6. The Brokenness in Church History, Part 2: Christian Institutions

It is not just Christian leaders that are fallible. Christian institutions are fallible as well and have made some grave mistakes throughout history. That does not mean all of the Church’s theology is wrong. That does not mean God has not been at work. It does mean that Christians in every generation should continually examine the Scriptures to ensure the theology we have inherited matches with the teaching of God, Jesus, and the apostles. It does mean that there may be areas – even major areas – where the Church needs reform, even today. God promises to guide us and lead us in all truth, so we can trust the Spirit’s leading to do just that today.

Note: what I write about in this section are areas where major Christian institutions have gravely erred. This does not mean there were not individuals or smaller Christian groups that disagreed with these errors and fought against them. In each case I give, there were. However, these examples are still relevant, because the Church as an institution plays an integral role in what Christians understand to be orthodox theology. My point is that the Church has been wrong, and we should judge all doctrine by Scripture, even if the theology we have inherited is centuries old. As I show below, the Church has erred for centuries over certain topics and has needed reform. This may be needed again. God’s Word is the guide.

1.     Slavery: Perhaps the Clearest Example of Biblical Interpretation Requiring Correction

American slavery gives us an especially powerful example because Christians argued directly from the Bible.

It would be historically false to say all Christians supported slavery. Christians were also enormously important within abolitionism.

That is precisely the point.

Christians who believed the Bible reached opposite conclusions about an extraordinarily serious moral question.

Virginia Baptist minister Thornton Stringfellow published an extensive biblical defense of slavery. He appealed to the patriarchs, Mosaic law, Jesus, Paul, and Philemon. He explicitly argued that Scripture showed that “slavery has the sanction of God, and is not sinful.” He believed abolitionists were misreading God's Word. (Stringfellow)

Other Christians read the same Bible and concluded that slavery fundamentally contradicted God's will. Eventually, many churches that had tolerated or defended American slavery acknowledged grave error. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention—the largest Protestant denomination in the United States—formally acknowledged that slavery played a role in its own formation and that many Southern Baptist predecessors had defended slaveholding, participated in it, supported it, or acquiesced in it. The denomination repudiated racism and formally expressed repentance. (Southern Baptist Convention, “Racial Reconciliation”)

The Bible had not changed.

Christian interpretation had.

That should profoundly humble anyone who says:

Christians have interpreted this verse this way for generations; therefore that interpretation cannot be wrong.

History shows that it can.

2.     Christians and Jews: A Long Tradition Can Require Repentance

The history of Christian treatment of Jewish people provides another painful example.

Jesus was Jewish.

Mary was Jewish.

The apostles were Jewish.

The earliest Church was Jewish.

Christianity arose completely within Israel's Scriptures, Israel's God, and Israel's hope.

Yet Christian history produced long and influential traditions of anti-Jewish theology and rhetoric. (Sloyan)

Luther's writings provide one horrifying example, but the problem was vastly larger than Luther.

Modern Christianity has undergone significant reassessment.

Vatican II's Nostra Aetate, for example, explicitly stated that Christ's death cannot be blamed indiscriminately upon all Jewish people then living or upon Jews today. It declared that Jews should not be presented as “rejected or accursed by God” and condemned hatred, persecution, and antisemitism directed against Jews. (Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate sec. 4)

Again, I view this as good news about the Church.

Christians can repent.

Christians can reconsider theology.

Christians can recognize that inherited ways of reading Scripture produced terrible fruit and return to Scripture with greater humility.

That is not evidence against Christianity.

It is evidence against Christian infallibility.

3. Religious Persecution and Coercion

One of the clearest and most painful demonstrations of the fallibility of the Church is the long Christian history of religious coercion.

For many centuries, major Christian leaders, churches, and governments accepted an assumption that Christians today reject: (Bradley; Peters)

Religious truth can legitimately be enforced through civil power.

The consequences ranged enormously.

Sometimes coercion meant losing legal rights.

Sometimes it meant confiscation of property.

Sometimes exile.

Sometimes forced religious conformity.

Sometimes imprisonment.

Sometimes war.

And sometimes death.

This history was never uniform. Different churches, countries, rulers, centuries, and theologians behaved differently. There were always Christians who opposed coercion, sometimes at great personal cost.

But the historical record is devastating:

For centuries, Christians repeatedly used political and institutional power to punish people for what they believed about God.

From a Persecuted Church to a Coercive Christian State

The earliest Christians lived without control of the Roman government and were themselves periodically persecuted by it.

That changed dramatically after Christianity gained imperial power.

By the late fourth century, Roman emperors were beginning to legislate Christian orthodoxy. In 380, Emperor Theodosius I issued an edict identifying the Trinitarian understanding of Christianity as the official religion his subjects were expected to follow. Under Theodosius and his successors, laws increasingly penalized religious groups classified as heretics and also restricted Jews, pagans, and others. People could lose access to public office, legal privileges, property, assemblies, or even residence in particular places because of their religious identity. (Hunt 57–68)

Something enormous had changed.

Christians had once asked governments to stop persecuting them.

Now Christian rulers increasingly used government to enforce Christian orthodoxy.

That should make Christians pause.

Christians Against Other Christians

Religious coercion was not reserved for people outside Christianity.

Christians also persecuted other Christians.

Around 385, Priscillian, a Christian bishop condemned for heresy and other alleged offenses, was executed under the Christian emperor Magnus Maximus. Importantly, prominent Christians protested his execution. The idea that heresy deserved death was therefore never universally accepted. (Toom 470–84)

After Priscillian, Western Europe appears to have gone roughly six centuries without another documented execution specifically for heresy. (Toom 470–84; Barbezat 399–420)

But the underlying idea that governments could enforce religious truth did not disappear.

In 1022, people condemned as heretics were burned at Orléans. (Barbezat 399–420)

During the following centuries, persecution became increasingly organized.

One of the most disturbing examples was the Albigensian Crusade beginning in 1209 A.D. Pope Innocent III called a crusade into southern France against a region where Christians condemned as heretics had become established. The campaign became an extraordinarily violent war. Modern scholarship describes it as the first crusading holy war in which Christians received the spiritual rewards associated with crusade for fighting other Christians accused of heresy. (Pegg 470–97 A.D.)

Think about that.

Christians went to war against other Christians over theology.

People could believe they were serving God by participating.

This shows how dangerous religious certainty can become when joined to political and military power.

The Inquisitions

In the thirteenth century, the prosecution of heresy became more institutionalized.

Pope Gregory IX began appointing papal inquisitors in the 1230s. Inquisitorial systems investigated accusations of heresy, questioned suspects, sought recantations, imposed penances or imprisonment, and worked in conjunction with secular governments. (Peters)

Ecclesiastical authorities did not ordinarily carry out executions themselves.

That distinction matters.

But it can also obscure the moral reality if stated without explanation.

Church tribunals could determine that someone was an obstinate or relapsed heretic and then deliver that person to a secular government operating under laws that allowed death for heresy. (Peters)

The civil official might light the fire.

But the religious process had helped put the condemned person there.

This is the world in which Thomas Aquinas could write that persistent heretics should be “severed from the world by death.” I believe his position was deeply wrong, but it was not historically isolated. It reflected a larger Christian system that had increasingly accepted the idea that theological error could become a civil crime. (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 11, art. 3)

Jews and Religious Coercion

Christians also used coercion against Jewish communities.

In the early seventh century, the Visigothic king Sisebut ordered the Jews of his kingdom to convert to Christianity. For decades afterward, Christian councils and rulers produced laws dealing with Jews and forcibly baptized former Jews. Cambridge scholarship describes Visigothic Spain as an exceptional case in late antiquity because of the scale and persistence of these forced-conversion policies. (Laham Cohen 42–51)

Centuries later, pressure on Jewish communities again became severe in Christian Europe. Some Jews faced the choice of conversion or death; others lived under legal, economic, or social pressures that made conversion increasingly difficult to call entirely free. (Sloyan; Highfield)

And in Spain in 1492, the Catholic monarchs ordered Jews who would not convert to leave the kingdom. (Highfield)

This was Christianity being spread not merely by persuasion.

It was backed by power.

Muslims Under Christian Rule

The Christian relationship with Muslims was also complicated.

The medieval Crusades against Muslim powers involved warfare justified in explicitly religious terms, but warfare between political states is not identical to forced conversion, and the two should not simply be collapsed into one category.

There are, however, unmistakable examples of religious coercion once Muslim populations came under Christian rule.

After centuries of coexistence among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in parts of Iberia, the situation changed dramatically as Christian kingdoms consolidated control. (Highfield)

In 1492 Jews who refused baptism were expelled from Spain. In 1502 Muslims in Castile likewise faced the choice of conversion or emigration. Muslims in other Spanish territories later faced similar pressures, and eventually the Morisco population—people of Muslim ancestry who had become nominal Christians, often under coercive circumstances—was itself expelled. (Highfield)

In Granada, Christian authorities oversaw mass baptisms, the transformation of mosques into churches, and eventually a legal order in which Christianity became the only permitted religion in Castile. (Highfield)

Again, this is not the gospel spreading because someone heard about Jesus and freely believed.

It is the state determining what religion people were permitted to practice.

The Reformation Did Not Solve the Problem

Religious persecution was not fundamentally a medieval Catholic problem.

The Reformation broke Western Christianity apart theologically.

It did not immediately break the assumption that governments should enforce religious truth.

Catholics persecuted Protestants.

Protestants persecuted Catholics.

Catholics and Protestants both persecuted Anabaptists.

Different Protestant groups persecuted other Protestants.

Anti-Trinitarian Christians could be - and were - executed.

Religious identity could determine whether someone was imprisoned, expelled, stripped of rights, or killed.

Cambridge's History of Christianity estimates that from the 1520s into the seventeenth century, roughly 5,000 people were executed for religion in Europe through judicial processes enforcing correct religious belief and practice. The victims included Anabaptists, Reformed Protestants, and Roman Catholics. (Gregory)

Within only about a decade after the first Anabaptist executions in 1525, nearly 500 known or probable Anabaptist executions had occurred in central Europe. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant authorities persecuted Anabaptists, many of whom were themselves advocating forms of Christianity that rejected the coercive union of Church and state. (Gregory)

Think about the tragedy of that.

Christians were killing Christians over baptism.

Over Communion.

Over the authority of the pope.

Over the Trinity.

Over what constituted the true Church.

Over which interpretation of Christianity the government would permit.

Under Catholic Queen Mary I of England, roughly 290 people condemned as Protestant heretics were burned. (Smith 353–86)

Under the later Protestant government of Elizabeth I, heresy executions were much rarer, but around 189 Catholics were executed under laws treating many Catholic activities as treasonous. The political circumstances were complicated, particularly because England faced genuine threats involving foreign Catholic powers, but religion and political loyalty had become inseparably intertwined. (Houliston and Muller)

In Reformed Geneva, Michael Servetus was executed after rejecting orthodox Trinitarian theology. (Schaff, vol. 8)

The Protestant Reformation demonstrated powerfully that the Catholic Church could be challenged.

But many Protestant institutions and governments still had to learn that religious freedom has to include people whose theology they believed was wrong.

This Was Bigger Than One Church

That point is essential.

This history cannot fairly be reduced to:

“Catholics were intolerant.”

Nor can it be reduced to:

“Protestants were intolerant.”

For long periods of European history, Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed Protestants, Anglicans, and other state-supported Christian traditions operated with versions of the same basic assumption:

A religiously unified society was desirable, and government could legitimately help preserve that unity.

Modern historical scholarship notes that even after the wars of the Reformation, early modern European societies commonly assumed the necessity of one state-sanctioned church supporting civil authority. Catholic and Protestant countries differed profoundly about which church possessed the truth, but they often shared the assumption that religious conformity was a legitimate concern of government. (Bradley)

That is what makes this such an important example of institutional Christian fallibility.

The problem survived enormous theological divisions.

Different groups inherited the same basic instinct:

We possess the truth.

Religious error is dangerous.

Therefore power may be used to suppress religious error.

The targets changed depending on who controlled the government.

The principle remained frighteningly resilient.

This Does Not Mean Every Christian Supported It

There is another side to this history that matters.

Christians repeatedly resisted religious coercion.

Some protested executions for heresy.

Some defended freedom of conscience.

Some religious minorities, particularly groups who experienced persecution themselves, began articulating stronger understandings of the separation between the Church and coercive government.

So I am not arguing that “Christianity persecuted everyone for centuries” as though Christians unanimously agreed.

They did not.

Nor am I saying that every act of political violence involving Christians was motivated purely by theology. Politics, territorial ambition, ethnicity, economics, social fear, and personal power frequently mixed with religion.

History is more complicated than that.

But acknowledging complexity cannot erase the central fact:

Major Christian institutions repeatedly accepted coercion in matters of faith.

People suffered because of it.

People lost homes because of it.

People were expelled because of it.

People were imprisoned because of it.

And people died because of it.

The Church Reconsidered

Thankfully, Christian theology did not remain frozen.

Modern Catholicism itself gives us an example of institutional reconsideration.

At Vatican II in 1965, the Catholic Church explicitly affirmed a human right to religious freedom. Dignitatis Humanae declared that people should be “immune from coercion” in religious matters and that no one should be forced to act contrary to his or her beliefs. (Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae secs. 2, 12)

The document acknowledged that in Christian history there had at times appeared ways of acting that were “hardly in accord with the spirit of the Gospel or even opposed to it.” (Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae sec. 12)

I think that acknowledgment is important.

It is hopeful.

The Church can reconsider.

Christian institutions can repent and reform.

Christians can look back at something once defended by theologians, popes, pastors, monarchs, churches, councils, and governments and finally say:

We were wrong.

Why This History Matters

Most Christians today would be horrified by the idea that someone should be burned because he or she rejects the Trinity.

We would be horrified by a government forcing a Jewish family to be baptized.

We would be horrified by telling Muslims that they must become Christians or leave their homeland.

We would be horrified by Catholics executing Protestants because they rejected Catholic doctrine.

We would be horrified by Protestants executing Anabaptists because they rejected infant baptism.

And we should be.

Jesus taught.

Jesus persuaded.

Jesus rebuked.

Jesus warned.

Jesus called people to repentance.

But he did not instruct his followers to imprison people who rejected him or kill people who interpreted theology incorrectly.

Christianity is supposed to invite people into truth.

Faith coerced by fear of imprisonment, exile, or death is not genuine faith.

And yet generations of Christians built theological systems in which religious coercion appeared not merely permissible, but righteous.

That should make us humble.

The Bible did not change.

Jesus did not change.

Christian interpretation changed.

Christians eventually became willing to reconsider beliefs about the relationship between Church, state, conscience, and religious freedom that had been embedded in Christian societies for centuries.

That does not prove that every ancient Christian doctrine is wrong.

It does not prove that the Church is wrong about the Trinity, Jesus, eternal punishment, the Holy Spirit, or any other doctrine examined on this website.

Those questions must still be evaluated on their own biblical evidence.

But religious coercion demonstrates something critically important:

“Christians believed this for centuries” cannot end a theological discussion.

Neither can:

“The Church has always taught this.”

History shows that Christian institutions can preserve serious errors for very long periods of time.

Sometimes reform comes slowly.

Sometimes Christians have to return to Scripture and recognize that what they inherited does not reflect the character and teaching of God.

That possibility did not disappear when religious persecution became unacceptable.

It may still be true today.

It is wise to study Christian tradition and consider what there is to learn from it.

It is wise to study Christian history and consider what we can learn from those who have lived before us.

But neither tradition nor history is the final standard, and it is unwise to think that Christian tradition and history are infallible.

Only God's Word is.

4. The Crusades

The Crusades provide an example of large parts of the institutional Church becoming convinced that warfare itself could be turned into a sacred Christian undertaking.

Historical context matters. The First Crusade did not appear out of nowhere. By the late eleventh century, the Byzantine Empire had lost much of Asia Minor to Turkish powers, and Byzantine emperor Alexios I sought military assistance from the West. Pope Urban II responded by preaching an armed expedition at the Council of Clermont in 1095. Christians who took the cross could understand themselves as aiding Eastern Christians, protecting access to holy places, undertaking a pilgrimage, and serving God. Crusading was also enormously expensive; many participants sold or mortgaged property to finance the journey. It is therefore far too simplistic to assume that everyone who went on crusade was motivated by greed or hatred. Many appear to have sincerely believed they were doing something holy. (Frankopan 1–12; Park 1–14)

That sincerity is precisely what makes the history so disturbing.

The Church did not merely permit Christians to participate in a military campaign. Crusading became a religious act. In a surviving letter written soon after Clermont, Urban described the expedition as a preparation for “the remission of all their sins.” Later crusading developed an elaborate system of spiritual privileges and indulgences associated with taking the cross. Warfare, pilgrimage, penance, and salvation became intertwined. (Urban II; Park 1–14)

I believe that was a catastrophic theological mistake.

Whatever position Christians take on the separate question of whether governments may ever use military force, crusading went much further. The Church placed its spiritual authority behind military expeditions and taught Christians that participation in those wars could become part of their penitential devotion to God.

The consequences appeared almost immediately.

In 1096, before the main crusading armies even reached the eastern Mediterranean, groups associated with the First Crusade attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland. Jewish communities in places including Speyer, Worms, and Mainz suffered terrible violence. These massacres were not simply ordered by Pope Urban II, and some Christian bishops and local authorities attempted to protect Jewish people. That distinction matters. But the attacks nevertheless emerged from the religious fervor unleashed by the crusading movement, as some crusaders turned the logic of holy warfare against Jewish neighbors living much closer to home. (Chazan 50–136)

Then came Jerusalem.

On July 15, 1099, crusaders captured Jerusalem after a siege. What followed was mass killing. Medieval Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Armenian sources differ in details and casualty estimates, and some famous numerical descriptions are clearly rhetorical or exaggerated. But the basic historical fact is not seriously in doubt: after entering the city, crusaders killed large numbers of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Modern historian Thomas Fudge, after comparing the different source traditions, concludes that the sources consistently attest violence, bloodshed, and mass killing during the conquest. (Fudge 448–69)

Christians had traveled thousands of miles believing they were serving God.

They reached the city associated with Jesus' teaching, crucifixion, and resurrection.

And they slaughtered people there.

I find that impossible to reconcile with Jesus' teaching to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44).

The crusading movement continued for centuries. The Second Crusade (1147–1149) followed the fall of Edessa. The Third Crusade (1189–1192) followed Saladin's capture of Jerusalem in 1187 and brought some of the most famous rulers of medieval Europe into the conflict, including Richard I of England. These later campaigns contained their own complicated mixture of military strategy, diplomacy, sincere religious devotion, political ambition, courage, cruelty, and suffering.

One episode from the Third Crusade is especially difficult. After the surrender of Acre in 1191, negotiations over prisoners and ransom broke down. On August 20, Richard ordered the execution of the greater part of the Muslim garrison being held by the crusaders. The precise circumstances and responsibility for the failed negotiations have been debated, but the mass execution itself is well established. (Gillingham 192–210)

Again, putting a cross on an army did not make the violence holy.

The Fourth Crusade makes the contradiction even more obvious. Pope Innocent III called for another expedition intended ultimately to advance toward the Muslim-controlled eastern Mediterranean. Financial and political circumstances diverted the crusaders first toward Zara, a Christian city, and eventually toward Constantinople, the great Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire. In 1204, crusaders captured and brutally sacked Constantinople. Churches were plundered. Sacred objects and relics were carried away. The Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates described the desecration of Christian holy places with horror. Even Pope Innocent III later condemned what had happened, accusing crusaders of violating holy places and carrying away crosses and relics. (Paterson 97–122; Choniates; Innocent III)

Think about what had happened.

A military movement preached by the Western Church to serve Christ ended with Western Christians attacking one of the greatest Christian cities in the world.

Christians attacked Christians.

They plundered Christian churches.

And they did it while still acting within a movement that had been endowed with extraordinary religious significance.

The logic of crusading eventually turned even more explicitly against other Christians. In 1208, Pope Innocent III proclaimed what became known as the Albigensian Crusade against alleged heresy in southern France. The conflict lasted for roughly two decades. Historian Mark Gregory Pegg describes it as the first crusading holy war in which Christians were promised the spiritual rewards of crusading while fighting other Christians, and he identifies the massacre at Béziers in 1209 as one of the campaign's most horrifying episodes. (Pegg 470–97)

I do not need to pretend medieval Christians were uniquely cruel people in order to condemn this.

Their world was violent.

Political authority and religion were deeply intertwined.

Muslim powers also fought wars, conquered territory, enslaved people, and committed atrocities.

Christian communities in the East faced real military threats.

But none of it changes my conclusion about crusading as a Christian religious system.

I believe crusading as a Christian religious system was indefensible.

The Church should never have taught Christians that killing people in a Church-authorized military campaign could function as an act of devotion, pilgrimage, penance, or spiritual merit. Christians should never have massacred Jewish communities in the name of religious zeal. Christians should never have slaughtered the inhabitants of Jerusalem and celebrated the conquest as a sacred victory. Christians should never have sacked Christian Constantinople. Christians should never have been offered crusading spiritual privileges for going to war against other Christians over alleged heresy.

These conclusions do not require us to claim that every crusader was personally evil.

That would miss the point.

Many of them may have been sincere.

Many may have believed Church leaders who told them that taking the cross was righteous.

And that is exactly why the Crusades belong in this article.

The problem was not simply that individual Christians sometimes behaved badly while ignoring their theology.

The theology itself could tell Christians that violence was holy.

The institutional Church could authorize it.

Popes could preach it.

Preachers could promise spiritual reward for it.

Thousands of Christians could accept it.

And the system could continue for generations.

That is one of the clearest examples in Christian history of why widespread agreement, institutional authority, religious sincerity, and centuries of tradition cannot by themselves establish that something is right.

Christians can sincerely believe they are defending God while being terribly wrong about what God requires.

The Crusades should remind us that even teachings endorsed by enormously powerful Christian institutions must still be tested against the life and teaching of Jesus and against God's Word.

5. Treatment of Women

Another area where Christian history should make us humble is the treatment of women.

This history needs to be told carefully.

Christianity did not simply make women's lives worse. Christian women exercised enormous spiritual influence throughout Christian history. Convents sometimes provided women with education, community, leadership, and opportunities unavailable elsewhere. Women founded religious communities, cared for the sick and poor, wrote theology and devotional works, served as missionaries, challenged rulers, and sometimes confronted the Church itself. Some Christian teachings also challenged aspects of the surrounding cultures' treatment of women. (Hall 181–212; Macy)

So I am not arguing that Christianity has been uniformly hostile toward women.

Nor is my historical argument simply that women were sometimes restricted from teaching or holding particular church offices. Christians today continue to disagree about whether Scripture reserves certain teaching or pastoral roles for men, and I address that biblical question elsewhere.

That disagreement is not the historical argument I am making here.

A Christian can believe that men and women have different roles in the Church without believing that women are intellectually inferior, less capable of studying theology, or especially vulnerable to demonic influence because they are female.

My question here is narrower:

Did Christians sometimes mistake fallen human assumptions about women for God’s order?

I believe the historical evidence shows that they did.

For long periods of Christian history, influential theologians and Christian institutions accepted assumptions about women's weakness, dependence, intellectual capacity, or natural subordination that most Christians today would reject. Those assumptions could affect women's education, religious authority, family life, and intellectual opportunities.

When Subordination Was Explained Through Supposed Inferiority

One important example comes from Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential theologians in Christian history.

In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas considered whether woman's subjection to man existed only because of the Fall. He answered that one kind of subjection did result from sin, but another existed even before sin. (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 92, art. 1)

His reason was explicit:

“Woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates.” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 92, art. 1)

The significant point is not merely that Aquinas believed men and women had different roles. Many Christians still believe that today.

The significant point is the reasoning he used.

Aquinas connected women's natural subordination with what he understood to be men's greater rational discernment. Elsewhere in the same discussion, he argued that woman's particular role as man's “helper” concerned reproduction, adding that for other kinds of work “man can be more efficiently helped by another man.” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 92, art. 1)

Aquinas certainly did not believe women lacked souls, reason, dignity, or the capacity for salvation. His thought was considerably more nuanced than simply saying that women were worthless or incapable of reason.

But neither should Christians minimize what he actually wrote.

One of Christianity's most influential theologians incorporated assumptions about women's lesser rational capacity into his explanation of a hierarchy he believed belonged to the created order.

Most Christians today—including many who continue to distinguish the ecclesiastical roles of men and women—would reject that reasoning. They do not believe that women are naturally less capable of rational thought, theology, education, leadership, or intellectual work because they are female.

That difference matters historically.

The stronger historical pattern is not that every Christian institution said exactly the same thing about women.

It is that assumptions about women's natural weakness or lesser capacity could become intertwined with Christian theology and Christian institutions.

Men overwhelmingly controlled formal theological education. (Frankforter 333–47)

Men dominated the universities in which scholastic theology developed.

Men occupied the ecclesiastical offices that formally interpreted doctrine and governed the Church.

Men produced most of the theological literature that later generations inherited.

Those realities did not prove that women were less capable. But they helped create an intellectual world in which men overwhelmingly defined the formal theological conversation while women had far fewer opportunities to participate in it.

This does not mean that every medieval Christian believed women were intellectually inferior.

It does mean that assumptions about female weakness, lesser rational capacity, and natural subordination became influential enough to appear within major theological and institutional frameworks and to be defended as part of God's created order.

Christians today would reject much of that reasoning.

A Christian woman does not become less capable of studying Scripture, theology, philosophy, history, medicine, mathematics, or science because she is female.

Women now study and teach at Christian universities and seminaries across the world.

Even Christian traditions that continue to distinguish the ecclesiastical roles of men and women do not defend those distinctions by arguing that men's reason naturally surpasses women's or that women are intellectually like children.

That change is significant.

The Bible did not change.

Christian assumptions about women did.

Women and Education

One of the clearest consequences was women's limited access to formal intellectual and theological life.

Medieval and early modern universities were institutions for men. Women were excluded from the formal training that produced theologians, philosophers, lawyers, and other professional intellectuals. One historian puts the consequence bluntly: because women were excluded from universities and formal scholastic training, developing careers as professional theological thinkers was virtually impossible for them. (Frankforter 333–47)

Again, the history is not simple.

Girls were educated in households, elementary schools, convents, and other settings, and some women became remarkably learned. Nunneries in particular could create spaces where women read, wrote, studied Scripture, produced literature, and exercised significant leadership. (Hall 181–212)

Women such as Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and many others demonstrate that female Christian intellectual and spiritual life never disappeared.

But their exceptional prominence also highlights the larger limitation.

A gifted Christian boy could, at least in principle, enter the formal educational structures that produced theologians and church leaders.

A gifted Christian girl generally could not.

Imagine the theological voices Christianity never heard because women were largely excluded from the institutions where theology was formally studied and defined.

Christians today may still disagree about ordination or particular offices in the Church.

But women are no longer broadly excluded from serious education in theology, Scripture, philosophy, science, or history in the way they often were within earlier Christian societies.

Whatever combination of social, legal, theological, economic, and cultural factors contributed to this pattern, women generally had far fewer opportunities than men for formal education and intellectual formation. That does not mean women were uneducated. Many learned in households, convents, courts, schools, and other settings, and some became remarkably accomplished intellectual and spiritual leaders.

But access to the formal educational structures available to men was profoundly unequal.

The Witch Hunts

Perhaps the darkest example belongs here, although it too needs careful historical qualification.

The European witch hunts were not only against women.

Men were accused as well.

Patterns varied enormously from one country to another.

In some places witch hunting was intense; in others it barely occurred.

Accusations could begin among ordinary neighbors rather than church officials. Economic tensions, local conflicts, politics, legal systems, popular superstition, fear of magic, and religious beliefs all contributed. Catholic and Protestant authorities both participated, while other Christian officials sometimes resisted or halted prosecutions.

But one fact is impossible to ignore:

The overwhelming majority of people accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe were women.

Scholarly estimates commonly place women at around 80 percent of the accused, though the proportion varied considerably by region. Tens of thousands of people were ultimately executed during the European witch persecutions. Both Protestant and Catholic territories participated. (Levack; Kelkar and Nathan)

And Christian ideas about women sometimes helped explain why the imagined witch was so often female.

One notorious example is the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), written principally by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer in the 1480s as a treatise on witchcraft and its prosecution. Kramer devoted substantial attention to explaining why women supposedly became witches more frequently than men. (Kramer, pt. 1, q. 6)

Its language is shocking.

It describes women as “intellectually like children,” claims that woman is “more carnal than a man,” and even describes her as an “imperfect animal.” (Kramer, pt. 1, q. 6)

Kramer also argued that women were supposedly more credulous and impressionable and therefore more vulnerable to demonic influence.

These statements were Kramer's. They should not be treated as the voice of the entire medieval Church. The Malleus was not an official statement of Catholic doctrine, nor should Kramer's extreme views simply be projected onto every Christian of the period.

Its significance here is narrower: it demonstrates that explicitly Christian arguments about witchcraft could incorporate assumptions about women's supposed spiritual, moral, and intellectual weakness.

Those assumptions had consequences.

Women who were poor, elderly, socially marginal, quarrelsome, sexually suspect, widowed, unconventional, or simply caught in community conflict could become vulnerable to accusations that they had entered into relationships with Satan and were harming their neighbors through supernatural power.

Historians continue to debate exactly how gender functioned within the witch hunts. Some argue strongly that the persecutions helped reinforce patriarchal social control; others caution that the hunts cannot adequately be explained as an intentional campaign against women. But historians broadly agree on the underlying numerical reality: women constituted the large majority of those accused. (Levack; Kelkar and Nathan)

Whatever explanation one ultimately prefers, Christians today should be able to agree on this:

Women should never have been tortured, imprisoned, or killed because frightened communities believed they were secretly having relationships with demons and causing supernatural harm.

Neither should men.

The witch hunts were a terrible failure of Christian societies to distinguish fear, superstition, accusation, and theological speculation from evidence sufficient to destroy a human life.

And because women bore such a disproportionate share of that suffering, the witch persecutions belong within the history of Christianity's treatment of women.

Women Who Refused to Be Silent

There is another side to this history.

Women continually pushed against these limitations.

They studied Scripture.

They wrote.

They taught other women.

They founded schools and religious communities.

They served the poor.

They became missionaries.

They reported visions and spiritual experiences.

They challenged theologians.

They challenged rulers.

Women therefore did not simply wait passively for men to grant them greater freedom.

Christian women themselves repeatedly appealed to God, Scripture, spiritual calling, and the example of other women in Christian history to challenge the boundaries placed around them.

That too is part of Christian history.

The Church Changed

Compare those earlier assumptions with Christianity today.

By Vatican II in 1965, the Catholic Church was explicitly teaching that discrimination based on sex should be overcome as contrary to God’s intent and specifically naming women’s equal access to education as a fundamental right. (Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes sec. 29)

Even Christian traditions that continue to reserve pastoral or priestly offices for men insist that this distinction does not mean women are less intelligent, less spiritual, less valuable, or less fully made in God's image.

For example, the Southern Baptist Convention—while maintaining complementarian positions on some church offices—has formally affirmed that men and women share the dignity of being created in God's image and has called for fairness for women in employment, compensation, benefits, and opportunities. (Southern Baptist Convention, “Women”)

Other Christian traditions have gone considerably further. The Church of England now ordains women as deacons, priests, and bishops and formally states that all orders of ministry are open without distinction of gender. (Church of England)

Christians therefore continue to disagree about what complete equality should mean for church offices.

I address that biblical question elsewhere.

I do not need Christians to agree about women's ordination for the historical argument here to stand.

The change is already enormous.

Women today study at Christian universities and seminaries.

Women earn doctorates in biblical studies, theology, Church history, philosophy, and ancient languages.

Women teach Scripture.

Women write commentaries and theological books.

Women lead Christian schools, charities, universities, ministries, and—in many denominations—churches.

Girls are not told that serious theological education belongs to boys.

The judicial witch executions that once occurred within Christian European societies have ended.

For much of Christian history, women had far fewer opportunities than men to participate in formal higher education and theological formation. That degree of educational inequality would now be rejected across the Christian denominational spectrum.

Why This Matters

Again, none of this means that Christianity itself is inherently oppressive toward women.

Nor does it mean that every Christian man oppressed women, that every woman lacked agency, or that Christian history made no positive contribution to women's lives.

History is far more complicated.

My point is about fallibility.

Christian theologians interpreted Scripture.

Christian institutions constructed systems around those interpretations.

Christian thinkers and institutions sometimes treated assumptions about women's weakness, dependence, or natural subordination as though those assumptions reflected God's order.

And generations of Christians lived within those systems.

Then Christians reconsidered.

Women gained access to forms of education that had once been largely closed to them.

Christians increasingly rejected the idea that women were naturally intellectually inferior.

Christian institutions began recognizing women's intellectual, professional, and theological contributions in ways previous generations often did not.

The large-scale European witch persecutions came to an end.

And while debates about women’s roles within Christianity continue even now, many major Christian traditions affirm women in leadership and teaching roles.

The Bible did not suddenly acquire new books.

Genesis did not change.

Paul's letters did not change.

Jesus did not change.

Christian interpretation changed.

That should make us humble.

If generations of Christians could read the same Scriptures we possess and nevertheless incorporate assumptions about women's inferiority into Christian theology and institutions, then Christians today should be cautious about assuming that every inherited interpretation concerning women—or concerning anything else—must necessarily represent God's final truth.

History does not tell us which interpretation of Scripture is correct.

It tells us why we must keep asking.

Women and men alike should be able to return to God's Word, examine what Christians have inherited, and ask:

Is this really what Scripture teaches?

Christian institutions are not infallible.

Christian traditions are not infallible.

Christian theologians are not infallible.

God's Word is.