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“To whom thus Eve, with perfect beauty adorn’d:
‘My author and disposer, what thou bidd’st
Unargued I obey: so God ordains;
God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.’”
Such teaching as this puts man in the very place of God. It is the spirit of Antichrist who “sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4 R. V.). It also teaches woman that most hateful of all sins to God, idolatry.
361. If the Apostle does not especially enjoin “subjection” on husbands, as such, it is because he has occasion to set forth more important duties on his part. Verse 23 of this passage in Ephesians tells him that, like his Lord, he is to be to his wife, “the savior of the body.” How free and chaste Paul intends her to be! Verse 25 teaches an utter self-renunciation, like Christ’s, for her sake. Verse 26, that by his own cleansed and sanctified fleshly nature, he is to “sanctify and cleanse” his wife’s body, so as to be prepared in the end to present her spotless (verse 27) to Christ,¾free from all moral injury by his conduct. Verse 28 teaches him to love his wife as he loves his own body, i.e., to nourish and cherish her. The opposite conduct¾the oppression of lust¾is to hate her. Verse 31: He (not she) is to forsake all others, and to cleave to her alone. (See pars. 45-64.)
362. Woman’s only century, in the Christian Church, was during apostolic days, and a little while thereafter. Prof. Ramsay, in his valuable book, The Church in the Roman Empire, states: “The Universal and Catholic type of Christianity became confirmed in its dislike of the prominence and the public ministration of woman. The dislike became abhorrence, and there is every probability that the dislike is as old as the first century, and was intensified to abhorrence before the middle of the second century.” With the growth of this abhorrence, we may rest assured that every conceivable effort would be made to find a warrant for silencing and subordinating women; and the “Judaizer” was at hand to point the method of torturing and twisting Scripture, especially Paul’s words, into teaching the same. Here we have, in a few words, the history of that “tortuous special pleading” which enables conclusions to seem to be drawn from arguments presented by Paul; arguments which, if rightly read, and interpreted by unbiased minds, would lead to very different opinions of the Apostle Paul and his teachings on the “woman question.”
==See Also==
