When Dulcie Gannett first stepped onto the campus of Fuller Theological Seminary in the fall of 1973, it didn’t occur to her that she would ever have any business teaching a man, any man, about Christianity. Raised in a conservative Presbyterian household, she knew little about what was then tagged “women’s lib.” But she knew plenty about the writing of the apostle Paul: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent” (I Timothy 2:12). “I had been involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, and it just had never been an issue for me,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to be an authority over men. I wanted to learn Greek!
Half a world away, lifelong Mennonite Reta Halteman Finger was spending the year in Germany with her husband, who was studying there. “I was pretty much cut off from the church at home,” she says. That spring a Mennonite acquaintance from the U.S. brought her a pile of back issues of their denominational magazine, Gospel Herald. “A woman I knew had written an article about expanding women’s roles. It was an awakening to me. Then I saw that in the issues after that a number of letters responded to her article, some of them very negatively. They said women have a certain role and must stay in it. They used a lot of Scripture, and although it seemed poorly interpreted to me, I was not sure.
In that first issue the lead article profiled and quoted Catherine Booth, who preached and taught, and cofounded the Salvation Army. Booth once said, “Jesus Christ’s principle was to put women on the same platform as men, although I am sorry to say His apostles did not always act upon it.” Groh recalls, “We got away with saying quite a bit,” both in the magazine and on the evangelical-college lecture circuit, “because we quoted people like Booth and Phoebe Palmer. We never quoted Gloria Steinem or those folks.”
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These are people that Jerry Falwell has stated he believes do not exist (“A Christian feminist to me is like saying, ‘a Christian evolutionist’ or ‘a Christian prostitute.’ They are a contradiction in terms”): women who take both the Bible and feminism very seriously, women who believe that Jesus Christ is Lord but that their husbands are not. For almost 19 years, from varying addresses on the north side of Chicago, Daughters of Sarah has served up a readable, unusually diverse mix of stories about history, scriptures, and women’s experiences. Today the magazine has 64 pages, about 5,000 subscribers (down from a peak of 6,800 in 1988) and newsstand distribution; it has one full-time and five part-time paid staff members, and an annual budget of somewhere around $130,000. Finger is the editor, Gannett the book-review editor. In the past year Daughters has won awards from both Associated Church Press and Chicago Women in Publishing. On September 1 it will move to offices at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston (2121 Sheridan Road, 708-866-3882).
“Grapples” is an accurate term. By far the most serious scholarly challenge to the Daughters viewpoint from the right is the thick 1991 collection of essays Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, who teaches at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in west-suburban Deerfield. This book is to Falwell roughly as Thomas Aquinas is to Tom Roeser. In more than 500 pages covering Genesis to Revelation, its mostly male contributors argue that the Bible teaches both women’s spiritual equality and subordination to male “headship” in home and church. They insist that subordination need not mean inferiority or oppression–an argument that always sounds better if you’re not the subordinated one.
Ignoring the Bible is not an option, according to Chicago Theological Seminary professor Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite. For instance, she says, “battered women frequently bring their religious beliefs to the process of working through a battering relationship. Phone calls to shelters often begin with the phrase “I’m a Bible-believing Christian, but . . . “‘ In other words, it probably wouldn’t help such a woman, who’s already in crisis, to tell her to forget that old book.
The easiest response is one that naive atheists and naive fundamentalists have in common: don’t put in any more work on it than you would on today’s Sun-Times. Read the words. Take them or leave them. From this viewpoint, Paul’s “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men” must mean just what it says.
