I appreciated the following comment from Rob, and not just for his use of an actual name, unlike too many of my brave patriarchal correspondents. I genuinely appreciate his concern and will address his points below.
From Rob, received August 4, 2011,
Keely,
I have been reading your blog and all of its gender neutral links (CBE) with interest. I have never encountered a person so given to turn the plethora of clear scripture and historically sound doctrine on its head. Yes, there are men and families that have applied scripture to devalue women, and I believe that we would both rightly confront this wrong on the basis of the Word. But I believe that you mistakenly bend and explain away clear biblical teaching on gender distinctions which are meant for the mutual blessing and protection of each other, and particularly for God’s glory. These distinctions of role, but not value, are some of the many boundaries which God has established within which freedom is able to abide. You call these distinctions “oppressive”, and that’s just plain wrong.
Keely, you indicate that you are a pastor. Its clear from your most recent posts that you are listening to those who would tell you want you want to believe. As you are in a position of influence, it is appropriate to warn you of error. Paul warned Timothy of similar error when he wrote the following:
“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”
Rob
(Prevailing Winds) — Several points bear address here. First among them is that CBE (Christians For Biblical Equality) is not a “gender-neutral” organization, unless one charges the Apostle Paul with a gender-neutral theology in Galatians 3:28, one of CBE’s and all egalitarians’ foundational verses. We don’t subscribe to some insipid “blessed androgyny” in the Body of Christ, nor do we women strive to be men, much less hope that men will be like women. May it never be! Rather, we take the Word seriously in living out the full significance of Galatians 3:28, and not, as my dear husband says, to a “two-thirds degree” in applying it only to class and race.
What we believe is that, as is clearly stated in the Galatians verse and supported magnificently in the New Testament, distinctions of class, race, and sex have no place in dividing members of Christ’s Body, nor in any hierarchy within it, nor in the denial of full, Spirit-gifted service offered and accepted among its members. In complementarian arguments that pin their hopes on several unclear verses, this clear call for ecclesiastical, Body-life harmony and mutuality rings brilliantly clear.
I have heard many complementarians talk about the “clear” teaching of Scripture on gender relations, teachings that often are not found at all (“headship” in Genesis 1 and 2) or not “clear” to any interpreter on first read. I hear that Adam’s naming of the animals and his primacy in creation forms the basis of his “headship” in Genesis, with no acknowledgement that Eve, Leah, and Elizabeth, to name a few women in the Bible, also exercised “naming privileges” over their children, which I doubt would cause any traditionalist to rejoice in their “headship.” Yes, they named their children. Adam named animals, and then he named his “ezer,” or strong rescuer, as the word is used with near unanimity in the Old Testament, where it refers to God as Israel’s “ezer.” In naming Eve, he rejoiced in her equal nature and her completion of him, which hardly argues for her subordination in “role and in function,” as Piper and Grudem, et al, insist.
Likewise, the dominion mandate was given by God to Adam and to Eve — equally. There simply is no hint of hierarchy in the Garden. Likewise, only a spurious and frankly desperate reading of the text would suggest that Adam’s sin in the Garden was his failure to operate as his ezer’s “head.” What you learned in Baptist or any other Sunday School is correct: The sin in Eden was Eve’s sin in eating of the tree, and Adam’s sin in doing the same. It’s noteworthy that Eve, who nowhere in the Genesis account was directly taught by God of the prohibition, nonetheless responded truthfully to God’s inquiry, while the directly-taught Adam, in the first post-Fall instance of sin, blamed his sin on “the one” God gave him. Paul understands this when he says in Romans that sin came to the world through Adam, and yet one part of 1 Timothy 2:13-14 — “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” — is enough for complementarians to cling to the mistaken notion of Eve’s innate greater sinfulness or gullibility and Adam’s “headship” in Creation.
Can Rob really say that the verse following, which insists that women “will be saved through childbearing” if they persist in good works and conduct, is an example of “clear teaching”? Are women always saved through childbirth? No. Do women get saved differently from men — not by grace through faith, but by childbearing? No. What about translations that refer to “the” childbearing? Not too clear, frankly. What about the verses preceding v. 13, where a woman is to learn “in silence and in submission,” and where Paul says he is not now permitting women to teach or to have authority over men? (That’s the Greek, which didn’t make it into most translations and which indicates Paul’s own decision, not timeless, to deny the women of Ephesus the position of teacher of the mixed assembly). Does Rob know what the puzzling verb “authentein” means? It’s the verb translated “to have authority over.” Commentators say it can mean “murder,” “usurp power from,” ” ‘killing’ the reputation of another,” and “behave insolently in taking the place of.” Surely all believers are prohibited from doing that. So, from the temporary, in-time-and-place nature of Paul’s prohibition here and the oddness of “authentein,” are we really sure what the women of Ephesus can’t do?
And if they’re to be silent in the church, why then does Paul devote much of 1 Corinthians 11 to guiding the Body on how a woman may pray and prophesy in the assembly so that she does not offend outsiders or cause shame on her husband? Would he instruct women in how to do something he forbids them to do later, in chapter 14, or here? Is there perhaps something particular to Ephesus, the home of the “divine feminine,” or the goddess Artemis and the female-supremacy cults that served her, that makes women’s teaching there at that time something that would have had a negative effect on the Church’s witness? Is Paul’s focus on not needlessly offending outsiders by currying controversy, or is it really a timeless, permanent injunction against Spirit-gifted women using that gift in the whole assembly? And couldn’t we make the case — which, actually, I do — that adhering to that cultural prohibition today needlessly offends outsiders and curries controversy?
What about the complementarian’s devotion to “clear teaching”? Do the women in Rob’s church remain stone-cold silent in the worship service, or are they given to wearing head coverings? Or perhaps Rob would recognize what most 20th- and 21st century commentators see in 1. Cor. 11 — that God, in giving woman her hair as a covering, has also given her authority over her own head so that she may, in fact, pray and prophesy in the assembly without shaming either her husband or her Church?
“Clear teaching”? Really?
Do Rob and his fellow complementarians equate the difficulty in interpreting these verses with the overall clear testimony of Scripture that Christ’s Gospel is one of reconciliation, restoration, and mutual submission? Is Christ’s victory in overturning the effects of the Fall somehow not applied to women’s and men’s relationships? Is a “two-thirds” application of Galatians 3:28 a truly Biblical one? Has Christ through his Holy Spirit ushered in a new Kingdom, a new community, and a new way of living that has as its goal Eden restored? Is Christ’s forward-from-the-culture treatment of women a model for us today? Could Rob honestly accuse St. John Chrysostom of seeking to have his ears tickled when even this historical patriarch recognized that Romans 16 lists a woman, Junia, as an apostle — and applauds this great woman so greatly called and honored by her God?
If God is not gendered, and yet if man and woman derive their personhood equally from God, why would we presume that God always favors the permanent, eternal submission of women to men? Can women really be ontologically equal to men if they are, by virtue of their very being, ALWAYS to be subordinate to them? Can ontology be equal if it and only it — not gifts, not experiences, not any other thing — is the determining factor in who’s on top in the hierarchy? Would a classical course in logic not reveal the fallacy of insisting that two people are entirely, fundamentally, ontologically equal IF an ontological and ONLY an ontological difference explains one’s permanent subordination to the other? And did God constantly overthrow the idea of “primacy in creation” when he chose or exalted David? How about rejecting the firstborn Esau and calling Jacob? Judah? Ephraim? Joseph? God’s adherence to “order of creation” would give us an entirely different list of names He used, called, and exalted. It seems our God laughs at primogeniture, unless he’s opening wide all of its benefits to women formerly not permitted them.
Has the LORD called His children to hierarchy, or to mutuality? Put another way, does Rob’s Bible have Ephesians 5:21 in it?
Finally, I confess to Rob that I read Scripture, by the grace and gifting of the Spirit, through egalitarian lenses — because my Savior modeled and commands it. I did not always consider myself an egalitarian. When I first came to Christ some 31 years ago, I was taught that this “feminism thing” in me had to fall by the wayside — conquered by Bible study, conformed to Christ by the Spirit, or beaten out of me by suspicious traditionalists. Only in recent years, as evidenced by the fact that I first attended an egalitarian church in the nine years I’ve been in Moscow (my current church is only my second like it), have I come to understand what the Bible really teaches about gender relations and service. I don’t “repent” of my earlier doubts that Christ’s was an egalitarian Gospel, but I do consider that the Spirit has led me into solid truth unfettered by cultural conformity.
William Webb, in his book Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals, calls this method of understanding Scripture a “redemptive-movement” hermeneutic. By the way, my bookshelf has volumes from both complementarians and egalitarians, and I have read a great deal from Grudem, Piper, and the Council For Biblical Manhood And Womanhood, which CBE was formed to refute. Can Rob say the same? Has he read egalitarian writers defending their beliefs? Or would he dare suggest that Bilezikian, Giles, Erickson, Clark-Kroeger, Keener, Gaebelin-Hull, Padgett, Lamb, Grenz, Spencer, and other egalitarian evangelicals — Christians as committed to the authority of the Word as he is, and likely more educated in it than either of us — are sub-par as theologians and heretics as teachers? And is he aware that Grudem is rightly under fire for teaching rank subordinationism, the quasi-heretical view that Jesus is eternally subordinate to Yahweh? This flirts with Arianism; Millard Erickson’s “Who’s Tampering With The Trinity?” is a good resource for overcoming Grudemism — or Arianism, for that matter.
I do appreciate what I take to be Rob’s sincere concern for my soul, my ministry, and my relationship with the Lord. And while I did pastor a Spanish-language church in Duvall, Washington, in the late 1990s, I consider myself a preacher; I just use an electronic pulpit these days. I hope he writes again — and I would love to hear his views on the points I’ve made, while I pray that both of us are equally (dare I say mutually?) guided by the Holy Spirit in our understanding of God’s Holy Word.
Your turn, brother.