Is Eve an Equal Partner to Adam?

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It seems to be conveniently forgotten that, even at its cultural height, Christianity was set within secular cultures. It arose within imperial Roman culture (which was famously shifted, not abolished, when Constantine converted). When it arrives in pagan Anglia, or Frisia, it does not simply take over the institutions and alter everything, but inherits trial by ordeal, slavery and whatever else, which have to be “converted” from within - often against the sustained opposition of the traditional power structures.

And, one must add, it is Anglo-Saxons and Frisians who get converted, and need first to have their own prejudices healed by the gospel before they can start on society - have you read the struggles Augustine had against his habitual love for the amphitheatre when he converted? It would have been even more problematic if a gladiator was converted - or the amphitheatre owner.

So is it more significant that slavery persisted in Roman society as long as it did, or that Gregory of Nyssa wrote the first serious anti-slavery argument in history and shifted thinking so that Christians began to see it in moral, rather than economic, terms? Is the presence of rapacious slave traders and owners in America the significant thing, or the fact that Britain and America were the first societies in history to abolish slavery (thank you, Messrs Wilberforce and Lincoln), on the grounds of its immorality, and to impose that abolition on the rest of the world as far as they had power to do so? Go to Libya now - the slave markets are out in the open.

As for Roe v Wade, is Patrick right that the case was a blow for the rights of women against religious bigotry, or is “Jean Roe,” ie Norma McCorvey, right in her claim that her weak position was exploited by progressive activists back then, which explains her own efforts since to get Roe v Wade reversed? Or does her conversion to Christianity make her now part of the oppressive ideology and negate her own individual rights as a woman? “You will support your right to free choice, even if we have to use the law to force you.”

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AFAICT, the western countries which are most religious are also those which are most unequal, and it is the most non- Christian western countries that have led the way in women’s rights - Iceland, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand.

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Well, this thread has now gotten quite off topic, I feel the need to respond.

Thank you, @jongarvey , for highlighting the 1st point I had made:

Yes, as Christians, we readily admit our imperfections and sins, and thus we understand that we need to rely on God’s grace, rather than our own merits

This discussion also reminds me of a point that Ravi Zaccharias often makes,

Quoting Augustine: “Never judge a philosophy by its abuse”

If Jesus wrote all the laws of the nations, I wager that women around the world would have had the right to vote much sooner.

Yes @Patrick and @Roy the role of religion in the women’s suffrage movement was complicated. However, you fail to acknowledge the fact that there were also Christians who fought for the right to vote, not just against it.

Here’s an interesting map of when women obtained the right to vote in nations around the world. Looks like Western/Christian nations generally led the way.

Also, I am currently a Christian women who votes and supports voting, as do all the other Christian women I know. So it is clear that core Christian doctrines do not prevent women from voting.

By the way, a few years ago as a recent hire into my current job, I had to ask my non-Christian superiors to change my title to be commensurate with that of another recently hired male colleague with the same experience and responsibilities. Why didn’t they give us the same title to start with? Why did I have to ask for the change? Nevertheless, atheism does not lead to women’s inequality anymore than Christianity does.

The lack of women’s equality around the world is evidence of the fall of humanity, not the failings of Jesus’ teachings.

@Patrick I would like to hear your thoughts on which Non-Western civilization has had a better record of women’s rights than Western nations.

@Roy, its not clear to me how you are defining “most unequal” and “most non-Christian Western” (if there even is such a thing)
80% of Icelanders are members of the Lutheran Church
70% of Norwegians are members of the Lutheran Church
60% of Swedes are members of the Lutheran Church
47% of New Zealanders are Christian and 13% are Catholic

As for abortion: it is no choice at all. Abortion is a difficult and tragic decision, often made in desperation by women who feel that they have limited options.

  • For the record: I have never told a woman what to do with her body, but if a friend of mine asked me for advice, I would listen, counsel and give support

  • Most women (66%) say they felt their decision to abort was wrong, and most women (74%) felt pressured to abort. Many American Women Have Felt Pressured into Abortions, Study Finds - PRI

  • Many women later regret their abortion decisions. Thus, it would have been better if they had they received more counseling about their options beforehand

  • If more people would step up to help women in these circumstances, less women would choose abortion

  • Sex-selective abortion is another tragic women’s rights abuse, which has disproportionately reduced the number of women in countries like India and China, leading to challenges for families and society https://www.pnas.org/content/116/19/9303

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In New Zealand (first country in the world to give women the vote) the movement was spearheaded by Kate Sheppard of the Womens Christian Temperance Union. Kate Sheppard | NZHistory, New Zealand history online

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I suspect if Jesus wrote the laws of nations, no-one would have the vote. There’s nothing in the bible about holding elections, either in the OT or the NT, and no suggestion that the historical Jesus would even know what an election was. As for female suffrage and Christianity, the most pertinent example surely must be the Vatican State.

I’m not failing to acknowledge that at all. I’m noting the lack of correlation between women’s rights and Christianity.

“Other countries who’ve were early adopters of women’s suffrage include: Australia (1902), Finland (1906) Norway (1907), Denmark (1915), Iceland (1915), Canada (1917), Russia (1917), Armenia (1917) and Estonia (1917).”

Western countries, certainly. But not so much Western Christian ones. Those western countries usually considered the most Christian at the time - Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, USA - aren’t listed.* Your own source refutes your argument.

Note that the country which is only 47% Christian - less than any western country except Estonia, Czechia or Albania - gave women the vote first.

*Armenia is an exception.

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Michelle:

I’m no longer a regular participant here, for a variety of reasons, but I would express general agreement with your argument that countries whose historical background is Christian have, on the whole, been quicker to grant rights to women. (And not just regarding the vote, but regarding many other social and political matters.) On the question of suffrage, the list given here –

– supports your point quite well. One notes that the earliest entries are all historically Christian countries, whereas the countries that traditionally were majority-Muslim, majority-Hindu, majority-Buddhist, majority-Shinto, etc. jump on the bandwagon only later. And while some Christian countries also adopted suffrage later, they were often Latin American countries ruled by dictatorships suspicious of any social change. Generally speaking, European countries, British Commonwealth countries, and the US – all offspring of European Christian civilization – led the way.

This is true not only regarding women’s rights but regarding many other things. Modern science was not born in Iran or Saudi Arabia or Morocco or India or China or Japan. Modern liberal democracy, with its emphasis on the rights and value of each individual human being, was not born in those lands, either. The university, too, is a product of European culture. The sacredness of freedom of speech and thought, while first suggested in ancient Athens, was never fully respected there, and became touted as a supreme value only in historically Christian cultures. (There is no Hindu or Muslim “Letter on Toleration” corresponding to Locke’s.)

None of this, of course, proves that Christianity is the true religion. It does, however, disprove the common claim that Christianity is intrinsically opposed to several of the cardinal features of modernity. The question thus arises why it was in a majority-Christian civilization that these “progressive” things arose, and not in Islamic, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, etc. civilizations. It is at least prima facie plausible that something about Christian religion lent itself to these developments. Academic historians of ideas have of course been taking this thesis seriously for decades, but for the most part, the discussion has not filtered down to the popular level. On the popular level, the charge that Christianity opposed all moral and intellectual progress is still widely made, including on origins blog sites.

Of course, one can, in reaction against anti-Christian intellectual hostility, press the connections too far, as some modern Christian apologists do, e.g., Rodney Stark. But the connections are numerous enough, and strong enough, that they can’t be simply waved away because one just doesn’t happen to like Christian religion.

I now retreat back to my scholarly and literary work, but I wanted to support your articulation of the Christian point of view, one which is often treated shabbily by many contributors to this site.

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Among the various biased and self-serving claims in Eddie’s post, two are obviously suspect:

The oldest recognised university is the University of al-Qarawiyyin, in Morocco, which originated as a Mosque and madrasa.

Freedom of speech existed in the pre-Christian Roman Republic, as did freedom of religion. Freedom of thought and religion was also a characteristic of the Mauryan Empire, and is mentioned explicitly in the Ashoka edicts.

and now e.g. Eddie too.

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Rib or no, isn’t this pretty explicit

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Whatever it is now, it was not originally structured like the universities we know, which are based on the pattern of the Italian, French, and English schools ca. 1050-1100 and afterward.

Thought and religion are not the same thing. Being able to be a Hindu or Buddhist or Jain without persecution is one thing; being able to say anything about anything (including criticism of the Mauryan rulers, for example) is another. I would like to see passages from original texts justifying radical intellectual freedom on all matters, including matters of social and political policy. In any case, isolated examples of particular periods of kingdoms or empires don’t constitute an ongoing bequest to the world, which is what arose in the European Christian context (though now intellectual freedom is threatened due to the totalitarian tendency, especially among the Western intelligentsia, toward political correctness). “I may disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it,” was not a sentiment uttered with any steadiness over any extended period of time in any culture but European-based culture. The thoughtful inquirer will wonder why this should have been the case.

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Yep. Notice the often total disconnect between what sophisticated apologists concoct to explain how the Bible and Christianity never ever suggested women were inferior, and what most normal Christians have believed for most of their lives for most of history, because some Christians(vehemently opposed by other Christians) in Christian-majority countries supported women’s right to vote roughly 2000 years after Christianity’s origins.

satanic rights of equality

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What “ongoing bequest to the world”?

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Me too, then we could show them to Christian cults like Jehova’s Witnesses to try to convince them they should’t try to live in their walled and sheltered communities, afraid of the pernicious influence of “radical intellectual freedom on all matters, including social and political”.

I guess that’s why so many fundamentalist Christians homeschool their children, they want to ensure they’re taught a diversity of views?

battlefield of the mind
battlefield of the mind639×606 321 KB

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If there’s any sort of correlation between democracy/freedom of speech, etc., and Christianity, it’s with Protestant Christianity. Catholic Christianity is negatively correlated. The same with equality of the sexes. That this has all been elided so far suggests that some people here don’t consider the Catholic Church to be true Christianity. True?

Further, the teachings of Jesus have been elided into the whole of the bible, I suppose in compliance with the doctrine that the bible is a seamless whole. But it isn’t. Jesus himself may have been relatively egalitarian; though his disciples were all male he at least had a couple of female friends. But then there are the letters of Paul, and there’s most of the Old Testament. And again, there’s a couple thousand years of church doctrine preceding the Reformation.

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Those schools weren’t originally structured like the universities we know either; nor are most modern universities based on the patterns of those schools. The school of Salerno began as part of a monastery, while the University of Paris was an annexe of the school of Notre Dame. Both of these have the same structure as al-Qarawiyyin. The University of Bologna apparently began as a series of student groups that sought protection against unjust nationalist laws, which is definitely not a pattern underlying any modern university.

Unless you can produce some specific characteristics of university structure that apply to 11th century Italian French and English schools but not to al-Qarawiyyin, you have nothing but assertion.

I would like to see an ID creationist honest enough to not delete examples and then respond as if they were not given.

The really thoughtful inquirer will wonder whether it was the case, note that it probably wasn’t - the line originated a biographer, and is not found in original writings - and then reflect that even if it was the case, this view arose out of post-enlightenment deism, in a Christian society where freedom of speech was non-existent, that this was a reaction against that society rather than an expression of it, and that some of the author’s works were seized by the authorities and burnt.

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Eddie wants to simultaneously claim Christianity credit for the open-mindedness expressed by liberal and non-literalist theologians in supporting post-enlightenment views on freedom of expression and thought, yet at the same time will turn around and denigrate these very same people and accuse them of causing some sort of western moral decay, and blame them for the rise of secularism and what he takes to it’s bad societal influences.

On the one hand Christianity is purported to be force for good in the emancipation from intellectual shackles by certain churches having funded and established institutions of education(see how great and open minded Christians alway were?), while on the other hand the non-Christian influence seen in the public school system is offered as a justification for parents to homeschool their children.

Sorry Eddie, not buying your transparent sleight of hand here.

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My kids went to public schools. Fundamentalism is intellectually odious. So is the politically correct dogmatism of the modern secular intelligentsia. What the modern world needs of more of the creative intellectual anarchy which characterized the West at its best in times past. We could start by abolishing all campus speech codes. And by being as concerned to establish diversity of thought among university faculty as to ensure diversity in their sexes, skin colors, etc.

And I did not say that Christians had consistently regarded women as equal to men. Obviously they have not done so. But all you have to do is read the description of the nature of women in some of the classical Hindu texts, and some Muslim texts, to see that there are differences that are not inconsequential. Mary Wollestonecraft did not emerge in Bombay or Baghdad. I have not said that Christianity is the only cause of the difference; historical causality is multi-faceted. Nonetheless, already the seeds of equality are found in certain Biblical statements (e.g., “male and female he created them”; “in Christ there is neither male nor female”). Other cultural factors of course conspired to keep women within a very limited place; but those cultural factors are found in just about every culture and therefore are not caused by Christianity. Ask a woman raised in, e.g., an ultra-traditional Muslim Arab culture, whether she thinks Christianity is the cause of the repression she endures. The fact that Christianity could not immediately overthrow thousands of years of cultural habit is not at all surprising, but it still remains true that it was only in a culture saturated with Christianity that modern liberal ideas arose and became a permanent part of subsequent human life.

To take an example from a different area, I don’t think any serious historian doubts that the agitation to end slavery was led by people (from the Quakers through Wilberforce) deeply inspired by Christian notions. (“In Christ there is neither slave nor free”; and note the relatively – in relation to most of ancient and medieval Islamic and Asian practice – more humane treatment of slaves required by the Old Testament law.)

Whether people here like it or not, the very liberal, democratic, egalitarian culture they praise grew up in Christian soil. It might be, in their eyes, an improvement on Christian culture, but to insist dogmatically that it had no connection with Christian culture would be to ignore decades of rigorous historical investigation regarding the connection of ideas and social change.

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I see that you have now become an expert on the history of Western universities? You have academic training in medieval history, then?

I’m far from ever relying on Wikipedia to establish anything, but since other people here seem to regard it as an oracle, and since I know from my own immersion in the study of medieval education that this Wikipedia statement is roughly correct, I’ll reproduce it:

“This article contains a list of the oldest existing universities in continuous operation in the world. Inclusion in this list is determined by the date at which the educational institute met the traditional definition of a university[Note 1] although it may have existed as a different kind of institute before that time.[1] This definition limits the term “university” to institutions with distinctive structural and legal features that developed in Europe, and which make the university form different from other institutions of higher learning in the pre-modern world.”

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No, unlike you I haven’t claimed any expertise in mediaeval education. I’ll add it to chemistry, biology, classics, philosophy, religion, history of science and logic.

I will again note that not only have you once again deleted specifics I provided (including a correction to your error about Voltaire), responding as if they were not there, you haven’t even answered the single sentence you did quote, since you couldn’t be bothered to list the “distinctive structural and legal features” of a university.

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See my other reply, above. I am far from claiming that Christians and Christian institutions have always behaved well. They have often behaved very badly. And I’ve made no claim that modern life owes everything to Christian notions; I’ve suggested only that it owes some things to Christianity. I’ve spend the last forty years of my life teaching, reading, and working with philosophers, medieval historians, Classicists, historians of ideas, historians of science, historians of political theory, etc. It’s clear to me that the consensus of these scholars (and many of them aren’t Christians) is that Christianity contributed something to modern Western thought.

The idea of “warfare” between Christianity and all of modern thought is an 18th and even more a 19th-century invention, which more exact historical scholarship has long since undermined. On this site many books on the history of science and other subject have already been cited to establish this point. Ted Davis, a specialist in the history of science, has also written at great length about this on BioLogos and in his own academic writing.

There is some truth in this, but it can be exaggerated. Catholic Christians in the Middle Ages founded the universities, and laid the foundations for modern science. (It’s a gross exaggeration to say that modern science began in a “revolution” in the 17th century – careful historians have shown that 17th century science had important points of continuity with medieval science.) At one point many of the Catholic scholars left the University of Paris in response to intellectual restrictions placed upon them. And regarding political theory, many of the ideas which would later emerge in the form of modern political philosophy were first developed by Catholic medieval professors. It’s true, however, that Protestant lands were the places where intellectual and social change was more rapidly realized.

It’s not my contention that the Bible as a whole endorses a modern program of democracy, science, and egalitarianism. The only point I’m making is that the Bible, and more generally Christian culture, seemed to provide an ethos that was less hostile to such developments than most other religions and cultures. There was a partial exception for a period of Medieval Islam, but eventually Islamic culture crapped out and reverted to a closed mode of thought, and Europe passed Islam on every level – philosophical, scientific, technological, etc. – by about 1100 or only slightly later. Islamic culture provided a helpful in-between stage, from which Christian thinkers borrowed, but in the end only Christian culture went ahead to generate the modern world.

I don’t equate Christian culture with modernity, of course. I think that Christianity was a necessary but not sufficient condition for what happened. Nor do I think that Christianity is compatible with all assertions made by the modern world. But the historian’s job is not to vindicate Christianity, or to vindicate the modern world. It’s merely to give credit for ideas and institutions where credit is due, no more and no less.

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I never made an error because I did not attribute any words to Voltaire. I’ve long been aware of the dispute over the provenance of the expression which I paraphrased. The point is that whoever first uttered those words, it is a sentiment we don’t find in pre-modern Islamic, Hindu, Shinto, etc. culture. It is Western European in spirit – whether it comes from the pen of a Frenchman or an American or someone else is irrelevant. The question is why that sentiment – and so many other things – emerges out of a Christian matrix and no other. A good number of world-class historians – and I don’t mean Christian apologists like Rodney Stark or Dinesh D’Souza or Francis Schaeffer – have said that Christian ideas have made some contribution to modern thought. The idea that Christianity and science, or Christianity and egalitarianism, or Christianity and progress, are inherently at war with one another, is no longer taken seriously by real academic historians. Things nowadays are more nuanced than they were in the days of A. D. White. But the spirit of White is still very much alive in today’s culture wars, and is not absent from writings found on this blog site.