When someone knocked on my door
wanting to explain the Bible to me, I told him that I was already a student of
the Bible, at which point he enthusiastically suggested that he come in to
compare notes. As I was thinking about how he would not enjoy that, he quoted
St Paul to me. I responded saying, “St Paul didn’t like women.” He looked
shocked and quietly left. I wonder if he has been studying 1 Corinthians ever
since to try and work out why St Paul speaks about women the way he does.
Take this verse for example:
"the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home." 1 Cor 14:34,35
How can such a doctrine stand today
when the importance of gender equality is broadly recognized? A closer look at
the actual Greek words St Paul uses reveals quite a different meaning,
especially if we apply them to what goes on within our consciousness. After
all, it is within our consciousness that we recognize gender equality.
The Greek word translated as church
is ekklesia from ekklētos meaning
called, from ekkalein to call out,
from kalein to call. In what
circumstances do we call out? We can call out for help, we can call out to get
someone’s attention, or we can make a call to challenge in some way. Behind the
word ‘call’ is the activity of bringing attention or awareness to something.
What are we called to become aware
of? Primarily, we are called to become aware of the activity in our soul; our feelings,
thoughts, and intentions. So many thoughts, feelings and intentions are active in
our consciousness in a robotic, impulsive way. It can be quite a shock to
become aware of them. When we call them out (ekklesia) we gather or assemble them
in a focussed way. This sounds like a church doesn’t it?
Now we must ask: what is the wife
and the husband within us? In a very basic, generalized way we know that the
feminine nature is the nurturer, filled with feeling. The male nature is more
practical, more pragmatic, based on thinking. Our task is to encourage these
two to work together so that feeling warms the coldness of our thinking and
thinking guides our feeling to be practical.
With these ideas in mind, a new
picture of what St Paul is saying emerges. When St Paul used the word ‘subordinate’,
which in Greek is hupotasso where hupo means under, and tasso
means to arrange, we can understand that he is saying we arrange our feelings under
our thoughts and in this way we keep our emotions under control.
Then St Paul says,
“If there is anything they (women) desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home."
Continuing on with the idea that
Paul is speaking about the activity in our consciousness; we can ask questions
of our thinking in the privacy of our own home, i.e. our inner being. This
should always be the case, to question our thinking, which in turn makes us
aware of our thoughts. This is when we can discover how often they are
negative, fuelled by our emotions. With this awareness, we can keep them
silent, “not permitting them to speak.”
What does this say about knocking on
people’s doors with our own ideas about what the Bible means! Unlocking the Bible
is now up to each individual person. Asking the husband-thoughts within us to
assist us to make sense of sacred texts, and not letting our wife-feelings run
away from us, is important work for every human being.
As published on Huffington Post
