Review of Cynthia Long Westfall, 'Paul and Gender'

Photo: C Imes

Cynthia Long Westfall's Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle's Vision for Men and Women in Christ is a tour de force. 

It's not a new book (c. 2016), but I finally took the time to read it, and I'm so glad I did.

Dr. Westfall is a graduate of Biola (where I teach), and currently serves as Associate Professor of New Testament at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

In the stuffy room marked "Paul's Views on Women," where a weary debate has been at an impasse for centuries, Westfall raises the blinds and throws open the windows, letting in light and fresh air. With my three degrees in theology and four-and-a-half decades in the church, I thought I had heard it all. But just ask my husband (at home) if he's ever seen me gasp so many times while reading, and if I've ever interrupted him so many times to read him a sentence or a paragraph.

Here are a few nuggets:

• "Pauline theology of ministry was based on metaphors of slavery and service so that any believer (gentile, slave, or female) could assume any function in the house church without violating the hierarchy of the Greco-Roman culture" (6; cf. 266). Later she explains that words like "pastor" and "deacon" were not technical terms until long after the New Testament. We associate them with prestige and authority, but they would not have had that connotation to Paul's recipients.
• Westfall problematizes the simplistic views of Greco-Roman authority, showing the many men were under women's authority (as children, slaves, or clients to wealthy women) and that most women had some measure of authority in the domestic sphere (e.g., pages 23, 267).
• She notes in that context a woman's "unveiled head signified sexual availability, so that a woman slave or a freedwoman was prohibited from veiling" (29). Therefore, "Paul's support of all women veiling equalized the social relationships in the community . . . [and] he secured respect, honor, and sexual purity for women in the church who were denied that status in the culture" (33-34).
• Paul regularly used male metaphors for all believers and female metaphors for those in church leadership. "Paul's use of maternal imagery for pastoral care illustrates a compatibility of pastoral care with feminine commitment and the female role of nurture" (53).
• Westfall argues cogently that "head" in Paul is a metaphor that relates to source rather than to authority. While she is not the first to contend for this reading, I found her explanation particularly insightful. "Christ is the source of man's life because he is the creator who formed man in Genesis 2:4-9. Man is the source of woman's life because she was created out of man in Genesis 2:18-23" (86).
• She demonstrates from Paul's own letters that Paul does not believe women are more prone to deception than men. "Women as well as men in the Christian community are in danger of deception, but the same remedies are available: biblical correction and teaching" (116).
• Westfall explains the historical background that likely prompted Paul's strange statement about women being "saved through childbearing" (1 Tim 2:15). "Artemis was the patron goddess of the city of Ephesus, and she was literally the savior to whom the women went for safety and protection in childbirth" (136). It is very likely that in 1 Timothy 2, Paul is addressing false teaching in Ephesus and urging women to trust God to watch over them during their vulnerable experience of childbirth.
• On eschatology, she writes, "According to Paul, there is no differentiation in humanity's destiny on the basis of gender, race, or status. Women, as well as gentiles and slaves, have a shared destiny of authority and rule... Women cannot have a final destiny that was not their intended purpose of function at creation. Rather, it is a transcendent norm for men and women to share dominion" (147).
• Paul is counter-cultural. "Christianity undercut essential patriarchal rights by requiring men to be faithful in the same way that the culture had required women to be faithful" (203).
• She explains that in Greek, "Masculine is the default gender, and it cannot be assumed that women are excluded as referents form masculine nouns, pronouns, and so forth, particularly in catchphrases, unless they are excluded by the context" (270).
• Westfall notes that Paul's letter to Timothy was personal, addressing specific problems in the congregation in Ephesus. "A document like Paul's Epistle to the Romans would have been a more logical place to make a clear prohibition on women teaching and in ministry" (297).

I cannot do justice to this rigorous book with a list of bullet points, but I wanted to give you a taste of the sorts of claims she is making. Westfall's conclusions are carefully researched and well argued. She has a way of turning things inside out to help readers see what has been hiding in plain sight. Her book simultaneously delighted and depressed me. If she's right -- and I think she is -- then this book offers good news for women who have long felt called to ministry in the church. But at the same time, Paul and Gender saddens me. I feel the weight of the fact that some corners of the church have unnecessarily missed out on hearing the Spirit-empowered voices of women for a very long time.

Church leaders, I beg you to read this book. You can't afford not to.

Carmen Imes: the gospel according to Numbers

Gospel? In Numbers? I admit I was a bit taken aback by this assignment. (The only disease worse than Numbers is Leviticus!) I quickly remembered, though, that the priestly blessing is found in Numbers 6:24–27. That was my ticket. Surely a blessing counts as gospel. So I said, 'yes.' And then I got back to work on my dissertation. That was July.

August and September were quickly swallowed up by dissertation work, TA work, getting kids back to school, etc. When I turned the page to October (yes, I still use a paper calendar), I knew it was time to nail down my chapel message. By that time I had heard Dr. Walton speak on Genesis and Dr. Ryken on Exodus. Both of them did such a great job of setting up the whole book as gospel. That's when I realized that the priestly blessing was a cop out. If I didn't read the whole book, I would never know what gospel I was missing. And so I did. Starting with chapter 1, I read clear through to the end.

Wow. Was I in for a surprise! Not only did I find more gospel, but in the most unlikely place. I would tell you where, but that would spoil it. You'll just have to watch for yourself and see. So grab a Sharpie (you'll need one), sit back, and enjoy!

The gospel according to Numbers is that we're counted as his.

on intellectual honesty

A number of months ago a kind reader introduced himself. He let me know that he was particularly interested in watching how I would be affected by the claims of critical biblical scholars (a.k.a. "liberals"). He's writing a book about how evangelicals respond to what he calls "extensive data that seems to pretty clearly rule out the traditional Christian dogma about the inspiration and authority (not just inerrancy) of Scripture, the messianic fulfillment of prophecy, the writing and canonization of the NT, etc." His big question is this: "how can one stay 'orthodox' and be intellectually honest?"

His question is a good one, and deserved a thoughtful response, so it took me quite some time to reply. You can read my full reply in the comments section here (which I deleted and reposted because I found some typos), but I came across two statements yesterday that speak to this whole issue. Both are from an essay by V. Phillips Long introducing the book Windows into Old Testament History: Evidence, Argument, and the Crisis of 'Biblical Israel.'

Long says this: "who we are as whole persons affects how we approach and assess evidence" (8).

And this: "we shall make little progress in understanding one another and in intelligently debating our competing historical judgments until we are willing more openly to explore how our judgments are fundamentally affected by our core convictions" (10). In other words, it goes both ways.

The beauty of Postmodernism is that it has made (almost) all of us aware that we speak and listen from a particular vantage point. What we find persuasive largely depends on what we already believe is true and what counts as evidence in our way of looking at things. I'm not saying there is no absolute truth. I'm simply pointing out that our disposition towards it is very much determined by where we begin.

Intellectual honesty is important to me. For that reason, I have changed my views on a number of things since I started out in seminary seven years ago. But my faith is stronger than ever. Take "messianic prophecy," for example. Meeting with Jehovah's Witnesses helped me to realize that my simple, connect-the-dots understanding of prophecy was not robust enough to account for Trinitarian doctrine. I was forced to go back to the Bible with harder questions, and I was profoundly awakened to the radical claims of the New Testament. The New Testament authors really "got" who Jesus was and what his coming meant for world history. They were not just connecting the dots. They saw Jesus as the ultimate fulfillment of what Yahweh himself had claimed to be and do. (You can read my posts on that topic here.)

I'll never forget my summer job after my senior year of high school. I was a "cast member" at Incredible Universe in Denver, where I welcomed "guests" for a shopping experience. One of my fellow cast members was a middle-aged man who worked in Software. We often talked about God in the break room. As I recall, he was not a Christian, but he admired my faith. He became concerned when he learned that I was going off to Bible College in the fall. He talked about how so many lose their faith in seminary (a.k.a. "cemetery"), and he didn't want the same to happen to me.

That was 1995. And here I am, more than 17 years later, still studying the Bible in academia and still loving Jesus. I do think about the Bible differently than I did in high school. My faith has been stretched and deepened in important ways. Some of my naivete about the Bible has been replaced, thanks to a better understanding of the ancient world and more time spent in the text. Its terrain is more exciting now than it was then, and I'm better prepared to pick up nuances in its message than I was before. Meanwhile, some of my "easy answers" about God have been replaced, thanks to the struggles of life. I no longer see him as the "anesthetist-in-chief" but my trust in Him is deeper than ever.

Wheaton is a place where students can engage openly with tough questions and other points of view and learn from critical scholarship . . . alongside professors and other students who are committed followers of Jesus, people who see the Bible as their authority for faith and life. Together we wrestle with the text and we wrestle with ourselves, seeking to live faithfully in light of what we learn. If Long is right that "who we are as whole persons affects how we approach and assess evidence," then approaching the Scriptures as believers will make a difference. It has for me.

why "tell me the story"?

If you sit down and read documents from the ancient Near East (I realize very few of you have actually done this . . . but stay with me), it doesn't take long to notice the difference between the vast majority of ancient writing and the Bible:

The Bible is full of stories. Lifelike stories. Stories about real people, warts and all, who muddle about trying to listen to God and obey him. But most of all, stories about God's great acts in history.

Why tell all these stories?

Not for entertainment. Not as "royal records" (the documents that served that function in ancient Israel have been lost). No, what we have to understand about the ancient world is how historical narratives functioned. You see, the one place we have this type of "historical narrative" in other ancient Near Eastern cultures is in treaties. In a covenant between two parties, "the past was recounted for the specific purpose of instilling a sense of gratitude as the foundation and ground for future obedience" (from George Mendenhall's article on "Covenant" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary). If a king asks someone to swear loyalty to him, he first recounts all the generous things he has done to benefit the other party.

The stories of God's great acts in history are told for a reason.

They show us who HE is, and why He deserves Israel's highest praise and deepest devotion. This is why the Ten Commandments begin with a statement that changes everything: "I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of Egypt." That story-in-a-nutshell stands as a potent reminder that God asks nothing of his people without first giving them everything. His "laws" do not enslave. If he had meant for Israel to be slaves he would have left them in Egypt. Instead he set them free. And in their freedom he painted a portrait of what life-in-freedom-with-Yahweh looks like—a life free from enslavement to other gods and their every whim, a life free from worry about whose they are (they belong to Him and bear His name!), a life free from worry about possessions (they rest in His provision), free from disrespect, free from worry about premature death, the lure of a neighbor's advances, a ruined reputation, or the loss of what is rightfully theirs. (See Lochman's book for a beautiful exposition along these lines.)

But wait. The Ten Commandments are not designed to protect our own freedoms. If we read them carefully, we see they are designed to protect the rights and freedoms of our neighbors. As Daniel Block has often said, they function like the 'Bill of Rights' except that they are the 'Bill of Someone Else's Rights.'

Because of what God has done to set us free, we are to live in such a way that others can be free. Again and again, the stories remind us that freedom is a gift, a fragile gift, and that we best protect it by living life God's way. That's why we need someone to tell us the stories.

And that's why the stories are told.

The author of Hebrews, whoever it was, gets that. He (or she!) spends a great deal of time recounting the Old Testament stories as a reminder of what God has done, and what that means for believers in Jesus. Just as God set the Israelites free from Egyptian bondage, so he has set us free from bondage to fear and death. That freedom ought to transform everything, because that's what stories do. They tell us how it is. And who we are.

"Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, he likewise shared in their humanity, so that through death he could destroy the one who holds the power of death (that is, the devil), and set free those who were held in slavery all their lives by their fear of death. ... Thus we must make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by following the same pattern of disobedience." (Hebrews 2:14–15; 4:11 NET)

Tuesday Tidbit: tell me who I am

Joel Green, in his book, Practicing Theological Interpretation, says this:

"if this letter [James] is to serve as Scripture for us, then we will allow it to tell us who we are" (18).

What would happen if we let the Bible tell us who we are?

seeing Jesus in 3-D

Almost a year ago Gordon-Conwell asked if I would contribute to a weekly e-devotional celebrating 20 years of ministry at the Charlotte campus. I was honored to have this opportunity to reflect on how my studies at Gordon-Conwell transformed the way I see Jesus. The devotional was released today, but you can read it right here:

[Jesus said], "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he [smeared over] the man's eyes with the mud and said to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam." So he went and washed and came back seeing.... They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, "He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and I see." Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath." But others said, "How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?" Then they turned again to the blind man, "What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened."...Then the man said, "Lord, I believe," and he worshiped him. Jesus said, "For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind."

John 9:1-39, selected

I first saw Jesus in 3-D at Gordon-Conwell—Charlotte. Just as Jesus appears to be stepping right out of "The Sower" fresco and into the chapel, so he stepped off the pages of Scripture during my studies.

Again and again I found the key to understanding him was the Old Testament. Most of Jesus' life and teaching is unintelligible without it. With the Old Testament close at hand, Jesus' identity comes into sharp focus. He intentionally does things to fulfill prophecy and signal that he is the long-awaited Messiah. Not only that, he does what God alone is expected to do!

An example is found in John 9. The story there is familiar—Jesus heals a man born blind and the Pharisees are disgruntled. How does the Old Testament help us understand this event?

Jesus announces that he is the light of the world.
     We know from Isaiah that Yahweh is the light dawning (Isaiah 60:1-3).

Jesus smears mud on the blind man's eyes.
     Isaiah, too, was told to besmear the eyes of Israel as a picture of God's judgment (Isaiah 6:9-10).

The blind man sees.
     Isaiah tells us the blind will see when God's kingdom is established (Isaiah 35:5).

In this event we encounter Jesus as a prophet who brings judgment on unbelieving Israel. But he is more than a prophet. He inaugurates the kingdom of God the prophets only foretold, and claims to do what Yahweh alone can do: illumine the world.

Our response can go one of two ways. We can accuse him of blasphemy like the blinded Pharisees or we can worship him like the man who can now see.

May we have eyes to see Jesus clearly today!

is the Bible just like any other book?

Or are there distinctively Christian ways of reading Scripture?

Todd Billings thinks so. His book is a great introduction to the theological interpretation of Scripture. According to Billings, "Something much bigger is going on in receiving, understanding, and believing the word of God than human linguistic understanding" (3). Later he explains, "Through Scripture, the Spirit addresses all of God's people, not just the original hearers" (61). Not only are we addressed, but we are invited to participate in the drama of God's action in the world. The process of interpreting Scripture is not complete until we are changed. He says, "Revelation brings not only knowledge of God but fellowship in and with the triune God, a saving fellowship that transforms believers ever deeper into Christ's image as Christ's body" (198). This fellowship extends not just vertically (with God), but also horizontally, as we are formed into a community of God-followers. This community transcends space and time, as we join those who have read Scripture in the centuries before us and in cultures around the world. Together we are transformed.

In answer to our opening question, Billings concludes, "While there are important practices of reading that apply to nonbiblical books as well as to Scripture, ultimately we should not read Scripture as we read other books. We should read it in prayer, memorize it, speak and sing it with the congregation in worship—worship that delights in telling and tasting the story of God's saving work in Christ, accessed through Scripture. We should come to Scripture, as we do to worship, with an expectation of meeting the mysterious triune God, with the prayer that we would grow in our love of God and our neighbor—becoming more like Jesus Christ" (224, emphasis mine).

Billings was here on Wheaton's campus in December serving as the outside reader for the dissertation defense of a fellow student. I'm glad to have had an opportunity to read his book. His vision of the promise of theological interpretation is coherent, compelling, and accessible to a wide range of readers. If you've been wondering what it should look like when Christians read the Bible, this book is for you!