CHRISTIAN WOMEN AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES
BY
D. M. PANTON.
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 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 God’s
Mind 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 everything," (Eph. 5: 24.) for "the head of the woman is the man" (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). If 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 no further go. "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 carries with it a very valuable lesson. 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
unanimity 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 contemporary 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 shewing, 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 COMMANDMENTS 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." ***
[*
Ibid., p. 167. ** Ibid.,
p. 313.
*** Ibid., p. 273.]
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.
-------