Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 38:2 (Spring 2024)
Article: Women And Men: A Biblical And Theological Perspective
Author: Ian Payne

PP 38:2 (Spring 2024) p. 8

Women And Men: A Biblical And Theological Perspective

Ian Payne

Ian Payne is executive director of Theologians Without Borders. He was principal and head of the department of theology at South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies (SAIACS), Bangalore, India, from 2008 to 2018. He has his PhD in theology from the University of Aberdeen, UK, focused on epistemology, God’s love, and Karl Barth. He is the author of Wouldn’t You Love to Know? Trinitarian Epistemology and Pedagogy and The Message of Humanity (IVP, anticipated). The son of New Zealand missionaries, he grew up in India. After being an architect in New Zealand, he received an MTh at SAIACS in the mid-90s, accompanied by his wife, Judith, and three daughters. From building church buildings, he has been drawn into the excitement of building the church. He has retired from being interim pastor at Eden Community Church, Auckland, and through Theologians Without Borders continues to serve global theological education.

This article is an edited version of a chapter in Ian Payne’s forthcoming book, The Message of Humanity, in The Bible Speaks Today series (IVP, 2025).

“My first memory was from when I was three years old,” he said to me. “I’m clinging to my mother’s sari as my father is strangling my mother!” It helped me understand a little more his struggle to stop beating his wife.

Relationships between men and women can be heaven. They can be hell. How easily men learn they can dominate women! They learn to think they must keep them in line. They learn to treat women as subordinates, as possessions.

“Is a woman a person?” This is the title of Sudhir Kakar’s article, written not long after the nation-shocking rape in a Delhi bus of a young woman dubbed by the media as Nirbhaya.1 Kakar, an Indian psychoanalyst, explores the tension between Western and traditional views of women. Is a woman a person? The answer, it seems, is yes—so long as she is a mother, daughter, sister, or wife. If not, the answer is no. She is just an object, an object for the enjoyment of men, an object for the playhouses of their minds.

The article makes a great discussion point in my theology classes. Is a woman a person? Are men entitled to treat women as subordinate, as possessions? There is plenty of ill-treatment of women in the Bible. Does the Bible permit, even promote, this? Though God’s word comes through patriarchal settings, does it reinforce that patriarchy—or not? By looking at God’s purposes for men and women in creation and in new creation, focusing especially on 1 Corinthians 11:7 and You must have a subscription and be logged in to read the entire article.
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