Do you ever wonder why some people think the way they do? Why they have the presuppositions they do? If you are in an unbiblical church setting (oxymoron), a church that has “high standards” and manages people with other people’s expectations, you might find the following interesting.

If you are in a biblical church and you just don’t get it–where did those oppressive ideas come from?–the following may help you as well.

Please sit back and listen/read as Rev. Winston Bosch of Ottawa explains stereotypes that affect men and women’s roles in modern churches*:

“A descriptive stereotype describes how the world is, or how men are or how women are.

“A prescriptive one would be how men should be or how women should be. So it prescribes something.

“[From historians and others like Nancy Percy] you get stereotypes that come to us out of the Greco-Roman world. These were stereotypes that already existed in the New Testament era. And, they sort of come up every once in a while in history. It’s the idea, the stereotype that men and women are completely different. They’re opposites, they’re separate. There’s no overlap in terms of their character and their qualities. They’re separate, and that they’re also unequal. So you have it that men are better than women. That they might be morally better, that they might be better at all kinds of things.

“That’s a stereotype from the Greco-Roman world that was already there. In the sermon I mention sort of a funny example of the word, “hysterical” or “hysteria”—where that comes from. It comes from the Greek word that is the word for “uterus” and it’s this really weird idea that if a woman didn’t use her uterus for birthing children, then it would float around in her body and touch her other organs and she would become hysterical.

“It was—you have these ideas of women—your only role is to have children and if you don’t do that there’s something wrong with you or something will happen with you.

“You get it in Aristotle where he separates the world into the domain of the home and the domain of the city, or the political domain, and that—the men are over here and the women are over here. So the men need to be educated and they also need to understand theology. They need to understand those things. Women don’t need that. They’re part of the home. Those two don’t overlap.

“Those stereotypes come up every once in a while. If you understand that, that’s in the background, in the eros of the New Testament, then you realize some of the counter cultural teaching that happened in the New Testament. Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 7 that you don’t have to be married; that you could stay single. That was a very radical teaching in his time. ‘You can be a person of value and dignity without being married if you’re a woman.’ That was radical teaching. That was like, ‘blow your mind.’

“Then you get interesting things like Tertullian writing about 200 after Christ. He writes a letter to his wife and he says, ‘You know if I ever die, and you’re going to remarry, make sure you marry a Christian man because the non-Christian men will not afford you the liberties that a Christian woman would expect.’ The church was counter-cultural. It wasn’t abiding by these Greco-Roman ideas of men and women.

“And then, you see other stereotypes in history around men and women and they sort of pop up and follow this Greco-Roman ideal. In the 1700’s and the 1800’s… In the 1700’s before the Industrial Revolution, pre-1760, you have, a lot of our ancestors were farmers or fisherman. You can’t run a farm if you don’t have good cooperation between men and women. The husband and the wife each have to work a lot. And you have to work cooperatively otherwise you starve and you freeze during the winter. Both people have valued positions in the economy of the home.

“So pre-Industrial Revolution, masculinity and femininity, there were ideas about it, but not as rigid as we find post-Industrial Revolution where we find now its men going off to the factory. Women stay home with the children. It’s very divided. The men go off to work and the women, they don’t work. They stay at home. Then you get these new ideas of femininity and masculinity. Women are soft and homely and they belong to the private realm, the domestic realm. They keep care of children; they don’t need an education. They shouldn’t work outside of the home. Men, public realm. Tough, hard, providers, workers, ambitious, all of those things. They don’t change diapers and they don’t keep care of children. That’s women’s roles.

“You see that develop in the Victorian era. And then you get this, you get Darwinism shows up in the 1800’s. We all know him for his evolutionary perspective, right? But he also writes, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. I’ve got a quote, ‘Man is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than women and has a more inventive genius. Man has a higher eminence in whatever he takes up than women can attain.’ Just saying that, ‘Men are better than women.’ That was Darwin’s perspective. Which makes you think that all the people that want to pull down statues, you probably should be pulling down statues of Darwin, too, because he certainly didn’t hold women in high regard.

“Or you get the famous French psychologist and doctor, Gustave Lebeau, and he says that ‘Women are an inferior form of human evolution…. A distinguished woman who surpasses an average man is as exceptional as a gorilla with two heads.’ These very very low ideas of women, and that’s common in the culture all around the world; all around the church at that time.

“Then that culture, that Greco-Roman culture, that Victorian culture, that Darwinian culture, it seeps into the church and it changes how people think. Instead of thinking biblically about men and women they start thinking in a secular way about men and women.

“We have the same danger today, perhaps the reverse, but that’s what was happening. In the Victorian era you see that Greco-Roman, Darwinian philosophies coming together so people have odd ideas about men and women.

“Think about the fact that in our own culture it wasn’t until 1929 in Canada that women were considered persons. It’s not that people didn’t think they weren’t’ people, but they weren’t persons according to the law, so they couldn’t participate in political realm. I live 20 minutes from Quebec. It wasn’t until 1940 that women in Quebec could vote in political elections. It’s not really that long ago. So this has been the dominant mindset for a long time.

“It comes out in interesting ways in the church still today. I sometimes see it in my own ministry where the assumption is that women shouldn’t be as interested in theology as men, or perhaps, don’t have as much access to their pastor as the men do because, well, theology, that’s part of the public realm in the Greco-Roman philosophy, so women don’t….

“Those are examples of stereotypes that existed over history.”

Inspired by the Holy Spirit, the Apostle Paul wrote this:

“…for through faith you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus.

“For those of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.  And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:26-29)

Truth.

• Taken from https://www.realtalkpodcast.ca/e/ep-40-male-only-leadership-rev-winston-bosch/ (9:23-18:00)