For example, in both versions of the Ten Commandments in the “Old Testament”, a man’s wife is listed as the first of his possessions, which other men should not covet, along with his slave, his ox and his donkey. At least, the wife and the slave are listed separately!
In the “New Testament”, in several passages in letters attributed to St Paul, women believers are told to be “in full submission” to the men. On the basis of one of these passages, in “the first letter to Timothy”, some parts of the church refuse to ordain women. Others, like my own Anglican diocese of Sydney, ordain women as deacons, but do not allow them to preach to mixed congregations.
The problem with taking these passages literally is that we are reading books written in another time, in another culture, in another language. Learned opinions differ on which passages in the Bible are historical/descriptive and which are normative, for all time. The Timothy passage may not refer to church life at all, but to relations between a man and his wife, depending on how we translate the Greek.
The first centuries of the church saw continuing arguments about the relations between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. How could all three be gods, and yet God be One? Eventually the church fathers agreed on the formula of the Trinity, in which the three persons were said to be equal in “substance, essence and nature”, but distinct in role.
In the 1970s, some theologians begin to link the relations between the persons of the Trinity with the relations between men and women – some argued that, just as the Son was subordinate to the Father, so women were subordinate to men; others argued the other way: just as women were subordinate to men, the Son was subordinate to the Father. The centuries-old doctrine of the Trinity was being revisited, in a new confusion between person and role.
In 1948, Alfred Kinsey coined the term “missionary position” for a particular way of making love, saying that missionaries taught their flock that this was a symbol of the subordinate position of women. There is no evidence that missionaries actually did this, but it made a good story. Recently the Sydney Morning Herald has published two articles claiming that Christian teachings encourage or at least condone domestic violence. Again, this claim is not supported by any evidence, certainly not from the Bible.
Here is a theological sequence which is Scriptural – God created men and women as equals, both in the image of God (Genesis 1.27); when paradise was lost, patriarchy was one of the evils which came into the world (Genesis 3.16); when Christ returns, paradise will be restored (Acts 3:21 et al); in the meantime, Christian believers, as citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20 et al), must relate to each other as equals, neither sex being seen as subordinate to the other. The world would be a better place if everyone did.
