Little more than a century ago, the city of Vienna imagined itself the embodiment of modern enlightenment.
Philosophers were redefining the way people answered life’s most important questions. Avant-garde painters and musicians were redirecting the fine arts. Sigmund Freud was virtually inventing the field of psychology. It seemed to many like a brave new world.
In other respects, unfortunately, life was dismally the same.
Women, for instance, were still treated the way they had been regarded for hundreds of years: second best. Even the brightest women were imagined to be little more than adornments for men.
The great Viennese musician Gustav Mahler married a brilliant young composer, Alma Schindler. During their courtship he laid out her future.
She would have to give up what she loved the most, composing music, for his sake. “From now on you have only one vocation: to make me happy. You must give yourself up unconditionally. Make the shaping of your future life, in all its facets, dependent on my inner needs.”
According to historian Anne-Marie O’Connor, the role of women – even the most gifted – was amazingly limited.
Passivity was not just a virtue for women. It was their natural state. Too much thinking would damage their souls. According to O’Connor, “Waiting for a man was simply waiting for the moment when she could become completely passive.” Woe to those who pushed back.
Ambitious women were considered “brazen, unnatural, mad, or, in Freudian terms, hysterical. Or simply irrelevant.”
Women who violated the notion of the feminine nature were derided with a fashionable new term: degenerate. Women who pushed for the right to vote were said to be having a “degenerative emancipation fit.” Men who advocated for female rights were labeled degenerate, too.
A best-selling author of the time made it clear that “there is no female genius, and there never has been.”
How is it possible that a supposedly enlightened culture could so casually write off one half of humanity?
A number of historians have blamed Christianity. Reactionary, chauvinist church leaders, so the story goes, systematically relegated the women of Europe and America to the back of the bus.
Here we need to draw a clear line between Jesus of Nazareth and some of his followers – preachers and teachers who have said and done regrettably tone-deaf things in Jesus’ name.
Jesus lived in a time in which prejudice against women was deep and wide. In ancient Greece, for instance, women had the legal status of children. They were typically not allowed to testify in public courts because their observations and assertions were considered invalid.
In the Gospels, however, it is women who discover Jesus’ empty tomb and are credited with spreading the story of the resurrection.
Throughout the New Testament women are elevated to a previously unimaginable place. About half of the house churches mentioned in the earliest documents of Christianity are run by females.
Jesus routinely spends time with women who would have been rejected by most “respectable” religious leaders: prostitutes, pagan foreigners, a woman caught in the act of adultery, and another woman who has had five husbands and is co-habiting with her current partner. But he never treats any of them as degenerate.
Far too many Christian teachers seem to have overlooked the fact that two of the most significant verses in the Bible – one in the Old Testament and the other in the New – declare the essential equality of women and men.
We read in the Bible’s creation account (Genesis 1:27), “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Men and women are co-bearers of the image of God.
The apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3:28, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In one fell swoop he wipes away the traditional barriers of ethnicity, social standing, and gender.
Here’s one woman’s assessment of Jesus. It was written in the middle of the twentieth century by Dorothy Sayers, the first female ever to receive a degree from Oxford University:
Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were the first at the Cradle and the last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man – there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them; who never treated them as ‘The women, God help us!’ or ‘The ladies, God bless them!’; who rebuked without demeaning and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend.
Where can we find a compelling advocate in the 21st century for lifting up the essential God-provided dignity and giftedness of women?
Perhaps we should begin by going back to the first century to check out an itinerant teacher in Palestine.
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