E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4335-4895-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
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Michael A. G. Haykin (ThD, University of Toronto) is professor of church history and biblical spirituality at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. He has authored or edited more than twenty-five books, including Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church.
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Introduction The word feminism first appeared in the English language in the late nineteenth century.1 Yet debates about the role and status of women in society had been going on for a considerable period of time before that. Take, for example, the historical era of the British Civil Wars (1638–1651) and the Republican government of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) that followed these wars in the 1650s. It is a period of history that has been well described as “a world turned upside down.” Questions were raised about so much that had been taken for granted, and among these questions were ones about the role of women. The Quakers and Women Preachers The Quakers, for example, who emerged as a potent force in the 1650s, proclaimed that there were no spiritual differences between men and women, and therefore there should be no distinction in ministry. Margaret Fell (1614–1702), wife of the Quaker leader George Fox (1624–1691), asserted her right to preach in her best-known work Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (London, 1666),2 as did a few other Quaker women in the 1640s and 1650s, like Elizabeth Fletcher (c. 1638–1658) in Oxford and Martha Simmonds in London, and this sometimes against Quaker male leadership.3 Jacqueline Broad has noted that Margaret Fell’s arguments in favour of female preaching rest on a principle of spiritual equality, or the idea that both men and women have the supernatural light of Christ within them. But for Fell, the ability to hearken to that light implicitly requires that women possess a natural capacity to discern the truth for themselves, to exercise strength of will, and to exhibit moral virtue or excellence of character. In these respects, Fell’s arguments for female preaching contain an implicit feminist challenge to negative perceptions about women’s moral and intellectual abilities in her time.4 Puritan Response to Quaker Views about Women Preachers This brief discussion of the Quakers is significant, for Quaker women preachers reinforced in the mind of more mainstream Puritans, like the Baptists, that having female preachers was definitely wrong.5 In 1645, before the emergence of the Quakers, when representatives of the Calvinistic Baptist churches in what is known as the Western Association met, the question was asked whether a woman could speak in the church. The reply was clear: “A woman is not permitted to speak at all in the church, neither by way of praying, prophesying, enquiring, 1 Cor. 14.34f., 1 Tim. 2.11f.”6 The same question was raised ten or so years later, after the Quaker movement had begun. This time it was the Midland Association where the question was asked. The same answer was basically given along with the reason for women’s silence: the “inferiority of their sex” and to prevent any “usurping of authority over men.” Nevertheless, five exceptions were given when a woman could speak in church: 1. To publicly give a testimony of conversion when seeking baptism and church membership. 2. To give a report if she had been involved in seeking the restoration of a wayward church member. 3. If she had been sent with a message from another congregation (are they thinking of Phoebe here, Romans 16:1–2?) 4. If she needed the church’s help and had to lay out that need before the church. 5. If she had been “disfellowshiped” because of sin and was seeking forgiveness by the congregation and reconciliation.7 Women Essential to Puritan Nonconformity Despite these restrictions, in mainstream Puritan groups—Baptists, as well as Congregationalists and Presbyterians—women did play critical roles in two key areas. First, they played a critical role in teaching children and servants in the home in accord with the marginal note in the Geneva Bible’s rendering of Deuteronomy 21:18, “It is the mother’s duty also to instruct her children.”8 Proponents of the state church feared this Puritan emphasis on the family as a school of piety, for, in their minds, it weakened the parish church.9 Then, in opening their homes to Puritan ministers, women often played a key role in the establishment of Puritan congregations. For example, Mrs. Dorothy Hazzard (d. 1675) seceded from the parish church of her husband, Matthew Hazzard, in 1640 to establish what later became Broadmead Baptist Church. The church actually began with Hazzard and four men meeting in the Hazzard home, which, of course, was also the home of the parish minister! Within three years the church had 160 members. Not surprisingly, this congregation also appointed deaconesses in the 1660s and 1670s. The first deaconess to be appointed was Mary West in 1662. After her death she was replaced in 1673 by a “Sister Murry,” and by 1679 three more women had been appointed. Following 1 Timothy 5:9, these women were required to be widows over the age of sixty who agreed not to pursue remarriage. They were to take care of the physical needs of the sick in the congregation and be ready to “speak a word to their souls as occasion requires.”10 As Patricia Crawford rightly concludes, “women were essential to Nonconformity,” both its emergence and its growth.11 The Apostle Paul and the Modern Day The key roles that women played in the advance of Puritan and Nonconformist congregations have strong biblical precedent. For instance, a close reading of Romans 16:1–16 reveals the truth of the remark by Roger Gryson that “there is no doubt that Paul was the beneficiary of numerous instances of assistance from women in his work as an apostle.”12 Of the twenty-seven believers mentioned here in Romans 16, ten of them are women, with a number of them being commended for their hard work in the Lord (Mary, v. 6; Tryphaena and Tryphosa, v. 12a; Persis, v. 12b) and others being especially recognized for their help to Paul (Phoebe, vv. 1–2; Priscilla, vv. 3–4; Rufus’s mother, v. 13b). Paul’s remarks in this chapter of Romans have to be viewed against the cultural milieu of his day that frequently disparaged women. Today, thankfully, the misogynistic trends of certain areas of Western culture have been challenged, and the issues that Christians face in this regard are somewhat different from those of Paul. A strong feminist movement in Western culture has effectively produced a crisis of masculinity in many areas of Western thinking. From the disparagement of women, our culture has swung in many respects to the opposite extreme, the disparagement of men. And in the midst of this, the church needs to be found faithful to the biblical witness. In a culture being swamped by a tsunami of feminism, the great danger for the church is to have a knee-jerk reaction and fail to appreciate what the apostolic generation, and our Puritan and Nonconformist forebears knew: the vital importance of women for the life of the church. The Genesis and Nature of This Book This book—really an extended essay comprising eight different historical and textual vignettes—seeks to remind contemporary Christians, especially evangelicals, of the vital role that women have played in the history of our faith. Although I began lecturing in the 1990s on women in church history, the immediate inspiration for this book lies in a suggestion made to me by my good friend Jim Fraser, a high school teacher on the Simcoe County School Board, during a week that I was teaching at Muskoka Bible Centre, Ontario, in the summer of 2013. He pointed out that Eric Metaxas had just brought out his Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness,13 and that I should do a comparable book on women. I was eager to follow up on this suggestion as I recognized the real need for such a book in the life of the church. I am very thankful for Jim’s ongoing encouragement of my writing on this topic. I had come across past books such as Samuel Burder’s Memoirs of Eminently Pious Women of the British Empire (1823), a three-volume expansion of an earlier volume by Thomas Gibbons that had first been published in 1777. But books like this were long out of print. Much more recently Jamie Janosz wrote When Others Shuddered: Eight Women Who Refused to Give Up,14 which focuses on eight nineteenth-century figures. In many ways I felt that earlier centuries, especially the eighteenth century, were critical to...
