Note on Dr. Katherine Bushnell’s
Works.*
[See, Marriage and the Woman Movement.]
It is always a relief, but also a tragedy, when the seeds of
error burst into their final bloom: a relief, because all eyes are opened to the
evil at last; but a tragedy, because when an error comes in all its naked
hideousness into the open, it is generally because its battle is won, and it
can now afford to drop the mask.
Dr. Katharine Bushnell’s works, which may be taken as a fair
sample of much that is being taught to Christian women to-day, and which are
presented by her admirers as “nothing short of a
revelation direct from God,” reveal, as by a sudden flash of
lightning, the ultimate goal of practices which, to many sincere and simple
souls, appear innocent and even laudable.
A pound of fact outweighs a ton of precept in disillusionment.
1. THIS TEACHING STRIKES A DEADLY BLOW
AT PRIMAL LAW.
The Scripture says:- “I permit
not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion over a man: for” - here
is the bedrock reason on which the prohibition rests – “Adam was first formed, then Eve; and Adam was not beguiled, but the woman being beguiled hath
fallen into transgression” (1 Tim. 2:
12). That is, the
prohibition of a woman’s public teaching, or exercising any sort of
authority over man, is prohibited on the ground of the order of creation, and
also on the ground of her prior fall; both the priority given to the male by
prior creation, and Eve’s disastrous misuse of initiative, are made, by
the Holy Ghost the grounds of a forbidden public ministry. Now Dr. Bushnell’s divergence is
radical and profound. Humanity
(according to her) was originally, as (sic)
the Deity now is, bi-sexual, so that both were created by a simultaneous act:
the sexes appeared when Adam was divided into two, man thus having no priority
over woman: Eve never fell, never sinned herself, though she got involved in
the fall, and Adam was already fallen when she was sent to restore him: had Eve
not hearkened to Adam, she might have reversed the Fall: that birth-travail was
imposed as a penalty of the Fall is “a wicked
and cruel superstition”: God warned Eve in Eden not to obey her husband, and it was her
obedience to her husband which was the Fall: the subjection of
woman in church and home had its origin in the woman-hatred of the Rabbis, and
its perpetuation by priestcraft: therefore also, as the Fall was woman’s
subjection, so the social salvation of the race will follow woman’s emancipation. And how does Dr. Bushnell arrive at
these astounding results? By giving
a fresh translation to nearly every Scripture involved. Our versions, both Authorised and Revised,
wherever passages on woman’s status occur, are cast contemptuously aside
as man-made
translations, which “would have been of a much
higher order had women had a place on the translation-committees”*
and the true meaning of the Holy Ghost, after a burial of nineteen centuries,
has now been unearthed by Dr. Bushnell.
[* It may be taken as an axiom that the writer who pronounces
both our Versions incompetent in an entire department of translation at once
puts himself out of court with all serious thinkers, and ruins even the truth
which he may really present by an initial blunder so colossal. Dr. Bushnell’s alterations are
exceedingly daring. The knowledge
of good and evil becomes the knowledge of pleasure and pain (Gen. 2: 17) - in Gen.
3: 16, ‘desire’ becomes ‘turning,’
and ‘conception’ a ‘snare’; Sarah’s obedience and calling
Abraham. ‘lord’ (1 Pet. 3: 6) becomes Sarah calling him ‘Sir’ and Abraham obeying Sarah (Gen. 21:
12); the man’s ‘headship’
of the woman (1 Cor. 11: 3) means ‘support’ only, and involves no control. 1 Tim. 2: 12
is confined (conveniently) to the age of Nero; ‘made’
(1 Tim. 2: 13, 15) means, not ‘created,’ but socially developed, and ‘childbearing’ has no reference to the ordinary
birth of children; Paul’s words – “Is
it seemly that a woman pray unto God unveiled?” (1 Cor. 11: 13) become – “IT is seemly that a woman pray unto God unveiled”;
and so forth and so on. (All
quotations are from Gods WORD TO WOMEN AND ONE HUNDRED AND ONE QUESTIONS
ANSWERED).]
2. THIS TEACHING STRIKES A DEADLY BLOW
AT HOME LIFE.
The Scripture says:‑“Let a
woman learn in quietness with all subjection” (1
Tim. 2: 11): “as the church is subject to
Christ, so let the wives also be to their husbands in everyihing”
(Eph. 5: 24): for “the head of the woman is the man” (1
Cor. 11: 3). All
obedience and even subjection in woman or wife are, wholly denied.
God, says Dr. Bushnell, “never
ordained the governance of woman by man: He has forbidden it among believers”:
Eve fell under Adam’s rule, “but this is
not God’s will; this is the fruit of her wrong choice; let the choice
cease. Where this state of bondage
reigns, whether the bondage of a slave or a wife to a husband, the kingdom of
heaven has not yet come.”
“Lordship of the husband over the wife is
Satanic in origin.”
How profoundly different God’s ideal! The Holy Ghost is careful to insist with
equal emphasis on two things - the husband’s love, the wife’s
obedience (Eph. 5: 24, 25): where these two
are, there is the perfect home. As
a woman herself has put it, tenderly and beautifully:-
Her seat is endless ministry; her
crown
The need and worship of some man whose
love
She o’er her pride and
self-desire folds down
And sets in mastery her own heart
above;
Her sceptre is a little child’s
weak hand;
Her orb, humility; her mantle, prayer;
Her right divine, to be, at
Heaven’s command,
Man’s mother, mate, and
help-meet past compare.
3. THIS TEACHING STRIKES A DEADLY BLOW
AT CHURCH ORDER.
The Scripture says:- “Let the
women keep silence in the
churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak; for it is shameful for a
woman to speak in the church.” (1
Cor. 14: 34). No interpreter
is present, the speaker in tongues is to KEEP
SILENCE: if a seated prophet has a sudden revelation, the speaking prophet
is to KEEP SILENCE: the women,
without exception, are to KEEP SILENCE. Twenty times in fifteen verses ‘to speak’ means to address the public
assembly. I confess that I turned
with great curiosity to see how an acute intellect would attempt to storm an
impregnable citadel. Will it be
believed when it is stated? Dr.
Bushnell says the words are a quotation - a quotation from Jewish Rabbis and
woman-haters; that in these words Paul is quoting what he is opposing with all
his might; that it is a quotation which he is attacking, not a truth which he
is asserting: “Paul is uttering a strong protest
against this sort of opposition to women.” One falls back aghast. Surely what the Holy Spirit calls
‘wresting the Scriptures’ (even
though, it may be, with sincere motives) could go no further. “The
teaching,” says Dr. Bushnell, “that
woman must perpetually keep silence in the church, be obedient to her husband,
and never presume to teach or preach, blights the doctrine of the Atonement, and robs Christ of glory.” But this interpretation carried with it
a very valuable inference. If Dr.
Bushnell sees only the quotation from an antagonist in the command of silence
it is because she abandons in despair all hope of reconciling that command with
woman’s public ministry: her grotesque conjecture is a final
acknowledgment that the passage cannot be squared, by any ingenuity of human
skill, with anything but silence. Grave church disorder will enter in
through disregard of a rebuke of our Lord in one of His last utterances to a
church on earth: “Thou sufferest the woman
Jezebel TO TEACH” (Rev. 2: 20).
4. THIS TEACHING STRIKES A DEADLY BLOW
AT WOMAN'S SAFETY.
The Scripture says:- “Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for
the man: for this cause ought the woman to have a sign of authority on her
head, BECAUSE OF THE ANGELS.”(1 Cor. 11: 10). Dr. Bushnell appeals to the Montanists
of the third century, whose ‘inspired’
were almost exclusively women, and among whom, appointed by that ‘inspired’ utterance, were women pastors, women
evangelists, women deacons, and women bishops. No appeal could be more fatal. Montanus
was a man who claimed to be the Godhead incarnate; and the whole church,
with a un-animity rare even then, refused Montanism as a manifestation of
unclean spirits.* Montanism is
exactly what reveals woman’s peculiar peril, and God’s wise placing
of her within natural and holy family and church safeguards. The vast majority of the ‘inspired’ among the Montanists, the Camisards, and the Irvingites were women, AND
EACH OF THESE ORIGINATED WITH WOMEN; witches all down the ages have been
proverbially commoner than wizards; in every large American city to-day there
are hundreds of women mediums; and most modern demonisms (including
Spiritualism itself) have had women founders, from Ame Lee and Joanna Southcote
to Madame Blavatsky, Mrs. Eddy, Mrs.
Besant, and Dr. Julia Sears. As all history shows, woman herself is
the worst sufferer from the outbreak of lawless passions, whether from the
unseen world or from men; and her sole
safety and only genuine emancipation lie in loving and loyal obedience to the
exact letter of every Word of her God.
[* Montanus said:-
“I am the Lord God Almighty dwelling in man: I
am the Word, and the Spirit, and the Power.” A temporary writer,
quoted by Eusebius, says:- “This arrogant spirit taught them to revile the whole and
every particular church under heaven, because this spirit of false prophecy
received no honour or countenance from it.” Montanism, Eusebius adds, “was held in
abhorrence by the whole Christian brotherhood throughout the world.”]
5. THIS TEACHING STRIKES A DEADLY BLOW
AT DIVINE INSPIRATION.
Paul’s utterances, taken as they stand in our Versions,
are - in Dr. Bushnell’s words – “puerile
sophistries,” “pitiful, puerile,
and ego-centric.” The
entire fabric of Scripture reels if one brick is thus found utterly rotten; and
the catastrophe is only to be averted, on Dr. Bushnell’s own showing, by
the Church repudiating the scholarship of two thousand years, and adopting her
own versions. It is a colossal
claim, and it is exceedingly impressive and will, to most, close the
controversy, that, if our Versions are correct,
the Church’s age-long attitude on woman’s status is proved
Divine, Dr. Bushnell herself being the judge. The instructed
believer who nevertheless welcomes the modern woman’s ‘emancipation’ from all the restraints of
nature, custom, and revelation, must (and does) accept the Woman Movement, alone
among the vast world-movements of to-day, as Divine in origin and impetus; that is, he impales himself on
an impossible intellectual dilemma, and must either ultimately broaden out into
an acceptance of the awful parallel world-currents and so be swept into
apostasy, or else detect one more stratagem whereby Satan is ensnaring the
world. The Holy Ghost, foreseeing
such assaults as these upon His ambassador, couches His protest in words of
uttermost solemnity: “If any man thinketh himself
to be a prophet, or spiritual [inspired], let him
acknowledge [as a
discriminating test among the miracle-gifted, to whom alone this test applies,
discriminating Divine from Satanic supernatural action and utterance] that the things I write unto you [the silence of women
being the last command immediately preceding] are THE COMMANDMENT OF THE LORD”
(1 Cor. 14: 37).
The gravest and most startling fact still remains. IT
IS A FACT OPEN TO ALL TO VERIFY THAT THIS TEACHING IS GIVEN (PROBABLY FOR THE
FIRST TIME TO THE MODERN WORLD) IN ONE OF THE MOST SATANIC BOOKS OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY. The
perfect Way was written by
two powerful Theosophists, Dr. Anna Kingsford and Mr. Edward Maitland, who
claim for every word of it (I doubt not correctly) inspiration from the unseen
world. Every point quoted from Dr.
Bushnell in my second paragraph is here with this difference - that
Paul’s words are not translated away, but, accepted as the whole Church
and the whole world have always understood them, are openly flouted and
scorned. Man was Originally, as God
now is, bi-sexual; the Fall was no sin of Eve, but Adam’s; the woman’s
subjection to man was the Fall –
“Eve, having rejected God, falls under the sway
of Adam, and perfection is lost”; the prohibitions of
woman’s publicity and initiative are importations from woman-hating
Judaism and Rabbinism, which have been perpetuated by the churches and by
priestcraft; “Paul accepts in all its gross,
impossible crudity the fable of the apple and the snake,” and,
declaring that for Eve’s transgression her daughters must suffer silence
and subjection, “appeals to the Law (1 Cor. 14: 34), which at
other times he repudiates and denounces, and forges its chains anew”;
and so the world’s redemption can be wrought only by a reversal of the
process – woman’s restoration to equality, and even exaltation to
superior dignity.* “The final redemption of the earth is to be found in the
exaltation on the universal, fourfold planes, physical, philosophical, psychic,
and celestial, of the WOMAN”:
** “The
Woman shall be first in rule and highest in dignity: so that men shall say, Oh
that we had been born women!”*** And the Theosophic paradise is summed up
in an absurd (but also sinister and wicked) utterance attributed to our Lord in
one of the Gnostic ‘gospels’:
“The kingdom of heaven shall come when you women
shall have renounced the dress of your sex.” **** He is bold indeed who imagines that a truth
of the Holy Ghost, which has lain buried for nearly two millenniums, was first
unearthed to the modern world in a book embodying the quintessence of
Theosophy.
[*The Perfect Way, pp. 185, 186; 270. ** Ibid.,
p. 167. ***Ibid., P. 313. ****Ibid., P. 273.]
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