This multi-part, extensive and detailed paper on the role of women in the church is based on analysis of the Bible’s perspectives on women from Creation to Redemption and beyond.

A request from the author:
I request everyone who reads this paper to read it right through from the beginning rather than moving straight to the section on the two texts seen to be particularly relevant to the question. That section is written on the basis of all that has gone before it.

Methodology:
Rather than look simply at the biblical texts commonly discussed in relation to this issue this paper looks first at the over-arching Biblical truths within which all individual texts are to be understood.

In this way

• the particular is understood in relation to the whole; 
• the obscure or ambiguous is understood in relation to the perspicuous;
• the letter of the law is understood in relation to the spirit of the principle behind the law;
• the temporary and physical is understood in relation to the eternal and spiritual;
• and the old is understood in relation to the new.

To present these over-arching truths I have modified several of the studies from my study series The Biblical Foundations of Marriage. Only after this have I looked at the particular question of the role of women in the church, and the two passages commonly used in debates on this issue.