Women in the Early Church

And so I started looking into just what were Christian women doing down through the centuries. And I haven't stopped the journey yet.

And then after Constantine you have the great writers, and you have the Roman elite who, both men and women, who are supporting the church, and thinking a lot about celibacy, virginity. Virginity and martyrdom are linked conceptually. And also then just the problem or the issue of wealth. And I point out those things, 'cause I think that those topics also matter a lot today, as we think about our bodies, and what it means to be an embodied Christian. And then, in the West, of course, with our amazing wealth, compared to any other time in human history, I think the Patristic period and the writings of the men and women can help us think theologically about our own time.

But from generation to generation, we see gradual progression as far as relationships between men and women, and women in the church and in ministry leadership, et cetera. As culture changes, as the church moves from a primarily a synagogue centered movement to outside the synagogue and … you are gonna see some differences, because cultural expectations are going to be different for men and women. There isn't …

This myth that everything in the Roman Empire was the same, literally when you went from city to city, region to region, cultural practices could change, and expectations. Class. If you were wealthy vs. working class or poor, those expectations would change. So we just have to be careful that we don't come to these stories or these texts with artificial expectations, and let them speak to us, and hopefully not read into it also our own 21st century understandings, yeah.

Okay. So, we're clearly in a wave of societal discussion currently in our own society about women, their roles, their rights. And that can be a really sensitive conversation for the church. And I think we look a lot at what our interpretation is of what the Bible has to say about those kinds of things. But it strikes me that maybe history, and especially the early church history, can help us think through these things as well. Would you all … One, would you even agree with me? And two, if so, why should we pay attention to what has happened in the past, and really consider it as we're considering how to move forward in our own time. Dr. Svigel, if you want to go first.

So one great thing we see is a variety of examples of how Christianity, not just survives, but thrives and flourishes in a variety of contexts. And Lynn mentioned the change between third to fourth century, and Christianity become legal and then the official state religion. That changes the context for us. And so we are now in a cultural context today where Christianity's moving in the other direction. It's not so much an accepted religion, or assumed religion. It's really moving into what people say a post Christian context where people don't take us seriously or don't … It's looking a lot more like, perhaps, a church of the second century.

So we can learn some things of how they contextualized things in those realms, and learn some lessons, maybe be provoked about some of our assumptions. I think there are lessons to be learned there, and wisdom to be gained.

In the ancient world, the imperial family was very important. And Caesar Augustus, his wife Livia, had tremendous power. And we also, the mother of Nero, Agrippina, she also had a lot of power, and her press, her ancient press is a bit mixed on how she used that. But that same kind of power and influence extended through to the post Constantine era. And you have a woman named Pulcheria who we talk about in a book that I co-authored with Amy Hughes, Christian Women in the Patristic World. And this woman, Pulcheria, she was the sister of Theodosius II. She was a committed virgin. And when she was ten her father died, the emperor died. And her brother, who was eight, in a sense takes the throne, although he doesn't begin to rule right away.

But when Pulcheria turns 15, she began to oversee her brother's education. And from the ancient historians themselves, they say that she effectively ruled the empire. She was very involved in the Christological debates of the day. The Council of Chalcedon in 451, where the church confirmed the view of Jesus as being fully human and fully divine. She was very influential in that. She had written to Pope Leo I to call this council.

Once you realize just how involved women were from the imperial family, and then you think of … and this would be way earlier, late first century, early second century … the figure of Thecla, we can … I'm sure we'll be talking about her in a little bit … she was almost like a meme for several centuries as the first female martyr, a follower or disciple of Paul, advocated the celibate or virginal life. And so there's just so much influence, such a rich history of women participating in the church at all different levels. And I think once we realize that, as we delve into that, we find parallels, and they can help us. They can help us think through what feel like, perhaps, just only contemporary issues. But there's nothing new under the sun. They had a lot of our same issues.

But I'm just curious if … we talk about diversity and everybody's voices offering a different perspective. I'm just curious if there is a perspective, especially Dr. Cohick, that you've seen from your research in this are that they offer us that maybe we haven't heard before?

She gives a very powerful testimony. And one of the threads in her text is her defiance of her pagan father, which is an extremely impious deed to defy him. So she has this pagan culture, and the virtue of obeying your parents. And she flies in the face of that, because she says to him, "I am a Christian." And that just rings through her text. And it captured the imagination of Christians down through the centuries. So Augustine has a couple of sermons on her feast day where he talks about her. And it's clear that her testimony … So she was killed in 203, and Augustine is writing I don't know how many … couple centuries later, right? And she is … I'm not good at math, so I don't … Within two centuries, right? And she's a member of the church, if you will. They still think about her as a figure they can emulate, even though the age of the martyrs is done, and they still honor her and her testimony. "I am a Christian." You can't get more basic than that.

But another approach is the gaining wisdom and inspiration, et cetera, from a lot of these stories, men and women who throughout history have given their lives. I think it's a more responsible way. Paul even says, in the Old Testament these things were done and written for our benefit, and even acknowledging the different context. It is idealistic and impossible to go back and completely recreate the context and the structures and those kinds of things of the early church.

So it has to be a dialog. You're reading and … reading them critically and in some sense sorting through the wheat and the chaff. But at the same time, letting them read us in a sense, and inform us and teach us. And so it's always this dialog that we're having with the past, rather than importing it or adapting it or adopting it.

So it may feel like you're overemphasizing women, but really all it is is that you just haven't talked about them a lot. Now you are.

Macrina, who is the sister of Gregory the Great and Basil of Caesarea. She talks about, or Gregory indicates that Macrina's secret name, if you will, is Thecla. And so this woman and her piety against all odds, and her faithfulness, her perseverance against all odds was seen as a role model. So that would be a figure that I would say is useful to study or to think about. And also the reaction to her. I find that also very fascinating.

And so I think that that is a … it's a lesson, again, without being hokey, but it's a lesson for, as Dr. Cohick said today, we are living in a time when we have an immense amount of influence and leisure time, frankly. And women, especially in the West, have so many opportunities, and can look to figures like this as how yes, we can sacrifice everything, as did Thecla, for instance, but we can also then utilize these things that we are given for the benefit of the church. So I think that there are … there's not a one size fits all kind of approach to this, which I think is what you see with these accounts of women throughout the history of the church.

But what I wanted to drive home with this emphasis on widows, so they wouldn't remarry, virgins who never married, that it wasn't that they hated their bodies, or that they somehow were prudish and against sex. And I'm not even sure that they felt marriage at the time was so patriarchal that they couldn't … they wouldn't have any self actualization, because Roman women, or in the Roman period, women could have their own wealth, apart from their husbands.

So I'm not saying that everyone had married bliss at this time, but I'm not sure that all women chose the virginal life just to get out of getting married. Instead, the chose it … they had agency … they chose it because they believed it offered a foretaste of the resurrection life. And the resurrection life, in that immortality, that imperishability, that age where we are … it's the great supper of the Lamb, the kingdom of God having come, all of those wonderful things that all Christians look forward to, the resurrection of the body, these women and men just wanted to have a taste of that, or a richer experience of that life, and they felt they could achieve that through the virginal life. And that was greatly admired by most of the church.

So I think that's one thing that we can, as we think about our own day and the message that we have about what a fulfilled life means, I think we can look back to these women and see how they understood what a fulfilled Christian life could look like. And that could be instructive for us.

But there is a question of how to translate. She's well known. They are well known among the apostles. Does that mean we? Like Dr. Cohick is well known among the faculty of Dallas Seminary. Or is it they're well know because they are among the apostles themselves. It's not completely clear. And that's about the clearest passage we have.

On the other hand, prophetesses are all over the place in the New Testament. And so … And the other other hand, the fact that Paul is talking about Andronicus and Junia and Phoebe and all of these women who are clearly traveling and back and forth and heavily involved and commended, we start losing the forest for the trees, and see that women are heavily involved during the apostolic period in part of what we might more generally call the apostolic ministry. So whether they are holding the office, if there is that kind of language, of apostle is not completely clear, but I think misses, probably, the point. That's my perspective.

Oftentimes I think what happens is we come with a question, what roles should women play in the church? And we have a particular ecclesiological structure in mind. And then we go to the New Testament and we see, "Okay. Well, given my ecclesiological structure, what does the Bible say about it?" instead of reading the New Testament from its own context and looking at the language that it uses, presbyters, elders, apostles, coworkers, and from there trying to figure out what were Paul's expectations and Peter's expectations and the rest in terms of how the church can function well, or not so well, as we see it in the Corinthians. Seems to be all over the place.

And I'm always thankful for the Corinthians, 'cause I think, "Okay, there's hope."

So, yeah, but I think the deaconesses … it depends on how you're gonna use that understanding. As you were talking I was thinking of Pliny the Younger has a missive that he sends to the emperor. He's checking out Christianity and he's got these two Christians that he has tortured to try and get more information. That's what you did back then. And they're two slaves who are Christians, and he's torturing them. And he identifies them as ministers, which is the Latin way of saying deacon. And they're women. Now he saw them as authorities in the church, that they could speak on behalf of this group of Christians, this group that he thinks shouldn't exist, that is in defiance of the empire.

So what do I do with that. They don't have a title of a set office within the church, but functionally, the governor of the area thinks they're church leaders. So that, I think, is where we just struggle with our evidence, because it doesn't actually always line up with how we do church today. And we tend to locate authority within an office. And they did that in the ancient world, too. But what I'm saying is they didn't necessarily always do that. And that's what makes it difficult, or why you have a variety of opinions on how to read the evidence.

But then it does open up the possibility then for the church at large to begin to forget, and the shift toward a, we're just going to read the Bible, just gonna focus on the Bible, not think of history in our legacy, in the heritage. I think that it opens up the possibility to forget.

But sometimes, when a group becomes more established, it tends to, as it organizes itself, the leadership tends to become more predominantly male. And so I think that that's just what you see. I was also thinking that, in the great missionary movements that we've had post reformation, women are very much represented. Amy Carmichael, we know about her legacy. And so sometimes it depends on what is the church doing, what is the task of the church, and as to how men and women are working side by side, or whether it's more hierarchically structured.

Again, want to thank you so much Dr. Svigel and Dr. Cohick, for your time. And we want to thank you for listening. And if you would like to have a topic for us to consider for a future episode, please feel free to email us at [email protected], and be sure to join is next time as we discuss issues of God and culture.