Christianity is a religion centered on salvific events in history. It makes claims about an eternal God and his transcendent truth. Yet, at the same time, it paradoxically finds its sources of knowledge about the eternal God in the finitudes and contingencies of history. The historical embeddedness of Christianity not only pertains to biblical revelation, but also to the subsequent task of Christian theology.
Because Christian theology is embedded in the historical, it is also always contextual.1 New Testament scholarship of the previous two centuries made much of how our first documented Christian theologian, the Apostle Paul, expressed his theological vision in the form of occasional letters to his congregations.2 This pattern continues in the history of Christian thought. Starting with Ignatius of Antioch and moving onto Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Newman, Barth, and Rahner all theologians address a specific context even in their non-occasional writings.3 In each generation, theologians must look to the Word of God, test the present proclamation of the Church against it, and apply it to the challenges of the contemporary Christian community.4
The simul of Christian existence necessitates the sacrament of confession and absolution. Additionally, an intimate connection exists between baptism and confession and absolution. In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther initially stated that there are three sacraments: baptism, confession and absolution, and the Lord’s Supper. By the end of the treatise, he changed his mind and reduced the number of sacraments to only two, namely baptism and the Lord’s Supper. This is not because Luther disregarded the sacramentality of the word of absolution, but rather because he saw absolution as derivative of the gospel-promise present in baptism.1
The Problem of Post-Baptismal Sin
In the ancient Church, there was a strong and appropriate sense of baptism as the definitive rupture between the old life and the new life, including the final eschatological purification. Nevertheless, early Christians fell into a profound misunderstanding of this rupture due to both legalism and trust in an overly realized eschatology. Many reasoned that since baptism brought a final purification from sins, then the Church could not forgive post-baptismal sin. The teaching that baptism could not be repeated further reinforced this conclusion. After all, how could a Christian who sinned after his baptism regain salvation when the Church could not baptized him anew?
Yet, practically speaking, the pervasive nature of sin made it difficult to sustain the doctrine that Christians lost their salvation by sinning after baptism. One direct consequence of this teaching was that people delayed baptism and, therefore, also their full participation in the life of the Church. Such a doctrine was simply unrealistic about the possibility of remaining sinless in an age in which sin and death persist even for believers.
In other words, for Luther, the Eucharist (and by implication Baptism as well), confirms for the individual what the word universally proclaims. The word of the gospel is addressed to everyone in the congregation, and therefore it is possible to worry that this promise may not apply to you as an individual, or you have not genuinely received it by faith. Nevertheless, the Lord’s Supper contains within it the same promise and presence of the risen Jesus as the sermon. For Luther, words are sacraments and sacraments are a kind of word. The difference between the sermon and the sacrament is that the latter is applied to the individual who directly receives it. When reflective faith invariably worries about whether or not one has individually received Jesus and his promise of forgiveness, the believer may rely on the sacraments to give them assurance. There can be here no doubt that you have personally received the promise in the form of the sacrament since it was you as an individual who heard the promise and consumed the elements. By receiving the Eucharistic elements, the promise and presence of Jesus are given to you as an in tangible and physical way that draws you out of your subjectivity and enthusiasm (Did I truly believe? Did I truly receive the promise?) to the objectivity of the gospel.
Guest Post by Dcs. Ellie Corrow and Dr. Bethany Kilcrease
Part III: The Second Part of Our Epic Critique
Making of Biblical Womanhood presents several convincing historical arguments that deconstruct the assumed uniformity of biblical womanhood throughout the church’s history, but Barr falters when attempting to address modern controversies of the twentieth century. Barr’s conclusion that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy “became important because it provided a way to push women out of the pulpit” may well be true.1 Barr does show evidence of correlation. But she did not present enough evidence to convince us that this was in fact a case of causation, that inerrancy became important primarilybecause it served as a helpful item in the patriarchal toolkit and not merely that promotion of inerrancy and the solidification of “biblical womanhood” among evangelicals happened to occur around the same time. We suspect Barr is correct, but we would have liked to have seen more evidence.
Additionally, Barr’s argument regarding inerrancy is built around an insufficiently nuanced doctrine of inerrancy. One way to think about the doctrine of inerrancy is to make it the foundation of one’s belief system. This is common among both fundamentalists and evangelicals. According to this line of thinking, Christians believe in the Bible because it is inerrant. Since the Bible is inerrant, Christians believe everything it says about Jesus and can trust Him. Therefore, if inerrancy is undermined, by, for example, questioning Paul’s directives regarding women, all of Christianity comes crashing down. A better, and we would argue more biblical, approach is to begin with Christ. We believe in Christ’s resurrection from the dead. His divine authority then leads us to trust His authorized Scriptures completely.2 In this way, inerrancy flows from belief in Christ, rather than belief in Christ resting precariously on inerrancy.
Unfortunately, this dismissal of inerrancy as a tool of the patriarchy leaves Barr vulnerable to the argument that she rejects complementarianism because she rejects the authority of Scripture, which would be an unfair characterization of her work. In an earlier chapter, for example, she invites the reader to reexamine Paul’s writing on women by way of cultural and historical context, whereas someone less committed to the veracity of Scripture might either argue for non-Pauline authorship or blatant rejection of difficult passages. However, despite her problematic approach to inerrancy, Barr’s broader point that inerrancy has been weaponized against women has validity. Indeed, literalist readings of 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14 are often used a litmus test for biblical faithfulness, whereas other Pauline texts that are not directed specifically at women rarely receive the same sort of rigid application.
Guest Post by Dcs. Ellie Corrow and Dr. Bethany Kilcrease
Part II: The First Part of Our Epic Critique
Barr’s real contribution in The Making of Biblical Womanhoodis to finally make scholarship detailing the historical development of the threads constituting biblical womanhood accessible to the public. Her main argument that biblical womanhood, which tells women they must be domestic, housebound, and married mothers at the expense of other vocations is important and prophetic. As such, her book deserves to be widely read throughout the Church. She demonstrates that the way we often read even the Bible through a patriarchal lens has led the Church to discount the significance of named women in the Bible, including Mary Magdalene, Phoebe, and Junia. Moreover, the chapters on the history of women in the Church during the Middle Ages and Reformation period are alone worth the cost of admission. Her chapter on the Reformation, for example, helps explain why Katharina von Bora Luther died impoverished. Her tragedy extended beyond an individual failure on the part of the Church. Rather, it was a product of a newly constructed economic system that limited women’s opportunities outside the home.
People! Go read this book!
The Making of Biblical Womanhood is a tour de force, but there are also spots where Barr could strengthen her historical arguments and where we, as confessional Lutherans, disagree with her theological conclusions. Again, historically speaking, Barr’s argument that “biblical womanhood” is essentially an evangelical version of the patriarchal cult of domesticity is accurate. There is nothing in the Bible that confines women to the domestic sphere and subordinates them to all men in all contexts. As the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR) noted in 2009:1
"The Bible’s clear direction regarding responsible male leadership in the home and male ordination to pastoral ministry may not be assumed to mean that only men can exercise any kind of leadership or authority in home, church, or society. Some view this as an inconsistency, but it is not. In Baptism every believer is called to service in his or her vocations within the various spheres of life. The body of Christ requires that its individual members exercise the wide variety of their gifts, whether that individual is male or female (1 Cor 12:7).... Such leadership of women is not inconsistent with Scriptural teaching. On the contrary, it exists in the very context of our church’s life and teaching which upholds and promulgates the divinely ordered responsibility of pastors and husbands. When women serve in this way they are enhancing the work of the priesthood of all believers, serving as members of the body of Christ, and not usurping pastoral authority or violating the 'order of creation.' Scripture provides numerous examples of such service, for instance Priscilla’s instruction of Apollos (Acts 18:26) or the teaching Timothy received from his mother and grandmother (2 Tim 1:5)."2
However, this is not to say that we support approach Barr’s exegesis uncritically. She does not adequately address the distinction between biblical texts dealing with the vertical relationship between humans and God and those addressing the horizontal relationships between humans and other humans.3 For example, Galatians 3:26-29 relates to the vertical relationship between believers and God in Christ. But the other passages, such as those in 1 Corinthians 14, deal with horizontal relations within the Church or between spouses. Others, such as Ephesians 5, may address both.
