The CBE Scroll

A prominent sociologist on evangelicals, Sally Gallagher, has much to say to egalitarians in her article, The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism. She questions, when 56% of evangelical women are employed outside the home and when many evangelical marriages are egalitarian in practice, why evangelicals as a whole have still rejected mutuality and partnership between the genders.

One important point she makes is that well-known evangelical leaders have effectively linked evangelical feminism with androgyny. I have personally seen this many times from complementarian writing—statements like “evangelical feminists and their efforts to blur the genders that God made so beautifully distinct.” Complementarians have had definite success in convincing many people both that androgyny will be the awful result if we embrace gift-based leadership and that secularization of the church is the purpose behind egalitarianism.

In light of this, I can’t help but believe there is a huge issue of fear in the evangelical church. It seems to me that much of what we do in the church is more of an effort to preserve our way of thinking (because our interpretation must be correct) rather than actually critically thinking and dealing with Scripture and culture (of both the past and the present). This is particularly fascinating to me since evangelicals distinguish themselves from fundamentalists in their insistence that culture should be engaged.

How do we combat fear in the evangelical church?

Evangelicals talk a lot about being “set apart” from the world. But that distinction often seems to be based in fear—a strict definition of what we are not rather than what we are. When discussing the evangelical identity as set apart from the broader culture, Sally Gallagher suggests that evangelicals could accept mutuality and still be distinguished from the “secular” world if:

“…they were demonstratively more egalitarian than the broader culture in sharing responsibility for, and not just helping each other with, paid and unpaid family labor.”

What if the church was about radical equality—where Christians practice mutual submission characterized by love, humility, and selflessness, where Christians’ gifts are used for the glory of God, and where gender is neither blurred or stereotyped, but celebrated? This sounds like the example of the early church. It also sounds like a way that evangelicals can set themselves apart from the rest of society—a way that evangelicals can still be evangelicals.

Andy passes along this blog reference for our attention — http://www.emergentvillage.us/weblog/being-emergent-woman — as an example of what younger church leaders are thinking, in this case within the emergent movement. He also suggests that this blog post that he’s recommending could use our support. I think it’s a great idea.

Salon has an article on Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church. I was so sad after reading this article. In short they’ve taken the post-WW2 culture, and they are trying to make it biblical.

Following Driscoll’s biblical reading of prescribed gender roles, women quit their jobs and try to have as many babies as possible. And these are no mere women who fear independence, who are looking to live by the simple tenets of fundamentalist credo, enforced by a commanding husband: many of the women of Mars Hill reluctantly abandon successful lives lived on their own terms to serve their husbands and their Lord.

So if Deborah went to Mars Hill, she would have had to resign from being a prophet and judge, and who would have led Israelite troops to victory over Sisera? I guess Isreal would not have had that 40 years of peace under her rule. I guess Phoebe would not have been a deacon in the church at Cenchreae (Romans 16:1). The word that describes Phoebe as a “deacon” is the same word Paul uses when speaking of Timothy and Titus in their pastoral duties. At Mars Hill Phoebe would not have been allowed to pastor the church at Cenchreae, and she sure wouldn’t have been allowed to take Paul’s letter to Rome. Priscilla would not have been a tentmaker and copastor with her husband. Junia would not have been an apostle (Romans 16:7).

The online screening process that is used in Driscoll’s Acts 29 church planting application “begins with a lengthy doctrinal assertion that every word of the Bible is literal truth; the application plucks out the examples of creationism and male headship of home and church to clarify this doctrine.”

I have dealt with biblical literalism in Truth vs. Fact. In Does It Really Mean Helpmate? I looked at the creation account and showed that the Hebrew phrase ezer cenedgo means a help or power equal to, and that there is nothing submissive about the term. Woman was created equal with man to be partners with him in life, marriage, and ministry.

In other conversations I have pointed out that I am from rural Oklahoma. On the farm or ranch—everyone worked. There was no man’s work and woman’s work—husband, wife, children, and who ever else lived there worked to bring in the crop and cows. If they didn’t they starved. The division of the family between separate jobs and home is a fairly new phenomenon within human history. I also come from a poor, working class family—my mom worked; she had to. I have always looked at the stay-at-home mother as a middle class luxury. In many places around the world both men and women work hard to keep their families from starving. Not everyone has the luxury of one person staying home. In fact, few people do. That’s why I call this the post-WW2 mentality—society has to be at a certain economic level within an industrialized or technological society to afford the luxury of the stay at home mom.

The bottom line is it’s not biblical. God called women to be prophets, judges, and other leaders to obey him and lead his people. Women have the right to work: in Genesis 1:26 care and dominion of creation is given to both man and woman before the command to procreate in verse 28. Women are called to work in the world, work in ministry, and be ordained as pastors and ministers, because God has called us as the full witness of the Bible affirms.

Things like this used to make me mad. Now I grieve. I grieve over the bondage that this lie puts on both men and women, and it is not God’s will.

Two weeks ago, the story of Mary Lambert became major national news. The audacity of firing an older woman from her long held position as Sunday school teacher based on her gender angered many. Since the initial report, the church and the pastor have tried to give a fuller picture of the situation. Conflict between Pastor LaBouf and Ms. Lambert started when he first began serving two years ago. Ms. Lambert was part of a small group of members who challenged the changes he made in the structure and official theology of the church. This disagreement caused a rift in their relationship and, according to church officials, led to her being let go from her position. According to the press release from the church, the reasons for Mary Lambert’s dismissal were “multifaceted and the scriptural rules concerning women teaching men in a church setting was only a small aspect of that decision. Christian courtesy motivates us to refrain from making any public accusations against her.”

Why then did the official letter state gender as the primary reason for Ms. Lambert’s dismissal? “We had originally intended to include the various multifaceted reasons for the dismissal in our corresponds however after legal review it was recommended that we refrain from including issues that could be construed as slander and stick with ‘spiritual issues’ that govern a church, which the courts have historically stayed out of.”

To avoid a potential lawsuit the church decided that the easiest course of action was to dismiss Ms. Lambert based on something unarguable- her gender. In this situation, the church used Ms. Lambert’s gender as a weapon against her. They do not even consistently hold to the interpretation of scripture they used to justify this unjust action- it was merely convenient.

A seemingly straightforward situation of theology producing action reveals a complicated situation of church politics and factions. However, the fact that a church thought it was appropriate to use a person’s gender to remove them from a teaching position is saddening. Gender and life experience are aspects Christians should celebrate. As a community of believers, we are the body of Christ. When we embrace the diversity within our midst and invite people into the position of preacher and teacher, we allow ourselves to hear the voice of God from a different mouth and to be blessed by the way the Holy Spirit works in another individual.

I’ve been reading the recent issue of Priscilla Papers (Summer 2006). I have been struck by both Catherine Clark Kroeger and Philip B. Bayne’s use of history in their respective articles on 1 Corinthians 11. In Kroeger’s article she is looking at what kephalē, “head,” means in 1 Corinthians 11:3: “But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ” (NASB). She uses a plethora of secular, Jewish, and early Christian historical sources to show that the conventional meaning of kephalē means “source” or “beginning,” not a hierarchal understanding of a boss or somone who has authority over other people. Bayne does the same thing in his exegesis of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16. Using sources contemporary with Paul, he shows what Paul meant by “head” as well as the culture and custom of the day regarding how men and women should wear their hair, which has nothing to do with head coverings. He also looks at what the early Church Fathers had to say about this passage and how they interpreted it. The striking thing is the consistency of the translation of “head” in all the sources: secular, Jewish, and Christian—nowhere is kephalē translated to be an authority over another. It always means source or beginning.

One of the things that has aggravated me about Evangelicalism for the last 15 years is its ignorance regarding Christian history, and it’s arrogance in thinking it doesn’t need it. I am very happy to see Robert Webber and others working to bring Evangelicals back into the stream of our shared history instead of just looking at it as “Catholic history” we don’t need (I grew up Southern Baptist in rural Oklahoma, and this was how early Church history was referred to). I think both of these articles show how important it is for us to know how contemporary sources and the early Church used words, and how the early Church interpreted Pauline and other passages. This history shows that the complementarians are wrong in their translation of kephalē, and corrects how we also interpret head coverings and how Paul wanted men and woman to relate to each other. When we consider all of Christian history and tradition, then we have the resources we need to more correctly understand what the biblical writers were saying instead of imposing our own intepretations and world views on the text.