In returning respect back to women, one first wonders where it went. Who or what caused respect to diminish among women? How far back do you have to go to find a time or place where women were respected? How about Eve before the fall? For too long, within many evangelical spaces, women have borne the weight of judgments—spoken and unspoken—rooted in traditional male thinking rather than the Spirit of Christ. In the church, a lot of the loss of respect for women can go back to Paul and his admonitions for women to be silent in the church and to his teaching on the hierarchy of men as the head of women as Christ is the head of the church. What makes this balanced, however, is the fact that Paul also teaches about the equality of men and women, and the fact that the headship he speaks about is the purposeful emptying of oneself in humble service as Christ came not to be ministered unto but to minister and give his life up for those he serves. It’s the opposite of power from above and domination.
The problem isn’t with Paul, but with those who want to choose just the part of these admonitions that they can use to dominate and control women while claiming they are being biblical in their domination, and it is this kind of wrong thinking that has cost women a great deal of respect in the past. The total picture must be adopted which includes biblical equality, servant leadership, and then the many examples Paul uses of women in leadership such as Phoebe.
“I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a deacon in the church in Cenchrea. Welcome her in the Lord as one who is worthy of honor among God’s people. Help her in whatever she needs, for she has been helpful to many, and especially to me.” (Romans 16:1-2)
And in the rest of chapter 16 of Romans where Paul is giving personal greetings to people he knows in Rome at least eight of them are women, and of one of them, Junia he says, “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews, who were in prison with me. They are highly respected among the apostles and became followers of Christ before I did.” (Romans 16:7) And I don’t have the time to enumerate all the other women who are mentioned in his other letters to the churches. The tragedy is not Paul’s words, but the later misuse of them to exclude women from roles Christ intended them to have.
It’s time to once again return respect back to women. We are all equal partners together in the service of God and His kingdom.
Jesus never silenced women, never dismissed them, never treated them as less than fully human. He entrusted them with his most important message—his resurrection—and restored their dignity in a culture that had stripped it away. If Christ himself met women with such respect, then Christian men must do the same—meeting every woman as though they were meeting Christ, and caring for them with the same measure of love they desire for themselves.
John Fischer The Catch 
I understand that respect for women begins with men assuming their role of leadership and priesthood. I see a closeted feminism in your last posts creating the basis for a confusion within the church with crass distortions of what is in the Bible about the roles of men and women. The Bible contains both PRECEPTS and DESCRIPTIVE texts. This is basic so as not to start heresies. I’m just a woman, I’m not a deep connoisseur of Hebrew and Greek, and I’ve not studied exegesis, But I know that.
John, I appreciate that, over the course of this series, you have laid out the Biblical passages used by those who disagree with you, stated their views, and then explained rrspectfully why you think they have missed the truth. Too often, evangelicals (and other Christians) have quoted the Bible as a way of avoiding a discussion rather than engaging in a discussion of what God’s Word means and how we are meant to apply it in our lives. You offered real engagement with God’s Word.
Many believers are unwilling to be honest about the fact that they choose some Scriptures to be put in the category of being applicable to everyone in all times, while they insist that other Scriptures are to be interpreted in context and applied differently in different situations, without addressing how they have decided which Scriptures go in which categories.
Why is “I do not permit a woman to teach” placed in the forever at all times category, but “I was a stranger and you gave me no welcome” is hedged about with judgments about which strangers should be welcomed and which should be deported, and “Sell all you have and give to the poor” is never placed in the forever at all times category, and the commands to not charge interest to a poor person and to never receive interest on your own money (Lev. 25:36-37) are such foreign concepts that most Christians don’t even know the Bible says that and would be aghast if the church were to teach them as requirements of the faith?
When people exclude women from leadership or hem them in with claims about what their “role” is and is not, they are making choices that are a matter of interpretation, not handed down from God, who nowhere has told us that we must adhere to the one universally but can choose to adjust the others to our times. They are claiming approval from God for the decisions of humans. Please understand, these are decisions that we must make, but we should be very leery of claiming that every one of our judgments is actually God’s judgment.
What we need is an honest dialogue, as you have tried to promote, about whether and why some passages are more universally applicable than others. Thank you for trying to do that.