God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

  Image by Vecteezy First Problem In the spring of 1992, several young male students at an Assembly of God Bible college in Sacramento, California, were confused about all those women passages. If you were raised in a conservative Evangelical church, you know the ones―women should be silent in the church; women were created second and were the glory of man rather than the glory of God; first God, then Jesus, then the man, then the woman; women must submit to their husbands; women should not teach; women should pray and prophesy with their head covered as a sign of submission; women would be saved in childbirth; women should have long hair; women must not wear certain clothing, etc., etc. For two thousand years, those passages have supported male bias against women in academia, science, art, theology, and even sainthood. That constant disrespect is religion. It’s not love. The issue was never discussed in our Bible college because one of the professors was a woman, and most of...

  Image by author using ChatGPT I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools from 3 rd through 6 th grade. Although committed to my faith, I had a tendency even before college to shake my fist at heaven and demand, “Why?” Why do women have to wear hats, veils, and scarves to church? Why can’t we go past the altar rail? How can you judge people when you are so distant? I just wasn’t impressed with the 200-year-old appearances of the Virgin Mary on a foreign hillside to shepherd children. People need God here and now. In High School, three of us gals would sit at lunch and discuss religion. One was a Unitarian, one a Mormon, and I was still a devout Catholic. We were all committed to the belief system in which we were raised, and we were all aware of that bias. When I had a question I couldn’t answer, I went to the priest, fetching that wisdom back to our philosophical coterie. College is usually where it all falls apart, and that happened to me. It dawned on me that all...

  Writing for Bible History Daily (biblicalarchaeology.org), Megan Sauter references an article by Holly Beers of Westmont College in which Beers surveys the first century culture that restricted women in the emerging New Testament Church. Both articles were too short to do justice to a topic which has inspired thousands of books. There isn’t one debate point on the topic that hasn’t already been chopped, baked, fried, and diced to oblivion. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading Sauter’s spinoff on Beers. Sauter pointed out 5 ways that women served in the NT church: a] They served at the Passover meals, b] they offered prayers, c] they led hymns (1 Cor. 14:26), d] they read and interpreted Scripture (Acts 18:24-26), e] they performed acts of charity, ministering to widows, the sick, and those in prison. Actually, pretty bland stuff. One of several NT passages that has caused such turmoil among theologians is 1 Tim. 2:8-15, in which Paul, or someone writing in his name, makes it very cl...