Still More on the Church and Authoritarianism

I didn’t intend to “liveblog” my reading of Elaine Pagels, but learning about the early church has been such an eye opener for me. It turns out that the early church was way more accepting of women as participants and leaders in worship and the community of the faithful than the later church. One of the main complaints of the orthodox bishops about the Gnostics was that they suffered women to teach and lead and serve on an equal footing with men. They also employed a set of feminine metaphors in talking about God that undermined the notion of male dominance.

Pagels implies, or at least I inferred, that the orthodox church adopted a number of “pseudo-Pauline” epistles that represented Paul as commanding that women be kept silent in church and that validated the supremacy of men over women.

I am thankful that my own church encourages women to be leaders and take active roles in church despite Paul’s supposed decrees to the contrary. Nonetheless, at least one of my literalist fellow congregants believes that women should be silent and that their activities are tolerable to him only because men have “abdicated their responsibilities”.

Even in the Bible Belt where I grew up, most of the churches I knew about had women in active roles. Some even had women preachers. All had women Sunday School teachers. How did they reconcile this with Paul’s alleged dictates about the inferiority of women and their disqualification from such roles? They didn’t, as far as I could tell. Then and now, it was unlikely that such a passage would be featured in worship or Bible study, and if the issue came up it was dismissed as an artifact of the socio-cultural and historical context within which Paul wrote. That was good enough for me when I was a child, but as an adult Christian I have never been able to reconcile the idea that Paul advocated domination by males over females or that he supported slavery with the teachings of Jesus. If Paul never actually wrote the troublesome passages, all the better as far as I am concerned.

The more I learn about the early orthodox bishops and their authoritarianism, the less inclined I am to trust that their selection of texts for the canon was inspired by the Holy Ghost.