Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ by Cynthia Long Westfall

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ by Cynthia Long Westfall Gail P. Streete cynthia long westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016). Pp. ix + 348. Paper $32.99. As anyone who wants to decipher the tangle of the canonical writings of the apostle Paul knows, there are cryptic sayings, confusing responses to questions or problems that do not themselves appear in the texts, and an overall challenge to understand Paul both in his context and against his context. Paul is not our contemporary, yet his writings have shaped contemporary Christian views of Jesus, the church, and the human person. For some, particularly evangelical scholars, the challenge is to understand Paul in such a way that he is responsive to his context but not constrained by it, a challenge particularly difficult in reading those passages that appear offensive to modern sensibilities, especially regarding sexuality and gender. As Westfall notes, “The practice of a rigid hierarchy based on gender in the church and the home is not consistent with the cultural move to a democratic worldview and its privileges” (p. 313). Westfall aims both to explain “those Pauline passages that concern gender” and to “move toward a canon-based Pauline theology of gender” (p. ix). She has five priorities that inform this movement: fidelity to the “texts and contexts of the Pauline corpus,” interpretations that attempt “to be intelligible within a reconstruction of the narrative of Paul’s life,” interpretations that seek to be “understandable within the context of language, culture, and situation” of the texts, interpretations that “strive to be coherent” within the context of Pauline theology, and contemporary applications that are “consistent and coherent” with the “biblical worldview” of the contemporary interpreter (p. ix). Thus, her work is both commentary and theology, as she takes the reader through a wide-ranging exegesis of the Pauline material in nine chapters: “Culture,” “Stereotypes,” “Creation,” “The Fall,” “Eschatology,” “The Body,” “Calling,” and “Authority,” with a special chapter on “1 Timothy 2:11–15.” She urges evangelical scholars to “trust the text” (p. 314), meaning that cherished interpretations, theologies, and theories should not stand in the way of a close rereading of the Pauline canon. Yet even the idea of a Pauline canon is an interpretation. W. assumes that all the letters attributed to Paul in the NT canon are in fact written by him and need to be interpreted as parts of a whole corpus. What that means for her argument is that she is does not have the luxury of rejecting such passages as 1 Cor 14:33–35, Eph 5:23, or 1 Tim 2:12 and the like as being “inauthentic” or later interpolations into the “genuine” letters of Paul. She interprets them in such a way as to make them cohere with the entirety of Pauline theology, even if they appear to be inconsistent or contradictory. She does this in part by extensive contextualization, reading “Paul” both within and against his contemporary contexts, in understandings of the social order, most importantly marriage, family, and the client–patron system. This contextualizing sometimes results in a piling-on of examples (such as the meaning of “head” in several places, pp. 37–42, 62, 63, 79–105, 233), so that the text becomes extremely dense at times. Westfall’s work seems relatively uninfluenced by some major contemporary theoretical discussions. Although this is consistent with her aim to grapple primarily with texts, it does leave some puzzling gaps from works on gender in the Pauline literature, excluding any insights from queer theory, for example. A startling omission is Dale B. Martin’s The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), especially when it addresses [End Page 722] the vexed issue of “veiling” in 1 Cor 11:3–16, which occurs several times in W.’s book. The topic of men and gender, which is often overlooked in contemporary discussions, is an important contribution by W. to the discussion of Paul and gender. She ignores questions of both male and female homosexuality, alluding to Rom 1:18–32 only in...