Gender and society

Overview

Recall questions on changing views of gender roles, the household code in Ephesians, Mulieris Dignitatem and complementarity, Christian responses to changing family life and family forms, motherhood and parenthood, secular gender equality, and whether the Church should be countercultural on gender.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is meant by changing views of gender roles, and why has that posed a challenge to Christian thought?

   Model answer

   It refers to the shift, over roughly the last century, from an assumption that men and women have fixed and different social functions - man as provider and head of household, woman as homemaker and mother - towards an expectation of equal access to work, education, property, public office and shared domestic responsibility, together with increasing questioning of the categories themselves. It challenges Christian thought because parts of the tradition, including some biblical texts and long-standing Church practice, assumed the older arrangement and treated it as given by God.

2. 2

   Explain what the household code in the letter to the Ephesians says about husbands and wives.

   Model answer

   It addresses wives and husbands in turn within a wider set of instructions about family relationships. Wives are told to submit to their husbands, and the husband is described as head of the wife on the analogy of Christ as head of the Church; husbands are then told to love their wives with the self-giving love Christ showed the Church, to the point of laying down his life, and to care for them as for their own bodies. The section is introduced by a call to mutual submission out of reverence for Christ.

3. 3

   How do Christians disagree about the interpretation of the Ephesians household code?

   Model answer

   Complementarians read it as teaching an order of relationship given in creation, in which men and women have equal worth but different roles, headship meaning responsibility rather than domination. Egalitarians argue that the governing instruction is the mutual submission with which the passage opens, that the demand on the husband is far more radical than the demand on the wife by the standards of the time, and that the household form assumed is a first-century one that Christians are not obliged to reproduce. Both claim to be reading the text rather than the culture.

4. 4

   What does the apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem teach about the dignity of women?

   Model answer

   Written by John Paul II in 1988, it affirms that women and men are equally made in God's image and possess equal personal dignity, and it treats the subordination of women as a consequence of sin rather than part of God's design. It develops the idea of a distinctive feminine genius, a particular capacity for attention to the person, and presents motherhood and consecrated virginity as two forms of women's vocation. It maintains that men and women are complementary rather than interchangeable, and it does not open ordination to women.

5. 5

   Why do feminist critics find teaching on complementarity unsatisfactory, and how do its defenders reply?

   Model answer

   Critics argue that separate but equal has a poor record, that praising a distinctively feminine capacity for nurture conveniently assigns women the unpaid work, and that a doctrine of equal dignity which still excludes women from decision-making is contradicted by its own practice. Defenders reply that equality does not require sameness, that the tradition honours motherhood as a genuine calling rather than a consolation prize, and that ordination is a question about sacramental sign rather than status or competence.

6. 6

   How have Christians adapted to changing attitudes to family life?

   Model answer

   Very unevenly. Most churches now accept contraception within marriage, women in paid employment and shared parenting, and many have revised their practice on divorce and remarriage; the Church of England has ordained women as priests since 1994 and as bishops since 2015, while Catholic and Orthodox churches reserve ordination to men. Denominations differ sharply on same-sex relationships and on the blessing of such couples. Alongside adaptation there has been deliberate resistance, with some churches presenting traditional family structure as a countercultural witness.

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