DR. CUMMINGS: Did St. Paul hate women?

There are five "Pauline texts" (four of them seem to be forgeries — a common and accepted practice in those days) that flat-out demean the role and position of women in the Christian church. Christians call all five Holy Scripture, the inspired word of God. How can they do that?

Are Christians to believe (and practice) that "women can't teach; they should learn in silence with full submission" (1 Tim. 2:12), that "they must submit to their husbands in everything" (Eph. 5:22), "They must wear veils in church as a symbol of the male authority over them" (1 Cor. 11:2), "They must not speak up in church meetings but ask their husbands at home if they have any questions" (1 Cor. 14:33) and that "all young widows are prone to be idle and become just busy-bodies and gossips" (1 Tim. 5:13)?

Is this our Christian image of women? Well, that's what it says; that's what the Bible teaches. Can we just ignore these texts and still maintain the integrity of the Bible? There are so many feminine-loving and inspiring verses we can read, why read these perverted, misogynistic texts at all? Or maybe we can explain them away; you know, put a spin on them to make them less odious and less demeaning.

Frances Taylor Gench, professor at the Union Presbyterian Seminary, just published her book, titled: "Encountering God in Tyrannical Texts." She says all five of these texts are certainly tyrannical and canonical embarrassments, and in fact, as she states, "the Bible is full of texts of terror for women, slaves, Jews, gays, etc." But her spin is this: Some Biblical texts are "prescriptive" and others are "descriptive." That is, some tell it like it is; some tell it like the author wants it to be.

A descriptive text is one that states a description about the way we are currently living our Christian lives. A prescriptive text is the author's ideal; it's the way he'd like it to be; it's not going his way now and he'd like to change it. In other words, women were not being "silent and submissive and subordinate" and the man who wrote these texts wanted women to be that way.

So a fight began back in the beginning of the second century (when these verses were written) and it continues to this day. Gench feels that this wrestling and questioning is the only way to read Scripture. I think I like her spin.

The alternative, of course, is to take these five texts literally (there's that word again). If you'd like to see how this works out in Macon just go the Muslim Mosque; it's called the Islamic Center on the corner of Vineville and Lamar avenues. If you're a man, you can enter in the front door at 2 p.m. on Friday afternoon and be welcomed warmly. If you're a woman wearing a veil, you go around to the back door.

Inside the mosque is a large room divided by a tall screen. The men are sitting on the rug listening to the Imam preach and entering into the prayers and discussions in a very lively manner; the women are sitting on the other side of the screen in complete silence. If they have any questions or suggestions (and I know they do), they wait and ask their husbands at home. It seems Muhammad and our Pauline authors had a lot in common.

Our Muslim neighbors are extremely kind and gracious and I'm sure they love their wives as much as we do, but they follow the literal interpretation of their Bible, the Quran. Many Christian men wish we would do the same thing with our Bible.

But maybe Paul himself was different from those who wrote in his name. Gench ends her book with a discussion on Romans 16:1, where Paul (and it really is Paul) identifies 28 people (10 of whom are women) who have been "co-workers in Christ Jesus." He calls them "outstanding women among the apostles" and women who have "risked their lives for me." This doesn't sound like a bunch of silent girls, who slid around to the back of the church with veils over their heads.

But what are we to believe? How should we read this Bible that is so full of contradictions? Gench, who teaches Scripture to seminary students, puts it this way: "I do not believe the Bible was divinely dictated or faxed from heaven, but rather that it is as fully and thoroughly human as was Jesus himself — these are the words of men, (not women) given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times in which they were written."

And I might add that men are — as any woman will tell you — universally prone to contradictions.

Dr. Bill Cummings is the CEO of Cummings Consolidated Corporation and Cummings Management Consultants. His website is www.billcummings.org.

This story was originally published November 21, 2015 at 2:33 PM with the headline "DR. CUMMINGS: Did St. Paul hate women? ."