A Valentine for Every Single Woman

A reminder for those of you “left outside the walls of civilization as of little worth,” as Jordan Peterson puts it, cut adrift from the island of continued existence by the collective vote of humanity, the situation of anyone excluded from the smallest voluntary hierarchies attached to society (the grace-based units some men build in what we call families), and the experience of not a few wives abandoned within them:

~

No man can buy a woman’s love. The attempt would bring him scorn.

All the treasure in the world cannot match your worth,

Not because of what you do, but because of who you are:

“Dawn-fresh, moon-lovely, sun-radiant,”

“You are the greatest thing God ever made,”

And the source of His infinite delight.

Rescuing 1 Timothy 2 from the Misogynists Part 3: The Surprising Equality of Teaching Authority for All Women with All Men Who Are Not Rabbis

Giant offset text will allow you to scroll to the main points in this last post of the series. In Part 1, we identified the writer and audience. In Part 2, we continued answering what, where, why, and when questions in our skim of 1 Timothy. We found the letter addresses issues of leadership in a Jewish synagogue, and that it was written by a first-century Jewish rabbi to a first-century Jewish rabbi and the congregation in Ephesus.

In Part 3, the first section answers how the text is structured. Scroll to Step 2 for the close reading of the 1 Timothy 2 passage about women learning in silence, not teaching, and being saved through childbearing. Though the letter may have nothing to tell us about women in Christian churches and hierarchies, it may have relevance for those of us who have had enough of unauthorized teachers using the Bible to harm women.

The Restoration of Feminine Desire: A Sign of the Final Redemption

Recommended for women only.

Rescuing 1 Timothy 2 from the Misogynists Part 2: What Is This Letter About? Synagogue Administration

In Part 1, we asked, “Who Wrote This to Whom?” to identify the author and intended audience for our text, 1 Timothy, and found our answers in the first two verses. It claims to be from the Apostle Paul to his disciple Timothy along with Timothy’s congregation at Ephesus.

I sketched a few relevant details about these characters, details the New Testament preserves for us, like notes about Paul and Timothy as circumcised Jewish men within Pharisaical Judaism who demonstrate full submission to James (a believer in his brother’s Messianic claims) for apostolic doctrine and the Sanhedrin for matters pertaining to Jewish law and practice.

Since we began this quest to see what I Timothy 2 says about women in Christian churches and careers, a matter of spiritual authority with significant practical consequences, I used the word authority eleven times in Part 1. If we had a different reading goal, I would have taken notes relevant to that other goal. As I mentioned, your answers may vary as you consult your working knowledge of related texts, history, your own faith traditions, and scholarship you deem credible.

Rescuing 1 Timothy 2 from the Misogynists Part 1: Who Wrote This to Whom? Reading the Mail of First-century Jewish Rabbis

Women bring me 1 Tim 2’s “learn in silence” and “I suffer not a woman to teach” as they wrestle with their career decisions and consider offers of ministry positions. They want to honor God, and hasn’t God said that women need to “be silent” in Christian churches and refrain from positions in any hierarchies that place them above “any man”?

No.

But I want you to have a process to use to answer questions like these for yourself when the Bible gets used against you as a “misogynistic tool by misogynistic tools,” as a friend put it, or when you encounter passages you hope to apply to your life in a God-honoring way.

Come and learn, or send this to a woman who can use it. Bad ideas taught by unauthorized teachers hurt people, turn them away from their callings, break their hearts, and shipwreck their faith in the goodness of God.

Ironic and tragic that I Timothy exists to stop the harm being done by unauthorized men teaching their own bad ideas to believers in Ephesus. I think it is safe to say, two thousand years later–as a Reddit user posted a banner of what the Bible says women “should be” and another followed with a question thread, “Do you agree women should be silent?”–we have up to this point failed to follow the advice in the letter to refuse to learn the Bible from dangerously ignorant men.

“What’s the One Thing All Women Want? Everything”: False. Nothing Draws a Woman Except Attention to the Safety of Her Body

Individuals with their delightful variations are not my focus in this post exploring the differences between how men and women in general value attention and experience loyalty.

“What is the one thing that all women want? Everything” was a comment on an Orthosphere post, “Women and Evolution.” It struck me as a succinct encapsulation of the frustration men have in feeling nothing they do could ever be enough: men give their lives and lay them down protecting women; women, the conversation suggests, fail to express such loyalty to men in return, an observation I would explain as a difference in values, not a virtue fail in women. Like the conclusions drawn about the lack of masculine loyalty in women, the comment about women wanting everything contains two faulty assumptions from the misapplication of a masculine frame of reference to a woman’s behavior. Women had not contradicted his punch line, “Everything.” But it’s the wrong answer because it’s the wrong question. A woman does not want a man to add to her. She wants him not to subtract from her.

The one thing all women want is to avoid life-reducing harm from a man. What he will refrain from doing matters more to a woman than anything he could ever do, and he cannot restrain himself from harming her if he will not pay attention to her subjective experience of his actions.

Reading and Rereading the Bible for Intimacy: Finding God’s Desire When We Set Ours on Him

“Haven’t you read that book before?” someone once teased me. He wasn’t asking for a defense of devotional reading, and what could I have said, something about how the word of God lights up in different ways every time? But we ourselves come as different people every time we return to the same text, hence the re-readability of classic literature: we change and find our new selves anticipated and welcomed into the creation of an author generous and far-sighted enough to accommodate many versions of us.

I could have said the spirit of God promises to dwell in and with the word of God, so I enter and re-enter the pages for the sake of encountering God, but that creeps people out as dangerous mysticism. 

Fine: I don’t have a universally compelling answer. I can live with that. Instead, here’s a sustained meditation on the theme of devotional reading as intimacy with some extrapolations for marriage and for singles suffering with desire.

Abuse Is a Criminal Problem, Not a Relational Problem: Go to Court, Not a Counselor

Dear Christians,

We’ve made a category error in talking about “abuse” as a relationship problem rather than a criminal problem. Re-contextualizing it as a criminal problem helps us find the appropriate solution in the justice system, and it clarifies why biblical submission requires you to say no to your husband’s illegal demands, besides saying no to his immoral or unethical ones.

A Better Explanation for “Objectifying” Half-naked Women, Drug Addicts, and the Homeless: Compassion Asks, “What Can I Do?” Not “Who Is That?”

This belongs in a series called Please Stop Criticizing Men for Not Being Women and Consider the Alternatives.

Dear Readers,

I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines that say researchers have evidence from brain scans that men think of scantily clad women as “dehumanized” sex “objects” because men’s brains light up in the same place when they view those women as when they are shown power tools. But isn’t this what would you expect if God wired men for compassion? Wouldn’t a healthy man want to do something when he finds a stranger exposed?

If you were the naked or nearly naked woman, wouldn’t you want a strange man to act on your behalf, regardless of who you are?

Dating Tip for Young Men: Approach the Woman Who Can’t Look at You, Not the Ones Who Can

Women are advised to “do what men do” to signal interest in a stranger: make eye contact with someone, hold it, and smile. Good advice, and men do seem to watch for that, but I want to give young men an insider tip from my experience:

It’s not possible.

We’re not men.

The greater the impact a man has on a woman’s emotions, the more her limbic system will pull her eyes down involuntarily. The less she looks at him, the more he will think she means to voluntarily avoid him. That’s a bummer because a woman’s downcast eyes are an invitational signal she does not consciously control.