CYOA: 1 Timothy 2:1-15 - Caitlin Kellog, A Bunch of Brokeness

I’ve been trying to avoid this conversation for a long time. Every time I turn around, it is smacking me right in the face. First of all, because I am a woman, secondly a single woman, and thirdly, a single woman studying at seminary. Though I don’t want to be a pastor, I do want to teach the Bible.

I am literally exhausted by this conversation. Mostly because it is 1 AM in the morning and I had two beers with my brother (who is also going to seminary). But also because this question, this “issue” has been a thorn in my side, for years, but in particular this semester. It just causes one too many emotions. And in the end, both sides are able to explain quite eloquently (and without vile, psyche!) “the correct” position based on the scriptures. So let’s just say we’re tied.
And get back to more important questions like why there are still no hotels on the moon.

What I can tell you is some of my experience.

My parents are a lovely mixture of egalitarian and complimentarianism. My dad never lets my mom mow the lawn, mostly because I think he secretly loves the smell of cut grass mixed with gasoline. But they share other duties, like cooking or doing the dishes, etc. I think it works out quite lovely actually. I grew up going to church, but have never had a woman pastor, sure lots of Sunday school teachers, and reading books about women missionaries and who would preach and baptize overseas (which is ironic and racist, because it is “good enough” for “those people” but not for us to have women in leadership). I went to Bible college where I felt affirmed as a woman studying theology, but it was lonely. Now I am attending a seminary with affirming professors who ask me to speak up in class. But again, it is lonely. The 3 professors I have are males; the majority of students in classes are married men. And the only other single woman entering in seminary this year isn’t even in the same program!

In the end, I claim both egalitarianism and complementarianism.
Why not? Why do we always have to say one or the other? That’s stupid.
I think it is impossible to be in real life friendships/relationships/what-have-you without both.
I believe in and hope for equality. And I long for a day when power does not corrupt. But I would hope that relationships are also about give and take. I always come back to interlocking fingers while holding hands with another person; the weakest parts of your hand (all that squishy stuff in between) are covered by the strongest parts of my hand, the fingers. This is what I can offer you, it is quite a basic human transaction really. I need you and you need me.

Currently I am working on a paper for my Christian History and Theology class (which is due on Monday, adding to the exhaustion), on the virgin martyrs. These were a small group of women, who chose Christ and death over the socially and culturally demanded marriage. They were tortured and threatened with sexual assault, often dying in the most inhumane ways; one woman even had her breasts sliced off. At the heart of this persecution, was the body. These women rejected the very thing which defined their “femaleness”, marriage and child-birth; it was a “renunciation of social insignificance”. For a time their stories were the precedent for women to carry on in ministry and leadership, baptizing and preaching. Eventually they were first women to be venerated as saints, standing alongside Mary, the Mother of Jesus. However, along came the Church Fathers and Christian society a-la Constantine (who actually didn’t establish Christianity as the state religion, that was his grandson), exerting culturally-based misogyny and control over the new virgins. The only way they could describe these martyrs’ bravery and self-control was to say that they became men, that they literally took on the male form; because those kinds of qualities could not exist within women (and there are so many cultural reasons why this was a NORMAL concept to have of women, that to call them misogynists is really to say, they were just men of their time, unfortunately).

Now today feminists see the virgin martyrs as symbols of liberation from man’s control of women’s bodies. These women were subversive and able to overthrow the dominant culture by claiming virginity, thus claiming their sexuality, thus claiming their identity. But the tension lies in the fact that we simply cannot read twentieth century ideology into the 3rd. It is absurd and just terrible exegesis, even I know that as a woman.

What has been the most difficult for me in this project and this discussion on the blog is that while I agree with Duncan and Danielle about Jesus loving women too, it seems that the following apostolic tradition did not love women like Jesus did, that there was a reversion back to the maintenance of the dominant cultural norms surrounding the religious and civic roles. And it is excruciatingly depressing. Jerome, Tertullian, Augustine and all the other Fathers wrote brilliant theologically treatises. I cannot deny that. But then to read their views on women, and women’s bodies in particular, the loneliness creeps back and screams in my ear: “there is no historical precedent for women to have power!” I just wanted to excommunicate them all and when I get to heaven I will punch them all in their faces.
But I can’t.
And I won’t.
Because 2 Corinthians 12.
At the heart of what I believe about Jesus, the Incarnation, redemption and how we are to live our lives as Christians, is not of power but of weakness; of foolishness instead of wisdom.
The things men have deemed ugly and contemptuous is that which brings glory to God.

The virgin martyrs were subversive because the Gospel is subversive.
Grace is sufficient for us, for Christ’s power is complete in weakness.
When I am weak, then I am strong.
And if I am weak because I am a woman, then I am strong because of Christ. And so are you.

By Caitlin Kellog