Womanhood: My oldest daughter has twin girls. They are seven years old, and she talks quite a bit about girl empowerment. And I have to admit, I love that. When I look at those two little girls, absolutely bursting with life, personality, intelligence, curiosity, and possibility, there is something wonderful about telling them that being a girl places no limitation upon their worth, their minds, their usefulness, or the fullness with which they may live the lives God has given them.
But lately I have found myself wondering whether we need to look even deeper than empowerment. Perhaps the more interesting question is how we ever reached the place where women needed to be “empowered” in the first place. Christianity certainly recognizes distinctions between men and women. Asking these questions does not require us to erase those differences, abandon male headship, dismiss what we see in I Timothy 2–3 and Titus 2, or set aside the particular order God has established within the home and the church.
The question is not whether those distinctions are real, but how far we have allowed them to define everything else. Did Christians sometimes take genuine biblical distinctions and build something considerably larger around them? Did we move from recognizing an order to defining almost the entirety of womanhood by that order?
There is a uniqueness about men and women that ought not be erased. But sometimes in our determination to preserve that uniqueness, I wonder whether we have actually minimized one half of it. We have spoken endlessly about a woman’s “place,” her submission, her relation to her husband, her limitations within the church, and the boundaries surrounding her life. Some of those discussions arise from real biblical texts and therefore cannot simply be dismissed. But womanhood must surely be larger than a collection of boundaries.
That thought came back to me recently while thumbing through a massive volume entitled What Luther Says, published by Concordia. I navigated to the heading “Women,” where page after page collects statements from Luther concerning women, marriage, motherhood, and their place within society. At the beginning of that entry appears a familiar claim about the Protestant Reformation: “Women owe the Reformation a debt of gratitude, for it restored her to her God intended place in society.” Her “God intended place in society.” That is an enormous assumption packed into a very small sentence.
I have heard some version of this statement many times. The Reformation, we are told, liberated women from the distortions of medieval Catholicism and restored marriage, motherhood, and domestic life to their proper dignity. There is certainly some truth in that. But hidden inside the statement is an assumption that deserves a closer look: that the Protestant view of a woman’s place was not just better than what came before, but was actually the order God intended.
And once we say that, an obvious question follows. What exactly did we decide her God-intended place was? Because perhaps the question before us is not whether men and women are different. They are. Nor is it whether Scripture contains an order within the home and church. It does. The question is whether everything Christians built around those truths actually came from Scripture, or whether, somewhere along the way, biblical order became something much larger – an entire way of thinking about womanhood.
And that is where things become interesting. Once we begin looking at what Christians actually meant by a woman’s “place,” we often find much more than a few clear biblical distinctions. It could become an entire picture of what a good woman should be: quiet, domestic, yielding, dependent, careful not to step too far outside the role marked out for her. It could shape how she was expected to speak, learn, work, lead, dress, and even think about herself. Some of those expectations may have grown out of sincere attempts to honor Scripture. But that does not mean every expectation came from Scripture itself.
And perhaps one way to test that picture is simply to look again at the women Scripture actually gives us. They are not all described in the same way, and they do not all fit neatly into a single mold.
Some are quiet, some are bold, some exercise remarkable influence, some teach, some speak with remarkable courage, some manage households, some influence kings, some support the work of Christ, and some are among the first to recognize and speak of what God is doing. Scripture gives us order, but it also gives us women who are far more varied than the narrow picture we sometimes inherited. Maybe that is part of the problem. We have sometimes approached these women already knowing what a woman is supposed to be, and then read their lives through that expectation.
But what if we simply let Deborah be Deborah, Mary Magdalene be Mary Magdalene, Priscilla be Priscilla, and Anna be Anna? What if we allowed the women of Scripture to show us something about womanhood instead of only using a handful of passages to tell us in advance what every woman must look like? I wonder whether we have sometimes allowed a few passages about order and limitation to become the lens through which we see every woman in Scripture. Those passages matter, and they cannot be ignored. But they are not the whole picture. If we let the whole Bible speak, the picture becomes much richer. We begin to see women not merely in terms of what they may not do, but in terms of who they are, what they know, what they see, what they say, and how God uses them.
Think of how many different kinds of women Scripture places before us. Deborah sits in judgment over Israel. Judges 4:4-5. Huldah speaks the word of the Lord to a king’s messengers. II Kings 22:14-20. Abigail acts with wisdom and courage when her husband will not. I Samuel 25:18-35. Priscilla helps instruct Apollos. Acts 18:24-26. Anna speaks of Christ to those looking for redemption. Luke 2:36-38. Mary Magdalene is among the first to proclaim that the risen Lord has been seen. John 20:16-18. None of those women erase the distinctions Scripture gives us, but neither do they fit very comfortably inside a picture of womanhood built mostly around silence, dependence, and limitation.
Sometimes our picture of womanhood has been shaped more by boundaries than by fullness. We have been very clear about where a woman should stop, but perhaps less careful to notice all that Scripture shows us about where she may stand, speak, serve, act, think, and flourish. Limits may have their place, but they should never become the whole definition of the person standing inside them. At the very least, all of this should make us hesitate before defining womanhood too narrowly.
Maybe that is the best place to leave it. Christian womanhood is far too rich and varied to define in a few paragraphs. I am simply wondering whether some of the things we have long treated as obvious deserve another look. Perhaps our picture has sometimes been too narrow – too focused on limits, and not enough on the fullness of the women God actually gives us in Scripture. MPJ