Professor Tim Schramm, in his lecture “Exegesis of the biblical texts traditionally used to oppose women’s ordination,” concludes after the exegesis of the Apostle Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians 11:2-16 and 14:26-40: “Among the followers of Christ there was equality. Jesus paid attention to both men and women. The idea that women should be subordinate to men was not part of His teaching, for that would contradict His commandment of love. Through His teaching and His conduct, Jesus broke down the barriers that shaped the social and religious life of His era.”
After Easter, the model of relationships established by Jesus was applied in the baptismal theology of the church. According to this theology, whoever has been baptized into Christ has put on Christ. Through baptism we become daughters and sons of God. Christians are children of God and therefore “a new creation – everything old has passed away, everything has become new” (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15). Through baptism we are all children of God, without any discrimination. Baptism has an exhilarating, creative, and also leveling effect. The one who has been baptized lives in this world, but is no longer of this world. The water of baptism washes away all distinctions, sociological and anthropological, those relating to heilsgeschichte, all the distinctions that had until then been so dominant. In the Christian Church there are no distinctions between Jews and Greeks, between slaves and free, between men and women – we are all one in Jesus Christ (Gal 3:28).
It is truly astonishing that Paul was able to learn this kind of theology, that he was able to accept such ideas and pass them on. What made this possible was Paul’s encounter with Christ. No one had raised Paul in this way. Paul, before he became a Christian, was by his own words a strict Pharisee and therefore an expert at dividing the world between the clean and the unclean, between Jews and non-Jews, between sinners and the righteous, between men and women. As a Christian, Paul coped well with his newfound freedom. His missionary practice and the congregations he founded took for granted the assumption of the equal status of men and women. Like no one else, he took up the words and work of Jesus and spread them throughout the whole world.