I’m occasionally asked why I go after my Christian brothers and sisters who believe that while women are ontologically equal to men — made in God’s image, made of the same stuff — they are, by the teaching of Scripture, only to serve in specific roles in home, church, and society. After all, aren’t there bigger issues in the Church, in the world, than who gets to be an elder or preach from the pulpit? Besides, critics remind me, most of their women friends don’t want to be in positions of church leadership — and am I sure I’m not a Biblical egalitarian just because I do?
Because this issue, the debate between these complementarians and the egalitarians who believe that the Gospel message obliterates hierarchy and the top-down power we benignly call “male leadership,” is a focal point of my writing, it’s time to answer it anew. This is a huge issue, both in scope and in importance, and it takes more than one blogpost to defend the message of the Gospel. But I’ll start off again by saying that the difference between keeping women out of the pulpit, which good people defend, and, for example, female genital mutilation, which no “good” person defends, is one of degree and not kind.
The same vicious worldview that believes girls can only grow up “tamed” when their clitorises are removed by filthy, rusty knives wielded by men and women encrusted with the filth of patriarchy is an extreme manifestation of the bland theological vapidity that assures you and me that we are at our best when we’re kept in our places, even if those places are in spotless church kitchens and nurseries. Both have their root in the same thing — patriarchy, which is defined by male dominance of anyone the patriarch deems below or less-than him — even as the expression of that patriarchy flourishes into the forest of vicious oppression that allows men to beat, own, rape, control, and abuse the women around them or the delicate flower of “soft complementarianism” that assures women that their men will do the hard thinking and the hard work of following Jesus. Both require an acceptance of male rule and female submission, simply as a definition of what it means to be male and female.
There is no Christian theology that honors hierarchy within church, home, or society when the expression of that hierarchy, no matter how seemingly harmless, depends on the elevation of men over women to define and defend it. There is no Gospel message that keeps all of God’s people in sex-prescribed — and sex-proscribed — roles in serving the Lord Jesus. And there is no rationale in condemning sex slavery, rape culture, and the oppression of women if you define “lesser” forms of male hierarchy and dominance — masculinism — as acceptable because you take comfort in a faulty hermeneutic that cherry-picks Scripture to defend what Scripture itself calls indefensible.
If Christian brothers and sisters worked even half as hard to establish the righteousness of the Kingdom as they do in defending theologies and practices that mock it, the Church would rise as one against all forms of oppression and abuse — and the oppressed and the abused would finally have reason to trust that we stand with them, with Jesus, and not with their victimizers.