GENDER EQUALITY REFERENCES, Part II
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The Tabernacle of God with men in the latter days must live gender-equal ideals among humankind. Jesus demonstrated how to live a life reflecting equality of the sexes.
Some religious convictions result in unconditional acceptance of false ideas from scholastic theology, which is a mixture of pagan philosophy and Jesus’ teachings, sometimes the substitution of the former for the Messiah’s. For an example of the latter take Aristotle’s derogatory views of women and the mistranslations of the Greek middle voice concerning women as found in some epistles attributed to Paul, views not taught by Christ, who engaged and respected women, including them in his ministry and following.
Most denominations are accepting of at least four of John’s criteria, except perhaps for expressing gender-equal ideals and healing. There is much diversity in the acceptance of masculine-feminine equality. For example, on the one hand, the Roman Catholic Church is still influenced by Thomas Aquinas’ thirteenth-century Christianization of the anti-women position of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
(See more on the history of how women were marginalized through the centuries in Championing Womanhood Through a Higher Concept of God.)
Today, most denominations’ ideals of gender equality are somewhere in between these two groups, with more and more denominations slowly changing their paradigm to accept women as equal to men.