Their story of how they blew the whistle on this theology and brought it up to the forefront so that it could be finally condemned by, you know, this sort of this council where we got all these evangelicals together and taught, you know, they were like, no, no, this is not what we believe. And Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware had to back down. But that was because of Rachel Green Miller and Amy Bird I remember hearing Amy told me about that I wish I was following that that would have been exciting all of the blogs are up you can follow it

from it's very beginning it's a really crazy and exciting story so from the little again the little I've read I've read mainly like I try to read it's going to sound bad but like thoughtful people on both sides so like you know the little, again, the little I've read, I've read mainly like, I try to read, it's going to sound bad, but like thoughtful people on both sides. So like, you know, you know, and so I like, you know, Tom's a friend and I like his, I think he has a, you know, one of the best complementarian presentations. And he's like, no, I mean, there's obviously we

should never, ever, it is heresy to say that the son is ontologically inferior. But to say on a relational level, he freely chooses to be obedient to the father on a relational level, not because he's lesser than. There's nothing in – and even like the Christian virtue of submission is never because the one submitting is lesser than. It's a freely obedient act, which elevates the very virtue of submission in the Philippians 2 sense. And I'm not saying you even agree with that, but if you frame it that way, then no, there's no ontological difference there. So here's the thing. If submission is voluntary, it means that you can choose not to. So if Jesus could also choose not to do that and be, but what that also implies there is that there is a difference of wills, that the potential of the difference of wills is there, which implies a separation in the Godhead. I mean, that's what this early church council and even medieval, this is what they were so upset about. You know,

they were like, there is not two wills here. There is not a will of the Holy Spirit and the will of God the Father, and there's the will of the Godhead. And the will of the Godhead was Jesus to submit when he was human form. But it is this, you know, so it's this separation of wills. Now, when you bring that to women, because people do this too, and I actually directly addressed this in my postscript, because a lot of people and a lot of women that I love and think are really fine scholars, and I want to promote their work, but, you know, I disagree with them about male headship, and a lot, you know, they're like, it's a beautiful vision. You know, the problem with complementarian theology is that people are

broken, and that people have messed up what God created to be a beautiful vision, and I'm like, I understand that, and I understand the desire for that beautiful vision. But at the same time, when you argue that there is something about a woman that makes her unable to lead, it's not just voluntary. It's that there is a limit put on women, that women cannot be called by God to teach in a way because there is something, whereas they're never called to be in leadership over men. There's something about her that makes her unable to do that. That's not submission. That is saying that there is something about a woman that is created differently. And so, yes, she can agree to submit, but that's not the choice that's given to women. The choice that's given to women here is that if you get married, you don't just graciously submit to your husband.

You are ordained by God that you have to submit to your husband. There is no choosing in here. If it was really gracious submission, it would be, you know, that's why I think Ephesians 521 comes in, that we are called, you know, submission is not a natural quality of men or women. But we are called together to submit, and we are called together to submit to God. And so I have a fundamental theological, you know, I do think it's about ontology. And I think that we frame it in a way that makes it look pretty and makes us think it's not about ontology. But if you actually get down to it, that's what it's teaching. ontology, but if you actually get down to it, that's what it's teaching. And so, you know,

but I mean, I am willing to have disagreements with folk on this issue and love them as my brothers and sisters in Christ, but I've gotten to a place where I do not, I cannot see this outside of thinking about it ontologically. So, no, that's so, because that is, many if not most complementarians would say God has designed women to be, like there is something in the ontology of femaleness. Yep. Yeah. And so if you agree with that, then map that back on the Trinity, then you're assuming some kind of ontology there. That's, yeah. That's exactly right.

Yeah. I mean, we have tricked ourselves with words and we have framed things so lovely and we've wrapped them in pink Bibles, as Amy Bird so eloquently pointed out. down to it, I mean, that's essentially what we are. And what's so insidious about this is that this is also why we still have racism in the church, because we are arguing that ontologically God creates some people as better, and it's terrifying. Sorry, I want to keep going, but... I know, I do have to go. My assistant has come like three times to the door. Okay. Okay. I'll let you go.

I've already taken you over. No, no, no, no. This is really fun. This is just a very complex topic that, um, yeah, we can do one more thing. If you want to ask whatever you're about to say. Well, just the, the, the, uh, difference doesn't need to be unequal. Like, because I don't, sex differences, I mean, there's bell curve, you know, differences. And there's more similarities between men and women.

Difference doesn't have to be equal. Right. But when you argue that some people, because of their differences, are unable to do things that other people are. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not talking about physical disability or, you know, something like that. And I'm not talking about men growing uteruses either. I'm saying in our cultural, social rules of behavior when we argue that because of the difference of a

person's body, that they are unable to even have the opportunity to do social, cultural, when we put the boundaries on it. You know, I always tell people, why are we limiting God? Why are we telling God who can serve and who can't serve? It's my biggest hang up with the complementarian, because I, again, I'm working through it, probably take me a while to work through it. But I don't see any, I don't see any rationale for why women categorically can't be leaders.

That just doesn't make any sense to me. And it's one of those, if God said it, I believe it. Okay, whatever. But there's no rationale. Even if you take men and women are generally different, and even if you did say biologically the qualities that leaders should have are predominant among men and not among women. And even, okay, even I'm not saying I agree with that. I'm just saying, even if you argue that way, it's still generalities. Some women are way more rational and analytical than men. Some women

cry during chick flicks and there's always going to be. So, I mean, even if you had 70% of men because of their whatever, you know, you still have a portion of women that are biologically very capable of being leaders. I know it doesn't make sense to me why God would, you know, say they can't. So, all right. Yeah. This has been fun. I really enjoyed talking with you. Yeah, you too. You too. Thank you so much for your book. So, I mean, I mentioned at the beginning, but The Making of Biblical Womanhood, How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. It is a provocative book. I would highly recommend it to anybody interested in this conversation.

So thank you, Beth, for your time. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. God bless. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

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