The Early Church Fathers
Part I

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Very few Christians research the writings of those who established the theological foundations of the church. It is interesting to go back to see what some of them thought about particular things.

                    One of the major conflicts in today’s church concerns the position of women in leadership. Why is there is so much opposition? Perhaps the answer can be found in this writing of Tertullian from "On the Apparel of Women": 

                    "And do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert - that is, death - even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?

                    "Come now; if from the beginning of the world the Milesians sheared sheep, and the Serians spun trees, and the Tyrians dyed, and the Phrygians embroidered with the needle, and the Babylonians with the loom, and pearls gleamed, and onyx-stones flashed; if gold itself also had already issued, with the cupidity which accompanies it, from the ground; if the mirror, too, had license to lie so largely, Eve, expelled from paradise, already dead, would also have coveted these things, I imagine!

                    "No more, then, ought she now to crave, or be acquainted with (if she desires to live again), what, when she was living, she had neither had nor known. Accordingly these things are all the baggage of woman in her condemned and dead state, instituted as if to swell the pomp of her funeral."

What do you suppose Jesus and his mother, Mary (a woman) would have thought about this?

Continue to Part 2

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