0.8 2.4 the life and teaching of jesus  (Page 5/5)

The incident of Jesus and the Samaritan woman speaking at the well illustrated that "Christianity gave the world a new definition of woman. The age-long conceptions of her station are thrown on the scrap-heaps of antiquity when Christ comes along. The rabbis taught: 'Do not prolong conversation with a woman; let no one converse with a woman in the street, not even with his own wife; let a man burn the words of the law, rather than teach them to women.' Woman was a slave until emancipated by Jesus." BS, January 7, 1915, p. 8. The "first Ladies Aid Society" was the group of women followers mentioned in Luke 8:1-3; "since the day when Mary and Martha received Him a welcome guest in their Bethany home and did obeisance to Him as Lord and Master, woman has had a large place in the service and Kingdom of our Redeemer." BS, July 2, 1914, p. 2. "Last at the cross and first at the open sepulchre" became the phrase that captured the alliance between women and Jesus. Appropriately, a missionary summed up this spiritual conjunction: "It is the Christ of the Bible, it is his spirit entering humanity that has lifted woman. . . . BS, February 11, 1897, p.14.

The elevation of women was celebrated for the value it placed on her mind and her companionship, as well as her support and service. She was "the helpmate and the friend of man, not his toy or his slave." Ibid. Jesus "discovered woman as a companion and friend. He loved Mary and Martha as well as Lazarus. He did not regard woman as a toy and a flirt, whose every thought turned to courtship and marriage, but looked upon her as the soul of sympathy and teachableness, and sought her as His disciple and friend." BS, June 8, 1916, p. 8 One author even claimed that "Christ's teaching lifted from woman's shoulders the load of unnecessary household care," referring to Jesus' rebuke of Martha's serving; a raised moral consciousness would put housework in its proper (lower) perspective. BS, December 28, 1911 p. 9 Clearly, the teaching and example of Jesus encouraged and justified women's intellectual advancement as the twentieth century progressed.

Jesus' statements regarding marriage were generally employed to enforce a legalistic strictness against divorce, with adultery the only possible "scriptural cause" for such action. Because the statement was phrased with reference to a "man putting away his wife," questions arose whether a woman had the same right if her husband had committed adultery. "Some say the law does not apply to both man and wife the same," admitted someone writing in the Baptist Standard in 1903, but "if God has given two laws I fail to find it." BS, May 21, 1903, p. 3 In 1895, another writer said that in his "opinion" (a usage indicating controversy) a legally divorced woman would have the same privilege to remarry that a man would. BS, September 12, 1895, p. 1. The use of Matthew 19 and Mark 10 was limited to rights to divorce and remarry, not to equality of personhood within marriage. A unique application of the man's leaving home and "cleaving unto his wife" was the advice of a problem-solver in 1902 that "more happiness results from the husband's going to live with the wife's people" than the reverse. BS, June 12, 1902, p. 7.

The most radical aspect of the relationship of Jesus to woman lay in the doctrine of atonement, as understood in the Reformed tradition of Christianity. Baptists' belief in redemption, based on the sacrifice of Jesus and appropriated by faith, included the possibility of anyone's being saved regardless of sex, race, or other human condition. In that spiritual state of grace, distinctions that ordinarily designated one as inferior or subordinate were transcended.

"Jesus is my Saviour./ He has washed me whiter than snow in his blood." BS, June 28, 1894, p. 7. This nineteenth-century woman's testimony affirmed with clarity and simplicity that she believed access to that salvation was hers. Very likely she thought the worth with which she had been endowed would finally be realized in another realm, after death, but that there were some intimations of glory in this life. In the early twentieth century, a minister waxed poetic, if not specific, about the earthly transformation possible for women under the Christian system: "Jesus died for woman as well as for man, and in the light of the cross she is invested with a new dignity and worth. She ceases to be a means and becomes an end. She ceases to be a toy and becomes a treasure. She ceases to be a slave and becomes a soul." BS, June 8, 1916, p. 8. Reasoning went even further: if woman was extended the benefits of atonement, and if some of those gifts were to be manifest upon her embracing the faith, then surely they would be operative in Jesus' spiritual body on earth, the church. This issue--translating the implications of the Christian gospel in a particular social setting--was central to the writers who composed the latter part of the New Testament. To

those books, primarily letters to young churches, Texas Baptists most often turned to learn how the "totally new relation established by the Lord between women and religion” BS, December 28, 1911, p. 9. should be expressed.