Please visit John's webpage on Christ and Gender.
Christ and Gender Roles
Traditionally Christianity has called for gender-distinctions in religious service. This is based on a handful of verses together with inferences from other contexts. In this series of classes we argue that the traditional understanding is flawed.
1. A case to be addressed
Christadelphians are used to wrestling with the complexity of scripture, rather than simply taking the superficial meaning of complex verses. We show that the verses usually used for teaching gender-distinctions in religious service deserve another (and closer) look.
2. Women Speaking for God
There are many scriptural accounts of women speaking on behalf of God, spread across many hundreds of years. There is a power to reviewing their calling and message. And it provides a clear demonstration that God himself has called women to positions of spiritual teaching and leadership. This provides important context for when we next study specific key passages.
There are many scriptural accounts of women speaking on behalf of God, spread across many hundreds of years. There is a power to reviewing their calling and message. And it provides a clear demonstration that God himself has called women to positions of spiritual teaching and leadership. This provides important context for when we next study specific key passages.
3. Key Passages
In the previous talk we saw that God had appointed women to vocal prophetic roles through history, and this included the Corinthian assembly to which Paul writes. In this talk we we examine the three New Testament passages that contain explicit directives often used to establish gender-distinction teachings. Our goal is to resolve the apparent contradiction between these verses and God’s actions. This class completes the sequence of three classes that address the major points about gender-role distinctions – we close with a summary of the case and consider implications for today.
