Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God. – 1 Corinthians 11:11-12

Today’s Scripture Reading (January 11, 2018): 1 Corinthians 11

Susan B. Antony once commented that “No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.” Over the little more than a century since her death, our society has watched the role of women change significantly in our society. Sometimes the church seems to be the last holdout that is standing against women’s rights. We have a parochial viewpoint that we think comes from the Bible that governs the relationship between the sexes, creating the man to be the head of the genders. We are wrong. And I am proud to be a part of a church movement that has swept many denominations that declares an equality between the sexes.

Antony never married; maybe she never found the man to whom she was willing to give her consent to govern. Antony always claimed throughout her life that she didn’t need a man to make her happy. And the truth is that if we need a man, or a woman, to make us happy, then we will never be satisfied. The best male-female relationships are always the ones where both the man and the woman are complete alone, and yet still consent to enter into a relationship where they will share everything with each other. The Hollywood ideal of “you complete me” is an excellent recipe for divorce. If we aren’t complete by ourselves, another person can never complete us.

Essentially, Paul is describing life in the patriarchal society in which he lived. What seems shocking to us in his description of male-female relationships would not have been surprising to the people who first read his letter. This was a society where your importance was often at least partially based on your maleness. We can exclaim that this is wrong, but that doesn’t change anything. This was the culture in which Paul lived. When you counted a crowd, you only counted the men. When anything was put to the vote, it was just the men who voted. Sometimes in our rush to preach an egalitarian sexual message, we forget that the culture into which Jesus and Paul taught did not consider the sexes to be equal in any way. For us, the idea is wrong and outdated. But for Paul, it was merely the way that the world worked.

But that didn’t mean that Paul did not push a few buttons. One of them is in this conclusion to Paul’s discussion of the sexes. According to Paul, the woman is not independent of man, something that most who heard his message would have agreed with, but the second part was entirely unexpected. Neither is man independent of woman. We need each other. It may not be the fullest explanation of an egalitarian world that we wish was present in the text. But it is a move away from the male-dominated society in which Paul lived. Men need women, not just for sex, but to come into the possession of the wisdom necessary to exist in the world.

I said that we couldn’t complete each other. And I believe that. But I also know that women possess an innate understanding of the world that men don’t have. And it is an understanding that we need. We are created male and female, and our world needs the sexes to be working together to find the solutions to our problems. A culture where one sex dominates over the other is a world where our problems will never be solved. God created this world in such a way that both sexes hold the keys to solving its problems, especially as they recognize that everything comes from God.    

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 1 Corinthians 12