Is it possible to be a good Christian at the same time as being a feminist?

Took me a while to find it, but the passage (1Corinthians 14) talks of God being '...not the author of confusion,but of peace..)v33 . In this passage he also talks about the church events being orderly, in case unbelievers were to walk in. He mentions everyone speaking together in tongues, with no one to interpret, in the same vein.

I expect that in the society they lived in, it was not regarded as correct for a woman to be speaking up and Paul did not want unbelievers to be put off by lots of vocal women or everyone speaking in tongues at the same time. He wanted the message to be clearly communicated.

I agree curlew - that was the wriggle room that I was talking about upthread. Some can do it. Good for them. I can't - there would be far too much religious gymnastics going on to make the Bible fit into a particular world view.

Shame for me. I love going into old churches, love the music, carols at Christmas etc. and the community feel, but I can't square the circle enough to be part of a church that treats half the population as lesser beings.

For me, the church lacks the Christian ideal of compassion, fairness and justice where women are concerned.

I find it ....irritating....that people are so quick to find justification for the misogyny of the Church. It's always......oh, it's just interpretation...... yes of course there were loads of women among Jesus' followers, they just didn't get written about.......Oh, Paul, yes, he was a bit grumpy but he was an old dote really.....look, god chose a woman to be his son s mother didn't he?.....women and men are different but equal..of course doing the flowers and polishing the silver is as important as being a priest.....

Hmm curlew I appreciate your difficulty with the silence in churches which Paul spoke of.

As a Christian, it helps me to think of it as men just not being won over by lots of intellectual arguments....actions speak louder than words sometimes.

"So when you look at how fully involved the women in Jesus's group were and how central they are in events of the Gospels and Acts, and how Paul references women of the various churches, it's a pretty astonishing contrast."

Hang on, who are these "fully involved" women in Jesus's group? And you are talking about Paul "women keep silent in churches" of Ephesus?

On 1st century Jewish women's participation in religious life: synagogue was optional for women. They couldn't read in synagogue or be counted towards the quorum of people you need for public prayer, they weren't meant to study the Torah and didn't even have much of a religious role in the home - the prayers and blessings were reserved for men. Plus remember this is Second Temple period - they were excluded from the innermost parts of the Temple and from the hereditary priesthood of the Temple.

So when you look at how fully involved the women in Jesus's group were and how central they are in events of the Gospels and Acts, and how Paul references women of the various churches, it's a pretty astonishing contrast.

Marking place to read properly. Lots of interesting stuff here. I'm a Catholic and a feminist, lots of issues with the wider church and struggle with this a lot.

I see the woman caught in adultery as a legal issue as much as a gender one. After all, the context gives away the fact that 1st c. Palestine wasn't a fair place for women - the man with whom she had adultery isn't anywhere to be seen, is he? The crowd are within their rights to stone her - they are keeping the law by doing so, and could defend their actions with reference to the legal codes of the Hebrew Bible, and pride themselves that by doing so, they are keeping Israel pure.

But what Jesus does is to take that thinking to the very extreme by implying that no-one is pure, that an Israel cleansed of all its sins would have no-one left in it. It's like the idea (in Matthew's Gospel) that Jesus doesn't come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, to take it to the extreme - and what the extreme of the law looks like in this instance is a crowd all realising their own complicit collusion in an understanding of the law that rates some sins as punishable and others as not (as I said, the man is nowhere to be seen).

Where all that leads from a feminist POV I'm not sure; that we are all equal, male and female, in the eyes of God, and equally culpable?

It also says the woman was caught in the act. So I presume the man was also there. They weren't about to stone him...so this was very much a gender issue.

and on the adultery / stoning thing: what do you mean curlew, when you say "just social justice"? Are you saying it was not a gendered thing? Or that he was just saying you shouldn't in general stone people, or not for adultery?

Here is how it should be understood as a very gendered point: adultery was a sex crime that applied to a huge range of behaviours when women did them, including even smiling at a man not your husband. Jesus' point was that the men doing the stoning were very unlikely not to have ogled or flirted. He was asking them ("let he who is perfect throw the first stone") to lift the sexual double standard. This is radical. Lifting the sexual double standard is radical now, even.

The website www.godswordtowomen.org is a really good resource, full of scholarly articles about such things as women in leadership and headship.

Going back to the Mary Martha story, it's important to understand that the phrase 'sitting at the feet of...', was a euphemism for being a student of a great teacher. for e.g. the apostle Paul is described as having sat at the feet of Gamaliel (sp) meaning he was a disciple of Gamaliel. So when Mary is described as sitting at the feet of Jesus, it means that she was being a disciple of Jesus, being taught by him. This was radical for the time as women were not regarded as those who should be taught but as those who should operate only in the domestic sphere. One first- century rabbi, Eliezer, put the point bluntly: "Rather should the words of the Torah be burned than entrusted to a woman ...Whoever teaches his daughter the Torah is like one who teaches her lasciviousness. " So Jesus' willingness to teach Mary, and his praise of her for taking on a 'masculine' role would have been very shocking at the time.

Interesting then that consorting with women wasn't one of the accusations brought against Jesus. Consorting with tax collectors, Samaritans and so on, and being a "glutton and a wine bibber" but no mention of women. Or was there, and I'm showing my ignorance again?

Just had to sign up again to say thanks to the Christian feminists on this thread. I've been struggling to fully integrate the two and there have been parts of posts that have really helped a lot.

Actually I think in first-century Palestine women didn't even go to synagogue. I haven't got any reference books with me (on holiday) so can't check, but I'm pretty sure in the context of the time it's radical stuff.

I am fascinated by my misremembering of the Martha and Mary story. However, I still don't think it's a particularly pro women story, apart from the fact that Jesus was happy for women to listen to him preach. I wonder if that was uncommon- I assume that women went to synagogue- they just weren't allowed to speak. And there's no reason to suppose it was any different in Jesus's "mobile synagogue".

Going? Stupid autocorrect, I meant find!

Hilda of Whitby is one of my favourite saints.

Yes, curryeater, I've also had Martha and Mary presented to me in quite a sexist way - because if those uppity women started to think that learning was more important than housework and servicing men, then where would we be? It's still something some men (and indeed some women who've spent their lives servicing men) going quite threatening.

It is very interesting that curlew made the mistake of remembering the martha and mary story with exactly the opposite of its actual import. I have mused about this on here before: that somehow I misremembered it too until I checked it again; not as wildly as curlew, but somehow it had been watered down in the way it was presented to me by my catholic sexist religious culture as "martha and mary are both doing important things". When it actually explicitly says "Mary has chosen the better part"

FairPhyllis good point about Mary and Martha, one of my favourite stories.

I'm aware that the power women have is always circumscribed in religion (when isn't it in society?), but I agree about nuns.

Hild of Whitby was in charge of a double house of monks and nuns - she was the boss of the men as well as the women.

Yy about nuns. The early church's emphasis on virginity and celibacy is less about sexual purity at that stage, more about living in a counter-cultural way (utterly, utterly counter-cultural for a woman in Jewish and Helleno-Roman world then unless you were a pagan priestess), free from family, imo.

Christianity also to some extent liberated women from the concept of women's bodies being polluting - we're not all refraining from touching men while we menstruate and having to use a mikveh to purify ourselves every month, are we? Yet that is still a part of some branches of Judaism. I know there is lots of later nasty stuff about women's bodies, but I think the fact that that practice disappeared is a pretty strong indicator that women's bodies were not seen by the earliest Christians as sources of sin/uncleanness.

Also leadership stuff - Christianity gave women a chance to be spiritual leaders in a way that would never have been possible in contemporary Jewish society.

Women who were also slaves must have found it a deeply powerful philosophy - don't forget how popular Christianity was among slaves.

I think Paul gets a bad rap tbh. His letters are not 'Women should be good little wives'. They are more 'Help! the end of the world is coming! What do you mean, you want to get married?'

Also, don't forget about nuns. Being a nun could be viewed as a powerful gesture of female separatism. It's a way of getting out of the romantic / sexual / reproductive / matrimonial rat race that was once the only way a woman could earn a living.

curlew, as FairPhyllis points out, Martha and Mary are about exactly the opposite - Martha is busy in the kitchen, Mary is discussing things with Jesus like a disciple, or in fact as a disciple, and Jesus defends her prioritising the life of the mind / spirit over scurrying about serving domestically - "Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.?

I completely respect and understand anyone who can't stomach traditional, patriarchal religion. These institutions are not set up for us and can be hard for us to be in. I do find a lot of good stuff in the gospels though

There's another aspect to feminism and religion and that's the social aspect. Many religious settings are also places where women come together as a group and that can be extremely powerful.

The women's movement in Liberia that removed the President and kick started a peace deal came about via women meeting in churches and mosques.

I'm sure there are many other examples people can add.