Extraordinary Women of Christian History

A. Tucker Ruth

Description

Christianity has long been criticized as a patriarchal religion. But during its two-thousand-year history, the faith has been influenced and passed down by faithful women. Martyrs and nuns, mystics and scholars, writers and reformers, preachers and missionaries, abolitionists and evangelists, these women are examples to us of faith, perseverance, forgiveness, and fortitude.With gracious irreverence, Ruth Tucker offers engaging and candid profiles of some of the most fascinating women of Christian history. From the famous to the infamous to the obscure, women like Perpetua, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, Anne Hutchinson, Susanna Wesley, Ann Judson, Harriet Tubman, Fanny Crosby, Hannah Whitehall Smith, Corrie ten Boom, and Mother Teresa, along with dozens of others, come to vivid life. Perfect for small groups, these portraits of women who changed the world in their own significant way will spark lively discussion and inspire today's Christians to lives of faithful witness.

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 09 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493401581
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2016 by Ruth A. Tucker
Published by Baker Books
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakerbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-0158-1
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Contents
Cover i
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Introduction vii
1. Thecla and Early Martyrs, Monastics, and Saints 1
2. Hilda of Whitby and Medieval Nuns and Abbesses 17
3. Hildegard of Bingen and Catholic Mystics and Scholars 35
4. Katherine Schütz Zell and Protestant Reformers 51
5. Teresa of Ávila and Sectarian “Heretics” 69
6. Susanna Wesley and Eighteenth-Century Evangelists 88
7. Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and American Protestant Missionaries 106
8. Jarena Lee and African American Evangelists 124
9. Elizabeth “Betsy” Fry and Women of the Social Gospel 141
10. Anne-Marie Javouhey and British and European Missionaries 161
11. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nineteenth-Century Poets and Writers 179
12. Susannah Thompson Spurgeon and Ministers’ Wives 199
13. Aimee Semple McPherson and Pentecostal Preachers 217
14. Corrie ten Boom and Celebrated Speakers and Missionaries 235
Epilogue 255
Notes 257
Index 269
Back Ad 273
Back Cover 274
Introduction
I invite you on a pilgrimage, dear Reader. Come along with me . . . to places we have never seen before and to people we could otherwise never have expected to know. . . . And we shall meet sundry folk even more exotic than ourselves. “By adventure”—by happenstance—we have fallen into fellowship.
Thomas Cahill, Mysteries of the Middle Ages
The setting is the Mediterranean world of the first century. She wears men’s clothing to disguise her gender. A coworker and companion of the apostle Paul, Thecla is a miracle worker, missionary, and desert holy woman. Church fathers revere her, and today she is recognized as a saint. Another desert saint is Mary of Egypt. Leaving behind a life of depravity and sex addiction, she denies herself basic necessities to follow God’s call. She dies on April 1. More than fifteen hundred years later, Pulitzer Prize winner John Berryman writes a poem titled “April Fool’s Day, or, St Mary of Egypt.”
Springtime in the Italian Apennine Mountains, 1212. Young, beautiful, and highborn, Clare runs away with Francis only to be cloistered in a convent for the remainder of her life. Later they both are canonized as saints, the great duo from Assisi. Generations after Clare, in another Italian village, Catherine of Siena is thought by many to be mentally ill. To show her identity with plague victims, she drinks pus from the sores of the one to whom she is ministering. Seventeenth-century French mystic Jeanne Guyon takes her spirituality a step further. She pulls out healthy teeth and rolls in prickly nettles in her imagined service to God. But she’s also capable of offering timeless advice:
I entreat you, give no place to despondency. This is a dangerous temptation . . . of the adversary. Melancholy contracts and withers the heart, and renders it unfit to receive the impressions of grace. It magnifies and gives a false coloring to objects, and thus renders your burdens too heavy to bear. God’s designs regarding you, and His methods of bringing about these designs, are infinitely wise. 1
Argula von Stauffer stands up to Catholic prelates in defense of Martin Luther. To them, she is no more than a daughter of Eve. Anne Hutchinson, another such daughter—and the mother of fifteen children—is banished from Boston by Puritan preachers. Deemed a heretic, she is justly killed by Native Americans, so say the Puritan divines. In 1865 Catherine Booth, with her husband William, cofounds the Salvation Army and is a popular preacher among the affluent of London’s West End.
Carry Nation, in her Kansas campaign against alcohol, wields a hatchet to smash saloons. Pandita Ramabai, across the globe, establishes a mission society and sets in motion a great religious revival in India. Popular evangelist and founder of the Foursquare Church, Aimee Semple McPherson captures the headlines in the spring of 1926. Missing in action. Speculation. Rumors. A drowning? A kidnapping? Appointment with a plastic surgeon? Hiding out with her handsome music director? Except for her not having drowned, the verdict is still out. Eliza Davis George fights racism to serve as a Baptist missionary to Africa. After toiling some six decades, she dies in 1979 at age one hundred.
One after another these extraordinary women grab our attention, sometimes for all the wrong reasons. They form a dizzying and disparate array of personalities and lifestyles. Imagine them today as headliners for a grand conference, the mother of all women’s retreats. Impossible, some would say. Imagine them all fitting into the same heaven. Impossible? Their enormous differences and flaws are not easily swept under the carpet, but they all stand solidly on common ground. Amid their malfunctions and failures, they profess an undying faith in Christ and seek to serve him. We dare not dismiss them any more than we would their biblical counterparts.
We easily imagine that the demarcation between biblical history and church history is very clear, one stopping as suddenly as the other begins, one sacred the other secular. But the church fathers recognized a continual flow as a river from one century to the next. True, they stipulated certain writings as the canon of Scripture, but one generation of believers followed another with no assumption that those featured in the biblical text had an edge over those who followed after.
Jerome, in fact, rated his friend Marcella above the prophet Anna. Here is this celebrated theologian and Bible translator of the fourth century, concluding that Anna comes out on the short end:
Let us then compare her case with that of Marcella and we shall see that the latter has every way the advantage. Anna lived with her husband seven years; Marcella seven months. Anna only hoped for Christ; Marcella held Him fast. Anna confessed him at His birth; Marcella believed in Him crucified. Anna did not deny the Child; Marcella rejoiced in the Man as king. 2
Jerome might have added that Marcella demonstrates sacrificial ministry in action, forsaking her wealth to serve the poor and afflicted. He would not have made favorable remarks about Héloïse, who lived and died several centuries later. Except for her cloistered life as a nun, her story is easily situated in the twenty-first century, as the opening paragraph of a 2005 New York Times book review indicates:
Almost a thousand years ago, a teacher fell in love with his student. Almost a thousand years ago, they began a torrid affair. They made love in the kitchens of convents and in the boudoir of the girl’s uncle. They wrote hundreds of love letters. When the girl bore a child, they were secretly married, but the teacher was castrated by henchmen of the enraged uncle. At her lover’s bidding, the girl took religious orders. He took the habit of a monk. They retreated into separate monasteries and wrote to each other until parted by death. 3
The account of Héloïse illustrates the wide-ranging popularity of historical biography. And her case is not unusual. The lives of Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Ávila, Susanna Wesley, Aimee Semple McPherson, Corrie ten Boom, Mother Teresa, and others have been written multiple times. This introductory volume, with issue-oriented questions at the end of each chapter, will hopefully stimulate more writers and more readers to dig into their fascinating stories. And may this book also spur similar overviews featuring Asian, African, and Hispanic women.
So how does an author even attempt to write some sort of two-thousand-year overview of Christian women from around the world? It’s an impossible assignment. Indeed, had my publisher permitted me more space, I might have titled this book 777 Extraordinary Christian Women . Truly hundreds of such women have been left out, and the reader can only sigh and scribble additional names in the table of contents. Needless to say, my pleasure in choosing the tastiest candy from this sampler box of chocolates turned into a very subjective task. In the end, weight gain was the biggest consideration, thus a lean and shapely volume.
But aren’t there already enough sampler-box books of women in Christian history? And aren’t there profiles of these women online? Perhaps. But in many cases the candy is too sweet for the palate—sugarcoated heroines. Flaws and failures are frosted over, without a hint of the bitter cocoa that gives chocolates that singular gourmet tastiness. In fact, as I reread and edited the manuscript, I was struck by how many failed marriages and failed ministries had become added ingredients of this volume. And I was loathe to leave them out. These women are anything but the super-saints of pious heroine tales. They are real people, and they are like us.
The greatest honor we can bestow on them is to present them as honestly as the sources allow. The Bible is our model. Beginning with Eve, the text is straightforward about sin and failures. Sarah’s anger toward her husband and her foul attitude toward Hagar are not disguised, nor is the account of Lot’s daughters, who carry out their