Nuns and Legalism

It’s very easy to twist things into legalism. This weekend’s community Bible lesson in 1 Timothy 5 is a passage that gets twisted that way quite often.

Read between the lines, folks. Paul is writing a rather private message to Timothy, who was expected to fill in some blanks in the broader understanding of things. If you form a mental image of the society at that time and place, you can easily understand that the business of widows as nuns was an issue in Ephesus mostly because the Christian community there was rather large, and it sounds very much like there were multiple church houses around that area. This was soon to become the central capital of First Century Christian religion.

On the one hand, we have a biblical mandate in the first place to bond together as Christians in one spiritual family. That includes all the customary obligations we would expect from an extended family household of kin in the flesh. There were laws about it back then, not so different from the commands in the Law of Moses. Those who led a household were obliged to provide for the welfare of everyone who shared that household. To be dependent meant to depend on someone, and their social structure restricted tightly who could act like they were in charge of anything. Most people were dependents in one way or another.

And we know from Scripture that, in churches, widows and orphans were special cases. If these people were truly dependent on you, then your leadership naturally included the duty to feed, clothe and house them. With widows, this meant for her the expectation of duties and behavior that today we associate with nuns. It was a common thing, but because it’s so foreign to our society today, we struggle to picture it.

An aging woman who lost her husband lost her last immediate family. A widow who had no immediate family to care for was expected to mother the whole community. That was simply the role everyone relied on her to embrace. If her community was also her extended family kinfolks, then it wasn’t hard to figure out how she spent her days — babysitting, helping with larger seasonal food preparations, nursing the sick, etc. In return, her physical needs were provided by those kinfolks.

Taking a cue from the matronly widows who volunteered in the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem, churches (“Christian synagogues”) would take upon themselves the care of widows who might be isolated or otherwise separated from their earthly kin. You can guess how that would happen with Jews who were ostracized for professing Christ, or pagans who were treated the same way by their families. Or maybe the woman moved with her husband from far away and had no local kinfolks at all. When he died, she was bereft of all support. She could either travel home (as Naomi and Ruth did) or try to make a life where she was.

If she was a member of the local church body, it was their duty to put her to work as their adopted grandma and take care of her life support. But in Ephesus this became a formal office because of the rather unique situation there. Apparently it spread from there later. Paul makes it clear in his language here that it was accompanied with a vow. Without chasing rabbits, such things were taken quite seriously in the Old Testament, and it didn’t change under Christ. Paul was referring to a church office; the balance of her life was tightly wrapped in this commitment, and should not be broken.

The issue with encouraging younger widows to remarry was the same as it was in Hebrew culture: She should not marry outside the covenant community. Paul referred to some widows who had gone off the deep end by taking up with men outside the church. The local pagan culture was loaded with customs that Christians regard as immoral. Those who married within the Covenant were encouraged to build up the community. If she’s still fertile, she should have children. Otherwise, she can help stabilize a household by taking up a matronly role.

Only those who had nothing left to live for, except Christ and His body, could become nuns.