mandatory by-product of marriage.
I felt a wave of compassion for all the women who had been exposed to this toxic teaching and were left wondering if they were less loved by God, or who were questioned and challenged over the years about being single or childless or working outside the home. This hardly sounds“ biblical.”
That lesson became a turning point for me. I began to rethink many of the“ biblical womanhood” teachings I had accepted without question over the years and sadly even recycled into some of my early books and Bible studies. Fortunately, those books are now out of print, but it grieves my heart all the same to know I may have added to the confusion and pain many Christian women experience in unpacking their identity. I began to dig deeper into the Scriptures about the roles of women in the church and
home and could find nothing that supported the assertion that a woman’ s primary purpose is linked to marriage and motherhood or that being a mother is a woman’ s highest calling. The lack of Scriptures that speak to women’ s roles, let alone parenting, is truly astounding.
What I further realized is that, if I’ m going to be wise and responsible in discerning the meaning of different passages of Scripture, I needed to consider the few that speak to women’ s roles within the larger context of the patriarchal times in which they were written. Over the years various Bible theologians have studied these passages without agreeing on their meaning, but context gave me clues that my original understanding of biblical womanhood was far too limited.
One much-touted example was the Proverbs 31 woman( aka“ a virtuous woman” or“ a wife
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