Oct 4, 2026 · 22 min · 8 segments
Are there limits on the spiritual gifts and callings women can receive? How prophecy, preaching, and leadership are for all believers, without restriction, focusing on Acts 2 and Joel 2. Dr Selina…
Obviously, we agree to that as well.
I wonder, how do you respond to Christians who point to passages like 1 Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 14? They're often weaponized, aren't they? And they often restrict women's authority in the church.
What would your response be?
I think I would always invite people to think a little bit about what they're actually reading when they're reading the Bible.
Um, the Bible has so many different kinds of texts, so many genres of text, and even today we wouldn't read a letter someone wrote as a science textbook or read poetry as if it's a kind of recipe book.
We kind of understand how we should engage with different texts depending on the genre, and this is partly what we need to do when we're reading the Bible, is understand when we're reading letters, some of which we know were written by Paul, the church's first theologian.
Others are contested, so we don't-- We think it might be him, but it might have been somebody else.
Um, these texts are him writing to churches in his day and time, advising them on best practice based on the realities of the day.
Um, so for in contexts where women might not have access to certain kinds of freedoms of their own or educations of their own, he's writing in that kind of world, but he's also writing in ways that I would think are quite progressive.
So we often think, for example, about telling women not to kind of speak in the church, but to talk to their husbands at home as like a condemnation of women's voices in the church.
But in a world where women were not even allowed to attend places of learning, the fact that women are allowed to be present in the ecclesia, in the gathering of Christians, is quite revolutionary and radical, um, in a world where they wouldn't have been permitted to share space with men for learning in congregations.
It might not stand up to much in our current contemporary world, but in his day, he's breaking down certain doors for women in terms of the church, so that women are experiencing kinds of freedom in the church space they wouldn't experience in wider cultural spaces.
Mm.
So I think we have to give Paul credit where it's due, even though in contemporary readers we might think of it as a little bit backwards.
Completely agree.
And actually, for some of our listeners and people who are watching in on this, I would refer you back to piece eight, Mark's piece, where it talks about was Paul a misogynist or was he misrepresented? Based off what Selina said, he was hugely misre-represented and sadly continues to be so.
I actually agree with you.
He was hugely progressive and supporting of women, and we see that threaded all the way through, if we can just be brave enough to think again, to look again and, and dive a bit deeper.
So totally agreed.
Obviously, we agree to that as well.
I wonder, how do you respond to Christians who point to passages like 1 Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 14? They're often weaponized, aren't they? And they often restrict women's authority in the church.
What would your response be?
I think I would always invite people to think a little bit about what they're actually reading when they're reading the Bible.
Um, the Bible has so many different kinds of texts, so many genres of text, and even today we wouldn't read a letter someone wrote as a science textbook or read poetry as if it's a kind of recipe book.
We kind of understand how we should engage with different texts depending on the genre, and this is partly what we need to do when we're reading the Bible, is understand when we're reading letters, some of which we know were written by Paul, the church's first theologian.
Others are contested, so we don't-- We think it might be him, but it might have been somebody else.
Um, these texts are him writing to churches in his day and time, advising them on best practice based on the realities of the day.
Um, so for in contexts where women might not have access to certain kinds of freedoms of their own or educations of their own, he's writing in that kind of world, but he's also writing in ways that I would think are quite progressive.
So we often think, for example, about telling women not to kind of speak in the church, but to talk to their husbands at home as like a condemnation of women's voices in the church.
But in a world where women were not even allowed to attend places of learning, the fact that women are allowed to be present in the ecclesia, in the gathering of Christians, is quite revolutionary and radical, um, in a world where they wouldn't have been permitted to share space with men for learning in congregations.
It might not stand up to much in our current contemporary world, but in his day, he's breaking down certain doors for women in terms of the church, so that women are experiencing kinds of freedom in the church space they wouldn't experience in wider cultural spaces.
Mm.
So I think we have to give Paul credit where it's due, even though in contemporary readers we might think of it as a little bit backwards.
Completely agree.
And actually, for some of our listeners and people who are watching in on this, I would refer you back to piece eight, Mark's piece, where it talks about was Paul a misogynist or was he misrepresented? Based off what Selina said, he was hugely misre-represented and sadly continues to be so.
I actually agree with you.
He was hugely progressive and supporting of women, and we see that threaded all the way through, if we can just be brave enough to think again, to look again and, and dive a bit deeper.
So totally agreed.
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