What Constantine Built, Scripture Did Not Require
Part 1 of 4 Month of June: Women, Exegesis, and Bible | Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network
There is a question that the Church has not always wanted to ask itself: when we enforce a practice across centuries, are we following the Spirit — or are we simply following the empire that once gave us a building?
Christian tradition has long relied on the concept of authority to justify its structures. But authority derives from somewhere. It flows from Scripture, from the Spirit, from lived apostolic witness — or it flows from the pressures and preferences of the surrounding culture. These are not the same source. And when they are treated as though they are, the result is a theology that has borrowed its logic from the world while dressing it in the language of God.
The Constantinian Shift and the Church’s Mirror
In 313 CE, the Edict of Milan extended legal tolerance to Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. What followed — in the decades and centuries of what scholars call the Constantinian settlement — was a profound transformation of the Church’s relationship to power. A movement born in the margins, among the poor and the colonized, became the official religion of an empire built on hierarchy, slavery, and the subordination of women.
The patriarchal structures of Greco-Roman imperial society did not disappear when Rome became Christian. They migrated into the Church’s governance, its liturgy, and eventually its theology. What had been a social arrangement — the Roman paterfamilias, the exclusion of women from public office, the assumption of male intellectual authority — was gradually given a theological rationale. The cart had been placed before the horse, and then the Church was asked to worship the cart.
Church historian Justo González documents how the post-Constantinian Church absorbed the administrative and social logic of Rome. Bishops began to resemble senators. Church hierarchy mirrored imperial rank. And the women who had led house churches, funded missionary work, and carried the news of the resurrection were gradually — not immediately, but steadily — written out of institutional authority.
What the Text Actually Required
This matters because the claim made to justify women’s exclusion from leadership is almost always a textual one. The appeal is to Scripture — to a handful of passages in the Pauline corpus that, read in a particular way, seem to restrict women’s speech or authority. But the question of which reading is correct cannot be separated from the question of which pressures shaped the interpretation.
When scholars like N.T. Wright and I. Howard Marshall examine the so-called “restrictive passages” in their literary and historical context, a different picture emerges: texts that addressed specific, local problems in specific, culturally fraught communities — not universal, timeless prohibitions leveled at half of humanity.
A practice that expands after Constantine — after the Church begins mirroring imperial patriarchy — and that requires increasingly elaborate textual gymnastics to justify, is not a practice anchored in Scripture. It is a practice anchored in history. And history, unlike Scripture, is subject to correction.
The Theological Weight of Reform
To say that the institutional exclusion of women is a product of cultural accommodation is not to say that tradition is meaningless. Tradition carries weight. But the weight of tradition does not equal the weight of revelation. The Reformation itself was built on precisely this distinction: the recognition that what the Church had inherited was not always what God had intended.
The World Council of Churches and numerous denominational bodies have undertaken serious re-examination of these questions. What they have found, consistently, is that the strongest arguments for women’s exclusion from leadership are not arguments from Scripture — they are arguments from the Church’s imperial history, dressed in scriptural clothing.
If a practice cannot be grounded in Scripture or in the movement of the Spirit — if it can only be grounded in the fact that Rome once organized itself a certain way — then it carries no binding theological authority. It carries only the authority of inertia. And inertia is not the same as obedience.
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Resources
Justo González, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1 — Standard reference on the early Church’s encounter with Roman imperial culture
N.T. Wright, “Women’s Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis” — Scholarly argument for women’s full participation from a conservative Anglican theologian
I. Howard Marshall, Pastoral Epistles (ICC Commentary) — Critical exegesis of the Pauline passages most often cited against women’s leadership
World Council of Churches: Women in Church and Society — Ecumenical documentation of denominational debates and theological conclusions
Oxford: Woman in the World of Jesus — Historical study of women’s roles in first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts
Thank you so much for this discussion. It is very important for women to read how much Roman patriarchy influenced the development of the early Christian church, using carefully chosen biblical passages to bolster their claims that came more from their belief that women were inferior and ought to be subservient than from truly scriptural sources.
I grew up in the 1960s in a church where women preachers would come to lead revival meetings. My grandmother, though not ordained, would preach when the pastor was away and fill-in at other area churches, too.
It wasn't until I was almost 30 years old that I realized how special this experience was. Thank you for your writing.