UTC BD IV

Socio-Political Activity of Women in the 19th and 20th Century

2007-08-21T04:38:00.001-07:00

Introduction:
The need for women’ history is now recognized to a certain extent. A focus on women leads to the articulation of gender as a category of historical analysis, and to a conceptual perspective that makes possible a genuine rewriting of history. The paucity literature on women, however, remains grave, especially in the context of modern Indian history. One has to extend one’s sources. In this context, contemporary literature becomes extremely important. Literature is socially constructed and is too political.
During the nineteenth century women actively participated in the philanthropic and missionary activity which is the result of the evangelical movement and the new female role that was implicit in this Protestant revival. The Evangelical movement was a reform movement within the Anglican Church and in American churches and dominated Anglo-American societies during the nineteenth century. It had a profound and complex influence on the life and world-view of women.[1]
When we analysis the history carefully, one striking and glaring similarity is that different cultures, civilizations and even societies of different faith and religions down the annals of time, women were exploited and subjugated. We read in the history the deplorable plight of Indian women in the 19th and 20th century, wherein women were denied even basic human rights. Religious texts and sacred texts were interpreted in such a way that the women fold remain subjugated and chained by ancient beliefs and traditions. The women were not treated at par with men, and there were many social evils like child marriage, female infanticide, and the inhuman practice of Sati. (The burning alive of a widow, on the funeral pyre of her husband.) Though elementary schools were open yet girls and low caste children were not given admission in these schools. But there was a small section of girls who had received education. Widow Remarriage was prohibited, devadasi system, dowry system thus women were denied liberty. As the saying goes ‘Old habits die hard’, some of the social evils that haunted the women in the 19th century or the periods before continued to be practiced till today even by the educated people, a good example will be the inhuman custom of Dowry.
It is very sad to note that many Indologists have seized upon these social evils as distinctive evidence of India’s perennial backwardness. Moreover, during the colonial period these social inequalities and social divisions based on caste has become a convenient tool in the hands of the colonizers. On the one hand, they could tactfully play of one community against another. On the other hand, they could create an impression that India was a land rife with uniquely abhorrent social practices that only an enlightened foreigner could attempt to reform. India's social ills were discussed with a contemptuous cynicism and often with a willful intent to instill a sense of deep shame and inferiority.
The nineteenth-century-Protestant missionaries’ understanding of Christian mission as transplanting of the Western Christianity in Asia and Africa reinforced the subjugation of native women. It reduced the Christian mission to the changing of religious identities; it also divested the women of their personhood by treating them as either “stumbling blocks” or stepping-stones in missionaries’ expansionist enterprise.[2] Most female reformers of the nineteenth century believed that the guarantor of social progress, the agent of civilization, was woman herself. Western missionaries were committed to effecting a substantial change in the social norms affecting women. Among the majority of missionaries in India, for example, this commitment was reflected in a rhetoric that stressed women’s low status in Indian society and urged conversion to Christianity as a means of raising women’s status.[3]
Missionary reports written by Katherine mc Laurin and Mattie E. Currie, Canadian Baptist missionaries in Andhra Pradesh in the first half of the 19th century illustrate that they used women as an ‘agency’ to achieve their agenda of ‘winning’ the native community. They represented Telugu women both as obstacles to and as potential agents in Christianization of the Telugu communities. Moreover, they opined that these “brute” objects could become “Kings (God’s) daughters through the efforts of Canadian missionary women. Mc Laurin believed that “pagan” Telugus were waiting to be redeemed by her compatriots and their “dark” cultures needed “light” from Canadian Baptists. She regarded her compatriots as “masters” and Telugu Christians as “servants”.[4]
However, it should be admitted that Laurin has taken an extreme step in preserving the stories of single women missionaries and some Bible women in a chapter, which need to be appreciated. Other Canadian Baptist missionaries did not give so much space for women in their reports. While Mc Laurin representation viewed Telugu women as mostly hindrances to Christian expansion, Mattie E. Currie, a missionary teacher at Eva Rose York Bible Training School for Women, Tuni, depicted Telugu women as heroic new women. The story of Rajabullamma, a Telugu Bible woman, by Mattie Currie illustrates this attitude. A Canadian Baptist missionary journal, Among the Telugus, published this account of a runaway woman in 1936. Currie explained the enthusiasm that Telugu women showed in embracing Christianity and the need for women’s missionary adventures and sought support of the readers.[5]
Evangelization for Christ was the only aim of the missionary societies and for that they wanted to educate the women also. They believed that the church of Christ will never appear in its great beauty, unless the foundation of Christian education be laid in the minds of its members by the hands of a Christian mother. Moreover the missionaries realized that education was one of the means to raise the women folk from their low status in the society. Therefore, along with evangelistic work, the missionaries concentrated on educational work also. Women missionaries had a far-reaching impact and were among the most effective agents of cultural change. New ideas of female higher education, employment and social liberation and equality touched the lives of many women, and contributed much to their social and cultural transformation. The missionaries showed particular interest in the development of female education, irrespective of caste or creed. Free boarding, food, and clothing provided at the beginning was a blessing to the slaves and poor girls.
While women were often in subordinate positions in terms of missionary hierarchy, the mission movement contributed significantly to the entrance of women into the public domain. It gave women the opportunity to engage in charitable activities outside the home, the chance to learn organizational skills, and the opportunity to enter the labour market as missionaries. Most missions have acted deliberately to change gender structures among the local people they encountered in the mission field, but they have also, intentionally and unintentionally, caused changes in such structures both in their own organizations and in their home countries.[6]

Pandita Ramabai
Pandita Ramabai, a poet, scholar, and champion of the rights of women, has been acclaimed as a "mother of modern India." A widely traveled lady, she visited most parts of India, and even went to England (1883) and the USA (1886-88). She wrote a book titled The High Caste Hindu Woman, which was used as an appeal to raise funds in the US and elsewhere, for a home for Brahmin widows in India.
She married at the age of twenty-two, but her husband died of cholera after only sixteen months, leaving her alone with an infant daughter, Manorama. Her travels in India and now her present circumstances sensitized her to the bleak plight of widows and orphans.
The practice among higher castes of betrothing young girls to much older men (her own mother had been nine, her father over forty, at the time of their marriage) had contributed to the vast number of widows, women without status or protection. Ramabai set out to do something about this social problem, establishing centers for widows and orphans in Poona and later Bombay, where the women were given basic education and training in marketable skills. Soon Ramabai had become the leading advocate for the rights and welfare of women in India. She established the Mukti Mission in 1889 as a refuge for young widows who were abused by their families. Meera Kosambi and Meena Alexander, in their respective studies of Pandita Ramabai Saraswathi, the feminist and social reformer of late 19th century and early 20th century say that the path was harder, as women of her days had not entered the public domain. Educated, outspoken and unorthodox, Ramabai lived her life on her own terms, while working for the social emancipation of women through institutional initiatives such as shelters for widows as well as through her writings and active public life. Kosambi draws attention to an aspect of Ramabai's perspective that almost anticipated the human development approach towards social and economic progress, namely, her belief that a society which oppresses its women and discriminates against them can never progress.

[1] Billie Melman, Women’s Orient: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918 London 1995, 166.
[2] James Taneti, Empowering Mission or Enslaving Enterprise? Women Missionaries’ attitudes to Telugu Women in Bangalore Theological Forum vol. XXXIX, No. 1 June 2007. 161.
[3] Flemming ‘A New Humanity: American Missionaries’ Ideals for Women in North India, 1870-1930’ (1992) p. 194.
[4] Malcolm L. Orchard & Katherine S. Mc Laurin, The Enterprise: The Jubilee Story of the Canadian Baptist Mission in India, 1874-1924 (Toronto: The Canadian Baptist Foreign Mission Board, n.d).
[5] Mattie Currie, Among the Telugus: The Canadian Baptist Foreign Mission board, a report published by CBFMB, Toronto, 1936. 93-94.
[6] Line Nyhagen Predelli and Jon Miller ‘Piety and Patriarchy: ‘Contested Gender Regimes in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Missions’ in Taylor Huber and N C Lutkehaus (eds.) 1999.

Nineteenth to Twentieth Century’s Missionary Movement

2007-08-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

Introduction

In the early-to-mid 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church carried out its mission works in India. Protestant Christianity was firmly planted on India through the Tranquebar mission with the arrival of German Lutherans sent from the King of Denmark in the early 18th century.

From the mid-nineteenth century the Christian Protestant mission developed a great momentum. The movement engaged women on a large scale in the USA and in Europe and enjoyed an unparalleled success among married as well as unmarried women. Women played a central role both at home, as fund-raisers and as active agents in non-Christian countries. Women were a majority in the missionary movements and missionary work attracted women. It also offered middle class women a wider range of permissible activities. While spreading the Christian message was initially the main aim, social work, especially health and education, soon became accepted missionary activities, legitimized as the best way of reaching the local population. As the result, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century mission thinking emphasized the need for the social work along with the evangelization by providing health facilities and education to the recipients of the Gospel. In such a shift in the mission activity, the contribution of women to the mission in India is remarkable.

The Contributions of the Missionaries in the Evolution of Women’s Education in India
The Christian missionaries played a pioneering role in promoting female education in India. Infact, we can say that they were the initiators of female education in India, “because in the early 19th century the officials of the East India Company were reluctant to take up issue for they feared that it would create unnecessary hostility amongst the people and would amount to interference in their social and religious activity.”[1] It was the Christian missionaries who promoted the female education in India despite the strong opposition because of their evangelical and humanitarian zeal. However, the education work of the Christian missionaries is often criticized badly as the cause and the end of proselytization. There were agencies through which the Christian missionaries worked for promoting female education. They are: 1) Girls Day Schools 2) Orphanages and Boarding establishments 3) Domestic teaching of women arranged in middle and higher class families popularly termed as “Zenana teaching”[2]

The Role of Education in Women’s life

Education became the most widespread and effective form of women missionary activity and was seen as the primary avenue for social change. The Girls’ schools were started in the mission fields and much importance was given to the education of women. However, the education of women was seen as an opportunity for evangelization. Besides teaching local girls and women hygiene and childcare among other things, education thus played a central role in the proselytism. The education of women would besides provide Christian wives for the native Christian workers also subvert the very foundations of ‘heathen’ society and would catalyze the profound social changes needed to accompany broad conversion to Christianity. In general, Protestant missionaries were eager to found boarding schools and especially boarding schools for girls, in hopes that more sustained and pervasive influence of the teachers would result in more effective evangelism and the formation of ‘Christian Character’.

Schools became havens for the girl children of all communities, though they meant certain restrictions. It was here they started to discover themselves away from their families. While for some of the girls, whose childhood was in a way no childhood at all because they were not allowed to play freely, speak loudly, even hop, skip and jump, school must have meant a real liberative experience. For some others, in their childhood, they had to take care of their siblings or to contribute to the family earnings. In this way, the education of women in the schools must have opened them to totally new avenues of life.

Contribution of Women in the Teaching ministry

v Mary Lyon, a schoolteacher from Massachusetts, America, was the pioneer who founded the world wide model of higher education for women.[3] She is considered as the important personality in the history of mission.

v Jarena Lee: Lee born in the year1783 at New Jersey. Lee left home at the age of seven to become a maid in a household. Though lee is recognized as the first female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she was not ordained. Lee used to conduct prayer meetings and preach in the churches. In this way, lee’s teaching ministry through preaching in the church is remarkable.

v Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922): Ramabai was the daughter of orthodox Hindu parents and the native of India. When she was eight, she learned to read the sacred puranic literature from her parents. At that time, there were no schools for girls or women, and training in the sacred literature was forbidden. After her family suffered during an extreme famine, Ramabai and her brother journeyed to Calcatta in 1878. in 1881, at age twenty-two she married, but sooner he died leaving her with an infant. In 1883 she left for England to study, and there was baptized. After returning to India, she established the Mukti mission in 1889, to provide education and opportunities for women and girls of India.

Ramabai in her autobiography mentions about the education ministry that she did through her mukti mission.
“…there were only two day-pupils in my school, when it was started…, No one was urged to become a Christian, nor was any one compelled to study the Bible. But the Book was placed in the library along with other religious boos… After the first ten years of our existence as a school, our constitution was changed slightly. Since, then every pupil admitted in the school has been receiving religious instruction…Many hundred of the girls and young women who have come to my Home ever since its doors were opened for them have found Christ as I have. They are capable of thinking themselves. They have had their eyes opened by reading the Word of God, and many of them have been truly converted and a saved, to the praise and the glory of God…”[4]
v Amy Carmichael (1867-1951): Carmichael was a Protestant Christian missionary in India, who opened an orphanage and founded a mission in Dohnavur. She served in India for fifty-five years without absence. Amy Carmichael was born in the small village of Millisle in Northern Ireland to David and Catherine Carmichael. In many ways she was an unlikely candidate for missionary work. She suffered neuralgia, a disease of the nerves that made her whole body weak and achy and often put her in bed for weeks on end. It was at the Keswick Convention of 1887 that she heard Hudson Taylor speak about missionary life. Soon afterward, she became convinced of her calling to missionary work.
Initially Amy traveled to Japan for fifteen months, but she later found her lifelong vocation in India. She was commissioned by the Church of England Zenana Mission. Much of her work was with young ladies, some of whom were saved from forced prostitution. The organization she founded was known as the Dohnavur Fellowship. Dohnavur is situated in Tamil Nadu, thirty miles from the southern tip of India. The fellowship would become a sanctuary for over one thousand children. In an effort to respect Indian culture, members of the organization wore Indian dress and the children were given Indian names. She herself dressed in Indian clothes, dyed her skin with coffee, and often traveled long distances on India's hot, dusty roads to save just one child from suffering. Even today, the educational institution stated by Amy Carmichael stand as the monument for her contribution in serving the children of the missionaries.
Conclusion
The mission movements gave much importance to the education from 19th century onwards. The education of women and their engagement in teaching has made a huge change in the social condition of the people. The entire life of the people has changed dramatically, with the education that they learnt from the mission societies. In this way, the contribution of women to the shaping of the church and society is remarkable.

[1] Gouri Srivastava, Women’s Higher Education in the 19th Century (New Delhi: Ashok Kumar Mittal Concept Publishing Company, 2000), 38.
[2] Ibid., 40.
[3] http://www.mtholyoke.edu/marylyon/
[4] Amy Oden (ed), In Her Words: Women’s Writings in the History of Christian Thought, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 326,327.

Theological and cultural assumptions of “Early Church Fathers”

2007-08-20T21:09:00.000-07:00

Introduction:
Early Christianity accepted the Hebraic conviction that the world had been created by God and hence was essentially good, as Genesis 1 proclaimed. In Genesis 3 we come across the first sin in the world which is the fall. Who is the cause for the fall? Is it Adam or Eve or the serpent? This is one of the pertinent questions that the church and every individual Christians raise right from then and even now. Pondering over the same, this paper is an attempt to highlight from an historical perspective the ways in which the Early Church Fathers[1] praised and blamed, honored and disparaged the female sex. I would like to highlight the Father’s use of Scripture in their discussions of women.

Theological and cultural assumptions:

The main topics that were discussed by the Fathers are Creation, Fall and Marriage. I would like to present the opinion of the fathers accordingly.

The Church Fathers understood Genesis 1 & 2 as a connected unit written by a single author. They assert that both woman and man was formed by God and hence shared in the goodness of the created order. Augustine, bishop of Hippo argued in his treatise On the Good of Marriage that God created humans as social beings and that the first human “society” was that of man and woman.[2] Every person is a part of the human race and human nature is something social. There is a power of friendship in this human nature. This is the reason that God created all humans from one person so that they might hold fast in their society not only by likeness of descent but by the bond of relationship. Thus the first tie of natural human society is husband and wife. The union of their society resulted in children not of the marriage of man and woman, but of sexual intercourse. Hence Augustine says, there could have been a kind of friendly, genuine relationship between sexes one of them ruling the other even without such sexual intercourse.

Despite this positive view of creation, Augustine reflects on the kind of “help” Eve was supposed to provide for Adam. He puts forward a question. “If the woman was not created to be man’s helper specifically for the production of children, why was she created as a “helper”? He responds that Eve was created as a helper because she could provide the companionship for the man.[3]

The purpose of Woman’s creation in view of her responsibility for the original sin was also considered by Ambrose, bishop of Milan in his treatise On Paradise. He focuses on the Genesis 2:15 and argues that man was in the very land in which he was created. God by his power thus took the man and breathed into him in order to develop and increase the man’s power. In other words, God stationed him in Paradise so that we may know that he was “taken,” breathed on by the divine power. Man was made outside the Paradise but the woman was made inside the paradise. In fact, even though man was created outside the Paradise (i.e. in an inferior place), he is found to be superior, while woman, though created in a better place(i.e. inside Paradise) is found inferior because the woman was the first one to be deceived (I Tim. 2:14). So she who was created to be a helper to man requires male protection and the head of woman is man (I Cor. 11:3).

John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople had two minds about woman’s status at the time of creation. In some of his writings he stretched that there had been an original “equality of honor” between Adam and Eve and argued that Eve’s role as “helper” was much superior that of the animals that God had also made to assist man. Before the sin, the woman was like the man. Indeed, when God molded the woman, he used the words in creating her that he had used when he created man. He does not call her simply a “helper,” but “a helper like him (fit for him),” once more showing the equality of honor.[4] Even though he argues for equality of honor, he also believed that woman did not possess the “image of God” (Gen. 1:26) as man did, and he linked her subordinate status to this deficiency. Eve’s status in other words was not simply a result of the fall, but was an inferior one even at the moment of her creation. He also argues against those who claim that both the man and woman have the “image of God.” He says that the “image” is not meant in regard to essence, but in regard to authority.[5] He quotes Paul’s words in order to substantiate his arguments. “For the man ought not to be veiled, for he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. Therefore she ought to have a veil on her head” (I Cor. 11:7-10). The “image” has rather to do with authority, and this only the man has and the woman has it no longer. For he is subjected to no one, while she is subjected to him; as God said, “Your inclination shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16). Therefore the man is in the “image of God” since he had no one above him just as God has no superior but rules over everything. The woman, however, is “the glory of man,” since she is subjected to him. Whatever Eve’s original role and purpose, the Church Fathers agreed that she was responsible for the sin of Genesis 3.

Eve’s particular responsibility for the first sin is also pressed home by Augustine in his Literal Commentary on Genesis. Augustine makes much of the Biblical wording that Eve, not Adam, was the one who was led astray. He argues that if Adam was already spiritual (atleast in mind), how could he have believed what the serpent said? For the serpent said that God prohibited them from eating the fruit of that tree because he knew that if they did so, they would become gods by their knowing good and evil (Gen. 3:5). And just because it is impossible to believe it, woman was given to man, woman who was of small intelligence. He asks, is this why the apostle Paul does not attribute the image of God to her? Paul speaks, “The man ought not to cover his head, for he is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man” (I Cor. 11:7). He further explains that, however, maybe the woman had not yet received this grace that comes with the knowledge of God, but would have acquired it only gradually, under the man’s rule and management. He asserts that the apostle Paul’s words were not meaningless when he said, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not led astray, but the woman was, and was made guilty of transgression.”

Interestingly, Irenaeus contrasts Eve’s disobedience with the obedience of Mary but he does not engage in vituperative declamations against women on the basis of Eve’s sin. Irenaeus argues that Eve was disobedient since she did not obey when she was still a virgin. Indeed, she had a husband, Adam, but was still a virgin. Eve having become disobedient was made the cause of death both for herself and for the entire human race. Thus also Mary had a husband selected for her and nonetheless was a virgin, yet by her obedience she was made the cause of salvation both for herself and for the entire human race.

The view that blame for the first sin extended from Eve to all other women soon became a commonplace in early Christian Literature. Tertulian, an important Christian writer was particularly passionate in his denunciations. He accuses women very unkindly in his treatise On the Dress of Women. Once he address a female audience in the third century saying, “you are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that tree; you are the first foresaker of the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the devil was not brave enough to approach; you silently crushed the image of God, the man Adam; because of your punishment, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die.”[6]

Chrysostom made clear that whatever the inferior position of woman at creation, she was subjected to the man chiefly because of her role in the first sin. He, however, believed that woman’s subjection was all for the good and was not burdensome to women who accepted it s God’s will.

Augustine’s views on the original sin were of prime importance for the development of western theology. He agreed with other Church Fathers that women’s subjection was one result of that sin, but he analyzed in greater detail two other results of that sin, the entrance of death and of lust to the world. Augustine believed that lust, so irrational in its expression, would not have existed in Paradise had the sin not been committed, yet he affirmed that there would have been sexual intercourse and procreation even if the sin had not occurred. Despite Augustine’s despair over the power of lust, his hypothesis that sexual intercourse would have been part of God’s world even if humans had remained sinless opened the way for a stronger appreciation of marriage than did the views of some other Church Fathers. Clement argues against the Gnostics who say that Adam and Eve became like beasts when they began to practice sexual intercourse. He retorts that the first couple performed the sex act “by nature.”

Augustine firmly believed that God had willed women to be subject to their husbands in marriage. Even if they wished to live an ascetic life, one more in keeping with the monastic values of late ancient Christianity, they could not do so unless their husbands agree.

It was not just marriage in general that early Christian writers criticized; special problems associated with marriage might arise for Christian women who lived in a world still dominated by pagan values and customs. When a woman converted to Christianity but her husband did not, thorny difficulties could develop in their relationships.

Reflective Conclusion:
In such ways which we discussed above, the Church Fathers alternately praise the goodness of God’s created order, condemn the woman responsible for the original sin, and consign her female descendants to a life of submission to men. According to them, marriage was a reminder to women of the Paradise they had lost.
One of the problems in the understanding of the Early Church Fathers is that they read the Scriptures selectively to find legitimation for their arguments. It would be desirable that we balance our argument. I strongly believe that God who is the creator of this entire universe is a God of just and there is no partiality in God. We are all God’s children no matter male or female. Thus, each individual in this world is of the image of God which really brings out the love of God for the entire humanity. When we consider the other as not the image of God, there we can find lack of oneness which may lead to social disharmony.

Bibliography:

Clark, Elizabeth A. Women In The Early Church. Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1983.
[1] The term “Fathers” is usually reserved for Christian writers by orthodoxy of doctrine, holiness of life, ecclesiastical approval and antiquity. “Antiquity” is generally understood to include writers down to Gregory the Great in the West, and John Damascene in the East. Elizabeth A. Clark, Women In The Early Church (Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1983), 11.
[2] Ibid., 27.
[3] Ibid., 28.
[4] Ibid., 34.
[5] Ibid., 35.
[6] Ibid., 39.

Women and Interfaith Dialogue

2007-08-20T03:35:00.000-07:00

Full and equal participation of women in church and society has been one of the long standing commitments of WCC and it applies to WCC’s own structure also. In world today we experience pluralism in religions, cultures, customs, language, and world views. Inter-religious dialogue, as currently understood practices and promoted in many parts of the world, particularly among Christians, is strongly marked by the absence of women. In deeper sense dialogue implies intimacy of personal relationship, enjoyment of each other, and sharing of knowledge, experience, problems, suffering and resources.[1] The founders of various religions Jesus, Buddha and Prophet worked to bring about change in the position of women but in due course of history the advances made have been reversed and thus pressing women back to subordinate position, fixation of roles, scripture denied to them. Here in this paper I would like to discuss the role of inter-religious dialogue which is concerned about women, their empowerment.

Issues of Women Interest to be Taken Up in Dialogue
In 1994 a group of women were interviewed from around the world concerning the guidelines by the central committee of the WCC, and in 1995 the group was drawn together for a dialogue. The guidelines for dialogue were identified as marginalization, identity, boundaries, power and strength.[2] Marginalization emerged as the strongest theme; it was believed to be the common experience of the majority of women.[3] The women in the group felt that the way of living led them to marginalization and the experience of it formed the backdrop to their experience of the whole life and helped them to formulate other common themes which were identified as follows. The question of Identity also provided a strand in the women’s self understanding. The nature of identity was of particular interest to women in their self perception and the perception of the world. The question before them was weather identify can be defined individually or only in community; how much of personality helps to define identity and how much it is bound by the culture. The third guideline was with the issue concerning women and boundaries.[4] This question was based in context of Christian service; weather women have boundaries to their compassion, to their willingness and to serve others. Strength and power provided the final backdrop of discussion. This point aimed to explore the nature of power both structural and innate which exercised in the context of women and service. The focus was to be on the fact that women exercised much in innate power and show great strength and creativity, but are rarely in the position of structural power and influence.

Patriarchal Nature of Inter Religious Dialogue
Feminist theologians have argued that the dialogue program has suffered from insufficient involvement of women and the absence of women concerns in the issues taken up for dialogue. Diana Eck[5] pointed out how glaring was the absence of women in interfaith events and efforts.[6] She pointed out, that although there had been a consciousness of the issue and the efforts to address it; the dialogue has suffered from the insufficient involvement of women and the absence of women’s concerns in the issues taken up by the dialogue. Women have actively participated in dialogue but the overall picture remains poor. The sexism that pervades among religions is evident in dialogue also. The participation of women is only symbolic than real as men could set both agenda and frame the work of discussion.
Ursula King has pointed out that it is evident the inter-religious dialogue remains a part of patriarchy.[7] She says “to envision the development of post-patriarchal dialogue, it will be necessary to do away with the hierarchies of gender which is persuasive in religion. Radical institution and doctrinal transformation are needed to respond to the needs of women for equal participation and dignity and demand to condemn all prejudice and violence against women, especially done in the name of religion.”[8] The real problem lie in the heart of religious tradition themselves, the sexism that pervades in religious traditions is also affected in their dialogue with one another. Thus the dialogue enterprise so far accommodates this reality and in compromised. Diana Eck further dealing with the same issue, calls for six fold revolution, revolution of language history, interpretation, experience, leadership and ritual. According to them feminism is a missing dimension in dialogue
Need For Change
Dialogue has played an important role in transforming people, there views. It has granted people different perspectives to ponder upon. If the Dialogue has to respond to the challenges that feminism posits it has to undergo a change. The dialogue has to undergo change because of four major reasons.
1) The importance of dialogue at grass root levels: the approach to dialogue and the actual practice of dialogue among women are more life oriented, they evolve out of experience. It brings concrete changes in perception and practice at basic level of the lives of people. As Raymond Pannikar pointed out “an inter-religious dialogue today is unavoidable; it is a religious imperative and a historical duty for which, we must suitably prepare.”[9] A dialogue that is life oriented is needed. Women approach to dialogue is oriented to the practice of this reality.
2) The importance of feeding new thinking in Dialogue: The participants of inter-religious dialogue should become aware of the need to explore ways in which abstract religious beliefs both effect and are effected by social situations in which religions are practices. There are men and women in each religious tradition that challenge some of the traditional language, imagery, teaching and structures of patriarchy. Paul Knitter pints out in an essay in his collection the Myth of Christian Uniqueness “from the perspective of those concerned with liberation, the past decade has indicated what an important and powerful role religion can play, for better or worse, in bringing about socio-political transformation.”[10] The inter-religious dialogue should give preference to them in bringing about new concepts that address the problem of feminism.
3) The importance of dialogue for new thinking that is emerging: it is evident that all religious traditions are in the process of revisiting there traditional teachings in response to the present challenges. Religion and ideologies are not only explanation of the meaning of life, but also ways to live according to that explanation.[11] Therefore the involvement of women dialogue in important not only for dialogue but for feminist thought also.
4) The importance of sign and signals: dialogue through its work should make evident that it is a part of women’s activity or else it will remain a part of patriarchy.

Implication Of inter religious dialogue for women[12]
The implication of inter-religious dialogue for women are threefold, firstly, women will have greater awareness and appreciation of diversity among themselves. Through which an atmosphere of trust is created clarifying diverse perspectives. Secondly, there will arise a need for women to reflect on and write about there conversation. As the meaning of the concepts such as liberation, Oppression and feminism cannot be assumed; therefore inter-religious dialogue must forsake the preconceived notions and place them specifically in context of social change and prevent them from irrelevant theorizing. Thirdly women will be more prepared to act for social change. Dialogue is commitment; only through dialogue women will come to learn each others needs, existence and the extent of oppression, and the most effective way to end them. Through dialogue and literature, women will able to communicate their growing consciousness of themselves and of others and their experience of similarities and differences with each other. Communication of all this will empower women in inter-religious dialogue to act more dynamically.

Conclusion
It is really important to know who people are, in order to really understand what they believe and why the believe it. The common struggle for greater equality between men and women brings women closer to each other. What is to be envisioned is that women engaging in dialogue seek to discover, through conversation, the reality of oppression. Inter religious dialogue helps women in coming over boundaries. Dialogue takes place I terms of collective experience, dialogue can help women in finding new ways of restoring the balance of power in relation between men and women.
In women’s dialogue, therefore, we need to question the concrete situation in which women has to suffer, and we need to understand relativity of our own. What needs to be analyzed in the inter connectedness of social issues and women issues and demonstrate new and creative ways and interpretation and approaches to women’s rights. We have to view feminism in broader political perspective, which would be visible everywhere.
Dialogue is commitment. The more one engages in it, the greater is the perspective and the goal. Only through dialogue mutuality among women can be realized. Only through dialogue we can learn on others need, the existence and the extant of a culture’s oppression practices, the women’s reaction to those practice, and the most effective ways to end them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
ü Knitter, Paul. “Towards a Liberation Theology of Religion,” In The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Towards a Pluralistic Theology Of Religions Edited John Hick and Paul F. Knitter. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990.
ü O’Neill, Maura. Women Speaking Women Listening: Women In Inter Religious Dialogue. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990.
ü Swiddler, Leonard. “Interreligious and Interideological Dialogue: the Matrix for All Systematic reflections Today,” in Towards a Universal Theology of Religion, Edited by Leonard Swidler. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987.
ü Ariarajah, S. Wesley. Not Without My Neighbor: Issues In interfaith Dialogue. Switzerland: WCC Publication, 1999.
ü Panikkar, R. The Intra Religious Dialogue. USA: Paulist Press, 1978.
ü Selvanayagam, Israel. A dialogue on Dialogue. Madras: Christian literature Society, 1995.
ü Blyth Myra & Wendy S. Robins. No Boundaries to Compassion? An Exploration of Women, Gender and Diakononia. (Great Britain: Kent Christian Press, 1998.

[1] Israel Selvanayagam, A dialogue on Dialogue (Madras: Christian literature Society, 1995), 2.
[2] Myra Blyth & Wendy S. Robins, No Boundaries to Compassion? An Exploration Of Women, Gender And Diakononia (Great Britain: Kent Christian Press, 1998), 12-15.
[3] Myra Blyth, No Boundaries…, 12.
[4] Myra Blyth, No Boundaries…, 13.
[5] She is from Harvard University and has been the moderator of the Sub- unit on dialogue. She made these comments in the meeting of the working Group in Casablanca, Morocco, in June 1989.
[6] S. Wesley Ariarajah. Not Without My Neighbor: Issues In interfaith Dialogue (Switzerland: WCC Publication, 1999), 59-60.
[7] S. Wesley, Not Without…, 60-61.
[8] S. Wesley, Not Without…, 61.
[9] R. Panikkar, The Intra Religious Dialogue (USA: Paulist Press, 1978), 78.
[10] Paul Knitter, “Towards a Liberation Theology of Religion,” in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Towards a Pluralistic Theology Of Religions eds. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), 179.
[11] Leonard Swiddler, “Interreligious and Interideological Dialogue: the Matrix for All Systematic reflections Today,” in Towards a Universal Theology Of Religion, ed. Leonard Swidler (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987), 16.
[12] Maura O’Neill, Women Speaking Women Listening: Women In Inter Religious Dialogue (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), 102-104.

“Women Who Influenced the Protestant Reformation in Europe”

2007-08-20T03:15:00.000-07:00

What an honoured place is given to godly women in the New Testament! And throughout the history of the Christian church there has been a succession of women who have been shining examples in their life and witness. There are a number of women who devoted their lives to the cause of religious reformation, and courageous women who renounced religious vows, opened their homes to those fleeing religious persecution, and faced estrangement from their families in the cause of the Protestant Reformation. There are also politically powerful women who employed their power to influence, promote and strengthen the reformation movement in various ways. The Reformation period was therefore marked by a number of gracious women whom God raised up.

Besides, the women constituted a half of the population, and therefore, had they boycotted the Reformation movement, it may be sure that would have been the end. Some aspects of women's historical roles in the church will never be known, because for most Christian history only a small percentage of women were educated sufficiently to write and leave a literary legacy for us to discover. Male church historians have seldom told us very much about women's life and thoughts, and what they tell us is often biased against women. Fortunately recent research has shown that there is a rich literature written by women of the church for us to explore, so many women's voices from the past are being heard again.

Of many prominent women figures who influenced and contributed to the Protestant Reformation in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, we shall deal briefly with the most prominent ones, those from Germany, Italy, France and England.
(Main Source:- Ronald H. Bainton, Women of the Reformation)
A. Germany:
1. Katharina von Bora (January 29, 1499 – December 20, 1552)

Katharina von Bora was Luther's companion and equal partner; she was the picture of a self-assured, self-confident, liberated woman at the side of her husband. But this most important woman of the Reformation period of the 16th century is relatively unknown, for she lived in the shadow of her powerful husband.

Katharina (Catherine) von Bora was born in January of 1499, and at the age of ten she was placed in the convent at Nimschen near Grimma when her father remarried. While at the convent, she learned reading, writing, and some Latin. After several years of religious life, Katharina became interested in the growing reform movement and grew dissatisfied with her life at the convent. She conspired with several other nuns to flee from it, however, this was difficult, as leaving or assisting others in leaving religious life was an offense punishable by death. The women secretly contacted Luther, begging for his assistance. The nuns successfully escaped by hiding in Koppe's covered wagon among the fish barrels, and fled to Wittenberg. Within two years, Luther was able to arrange homes, marriages, or employment for all of the escaped nuns- except for Katharina. Katharina had a number of suitors, including Wittenberg University alumnus Jerome (Hieronymus) Baumgärtner (1498–1565) of Nuremberg and a pastor, Dr. Kaspar Glatz of Orlamünde, but none of the proposed matches resulted in marriage. Finally, she told Luther’s friend and fellow reformer, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, that she would be willing to marry only Dr. Luther or him.
Luther eventually became engaged to Katharina on June 13, 1525. On June 27 of the same year, they were married by Bugenhagen. Katharina was twenty-six years old, Luther forty-two. The couple took up residence in "The Black Cloister", the former Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg, given as a wedding gift by the reform-minded John Frederick, Elector of Saxony.
Katie was a wonderful manager of the household, despite limited funds and a large number of guests, she managed the finances of the family and helped free Luther's mind for his work of writing, teaching, and ministering. She immediately took on the task of administering and managing the vast holdings of the monastery, she took care of the vegetable garden, orchard, fishpond, and barnyard animals, even to the butchering of them herself; breeding and selling cattle, and running a brewery in order to provide for their family and the steady stream of students who boarded with them and visitors seeking audiences with Luther. Often there were as many as 30 students, guests, or boarders staying in the monastery, all of whom came under Katie's care. Luther was often ill, and Katie was able to minister to him in his illnesses because of her great medical skill. In times of widespread illness, Katharina operated a hospital on site, ministering to the sick alongside other nurses. Luther called her the "morning star of Wittenberg" for her habit of rising at 4 a.m. to take care of her various responsibilities.
In addition to her busy life tending to the lands and grounds of the monastery, Katharina bore six children. The Luthers also raised four orphan children, including Katharina's nephew, Fabian. After Luther died in 1546, Katie lived six years. She fled from the Smalkaldian War in 1546 to Dessau and then to Magdeburg. She died on December 20, 1552 in Torgau where she had fled to get away from the plague in Wittenberg.
2. Catherine Zell (1497 - 1562)
Catherine Zell of Strasbourg was a zealous promoter of the Reformation and supporter of equality between women and men. When her husband, Matthew Zell, one of the reforming pastors of Strasbourg was excommunicated for marrying her, she published a letter to the bishop in defense of clerical marriage, declaring: “You remind me that the apostle Paul told women to be silent in church. I would remind you of the word of this same apostle that in Christ there is no longer male nor female (Gal. 3:28) and of the prophecy of Joel (2:28-9): ‘I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy.’ I do not pretend to be John the Baptist rebuking the Pharisees. I do not claim to be Nathan, upbraiding David. I aspire only to be Balaam's ass, castigating his master.” In other words, she desired to be a prophetic voice.
Catherine published other tracts. One was for the consolation of wives whose husbands were in exile because of their faith, citing Isaiah 49:15, where God is spoken of as a mother who can not forget her nursing child. Another consolation tract was for a magistrate of the city who was quarantined with "leprosy." This tract was a meditation on the Lord's prayer, which included these thoughts: "Our Father, who art in heaven. He is called not Lord or judge, but Father. And since through his Son we are born again we may call him grandfather, too. He may be likened also to a mother who has known the pangs of birth and the joy of giving suck." There was also a collection of hymns edited by Catherine.
Catherine was not primarily a writer, however. She visited the prisoners and the sick and arranged care for floods of Protestant refugees. When she saw serious deficiencies in the way one of the city hospitals was being run, she sent the City Council a scathing set of criticisms with recommendations for reform. The Council complained, but it adopted her recommendations. She accompanied two of the ministers visiting troops assembled at the time of the Peasants' War; they pleaded for peaceful solutions. Finally, just before her death, she conducted a funeral service for an Anabaptist woman at 6 a.m. because the husband could not accept the conditions laid down by the pastors for conducting a funeral. Since she held no public office at all, she was often criticized for her abrasiveness and her "imperiousness" in involving herself in such activities. She seems to have felt the call of God to do so.
3. Elizabeth of Brandenburg (1485 – 1545)
Elizabeth, daughter of King John of Denmark, was born in 1485, just two years after the birth of Martin Luther. While Elizabeth was convinced of the truth of the Reformation teachings through her brother, she was married to Elector Joachim I of Brandenburg, a staunch opponent of the Reformation. She was forced to practice her faith in secret. While her husband was away on Easter 1527, she received communion from a preacher sent out from Wittenberg- both bread and wine. When the news reached her husband, he demanded that she return to Catholicism and gave her until next Easter to change her mind. He became impatient in the meantime, however, and when she refused to celebrate All Saints’ Day with him, his bishops and abbots exhorted him to imprison his wife for the remainder of her life.
Terrified by her husband’s intentions, Elizabeth made plans to flee to her uncle, Elector John of Saxony. One evening when her husband was absent, she slipped out a side door and made her way across the river to where her brother was waiting to escort her to Torgau. Angry with John for agreeing to protect Elizabeth, Joachim demanded that John surrender his wife. John would only agree on the condition that Elizabeth be allowed to profess her Protestant beliefs openly and without retribution. This was unacceptable to Joachim, who later involved even the emperor in his unsuccessful demand for the return of his wife.
During the time of her exile Elizabeth lived in Torgau, Weimar and at the home of Martin and Katie Luther in Wittenberg. Later, Elector John Frederick provided her with living accommodations at Castle Lichtenberg. Joachim I died in 1535 without ever reconciling with his wife, and their son Joachim II invited his mother to return from exile. Suspicious of his engagement to the Catholic Polish Princess Hedwig, Elizabeth would return only if her son gave her his word that she could openly practice Protestantism. Again her demand was deemed unacceptable, and finally only after Joachim II converted to the Protestant faith in 1545 did Elizabeth finally return home.
A testament to her enduring faith, Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth of Brunswick-Calenberg went on to become a major reforming influence in that region.
4. Elizabeth of Brunswick-Calenberg (1510 – 1558)
Elizabeth was born in 1510 to the Catholic Joachim I of Brandenberg and his wife, Elizabeth of Brandenberg, who was a follower of Luther. She shared her mother’s faith and grew up to become a strong reforming influence in her territories.
Elizabeth was married at 15 to Duke Erich I of Brunswick-Calenberg, who was loyal to the Emperor and the Catholic Church. This meant that Elizabth, like her mother before her, did not share the religious conviction of her husband. Unlike her father Elizabeth’s husband Erich I did not exile his wife because of their strong religious difference, but sought to keep family life harmonious. He stated “My wife does not interfere with and molest us in our faith, and therefore we will leave her undisturbed and unmolested in her.”
However, even this passionate opponent of the Reformation could not keep the new beliefs out of his land. In order to supplement the dwindling financial resources of his dukedom, Erich I was forced in 1532 to sale their religious freedom to three cities. When he died in 1540, his and Elizabeth’s son Erich II was not yet of age, and Elizabeth therefore became regent.
Now completely unhindered in her faith practices, Elizabeth waste no time in championing Martin Luther and his colleagues, and by 1542 Brunswick-Calenberg belonged entirely to the Reformation. She converted Catholic into Protestant convents, and established in Hannover and endowment fund that still today funds churches, social agencies and the Sciences. She also directed her creative energies towards the cause of composing lyrics for several Protestant hymns and writing a book of consolation for widows. She later remarried to Count Poppo XVIII of Henneberg-Schleusingen.
Elizabeth of Brunswick-Calenberg was a woman of strong convictions and character. Her faith, learned at her mother’s feet, sustained and inspired her, and through her the message of the Reformation reached many.
B. Italy:

1. Olympia Morata, (1526-1555)

Olympia Morata was born in Ferrara in 1526 to Fulvio Pellegrino Morato and a certain Lucrezia. In her early years, she was educated by her father, a well-known humanist and university professor. She learned her subjects so well that at the age of twelve or thirteen she was invited to the court of Ferrara as a companion of study to Anna d'Este, the daughter of Duke Ercole II and Duchess Renée of France. There she continued her classical studies with Anna under the guidance of her father and two German brothers, John and Chilian Sinapi. She was considered a "fanciulla prodigio," and won the praise of many intellectuals for her fluency in Latin and Greek. It is highly probable that her sympathies for the Reformation began at the court of Ferrara since the Duchess herself supported the efforts of the reformers. Morata’s formal studies came to an end in 1548 when she was called home to care for her dying father. After her father’s death, she made a request to return to the court, but it was denied. Many of her reformist friends had already left the court and Anna now resided in France with her new husband Francis de Guise.
In 1549 or 1550, Morata married Andreas Grunthler, a German protestant who came to Ferrara to study medicine. Shortly after their marriage, the couple moved to Germany to evade the Roman Inquisition. They took with them Morata's eight-year-old brother Emilio, never to return to Italy. They were at Grunthler's home in Schweinfurt, in central Germany (Morata's mother and sisters remained in Italy). There Morata continued her writing: the second of two Latin dialogues; Greek poems; and letters, written in Latin to fellow scholars (male and female) and in Italian to non-scholarly women. Two of her letters and one poem were published in 1553.
In a war between mercenaries, the city of Schweinfurt was besieged for 13 months and then destroyed, and the Grunthler household left the city as refugees, having lost everything, including most of Morata's written work. Then they went eventually to Heidelberg; Grunthler accepted a position as professor of medicine at the university in Heidelberg and Morata tutored students in Greek and Latin. However, the fever that Morata caught in Schweinfurt never subsided, and a few months later she died. She was not quite 29 years old. Less than two months later, Grunthler and Emilio also died, most likely of the plague that had taken hold of the residents of Heidelberg.
While much of Morata's writing was lost in the siege on Scheiwnfurt, Grunthler managed to salvage some and sent it to Celio Secondo Curione, a professor at the University of Basel and close friend of Morata's father, who published three editions of her work (1558, 1562, 1570). Another edition followed in 1580. Morata's extant writings consist of fifty-two letters (most written in Latin), two dialogues (in Latin), a declamation on Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes and another In Praise of Mutius Scaevola (the latter in both Greek and Latin), eleven poems (eight in Greek and three in Latin), as well as translations of seven Psalms (in Greek) and the first two stories of Boccaccio's Decameron (in Latin). From these remaining works of Morata, we can hear the voice of a woman trying to balance her humanist ideals with her religious beliefs, and trying both to live in an uncertain world and to help her friends to do the same. 2. Renee, Duchess of Ferrara (October 25, 1510 - June 12, 1574)

Also known as Renee of France, was born on October 25, 1510 in the Chateau de Blois, France and was the second daughter of Louis XII, King of France and Anne, Duchess of Brittany. Two years after Renee's birth Anne died and therefore Renee became an orphan.

Having been early orphaned, she was brought up by the devout Madame de Soubise. She was married in April 1528 to Ercole II, Duke of Ferrara, eldest son of Alfonso I d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia. On October 31, 1534, her father-in-law died and Ercole succeeded to the throne. And while the Curia was urging the duke to put away the French that were suspected of heresy, there came to Ferrara no less a heretic than John Calvin, whose journey to Italy must have fallen in March and April 1536. Calvin passed several weeks at the court of Renée, though the persecution had already begun, and about the same time a chorister by the name of Jehannet, also one Cornillan, of the attendants of the duchess, together with a cleric of Tournay, Bouchefort, were taken prisoners and tried.

In 1559 Ercole died, and from that day Renee passed entirely out of the sphere of the Renaissance into that of the Reformation.

Renée was not only in correspondence with a very large number of Protestants abroad, with intellectual sympathizers like Vergerio, Camillo Renato, Giulio di Milano, and Francis Dryander, but also that on two or three occasions, about 1550 or later, she partook of the Eucharist in the Evangelical manner together with her daughters and fellow believers. Meanwhile, notwithstanding its external splendor, her life had grown sad. The last of her French guests, the daughter and son-in-law of Madame de Soubise of Pons, had been obliged, in 1543, by the constraint imposed by the duke, to leave the court. The drift of the Counter-Reformation, which had been operative in Rome since 1542, led to the introduction of a special court of the Inquisition at Ferrara, in 1545, through which, in 1550 and 1551, death sentences were decreed against Evangelical sympathizers, and executed by the secular arm.
Finally Duke Ercole lodged accusation against Renée before King Henry II of France, and through the Inquisitor Oriz, whom the king charged with this errand, Renée was arrested as a heretic, and declared forfeit of all possessions unless she recanted. She thereupon yielded, made confession on September 23, 1554, and once again received communion at mass. “How seldom is there an example of steadfastness among aristocrats,” wrote Calvin to Farel on February 2, 1555.
Renée's generosity was admirable. The most prominent facts in the book of her daily expenses are sums given in some form of charity. She appears, indeed, to have been unable to refuse any cry for assistance, and all her life gave with equal pleasure either to Roman Catholics or to Protestants. She had been writing secret letters to the Pope, supplicating him to have the prisoners delivered out of the power of Ercole into the authority of France.
Renee's longing to return home was satisfied when her husband died on October 3, 1559. In France she found her eldest daughter's husband, Francis, Duke of Guise, at the head of the Roman Catholic party. His power, indeed, was broken by the death of Francis II, in December, 1560, so that Renée became enabled not only to provide Evangelical worship at her estate, Morntargis, engaging a capable preacher by application to Calvin, but also generally to minister as benefactress of the surrounding Evangelicals. In fact, she made her castle a refuge for them, eventhough her son-in-law once again lighted the torch of war.
Her conduct won Calvin's praise (May 10, 1563); and she is one of the frequently recurring figures in his correspondence of that period; he repeatedly shows recognition of her intervention on behalf of the Evangelical cause; and one of his last writings in the French tongue, despatched from his deathbed (April 4, 1564), is addressed to her. While Renée continued unmolested in the second religious war (1567), in the third (1568–70) her castle was no longer respected as an asylum for her fellow believers. On the other hand, she succeeded in rescuing a number of them from the massacre of St. Bartholomew's night, when she happened to be in Paris. After having many contributions for the cause of the Reformation Renee passed her life on June 12, 1574.
C. France:

1. Marguerite de Navarre (April 11, 1492 - December 21, 1549) (Catholic)
One of the most elusive queens in French history, Marguerite de Navarre, was the queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre. She was the daughter of Charles of Orleans; her younger brother became King Francis I in 1515, after a batch of unexpected deaths among closer heirs to the throne. Her mother Louise tutored Marguerite's mind from her earliest childhood by excellent teaching and she even learnt Latin. Marguerite therefore received an education in Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, and later, Greek and Hebrew. At 17, she was politically married to a duke, a feudal lord culturally not her match. When her brother ascended to the throne, she became a major cultural influence: she had Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini work at the court of Francis I. This brother was taken prisoner during a war on Italian soil with Charles V of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor.
After the death of her first husband in 1525, Marguerite married Henry-II of Navarre. Marguerite bore Henry a daughter, Jeanne d'Albret (mother of the future Henry-IV of France). Marguerite was an intellectual who corresponded with many European humanists during her lifetime. Like many French humanists, Marguerite was a devout Catholic interested in religious reform who supported translating the Scriptures into the vernacular and believed in a doctrine known as French Evangelism. Unlike the Protestants, French Evangelicals were interested in reforming the church from within. The French Evangelical agenda focused on specific clerical abuses, such as pluralism and absenteeism, and reforming convents and monasteries.
Marguerite became the most influential woman in France, with the exception of her mother, when her brother acceded to the crown as Francis I in 1515.
Marguerite wrote many poems and plays and the classic collection of stories, the Heptameron. Anne Boleyn, before becoming the second wife of King Henry VIII of England, was lady-in-waiting to Queen Marguerite, who gave her the original manuscript of Miroir de l'âme pécheresse. Later Anne's daughter, Elizabeth—to become Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)- at age twelve, translated this poem for publication in English.
As a generous patron of the arts, Marguerite befriended and protected many artists and writers, among them François Rabelais (1483-1553), Clément Marot (1496-1544), and Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85); also, Marguerite was mediator between Roman Catholics and Protestants (including John Calvin). Although Margaret espoused reform within the Catholic Church, she was not a Calvinist. She did, however, do her best to protect the Reformers and dissuaded Francis I from intolerant measures as long as she could. During the time of the Reformation movements, Marguerite was preoccupied with religious and ethical issues: like Erasmus, her philosophy was that of "Christian humanism," and she protected writers and thinkers accused or suspected of Protestant leanings, including Rabelais.
2. Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre (January 7, 1528 – June 9, 1572)
“Jeanne d'Albret (1528-1572), though little remembered today, is one of the great heroes of the French Reformation. Luther had posted his ninety-five theses in Germany years before, Calvin was preaching in Switzerland, and Knox in Scotland, and Jeanne d'Albret was furthering the cause of the Huguenots in France. Strength and weakness, power and helplessness -- these extremes characterized the life of so remarkable a woman. She did not possess physical strength. In fact, always frail, she died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four. She did have some political strength as the highest ranking Protestant in France, but beyond that, she possessed a strength of will and a strength of character that held her up when she seemed the most helpless. Above all, however, was her reliance on God and the strength of His power to preserve her which bolstered her beyond measure when her situation seemed the most hopeless.” -Marilyn B. Manzer, an instructor of Latin and English at Newport Christian Schools.

Jeanne d'Albret was Queen regnant of Navarre from 1555 to 1572, wife of Antoine de Bourbon, and mother of King Henry IV of France. She was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines in 1528, and was the daughter of Henry II of Navarre and Marguerite of Navarre. Marguerite was the sister of Francis I of France, and Jeanne grew up at the French court. In 1541, when she was thirteen, Francis married her to William "the Rich", Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, but this political marriage was annulled four years later.

After the death of Francis and the accession of Henry II Jeanne was married to Antoine de Bourbon, who would become heir to the French throne if the Valois line died out. She bore two children, Henry and Catherine. The couple lived quietly until 1555, when Jeanne's father died and they became rulers of Navarre and Bearn, with control over much of Gascony and Guyenne. The southwest of France had become a refuge for French Calvinists- called “Huguenots”, and fertile ground for preachers from Geneva. Calvinism had been spreading throughout France from the mid 1530's to the 1550's. The Reformers insisted that they were not bringing in a new gospel but returning to the gospel preached by the apostles. They challenged the people to open their Bibles and to prove it to themselves. Ministers were sent from Geneva, and, despite the work of the Counter Reformation, the number of French Protestants was increasing daily.

Calvinism was in vogue even at the royal court. Nobles brought the ministers into their own apartments to preach. And support from the nobility was exactly what the Calvinists needed if the movement in France was to be considered anything more than a rebellion. Jeanne also had already supported religious reformers, as her mother had before her, and she began to become more active in Bearn. In the first year of her reign, Jeanne d'Albret called a conference of beleaguered Huguenot ministers which led to her declaring Calvinism the official religion of her kingdom. In 1560, Jeanne publicly announced her adherence to Calvinist belief; because of her rank she became one of the leaders of the Huguenot party.

However, Antoine's interest in reform is less certain; he seems to have chosen whatever side promised more political benefit. The power struggle between Catholics and Huguenots for control of the French court and France as a whole led to the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion in 1562. Antoine declared for the Catholics and sent Jeanne home, but he kept their 9-year-old son Henry at court, ostensibly for his education, in effect as a hostage. But Antoine was mortally wounded at the siege of Rouen, and that finally ended his life. Jeanne's son Henry now became "first prince of the blood."
In 1567, Jeanne was allowed to take Henry, now 14, away from the court and home to Bearn. Later that year war broke out again, and Jeanne fled to the Huguenot city of La Rochelle.

Huguenots captured the city of La Rochelle and fortified it as a permanent base. In 1568, Catholic nobles in Jeanne's lands revolted, and Bearn was threatened by both French and Spanish forces. Jeanne took her two children and went to La Rochelle, where she was involved both in military planning and in raising money for ships and arms. A year later, Catherine de Medici, Charles' mother, began peace negotiations with Jeanne, but fighting continued; in 1570 a peace was concluded and official talks began on a marriage between Henry and Catherine's youngest daughter, Marguerite de Valois.

With her lands restored, Jeanne returned to Bearn to establish an even more thoroughly Calvinist state. At the start of 1572, she went to the French court to arrange Henry's marriage. She hoped he would be a future Protestant king of France; in case that didn't come about, she wanted him to be given all of Guyenne as a dukedom, so that there would be at least one area within France to provide a Protestant refuge. By April an agreement for the marriage had been made (but with no dukedom). Jeanne accepted it because she saw it as the best hope for Henry and for the Protestant cause. She died in Paris at the age of 44, two months before the wedding and the massacre of Huguenots that followed it.

The writings published during Jeanne's life span were mostly of her active political career from 1563 to 1571. Their purpose was to encourage the Protestant faithful and to exhort the undecided to join her in the cause. An exchange of letters between Jeanne and a Catholic cardinal were printed in Bearn in 1563. Four letters that she wrote to the royal family on her 1568 trip from Bearn to La Rochelle and one written later to Elizabeth I of England were published. In 1570 was published Ample declaration “sur la jonction de ses armes des Reformes en 1568,” Jeanne's justification for having left Bearn to join the army at La Rochelle. Finally, in 1571 the Ordonnance Ecclesiastiques de la Reine de Navarre was printed, for the use of other Protestant rulers.

{{{….It is necessary at this point to say a few words about France's foreign and domestic affairs during this period. The royal families of France and Spain (the Valois and Hapsburg respectively) had been in constant rivalry since the 1490's. The country of France was slowly led to bankruptcy in a series of wars that had lasted well through the 1540's. An uncomfortable peace ensued. The financial status caused great dissatisfaction, to the point of threats of a civil war among the French people. The spread of Calvinism brought into the country still more unrest. Catherine had now to deal not only with the threat of a Spanish invasion but with the displeasure of the Papacy, as well. Beginning in November of 1561 the Catholics issued their counter-attack. "From Parisian pulpits inflammatory sermons aroused the congregations against the royal family and the crown's officers as well as the Huguenots....Destruction of Huguenot property, assassination, and other violent incidents were occurring all over France." The Papacy also let it be known that it lent its support to the King of Spain. Though sympathetic to the reform, Catherine's first priority was to keep control of France.

Antoine's Betrayal
Antoine and Jeanne were at court when Antoine at last sided with the Roman Catholics. Many nobles followed his lead. This, in turn, forced Catherine's hand. She reinstated conservative Catholic tutors for Charles IX, forbade discussion of Calvinist doctrine, and her lenience towards those arrested for religious reasons ceased. Still more nobles placed themselves within the Roman camp.

Jeanne, however, could not be dissuaded. Her conversion had been motivated by neither politics nor fashion, and she would not bend. The strength of her will, this time put into service for God, was unflinching. While others cowered back to the Mass, Jeanne had Protestant services in her apartments "with all the doors open" as exasperated observers pointed out. Others followed Antoine's lead, but Jeanne called to him to remember the true teaching they had received. Antoine demanded that she go to Mass, but Jeanne flatly refused. "When the Queen Mother tried to persuade her to accommodate her husband, she finally replied, rather than ever go to Mass, if she held her kingdom and her son in her hand, she would throw them both to the bottom of the sea. This was the reason they then left her in peace on the matter."

As fellow Calvinists saw the price Jeanne was paying for her stand, her strength strengthened them. Already suffering from tuberculosis, she was so ill at this time (1562) that doctors were unsure if she could recover. Antoine had made her all but a prisoner in her apartments, had taken away their son, and was threatening divorce. Finally, both Antoine and Catherine wanted her out of Paris. Catherine had even promised that after Jeanne's departure, no Protestant services would be permitted at court. This in itself should speak of Jeanne's influence. On March 6, 1562, Jeanne left Paris to return to Bearn. She left without her son (she was permitted to say goodbye and to enjoin him never to go to Mass), still very ill, and under fear of being kidnapped along the way.

Jeanne as Supreme Regent
In April 1562, the first civil war (the first of three that would occur in Jeanne's lifetime) broke out while Jeanne was still en route to Bearn. The Huguenots were under the command of the Prince de Conde and Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. The Catholics were led by the Duke de Guise. Jeanne herself was not involved in this or the second civil war, but rather concentrated her efforts on her own kingdom. Upon her return, "Jeanne devoted herself primarily to local administration and to foster the Reformed faith in her domain." She could not escape the war's impact, however. First, being so close to Spain, she needed to prepare herself with military defense. Secondly, some months into the war, Antoine had been wounded fighting on the Catholic side. Although Antoine had summoned his mistress in his convalescence, when word of his injury reached Jeanne, she immediately made herself ready to go nurse him. But the infection spread, and Antoine died before Jeanne could obtain permission to enter enemy lines.

Antoine's death forced the surrounding powers to deal with Jeanne directly. Her son was still to be a hostage at court for the next four years, but she was able to reinstate Protestant tutors for the boy to oversee his education. Her husband's death also put her in sole control of Bearn, and she worked with great energy, against great obstacles, to strengthen and reform her domain. "Her reorganization of the economic and judicial system was so sound it remained in force well into the 18th century." Theodore Beza, Calvin's right hand man in her request, sent her more than a dozen ministers to preach the gospel. Laws were passed to protect these ministers, she abolished public processions, purified the churches of images, and suppressed the Mass in some parts of her kingdom. A synod was formed and there were plans for a Protestant Academy. Her achievements led one reformer to say of her, "The Queen of Navarre has banished all idolatry from her domains and sets an example of virtue with incredible firmness and courage."

Meanwhile, the King of Spain, now Philip II (the same Philip to whom her father had hoped to marry Jeanne), tried to persuade her to marry one of his sons. Ironically, the union with the Spanish royal family that her father had so wanted in the past would now have cost Jeanne everything -- her kingdom, her independence, and her faith. She saw this but felt compelled to reopen the negotiations with Spain that had stopped at her husband's death. Sending an ambassador, Philip demanded she cast aside her religious policy, calling it evil and threatening that he would not tolerate Calvinism "so near to his subjects." The ambassador related Jeanne's reply, characteristically sharp when she was provoked. "Although I am just a little Princess, God has given me the government of this country so I may rule it according to His Gospel and teach it His Laws. I rely on God, who is more powerful than the King of Spain." Philip's reply is menacing. "This is quite too much of a woman to have as a daughter-in-law. I would much prefer to destroy her and treat her as such an evil woman deserves." Quite too much of a woman, indeed.

The Papacy, too sought Jeanne. Pious IV sent his own ambassador and his own set of threats. She was warned that her subjects would not stand for reform, that Spain would not stand for it. She was ordered to restore the churches and to cast off the heresies that he for a time "seduced" her. She was implored "with tears to return to the true fold." Her reply did little to hide her annoyance, "You appeal to your authority as the Pope's legate. The authority of the Pope's legate is not recognized in Bearn. Keep your tears for yourself. Out of charity I might contribute a few." There followed a plot to kidnap her and deliver her the Inquisition in Spain. She was summoned to appear in Rome upon penalty of excommunication, confiscation of goods, and a declaration that her lands would be open to the first taker.

This last claim troubled Philip of Spain who did not want just anyone to take over Navarre. It made Catherine furious. She resented the Papacy's presumption in disciplining Jeanne over the head of France. It was a dangerous game Jeanne was playing, pitting the larger powers against one another while her kingdom and her life were held in the balance. Meanwhile, she continued with her reform. There were plans to carry out "the total suppression of idolatry." The Calvinist Academy became a reality and ecclesiastical wealth was confiscated and given to the poor.

Spain and the Papacy were up in arms. "It was disturbing enough that John Knox had created a Calvinist establishment in Scotland, but if it were allowed to develop in Bearn, it might spread throughout France, a far more serious challenge to the church." They put pressure on Catherine, Catherine put pressure on Jeanne, Jeanne was evasive. She had returned to court for a time to appease Catherine who was confident of her powers to control people near her. Reform went on in Bearn in spite of Jeanne's absence. She was able to return with her son Henry, at last.

Fleeing Navarre to Greater Service
When the third civil war broke out in 1568, Jeanne could no longer concern herself with her domains alone. Catherine could no longer protect her because a moderate faction no longer seemed to exist. Jeanne's life was now threatened by Spanish and French Catholic troops. She and her son took flight to La Rochelle, the Protestant stronghold and threw in their lot with Coligny, Conde and the other French Protestants.

It is in La Rochelle that the strength of Jeanne's service to her God -- and His strength at work through her -- is best seen. While staying in touch as best she could be with Bearn, she also proved invaluable to the Huguenot cause. As Minister of Propaganda, she wrote manifestoes and requests for aid to foreign princes. Under her direction fell such concerns in La Rochelle as "finances, fortifications, discipline (except in the army), and, in part, intelligence." She contributed her wealth, even offering her jewels as security in foreign loans. She supervised the care of the tens of thousands of refugees that poured into the city. She did not confine herself within the city's walls, however. At even critical points in the fighting, she would accompany Coligny, inspecting the defences and rallying troops. When one Huguenot captain, La Noue, hesitated to have his arm amputated after it had been crushed, Jeanne held his hand in support during the surgery and was praised for the care she took of him in his recovery.

A college was established in La Rochelle under direction, to be "a seminary of piety and a center for the education of the holy ministry." She brought to it some of the most learned men of the Reform. The better part of their salaries was paid by Jeanne herself. She was working at such a frenzied pace, perhaps realizing that she did not have long to live. Her body grew weaker, but her determination was stronger than ever.

Jeanne was at her height; the Huguenot cause was at its height. It offered its terms of peace. Jeanne wrote to both the King and the Queen Mother, but when the terms were denied and the Huguenots were told that the condition of peace was that they lay down absolutely all their arms, Jeanne answered, "We have come to the determination to die, all of us, rather than to abandon our God, and our religion, the one which we cannot maintain unless permitted to worship publicly, any more than a human body can live without meat and drink." At last the Peace of St. Germain was signed by Charles IX in August of 1570, granting the Huguenots more than they had ever before been granted: "freedom of worship except in Paris or near the court, full eligibility to public office, and, as guarantee that these terms would be honored in practice, the right to hold four cities under their independent rule for two years."

Peace was uneasy. The Catholics were outraged by the King's concession. Charles was himself trying to assert his independence from his mother, and under Coligny's council was considering war with Spain in an attempt to unify his people. Catherine had her own plans for unity. She suggested the marriage of Henry of Navarre to her daughter Marguerite. This would unite the Bourbon and Valois families, it would unite Jeanne and Catherine, Protestant and Catholic, it would unite France. Both factions had strong supporters of the marriage, each side thinking it had the most to gain. Other Protestants were quite critical. Jeanne herself was in agony. She greatly feared that her son would return to Catholicism, and that would break her heart. On the other hand, she feared for France and took it to heart when it was suggested that her stubbornness in the matter would be at the cost of the Reform.

She arrived in Paris in January 1572 to begin what would be months of negotiations concerning the marriage. Horrified upon her arrival by the court's decadence, she wrote to her son:
[Marguerite] is beautiful, discreet, and graceful, but she has grown up in the most vicious and corrupt atmosphere imaginable. I cannot see that anyone escapes its poison... Not for anything on earth would I have you live here. Therefore I wish you to be married and to retire -- with your wife -- from this corruption. Although I knew it was bad, I find it even worse than I feared.... If you were here you would never escape without a special intervention from God...

You have doubtless realized that their main object, my son, is to separate you from God, and from me...you can understand my anxiety for you.... I beg you, pray to God.

Feeling herself powerless to stop the marriage, Jeanne nevertheless made certain demands. "She insisted that Cardinal de Bourbon should perform the ceremony, not as a priest but as a prince, not in a church but outside it, and that Henry should not accompany his wife into the Church to hear Mass." Catherine reluctantly agreed.}}}

3. Louise de Coligny (1555 - 1620)

Louise de Coligny was the daughter of Gaspard de Coligny and Charlotte de Laval and the fourth and last spouse of William the Silent.

When she was seventeen, she married Charles de Teligny. Both he and her father were murdered at the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. She then married William the Silent on April 12, 1583. Like her murdered father, she was a French Huguenot. She became the mother of Frederick Henry in 1584, William's fourth legitimate son and future prince of Orange. During her life she remained an advocate for protestantism.

D. England:

1. Catherine of Aragon (16 December 1485 – 7 January 1536)

Catherine of Aragon was the first wife and Queen Consort of Henry VIII of England. Catherine was born on 16 December 1485, the same year that Henry VII established the Tudor dynasty. At the age of three, she was betrothed to his infant son, Prince Arthur. In 1501, shortly before her sixteenth birthday, Catherine sailed to England. But her marriage to Arthur lasted less than six months and was supposedly never consummated. Catherine was then betrothed to Arthur's younger brother, Prince Henry. Henry tried to have their twenty-four year marriage annulled in part because all their male heirs died in childhood, with only one of their six children, Princess Mary (later Queen Mary I) surviving as heiress presumptive, at a time when there was no precedent for a woman on the throne. The Pope refused to allow the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine, which set off a chain reaction that led to Henry's break with the Roman Catholic Church and his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn in the hope of fathering a male heir to continue the Tudor dynasty.

Because of the lack of heirs, Henry began to believe that his marriage was cursed and sought confirmation from two verses of the biblical Book of Leviticus, which said that, if a man marries his brother's wife, the couple will be childless. He chose to believe that Catherine had lied when she said her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated, therefore making their marriage wrong in the eyes of God. He therefore asked Pope Clement VII to annul his marriage in 1527.

The Pope stalled on the issue for seven years without making a final judgment, partially because allowing an annulment would be admitting that the Church had been in error for allowing a special dispensation for marriage in the first place, and partially because he was a virtual prisoner of Catherine's nephew Charles V, who had conquered Rome. Catherine chose to fight their case out in the courts, which ruled against her. Had Catherine acted differently, the religious reformation would have been delayed or might not have come to England at all. The pope would not agree to the annulment. Henry separated from Catherine in July 1531; in January 1533, he married one of Catherine's former ladies-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, sister of his former mistress Lady Mary Boleyn. Henry finally had Thomas Cranmer, whom Henry had appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury in expectation of Cranmer's support, annul the marriage on May 23, 1533. Five days later Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be valid. To forestall an appeal to Rome, which Catherine would have almost certainly won, Henry had Parliament pass the Act of Supremacy, illicitly repudiating Papal jurisdiction in England, making the king the head of the English church, and beginning the English Reformation.

Catherine however refused to acknowledge the annulment and took the issue to the law, but she lost and was forced to leave Court. She was separated from her daughter and was sent to live in remote castles and in humble conditions, in the hope that she would surrender to the inevitable; but she never accepted the annulment and signed her last letter, "Catherine the Queen."

Catherine died of a form of cancer at Kimbolton Castle, on January 7, 1536 and was buried in Peterborough Cathedral with the ceremony due to a Princess Dowager of Wales, not a Queen. Catherine's embalmer confessed to her doctor that Catherine's heart had been black through and through, which led many of her supporters to spread the rumour that Anne Boleyn had poisoned her. Henry did not attend the funeral, nor did he allow Princess Mary to do so.

2. Anne Boleyn (1501 – 19 May 1536)

Anne Boleyn, Queen Consort of England was the second wife of King Henry VIII and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I. At the time Anne Boleyn came to court, Henry's first wife Queen Catherine was popular with many people, although she had been inactive in politics and court life for some time. All her sons by Henry had died young and Henry was anxious for a male heir to his throne in order to preserve the monarchy and prevent civil war. In the mean time, between Henry and Boleyn there was an affair, and both of them hoped that at the request of Henry the Pope would annul Henry’s marriage with Catherine, which, however was not successful. Her exasperation with the Vatican’s refusal to make her queen persuaded her to promote a new alternative to Henry. She suggested that he should follow the advice of religious radicals like William Tyndale, who denied Papal Authority and believed that the monarch should lead the church. When William Warham, the conservative Archbishop of Canterbury, died, Boleyn had her family's chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, appointed to the vacant position.

Events now began to move at a quick pace. On May 23, 1533, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable to rule on the validity of the King's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void. Five days later, on May 28, 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be good and valid. After seven long years, Anne was finally legally Henry's wife and Queen of England. Catherine was formally stripped of her title as queen in time for Anne's coronation, which took place on June 1, 1533. In defiance of the Pope, Cranmer now declared that the English Church was under Henry’s control, not Rome's. This was the famous "Break with Rome", which signalled the end of England's history as a Roman Catholic country. Although Henry VIII himself was a religious conservative, England slowly began to create the branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism, which often considers itself to have taken a middle road between Luther's and Calvin's Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

King Henry's marriage to Anne, and her subsequent execution, were therefore part of the complex beginning of the considerable political and religious upheaval which was the English Reformation, with Anne herself actively promoting the cause of Church reform. She wielded immense political influence and has been called "the most influential and important queen consort England has ever had".

Anne Boleyn is popularly known for being beheaded on charges of adultery, incest and treason on 19 May 1536. She is widely assumed to be innocent of the charges, and was later celebrated as a martyr in English Protestant culture. After 1558, Anne was venerated as a martyr and heroine by English Protestantism, particularly through the works of the ultra-Protestant propagandist, John Foxe, who argued that Anne had saved England from the evils of Roman Catholicism (as he saw it) and that God had provided proof of her innocence and virtue by making sure her daughter, Elizabeth I, later became queen. As a result of this view, many English nobles displayed pictures of Anne in their homes, in order to show their loyalty to Elizabeth and the Protestant monarchy. While many Roman Catholics despised her, many Protestant Reformers hailed Anne and praised her. Anne's protection helped the Protestants further their cause.

3. Catherine Parr (1512 – 5 September 1548)
Catherine Parr, also known as Catherine or Catherine Parr(e), was the last of the six wives of Henry VIII of England. She was Queen Consort of England during 1543–1547, then Dowager Queen of England. She was the most married queen of England, with four husbands.

Catherine was born in about 1512, either in Kendal Castle or in Blackfriars, London. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal, Westmorland and his wife, Maud Green. Her father died when she was five. She married Henry VIII on 12 July 1543 at Hampton Court Palace. She was the first English Queen consort to enjoy the new title Queen of Ireland following Henry's adoption of the title King of Ireland.

Her religious views were complex, and the issue is clouded by the lack of evidence. Although she must have been brought up as a Catholic, given her birth before the Protestant Reformation, she later became sympathetic and interested in the "New Faith".

It is said that she held some strong reformed ideas after Henry's death. She was reformist enough to be viewed with suspicion by Catholic and anti-Protestant officials such as Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton who tried to turn the king against her in 1546. An arrest warrant was drawn up for her, but she managed to reconcile with the king after vowing that she had only argued about religion with him to take his mind off the suffering caused by his ulcerous leg.

4. Lady Jane Grey (1537 – February 12, 1554)

Lady Jane Grey, a grand-niece of Henry VIII of England, reigned as uncrowned queen regnant of the Kingdom of England for nine days in July 1553.

Though Jane's accession, pursuant to the will of King Edward VI, may have breached the laws of England, many powers of the land proved willing to accept her as Queen of England, even if only as part of a power-struggle to stop Henry's elder daughter, Princess Mary, a Roman Catholic, from acceding to the throne. Jane's brief rule ended, however, when the authorities revoked her proclamation as queen. Mary's subsequent régime eventually had her executed for treason.

Jane was well educated, knowing Latin, Greek and Hebrew as well as modern languages. Through the teachings of her tutors, she became a devoted Protestant.

The Protestant rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt in late January 1554 sealed Jane's fate, although she had nothing to do with it directly. Wyatt's rebellion started as a popular revolt, precipitated by the imminent marriage of Mary to the Catholic Prince Philip (later King of Spain, 1556–1598). But Jane's father (the Duke of Suffolk) and other nobles joined the rebellion, calling for Jane's restoration as Queen. Philip and his councilors pressed Mary to execute Jane to put an end to any future focus for unrest. Five days after Wyatt's arrest the execution of Jane took place. The "traitor-heroine of the Reformation" was merely 16 years old at the time of her execution.
4. Elizabeth I of England (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603)
Elizabeth I was Queen of England, Queen of France (in name only), and Queen of Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Elizabeth I was the fifth and final monarch of the Tudor dynasty, the other Tudor monarchs being her grandfather Henry VII, her father Henry VIII, her half-brother Edward VI, and her half-sister Mary I (also known as Mary Tudor or Bloody Mary). She reigned for about 44 years, during a period marked by increases in English power and influence worldwide, as well as great religious turmoil within England.
Henry VIII died in 1547 and was succeeded by Edward VI. Catherine Parr, Henry's last wife, married Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, Edward VI's uncle, and took Elizabeth into her household. There, Elizabeth received her education under Roger Ascham. She came to speak and read six languages: her native English, as well as French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Latin. Under the influence of Catherine Parr and Ascham, Elizabeth was raised a Protestant.
Following a moderate start to her reign, the Roman Catholic Mary opted for a hard line against Protestants, whom she regarded as heretics and a threat to her authority. In the ensuing persecution she came to be known as "Bloody Mary". She urged Elizabeth to convert to the Roman Catholic faith, but Elizabeth, instead, kept up a skilful show of allegiance to suit her own conscience and ambitions. The persecuted Protestants saw Elizabeth as their savior, since she was seen as an icon of "the new faith". After all, it was to marry her mother Anne Boleyn that Henry instituted the break with Rome. Because of this, several rebellions and uprisings were made in Elizabeth's name, although she herself probably had little or no knowledge of them.
Mary Tudor contracted a marriage with Prince Philip of Spain (later King Philip II), seeking to strengthen the Catholic influence in England. Wyatt's Rebellion in 1554 sought to prevent Mary from marrying Philip, and after its failure, Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower of London for her alleged involvement. There were demands for Elizabeth's execution, but only few Englishmen wished to put a member of the popular Tudor dynasty to death. Even the Lord Chancellor Stephen Gardiner wanted to remove Elizabeth from the line of succession, but neither Mary nor Parliament would allow it. After two months in the Tower, Elizabeth was released on the same day her mother had been executed eighteen years earlier. She was then put under house arrest under the guard of Sir Henry Bedingfield
Mary Tudor died in November 1558, leaving Elizabeth as heir to the English throne. Upon Mary's death there was rejoicing in the streets of London, and in November 1558 Elizabeth was set to succeed to the throne.
One of the most important concerns during Elizabeth's early reign was religion. She relied primarily on Sir William Cecil (whom she called "Spirit") for advice on the matter. The Act of Uniformity 1559, which she passed shortly after ascending the throne, required the use of the Protestant Book of Common Prayer in church services. Communion with the Catholic Church had been reinstated under Mary I, but was ended by Elizabeth. The Queen assumed the title "Supreme Governor of the Church of England," rather than "Supreme Head," primarily because several bishops and many members of the public felt that a woman could not be the head of the Church. Therefore, her first order of business was to eliminate religious unrest. She was, compelled to take a stronger pro-Protestant stance when events demanded it, for two reasons: the machinations of Mary Queen of Scots and persecution of continental Protestants by the two strongholds of Orthodox Catholicism, Spain and France.
The persecution of continental Protestants forced Elizabeth into war, a situation which she desperately tried to avoid. She sent an army to aid French Huguenots (Calvinists who had settled in France) after a 1572 massacre wherein over three thousand Huguenots lost their lives. She sent further assistance to Protestant factions on the continent and in Scotland following the emergence of radical Catholic groups and assisted Belgium in their bid to gain independence from Spain.
Upon the death of her husband, Francis II, Mary Stuart (a catholic cousin of Elizabeth) had returned to Scotland. In France, meanwhile, conflict between the Catholics and the Huguenots led to the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion. The English government also involved itself in the conflict in France, where the throne was claimed by a Protestant heir, Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV of France). Elizabeth sent 20,000 troops and subsidies of over £300,000 to Henry, and 8,000 troops and subsidies of over £1,000,000 to the Dutch. She made peace with France in 1564.
In addition, the Act of Supremacy 1559 was passed requiring public officials to take an oath acknowledging the Sovereign's control over the Church or face severe punishment. Many bishops were unwilling to conform to the Elizabethan religious policy. These bishops were removed from the ecclesiastical bench and replaced by appointees who would agree with the Queen's decision. She also appointed a new Privy Council, removing many Catholic counsellors by so doing. Under Elizabeth, factionalism in the Council and conflicts at court greatly diminished.

Although Elizabeth entertained many marriage proposals and flirted incessantly, she never married or had children throughout her life. Probably because a Renaissance wife was expected to defer to a husband's authority, a reigning queen risked her political supremacy. Marital life might have created unwanted tension in the bedchamber, at home and abroad; however, the genuine reason of keeping her virginity was not known.

{{{Elizabeth and the 1559 Religious Settlement
Catholicism had been restored under Mary I, but Elizabeth claimed to be Protestant, and thus wanted to create a Protestant Church. Parliament was summoned in 1559 to consider the Reformation Bill and to create a new Church. The Reformation Bill defined the Communion as a consubstantial celebration as opposed to a transubstantial celebration, included abuse of the Pope in the litany, and ordered that ministers should not wear the surplice or other Catholic vestments. It allowed ministers to marry, banned images from churches, and confirmed Elizabeth as Supreme Head of the Church of England. The Bill met heavy resistance in the House of Lords, as Catholic bishops as well as the lay peers voted against it. They butchered much of the Bill, changed the litany to allow for a transubstantial belief in the Communion and refused to grant Elizabeth the title of Supreme Head of the Church.
Parliament was prorogued over Easter, and when it resumed, the government entered two new bills into the Houses — the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity. The Act of Supremacy confirmed Elizabeth as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, as opposed to the Supreme Head. Supreme Governor was a suitably equivocal phrasing that made Elizabeth head of the church without ever saying she was, important because in the sixteenth century, it was felt that women could not rule a church.
The Bill of Uniformity was more cautious than the initial Reformation Bill. It revoked the harsh laws against Catholics, removed the abuse of the Pope from the litany and kept the wording that allowed for both consubstantial and transubstantial belief in the Communion.
After Parliament was dismissed, Elizabeth, along with William Cecil, drafted what are known as the Royal Injunctions. These were additions to the Settlement, and largely stressed continuity with the Catholic past — ministers were ordered to wear the surplice. Wafers, as opposed to ordinary baker's bread, were to be used as the bread at Communion. There had been opposition to the Settlement in the shires, which for the most part were largely Catholic, so the changes were made in order to allow for acceptance to the Settlement.
Elizabeth never changed the Religious Settlement despite Protestant pressure (previously thought to originate from the Puritan choir) to do so and it is in fact the 1559 Settlement that forms much of the basis of today's Church of England.}}
In 1569, Elizabeth faced a major uprising, known as the Northern Rebellion, instigated by Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmorland and Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland. Pope Pius V aided the Catholic Rebellion by excommunicating Elizabeth and declaring her deposed in a papal bull. The Bull of Deposition, Regnans in Excelsis, was only issued in 1570, arriving after the Rebellion had been put down. After the Bull of Deposition was issued, however, Elizabeth chose not to continue her policy of religious tolerance. She instead began the persecution of her religious enemies, giving impetus to various conspiracies to remove her from the throne. She also permitted the Church of England to take a more explicitly Protestant line by allowing Parliament to pass the largely Calvinist 39 Articles in 1571 which acted as a declaration of Church of England faith.
Elizabeth was a successful monarch, helping steady the nation even after inheriting an enormous national debt from her sister Mary. Under her, England managed to avoid a crippling Spanish invasion. Elizabeth was also able to prevent the outbreak of a religious or civil war on English soil. Elizabeth's Accession Day of November each year was celebrated for many years after her death by Pope-burning processions. Her achievements, however, were greatly magnified after her death. She was depicted in later years as a great defender of Protestantism in Europe. }}}

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416)

2007-08-20T03:10:00.000-07:00

Introduction:
Julian of Norwich is also called Juliana. She was born on November 8, 1342 probably at Norwich, Norfolk in England and died on 1416. She is considered to be one of the greatest English mystics. She was Roman Catholic, as was all of Europe, but her work is a clear precurser to Martin Luther and other Reformation writers which gives her honored status in both churches. The Roman Catholic Church cannonized her and she is honored by both the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Anglican Church.[1] Little is known of her life aside from her writings. Even her name is uncertain, the name "Julian" coming from the Church of St Julian in Norwich, where she was an anchoress (which means a type of nun or lay woman, who lives in a small enclosure, never going out, and never abandoing her commitment to prayer for those who lives around her). Her whole life is given to silence, to worship and to deep comtemplation of the mysteries of God. At the age of thirty, suffering from a severe illness and believing she was on her deathbed, Julian had a series of intense visions. (They ended by the time she overcame her illness on May 13, 1373.) She recorded these visions soon after having them, and then again twenty years later in far more theological depth. They are the source of her major work, called Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (circa 1393). This is believed to be the first book written by a woman in the English language.[2]
Theology of Julian of Norwich:
Julian's theology was optimistic, speaking of God's love in terms of joy and compassion as opposed to law and duty. For Julian, suffering was not a punishment that God inflicted, as was the common understanding. Julian's ground-breaking theology was that God loved and saved us all. Popular theology magnified by current events including the Black Plague and a series of Peasant Revolts assumed that God was punishing the wicked. In response, Julian suggested a far more optimistic theology, universal salvation. Because she believed that beyond the reality of hell-fire is yet a greater mystery of God's love, she has also been referred to in modern times as a proto-universalist. Even though her views were not typical, local authorities did not challenge either her theology or her authority to make such faith claims because of her status as an anchoress.
As part of her differing view of God as compassionate and loving, she wrote of the trinity in domestic terms and compares Jesus to a mother who is wise, loving, and merciful. Similarly, she connects God with motherhood in terms of 1)"the foundation of our nature's creation, 2) "the taking of our nature, where the motherhood of grace begins" and 3) "the motherhood at work" and speaks metaphorically of Jesus in connection with conception, nursing, labor, and upbringing. She, like many other great mystics, used female language for God as well as the more traditional male pronouns.[3]
Her great saying, "...All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well", reflects this theology. It is also one of the most individually famous lines in all of Catholic theological writing, and certainly one of the most well-known phrases of the literature of her era.
Contribution of Julian of Norwich in the Christian mystics:
Julian of Norwich has her own unique place in the roll of christian mystics if only for the warm comfort of her teaching. She was an artless person, who told in homely language of her visions and spoke with utter confidence of God’s ways with the human soul, but her insight was nevertheless profound, and her understanding of her spiritual experiences both clear and subtle.
Christian mysticism is based on grace: the indwelling of the Trinity in the souls of mankind, and a divine call to holiness. Julian emphasizes this, and various other points of doctrine, with an exquisite joy, focusing on bliss and glory rather than the idea of earth's being a battleground for good and evil. During the middle Ages, the latter was the prevalent views - Satan sought to trip and trap us, and heaven was a promise difficult to hope for. Julian stresses the life of striving for virtue, but not in the highly negative manner common in her day, wherein rigid penance was the means to "atonement" for one's sin. In her Revelations, Julian shows great charm in the childlike, tender quality of her expression. She sees God as one who delights in his creation - and who is thankful to us for our happiness in heaven.
There are areas in which Julian was quite untypical:[4]
a) The fourteenth century was a period when the Inquisition was at full force, and the emphases of many theologians and religious Orders was the refutation of heresy. (Heretics were thought to be in league with the devil.) Julian is entirely positive - focussing on divine grace and not on the errors of his creatures.
b) Julian saw the suffering of the world not as a punishment (the common approach during the time of the Plague!) but as a channel through which God could draw us closer to Himself. The idea of purification of sin was hardly new, but her seeing rejoicing in it is quite in contrast to the "fire" which one would pay the Pardoner to avoid. (One wishes a meeting between Julian and contemporary Dante could have been recorded.) This is a joyous purification - not the lash.
c) Julian expresses both that the pain was the consequence of sin and that there is a mystery (not a clear cut cause and effect) which made this offering glorious. Theologians of the period (who tended to see the world as having belonged to Satan since the time when Adam fell), though they would have muttered "felix culpa", were at their wit's end to define exactly how the world was lost and "re-purchased". Julian glories in redemption, but shows unusual insight in admitting we cannot know precisely how this was accomplished.
d) Julian interestingly does not emphasize "using intercessors", but is keenly aware of the rejoicing of saints in heaven. Her kinship with the saints is profound, but she advocates approaching God directly as what best pleases Him. The "direct approach" to the King is hardly typical of the predominantly feudal society, with its "necessity" of intercessors. (This was the time when the saints were so stressed that pilgrimages during which one could view such curious relics as the head of the child John the Baptist or the palace of Dives were in much demand.)
e) Her references to the mystical nature of the Eucharist, during her revelations about "Christ our mother", show unusual depth. The common approaches to the Eucharist ranged from the superstitious to the scientific (and the faithful attended, but rarely participated in, the banquet.)
f) Julian gives us a picture of the devil as eternally frustrated. Sin was not "real" for Julian in that it was neither created nor eternal - she never denied sin, its pains, or the need for repentance and purification. The images of the sinner's redemption as leading to greater joy in heaven (and virtue on earth) makes even the evil one an unwilling co-operator with divine providence. All of creation serves its purpose in the divine will's being fulfilled.
g) The idea of the Church as a vehicle of divine revelation is essential to understanding Julian. Her supposed deference to holy Church is not a fearsome obedience (very understandable during the Inquisition period, even if England was not under fire at the moment) but a thankful awareness for a divine gift (and of our own eternal capacity for self-deception). It is stronger because it does not assume that the hierarchy exceeded anyone else in personal holiness, nor that any role in the Church (whether shoemaker, gatekeeper, or just penitent) was less vital to its members as a whole.
Conclusion:
Julian speaks of her own lack of letters, but most modern critics dismiss her self-deprecation. Whether she dictated to a scribe or wrote her thoughts in her own hand, however, Julian left a body of work attractive to theologians today because of the way she formulated the idea that the Christian God encompassed the feminine as well as the masculine sphere, a concept not often heard after the second century. Sadly, Julian enjoyed a short period of local celebrity and then was largely forgotten.
However, the church does not want to demonstrate the involvement of women but it could not afford totally to ignore women's usefulness. Numbers of women with a religious vocation, or literally call, answered that call by devoting themselves to the service of the church and to spiritual contemplation.

Bibliography:
Julian of Norwich., Showings. New York, Ramsey, Toronto: Paulist Press, 1978.
Pelphrey, Brant., Christ Our Mother-Julian of Norwich. Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1989.
Webliography:
http://www.gloriana.nu/julian.html. 4 July 2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich. 4 July 2007
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich 4 July 2007
[2] Brant Pelphrey, Christ Our Mother-Julian of Norwich (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1989), 17-18.
[3] Julian of Norwich, Showings (New York, Ramsey, Toronto: Paulist Press, 1978), 8-11.
[4] http://www.gloriana.nu/julian.html. 4 July 2007

Woman’s Work for Woman-Global Sisterhood.

2007-08-20T02:13:00.000-07:00

1. Introduction:
The Woman’s Missionary Movement of the late nineteenth century was the largest grass-roots movement of American Protestant women of its day. The Civil War had mobilized all American women into benevolent activity on behalf of soldiers and created energy that extended beyond the war. The death of the largest number of men in American history created an entire generation of single women. Male-run denominational agencies continued to drag their feet on the appointment of single women to the mission filed, even as competent men drew on their social capital to organize women’s societies that provided opportunities for unmarried sisters, daughters and classmates. Missionary wives in the field saw the need to increase the female work force and so threw their support behind the idea of single women missionaries. The result of women working together was a revolution in American missionary personnel and philosophy. By 1890, the infusion of single women meant that women constituted sixty percent of the American mission force. The unity among married and single women, prominent and ordinary women, missionary and home side women, and women of different Protestant traditions resulted in the origin of the Woman’s Missionary Movement. Through its fund-raising, its sending of single women as missionaries, and its distinctive ideology “Woman’s Work for Woman,” it had a major impact on American mission theory and practice. With this introduction of the emergence of Woman’s Missionary Movement, in this paper, an attempt is made to highlight how American women stitched together a missiology of local auxiliaries, sacrificial pennies and ecumenical flexibility and brought about great changes in the American mission.
2. A Woman’s Missiology: “Woman’s Work for Woman”
As women’s groups founded their own journals to disseminate missionary intelligence to their constituencies, a common missiology emerged known as “Woman’s Work for Woman.” The basic goal of “Woman’s Work for Woman” remained the same as in the mission theory of early nineteenth century wives- to evangelize women and so to bring them to salvation. It was launched in the optimistic climate of the post-Civil war period. Protestant women looked around at the technological and educational advances of the post-war period and saw the coming of God’s Kingdom as a real possibility, if only women could be mobilized. Mary Lyon was considered as a missiological pioneer of the late nineteenth century whose influence had a deep impact on the Women’s boards connected with the American Board. The proponents of “Woman’s Work for Woman” assumed that non-Christian religions led to the degradation of women, while Christianity provided not only salvation but “civilization,” the nineteenth century term for social liberation, though in western dress. They emphasized education as a woman’s form of evangelism, given that in most cases churches barred women from being preachers themselves. “Woman’s Work for Woman” was based on a maternalistic, albeit idealistic, belief that non-Christian religions trapped and degraded women, yet all women in the world were sisters and should support each other. It aimed to put into place instruments of education, medical work, and evangelization that would “raise” women to the status they presumably held in Christian countries. Belief in the worldwide unity of the female gender outweighed class, national, or racial categories for proponents of “Woman’s Work for Woman.”
The most obvious difference between “Woman’s Work for Woman” and the antebellum woman’s mission movement was that whereas the earlier movements made a married mission force the norm, the later movement consisted primarily of married women supporting single women in mission work. The late-nineteenth century woman’s mission movement legitimated the ministry abroad of single women, whose own high educational attainments attracted them to educational work as a key to social advancement for women everywhere. “Woman’s Work for Woman” bore am ambiguous relationship to the realities of cultural imperialism. What appeared as a “holistic mission” from the missionary perspective was often perceived by the missionized as cultural imperialism designed to tear down their own customs and societies. The emphasis on social change toward western norms, couched in the language of helping to bring about God’s kingdom on earth, made “Woman’s Work for Woman” a partner with the myths of western superiority so prominent during the late nineteenth century. At the same time, its focus on global sisterhood and the essential unity of humankind was a valuable corrective to patriarchal notions that valued men over women and boys over girls in many parts of the world. The social service institutions fostered by “Woman’s’ Work for Woman” are remembered in retrospect, even in non-Christian countries, as one of the most positive legacies of the Protestant missionary movement.
3. The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society:
The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society began at the request of missionary wives in India with the help of Mrs. Clementina Butler. The ideology of “Woman’s Work for Woman” arose from analysis of the Indian context, where segregation of the sexes was the norm for both Muslim and Hindu upper classes, and where social practices of child marriage, perpetual widowhood and religious sanctions against female education created a need for a special woman’s mission of evangelism and social uplift. The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society not only paid for and appointed its own missionaries, but it sent the first female physicians and it opened the first women’s hospitals in India, China and Korea. Missionaries from the society opened the first college for women in Asia (at present Ewha Women’s university in Korea). The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, the most powerful women’s mission organization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrates some of the key missiological issues for “Woman’s Work for Woman.”
Missionaries with the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society undertook mission work in three major areas: education, medicine and evangelism.
3.1 Educational Mission: As the “female” mode of evangelism during the early nineteenth century, education of women and children was the first open door available to women missionaries under the new women’s mission board. Teaching in either schools, homes or orphanages was thus the most frequent role for single missionary women. Not only had the role of teacher functioned as the female parallel to the ordained ministry since the time of Ann Judson,[1] but the ideology of “Woman’s Work for Woman” was based on the idea that education was the key for the liberation of women around the world. Missionary women founded a full range of educational institutions in response to their faith in education as a means of both evangelism and social uplift. As missionary training schools, Bible Schools and nurses’ training schools became a part of the American educational scene in the late nineteenth century. The issue of Christian colleges for women first arose in India initiated by Isabella Thoburn. By the 1890s, the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society was pushing its girls’ boarding schools to a collegiate level in India, China and Korea. For Thoburn and the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, the education of women for leadership was a missiological goal in itself.
3.1 Medical Mission: By 1909, the woman’s missionary movement had sent out 147 physicians and 91 trained nurses, representing ten percent of woman’s mission force, and was supporting 82 dispensaries and 80 hospitals around the world. The effect of women’s medical missions was far greater than its members suggest, both because their existence opened the way for the gospel in many otherwise hostile places, and because missionary doctors made the training of indigenous medical women a top priority and so revolutionized the medical treatment of women in India and China.
3.2 Evangelistic Mission: Although all missionary women considered their work evangelistic, public support for women evangelists lagged behind that for women teaches and doctors. The first evangelists sent by the WFMS to India was euphemistically called “zenana workers,” missionaries who entered women’s quarters to teach reading and sewing, but also to engage women in spiritual conversation. The idea of Zenana worker could be justified on the basis of “Woman’s Work for Woman,” that only woman could reach secluded women with the gospel. The first woman employed by the WFMS with the full-time designation of ‘evangelist” was Phoebe Rowe, who joined Isabella Thoburn’s[2] work in Lucknow in 1877. The zenana movement, pioneered by British women but quickly adopted by the Americans, was an effort to reach higher-caste women who were confined to their homes which was not in the case of the lower caste. The movement absorbed the WFMS which raised money and founded a zenana issue of Heathen Woman’s Friend so that newly literate women would have Christian reading matter. Mrs. Harriet Warren was its first editor and is considered as a major leader of “Woman’s Work for Woman.” In the meantime, the deaconess movement finally fully legitimated the role of woman evangelist within Methodist missions and in 1888, Bishop Thoburn made Phoebe Rowe India’s first deaconess. In the area of evangelism, one sees the fullest and earliest practice of partnership between indigenous and western women. By 1909, the woman’s missionary movement had employed 441 missionaries as “evangelists and zenana workers,” but it had hired 6,154 “Bible women and native workers.”
The late nineteenth century woman’s missionary movement conflated culture with religion, attributing the strengths of western culture to its Christianity, and the weaknesses of non-western culture to other religions. By analyzing non-Christian religions in terms of gender oppression and concluding that only women could reach other women with the gospel, it gave convincing rationale for women’s wide spread participation in the mission of the church. It hoped that the conversion of women to Christianity would trigger social changes that would attract more women to Christianity, thus putting into motion a continuous cycle that in the divine plan would lead to a better world through the conversion of whole nations. Its belief in the inseparability of body and soul, of social context and personal religion, and of evangelistic, educational and medical work was a central contribution to the mission theory of the period.
Reflection:
The history of Missionary movements clearly highlights changes in the women missionaries through the period. It also clearly reveals that the pioneer women missionaries (1836-1870) were products of a male dominated culture and therefore, they did not envisage a society free of male domination in the mission fields. Hence, their work received less publicity and recognition. Moreover, the wives were not considered as missionaries but they were only referred to as spouses. They were as ‘invisible’ workers, though quite indispensable. Due to the prevailing control of male domination, both in the mission filed and society, the missionaries could not voice their feelings strongly. But in many ways, we can perceive their feelings though their activities. Though women were accorded only limited recognition and were still under the control of their male colleagues, they began to make contributory participation in society and also began to make their mark on the mission field. The missiological rationale of “Woman’s Work for Woman” and its emphasis on the unique place of women in the missionary enterprise clearly explains how women not only played the role of helpers but also of leaders, of primary workers and not of secondary. The movement was both a liberation and step forward through which women also played a prominent role in paving the way for an ecumenical mission breaking down the barriers amongst denominations, regions and nations.
Bibliography:
Robert, Dana L. American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and practice. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998.

Webliography: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/fmmovementd.htm
www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/fmmovement.
[1] One of the earliest missionary wives.
[2] Isabella Thoburn and Clara Swain exemplified the first two forms of mission work supported by the Woman’s missionary movement-that of education and medicine. Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and practice, (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998), 167.

SHE SAYS, “YOU DEFINED ME, TO DISPOSE ME” ROLE OF ASCETISM AND VIRGINITY

2007-08-20T02:01:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION:
The women ascetic movement in Rome and the parallel one in Milan are basically known from the pens of Jerome and Ambrose writings by the end of fourth century. Both Jerome and Augustine and later Ambrose, wrote for their own purposes. All the three were avid advocates of the ascetic life and, in particular, saw it as the God-given solution for the ecclesial problem of women.
MARCELLA AND PAULA:
The beginning of the ascetic movement in Rome is lost in the mists of history, but it seems to have a spontaneous growth for some noble women, clustered in their great houses on the Aventine hill. The general history of asceticism in the west was boosted by two specific events. The first was a series of visits to Treves and Rome by the Great Bishop Athanasius, who was constantly, has been chased out from Alexandria into exile by a succession of emperors. Athanasius was recognized as one of the most avid promoters of the orthodox teaching on Christology proclaimed by the council of Nicea in 325.he also advocated an ascetic life. Secondly, Athanasius had also written a life of Anthony, the first hermit, which later had such influence on the life of Augustine, and he taught the twelve year old Marcella the secrets of Anthony’s monastic way.
Marcella:
Marcella was a young widow and she resisted all the efforts of her mother to have her re-married. When one rich suitor presented to her, she said to have remarked, ‘if I wished to marry…I would marry a man, not an inheritance’. Marcella is said to have lived a life of Asceticism alone for number of years and was then joined by several other women. These women were the ‘mother of the church’ in the fourth century. They include Sophronia, Asella, Principis and Lea. Meanwhile another of women met in a house close by owned by Paula, who was a relative of Marcella. Marcellina, sister of Ambrose of Milan, Paula and her group spent each day in Marcella’s house praying, studying, reciting the psalms and learning from Marcella the principles of the acetic life.
These women had been engaged in the ascetic practice for about forty years before Jerome arrived in Rome in the year 382. Jerome, in his forties at the time, had pursued the standard career, through Epiphanius, Paula and Jerome met and the thus began one of the great friendships of the early church. Jerome taught the women to sing the Psalms in Hebrew and practice of scriptural exegesis on their own. His friendship with Marcella and Paula seems to have been one of the more steadying influences in his life. After the death of Blesilla daughter of Paula who died of starvation after three months practicing the ascetic life under Jerome’s guidance. Jerome was later forced to leave Rome and he headed for Jerusalem, followed closely by Paula. Together, using her money and under her direction, they eventually set up double monasteries in Bethlehem and Jerome continued his biblical work. Without Paula’s help Jerome would not have had the money or leisure to complete his biblical translation and commentaries.
The writings of Jerome, especially, is laced both with a fanatical enthusiasm for ascetism and sarcastic vitriol against anyone who dared to question either his scholarship or his intention. In many ways, he used the women for his own personal agenda. It was only with then that he found any solace. Paula seems to have been the soul-mate, and together they are often named in a line of female/male friendship which starts with Tecla and Paul. Both Paula and Marcella are examples of the post-Marital celibacy which practiced by many roman noble women. An interesting comment by Palladiuus throws another light on the relationship between Paula and Jerome. Paula was, he says, “Hindered by a certain Jerome, for though she was able to surpass all, having great abilities, he hindered her by his jealousy, having induced her to serve his own plan.’
Jerome did not invent the asecetism practiced by the roman women but the credit goes to Marcella. Even though we do not have any words or teachings directly from these women, they speak to us across the centuries with their bodies. The virginal bodies of women offered to the world of the fourth century a powerful image of the advent of a new kind of women. These are the wealthy women and, as they disposed of their wealth, they offered to their household, including their slaves, the opportunity of gaining their freedom, or of joining them in the practice of the evangelical life. Paula’s own convent had three separate social and religious levels, but all the women dressed alike and joined together for meals and prayer. Moreover, all shared alike in the manual labor, which was an essential part of the ascetic life.
VIRGINITY:
It appears that most ecclesial lives of virginity were post marital. There was an insistent propaganda in the early church against second marriage. This created a work place of women ministers for many communities, but also forced the churches to deal with the presence among them of many very young women often in control of large inheritance.
Many women were widowed as early as late teens and since, in general, the men folk did not become christen as easily as the women.
Doctrine:
By the fourth century, huge numbers of women were taking on the life of virginity. The doctrine of virginity is based on a series of formulae, some arising from the experience of the writers rather than the practitioners, and some rooted in the scriptures. One of the most common biblical foundations was the parable of the sower, where fidelity to the gospel is rated according to the receptivity of the soil to the word of God. All the writers rate virginity at the top leve100%, widows’ rate at 60% and wives at 30%. The criterion was the level of carnality evident in the person’s life. Prostitutes, who were understood to be sunk in their bodies, were outside the scale.
Virgins have gone beyond the nature of women and now lead angelic lives. Both astonishment and fear are evident in the writings describing the phenomenon. The virgins are the glory of the church, the new aristocracy of faith. Female passivity was essential to their vision of the church and so the life of the powerful women virgins had to be tamed. All the writers’ exhibit great fear of freedom and independent women, and so, as the doctrine of virginity develops, the emphasis moves from freedom to obedience and submission. In men, it was said, the virtue of virginity elevates nature. In women, this virtue extinguishes nature. Women therefore, were in need of double redemption. The first, the choice of virginity raised them to the level of men; the second redemption, then helped them to attain to the transformation offered to the perfect. For all these writers, the male sex is stronger, more rational and closer to the divine. Women are inherently weaker, more prone to heresy and always daughter of eve.
Virgins, therefore, had to be secluded from the world. Silence, obedience, modesty and penance are recommended over and over again as the essential guardians of the virginal life. The consecrated virgin is an example to all the human beings as she came from God’s hands. Her body remains intact, with out penetration of any kind. Her physical integrity has been maintained. Her flesh is holy flesh, just as God created it. This highly emotive teaching was used to symbolize the pure intact church, unpenetrated by heresy. Virgins are likened to ‘uncut meadows’, ’untouched deserts’, and original ‘virgin forest’.
The new prevalence of women virgins showed that a new world was coming into being. ‘The things of the resurrection stand at the door.’ The ‘ugly scar’ of sexuality was being healed, and the ancient battle between the sprit and the flesh was being won by the spirit, in the bodies of women virgins. Women’s bodies, seen trough the projected sexual anxieties of men, were slippery with temptation. All signs of femaleness had been erased from these bodies. In the basilica, the place for virgins was surrounded by railing of pure white marble. The public veiling of virgins was a great triumphal act for the church.
It is obvious from this teaching that the practice of sexual renunciation represents, for this generation of sexually fearful and anxious men, the pinnacle of a kind of Christian perfection. Women’s life was governed by father and husband and strict obedience was demanded of them.
Church Father’s Contributions:
Ambrose taught that virginity in women was a virtue that transcended the course of nature. For him the male sex was always stronger, better and, in fact, the principal sex. Women carried in their bodies the weakness of eve, and thus had to endure the bondage, galling yoke and slavery of marriage. But this female weakness could be transcended by the practice of virginity. Mary had cancelled the debts of eve for all the women through virginity. Mary became his main weapon in the promotion of ascetic life. Virgins were the public sign of the victory of the church against their main enemy, sensuality.
Augustine found that he could live as a Christian only in all male-world. He instructed husbands to love their wives, but in the spirit of the scriptural dictum: ‘love your enemies’.

Conclusion:
Going through the history it truly reflects that it is His-Story, where this “His” always tried to subordinate “Her” with his creativity basically got from her. The so called church father unable to control their sexual thirst tried to control the women through their patriarchal power and proposed these things like virginity and asceticism. As male being we always forget that we are not only image of God but this image can into being through a woman. The pain a women under goes while carrying her child or conceiving itself prove she is the starting and ending point on His-story in this world.
References:
Ø Mary T. Malone, Women and Christianity, New York: Obris Books, 2001.
Ø Patricia Wilson-Kastner, A Lost Tradition, London: University Press Of America, 1981.
Ø Prasanna Kumari, Feminist theology perspectives and praxis, Chennai: Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, 1999.

St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)

2007-08-20T02:00:00.000-07:00

Her life and experience:
Saint Teresa was born in Avila, Spain, on March 28, 1515. She was the daughter of Don Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda, and Dona Beatriz de Ahumada, his second wife, who died at the age of 33 when Teresa was 12. Teresa was one of ten children. Later after a couple of years, she was placed by her father in a school under the charge of the Augustinian nuns. Her father had hoped that she would be benefited by the pious Christian atmosphere of the school; but had not expected, Teresa began to feel the first attraction to the religious life. After reading the letter of St Jerome, she decided that she must follow the call to enter religion. But her father loves her dearly that he was unwilling to allow her to leave, but later acquiesced.
In 1535, she joined the Carmelite Order and spent a number of years in the convent. Followed by a severe illness that left her legs paralyzed for three years, doctors were unable to determine the cause or find a remedy. In order to be cured she had to leave the cloister to undergo for experimentation with some more drastic methods of cure used by a woman in the town of Becedas. She herself explained: “I was nothing but bones,” she also explained, “When I began to crawl on hands and knees, I praised God.” These words signify the pain and agony, which she undergone, but her faith was unshaken. She died in her small Carmelite cell on October 4, 1582, repeating some verses from The Song of Songs and thanking God that she had been a daughter of the Church.
Mystical experience: After many extraordinary mystical experience of rapture, intellectual and imaginative visions, Teresa received her terrifying vision of hell. The result of which was her determination to live the Carmelite rule with greater perfection, which of contemplative life within the Church. Then On two occasions in 1554, she experienced a vision of “the sorely wounded Christ” that changed her life forever. She experienced at the sight of a statue of her Lord in His sufferings, and with much tears she begged Him to strengthen her. From this point forward, Teresa moved into a period of increasingly ecstatic experiences in which she came to focus more and more on Christ's passion. In the other instance, she was reading the Confessions of St. Augustine, and how he heard the voice calling him in the garden, she also experienced the call of the Lord from deep within her, and felt a new strength Her new way of life was with the first monastery of St Joseph in Avila in 1562. Teresa’s mysticism focused on communicating with God through meditation. “Enter into yourself” was her motto, but her goal was not mere inward reflection, but bringing God inside oneself and finally, spiritual marriage (to consider Christ as the bridegroom of the soul and to be union). In her most well known mystical dream, she experienced her heart being pierced by a spear of divine love. Following her conversion and more debilitating illness, Teresa began to experience ecstasies. These voices, visions, and levitations persisted during periods throughout her lifetime and contributed considerably to her reputation as a saint. In 1556, in her first experience of rapture, Teresa heard, not through her bodily ears but in her soul, Christ speaking to her. She explained that the rapture came unexpectedly, and said, “Having spent a day in prayer and begging the Lord to help me, I began the hymn (Veni Creator); and while I was reciting it, rapture came on me, so sudden that it snatched me out of myself… It was the first time the Lord had given me the grace of raptures. I heard these words: ‘Now I want you to talk no longer with men, but with angles.’ Some of Teresa’s friends believed that she was demon-possessed; they advised that she be exorcised, and her confessor instructed her to snap her fingers whenever she felt a rapture coming on. “Others advised her to spit.” Unlike many visionaries, Teresa did not equate ecstatic experiences with sanctity. She believed that women were more prone to have visionary experiences, but warned that they should seek them, lest they fall prey to “spiritual greed.”
Like other Catholic women who sought to make changes in the church, Teresa met with strong opposition. Sega, the papal nuncio, came to Spain to investigate her activities and to make certain of her absolute allegiance to the Church. The very fact that the religious houses needed reform reflected poorly on the Church, and Sega was obviously threatened by Teresa’s ministry. He describes her as, “a restless gadabout, disobedient, contumacious woman who promulgates pernicious doctrine under pretence of devotion.” As to her reforming activities, he wrote, “She leaves her cloisters against the orders of her superiors contrary to the decrees of the Council of Trent. She is ambitious and teaches theology as if she were a doctor of the church in spite of St. Paul’s prohibition.” Teresa’s involvement in Carmelite Convents: Teresa’s most enduring work was the reform and establishment of Carmelite Convents all over Spain. Her work began from reviving the Carmelite when a group who assembled inspired her in her house in 1560. When she was willing to reform the Carmelite like monastery of an eremitical type, her advisors ranged them with the opposition. She returned to Avila at the end of June 1562 for the foundation of the new convent arrived. In Aug’1560, the new monastery dedicated to S. Jose was founded. There was strong opposition among the town people and at the Incarnation. On August 25, 1560, the council at Avila met to discuss the matter of the new foundation, and on August 30 a great assembly of the leading town dwellers gathered. A lawsuit followed in the royal court, but before the end of 1562 the founders, as Teresa of Jesus, was authorized by the provincial to return to the new convent.

In 1567 Carmelite general, Giovanni Battista accepted Teresa’s reformative works and encouraged her to establish some more convents with some nuns from the convent of the incarnation. Following this, she found many convents in various places like Malagon, Pastrana. These foundations were followed by an interval during which Teresa served as prioress at the Incarnation monastery in Avila, an office to which she was appointed.
Teresa’s contribution through her writing: During the mid-1560s, she wrote the Way of Perfection in response to the need of the Carmelite nuns for more doctrine and practical instruction about the life of prayer, and the Interior Castle. She also left an autobiography, the Life of Teresa of Avila. Because of her efforts to describe her experiences group of people like theologians, teachers of spirituality, Dominicans, Jesuits, secular priests, laymen and women, and even the bishop of Avila were fascinating by both her personality and writings. Teresa’s autobiography, The Way of Perfection written between 1562 and 1566 and The Interior Castle written in1577 are prominent and useful contributions to understand the struggle of a soul, for she wrote, from her own experience that she faced at different stages of her life. Her doctrine of prayer found in her autobiography presents in a symbolically as found in the manner of securing water to wet a garden. The beginners in prayer life after being liberated from mortal sins are like first waters taken painfully from the well in bucket to water the garden. In the second stage Teresa refers to the prayer of quiet a gift from God, which helps individual to have a passive experience of prayer, which Teresa considers as an important stage in the spiritual life. The fourth method of watering is God given the rain. Teresa employs this metaphor to describe a state of union in prayer in which the soul is apparently passive. Teresa’s Way of Perfection, addressed to her nuns, teaches them the major qualities that demand their concern, throwing further light on the practice of prayer.
The Interior Castle is the principal source of mature thought on the spiritual life in its integrity with an expression of the soul’s progression toward God, through the many rooms of the castle until it reaches the very centre. The interior castle is the soul, in the center of which God is seated at the seventh dwelling place and preliminary dwelling places refers how the soul has to struggle or different stages to be union with God. According to Teresa, prayer and contemplation should lead to energy and action, not to passivity and lethargy. Growth in prayer enables the individual to enter into deeper intimacy with God-signified by a progressive journey through the dwelling places of the castle from the outermost to the luminous center.
Re- reading the history of Saint Teresa of Avila by using the methodology of experience:
Saint Teresa of Avila was a woman who built up her faith through prayer and contemplations. I personally feel that these two are the outcome of her life experiences within her family, and society. While re-reading the history of Teresa of Avila I asked myself some fundamental questions like, what made her to enter into religious life? How did her faith grew stronger day by day? If we look from her experiences in the family, we can understand the pain and agony that she underwent as a child. She must have been noticed the suffering of her mother who married at the age of fifteen, gave birth to ten children, and died at the age of thirty-three. She lived a life without hope during her illness, but she was restoring to life through her faithful prayer. All the experiences that she came across in her life molded her faith, and the unbroken cord of divine love interweaves her relationship with God.
Conclusion : Life of Teresa of Avila indicates the faith journey towards God and it talks about various stages in the life of our faith. I believe that she is really a spiritual leader in the early century. Her writings focus upon the spiritual life i.e. prayer and meditation, and the commandment of God ‘Love our neighbor’ which helps the present community to develop the spiritual life. In spite of her rich personality and the high mystical gifts with which she was endowed, she does not insists on or preach only contemplation and mysticism, she does not want everybody to deny the world, nor does she make self deny her central doctrine. She simply preaches and lives a holy life; a life of sanctity, and purity. Her contribution about prayer with reference to the spiritual life of a soul pictures the real struggle of a person who wishes to move ahead in prayer life. In today’s modern world people find less or no time for prayer, place an urgent need to realize the significance of prayer.
Along with Catherine of Siena, She was one of the two women declared “Doctor of the Catholic Church” by Pope Paul VI, because of her writings in 1970. She remains an important and inspiring religious figure. St Teresa was both a mystic and a religious reformer, and her ecstatic visions, fervent piety, and spontaneous writing style make her a fascinating character and a profoundly effective spiritual guide. She urged a return to God through belief in His infinity mercy, prayer, courage, and determination, underscoring her basic message that the mystical life has an incomparable value and leads to sacred truth and inner glory. Her writing about the soul as interior castle is very relevant if we think about the pain or problem that a person faces if the person really wants to move forward in the spiritual life.
Teresa of Avila was and is still an example for the women in the present context to be the leader in the church as reformers. Her life, experiences, suffering is the message to all the women in her time until today. True devotion and living a life of contemplation is the must. In spite of much opposition, and criticisms Teresa moved forward to reach the higher goal, which passed throughout all human understanding.

Organization place of women in the Early Church

2007-08-20T01:57:00.000-07:00

1. Introduction
History has always been a selective reading, which revolved around men. Women were not given deserving importance and were often neglected. At the same time, the fact that women have always been present in the history and played a major role in shaping the society can not be forgotten. The ministries of women were very prominent in the church from the beginning. Many were influential to such an extend even to influence the doctrines of the church and formulating them. “All Christian history – and particularly in the first century shows those women have played a considerable part in missionary work, in worship and in teaching. But, the difficulty in it is to know about women’s status in ministry of those days”.[1] Discussions about women in the holy orders and the admission of women to the priest hood are very lively nowadays. In order to understand the organizational participation of women in the church (especially early church) , a historical assessment is inevitable. Here is an attempt to analyse the organizational place for women in the early church from a historical point of view, paying special attention to Deaconesses and widows.
1.2. Widows and Deaconess
As the church became more established, more institutional and personal work for moral and social welfare was undertaken by the church to meet the changing needs of the poor, the deprived, the old and those away from home. In order to meet the needs of the people and the church, voluntary initiation was taken by the women. Thus in the early church, there were three recognized orders of women – widows, virgins and Deaconess. Of these three orders, the Deaconess order seems to have enjoyed a superior status. Widows and virgins were regarded as dedicated persons, called especially to the work of prayer[2]. In some of the non Biblical documents, it is not clear whether the distinction was mainly between widows, deaconess, and virgins. In the 2nd century literature except in the letter of Pliny, there is no reference to deaconesses, but widows are mentioned.

2. WIDOWS
Among the widows, there were some ‘appointed ones, who formed the ‘order of widows’. Normally widows were accepted to the office at least after 50 years old in order to guarantee against remarriage. Widows were generally aged women, forming to a larger group. A widow had to be distinguished by her mildness and evenness of temper. She should be with out malice and anger, not talkative or quarrelsome. If she was questioned, she should refrain herself from answering unless the question was about faith and morals. They had at least two things in common to the nuns of the following century: The vow of continence and the duty of prayer. The essential task of the widow was prayer. Widows had to be obedient to the bishop and deacon, and they couldn’t take any initiative with out their permission. Didascalia make the point clear that it is forbidden for a widow to baptize. The reason for this rule might be the attempt by at least some of the widows to baptize.
2.1. Church fathers about widows
Ignatius of Antioch and The shepherd of Hermes refer to widows as objects not as subjects. Clement of Alexandria considered widows to be one among the offices of the church and writes- “Innumerable commands such as these are written in the holy Bible and directed to chosen persons, some to presbyters, some to Bishops, some to deacons, others to widows.”[3] Origen commented that - ‘apart from the fifth petition of the Lords prayer: forgive us our trespasses, there is the debt of the widow, who is provided for by the church; the debt of the deacon; that of the priest …and that of the bishop’. Origen again in his homily on Luke writes that second marriage shut off access to ecclesiastical dignities: neither bishop, nor presbyter, nor the deacon, nor the widow may be married twice. In Didascala apostolorum, duties of bishop, widows are mentioned more than once. All these evidences points towards the existence of an ecclesiastical office of widows in the early church. At the same time, Alexandrians were not interested in widows or in senior women for themselves. [4]
In the fourth century, the order of widows was abandoned while deaconesses remained[5].

3. DEACONESS
The order of Deaconess facilitated women, a significant place in the church in its ecclesiastical affairs. Originally the chief work of Deaconesses was thought to be nursing, both in institutions and domiciliary.
Also the deaconesses intended to be the leader of women’s work in the congregation, inspiring and encouraging the women members of the churches to work with Christian concern and charity. diakonissa (diakonissa) was the word used for a deaconess.
The function of deaconess dates from the earliest period of the church, though the technical term in the female form deaconess 'diakonissa' evolved in the later period.
3.1. Biblical background
Majority of the New Testament scholars are of the opinion that the early church was predominantly strengthened by the worship, witness, fellowship and services of the deaconesses. History shows that in these, the deaconesses have succeeded in a very distinguished way. They therefore belong to the apostolic succession. In the biblical account, Phoebe was a deaconess in the church of Cencherea (Rom.16:1). She was a helper of Paul and therefore might have had an important social position. Deaconesses are referred to in Rom16:12 and I Timoty3:11. There are indications about Dorcas (Act9:36) as well. However the Biblical evidences are not sufficient enough to conclude how clearly the ecclesiastical office of the deaconess developed.
3.2. Historical Background 200 AD - 600 AD
The earliest non biblical reference to women functionaries in the church is found in a letter of Pliny, the younger governor in Bithynia, to the Roman emperor Trojan about 112 AD. The letter uses the term ministrae in Latin, which is the translation of the Greek word for Deaconess[6]. The council of Nicea (325) speaks only of deaconesses. The council of Orleans (533) speaks of widows who are called deaconesses.
Ignatius in his letter to Smyrna speaks of virgins who are called deaconess. Apart from the bit of information like that of the letter of Pliny the younger, the origin and early history of the office of the deaconesses are veiled in obscurity in the second century.
3.3. Eastern Church
It is quite certain that from the 3rd century onwards in the eastern church, Order of women known as ‘deaconess’ existed, who filled the position similar to the deacon. One doubt that prevails is whether there was an official diaconate for women or not. Church fathers like Clement and Origon discusses this matter by referring to the scriptural passages alone where deaconesses are thought to be mentioned. But they keep silent about the office of the deaconess as existent in their times[7].
The seclusion of women in the east made it necessary for them to be ministered to by members of the same sex. From the 4th Century onwards, Bishops in the Eastern Church ordained deaconesses by the laying on of hands.
The Syrian Didascalia of 3rd Century provides the selection and ordination of women by the imposition of hands and the use of a prayer which is widely for the consecration of deaconess.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church, women were ordained deaconess during 3rd and 9th century. Many of the deaconesses taught in schools. They were reputed for their scholarship, piety and for their Christian witness in even martyrdom[8].

3.4. Western Church
While deaconesses were found through out in the 4th century, in the western church they were very less in degree. Several documents of canonical legislation and other records reveal their existence in the western church. But western church gave less recognition for their services. Forms of their ordination are found in Italy and Gaul, but there are also canons of councils forbidding them to be ordained. The council of Orange (441), Epaone (517) and Orleans (535) are examples. This clearly shows that deaconesses were ordained in the early period.
The two major attitudes of the time were either to recognize the deaconess and give her definite parts in the administration of the sacraments and service of the church or to ignore her, her position and limiting her to the minimum share of a woman in the church service.
Order of deaconess is recognized in the council of Nicea (325) and Chalcedon (451) and is frequently mentioned in the writings of Chrysostom, Epiphanius, Basil and majority of the fathers of 4th and 5th century. Epiphanius says that even though they were ordained by the laying of hands like the deacon, they were women elders and not priestess. Their mission was not to interfere in the functions of the priest, but simply to perform certain offices in connection with women[9].

3.5. Age and Marital Status
The age for receiving one into the office of the deaconess was fixed as sixty. But latter it was changed to twenty. No married women were eligible to the office. In case a deaconess gets marry, she and her husband were to be cursed. If she gets married or allows herself to be seduced, according to the Justinian Code, penalty is death and the man suffered death by sword.

3.6. Functions of Deaconesses:
In parish work: Sharing the leadership of non-sacramental worship, (They usually assisted the baptism of women, especially in connection with the anointing of the body which in the Eastern preceded baptism by immersion)
· Home and institutional visiting (Particularly women), counseling and pastoral care were also part of ministry. They even carried the reserved sacraments to the sick.
· They acted as door-keepers in the church. They received the women as they enter the church and accompanied them to their seats.
· They instructed the catechumens and helped in religious education in day and Sunday school, and in adult Christian education.
· They also initiated social welfare such as the work done in the relief of needy, family welfare, court and prison work; among deprived children, young people in trouble and the aged.
· In home mission work, among minority and immigrant groups, in remote or thinly populated areas; in change of small parishes.
· Carried out church extension work in new towns and newly developing areas.
· In overseas mission, in nursing, teaching, Christian education and evangelistic work and especially in developing women’s leadership.
· In chaplaincy work in school, colleges and universities; in industry and the armed forces, in prison and hospitals.
· In theological education, they opened deaconess and lay training colleges and institutes and in specialist religious instruction in schools and teacher training colleges.[10]
3.7. Decline
Gradually abuses became prevalent against Deaconess, which led to the suppression of their ministry. There was a general refusal towards the administering of communion by women (deaconesses). More over West did not accept the diaconate of women. Drastic decrease in the number of women candidates for adult baptism also contributed to the decrease of the necessity of their ministry. Another factor lead to the declaim is the growth of monasteries.
After 6th Century very few references to deaconesses are found. By AD 1200, deaconess’s work seems to have stopped. In the middle age the order fell into abeyance, both in Eastern and Western church. Gradually the nuns took over the place of deaconesses. The last reference known to a deaconess in early Christianity is an obscure one defined in the 12th Century.

3.8. Reviving Attempts
In the Reformation Period nunnery got prominence. Luther vehemently opposed nunneries and saw nunnery as an escape from the responsibilities of earthly vocation. Thus deaconess as an office was not received in the day of reformation.
19th Century
Attempts to revive the order of deaconess have occurred in the 19th century. It resulted in three types of order of deaconess. 1. German deaconesses were primarily trained to be nurses. They belong to the great mother houses, stemming from the revival works of deaconess in early 19th Century. 2. Anglican Deaconesses were mainly trained theological and their ministry was mainly in teaching ministry, usually in the parishes. 3. Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian deaconess worked with in the parish mainly in the teaching of women and children under the direction of the ministry.
3.9. Deaconesses in India
It was in 1896 Church of England sent deaconesses to India. Sisters from Germany and Sweden came to work in Tamil Lutheran Church in south India. In the Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church Deaconesses work was started by Rt. Rev. Johnes Sandegam. Though there were German and Swedesh deaconess, he looked for Indian women. First Indian deaconess was Lydia-Vedanayakam, a high-school headmistress from Tajaore. In May 1939 a small home was opened in Tanjaore. Lydia was consecrated as first Indian deaconess on January 11 - 1945, in the New Jerusalem Church Tranquebar. Between 1945- 1965, eleven more were trained and consecrated[11].
Sister Carol and sister Bertha became the first elder sisters in the CSI along with 27 in 1947. In 1958 there were 63, and in 1975 there were 81 deaconesses in the CSI from all the 17 dioceses, who engaged in pastoral, educational, medical and social work[12]
4. Conclusion
Revolutionary changes in the socio-political life of women in India naturally raise the question of the place of women in the church and in the religious spheres. Right from the beginning of Christianity, women were in the fore front of the ecclesiastical affairs. One thing that is to be noticed is that, even though there are some evidences of women participation in the early church such as widows and deaconess, they were strictly under the patriarchal-hierarchical structures that never bestowed autonomy or freedom in sacraments or governance. They were always controlled and subdued by the male Episcopal order. Even though the widows were given responsibilities or the deaconesses were ordained, they were not welcomed to preside any sacraments. Epiphanius makes it clear that eventhough a woman is ordained by the laying of the hands, she is never a priestess, rather be a woman elder. It is to be noted that Widows were forbidden form baptizing by law.
Viewing the ongoing debates on women’s ordination in the majority of the traditional churches from the historical point of view, which have been passed on through the generation, we may not wonder. Organizational participation of women is to be taken seriously. As the primary step for the same, people should be concentized, providing edification in gender relationships.

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Bibliography

Books:
· Ady,CeciliaM. The Role of Women in the Church. New York: Fortress press, 1948.
· Bettenson, Henry ed., Documents of the Christian Church .London and New York, 1947.
· Bliss, Kathleen. The service and Status of Women in Churches.1952.
· Danielou, Jean. The Ministry of Women in the Early Church. New York: Faith Press, 1961.
· Foot, Light. The Apostolic Fathers –Clement of Alexandria, Ignatius, Polycarp .London: Macmillian & Co, 1890.
· Graham, Carol. T. The church of South India- A further stage in development .Brighton: southern Publishing Co, 1956.
· Gryson, Roger. The Ministry of women in the Early Church. Translated by jean Laporte and Mary Louise Hall. Collegeville: The Liturgical press, 1976.
· Robinson, Cecilla. The Ministry of Deaconess .London: 1878.
· Wang, Lily Kuo, “Ecclesiology and Women: A View from Taiwan” in We Dare to Dream: Doing Theology as Asian Women, ed., Virginia Fabella M.M. and Sun Ai Lee Park .Hong kong: Asian Women’s Resource Center for Culture and Theology, 1989.
· Weiser, FS. Love’s Response, A Story of Lutheran Deaconess in America. Philadelphia: The Board of Publication of the United Lutheran Church in America, 1962.

Documents:
o The Deaconess-A service of Women in the World of Today .Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1966.
o TELC Deaconess board- Short report of the time of the consultation with the mission, 1976.

[1] Jean Danielou, The Ministry of Women in the Early Church. (New York: Faith Press, 1961), 7.
[2] CeciliaM Ady, The Role of Women in the Church(New York: Fortress press,1948),12-13.
[3] Roger Gryson , The Ministry of women in the Early Church. Translated by jean Laporte and Mary Louise Hall (Collegeville: The Liturgical press, 1976), 25.
[4] Ibid., 29.
[5] Light foot, The Apostolic Fathers –Clement of Alexandria, Ignatius, Polycarp (London: Macmillian & Co,1890),12-13.
[6] Henry Bettenson ed., Documents of the Christian Church (London and New York, 1947),5-7.
[7] FS Weiser, Love’s Response, A Story of Lutheran Deaconess in America (Philadelphia: The Board of Publication of the United Lutheran Church in America, 1962),
[8] Kathleen Bliss, The service and Status of Women in Churches(1952),14-15.
[9] Cecilla Robinson, The Ministry of Deaconess (London: 1878),197.
[10] The Deaconess-A service of Women in the World of Today (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1966), 45, 50-52.
[11] TELC Deaconess board- Short report of the time of the consultation with the mission 17.9.1976
[12] Carol T Graham, The church of South India- A further stage in development (Brighton: southern Publishing Co, 1956

Pietism, Puritanism and Evangelical Awakening between 16th to 18th century.

2007-08-20T01:55:00.000-07:00

Introduction
The missionary enterprises in Europe and England were marked by many movements led by men and women in the church. The Puritanism in New England, German Pietism, Methodism and the Great Awakening were all evangelical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries which attracted many women for the mission of the church. The protestant Evangelical Awakening had its roots in the earlier German Pietism, the Puritanism in New England and the Moravianism, all these have impacted on the evangelical awakening. The most interesting thing to notice is that along with men the women also have participated in the movement. Pietism stressed on the pious life as puritans stressed, but both of them stressed on the missionary work of the church and of every Christian. One of the notable features of all these movements led many women to be a part of it. In this paper let’s see the role of women, their contribution and their thrust for the new awakening.

Puritanism
Puritans were Protestant Christians rooted and grounded in Christian Scriptures, Creeds, Practices, Literature and ritual. They inhabited a Christian Cosmos and shared its story of creation, redemption and fulfillment. In the history of Puritanism women have played a major role in upholding the teachings of Puritans. The women had shared equal responsibility in the church activities and the women have control over other men. They also defended their minister at times when he was in trouble. As the historian of Elizabethan Puritanism, Patrick Collinson asserted “it was the women of London who occupied the front line in defense of their preachers, and with a sense of emotional engagement hardly exceeded by the suffragettes of three and a half centuries later.” [1]
In the 16th century the women members were high in number who joined the Puritanism. In 1660s there were more than 80% of women members in the New Heaven Church, and their regular attendance did not go below 50% of total membership. In the 17th century the women shared a equal place with the minister, deacons and elders. Queen Elizabeth had tried to have control over the church and played an important role in the English Reformation. During Queen Mary’s time a great persecution happened to the Elizabethan followers, and many of them fled to other parts and came under the strong influence of Protestantism. They lived a pure life, so they were nick named as ‘puritans.’
Now the question may arise what made the women to be attracted to Puritanism? How did they survive in the church as members? A simple answer can be given that they had an equal responsibility with men. As Kochler sees it, “Puritans attracted to keep women subordinate and dependent by limiting their educational opportunities, separating the sexes whenever possible, providing no possibility of female economic security out side marriage, censuring ‘old maids’ deprives women of the vote in the church and commonwealth….” [2] As the reformation was taking place many women attracted to the Puritanism because “women were drawn to them partly because of the seductiveness of puritan Theology and Puritan ministers: especially when delivered by an inspiring preacher, images of Christ as a ravishing bridegroom and God as an Omnipotent Father answered women’s desires for powerful love objects. Thus Puritan sermons on the nature of conversion and the devotional characteristics of faith in God offered women imaginary experience of erotic satisfaction and emotional security.”[3] Puritan Theology and puritan preachers attracted women by enabling them to exercise the public authority. They controlled the ministers and in the course of time there were some women parishioners in New England. As William Gouge puts in his encyclopedia of Domestic Duties, he says, “Though a husband in regard of evil qualities may carry the image of the devil, yet in regard to his place and office, he beareth the image of God.”[4] However the Puritans believe that the female enjoys the moral liberty as being a Christian wife. As Kochler Keller and Barker Benfield say that the radical Puritanism was an effective means for women to protest the male dominance and assured their authority as women. However, Anne Hutchins view is that it is trying to eliminate the women’s status and women’s equality than ideas about religious experience ideas. The domestic life of women in England emerged as a historical response to social turbulence. In the area of marital relations they affirmed that marriage was a sharing not only of the spiritual but also of the sensual, recognizing that the sensual had an important part to play. They encouraged the education for all and learning was emphasized. One thing to notice is that until John Banyan’s wife would teach him he was an illiterate.
Puritans flourished as a social reform movement after 1558. Puritanism helped for the social and domestic stability among men and women. With all these we can come to a conclusion of women in Puritanism with three main points. 1. The Puritanism helped women to exercise the authority indirectly and had influence over men. 2. Puritanism emphasized on the marriage of female and male and expanded the domestic role of women and thus it helped the women to resist the dominance of male. 3. The social inequality, fear, subordination, exploitation also helped women to be attracted to Puritanism.

Pietism
While Puritanism attempted to reform the church structure by political means, pietism avoided it and emphasized on individual spirituality. “Pietism is the name for a great religious awakening within the Protestant churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the continents of Europe. The name was derived from religious gatherings called the ‘Collegia Pietatis’.” [5] The word ‘Pietist’ came into use in the last quarter of the 17th century and the Pietist movement was started by Phillip Jacob Spener of Halle University. “Spener instituted devotional circles for prayer, Bible reading etc; he emphasized the universal priesthood of all faithful, without, however in essence deviating from Lutheran doctrine or intending to separate from the church.”[6] For him personal spiritual experience is more important than intellectual acceptance of the doctrines of the church. Pietism was a mixture of the mystical and practical tendencies within the Lutheran and Reformed churches. It started simultaneously in Holland, Germany and Switzerland, and it is believed the earliest movement was started in Holland. The Pietists stressed on the practical and upright living in faith. They emphasized on the affair of heart than head. It was Agustus Herman Franke was influenced by Spener and brought the Pietist movement in Germany to its great climax.

Three things may be mentioned about the context of the Pietist movement in Germany. “First, the Thirty Years’ War greatly damaged the churches in Germany, and produced low morality among the people as a whole. Second, the theology of preaching of Lutheranism became absorbed in polemical defense against Roman Catholicism and Calvinism. Lutherans emphasized correct doctrine, and confessional rigidity, ushering in the age of Lutheran orthodoxy and Protestant Scholasticism. Third, the Lutheran emphasized on sacramental regeneration, and the omission of teaching on conversion and regeneration through the vital work of the Holy Spirit resulted in deadness in the church and low morality among the people.”[7]
The German Pietism was mainly influenced by the writings of Puritans in England and their translation into German. As Keith R. Bridston observes:
The Pietist movement, one of the most dynamic and creative movements in modern Church history, with its strong emphasis on the inner life and personal commitment, was the source of renewal in many churches, not least in arousing missionary concern within them. The powerful impact of Pietism on the missionary movement, s both an energizing force and a continuing ideological influence, is well known. In a real sense, Pietism made the protestant missionary enterprise.[8]
Since the Pietists stressed on the mission work and the priesthood of all believers there was room for women too to be the part of movement. Many young went as missionaries to the foreign lands. Since the Pietist attracted many young people like Puritanism many women also have joined the movement. I hope many women actively participated in this movement.

Evangelical Awakening
The chief out come of the evangelical awakening was the rise of the modern missionary movement. “The pietistic movement and Evangelical Awakening were significant contributing factors for the emergence of Modern Missionary Movement in the late 18th century and in the 19th century as well.”[9] In the protestant mission there are three major evangelical awakenings, they are; “first, the Great Awakening in the North American colonies between 1726 and1760, beginning within the Dutch Reformed congregations and later spreading others”. The pioneer of this movement was Jonathan Edwards. “The second major force that influenced this missionary movement was the birth of Methodism”.[10] During this time in 1735 John Wesley and his older brother went as missionaries to Georgia. The third significant event that set the stage for this period was the Evangelical Revival (in England) and the Second Great Awakening (in the United States).[11]
In the Evangelical Awakening the women also have played a major role. “Elizabeth Fry worked in among the prisoners. In England, Lady Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon (1707-1791), founder of the Calivnistic Methodist denomination during the Evangelical Awakening, functioned as a bishop by virtue of her right as a peeress to appoint Anglican clergymen as household chaplains and assign their duties, and to purchase presentation rights to chapels, enabling her to decide who would conduct services and preach.”[12] The place of women in puritanism was at equal status with men, but in the Pietist movement the women were attached to the holy living. However, Luther and John Knox do not give much emphasis on women’s participation. Luther decreed: “Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house and bear and bring up children.” He also taught: “If a woman grows weary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die from bearing, she is there to do it”[13] John Knox declares that women should serve and obey man, and she should not rule over man.
The women in the age of Puritanism, Pietism and Evangelical Awakening involved mainly in the preaching, Sunday school, women empowerment and they helped the ministers in the church. Many men and women involved in the philanthropic work with the industrial laborers and poor people.
In the second Awakening women like Deborah Peirce of Paris and Martha Howell of Utica became prominent in the church ministry. Catherine Booth (1829-1890) was one of prominent women who with her husband, William Booth, founded the Christian Revival Association in 1865 and the Salvation Army in 1878. The Booths regarded the active participation of women to be vital to Christianity.
In the time of three great Evangelical Awakenings many men and women were challenged to become the active participants in the church and society. The great passion of evangelicals was evangelism, both at home and to the ends of the world. William Carey, ‘Father of Modern Missions’ challenged many people by his writing, Enquiry. The wives of the missionaries also went as missionaries. “The first single American woman to serve as a foreign missionary was Betsy Stockton, a black women and former slave, who went to Hawaii in 1823. Later, in the 1820s, Cynthya Farrar, of New Hampshire, sailed for Bombay where she served faithfully for thirty-four years under the Marathi Mission.”[14]
There were three reasons why women were attracted to the missionary work.
1. There were fewer opportunities for women to work in the home land, and the work was considered to be of the male. 2. The Christian mission looked as an outlet for adventure and excitement. The adventure was explicitly for men, so the women dared to take it. 3. The greatest influence on women missionaries was the growing sense of feminism.(see Hrangkhuma p355)
After the Second Great Awakening in the United States and in England many women’s church-related organizations were founded for charitable and religious works. Women were actively involved in the missionary work, teaching, medical and charitable work wherever they went as missionaries.

Reflection and Conclusion
The women in the Christian history have a special attention for their work and their dedication for mission of the Church. The Puritanism in New England attracted many women who had enjoyed the equality of power sharing. The women stood against the social and ecclesial injustice committed to the women and poor. The dehumanizing factors in the society made women to be attracted to the Puritanism. This was not same with the Pietism in the Germany where the male Pietist had a different understanding of women’s participation. The Pietists including Calvin, Knox and later Luther had little interest in the women involving in the mission of the church. However, the Evangelical Awakening in the west, especially in England, America, and Scotland attracted many women to become missionaries. They went as single missionaries, as missionary wife. Many women dared to venture into the adventure of the new explorations. These women mainly came to Asia and African countries accompanied by their missionary husbands and coworkers. They involved in the medical work, education, humanitarian work, evangelism, gardening and they concentrated upon the deprived women in the elite and poor families. There work was both spiritual and humanitarian. Thus the Evangelical Awakening in the west has contributed much for the women’s participation in the church ministry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cross F. L. eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Hrangkhuma, F. An Introduction to Church History. Bangalore: Theological Book Trust, 1996.

Philip, T. V. Edinburgh to Salvador: Twentieth Century ecumenical Missiology-A historical study of the Ecumenical Discussions on Mission. New Delhi: ISPCK, 1999.

Porterfield, Amanda. Women’s Attraction to Puritanism in Church History Vol.60, No. 2. America: The American Society of Church History, June 1991.

Snaitang, O.L. A History of Ecumenical Movement: An Introduction. Bangalore: BTESSE/SATHRI, 2004.

Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder. Constants in Context: A theology of Mission for Today. Bangalore: Chartian Publications, 2005.

Webliography
http//www.humanismbyjoe.com, 11/07/2004
http://www.godswordtowomen.org, 11/07/2007

Presented To: Dr. M. N. Behra
Presented By: Mr. Babu. C. [BD IV]

[1] Amanda Porterfield, Women’s Attraction to Puritanism In Church History Vol.60, No. 2 (America: The American Society of Church History, June 1991), 196.
[2]Ibid., 197.
[3] Ibid.., 198.
[4] Ibid., 201.
[5] F. Hrangkhuma, An Introduction to Church History (Bangalore: Theological Book Trust, 1996), 308
[6] F. L. Cross eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1286.
[7] Op cit. F Hrungkhuma, 309 .
[8] T. V. Philip, Edinburgh to Salvador: Twentieth Century ecumenical Missiology-A historical study of the Ecumenical Discussions on Mission (New Delhi: ISPCK, 1999), 2.
[9] O. L. Snaitang, A History of Ecumenical Movement: An Introduction (Bangalore: BTESSE/SATHRI, 2004), 51.
[10] Bevans B. Stephen and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A theology of Mission for Today (Bangalore: Chartian Publications, 2005), 209.
[11] Ibid. 210
[12] http://www.godswordtowomen.org, 11/07/2007
[13] http//www.humanismbyjoe.com, 11/07/2007
[14] Op Cit., F. Hrangkhuma, p.355

Role of martyrs- Discussion on Perpetua and Felicity

2007-08-20T01:53:00.000-07:00

Introduction:
In this paper I would like to present the role of women martyrs played in the Christianity, and how they were negated from the history and the church.
Who was (were) a martyr or martyrs?
The word ' martyr' is derived from μάρτυς (martus), the Greek word for "witness”[1]A martyr is a person who is put to death or endures suffering because of a belief, principle or cause. The death of a martyr or the value attributed to it is called martyrdom.
In different belief systems, the criteria for being considered a martyr is different. In the Christian context, a martyr is an innocent person who, without seeking death, is murdered or put to death for his or her religious faith or convictions. An example is the persecution of early Christians in the Roman Empire. Christian martyrs sometimes decline to defend themselves at all, in what they see as an imitation of Jesus' willing sacrifice. Martyrdom arose quite naturally out of the work of proclaiming Christ as the only Lord and Savior and none beside him. It is therefore, specifically for this reason that the Christians died and in turn imitated Christ’s passion of suffering and through it teaching a lesson[2].
Women Martyrs: In the History of Christianity we can find out many women maratyrs which have given their lives for the Faith. It starts from the early Christian era of persecution to the reformation period, from East Christians to the West Christians. The womens like Perpetua, Felicity, Blandina… etc are some of the figures that can be seen.

Who were Perpetua and Felicity:
They are the two women martyrs who are martyred in the third century. By order of Septimius Severus (193–211), the emperor of Carthage, all imperial subjects were forbidden under severe penalties to become Christians or Jews[3]. Out of the six who were arrested in Carthage during the persecution of Septimus Serverus in 202-203, Perpetua was a leader of a group and a daughter of a wealthy provincial the mother of a nursing infant, and Felicitas was her slave and she was eight months pregnant[4]. She was 21 or 22 years old when she was arrested, a married woman with an infant whom she was breast-feeding. She was also a catechumen along with Perpetua in the Christian religion. After their arrest, and before they were led away to prison, they all were baptized. They had to undergone a drastic Persecution before her martyrdom. The Christians were then condemned to be torn to pieces by wild beasts, for which they gave thanks to God. They were killed in the amphitheater. After, both of them venerated by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox church. They are also recognized by the Lutheran church and the Episcopal Church.[5] 7th march is known to be as their Feast day.

She has written her account in the prison. It was later collected and translated to the Latin. It can be seen as the first to write in a feminist perspective. This account is clearly pregnant with her views towards the society and the church and the Christianity. In Kastner’s words, “The account helped to establish the symbolism of Christian martyrdom for centuries to come……. The account demonstrates the emergence within the church of a prophetic movement in which women assumed leadership roles indicative of a degree of male and female equality unknown in later periods of Christianity. It vividly portrays Perpetua’s conscientious objections to certain restrictive elements within the third century Carthagian society, and symbolically suggests that her liberation from these restrictions was accomplished through a transcending of the expectations placed upon her female sexuality,”[6]

Reflection: (In the perspective of Women in Christian History)
The common idea of women in both Christianity and the non-believing world was that the sex was inherently weaker and flawed, female martyrs gained respect in the eyes of the world because of their tenacious adherence to their beliefs, their mental and physical perseverance in the face of terrifying circumstances, and their equality with men and association with Christ found their suffering.
Contrary to the stereotype of women as having weak minds and changeable associations with religions, women chose to openly follow Christ with the knowledge that their adherence to the faith would attract persecution not only from without but also from within the Church itself. For a woman to proclaim herself a servant of Christ and to act as a leader within the Church was a bold move that many Christian men opposed.
InPerpetua’s account she states that, she was about to battle with the Egyptian and she suddenly she became a man. Kastener indicates that, “in keeping with spirit of the narration it seems erroneous to interpret this as a belief in one’s having to become a man in order to be saved.”[7]
Though more men than women were martyred, the Roman government then considered the martyrdom of women an opportunity to make a public spectacle of the Christian faith. Expecting Christian women to react in terror and cowardice when faced with painful deaths, the Roman government concluded that the martyrdom of women would prove that any faith in which this flawed sex is given freedom and equality with men before a deity is a weak and foolish religion. However, such women as Perpetua, and Felicitas shocked the Empire with their refusal to recant their beliefs.
Tertullian recognised that, as martyrs, women were on par with men, but when it came to church organisation and the duties and functions therein, he gave them a considerably more circumscribed role, and never includes women in a hierarchy of the church.”[8] Eventhough the martyrdom of Perpetua been recorded, the language which the editor used is erotic symbolism[9]. It shows the male supremacy over a woman.
The historiography has negated the making of history by the women so as the church. Here our task is to find out the roles played by the women in building up of the Christianity. Then the questions arises are how far it is possible in a maledominated world? How much importance we give for the living women martyrs?

Bibliography:
Balasundaram, F,J. Martyrs in the history of Christianity (Bangalore, UTC) 1997.
Wilson- Kastner, Patricia, et. Al. A Lost Tradition: Women Writers of the early church. (Lanham:University press of America) 1981.
Sebastian, jayakiran. “Martyrs and heretics: aspects of the contribution to women to early Christian Tradition.” In Feminist Theology: Persepective and Praxis. Ed. Prasanna Kumari, ( Chennai: Gurukul Summer Institute,1998)

Webliography:
http://wikepaedia.org
[1] http://wikepaedia.org.//martyr
[2] Balasundaram, F,J. Martyrs in the history of Christianity (Bangalore, UTC) 1997. p.70
[3] http://wikepaedia.org//perpetua
[4] Wilson- Kastner, Patricia, et. Al. A Lost Tradition: Women Writers of the early church. (Lanham:University press of America) 1981. P.1
[5] http://wikepaedia.org//perpetua
[6] Op.citt. Wilson- Kastner, Patricia. P2-3.
[7] Op.citt. Kastner. P.10.
[8] Sebastian, jayakiran. “Martyrs and heretics: aspects of the contribution to women to early Christian Tradition.” In Feminist Theology: Persepective and Praxis. Ed. Prasanna Kumari, ( Chennai: Gurukul Summer Institute,1998) P.139.
[9] ibid.144

LEADERSHIP PATTERNS AND ORDINATION

2007-08-20T01:52:00.000-07:00

“A wider and deeper understanding of the feminine contribution
to our culture should lead to the construction of a global history…which
will deal with every aspect of reality” – Adriana Valerio[1]
Though there were contributions made by women throughout history, it was in the twentieth century that the leadership roles of the women became more conspicuous.
In this assignment I attempt to bring out the history of the leadership role played by women and the history of the issue of ordination of women in the Church. For the sake of clarity I have divided the paper into three parts. 1. An historical background on the leadership role of women 2. The historical developments in the Twentieth and the Twenty-first centuries and 3. A brief mention about the first ordained woman in India. I conclude the paper with a few questions and comments.
Historical background (Upto the 19th century):[2]
The issue of women leadership has to begin with the early Christianity from the New Testament. There are several instances where women participated in the Ministry of Jesus (Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susana etc.,) and also in the early Church (Lydia, Priscilla, Tabitha, Tryphena, Tryphosa etc.)[3] The women deacons were part of the early Church and it is a probability that ‘widows’ were the first deacons to help. However in the fourth and the fifth centuries women deacons could do the same duties as the male deacons except for the Eucharist.[4] Apart from the deacons, the Abesses and nuns also exercised quasi-Episcopal prerogatives till the Council of Trent curbed the powers in the 16th century. The later middle ages show the women actively participating at all levels of society, thereby expressing their need for greater involvement and responsibility.
The17th and the 18th centuries saw the ascent of the women as preachers under the sectarian groups that were formed and later under the pietistic movement and the great awakening.[5] Especially during the Missionary movement, the wives of the Missionaries played an important role in the spread of the gospel and also in social activities like education and health care. Some prominent names are Dorothy Carey, Ann Hasseltine Judson. In the 19th century the General conference of the Brethren Church approved the ordination of women as Pastors and Missionaries and ordained Mary Sterling as their first Missionary. Other mainline Churches that had ordained women in the 1800s were the American Baptists, the United Church of the Christ, the Congregationalists and the Disciples of Christ.[6]
20th and the 21st centuries:
20th century was a period of both struggle as well as success, in the issue of women taking up the leadership in the Church and in Christianity. The Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland admitted women into the Ministry of the Church since 1918; the congregational Union of England and Wales, 1917; the Presbyterian Church of England, 1921 and the United Free Church of Scotland in 1929.[7]
The world council of Churches (WCC) played an important role in developing the leadership role of women. As early as1927, when the faith and order movement met for its first conference at Laussanne, a statement was drafted to introduce questions of Women's role on Ministry. This was taken up when the WCC was formed in 1948 and in the New Delhi session in 1961, the faith and order movement was again entrusted with the task of studying the issue. The 1971 Louvain meeting focused on ordination and the issue of the participation of men and women in the Church. The 1975 WCC session at Nairobi came up with the recommendations that, all the member Churches should encourage fuller participation of the women and recommend to the Churches that do not ordain the women and continue to dialogue on the issue. Apart from this several sub unit meetings were held between 1976 and 1978 regarding the same issue. In 1978, Bangalore session of Faith and Order commission, it was proposed to draft a document.[8] Although an Ecumenical decade of Churches in solidarity with the women (1988-98) was initiated in 1988, in the 1998 WCC assembly at Harare, the moderator, Aram I Catholicos of Cilicia, pointed out that women have not been completely accepted and integrated into the life of the churches.[9]
Until the 1986 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion was opposed to the ordination of women. The Church of England approved the ordination of women formally in 1993 and Archbishop George Carey ordained 22 women as priests. As of 2001, there were 600 women priest in the Church of England.[10]
In the Roman Catholic Church, St. Joan’s Alliance, which began in England in 1911 was the earliest Catholic group to raise the issue of Women’s ordination. In the Detroit meeting in 1975 and the Women’s Ordination conference (WOC) in 1976, the catholic women in large numbers began to deliberate on this. However in 1976, the Vatican responded by justifying the denial of the ordination of women with the maleness of Jesus. The WOC responded, by reframing the question from one primarily of gender to that of ecclesiology. In the early 1980s several movements were formed. Three conferences were conducted as a result – From generation to generation: Women-Church speaks (Chicago, 1983), Women Church: claiming our power (Cincinatti, 1987) and Women-Church: Weavers of change (Alburquerque,1993). In 1994, the arguments against the women ordination was reiterated by the Papal pronouncement Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. [11] However, Catholic feminists are giving shape and life to alternative catholic communities in which people live out their sacramental rights and their solidarity responsibilities.[12]
Orthodox Church: An international women’s gathering was organized at the monastery of Agapia in 1976, where about 30 women met together and drew proposals about the issue of women leadership in the Orthodox Churches. This stimulated a continuous study on the issue and the Sheffield international consultation in 1981, where a “letter to the Churches” was drafted and put forward to the WCC central committee, but was received rather coldly. In 1988 in Rhodes a consultation was held at the invitation of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and took up the theme of “the place of women in the Orthodox Church and the question of Ordination of women”. However, though the consultation did not have a big breakthrough, there is a ray of hope for all Orthodox feminist theologians like, Dimitra Koukora and Kalliope Bourdara. Elisabeth Behr Sigel, an Orthodox theologian, points out that the desire for the unity of the Lord’s followers in obedience should encourage the Orthodox Churches and other traditional Churches to face the question of women’s ordination to a full Ministry in the Church.[13] The same wish was taken up in the Orthodox women’s meeting in Damascus (October 1996) and Istanbul (May 1997).
Rev. Elizabeth Paul:
Rev. Elizabeth Paul was a member of the Diocese of Madras and was born in 1927. She became a Sister of the Order of Women in the Church of South India and represented the order at various assemblies of DIAKONIA and in 1976 she became a vice president of DIAKONIA. She was also a Tutor at the Selly Oaks College in Birmingham from 1962 to 1964. She was ordained as a Deacon in the Diocese of Madras in 1976 as a Deacon, the first to be done so in the Indian Church. Because of a court case she could be ordained only in 1987 as a presbyter. She also taught in the UTC and was in charge of Vishranti Nilayam, before she passed away in February, 2000.[14]
Conclusion:
There are several questions that arise from this paper. Do we have to lay so much emphasis on the leadership of women? What is the relevance of the leadership to the women in the villages and slums? Can a Professor of Theology and an executive Director of WCC make a difference for the commercial sex workers who are abused and harassed and the wives beaten up by their husbands?
At the same time, most of the feminist scholars agree that it is not a question of choice but rather, one of commitment.[15] While the leadership and ordination cannot give solutions and give answers, it has certainly brought to light the fears, doubts and mistakes that were taken for granted and swept under the carpet of traditions and culture. Finally, as Ioannis Petrou says, it is high time that the Church claims not only its God-given identity as koinonia, but also finds the way to allow that to which the Church bears witness to become a reality.[16]
******************

Bibliography

Osuigwe, Nkem. Perspectives on women ordination (Owerri: Alphabet Nigeria, 2001)
Parvey, Constance (ed.). Ordination of women in Ecumenical perspective (Geneva: WCC, 1980)
Ralte, Lalrinawmi & Rajkumar, Evangeline Anderson (ed.). Feminist Hermeneutics (Delhi: IWIT/ISPCK, 2002)
Sigel, Elisabeth Behr & Ware, Kallistos. The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church (Geneva: WCC, 2000)

Journals
Crawford, Janet “Women and Ecclesiology” in the ecumenical review, vol. 53 No. 1 (Geneva: WCC, January 2001)
Petrou, Ioannis “The Question of women in Church Tradition” in Anglican Theological Review Summer 2002 Vol. 84 No.3(Evanston: ATR Inc, 2002)
Hunt, Mary E. “We women are Church: Roman Catholic women shaping Ministries and Theologies” in Concillium , (London: SCM Press, 1999/3)
Valerio, Adriana “Women in Church History” in Concillium, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1985)
Weyermann, Maja “The Typologies of Adam-Christ and Eve-Mary, and their relationship to one another” in Anglican Theological Review Summer 2002 Vol. 84 No.3(Evanston: ATR Inc, 2002)

[1] Adriana Valerio, “Women in Church History” in Concillium, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1985), 69
[2] As I do not hope to concentrate much in this topic, I have taken much of the material from a single source that I have acknowledged below.
[3] Since the role played by women has already been highlighted in different papers, I shall not elaborate on it.
[4] Nkem Osuigwe, Perspectives on women ordination, (Owerri: Alphabet Nigeria, 2001), 57f
[5] There was no change in the view of the subordination of the woman to man.
[6] Ibid., 63
[7] Ibid., 64
[8] Constance Parvey (ed.), Ordination of women in Ecumenical perspective,(Geneva: WCC, 1980), 22ff
[9] Janet Crawford, “Women and Ecclesiology” in the ecumenical review, vol. 53 No. 1 (Geneva: WCC, January 2001), 14
[10] ibid 67.
[11] Mary E. Hunt, “We women are Church: Roman Catholic women shaping Ministries and Theologies” in Concillium , (London: SCM Press, 1999/3), 105ff
[12] Ibid., 108
[13] Elisabeth Behr Sigel & Kallistos Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church (Geneva: WCC, 2000), 45
[14] Lalrinawmi Ralte & Evangeline Anderson Rajkumar (ed.), Feminist Hermeneutics, (Delhi: IWIT/ISPCK, 2002), 8f
[15] Maja Weyermann, “The Typologies of Adam-Christ and Eve-Mary, and their relationship to one another” in Anglican Theological Review Summer 2002 Vol. 84 No.3(Evanston: ATR Inc, 2002), 644, Aruna Gnanadason, “We will pour our Ointment on the feet of the Church” in Lalrinawmi Ralte & Evangeline Anderson Rajkumar (ed.), Op. cit., 78 etc
[16] Ioannis Petrou, “The Question of women in Church Tradition” in Anglican Theological Review Summer 2002 Vol. 84 No.3(Evanston: ATR Inc, 2002),660

Women and the Political Economy (Globalization)

2007-08-20T01:50:00.001-07:00

Introduction
Women and the political economy special reference to Globalization, is a relevant and widely discussed topic. Let us start with understanding what is the nature of present economy? Cohen and Kennedy identifies six components of Globalization, they are:
Changing concepts of time and space
An increasing volume of cultural interactions
the commonality of problems facing all the world’s inhabitants
growing interconnections and interdependencies
a network of increasingly powerful transnational actors and organizations and
the synchronization of all the dimensions involved in globalization[1].
Under the heading of ‘Women and the political economy’ the positive effects and negative effects of globalization on women discussed and also some of the ways of challenging it.
Positive Effects of Globalization
On the positive side, globalization has contributed to bring about welcome changes in the
lives of women who have been able to avail of the opportunities, which have opened up
in the various sectors of development.
Globalization has opened up broader communication lines and brought more companies as well as different worldwide organizations into India. This provides opportunities for not only workingmen, but also women, who are becoming a larger part of the workforce. These jobs offered high pay, which raises self-confidence on women and brings about independence. This can promote equality between the sexes, something that Indian women have been struggling with their entire lives. Globalization has the power to uproot the traditional views towards women so they can take an equal stance in society[2].
Prospects of higher and quality education have become feasible for those women who can afford them, economically and socially.

Employment in technological and other advanced sectors, which have global bearing, has opened up for suitably qualified women. This boosted augmentation of women’s movements through exposures at the International level will help bring about major changes in the economic, social and political lives of women. This has impacted in the attitude towards women, especially in the urban areas, women enjoy more egalitarian set of gender relationship. Reduction in gender inequalities will have positive effect on women’s empowerment in the socio-economic context. This attitude changes not only in the office but also in the home, will help in the development of more confident among women.

Negative effects of Globalization
Under this heading, I like to discuss some of the areas;
Agriculture and land
According to estimates from World Development Indicators, “Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce half of the world’s food, but earn only ten percent of the world’s income, and own less than one percent of the world’s property (Tomlinson)”[3]. Women are suffering two fold. As women in developing countries move into the work force, their domestic responsibilities are not alleviated. Women work two full time jobs. One in a factory, where they are paid next to nothing, the second is in the home where they are paid nothing.
The three prominent rice-growing states of India are Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, women provide more than 2/3 of the inputs including transplanting, weeding, manuring and fertilizing, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, drying, stacking and carrying produce. In the tribal economy of Orissa, women spent 105.4 hours per year on shifting cultivation compared with 50.11 by the men[4].
Women's double burden - working long hours in the field as well as attending to household works like cooking and collecting water and fuel for the day - is often taken for granted.
Development for poor women has meant the migration of men to cities, higher prices for commodities, poorer job opportunities. “The mixture of corporate capitalism and Western culture models is dissolving family and community social controls as witnessed by higher rates of family violence, rape, divorce, and family breakdown”[5].

On the other side,The traditional role of women in agriculture,livestock and animal
husbandry, Khadi and village industries including handicrafts, handlooms, fisheries, etc, is being undermined because mechanization and automation is becoming prevalent in the market based economy which will adversely affect the village based traditional economy.
Curtailment of state provisions in child care, community care and social security, will increase the dual burden of employment and family responsibilities for women in general.

Privatisation of education and training will increase the cost of getting educated. When family budgets are readjusted, the female children will be the main casualty because most of the resources will be spent to educate the male children.
Dowry
Several scholars emphasize the links between female infanticide, the practice of giving a dowry, the devaluation of females and the alienation of land, women's labour, etc. Krishnaswamy adds hypergamous marriages to the list of reasons for the practice of female infanticide. These marriages prevented the woman from marrying a person of lower social standing, and led to the giving of large dowries because the economic value of the female was lowered. Another reason for female infanticide was the superstitious believes like if you kill a female child, the next one is sure to be a male[6].
"Among the poor, since female labour participation is typically higher and dowry incidence lower than among well-to-do households. But if underemployment among the poor women is high, so that their realized contribution to the household income is low or cultural factors in the region make for strong son-preference and high dowry among all classes, then despite more women entering the labour force, there would be a stronger bias against girls under poverty conditions”[7].
Another issue related with this issue is female infanticide.Even though it is the father who determines the sex of a child, the mother is condemned as unable to give birth to a son[8].The violence of female infanticide, like any other violence against women, is rooted in patriarchy. Those who control the woman's body appropriate the material benefits. Every aspect of a woman's body, sexuality and reproductive rights is reduced to a commodity, completely devaluating her.

Migration of women
Globalization promises to open the "gateway to heaven" in terms of opportunities, availability of labour across boundaries and building one true world. However, what happens is that, a majority of communities and families in the Third World get fragmented so that an exclusive minority may live as citizens of one globalized world.
Globalization offers these women opportunities of work outside their homes, but at the price of surrendering their human rights[9]. Migration of women specially for economic reasons often give rise to exploitation and trafficking in women at the local, regional and global levels.
Beauty pageants and globalization
Women are asked to compare their beauty with one another: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” Indian women, for whom the beauty pageant was once an alien concept, are today successfully drawn into the globalized capitalist system. Woman is identified in terms of her body. Globalization and its impact through the media have defined the ideal body of a “universal” and a “world” woman in India. One of the characteristics of globalization is fragmentations slim, tall, fair, blonde, blue-eyed, etc. An ideal feminine body is defined in terms of its slender shape. “Beauty can never be celebrated by the new global culture. It can only be vulgarized”.[10]

The newspapers and other marriage bureau also reveal the discriminatory gender slant in announcing the need for a bride or a groom. Women in a global market economy set-up are just another commodity to be bought and sold at a price.

Tourism and sex trade
Globalization created competition among states that attempt to make their state wealthier by boosting the economy. The most recent strategy being employed in third world states to bring in foreign currency in the form of tourism. In Britain, just forty percent of the population cannot afford an annual holiday, so the potential of tourism as a national income for third world countries is huge. “In Thailand, the Philippines, the Caribbean, West Africa and Brazil, the growing sex industry is closely linked with the expansion of tourism”[11].

In many of the developing countries, informal sector tourism is inseparable from the sex trade industry of women and children. Sex tourism is based on networks that provide services such as tourist guides, prostitutes, brothels, massage parlors, that serve not only foreign sex tourists but local customers as well. Many people are attracted towards this environment because of the possibility of obtaining money through these activities that do not require any special skill but where the work tool is the body itself. In the case of boys and girls and adolescents, those who are not prostituted are exposed to crime and exploitation. Tourism is not the cause of the sexual exploitation of minors, but it does provide easy access to vulnerable children[12].

Conclusion
Globalisation is a double edged process as far as women are concerned. On the one hand, majority of women in India and other developing countries find themselves stripped off the benefit of social security, government subsidy protection of labour rights and than safety nets. On the other hand there are possibilities of better education facilities and opportunities at the transnational sense which are very attractive to the privileged few.

The main goal of the Department of Women and Child Development is to empower women and to bring them within the purview of the mainstream development process.
Also the capacities and capabilities of women addressing their own development have been the main focus of important NGOs and women’s organizations. But most of the time, what happens is these commendable projects act as information supply agents which do not deal with information demands of special groups such as women. Women get information through various sources that are often not geared to their specific requirements. The activities of economic development of women should be done by them and for them.

Bibliography:

Agarwal, Bina ed. Structures of Patriarchy. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1988.

Kishwar, Madhu. "When Daughters are Unwanted: Sex Determination Tests in India', Manushi, Jan – Feb, 1995.

Krishnaswamy, S. "Female Infanticide in Contemporary India: A Case study of Kallars of Tamil Nadu', in Rehana Ghadially, ed., Women in Indian Society

Mayo, Marjorie. Global Citizens. New York: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc, 2005.
Stephen, Cynthia ed. Women in India: Profiles and Herstories. Bangalore: National Alliance of Women, 1996.
Webliography:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article
http://www.socialwatch.org/en/informesTematicos
http://www.warc.
http://www.warc.ch/24gc/rw014/05.html 29/7/2007.
http://members.tripod.com/global_india1/negative.htm.
http://members.tripod.com/global_india1/negative.htm

[1] Marjorie Mayo, Global Citizens (New York: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc, 2005),16.
[2] The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India is a union of women laborers willing to work and seize any work opportunities they might get. SEWA has established a Women’s Cooperative Bank with 125,000 members, and through the aid of globalization, they have even reached the women in the rural areas of India. http://members.tripod.com 28/7/07.

[3] http://members.tripod.com/global_india1/negative.htm.

[4] Cynthia Stephen, ed. Women in India: Profiles and Herstories (Bangalore: National Alliance of Women, 1996), p.25.

[5] http://members.tripod.com/global_india1/negative.htm
[6] Bina Agarwal, ed. Structures of Patriarchy (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1988), p.102.
[7] S Krishnaswamy, "Female Infanticide in Contemporary India: A Case study of Kallars of Tamil Nadu', in Rehana Ghadially, ed., Women in Indian Society, p.186.
[8] Between 1978 and 1982, there were about 78,000 cases of post-amniocentesis female foeticides in India. .Madhu Kishwar, "When Daughters are Unwanted: Sex Determination Tests in India', Manushi, no.86, (Jan - Feb 1995), pp.15f.

[9] There is very little one can do to redeem women from such situations as their passports are usually taken away from them on arrival in the strange land.
http://www.warc.ch/24gc/rw014/05.html 29/7/2007.

[10] Global watchers and feminist critics say that there is a direct link between the 1991 announcement by the then finance minister, Manmohan Singh, that India would open its markets to the outside world and the victories of Aishwarya Rai as Miss World and Sushmita Sen as Miss Universe in 1994. http://www.warc.ch/24gc/rw014/05.html 29/7/2007
[11] http://www.socialwatch.org/en/informesTematicos

[12] “About 200 girls and women enter prostitution daily, 80 per cent unwillingly”. It is important to note here that females are not just ‘pushed’ into prostitution by a combination of multinational corporations and international bodies but are also ‘pulled’ into prostitution by the increasing ‘sex tourist’ phenomenon. More than 30 million women and children have been victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation in Asia in the past 30 years” (UNICEF). Bangkok is a major destination for sex tourists and the government have allowed this to prosper as a source of national income by “passing an Entertainment Places Act [1966], which had enough loopholes to encourage coffee shops and restaurants to add prostitution to their menus” . http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article

Holistic Evangelism – Bible Women and Founder of Churches

2007-08-20T01:42:00.001-07:00

Holistic Evangelism
The keen spiritual atmosphere of the 1890s, mixed with American interest in other parts of the world, and a sense of urgency to complete the task of evangelization, caused the formation of numerous independent evangelical missions.[1] The Holiness Movement is a predominantly North American Protestant religious Movement arising in the 19th century. It was characterized by an emphasis on the Wesleyan doctrine of sanctification and focused on the post conversion of “entire sanctification”. The Holiness Movement was centered in a deeply emotional and experiential faith.[2] In the mid of 19th century the members of Methodist Church in the United States felt that there was a declining in moral standards of their churches so this movement helped them to address these issues.[3]
The Holiness Movement was officially founded in the “National Camp Meeting Association for the promotion of Christian Holiness”, which met in Vineland, New Jersey, in July of 1867.[4] The Association which latter known as the National Holiness Association, reported that it had 200 full time ‘holiness evangelist’.
The Methodist lay preacher and advocate of women’s ordination Phoebe Palmer was a catalyst for the Holiness Mission, later known as the ‘mother of Holiness Movement’.[5] This movement spread through house meetings and characteristic of Holiness Movement was its support as one of the first churches to accept women in ministry.
The theology of Holiness Movement taught a modified form of John Wesley’s Arminian doctrine of grace, which emphasized a cooperation of the human and divine will in the Christian perfection. Most Holiness Missions began by the efforts of individuals or married partners who journeyed out on faith.[6] About 23 Holiness denominations arouse between 1893 and 1900.[7] Current denominations formed in this period were the Church of the Nazarene, the church of God, and the Pilgrim Holiness Church.[8] Women were most active in the Holiness Movement, which emerged within evangelical circles as the 19th century progressed. [9] The Holiness Movement claimed that God’s grace available not only for salvation but also was given to sanctify and perfect a Christian life.
The Holistic Evangelism was formulated by Phoebe Palmer who traveled as an evangelist throughout the United States, Great Britain and Canada, and it was under her influence Catherine Booth and Frances Willard were called to public ministries. Booth did as much as her husband, William, to establish the Salvation Army.[10] The Holistic Mission was at first nurtured within the mainline Protestant Churches, particularly the Methodist church. Gradually, however, separate Holiness denominations emerged, which were encouraged the women to participate in the ministry in the 19th and 20th century. The Church of Nazarene is the largest of the Holiness Churches which has a strong presence in North America and United Kingdom which guaranteed Women the right to preach in its constitution. [11]
In terms of mission theory, Holiness Missions were committed to world evangelization and the fulfillment of the Great Commission.[12] Martin Wells Knapp, a Methodist, and Seth Rees, a Quaker, in 1897 founded the International Holiness Union and Prayer League whose purpose was to hasten the completion of the Great Commission by sending out holiness evangelists to help to lead missionaries into the experience of sanctification.[13] Knapp and Rees believed that the key to world evangelization was God’s Pentecostal power. To have the power of the full Gospel for mission work, one must be sanctified to keep one’s sanctification; one must be committed to the salvation of others.[14]
When Knapp died in 1901, he left control of God’s Bible School and The Revivalist in the hands of three women: his second wife Minnie Ferle Knapp, Bessie Queen, and Mary Storey.[15] Another holiness woman who ran a Bible school, and funded and administered a missionary movement through her periodical The Vanguard, was Free Methodist Anna Abrams of St. Louis, Missouri.[16]
Bible Women
Aside from Knapp, Queen, Storey, and Abrams, the woman who had the biggest role in early holiness missions was Lettie Burd Cowman, co-founder with her husband of the Oriental Missionary Society, later converted to Grace Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago.[17] Women exercised leadership in all aspects of the early Oriental Missionary Society. Lettie Cowman adopted a “Woman’s Work for Woman” perspective in her desire to improve life for East Asian women, arguing that women missionaries were necessary to evangelize women in Japan.[18] Throughout her career, Lettie Cowman promoted a missiology of world evangelization.
Through Bible School training she could train some women as Bible Women. The quality of Bible women varied considerably. [19] Some of these women, working on a bare subsistence wage, were employed to keep them alive when cast out by their families after conversion.[20] Others were extremely able and effective agents, high motivated and dedicated to their ministry. Much of their effectiveness of their work depended upon the ability of the missionaries to train, direct, and inspire them. Isabella Thoburn and Laura Haygood were taken as a typical example of missionaries engaged in this work. The number of Bible women expanding from 1820 to 1830 about 75 in United States, who were served as full time or pain itinerant preachers.[21]
Women as Founder of Churches
Public female ministry in the 19th and 20th century in Britain and United States can be divided into 3 rough chronological divisions: 1. The period from 1790 to 1840, when women operated as itinerant evangelists with a degree of denominational approval. 2. The 1840 to 1860, when female Preaching was fragmented and incoherent, and 3. The period from 1870to 1920, when women began to achieve a greater measure of lay and clergy rights within a wider range of denomination.[22]
Lettie Cowman was the most prominent American female founder of an independent Holiness Mission.[23] Independent holiness women also founded and directed missions that affiliated with such holiness denominations as the Church of the Nazarene and the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana).
One important example of women’s leadership “on the ground” was the work of holiness women in Swaziland, the earliest mission of the Church of Nazarene.[24] Lula Glatzel and Etta Innis, joined mission in Natal, South Africa, later becomes the founder of churches in Swaziland in 1910.[25] Living in rural Swaziland under great hardship Lula Glatzel and Innis opened two mission stations that they named Peniel and Grace Station. Etta Innis worked and lived there at Grace Station, acting as evangelist and pastor.[26] Innis believed that the education of the children was a route to the Christian life, and so she opened both a Sunday school and a day school. She had a strong emphasis on holistic work with women and children. On the other hand Lula Glatzel stated her mission from the women’s perspective arguing that the “woman of dark Africa is born a slave and a chattel.”[27] She attempted to involve herself to help girls, sold as infants, escapes from forced marriage and also provided medical facilities to the women.[28]
Another woman in other holiness missions in Africa took an active interest in the social condition of women as well. In 1927, Twyla Ludwig[29] took her family to Kenya under the Church of God, raising money herself for passage and salary. Ludwig was working as an evangelist and conducted a crusade against female circumcision, wife beatings and taboos against women under Kima mission. Her goal was to establish “Christian homes where the children would be raised in cleanliness and decency,” and so she taught home economies, including sewing and potter making, so that would earn money for themselves. Though the Church of God refused her to participate actively in the public ministry, so she moved to Nairobi mission and worked under Africa Inland Mission.
The holistic mission with its individualistic and positive view of sanctification legitimated a wide variety of roles for women in the 19th and 20th century.

Reflection
The female ministries in the 19th and 20th century were the emergence of evangelical missions which gave importance on both religious and personal conversion and adopted a pragmatic approach to church growth. Methodism, the most significant outgrowth of the evangelical revival gave women positive roles in those days. But at the same time male dominated western Protestantism resisted women’s desire to exercise public ministry. It sought to limit and restrict their roles and to deny them access to full rights church members, believing not only those roles would contradict Scriptures but also those women’s rights seize denominational control for themselves. Yet, the women who sought these roles consistently viewed their ministry in terms of service and argued that they desired ministries position only because they wished to serve God and God’s people better with a concept of public ministry that was based more on serventhood with rank and authority. With this ambition the women started their ministry with persistence, determinism and faith in God and in the later days they could achieve their goals. This is a challenge to all the women to involve them in the Church ministry.

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Bibliography

Beaver, Pierce R., All Loves Excelling. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1968.
· Gilley Sheridan & Brian Stanley, (Etal), The Cambridge History of Christianity World Christianities: c1815-1914c. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
· Hillerbrand, Hans J., (Ed), The Encyclopedia Of Protestantism. Vol. 2. New York: Rutledge, 2004.
MacHaffie,Barbara J., Her Story. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.
· Robert, Dana J., American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thoughts and Practice. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998
· Schmelzenbach, Lula, The Missionary Prospector: A Life Story of Harmon Schmelzenbach, Missionary to South Africa. Kansas City, MO: Nazarene Publishing House, 1937.

[1] Dana J.Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thoughts and Practice (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998), 231.
[2] Hans J. Hillerbrand, (Ed), The Encyclopedia Of Protestantism Vol. 2 (New York: Rutledge, 2004), 877.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Barbara J. MacHaffie, Her Story (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 109
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Dana J. Robert, op.cit., 232
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] R. Pierce Beaver, All Loves Excelling (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1968), 115-120
[19] Ibid., 120.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Sheridan Gilley & Brian Stanley, (Etal)., The Cambridge History of Christianity World Christianities:c1815-1914c (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 85
[22] Ibid.
[23] Dana J. Robert, op.cit., 237
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Lula Schmelzenbach, The Missionary Prospector: A Life Story of Harmon Schmelzenbach, Missionary to South Africa (Kansas City, MO: Nazarene Publishing House, 1937), 94.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Dana J. Robert, op.cit., 238-238.

‘Heretics’ and Creation of Christian Theology and Church Structure

2007-07-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

‘Heretics’ and Creation of Christian Theology and Church Structure

Organizational equality is maintained by shifting and alternating authority and leadership among members of a group, all of whom in principle have equal access to authority, leadership, and power. This was the case in the early Christian movement, insofar as all members of the community were Spirit-gifted people of God who had received the power and endowment of the Holy Spirit for the building up of the community. In the NT period it was believed, in which the apostle was superior to other Christians, and in the second century, the distinction between clergy and laity became clearer. The local leadership-seems to have developed similar to the administrative offices of Greco-roman private associations and Jewish synagogue organizations.
The shift, which took place in the second century, was from charismatic and communal authority to an authority vested in local officers, who in time took up not only the teaching authority of the prophet and apostle but also the decision-making power of the community. This shift is, at the same time, a shift from alternating leadership available to all the baptized members to patriarchal leadership restricted to male heads of households.
The Greco-Roman patronage system gave them influence and power over the members. Thus, insofar as they provided both legal and financial to the Christian association, wealthy members of the Christian community, especially those who presided over a house church had great influence and power in the church from its very beginnings. In the second century, the shifts of authority and influence from wealthy members of the community to the administrative local officers of the church become visible. This had a consequence that affected the leadership of women, since, in Greco-Roman society and in private associations in particular, wealth gave women great influence and authority. The superiority of local officers thus created three changes: (1) the patriarchalization of local church and leadership; (2) the merger of prophetic and apostolic leadership with the patriarchally defined office of bishop; and (3) the reduction of women’s leadership to marginal positions and its restriction to the sphere of women. The leadership and behavior of women and slaves became restricted and defined according to the patriarchal standards of Greco-Roman society so that outsiders will not take offense at their insubordinate behavior. The patriarchal order of the house, when applied to the order of the church, it restricted the leadership of wealthy women even within the Christian household community.
The Teaching Authority of the Bishop
Early Christian prophecy included the element of ecstasy and of speaking in tongues, as Paul, Acts, Revelation, and hermas documented. Prophets evidently exercise great authority and influence in the first centuries as spokespersons for the resurrected Lord. Women as wells men received such prophetic gifts.
The Didache, a church order probably written in Syria toward the end of the first century, proves that prophets and prophecy continued to have authority. People were reluctant to judge on the prophets’ words and revelations for fear of committing blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The Fourth gospel asserts that the Paraclete was sent to all the disciples and its community. It is thus no accident that the Fourth Gospel contains very powerful stories about women disciples like Martha, Mary, and Mary of Magdala. The shepherd of Hermas, probably written at Rome in the mid-second century, documents the continuing importance of prophecy. The valentinians say that the spirit, which each of the prophets received specially for his or her ministry, is poured out upon all in the church.
Whenever the congregation met, its members drew lots, a traditional Jewish and early Christian practice used to know the will of God. By means of these lots, they were selected for the role of the presbyter, for celebrating the eucharist as bishop, for reading and expounding the Scriptures, or for teaching or addressing the group as a prophet. All members, women and men, were eligible to act as bishop, presbyter, teacher and prophet. Because these functions changed from meeting to meeting, they never became the exclusive right of particular members.
Women were among the prophetic leaders of the Pauline communities. Luke characterizes Mary and Elizabeth, as well as Anna, as prophets. Women prophets are acknowledged as transmitters of apostolic tradition. John, the author of revelation, knows of a woman who was a prophet-teacher and the head of a prophetic school or house church in Thyatira. Thyatira later became a center of the Montanist movement. Asia Minor continued to recognize women prophets even into the second and third centuries.
In the second century, the Montanists attempted to legitimize their prophecy and apostolic origin by establishing a prophetic line of succession. Maxilla and Priscilla were the leading prophets in Montanism. They had equal spiritual gifts and leadership in the Montanist movement. Like Montanus, the woman prophets claimed that the Holy Spirit spoke directly to and through them. This claim was based on faith in the revelations given by the Holy Spirit to women and men in prophetic ecstasy. The movement expected a speedy coming of the Lord and showed a passionate contempt for this world by advocating sexual asceticism, fasting, and martyrdom.
Since the Montainsts’ opponents could not refute the movement on doctrinal grounds, they attacked it by slandering its leading prophets. Charges of immorality and of abandoning their husbands were brought against the women. It was claimed that Monanist leaders committed suicide, and that, in their mysteries, they slaughtered children and mingled their blood in the sacrifices, charges originally made by pagans against all Christians. The Montanists were reviled and finally driven out of the monepiscopal church. The struggle against Montanism, however, indicates that what was at stake was not a doctrinal issue but a competition between radically different church structure and Christian self-understandings. The Montanists, as well as many other groups, stressed the authority of the Spirit, that is, the authority of the prophets or ascetics, over and against the authority of noncharismatic local officers.
It is the Episcopal hierarchy which replaced early Christian prophecy. It seems, in the second century, that the gift of prophecy was claimed first to strengthen the authority of the local bishop then it was occasionally assumed that the bishop possessed the gift of prophecy, and then finally the authority of the bishop came to replace that of the prophet. In later centuries only the official hierarchy could claim to speak “with God’s own voice.”
By the mid-third century, the teaching authority of the bishop was so well developed that it seems to have become the rule. Now the ability to transfer Christian teaching to paper either belonged to the bishop or pointed a man toward consecration as a bishop. Patristic writers, therefore, insist that women cannot teach, have intellectual leadership, or write books. Nevertheless, it took centuries to gradually eliminate or suppress women’s authority as official prophets and teachers in the church. This process was not completely successful, since, throughout the centuries, women have claimed mystic-prophetic teaching authority and have preached even to bishops and popes.
The Apostolic Constitutions of the fourth century declare firmly, “We do not permit our women to teach in the church, but only to pray and listen to those who teach.” Furthermore, they limit the functions of the deaconesses to keeping the doors and assisting the presbyters in the baptism of women for reasons of decency. Thus Montanism, Gnosticism, and the patristic church all appealed to apostolic revelation and tradition to justify their own church orders and theologies.
The Didascalia Apostolorum argues that women were not appointed to teach and to preach. It does, however, acknowledge that women were disciples of Jesus. However, the Lord did not send them “to instruct the people” together with the male disciple. The Dialogue Between a Montanist and an Orthodox highlights the debate around the ecclesial leadership of women, clearly indicating that it centers around questions of public teaching and intellectual theological leadership even in the middle of the fourth century. The orthodox do not permit women to speak in the assemblies, nor to have authority over men, to the point of writing books in their own name: since, such is, indeed, the implication for them of praying with uncovered head.
Conclusion
In many of the churches today believe women are inferior to men on the basis of many biblical references which places women subordinate to men. Having seen the theological and sociological shift from gender unconscious to gender biased in the society that had an impact on the ecclesial realm ultimately, should open our minds to the reality of God who embraces all genders in his ministry. We see in the New Testament history that the stress on sociological and theological submission and patriarchal superordination succeeded over the sociological and theological stress on unselfish love and ministerial service. However, this cannot be justified theologically, since it cannot claim the authority of Jesus for its Christian praxis. The post-Pauline and post-Petrine writers seek to limit women’s leadership roles in the Christian community to roles that are culturally and religiously acceptable. Therefore, it is quite obvious that part of the biblical theology is conformed to the social and religious realities of its time. Our task as future minister is to untwine the calcified truth by bringing women back to its lost position as an active leaders and prophets of our church today. We have hope by the fact that wherever the gospel is preached and heard, the service of women are not totally forgotten because the Gospel story remembers that the discipleship and apostolic leadership of women are important parts of Jesus’ “alternative” praxis of agape and service.