Paul and Cone: Misogynist or Misunderstood?

Recently, I had the opportunity to read Sandra Polaski’s A Feminist Introduction to Paul for a class in New Testament studies. One of my fundamental takeaways from Polaski’s work was a better understanding of how, specifically, I might conduct my own academic study of biblical texts. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, where little emphasis was placed on the importance of biblical study outside the confines of the church or Sunday school setting, and the schedule for incorporating a few Scripture verses into the worship service each week – an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, an Epistle and a brief Gospel excerpt – rotated such that our congregation might go several years before encountering the same passage twice. Most any time I read or sought out Scripture independently of the church, it was primarily for personal application as a source of comfort or encouragement. My understanding of the Bible’s function, spiritually speaking, was as salve for a burn – not as the source of the fire.

Polaski’s examination of Paul’s masculinity and its impact on the Pauline texts was profoundly informative for me. I studied creative writing and literary theory as an undergraduate, and often we were instructed to disregard the idea – or at least, the function – of authorial intent. But in the context of Scripture, when a human author is understood by many as a conduit for the Divine, I believe the context and intentions of that human author ought to have tremendous bearing on the lens through which we view their text. Though I’ve never possessed an extreme opinion toward Paul, I’ve harbored an awareness of what I perceived as his misogynistic tendencies, and Polaski’s analysis of Paul’s maleness softened my perspective toward him and helped me to better understand Paul as a product of his social environment. Specifically, her examination of the structures of Greek language – “often serv(ing) to make women even more invisible than do English language structures” (16) – and her overview of the cultural belief of the “one-sex model” (18) granted me insight into some of the sociological factors working against an ideology of inclusion. Juxtaposing Polaski’s assessment that Paul’s frequent use of “metaphors of battle and soldierly conduct” (13) functions as an extension of his masculinity with biblical scholar Warren Carter’s observation that within the New Testament, “the military language is used without comment, suggesting it is deeply ingrained in these writers who live in the midst of Roman power” (26), Paul is construed as a product both of his maleness and of his Roman roots. In Polaski’s words, “Paul was in many ways a typical man of his day” (25).

A great deal of my theological studies thus far have centered on black and womanist liberation theologies, and with the notion of Paul as a typical man in mind, I was surprised to find that a comparison emerged in my reading between Paul’s treatment of women in his texts and the treatment of women in the early texts of the black theology movement. James Cone, for example, failed to incorporate, or even acknowledge, the black female perspective in several of his earliest published works, and these texts function today as some of the most foundational works of the black theology movement. Cone, however, exists in an age when the scholarly writings of women are preserved, not discarded, and when his own female students – such as founding womanist Jacquelyn Grant – could help bring the role of women to his academic attention without fear of retribution. On the contrary, Cone gave rise to Grant’s voice, atoning for his initial exclusion of women and attempting to make amends in later writings by lending significant weight to the womanist perspective.

Polaski’s interpretation of the Pauline texts suggests that “Paul does not specifically exclude women…rather, they are invisible to him” (17), and Grant uses the same rhetoric against Cone (among others) in her essay titled “Black Theology and the Black Woman.” Grant asks the question, “Where are Black women in Black Theology?” and responds, “Black women have been invisible in theology because theological scholarship has not been a part of the woman’s sphere” [emphasis added] (421). I have turned a critical eye toward Paul for his contributions to the marginalization of women while extolling James Cone for his contributions to a progressive liberationist theology, and Polaski’s depiction of Paul as a product of his environment underscored for me the hypocrisy of my stance, encouraging me to hold my thinking a bit more lightly. My intention is not to dismiss either author with a jovial absolution of “boys will be boys,” but to take into greater account the world behind each man’s texts. Just as I have viewed – and will almost certainly continue to view – James Cone not as a misogynist, but as someone bound between an old and a new way of thinking attempting to effect significant change, Polaski’s text is enabling me to evaluate Paul more fairly against the backdrop of his early Roman context while allowing the Pauline texts to breathe and evolve within my own context. For what if Prisca or another female colleague had asked him, “Where are women in your theology?” As Polaski so deftly surmises, if Paul had been directly questioned about the role of women within his texts – and if record of such a conversation survived him – the texts suggest that Paul, like Cone, would have acknowledged his intended inclusion, and perhaps his canon would even include evidence of attempts to make amends. But, as Polaski notes, “he was not asked, and it did not occur to him” (25).