Woman in the Pulpit
Book Reviewed
by Mimi Haddad, Executive Director of Christians for Biblical Equality
Woman in the Pulpit
By Frances Willard,
Chicago: Woman`s Temperance Publication Society, 1978.
Editor`s Note: CBE is an evangelical organization focusing on gender equality and will hold its 7th Bienniel Conference in Dallas on June 22-24, 2001. For details write 122 W. Franklin Ave. Suite 218, Minneapolis, MN 55404 or visit www.cbeinternational.org.
- An Exegesis of Consistency
- The Fruit of Women in Ministry
- Both Views Presented
President of the Women`s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most influential women in the US in her day. The WCTU, deemed one of the largest 19th century women`s organizations with two million members, had a three-prong mission of abolition, suffrage and temperance. Comprised of an army of women, the WCTU had an outreach ministry to workers of many trades. Willard, a convert of a Methodist revival, was a coworker of D. L. Moody.
An outspoken advocate of the woman`s suffrage, Willard believed God intends Christian women to advance the well-being of their families through their political vote. Willard combated prostitution, exposed the need for laws against rape, and called fashion designers to eliminate pencil thin waistlines, which were deforming women`s bodies. As evidence of her own achievement as an educator, Willard was made president of Northwestern Ladies College, which later became Northwestern University.
Willard was always an advocate of women in ministry. She encouraged women to pursue a ministry not limited to work among other women, as she herself had often felt confined. She believed God had work for women as evangelists and in every branch of church work and public life. She opposed the prejudice that keeps women from using their gifts for God`s glory.
A brilliant exegete, Willard approached Scripture with a dedication to excellence and consistency, as well as a commitment to female equality. In 1889, Willard inspired her peers by writing Woman in the Pulpit, an examination of the interpretive methods used to limit women in ministry. She even invited a renowned biblical scholar, opposed to her own position, to critique her exegesis.
Woman in the Pulpit had three main objectives. Her first purpose was to teach that Scripture be interpreted consistently—especially that the difficult passages on women be viewed in light of the main thrust of Scripture. Second, she examined the lives of women already serving in public ministry. And third, she presented opposing viewpoints by offering to theologians on either side of the issue a platform for their ideas.
An Exegesis of Consistency
Tackling faulty methods of reading the Bible, Willard exposed the tendency to literally interpret select portions of Scripture. "Why," she asked, "do some interpret literally the first part of 1 Timothy 2:11 ("Let a woman learn in silence"), while ignoring the remainder of 1 Timothy 2 and the mandate that women avoid `braided hair, fine clothing and jewelry?`"
Similarly, she points out that Christ commanded his disciples to "wash one another`s feet" in John 13:14, and yet we are not compelled to make this a matter of church practice. Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul elevates singlehood and celibacy over marriage, and widowhood over remarriage. "Why do not the churches teach likewise," she ponders? For Willard, to interpret Scripture with such variability confuses the "plain Bible-reading member of the laity" (p. 21).
Moreover, theologians would "outlaw as unorthodox anyone who did not believe Christ an equal member of the Trinity" (p. 29), yet these thinkers readily "preach and practice the heresy that woman is in subjection to man, when Paul distinctly declares that her relation to man is the same as that of Christ to God" (p. 29).
Interpreting God`s Word for personal advantage is always a temptation, warned Willard. Issues such as slavery and the leadership of women have fallen prey to a preferential reading of Scripture. Since most people enjoy being waited on, Willard feels this attitude has led to the promulgation of slavery. As many people enjoy seeing women beautifully dressed, and most would prefer marriage to singlehood, Christians tend to establish church practice according to our natural predilections rather than a consistent reading of Scripture.
To avoid such errors Willard charged her readers to read Scripture through Scripture. 1 Timothy 2:11 should be understood in light of the example of women leaders in Judges 4:4-5,1 Corinthians 14:3, Acts 18:26 and Romans 16:3-4. Similarly, the call for women to "keep silent" in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is best read in light of Joel 2:28, 1 Corinthians 11:5, Acts 21:9-10 and 1 Corinthians 11:11. Indeed, verse 35 is further clarified through Luke 2:36-38, Philippians 4:3, John 1:1-3 and Romans 16.
Harmonizing Scripture with Scripture, Willard called us to remember that there are more than thirty passages "in favor of woman`s public work for Christ, and only two against it, and these not really so when rightly understood" (p. 34). Rendering women`s subjection as anything but a product of the curse is an affront to God, as the "whole tenor of the Scriptures is to show that in Christ the world is to be restored to the original intent of its creation when `there shall be no more curse.`"
The Fruit of Women in Ministry
As president of the WCTU, perhaps the best-organized women`s movement of any era, Willard observed the advance of Christ`s kingdom through the leadership of women. Women served as superintendents over "departments of Evangelism, of Bible Readings, [and] of Gospel Work for railroad employees, for soldiers, sailors, and lumbermen; of prison, jail, and police-station workers" (p. 57). These women regularly studied and expounded "God`s Word to the multitude, to say nothing of the army in home and foreign missionary work, and who are engaged in church evangelism" (p. 57).
One woman, after 25 years as a pastor and preacher, states that "there is not work outside the home circle upon which women can so consistently and properly enter as that of the Christian ministry . . . none can be so well fitted by nature for understanding the great problems of character and destiny as those whom God has appointed to give birth to new life and to mould the characters of the young."
Yet, the ministry of these women remained outside the church, "not because they wish to be so, but because she who has warmed them into life and nurtured them into activity is afraid of her own gentle, earnest-hearted daughters"(p. 98-99). A church that breathes life into a woman`s soul, while bidding her to serve elsewhere is a spectacle that is "both anomalous and pitiful," (p. 58) claimed Willard. When will the church call in "these banished ones, correlate their sanctified activities with her own mighty work, giving them the same official recognition that it gives to men?" Prayer meetings in which women`s voices are excluded are declared lifeless and poorly attended, noted Willard .
Both Views Presented
Willard next offers renowned theologians and preachers a venue to defend or oppose women`s public ministry. Each tackles a difficult passage or defrocks biblical interpretation that is considered inconsistent. An anonymous contributor, whose editorial services reaches "several thousand readers per month, and is foremost among the leaders of a great denomination" writes:
"I believe women should be authorized as ministers in the church of God. . . [because] man has no greater natural or spiritual rights than a woman to serve at the altars of the Church, as a minister of the Gospel. If a woman possesses gifts, graces and usefulness, she occupies the same vantage-ground before the world, and is under the same obligations to God . . .If women can organize missionary societies, temperance societies, and every kind of charitable organization . . . why not permit them to be ordained to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments of the Church? If women should withdraw from the churches and all missionary and merciful work, we would begin to think that the foundation had dropped out of our civilization" (p. 58).
Another collaborator suggests that while there is no support in the New Testament that women or men received formal ordination at the commencement of their ministry, "we have unquestioned proofs that women exercised the essential functions of ministry" (p. 76). Moreover, the whole notion of the subordination of women, he suggests, stems from the fall. "If Christianity is completely to restore that which was lost in Adam, how can it stop short of completely abolishing the subordination of women, which the Bible declares to be the direct result of sin" (p. 76-77).
To her credit, Willard invites an articulate opponent to critique her theological defense of women in ministry. This critic rightly noted a tendency in Willard to suggest that women possess natural attributes making them superior to men. Women are not, her opponent correctly argues, "holier by nature than men, and if they were this would not make them better ministers. An angel from heaven is not more fitted to preach the grace of Christ than was Saul, the chief of sinners." We cannot, I would agree, sacrifice the foundations of "Christian theology for the misty sentimentalism that expatiates on the natural goodness of woman" (p. 78).
Perhaps the greatest strength of Women in the Pulpit is that it exposes the myriad of ways in which Christians read the Bible inconsistently. "A practice prohibited in one sentence and regulated in another, by the same author, shows either variability in opinion, or else an intended limitation in the original prohibition" (p. 117). Clearly, the Bible allows for women`s preaching and public ministry, and to deny women this right is a poor reading of the text, a hindrance to the kingdom of God, and an injustice to those created in God`s image
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