I grew up believing women could do all of it. In rural South Dakota, I used to be surrounded by farm women, who’re a few of the hardest, most resilient people I actually have ever met. My mom could bake delicious chicken and also slaughter them.
South Dakota also incessantly leads the nation in the share of women and moms who work outside the house. So as a young girl, I never doubted that girls could do whatever they wanted, that they were as equally capable as men. I could turn out to be president. I may very well be an astronaut. I could do whatever I set my mind on doing.
But as I prepared to achieve this, I discovered a niche between what I had all the time been told and what I now saw—and that gap was distinctly female-shaped. Despite the various women visible within the workforce in South Dakota, women felt largely invisible when it got here to the work of theology. My home church had never had a female preacher. During seminary, I had one female professor. In my doctoral studies, I had two, but none in my religion classes.
I used to be confident that Scripture supported women in teaching and leading the church: Women were the primary to proclaim the gospel (Luke 24:5–12), and Paul names women like Junia and Phoebe, who acted as apostles and deacons (Rom. 16:1, 7). But in comparison with the pages and pages dedicated to Peter and Paul, Augustine and Aquinas, Calvin and Luther, women often felt like names merely mentioned within the margins.
I wanted greater than names. I desired to see women leading. I desired to see women teaching. I desired to see their faces and listen to their stories. I wanted exemplars I could imitate: women who, with Paul, could say, “Imitate me, just as I imitate Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1, NLT).
I wanted heroes.
Eventually, on a visit to Italy, I discovered them. It was there I spotted that the witness of girls isn’t hiding within the margins. It’s written plainly. We just need to take a look at the inscriptions on the partitions.
I spent a very good chunk of my time in Italy watching stones. I used to be fascinated by the Colosseum, impressed by the grandeur of St. Peter’s, and marveled on the architectural perfection of the Pantheon. Most astonishing of all, nevertheless, was discovering that what I had struggled to search out in ink and paper I could see clearly in stone and paint. Here, in and on the partitions of ancient churches, I discovered my heroes.
In Rome, I discovered churches not only named after Mary but additionally after Anastasia, Susanna, Agnes, and Sabina. When I wandered into a few of these ancient churches, I discovered the connection was far deeper than a reputation written on a wall. In several of the churches, women were literally the muse the church was built upon—the partitions were built around their bones.
Tertullian famously said that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” and 1 Peter 2:5 describes the church because the “living stones” which can be “being built right into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood.” So when ancient Christians built their places of worship, they often did so on the bodies of believers who lived so profoundly for Christ that they gave their lives for him.
The martyrs were each the metaphorical and literal bedrock of the church. At the middle—the heart—of the traditional church stood the Eucharistic altar, which normally contained the bones of Christian martyrs and saints. Their bodies, and their willingness to follow Christ to his death, acted for example and an indication of what the Eucharist celebrates and calls the faithful to turn out to be. Taking bread and wine from a tombstone acted as a potent reminder that believers must die with Christ to be resurrected with him.
Consequently, while scholars still debate whether women led the Eucharist within the early church, there is no such thing as a debate over whether women were foundational to its celebration. Their tombs—and due to this fact their bodies—were the constructing blocks not only of the Eucharist but of all the church.
In Ravenna, I saw their faces. Alongside Peter, Paul, and the remainder of the apostles, Perpetua, Felicity, Daria, Euphemia, Cecilia, and Eugenia peered out at me from the glittering, intricate mosaics within the Archbishop’s Chapel of St. Andrew. These female heroes lived such lives of holiness that the early church wanted ladies and men to look as much as them, each figuratively and on the wall; to be inspired by their witness and to follow their example. Here—right in front of my eyes—were women leaders of the church who were such authoritative teachers and exemplars that even the archbishop, considered one of the best authorities of the church, looked to them for guidance.
And there have been more. In the Basilica of San Vitale, Empress Theodora stood equal in size and standing to her husband, Justinian. Along the length of the partitions within the New Basilica of Saint Apollinaris, both sides featured a procession of saints marching toward Christ. On the left was a line of girls, and on the fitting, the lads, equal in stature, equal in standing. The design and placement of the mosaics mirrored one another, in order that as I stood within the church, I could plainly see what it meant for men and girls to be “one in Christ” (Gal. 3:28). These weren’t women hiding within the margins or within the background but visibly leading the church toward Christ.
These early church heroes were distinctly concerned with their experience as women. And they weren’t afraid to discuss their female bodies.
Perpetua and Felicitas, two of the ladies featured within the Archbishop’s Chapel, prepared for his or her martyrdom by talking openly about their breasts, nursing, and childbirth. Imprisoned in second-century North Africa, each women refused to surrender their faith, regardless that Perpetua had just given birth and Felicity was pregnant. In the account of their imprisonment and martyrdom, Perpetua describes the grief and pain she feels when guards refuse her request to nurse her child in prison. Felicity gives birth early, in order that when she enters the sector to die, milk still drips from her breasts.
Both women relate their bodies to Christ and describe their relationship to him in maternal ways. Perpetua has a vision where she receives milk curds from a shepherd, describing it with Eucharistic language. But that it’s curds as a substitute of bread and wine also connects the life-sustaining breast milk she’s feeding her son with the “pure, spiritual milk” (1 Pet. 2:2–3) of everlasting life that Christ offers us. Jesus is sort of a mother whose body offers nourishment and life.
Felicity moves “from blood to blood,” the narrator of her martyrdom says, from childbirth to a martyr’s death. During her labor, Felicity compares her pains of labor to her martyrdom, saying, “I personally now suffer that which I suffer, but there one other shall be in me who shall suffer for me, because I’m to suffer for him.” A martyr, upon dying, undergoes a baptism of blood and experiences a second birth: the birth into heaven.
Felicity, like Perpetua, describes Jesus with maternal language. She relates imitatio Christi to the womb by describing her suffering and bleeding for Christ, who’s inside her, and his suffering and bleeding for her, which can end in her rebirth. Both Perpetua and Felicity describe their bodies not as hurdles or temptations, but as ways to grasp Christ, to turn out to be more like him.
Theodora, the sixth-century empress who adorns San Vitale’s wall, was so powerful and influential that students often consider her as a coruler (and even the true ruler) of Byzantium. Theodora was likely an actress and prostitute (these roles were often intertwined) before marrying Justinian.
When she became empress, Theodora didn’t forget her origins and channeled her power and influence to assist oppressed women. She freed women from forced prostitution, outlawed sex trafficking, closed brothels, and purchased women’s freedom, offering them shelter and resources for a latest start. She also helped institute harsher consequences for rape, forbade men from killing their wives for adultery, and adjusted divorce, child guardianship, and property laws to provide more rights to women. These laws formed the idea for girls’s rights laws we still have today.
In these church spaces, the writing and artwork on the partitions showed me that the feminine body didn’t must be shoved to the margins or made invisible but may very well be prominently displayed in worship spaces. When I checked out the witness of the ladies on the partitions, the feminine body was not an impediment or an obstacle but an indication of holiness.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
Theodora within the Basilica of Saint Vitalis
We tend to think about theology because the study of written words. But theology just isn’t only text-based, it’s performed—lived—within the body. Discovering women’s bodies in and on the stones of ancient churches helped me realize that the female-shaped gap I’d discovered during seminary was not a lot an absence because it was a keyhole, pointing me to look beyond the page to the body. Embodied forms comparable to art, stories, and physical spaces act as a key that helps unlock what is commonly the hidden history of girls.
In my quest for female heroes, I did, in reality, discover “proof” that girls had taught theology once I learned about women like Macrina and the desert moms. But women also went on pilgrimages and commissioned sacred artwork. They dedicated their bodies to Christ with a vow of virginity, a physical approach to exemplify their spiritual commitment to being the bride of Christ (and a alternative that always required them to defy their fathers).
Women owned several of the primary house churches where Christians worshipped (Col. 4:15; Acts 16:15; 1 Cor. 1:11). They donated land for the catacombs, built churches, and founded monasteries—all heroic tasks that built the church, and the form of work that each inspires and instructs.
Witnessing the ladies on the partitions helped me higher see the witness of girls in my very own history too. In funneling my vision to only consider female leaders and heroes in a certain way, I had neglected to see the various women who had written their love and knowledge and holiness into my very own life.
They were my prayer warriors. My Sunday School teachers. My most attentive listeners and advice givers. My models of patience and perseverance. My providers of practical wisdom, and essentially the most fervent followers of Christ. They were, in brief, my models and mentors, my inspirations and instructors, my authorities and leaders on almost every part that ended up mattering essentially the most.
The more I looked around during that trip to Italy, the more I spotted how limited my view had been. The church was filled with women leaders and teachers. They weren’t merely names within the margins but foundational—in every sense of the word—to the church. I just needed to know where, and how, to look.
Lanta Davis is the writer of the forthcoming Becoming by Beholding (Baker Academic, 2024) and teaches on the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University.
