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This Week
This week at praxis...Hey Hey Paul!
(As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the
churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as
the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask
their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you
the only ones it has reached?) Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have
spiritual powers, must acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command
of the Lord. Anyone who does not recognize this is not to be recognized. So,
my friends, be
eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues; but all things
should be done decently and in order. ---- I Corinthians 14: 33b-40
The Corinthian women prophets are also a witness to the new
life in Christ. They know Christ’s death in the continuing social
vulnerability of their lives so visible in this letter and are beginning to
learn the way of his rising. Paul wants them to marry to make sexual life
simpler for men, to cover their heads to make worship less distracting for
men, and to be silent to keep the people’s communication with God under the
control of men...Yet in spite of this, rumors and prophecies of the experience
of a new humanity in Christ that is "neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave
nor free, neither male nor female" have never completely died out, and
this letter is one of the witnesses. ----Antoinette Clark Wire, Conflict
and Community in the Corinthian Church
In this chapter I have attempted to establish four things. First,
Christian subcultures in the ancient world rapidly developed a very
substantial surplus of females, while in the pagan world around them males
greatly outnumbered females. This shift was the result of Christian
prohibitions against infanticide and abortion and of substantial sex bias in
conversion. Second, fully in accord with Guttentag and Secord’s theory
linking the status of women to sex ratios, Christian women enjoyed
substantially higher status within the Christian subcultures than pagan
women did in the world at large. This was especially marked vis-a-vis gender
relations within the family, but women also filled leadership positions
within the church. Third, given a surplus of Christian women and a surplus
of pagan men, a substantial amount of exogamous marriage took place, thus
providing the early church with a steady flow of secondary converts.
Finally, I have argued that the abundance of Christian women resulted in
higher birthrates – that superior fertility contributed to the rise of
Christianity. ----Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity
I Corinthians 33b-36: This self contained section upsets the context: it
interrupts the theme of prophecy and spoils the flow of thought. In content,
it is in contradiction to 11:2ff, where the active participation of women in
the church is presupposed. This contradiction remains even when chapters 11
and 14 are assigned to different letters. Moreover, there are peculiarities
of linguistic usage, and of thought. And finally, verse 37 does not link up
with verse 36, but with verse 33a. the section is accordingly to be regarded
as an interpolation...In this regulation we have a reflection of the
bourgeois consolidation of the church, roughly on the level of the Pastoral
Epistles: it binds itself to the general custom. Those who defend the text
as original are compelled to resort to constructions for help. ----Hans
Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians
I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.
Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion,
help these women, for they have struggled beside me in
the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers,
whose names are in the book of life.---Philippians 4:2-3
Questions:
- If you are a woman, have you ever been limited by the texts in Paul in
the church? How? How has it affected you?
- Was Christianity good for women or not? Was Paul good for Christian
women or not?
- Why would the beginning of the "be silent" text be in
parentheses? Do you believe Paul wrote these words? What if he didn’t?
- Why would he use women leaders in one church and tell them to be quiet in another?
- How do you experience life in Christ as a New Creation?
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