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Before the turn of the century, the Standard printed lengthy sermons of a grave theological mode on subjects like "atonement," "the doctrine of authority," or a sound, if conservative, exegesis of a scriptural passage. These sermons were primarily those of B. H. Carroll, minister of the First Baptist Church, Waco, Texas, and founder of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas. The blessed assurance that the truth was theirs and was easily comprehensible to common folk, however, made the "query page" a more palatable way to discuss doctrinal topics. Running alongside the sermons in the 1890s and taking precedence in the twentieth century, these question-and-answer columns were written by a seminary professor or respected minister who would answer with a "proof text" from Scripture the textual, religious, or purely social questions sent in by readers. Questions ranged from the simple and less consequential ("Will you explain what is meant by the horse-leech in Prov. 30:15?") BS, April 24, 1902, p. 3. to the complex ("Some people claim that God is unjust if he allows disasters, etc., to overtake one. How can it be proved, that God is a merciful and loving God and blesses his followers?"), BS , February 24, 1916, p. 19. but the answer rarely took more than a few sentences, never more than two or three paragraphs. The implications were clear: answers, even to religious questions, could be found at a single source, rather simply, and without serious contradiction.

When questions regarding a woman's sphere, both in and out of the church, were raised, the response was generally handled efficiently. "This woman preacher business is against the Bible, against nature, and against common sense," BS , September 20, 1894, p. 4. said an 1894 editorial, bringing authority from spiritual, physical, and intellectual realms to bear on the subject. There was no doubt in the minds of those who expressed public opinion that the Bible was clear on the matter: "the most harmful feature of the new woman question is the fact that it can make no progress at all without setting aside the plain teaching of the Bible. If the passages of Holy Scripture which stand in the way of this woman's movement can be set aside at the dictum of those who favor the movement, why may not the passages which stand in the way of anything else be set aside at the demand of anybody who wishes to do anything contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures? This will probably be the end of the whole matter ...." BS , January 2, 1896, p. 1. But it was not the end of the matter, and rapid social change called even for frontier Baptists to confront the idea of cultural relativity:

God has established relations between men and between the sexes that apply to every age and condition of the race.... The obligation to worship God, to pray and to repent of sin was universal and bound all classes, in all generations. So in the family. The rules governing earthly fatherhood, requiring the parent to support the child and the child to submit to the authority of the father, were as far-reaching as geography and time. The husband and wife in Palestine and Egypt, in Philippi and Ephesus and Corinth and Colassae are addressed as under a divine law. The wives and mothers of the Bible were not under a different code of laws from women of the nineteenth century. The relation and the duties that grow out of the family relation now are the same as they have always been and as they will be to the end of the world. Greece and Alexandria and Babylon were not so different in their civilizations as to induce the Lord God to give different revelations to suit the different conditions of society. The law governing women in China and America, in London and Mexico are the same. BS, March 4, 1897, p. 1. This is obviously a reprint since the author, M. V. Smith, died in 1893.

M. V. Smith, the author of the above passage, was associated with Baylor (Female) College at Belton, Texas, and staunchly defended women having a role in the church. Despite his firm stand on the unchanging will of God, he unwittingly revealed some difficulty (whether his own or his female parishioners') in accepting its message. "God has made one revelation," he restates; "he looked into the future and met the conditions of society in all generations, and we must accept it as reasonable and just." Ibid. Another writer in the 1890s was more forthright in meeting the criticism that biblical sexual arrangements were unfair: "If [the Bible] denies to woman some rights and privileges accorded to men, it is for her own good." BS, February 18, 1897, p. 3.

Equity aside, Baptists were convinced the Bible had once and for all time delineated woman's role. The substance and the boundaries of that definition were gleaned primarily from four portions of the biblical narrative: 1) the story of creation and the fall of Adam and Eve, 2) Jewish law and tradition, 3) the life and teachings of Jesus, and 4) the literature of the early church. These contributed material of considerable variety—character studies, legal formulae, moral and natural explanations—but in them biblicists found a divinely ordained pattern of feminine character and behavior. The following section will examine the key passages and examples from these four parts of the Bible that informed nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian womanhood, analyzing cases of emphasis or avoidance on the part of Texas Baptists and noting conflicting or changing interpretations.

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Source:  OpenStax, Patricia martin thesis. OpenStax CNX. Sep 23, 2013 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11572/1.2
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