“A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.” (1 Timothy 2:11-14)

Have the passages above somehow aided in the silence of women in the Church today? These passages have been troubling to many Christians throughout the ages, but especially to women in our modern era. Recently the modern feminist viewpoint is that Paul was oppressive to women in general. It is my opinion that this view has largely come about because anti-woman texts over the centuries have quoted Paul for support, and not because feminists have looked deeply at the Bible and carefully considered all the words of Paul in context. But even those who excuse Paul from the extreme charge of misogyny often don’t know what to make of these trou

So, in conclusion, Paul was helpfully accommodating the ideal of spiritual equality of men and women to the culture of his time. It obvious that he was necessarily influenced by the culture’s anxiety about women’s speech, and thus we have the noted limitations set upon women—along with freedoms given to women to compensate this limitation. Due to the misuse of these passages by unjust men, feminists’ just critiques of these men’s views, and the continued isolation of these verses out of their context, many people have accepted the feminist charge without further examination and have made the additional wrong step of dismissing Paul’s authority from God. Yet as we have now seen, in these passages about women, it was Paul’s prime concern to keep order and accommodation of God’s ideals to humans and culture, not the oppression of women as a gender and class. He made concessions to cultural restrictions on women so that the communication of God’s message would not be distracted by too much conflict with culture. Excessive conflict with culture would cause people to be offended and confused instead of listening and giving authority to a speaker. Paul was well aware of the difficulty of finding common ground with cultural views of women, as is implied in his frequent mention of women’s roles.

In a Christ-like humble way, we see in Paul’s writings over and over the theme of mutuality (“one another”) and unity (we are all one in Christ) emphasized over and above hierarchy among humans. The freedom to speak authoritatively is given to those who are willing to be humble and meek and serving, who are willing to accommodate somewhat to human weakness and culture when these forces are resistant to change, and to be willing to be silent when others are speaking from God. Yet Paul emphasizes that at the same time as we are orderly and accommodating, we must desire to prophesy, to speak words of encouragement, sometimes of rebuke, and to challenge one another to seek the ideal that lies beyond the accommodation. Without this tension between ideal and real, there would be no progression toward God’s ideals for human speech and relationships.

Paul was asking and requiring women to submit to this fallen order, to forgive or even accept the way that society was organized even if it seemed to be against them. Yet even in the midst of this struggle, he allowed women some measure of dignity and freedom that even his culture would have frowned upon—saying women should ask their husbands questions at home, thus honoring women by allowing them to learn the same things that men do, learning through speaking and conversation. He thus raises women’s status in marriage by making her education important to her husband, making a wife a spiritual companion not just a possession. Concerning female education, Leon Morris notes that from the Greek and Roman times until even recently, it was thought that any female education beyond mere household matters was not considered necessary or appropriate—the Jews regarded it as a sin to teach women . Yet Paul argues that women should be permitted the freedom to take an active role in their own spiritual education and that of others , not just merely to be passively indoctrinated in public and private.

Women’s unlimited speech in churches could reasonably imply that women could not only to speak authoritatively to men in church, but to do so in secular public office as well. To admit that revolutionary idea would require a revamping of politics to a degree that the early world was not ready for. It took almost two thousand years after Paul for the arguments of scripture to be applied to female vote and political leadership, not to mention nearly that many for scripture to be used in freeing humans from the institution of slavery.

Although there

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