Season 3: Episode 18 | Pulpit Fiction: The Women They Renamed, Silenced, and Forgot

Women in church leadership is not a new conversation, and it is not a closed one. The biblical record is clear. The ambiguity has been manufactured.

In this episode of Jesus, Justice + Mercy, we go deep into the text to meet the women who were always there: Deborah, judge and military commander. Huldah, the prophet, the king sent his priests to consult. Junia, the apostle whose name was changed to a man’s to erase her from history. Phoebe, the minister, and leader Paul celebrated. Mary, whose Magnificat is not a lullaby, it’s a liberation text. The women the church renamed, silenced, and forgot.

But we also go directly to the passages that have been used to shut down this conversation, 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, and read them in their full context. We look at the complementarianism vs. egalitarianism debate, the church’s invented teaching vs. preaching distinction, and the theological architecture of patriarchy that underlies the pulpit question. And we trace the argument all the way back to Genesis, where patriarchy first appears not as God’s design but as a consequence of the fall.

We also ask what the church has lost by silencing women’s voices, theologically, pastorally, prophetically, and spend time with female prophetic voices throughout history who preached anyway: Pauli Murray, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells.

This is a longer episode. It is theologically heavy. And it is one I have been waiting for.

EPISODES REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

• Episode 17: What the Church Owes the Grieving, Mary Magdalene
• Episode 10: Back Porch Mercy, Fannie Lou Hamer
• Episode 4: Just Left of Centered, Black Theology, Liberation & the Gospel, womanist theologians
• Episode 6: The Comfort We Called Holy, white Christian nationalism and formation

TERMS DEFINED IN THIS EPISODE

Complementarianism, men and women are equal in worth before God but have different God-ordained roles; men lead, women submit, in the home and in the church.

Egalitarianism, men and women are equal in worth and in function; gender does not determine calling or capacity for leadership.

Hermeneutics, biblical interpretation; the principles and methods you use to understand what scripture means.

Patriarchy, not just “men in charge” but a system, structural, institutional, often given the weight of divine design.

Exegesis vs. eisegesis, exegesis draws meaning out of the text; eisegesis reads a predetermined conclusion into it.

Kenosis, a Greek word from Philippians 2 meaning self-emptying; describes Christ giving up divine privilege to serve and die; relevant to what Ephesians 5 actually calls husbands to do, not sit at the top of a hierarchy but empty themselves in love.

Interpolation, when textual scholars believe a passage may have been added to a letter later and was not original to it; relevant to 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which appears in different locations in different ancient manuscripts.

SCHOLARS AND SOURCES REFERENCED

Gordon Fee, commentary on 1 Corinthians

Philip Payne and Cynthia Westfall, lexical research on authentein Pauli Murray, Jane Crow Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892) Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching journalism and activism John Chrysostom, on Junia (4th century)