I’d like to talk with you ladies for a few minutes this morning about “The Apostle Paul and the Women in His Life.” Now for a great many women, the missionary Apostle is about their most un-favorite saint, their most unpopular preacher. For Paul, more than anyone else, has made it hard for thinking women to be Christians.

He’s the guy who has sprinkled his “inspired writings” with such injunctions as: “Wives, be in subjection to your husbands.” “Women, keep quiet in church.” “Make the women keep their heads covered in church.” “Let women be subdued and modest in their dress. Rather than wearing ornaments of gold and jewels, let women ornament themselves with Christian virtues.”

When women seriously study their Bibles and come upon some of the things St. Paul wrote, they either seriously doubt his inspiration or seriously consider giving up the Christian life. In studying Paul’s writings with women’s groups, I’ve watched mouths tighten into a hard line and eyes blaze with an antagonistic fire as the ladies discussed some of the busy-body statements of Paul.

The old Apostle appears to be a woman-hater, a patriarchal tyrant of the worst sort, and certainly the cause of woman’s subjection to man within the life and organization of the church.

Last month the Board of Woman’s work in our church passed a resolution requesting that women be given more appointments on committees representing our denomination in keeping with their record of service and importance to the life of the church.

Many women feel that the continuing battle that has to be fought for women’s rights within the church is due largely to the narrow, bigoted, misogynist views of the Apostle Paul expressed in his New Testament epistles.

And yet a careful reading of the Pauline correspondence reveals another side to the missionary Apostle. He readily works alongside women in establishing new churches; he pays high compliments to the faith and courage of particular women, and he goes far beyond the customs of his day in according equal treatment to women along with men.

The first church Paul organized in Europe had its origin in a women’s prayer meeting at Philippi. He entrusted his precious Roman letter for safe delivery to a woman fellow worker from Cenechrae named Phoebe. His favorite couple, Priscilla and Aquila, with whom he worked in Corinth and Ephesus and who preceded him to Rome, Paul almost always addressed as “Priscilla and Aquila,” naming the wife first, which was so uncommon a procedure in first century nomenclature as to be a dead give-away that Paul accorded her the pre-eminence over her husband, both in missionary importance and in his personal regard. Eunice and Lois, the mother and grandmother of his dearest loved young fellow worker, Timothy, come in for favorable mention in Paul’s correspondence and to their tender training, Paul attributes the finest qualities Timothy possessed.

But the almost unbelievable passage we come upon in Paul’s writing is that striking statement in Galatians where he says: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:27-28)

Students of ethics have called this one statement of Paul the most revolutionary principle ever enunciated in social teachings. It has freed slaves, emancipated women, and battered down racial barriers.

To the influence of this principle may be attributed the remarkable position of equality and power of women in all Christian cultures. Jewish women in Paul’s day were segregated into a women’s court in the temple, “the court of the women.” If they went to synagogue, they had to sit behind a screen. The Romans expected domesticity of their females. The highest praise of a noble wife was “she abode in her home and spun the wool.”

But for St. Paul and his teachings on the Christian life, the 20th century American woman might well be the chattel slave of man as she is in Africa today, or as she was in India or China before Christian missionaries arrived there.

Now how account for these two contradictory strands concerning the ladies in Paul’s writings? One, patriarchal, harsh, stern, oppressive — the other, warm, tender, appreciative, emancipating? Was St. Paul a split personality? Does he blow hot, now cold, depending on how the ladies have treated him?

Dr. Holmes Rolston detects what he calls a conservative element and a revolutionary element in all Paul’s ethical teaching on all subjects. This conservative and revolutionary element is not confined to the natural order of sex alone. And Dr. Rolston says that the conservative element is rooted in Paul’s practicality, his recognition that the church must remain in the world and do the Lord’s work among people, while the revolutionary element in his teaching rises from his eschatology, or his faith in ultimate reality.

“The two principles emerge clearly in his treatment of the relation of man and woman to each other. We know from Jesus that the whole principle of sex belongs to the life on earth, and that this order of creation is not perpetuated in the resurrection life of God. ‘And Jesus said unto them, the sons of this world marry and are given in marriage; but they that are counted worthy to attain to that world, in the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage; for neither can they die anymore; for they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.’ The thought of Paul is in harmony with the position of Jesus. He boldly declares that in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female.

“Paul knew that the church is called on to build on earth a society whose corporate life witnesses to the life of that heaven where the distinction of sex has dropped out. No one can measure the effect of Paul’s principle on the emancipation of woman. It has presented woman as standing on an equality with man before God. It has demanded that there should be realized on earth a society in which every woman received her rights as an immortal soul with an eternal destiny.

“But Paul also recognizes that the whole matter of sex in an order of creation. He knows that even as it was said that man was created in the image of God, it was also said, male and female created He them. A Christian ethic must not forget that in the world of eternity, the distinction of sex drops out, but a Christian social message that ignored the distinction of sex would break itself on the rock of reality.”

The heavenly ideal of complete equality of the sexes, Paul insists must ever beckon to the Christian and shape the relationships of men and women, but the biological fact of the differences in the natural order must ever be remembered and bowed to in the structures of earthly society.

With the ladies in his life, as with the men, the Great Apostle was always direct and uncompromising. His ultimate goal for everyone was more Christ-likeness. Wherever he saw anything: slackened loyalty, looseness of morals, petty selfishness, unchastened affections, the Apostle did not pussy-foot and indulge in flattery, and slip up on the blind side of people to cajole them into goodness — he went straight to the point. If rebuke was in order, he rebuked. If praise, he poured it out.

If the ladies have, on occasion, caught the back of the hand of the apostolic reproof and correction, they have also been gallantly lifted and supported and cherished by the same hand.

I wonder what should be the next practical steps for Christian ladies in our day whose station has been so remarkably changed for the better by the Apostle’s dictum that in Christ there is neither male nor female, as they ponder the other great equality before God which he enunciates in the same sentence — the natural order of race?