Leonard Theological College

Subject: Role of women in the History of Christianity.

Introduction:

The Church Fathers inherited from their social and intellectual environment a long tradition of
debate about the physical, moral, and intellectual capacities of women. It would be an
oversimplification to say that the uniform teaching of ancient philosophers and rhetoricians was
that women were in every respect naturally inferior to men.

1. Tertullian (155-240 AD) was from Carthage in the Roman Province of Africa. Although he
has been called the father of Latin Christianity, he was the son of a centurion in the proconsular
service and was a pagan until his 40s, indulging his passions as he saw fit. He became a Christian
after witnessing the courageous martyrdoms of ordinary Christians in Roman games. Soon after,
he became a priest in the church of Carthage. At some point, he became disillusioned with the
church for what he believed to be compromise and aligned himself with the more ascetic
Montanist sect. Nevertheless, he is known for defending the church against heresy (namely
Christian Gnosticism), paganism, and persecution. He is also credited with being the first to use
the term “Trinity” (Latin: trinitas) when discussing the nature of God..

Here is an excerpt from Book I of Tertullian’s “On the Apparel of Women”:

“And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours
lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the
unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who
persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s
image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die. And do
you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?”

2. John Chrysostom (349-407 AD) was the Archbishop of Constantinople from 397-403. He
was one of the most prolific writers of the early Christian church, second only to Augustine. He’s
the chief representative of the exegetical principles of the School of Antioch, which used the
grammatico-historical method of interpretation, in contrast to the allegorical and mystical
interpretive methods of Origen and the Alexandrian school.
From Homily 26 on First Corinthians:

“This is again a second superiority, nay, rather also a third, and a fourth, the first being, that
Christ is the head of us, and we of the woman; a second, that we are the glory of God, but the
woman of us; a third, that we are not of the woman, but she of us; a fourth, that we are not for
her, but she for us.”

It’s interesting that Chrysostom argued here that female subordination and the restriction on
women teaching men was a direct result of Eve’s sin. He referred to the curse in Genesis 3,
which he understood as the wife being made subject to her husband, but then extrapolated it to
women being made subject to men in general. His statement, “This had not been said to her
before,” indicated his understanding that it was a consequence of the fall. In other words, he
wasn’t making an argument that this hierarchical arrangement was based on the created order.
He spelled it out explicitly by reasoning that women were now subordinate to men because Eve
had used her equality with Adam poorly.

3. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan from 374-397 AD, is remembered for baptizing Augustine,
fighting successfully against Arianism (a heresy that denied the deity of Jesus Christ), standing
up to several emperors, and teaching on a vast number of subjects, including the Old Testament,
congregational singing, Jesus’s incarnation, the Holy Spirit, and Christian ethics.

In his treatise, “On Paradise,” he wrote:

“In fact, even though the man was created outside Paradise (i.e., in an inferior place), he is found
to be superior, while woman, though created in a better place (i.e., inside Paradise) is found
inferior.”

4. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) is regarded as one of the most important church fathers of
the Latin Church because of how his theological, anthropological, philosophical, and
sociological writings influenced the development of Western Christianity. Even those who have
never read any of his works have most likely heard the following quote from Confessions: “Thou
hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” I heard it
just three months ago in an introductory Sunday-school lesson on Ecclesiastes.

In “Literal Commentary on Genesis,” Augustine wrote:

“If it were not the case that the woman was created to be man’s helper specifically for the
production of children, then why would she have been created as a ‘helper’ (Gen. 2:18)? Was it
so that she might work the land with him? No because there did not yet exist any such labor for
which he needed a helper, and even if such work had been required, a male would have made a
better assistant. One can also posit that the reason for her creation as helper had to do with the
companionship she could provide for the man, if perhaps he got bored with his solitude. Yet for
company and conversation, how much more agreeable it is for two male friends to dwell together
than for a man and a woman! . . . I cannot think of any reason for woman’s being made as man’s
helper, if we dismiss the reason of procreation.”

5. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) is considered one of the greatest Christian thinkers and
philosophers in history. In his masterpiece, Summa Theologica, he accomplished the classical
systematization of Latin theology. Bible teachers quote from it often and with great respect. In
the same lesson on Ecclesiastes, the Sunday-school teacher who quoted Augustine (above) also
quoted from Summa Theologica, “It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s
happiness…This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone.” (Summa Theologica II,
Q. 2, Art. 7) Summa remains required reading for many seminary students in the Catholic
Church, the Orthodox Church, and most Protestant denominations. For this reason, it remains
highly influential.

The following are excerpts from his writings:

“As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the
male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production
of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even
from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher
observes (De Gener. Animal. iv, 2). On the other hand, as regards human nature in general,
woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature’s intention as directed to the work of
generation. Now the general intention of nature depends on God, Who is the universal Author of
nature. Therefore, in producing nature, God formed not only the male but also the female.”

6. Aristotle 384–322 BC was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in
Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of
philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. In his Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men,
but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political
rule over the wife. Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more
impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same
weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be
happy unless women were happy too. Whereas Plato was open to the potential equality of men
and women, stating both that women were not equal to men in terms of strength and virtue, but
were equal to men in terms of rational and occupational capacity, and hence in the ideal Republic
should be educated and allowed to work alongside men without differentiation, Aristotle appears
to have disagreed.
In his theory of inheritance, Aristotle considered the mother to provide a passive material
element to the child, while the father provided an active, ensouling element with the form of the
human species.

Conclusion:

It’s helpful to see clearly that things like human hierarchy, slavery, and gender inequality based
on beliefs about female inferiority were not problematic constructs for either ancient Greek
philosophers or the majority of people in the Greco-Roman world. To them, it was simply the
way things were. Slavery was thought of as the natural condition of certain ethnic groups. And
women were second-class citizens conceived as biologically defective males. In light of the
dominant thinking of the ancient world, we can appreciate how radically counter-cultural the
apostle Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3:23-29 was—that in Christ and under his rule, the
established ethnic, gender, and economic human hierarchies of the time— not God-given
differences, as some misunderstand this passage to mean—no longer defined human identities or
the way his people are to relate to one another.

Bibliography:

Sarah Sumner, Ph.D. Men and Women in the Church. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press,
2003

Cynthia Long Westfall. Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women
in Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016.

Michelle Lee-Barnewall. Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to