Is the Bible Good for Women?

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Rebecca McLaughlin
Paul continues, Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. How did Christ love the church and give himself up for her by dying on a cross? You know, naked and bleeding like this is the model of Christian husbands.

Jen Oshman
Just spending some time studying history in the ancient Near East and other law codes that were present at the same time. You put them side by side, and you see the radical nature of the Old Testament law in the way that it was very protective of women and elevated women.

Heather Ferrell
Welcome to the gospel coalition podcast, equipping the next generation of believers, pastors and church leaders to shape life and ministry around the gospel. On today’s episode, you’ll hear a conversation with Kendra Dahl, Rebecca McLaughlin, Wendy Alsup and Jen Oshman as they answer the question, Is the Bible good for women?

Kendra Dahl
I’m Kendra Dahl, and I’m excited to be hosting this conversation about the deep truths of God with these lovely women at the table with me. So why don’t you all introduce yourselves? Wendy, I’m

Wendy Alsup
Wendy Alsup, and I’m from South Carolina. I’m a single mom, a math teacher and an avid whale watcher.

Jen Oshman
My name is Jen Oshman. I currently live in Colorado, where I’m involved in women’s ministry and church planting, and I have four daughters.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I’m Rebecca McLaughlin. I come from the United Kingdom. I now live in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts, with my immediate family, my husband and three kids, and our delightful church family, very passionate about church family being family, so I always want to say that, and I write books and talk about Jesus. My first book was confronting Christianity, 12 hard questions for the world’s largest religion. And I’ve just carried on writing it’s great.

Kendra Dahl
Well, thank you, ladies, so much for being with me today. We’re going to just tackle the really easy question, Is the Bible good for women? And Wendy, you actually have a book by this house, so maybe you could just answer for us, is the Bible good for women?

Wendy Alsup
Our subtitle was seeking clarity and confidence through a Jesus centered understanding of Scripture. And Jesus is the lens I love that through which we need to read Scripture and through which many people don’t read Scripture. And so therein is the problem.

Kendra Dahl
How else have you all been engaged in answering this question? What kind of work have you done in this area? Yeah, well,

Jen Oshman
I’ve been involved in women’s ministry for about 25 years. Always we lived overseas for many years, so just having the privilege and the pleasure of teaching God’s word to women in multiple different cultural contexts, and then, of course, raising four daughters will cause a mom to delve into the scriptures and ask, is this good? Is this good for me? Is this good for my girls? So it’s definitely been a heartbeat of mine for the last couple decades.

Rebecca McLaughlin
At a chapter my first book, which was titled, does the Bible denigrate women? Because I think in a lot of people’s minds, that’s that’s our baseline, that’s where people think we’re starting from. But as with pretty much any other objection to the Christian faith, I think the more you look into Christianity’s impact on women, the more you realize that actually it’s a pointer toward Jesus, rather than a roadblock against faith in Jesus. I’ve gone on to write a book that was called Jesus through the eyes of women, where I’m looking at the stories of named and unnamed women in the Gospels and their encounters with Jesus. And it’s actually not a book mostly about women. It’s mostly about Jesus. But seeing Jesus through the eyes of women, we also see women through the eyes of Jesus. And if we look at the history of the world, I think we’ll find the extraordinary positive impact of Jesus, of Nazareth, on women over the last 2000 years. Yeah, and

Wendy Alsup
I was a part of, I led women’s ministry at a mega church in Seattle, and it was a church that claimed biblical authority and claimed to be exegeting scripture, but really it was led by a man who had really pretty classic misogyny, and I wrestled so much in the aftermath of it with my sisters in Christ, who are like, Well, clearly the Bible is not good for women. I’m like, no, no, it’s been misused. Let’s look at it. And let’s look at at it used correctly, and not willing to give up on Scripture because it had been misused, and not willing to give up on God or give up on the church because there had been misuse of it in my life, but to wrestle with God and say, What does this mean? And I think that that’s what many sisters in Christ really need, is someone to wrestle with them to get to the pure truth of Christianity, especially when it’s been misused against them.

Kendra Dahl
I mean, that’s a good segue to talk about why women are asking this question, and that, I think, is one of the primary reasons, right? It’s like because the scripture has been misused and misapplied, and they have been the victims of that they are the ones at the receiving end of the misogynistic application or or just these wrong assumptions of them, and that they’re hurt and they’re weary and and they are just ready for a change, right? But, but what are some of the other reasons that this question comes up, or some of the underlying assumptions embedded within this question?

Jen Oshman
Well, I think in this cultural moment especially, we’re dealing with some untruths in the church regarding women and untruths in the culture regarding women, and so there are these two massive ditches on either side of what’s actually true. And I think there’s just a ton of confusion. And maybe especially just in sort of pop culture or surface level culture, there’s this assumption that the Bible is bad for women and that culture is good for women, right? But actually, counter intuitively, and I know Rebecca you can speak to this is we, the more we look at culture, the ways that culture values women come straight from the Bible and the influence of Christianity. So I think we just have these two deep ditches and bringing clarity to this cultural moment is really important. Absolutely.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah. I mean, the idea that women are fundamentally equal in value to men is not a self evident truth, and you can see that from the history of the world and from multiple other religious and philosophical traditions who actually aren’t saying that. I think the Bible profoundly is saying that, and so it’s the reason why people today in the West take that as a basic assumption. It’s also fascinating. If you look at the data in terms of women’s self reported happiness, you will find that the happiest women in America, for example, are highly religious women, and especially highly religious women married to highly religious men, are the happiest lives in America, which is sort of funny when you think that from many people’s perspective, you know, especially women who are choosing to stay home with their kids would be most pitiable from many people’s sort of cultural perspective. And conversely, if we look at the secular norms in our world today around women, we’ll find a culture that is actually profoundly misogynistic. Yeah, right, and yes, and there are two reasons for that among many you know. One is that the sexual revolution of the 1960s which proclaimed that it was giving freedom to women, was based on the idea that what women really will benefit from is as many sexual partners as possible, like so long as we have as much freedom to explore sexually, that’s going to be fantastic for women. Turns out, actually it’s really bad for women, not to say every single woman, but actually, on average, women, increasing the numbers of sexual partners is correlated with lower levels of mental health, happiness, high levels of depression, suicidal ideation, drug addiction, alcoholism, you know, you name it. So if we just looking from a purely data perspective, the evidence shows that what we have proclaimed to be good for women actually isn’t. And then in the last few years, actually, we’ve seen something doubling down on that in terms of negative impacts on women, which is the normalization of sexual violence under the veneer of consent. And we’ve taken sorry to be a little graphic here, but we’ve taken violent pornography, and as a culture, we have normalized that in real human interactions. And it turns out that women actually really hate being victims of violence, and the people who are victimizing them in that way are people who would say they are completely you know the most feminist people in town, you know the most valuing of women, and that Christians are the ones who are denigrating women, when in fact, if you look at what’s actually happening, you’ll find that comparing, you know, genuinely Christian marriage to what’s happening to happening secularly to women in our world today, there is simply no comparison in terms of who is more beneficial to women and who is misogynistic and harmful to women? Yeah, absolutely.

Kendra Dahl
Well, I think that’s so fascinating, like this underlying assumption that society is good for women, and the Bible, in trying to limit women in some way is what’s bad for them. But that, why is that our inherent posture, and yet, there’s also this hermeneutic of suspicion, right? Where it’s like the patriarchy is out to get you, and I think that that’s something that we’re up against, is like people’s trust in the scriptures as well as as even just their heart towards God, right? Have you seen that?

Wendy Alsup
Because it’s very hard sometimes to separate a criticism of a man from criticism of all men and and we hate it as women, right? You know, don’t, don’t project onto me what some other woman did in a marriage or but would sometimes tend to do it toward men. But biblical manhood, a manhood that calls men to image Christ, is not bad for women at all. Right? If a man grows in humility, if a man grows in Christ likeness the fruit of the Spirit, this is good. We want men to grow and in peace and long suffering and kindness and gentleness, there’s strength under control. So a biblical manhood, truly biblical, you know, not misused by Scripture is good for women, along with biblical womanhood, understood through the Jesus hermeneutic.

Kendra Dahl
So let’s help women. Let’s start to think through how would you answer this question? Someone comes to you and says, Is the Bible good for women? I mean, obviously we’ve we started touching on it, just big picture wise. Yeah, but, but how would you help them? I mean, my favorite part about this is you’re asking the question. So it’s like, first thing seek the answer, right? If the Bible’s good for women like Come in, come to the Scriptures, God can handle your questions. But then, what are some principles that they need to have, that we want to have as we approach the scriptures? To answer this question?

Wendy Alsup
Well, I think it’s very good to remember the big rocks of belief. So let’s say you’re coming to the Scripture. What, what is the bias that you’re bringing into it? So if you’re reading like, numbers five to me, is like a classic passage, and it’s on a man who suspects his wife of adultery, so there’s no evidence, and it almost seems to accommodate this man’s suspicion. And if you’re coming in with a bias against that Scripture is bad for women, then you’re going to read it and say, well, wow, why is God accommodating this unjust accusation that this man is making? But if you come in and you’re like, No, God is good and he loves his daughters, then you can read it. You’re like, Oh, my word. He’s protecting them from unjust accusation that this it has a trial by ordeal. But unlike regular trials by ordeal, where the miracle is if you’re saved from the ramification in this trial of ordeal, the supernatural event would be if you were found guilty. So the automatic result of the numbers five trial by ordeal is that she’s vindicated. But it takes coming in with that assumption that our God is good, that he loves his daughters, and then it’s clear, but our biases and our assumptions and our hermeneutic really can affect how if we’re not thinking deeply and looking at other resources and bringing in context?

Kendra Dahl
Yeahm, we’ve used that word hermeneutic a few times, but maybe tell somebody who’s never heard that word before, what do we mean when we talk about our hermeneutics?

Wendy Alsup
Well, I think of it as a Jesus centered understanding, or lens through which you read the Scripture. So if Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, and if Jesus is the rep, the word, the revelation of God, then you can look at the Old Testament narrative. Even the hard parts for women, the hardest stories for women, are showing that we need Jesus to rescue us, right? That’s not that God is saying this is good, it’s God saying this is bad, and this is why we need Jesus, because men are sinners, or women are sinners. And so if you look at all of these parts through the lens of Jesus, you have this different way of interpreting what’s going on here, so that you can see it in light of God’s long story to redeem His people and rescue them.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And just to back that up. Someone might hear Wendy and think, Oh, well, you know, she’s saying Jesus hermeneutic. She’s sort of trying to impose her understanding and her view of Jesus on this whole conversation. Actually, the apostle Paul specifically tells us that we should look at Christian marriage in particular through the lens of Jesus and Ephesians chapter five, when Paul writes about at most length about husbands and wives. It starts with Wives submit your husbands as the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. And I remember, as a college student, kind of first grappling with that passage for myself and thinking, Gosh, as I read through the Gospels, I see Jesus continually elevating women. And then it feels like here’s Paul kind of slapping them down again. And then as I properly started to read the rest of that chapter, I realized, Oh no, that’s not what’s happening here at all. Because Paul continues, Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. And when you think about what that means. How did Christ love the church and give himself up for her by dying on a cross, you know, naked and bleeding like this, is the the model of Christian husbands, and so often that passage is is mistaught. As you know, Wives submit to your husbands. Husbands lead your wives, or husbands make sure your Wives submit. Husbands are never actually told to lead their wives or make sure their Wives submit what they’re told to again and again is to love their wives. Now, I do think the implication from the idea of the husband as the head of the wife is that the husband should be leading, but it’s a leadership that is actually first and foremost seeking to love, and it’s not based on gendered psychology. It’s actually based on Christ’s end of theology Yeah, and so, so often that you know that passion passage is preached as well. Men are natural leaders, which is why women submit to men. I’m like, well, that’s not what Paul says, right? Paul says it’s because of Christ in the church. And as soon as we take Christ in the church out of the center of our understanding of what, of what Christian marriage means, which isn’t the only sphere in which kind of male female difference matters, but is clearly, you know, one important one. As soon as we take Jesus out, it’s a bit like in the film Moana, for those who have seen that film, where, you know, towards the end of the film, Moana realizes that the reason there’s this massive like lava monster running around trying to kill her and Maui is. Because it’s actually the goddess Te Fiti whose heart has been ripped out. And when we put the heart back in the center of this conversation, which is Jesus’ love for His people, everything starts to make sense in a whole new way, right?

Wendy Alsup
And you know, Paul speaks to women in that passage as if they have agency, and a culture in which they probably didn’t have much agency. So it’s the woman offering this. And I often think, you know, we need to think of the difference in oppression and submission. Oppression is taken, submission is given. And Paul speaks in this very distinct way to women that the culture was not speaking to them at the time. Yeah, absolutely.

Jen Oshman
And we do. We see this in the historical record, right? And sometimes you need to start this conversation with a woman who is suspicious of Scripture, outside of Scripture. And I think we have some wonderful historians, you know, Rodney, Stark, Tom Holland, others, who have shown us through some recent, wonderful work that things really changed when Jesus came, that the treatment of women was revolutionized. And this is part of the reason of the birth of the church and the rapid growth of the church is that those who were marginalized, those who were oppressed and didn’t have agency, found a home amongst the Christian church, and they received, as you said, the family of God welcomed them in as siblings and sisters and mothers and daughters. And so women were elevated. And so the revolution of Christianity is largely about the treatment of women and those who were mistreated. And so if we can go back to the historical record and even maybe start that conversation with those who are suspicious, right, and show them that, you know, women’s rights aren’t a given, human rights aren’t a given, this actually comes from the early church.

Kendra Dahl
To go back to some of those hermeneutical principles, you know, you read the Old Testament, and it’s like, what are these people talking about? Are you? Are you read these stories that are horrific, the way women are treated? Or you, you see, you know polygamy, or you see all these different things. And how do we help someone who’s just reading these narratives? Like, what? What are some other principles? I mean, obviously that it all points to Christ. That is like, that’s crucial and Central. But what are other tools that they need to have to be able to understand, like as you’re talking about studying these texts,

Wendy Alsup
I think a really easy one that’s super helpful is the difference in description and prescription. So every bad story described of women is not God. So many of them are. You know, like even in Judges, you have the rape of the concubine and the death of jephthah’s daughter, and at the end, it says everybody was doing what was right in their own eyes. There was no king. They needed King Jesus, right? And so if you first realize a lot of these descriptions are not God saying this was good or right, but really that we need Jesus, and so that’s been a very helpful principle to me.

Jen Oshman
And I think just spending some time studying history in the ancient Near East and other law codes that were present at the same time. I mean, you put them side by side, and you see the radical nature of the Old Testament law and the way that it was very protective of women and elevated women. So we, I mean, the Bible is complex and complicated, and so we have to come to it with these various tools, and we can’t come to it with our current cultural presuppositions. It does take some work.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I think even if we read Genesis one and we see that in the beginning, God creates human beings, male and female equally in his image, that completely washes over us, because our assumption is that men and women are equal. But that would not have been the assumption at the time, and it hasn’t been the assumption in many cultures, in much of human history. And so that the first building block that human beings, male and female, are both equally, made in God’s image, is then what everything else gets built on. And fascinatingly, that in Genesis two, when the first man and first woman are brought together, and their union is established as a sort of prototype for future unions. And the the narrator makes this sort of strange comment, therefore a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and they should become one flesh. When Paul then looks back to that, he says, that was always about Christ and the church, and so our kind of embodied existence, even as as women is, is part of helping us to understand what it means to be God’s people. Yeah, just as that you know, the best human father gives us a tiny echo of God’s fatherly love for us, so the best human husband gives us a tiny picture of like Jesus’s sacrificial love for us, and even the way that men and women can come together and have babies is like a visual aider, a living embodiment of the one flesh union that Jesus has with his people. It’s just extraordinary.

Wendy Alsup
It’s helpful, too, to really read it and understand the difference in especially in the United States, and Western perceptions of an Eastern culture, and we don’t value community. We’re this United States in particular, is what’s founded in a very individualistic, autonomous way, and even as many women would value, you know, more of a social. Maybe health care or something like that, but there’s still want a great autonomy over their own bodies, and we don’t realize that actually we were meant to be in community, and community is healthy, and what part and parcel of community is that we each make sacrifices for the good, the greater good, and whether it’s in how we think about our homes, our bodies, our church, our greater community, but we are all giving in this for the good of the whole and I think that’s that’s really been lost in western civilization to a degree.

Kendra Dahl
I think it’s also important that we acknowledge sin is real, right? You get, yeah, you see Genesis one, and we’re created in equal dignity and value. But we do get to Genesis three, and you see the fall absolutely and what doesn’t happen in the fall, right? Eve eats the fruit. But when God comes to them, he curses the serpent. He never curses the man and the woman. And he’s cursed, are you to the serpent? And he says, you know, he’ll put enmity between the serpent and the woman. So he’s, he’s reclaiming Eve. He’s saying, you know, yeah, Adam just threw her under the bus. And yes, she’s guilty of this sin, and yet she’s mine. I’m not going to give her over to the serpent, Steve, she’s going to be, you know, the beginning of the God’s promise to redeem His people. And I think that is such a crucial point in the conversation where we’re saying, you know, society, or even some Christians want to point to the fall as saying, like, see, women can’t be trusted. Look at what happens. And yet, that’s not what God that’s not his interpretation of the fall. And in fact, women play such a crucial role in the history of redemption, both in bearing, you know, children that are going to lead to Christ, but also in preserving the seat. You know, some of my favorite stories are these feisty women who are hiding babies Well, you know, like at Queen Athaliah is killing them all, and you’ve got, you know, the sister of the King who’s tucks away the baby, who’s the remaining line of David. Or, you know, just these, the way God preserves His people is so often through these women. And that just flies in the face of this narrative that the Bible isn’t good for women.

Wendy Alsup
Absolutely, that is such an important point. I think a lot about sin entered the world through a woman, but so did the Savior. Yeah, and it’s, it is God’s massive grace and mercy and elevation in that moment to say, You know what Satan you thought, but you it’s no, I’m going to enter. But also, I think it helps us understand the war against women throughout the decade, the millennium, right? Because if Satan, if the Savior, is coming into the world through women, through the woman, then Satan knew who to aim great deal of persecution against Absolutely.

Kendra Dahl
Well, where else can we point in Scripture just to illustrate this beauty of God’s heart towards women? I’m curious. Rebecca, in your your book, do you have a favorite encounter between Jesus and a woman in the gospels that you wrote about?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Gosh, that’s, I think that’s impossible to pick, but I’ll, I’ll go for two. Mary and Martha of Bethany are two of my favorite figures in in the New Testament, and we meet them both in Luke’s gospel and in John’s gospel and in Luke’s gospel. You know, Jesus has gone to with his disciples to have dinner at their house, and Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet, learning, and Martha is serving. And Martha, you know, is frustrated. She’s like, Jesus, can you please tell my sister to get up and work like like I am, and Jesus sort of generally but firmly responds to her, Martha, Martha, you were concerned about many things, but Mary has chosen the better portion, and it will not be taken away from her. So Jesus is actually defending Mary’s right to be his disciple. Now she’s sitting at his feet, which is their sort of technical language associated with discipleship. But I love how then, then John gives us an opportunity to see Jesus’s conversation with Martha, because after Mary, Martha’s brother, Lazarus, has died, and in fact, after Jesus deliberately let Lazarus die, on purpose not come when they called him, he shows up and he first encounters Martha, and it’s to her that he speaks those extraordinary words, I am, the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me, even though he dies, will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? And most of the famous I am statements in John’s Gospel are spoken to groups, but this one is spoken to one grieving woman, and Jesus wants to know, Do you believe this? And Martha’s faith in that moment is actually beautiful and extraordinary. So you sort of see, I don’t know, people come up with all these kind of character personality tests around Are you a Mary or a Martha? And you know, from Luke’s Gospel, which I think is complete misreading of the text in the first place. But that’s another, another question. But then we see Martha having her her own sort of real face to face moment with Jesus and engaging with him in that way. And then, of course, John also tells us the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, who knows that she’s the last person Jesus should be speaking to like Jesus should not have been seen dead with this woman. And yet he offers her living water. And I think he actually says one of his other I am state. To her that we don’t notice, because at the end of their conversation, which is the longest recorded private conversation Jesus has with anyone in the gospels, she says to him, I know that when Messiah, who is called Christ, comes, he will explain everything to us. And Jesus replies, I am the one speaking to you. And it’s just so beautiful, because the other I am statements are kind of telling us something about who Jesus is. I am the light of the world. I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. I am the resurrection and the life. And here he’s saying I am the one who’s willing to waste his time on a woman who no one else in its culture would have gone near. That is actually also part of who Jesus is. Sorry, that was a long answer.

Kendra Dahl
Well, how can we, as we kind of bring this conversation to a close? How can we encourage women who are in that space of just like weariness? Maybe they feel like second class citizens in their church, or maybe they’ve been, you know, just experiencing the weight of mus in their community or or even they’re wrestling with the text and they’re like, I don’t know what to do with this. How can, how can we encourage them with what to do?

Wendy Alsup
I would encourage them just stay engaged with Scripture and persevere and hope and with just do your research, read things in context and do your own wrestling. Go back and look at really cross references. See where else Matt says something about this passage. And a lot of times you’ll find that in the New Testament, it’ll reflect something of the old. But to stay engaged with the word with the confidence of the three big things of God’s character, that He’s sovereign and he loves his children, and he has compassion on us, and he’s wise. He’s wise, he knows what he’s doing. And so stay wrestling, because at some point the Holy Spirit is going to break in and show you clearly, and it always as I wrestle with the hard passage I always have my faith increased as God shows me through his word. Oh, you were misunderstanding that. And then it suddenly becomes clear, and you’re like, yes, thank you, Lord for showing me through the Scripture the beauty of your plan.

Jen Oshman
Absolutely I love Wendy, your exhortation to stay in the Word, and I think also just to our sisters who are suffering because we all know that the scriptures have been wielded in ways that were unfair and unkind and misogynistic, we want to have tenderness toward them. But also say, borrow our faith for now. Know that you are seen and you are loved, and borrow our faith that God is good and His Word is good, and find other women who can study deeply with you. You need other believers. You need sisters in the faith, mothers in the faith, who can point you to what is good and beautiful and true. And in the meantime, borrow our faith and be assured that the Lord is for you.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I would agree with all of that, and I would add, stay busy with the work that God has given you so often as humans, we are inclined to get our priorities actually the wrong way around. It’s fascinating how Jesus and the Gospels had to tell his disciples multiple times that power and authority in his kingdom didn’t work like power and authority in the rest of the world, right? And the reason is he turns everything upside down. He says, Whoever wants to be first among us be the slave of all why? Because even he, the Son of Man, didn’t come to be served, but to serve and to give us life as a ransom. For many, Jesus notices and values the insignificant, quiet, unseen work that any Christian does. And I think sometimes, as we enter into conversations about, for example, like women’s role in the church, or how, you know, how we can sort of reframe things in a larger context, which are important conversations to have, we sometimes enter into them with, actually, a Jesus free framework which says, oh, I need women to have the same power and privilege as like the senior pastor of our church has. Well, actually, the senior pastor of your church is grabbing power and privilege. He’s not. He’s not being the senior pastor of your church. He should be serving and sacrificing. That’s what leadership in our Jesus centered Kingdom looks like. So let’s just make sure, as we enter these conversations that we have Jesus’s set of spectacles on.

Heather Ferrell
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of the gospel coalition podcast. Check out more gospel centered resources at the gospel coalition.org.