Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Paul Interrupted: A Medieval Perspective

Paul Interrupted: A Medieval Perspective

Last updated on: March 21, 2018 at 7:47 am by Beth Allison Barr

Paul Interrupted: A Medieval Perspective 2018-03-21T07:47:06-04:00 Beth Allison Barr

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Just a few years ago, my entire family (parents, siblings, aunts, and my grandfather) attended a church service together. The pastor was preaching through Ephesians and had reached chapter 5.

Now, I have to tell you some about my grandfather. He was Baptist most of his life. After his family moved back to Texas from California, they joined Travis Avenue Baptist Church where he eventually met my grandmother. For most of his adult life, after the war, he served as a committed member, Sunday School teacher, and even deacon at Baptist churches in Dallas, Houston, and Ft. Worth (not to mention the ones in California and Illinois). He wouldn’t have identified as Evangelical, but he certainly identified as Baptist.

In short, my grandfather heard Baptist pastors preach once a week if not more (several times a week during revival services) for around 80ish years. By the end of his life, he probably found Ecclesiastes spot on–there wasn’t much new under the sun in regards to sermons.

Which is why it really struck me that Sunday. This particular pastor preached for wives to submit, he preached that women were eternally subordinate to men (more on Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem about this in a future post), and that women’s primary calling was that of home, family, and obedience. Women’s role in both church and society was to submit to the authority of their husbands. The preacher used an example from a once-popular movie (you may have seen it), My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The matriarch of the family consoles her daughter that even though the husband is the head of the family, the wife is the neck and she can turn the head anyway she wants. The pastor was quick to point out that this was an unbiblical perspective that subverted God’s designated hierarchy of patriarchal authority.

My grandfather shook his head. He looked over at my sister, patted her knee, and whispered (loudly), “You don’t believe any of this stuff, do you?”

80 years listening to Baptist sermons. 80 years, and still the hard complementarian message my grandfather heard that Sunday unsettled him. He didn’t believe it. He was unfamiliar with it. It seemed different.

This is my point. The hard complementarian message today that argues women are ordained by God to be subordinate to men and that this excludes them from most leadership roles in churches (teaching, preaching, serving as deacons and elders, etc.) is different. Yet it has so permeated evangelical culture–through Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology that is so pervasive in seminary culture, through John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, through Desiring God podcasts, through the popularity of the Acts 29 movement, through Focus on the Family–that most Christians don’t even blink during a sermon on female submission and male headship. I would surmise that many Christians would think it heretical to NOT argue for male headship and female submission. It is the divine order. Right?

As I discussed in a previous post, evangelical Christians in modern America fixate on a handful of verses to discuss women’s roles in the church–namely 1 Corinthians 11 & 14, Colossians 3, Ephesians 5, and 1 Timothy 2. Most arguments for complementarianism stem from these verses. These verses have become so prominent that many Christians–especially in churches identifying as evangelical–have a hard time seeing women through any other lens.

But these verses have not always defined Christian womanhood. Something has changed.

Today I am going to give you a peak at my current research into medieval sermons (stay tuned for my almost-finished book project, Women in English Sermons 1350-1500). Out of 120 late medieval English sermon manuscripts that I have examined (some of which contain a handful of sermons while others contain upwards of 50 and even 100 sermons in each manuscript), which includes the most popular and widely circulated sermon compilation in late medieval England (John Mirk’s Festial), only 5 manuscripts reference either the Pauline prescriptions (1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2), the household codes (Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3, as well as Titus 2 and 1 Peter 2), or the so-called Pauline doctrine of male headship (1 Corinthians 11:3).

FIVE. That’s it. And medieval sermons preached scripture–just see my previous post on The Top Ten Bible Verses in Medieval England. They just didn’t preach Paul’s writings about women.

1 Corinthians 14:32-36, otherwise known as the “women be silent” passage, never appears in the sermons. Colossians 3:18 (wives submit) also never appears. 1 Corinthians 11:3, the so-called Pauline doctrine of male headship, appears only in one sermon. Ephesians 5:22-23 appears in only two manuscripts, and verses from 1 Timothy 2:9-15 appear in only two manuscripts.

So, again, out of 120 sermon manuscripts, which represents the majority of surviving late medieval English sermon collections, only five reference the verses which today are synonymous with biblical womanhood.

Medieval preachers, from the evidence of the 120 Middle English sermons I have examined, never preached for women to be silent and mostly never preached for women to be submissive. While modern evangelical preachers insist on viewing women through the lens of these verses, medieval preachers almost never referenced these verses.

Have I got your attention? The way we understand biblical womanhood today is NOT the same as it has been understood in the past.

Okay, let’s deal with the resistance.

First, I imagine some of you will resist this argument because of false beliefs about the medieval Bible. The rebuttal will go something like this. It isn’t at all a surprise that medieval people didn’t focus on Bible verses about women because medieval people (including priests) didn’t know their Bible. Most of them didn’t have access to the Bible before the Reformation. Sorry. Wrong. I have argued before that medieval people may have known their Bible better than we do today–they just focused on different verses (see my previous posts).

Second, I imagine some of you will resist this argument because of correct knowledge about the medieval world. Medieval women did live in a patriarchal society and most women were legally under the authority of their husbands (and, yes, this is correct-I have never argued the medieval world was a golden age for women because it wasn’t…). Your rebuttal will go something like this. If sermons are responsive to problems within the church, maybe medieval preachers mostly didn’t need to preach on female submission because it was not questioned. It isn’t until the feminist movement that women began to question their God-ordained role, and hence why preachers today emphasize male headship. This is a better rebuttal, but it is still wrong. It assumes that medieval preachers constructed sermons for the same purposes as today. They often didn’t. The main purpose of late medieval English sermons directed to ordinary Christians was to help them understand and practice their faith. Sermons were very pastoral in nature–focused on conveying the gospel and the necessary components for salvation (the sacraments). Gender roles were not considered part of the gospel message nor central to salvation (which is actually different from how Grudem et. al. consider gender today…..). So medieval preachers didn’t fuss about submission. Wives submit to your husband wasn’t in the Ten Commandments, after all. Even if preachers were concerned about gender roles, they still probably wouldn’t have preached on them because maintaining a gender hierarchy was not a priority for medieval preachers (at least from the evidence of late medieval English sermons).

Which brings me back to my main point–something has changed. Medieval preachers didn’t consider gender roles central to the gospel or salvation. This is different from how gender roles are regarded by the complementarian movement today.

I haven’t even scratched the surface on why these differences exist in medieval sermons. You will have to wait for the book for that. But in some ways the reasons don’t really matter to this post. My point is simple. I want you to understand that the way biblical womanhood is defined today is NOT the way it has been in the Christian past. The way Pauline texts are used against women today has NOT been constant throughout church history. Subordination has NOT always been assumed an essential part of biblical womanhood.

To conclude, I want to tell you about the pictures and the title I chose for this post. My parents went to Rome just last week. They visited the church of St. Paul Outside-The-Walls and my dad sent me the pictures I used today. According to early tradition, this church venerates the original grave of St. Paul after his execution by Nero. It also contains an interesting relic–the chain that (supposedly) attached the Apostle Paul to his Roman guard.

This chain, however, no longer has power over Paul. Its power was interrupted a long time ago. Today it is just a reminder of Paul’s imprisonment.

This is all I hope to do. To interrupt the growing idea that biblical womanhood is, and has always been, defined by a handful of scriptures from Paul. Join me next time as we move our discussion into global Christianity.

medieval Christianity

complementarianism

medieval christianity

Paul

women

Previous Post

March 20, 2018

The Bishop's Boys: Religion and the Wright Brothers

Next Post

March 22, 2018 Defining Evangelicalism and the Problem of Whiteness

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe Guest Post guest post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who gave Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Wise men Disciples Shepherds Fishermen