From Doug Wilson’s Blog and Mablog, March 3, 2012:
Note on Intellectuals by W.H. Auden
“To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say
Is a keen observer of life,
The word Intellectual suggests straight away
A man who’s untrue to his wife.”
Fascinating. I had never thought to equate “Intellectual” and “Republican politician,” and in fact have very rarely ever thought them to be incompatible, given the GOP’s sordid moral history over the last 40 years.
Limbaugh has now apologized for his “insulting word choices” in describing the sexual activities and moral vacuity of Sarah Fluke (read the blogpost below), and goes on to share with us his deep-seated fear that feminism — which, I assume, produces the “feminazis” he derides with near-daily glee — is threatened by governmental insistence that employee insurers pay for women’s healthcare.
“Word choices”? Really? Would it be better if he had described her as merely a wanton woman instead of a slut and a prostitute? Would that have made the sentiment behind what he said OK? And does his apology, with the attendant bullshit about the imperiled status of the feminism he mocks with unrestrained glee and malice, solve anything?
How stupid, undiscerning, and naive does he believe his followers to be?
Doesn’t matter, though. Because they’ll meet and exceed his expectations at every turn.
“What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”
Rush Limbaugh,on the young woman initially denied the right to testify against the all-male Congressional committee on insurer-paid birth control and other medical services, a day after he said that women seeking health-care equality with men owe those men a video of their sexual activities.
Rush Limbaugh should be a focus of rage, pity, and, ultimately, evangelization on the part of the Religious Right that’s propelled him to success. That he won’t be, and that we’re still, in 2012, arguing about denying women insured access to contraceptives and other “they can have it if the boss says it’s moral enough” healthcare decisions, is beyond tragic.
The whoring from the Right continues, unabated and unabashed.
John Piper says Christianity is a “masculine” faith, as I’ve pointed out in last week’s blog posts, and what of it?
I mean, if a French boulangerie owner says Christianity is a religion of bread — a baker’s religion — we might raise an eyebrow, acknowledge that, yes, bread is not only a simile Jesus used to describe himself, as well as part of our Eucharist. But we would look askance at someone who elevated the baker’s role in the formation of and faithful living out of Christianity, particularly if both our Scriptures and Church history testified to the preciousness, the Spirit-giftedness, and the contributions of other laborers from other fields. And we would challenge, publicly and firmly, any theology that elevates one profession over another and, in doing so, effectively subjugates those in those other professions who have been – and are now – liberated by the mighty work of Christ. The baker’s declaration that Christianity is “that of his own type” would not surprisingly lead to the shutting out of non-bakers from Church service, if the bakers’ beliefs were dominant in the Christian culture, and it would be an egregious application of a mistaken theology indeed if those bakers misused their power to deny full participation in the Body of believers to those who are not, for whatever reason, bread bakers.
Bread-baking, of course, is not an ontological characteristic. While a baker-dominant theology would be in error, anyone who wanted to exercise the gifts the Holy Spirit gave them in the Church could choose to apply herself to the craft and profession of baking and thus enable themselves to enter into the ranks of leadership to which they feel called and to which their gifts attest – again, not because they’re bakers by profession, but, in this baker-centered Church, they’re gifted not only in the crafting of bread through study and experience, but for Christian service by the Holy Spirit. In other words, no matter how unfair or un-Biblical the theology that bars non-bakers from service, one’s “non-baking status” can be changed; it’s not ontological.
No one, of course, actually calls for the recognition and practice of Christianity as a bakers’, plumbers’, English Lit majors’, or competitive archers’ faith. Only the most bigoted backwaters of faux-Christianity take ontological characteristics other than gender as unequal categories of service, gifting, and participation. There are “Christian” churches, Christian in name only, who continue to claim that Black people are subhuman, and we can infer that those judged to be subhuman are simultaneously judged to be unable to serve their Creator in leadership roles in the congregation. Other so-called Christ-worshiping churches might disallow Jews or poor people in the pulpit, at the elders’ board, or in the diaconate. And, God be praised, most of us would find that objectionable for two reasons: we’d find it un-Biblical, and we’d find it nauseating. We understand, most of us, that the Church can never discriminate against or subjugate its own sisters and brothers on the basis of ontologocial characteristics. Even if they’re Cretans, whom the Apostle Paul assures us are thugs, bores, and utter, ineffable doofuses. The Spirit-gifted believer from the Isle of Crete is free to serve in even the most conservative of “Bible-believing” churches, for which we’re all undoubtedly glad.
That’s if our Cretan believer is our brother – not our sister. Because if our Christian sister, whether she’s a baker, Cretan, Baptist, seminary graduate, or the most obviously, lovingly Spirit-gifted woman any in her congregation have ever seen, she cannot, in most Christian churches, serve in leadership, teach men or mixed groups, or preach from the pulpit. Further, she’s told that whatever her talents, her “role and function” as a woman require her to be a follower, never a leader, in society and in the home as well, and this simply because she’s a woman. The complementarians will assure us that she and her sisters are ontologically equal to their brethren, no less loved by God nor saved by his Son. They do insist that the Lord’s Spirit cannot gift them equally – as pastors, preachers, leaders – and yet are comfortable in assigning different roles to equally-created believers, roles that correspond with utter and unshakeable consistency. The male role is one of leadership, always, and authority forever; the female role is one of follower, always, and subjugation forever. And while it seems illogical to argue that persons of equal ontology must rightly always take consistent roles that are unequal, based solely on that ontological characteristic, that is, indeed, what complementarians glean from the Scriptures. I disagree with them, and I can’t attend a complementarian church, but I don’t hesitate to acknowledge that they’re true believers, men and women I won’t refuse fellowship with, however strenuously I believe them to be in grave error.
But when Piper, Mark Driscoll, and Doug Wilson all claim that Christianity is inherently masculine, or that Jesus’ masculinity is at the root of the Gospel message, or that the biggest spiritual and emotional problem most people have is “father hunger,” they remove themselves from the mainstream of even the most fervent complementarians and become, instead, messengers of a Gospel entirely foreign to that of Christ’s and entirely out of place in any Christian church, although quite compatible with the silliest men’s lodges, private “dining clubs,” and perhaps treehouses, although I have some innate respect for boys who build forts and such to get away from GIRLS. They’re still humble, after all, and bend appropriately to their mothers’ and teachers’ authority, something these men would not do.
What they do is exult in the privileges of their masculinity and use a simplistic, wooden, literalist interpretation of Scripture to justify it. I applaud the taking seriously of difficult texts; what I see here is an inconsistent devotion to “taking the Bible literally” that is curiously – or not – absent in discussions of wealth and possessions, pacifism, and even the Pauline indictment of the character of those annoying Cretans. Theirs is not a hermeneutic of textual inquiry and respect, but one that justifies the privileges they were born into by using a few out-of-context verses from 1 Timothy (with its near-impossible understanding of the Greek “authentein”), 1 Corinthians, and 1 Peter, while ignoring clearer and more numerous testimonies in Scripture to the Gospel-charged abolishment of privilege and favored distinctions based on race, sex, and social class. When they preach on marriage, they cling to two verses in Ephesians 5 rather than the entirety of, for example, First Corinthians, which offers a seven-point call for marital equality, not a call for unilateral female submission – and even in Ephesians 5, they disdain a hermeneutic that would call for unilateral, unreciprocated male love toward a wife, and ignore the context-setting presence of v. 21, which calls for mutual submission. They proclaim that the original sin of Eden was Adam’s abrogation of headship, not his and Eve’s defiance of God in taking the fruit. In the same way that the Church has regrettably clung for the past century to a hermeneutic that confirms its cultural, social, and political presuppositions and preferences, these men and their followers profess a devotion to the Word astonishingly bereft of a Christ-centered, Spirit-guided approach to it. Such is the case, I believe, with all complementarians – but Wilson, Piper, and Driscoll, et al, go a step further, exulting in masculinity rather than submitting to the clear message of equality in texts like Galatians 3:28, which clearly echoes what the New Testament has been telling us all along: There are only two types of people in the world of the first century in which it was written – those who believe in Christ Jesus unto salvation for the forgiveness of their sins, and those who don’t. These mens’ insistence on foisting additional demographic, ontological divisors on the Church and the world around them would be – should be – a meaningless exercise in self-promotion and arrogance, except that they attract huge followings that give them influence far beyond what they deserve.
It must annoy the testosterone out of them that 1 Timothy promises redemption not in “the biological male, Christ Jesus,” but in “Christ Jesus, the human one,” and that the God-made-human author of our salvation accorded women unheard of and unprecedented freedom and autonomy in his service. That openness to the inclusion of the sociological “Other” caused scandal then, resulting in some of Paul’s time- and circumstance-bound prohibitions against specific instances of female leadership for a time, and the continued shutting doors of inclusion to women causes scandal, in the form of a rejection of the Gospel, among non-Christians today. Indeed, the transformative possibility of a Gospel message to a lost world is crippled by a Church determined to deny women and men the freedom promised in Christ, and it’s rendered offensive to those in the world not because of their sinfulness, but because it’s seen as it too often is – an apologetic for the injustice, unrighteousness, and oppression that has chained and battered millions and millions of women throughout history. We dare not change the message to accommodate culture, but we cannot continue to befoul the message we offer and blame the pollution on those harmed by the error we proclaim.
I’ll close this paean to egalitarianism in Christ – this attack on the Piper/Driscoll/Wilsonian insistence on a “masculine” faith authored by a Savior whose biological maleness is the fulcrum upon which his message rests by reminding my readers of my dear sister in Christ, Lupita Rocha Q., who pastors a small church in the most dangerous city in the world, Ciudad Juarez, in north Mexico. While Driscoll defends his petulant, snotty reaction to his wife’s “mom-haircut,” Wilson touts “father-hunger” as the primary psychosocial disease of our world and Piper brings us a manly Christ and his masculine faith-movement, and do so to adulation and riches, with risk of nothing more, at least temporally, than the stinging rebuke of a housewife in Moscow, Idaho, their sister Lupita risks her life every day ministering to former and current drug addicts, gang members, single women abused by patriarchy and the men it employs in its cruel service, and young families who haven’t the luxury of pursuing the classics or the drive to embrace pop culture – who simply pray every night that their kids don’t get shot on the streets. Lupita lives alone most of the time; when I saw her last March, I longed to go with her, because I knew then, and know now, that it’s likely that I won’t see her again. She is a gentle, humble servant, a powerful preacher, a gifted musician, an evangelist of incomparable gifting, and a teacher who would never, as Wilson does with his Federal Vision, confuse the salvation of the individual soul with the covenant membership of his family. Lupita has given her life to Jesus; she recognizes that it’s his to take, and she asks only that she die in his service. She is an Abigail, an Esther, a Junia, Deborah, Phoebe, Dorcas, Miriam – and she’s a Paul, Peter, Stephen, Barnabas, Philip, Matthew and Luke. The Spirit has given her tremendous gifts by nothing more than Divine pleasure and purpose, and it would be a shame for her to die in the service of a faith rich white men have deemed “masculine” for their own pleasure and purpose.
I don’t fault Wilson, Driscoll and Piper for not serving the Lord in Juarez. I fault them for the comfort in which they insistence that our sister and millions like her all over the world and throughout history are giving their lives to a faith defined by one characteristic – masculinity – that cannot possibly legitimate, validate, encourage, or even allow their service. Christ died to set them free from their worldly, unbiblical prejudices, and perhaps they, too, would be transformed by an encounter with Lupita or any other woman living out the gifting of the Holy Spirit in bringing Christ to a broken, lost, confused world.
Yes, it’s true that the history of women is the history of humankind.
It’s equally true that history is recorded by the victors, and those victors have been largely not women.
Further, the male-recorded, male-dominated history you and I and everyone else learned, unless they went to a progressive Friends K-12 school, gave very little concern or acknowledgement to women. Not to their struggles, and less to their victories, and almost never to their leadership.
Women have always been here; wherever you have powerful, history-making men, you have a woman who birthed him and, very likely, a woman who loved him — as well as women who’ve suffered oppression in the furtherance of his ambition or the reinforcement of his privilege. But we don’t hear their stories. We’re often not even aware they exist. So we need a month, or at least one good book, to nudge us into seeing more and looking deeper. And if we’re willing to do that, whether we’re men or women, whether we’re reading about our country, the narrative of Biblical history, or the story of the world throughout the ages, we’ll become richer.
Every stirring story of a forefather in history is equaled by the true story of strong, intelligent, brave and noble women — stories which are true whether you’ve heard of them or not. I urge you to get ahold of a good book on women’s history, or a well-researched biography of a woman in history. And here’s a hint:
If it’s published by an evangelical publishing house and features a gauzy, pastel-toned cup of tea on the cover, look further. Please. Your daughters as well as your sons need to know who they’ve come from, and if you’ve explained basic biology to them, you’ll have no trouble explaining that their foremothers were no less important than their forefathers, and very often a whole lot more worthy of admiration.
I dedicate this to the life, testimony, and memory of my great-great-grandmother, the physician and evangelist Louisa Spiller Bowles, who helped start the Disciples of Christ denomination in the midwest and worked as both an osteopath and a preacher. I’ll meet her someday, and I hope I’ve made her proud.
A famous minister in Moscow often uses parables to illustrate and comment on the travails of certain folks in his congregation, and so it seems appropriate to use a parable to illustrate a phenomena I have observed under heaven.
There were two worshiping congregations. Both proclaimed Jesus as Lord and Savior, both packed the pews with sincere followers of the Gospel, and both had strong pastors who guided their flocks with weekly exhortations from the pulpit. The people enjoyed fellowship with one another, but the goodwill of the people spoken of in Acts 2 eluded them both; the people in their communities were wary and the two congregations tended not to seek community with others in their towns.
But they both claimed Christ Jesus as Savior, and both were known by the people, however wary those people were, as Christian congregations. That they were more “stand-alone” than other evangelical churches seemed to mean little to the congregants themselves, and the churches enjoyed regular growth over the years.
One of the churches stressed a formality of worship in the service, devoting themselves to the singing of the Psalms and emphasizing the importance of practiced excellence in four-part harmonies. Each adult congregant was assigned, by the tone and range of their singing voices, a part as bass, tenor, alto, and soprano, and the singing of these Psalms marked their worship and consumed their weekdays as they practiced the discipline of not only memorizing, but mastering the singing of the scores of Psalms required for their participation in Sunday worship. This congregation expected children to remain in the service with their parents, and the mothers, who were tasked with keeping the kids quiet, and the fathers, whose successful headship was measured by the propriety their families displayed, felt the stress — the dichotomous tug of keeping toddlers quiet while simultaneously hitting their notes and remembering their lines in worship.
The worship and preaching of this congregation fed the souls of its leadership, even if its congregants struggled at times to find nourishment in the ministry of the church. The church’s worship and preaching also resulted in some things that a few of the congregants struggled with, especially the newer ones, who were unaccustomed to hearing a minister gleefully mock sinners from the pulpit, pray harm on its perceived enemies, and assure his flock that God really did create some people for the sole purpose of damning them to hell for his good pleasure.
This theology, however difficult for the congregants, did make some sense. After all, if the minister made fun of homosexuals and liberals and women who sought equality with men, it must be — it had to be, according to his theology — that they and others were “reprobates,” marked for damnation and thus fair game for the shredding rhetoric of the pastor. It had to make sense. Even if it felt like a pebble in their shoe during their walk with the Lord.
The other congregation smelled bad. The church that rented them space on Saturday nights was old and musty; the pews had absorbed decades of Murphy’s oil soap, which mingled on those Saturday nights with the sweat, motor oil, cigarettes and road debris that clung to them. Theirs was a “biker” church, a congregation of former and current addicts, gang members, and poor people wearied by lives of degradation, deprivation, and desperation. The aroma that rose up from the hundred or so worshipers was pungent, and it was entirely pleasing to the God they praised.
The brothers and sisters in this church were not scholars — not Bible scholars or classical scholars or, in many cases, not even high school graduates. They read out of the New International Version or the New Living Bible, although some didn’t read well enough to have a preferred translation. Others knew what they knew from tracts and tapes and the abrasive, insistent preaching of their leather- and chains-bedecked pastor, a towering, hairy, somber man whose lunch could usually be identified by the specks and stains adorning his beard. His was a salvation message, plain and simple, and not because his congregants were plain and simple — they weren’t, and in fact their lives were often doggedly complex. They were marginalized by their own choices and by the society, even the church society, around them, and when the pastor told them they were lost without Jesus, they didn’t have any trouble believing him. Truly, most of them felt pretty lost even after Jesus, but they kept coming, kept believing, kept praying, and kept waking up every day determined to praise Jesus.
Their music was guitar-driven and heavy on old “camp songs,” simple choruses from the revivals of centuries past. They sang with gusto and volume and fervor, and occasionally even sang in tune with one another — no melody, no four- or five-parts, and harmony not of the tonal variety, but of the convivial. They swung from “Jesus On The Mainline” and “I’ll Fly Away” to “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art,” and “Amen”s and “Hallelujah”s and “Hell, yeah!” rang out liberally. Guys named Spider and Two-Bit hugged women named Pineapple and Boo, and T-shirts stretched tight over big bellies were often streaked with tears as the worshipers fell on their knees and cried out to the God who saved them, even after weekends not remembered but fully mourned and repented of on Monday.
Those lost weekends became fewer and further between as the women and men grew in Christ, and as they found him, they realized they had also found each other, and many of them, for the first time in their lives, came to understand “community” — the love, support, empathy, accountability and affection they hadn’t gotten growing up. And where the other church’s pastor preached the appropriateness of “covenant lying” to unbelievers, this one was rigorous in its insistence that honesty and truth, integrity and virtue, were indisputable, unchangeable characteristics of the Christian life.
You didn’t want to get caught here registering your 2007 Harley Fathead as a 2004 just to save a few bucks, and you could expect an immediate, pointed, loving rebuke from the pastor if he found out you did.
The first congregation was staunchly Calvinistic in orientation, seeing salvation through the corporate lens of the covenant, not the individual soul, and it hailed baptism, even that done in infancy, as the defining trait of the Christian. The biker church couldn’t have cared less if it were Arminian, Calvinist, or anything else; it preached salvation in Christ alone, through faith by grace, and the altar call disdained by the former was the primary means of entrance into the fellowship of the latter. Baptisms were frequent and joyous, but only for those who consciously, publicly confessed their faith in Jesus. It didn’t save them, but it was a necessary step of obedience, and no one at the biker church would’ve asserted that evangelizing their own children was useless, even offensive, because of their “covenant membership.” You weren’t a “grandchild” in Christ, the pastor warned — the faith of your parents was irrelevant to your own salvation, and so kids were treasured, welcomed, and evangelized by parents concerned for their salvation.
Both congregations grew. Both remained apart from the larger Christian Church culture around them — the former, because of the controversial utterances and writings of the pastor, whose embrace of slavery and the Confederacy and condemnation of democracy and equality made him repugnant to other churchgoers; the latter, because of the unkempt, rowdy nature of the congregants, which upset the more staid, conventional churches around them. But they continued doing, both of them, what God called them to do, believing that the Lord they served was pleased with their efforts borne of faith.
The biker church practiced, in its own way, a piety and evangelistic drive the other church’s leadership derided as “sentimental” and “feminine,” and its members were counseled to shun the alcohol, tobacco, and other things considered vices — not just because of the havoc those things had wreaked on their lives, but also because the biker church clung to a simple, historical view of “righteous living” utterly at odds with the freewheeling approach to drink, dance, and “Christian hedonism” promoted by the other. They would not have understood each other, nor grasped how the Lord could be pleased with both. Where one admonished its congregants that the Bible “commanded” that they enjoy wine, the other encouraged its followers to avoid it, and each was certain that Spirit-led righteousness was the motivator for its proclamations and counsel.
The Bible insists that the believer will be known by the Fruit of the Spirit demonstrated in their lives — their ministries, their engagement with unbelievers, their families and careers, and their witness of the Gospel — and the fruit each individual in both groups demonstrated was generally kind, generally decent, and generally fragrant to the Lord Jesus. But there were signs of rot, whiffs of decay, dogging one of them, and it was noticed by a few on the inside and many more on the outside. Still, its congregants struggled to accommodate the vitriol and mockery they heard from the pulpit and read in the ministers’ words, but they clung, ultimately, to their belief that “reprobates” deserved it, and they stifled their discomfort by telling themselves that they couldn’t, and shouldn’t try, to “out-love” the Savior who had consigned them to hell, even before birth, for his own good pleasure.
It didn’t, perhaps, pass their sainted Grandmothers’ “sniff test,” and it wore, at times, on their souls, but they continued. Some, of course, tried to leave, only to find their innermost struggles become fodder for their pastor’s parables and sermons. They couldn’t take their concerns to their elders, almost all of whom were dependent on the pastor’s ministries and business empire for their livings, and they had, if they were heads of households, signed an oath to not discuss the church’s problems or failings with others. People in the community sometimes called the church a cult, and it didn’t feel like one — but it didn’t feel like it should, and it become a lonely place for anyone who smelled the faint stirrings of rot and decay from within.
But it wasn’t, at least, the smell of poverty. It wasn’t the smell of unsophisticated brutes and painted women and people ignorant of the privileges of covenant membership and unaware of the finer points of classic education. And that was enough for more than a few of them, who worked out their salvation in fear and trembling, as much because of the pastor as the Lord Jesus. The emphasis on the covenant, on the corporate nature of their salvation, meant that the group and its strength was the foremost priority of its leadership, and they brooked no dissent because of the risk of appearing to “deny their baptism” in doing so. And so they stayed, and they thought wistfully of simpler, better, more gentle times, when they belonged to congregations that loved Jesus, revered his Word, and served in the Holy Spirit those around them who didn’t yet know.
The Father of Light, the Son made perfect in suffering, and the empowering gifts and presence of the Holy Spirit were in Heaven and all around them, and as the Trinity of God reigned from above, two very different fragrances wafted up from below. The LORD of the harvest would come again for his own, but he tarried, and the aromas brought forth by both churches continued, unmixed, unfailingly offered, and unaffected one by the other.
Two fragrances, two Fruits, two congregations. One LORD. And may he judge rightly between the two, for the sake of his name and the sake of those perishing without it. Some of whom, sadly, were perishing inside the walls of congregations that bore his name, choking and floundering amidst the chorus of praise gamely offered by those looking out and wondering about the times they truly cared about those looking in.
“When I say masculine Christianity or masculine ministry or Christianity with a masculine feel,” says Piper, “here’s what I mean: Theology and church and mission are marked by an overarching godly male leadership in the spirit of Christ with an ethos of tender-hearted strength, contrite courage, risk-taking decisiveness, and readiness to sacrifice for the sake of leading and protecting and providing for the community. All of which is possible only through the death and resurrection of Jesus.”
John Piper, Reformed pastor, introducing his idea of “masculine Christianity”
Given the descriptive narrative as well as the prescriptive mandate of Galatians 3:28, for example, I have a hard time understanding why the ministry made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has as its apparent primary characteristic a gender-specific, masculine-favoring call to arms when the “ethos” Piper describes is one so clearly able to be manifested freely among those the Holy Spirit calls solely on the basis of God’s good pleasure — not on the basis of gender, according to the Scriptures.
I fear, then, for any ministry or mission whose appropriation of the power unleashed by Christ’s resurrection is gender specific, because the benefits thereof certainly aren’t and neither are the needs the equipped Church faces. Further, our Enemy is fighting us, metaphorically speaking, with both hands and all he’s got.
It seems tragic and self-defeating to march into battle with half of the troops marginalized, half of the armaments dismantled, half of the battle cry muted, and half of the troops convinced that victory is theirs by obedient reliance on their own masculinity. However, it is, I suppose, somewhat comforting to know that there is a role in this for women.
Because at every point of defeat, the masculinists’ assessment will reveal that it was the women’s abrogation of their proper roles that led to the opposition’s victory, and we will continue to be encouraged to live Godly lives of service to the Gospel while being chided and upbraided whenever we actually do so, and do so apart from the permission of men while responding with open hearts to the Spirit. These men may not welcome us on “their” battlefield, but we’ll remind them in love that we fight not for them, but for the One who equips and calls us.
Victory is assured, however un-masculine it appears in its achievement.
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