The CBE Scroll

I have been reading a wonderful book, Why Not Women? A Fresh Look at Scripture on Women in Missions, Ministry, and Leadership.  The authors are Loren Cunningham and David Hamilton.

Loren Cunningham wrote the first chapter entitled “It’s High Time! ” Listen to the hope he exuded:

“In the near future, the red-hot core of the spiritual awakening will be those now entering university and younger, a generation connected worldwide, not just through music and fashion but by common thoughts and by instant communication through the Internet.  This connection will help speed the message given by Jesus two thousand years ago.

As I envision this, I see every little girl growing up knowing she is valued, knowing she is made in the image of God, and knowing that she can fulfill all the potential He has put within her.  I see the Body of Christ recognizing leaders whom the Holy Spirit indicates, the ones whom He has gifted, anointed, and empowered without regard to race, color, or gender.  This generation will be one that simply asks, “Who is it that God wants?”  There will be a total equality of opportunity, total equality of value, and a quickness to listen to and follow the ones the Holy Spirit sets apart.”

How I wish I shared Loren’s sense of “it’s all getting better.”  Actually, I feel a sense of things turning backwards – at least in the US.  I sense a new kind of church community arising, gaining steam in many places, and being seen as the faithful answer to many decades of church decline, hedonism, and unbelief.  These are the churches that self-proclaim as being “truly faithful to the Word.”  It sounds so good on the surface – new churches, rapidly growing, filled with younger people, Biblically-grounded.  But, I have found more than one of these new biblically-focused communities putting much less emphasis on the Spirit’s leading.  I have also found them to be newly “woman-resistant.”  When I take a close look at their leadership roster, all the pastors are male, the elders are male, and even the deacons are male (if there is that elder/deacon system).  The teachings stress the submission of women.  Why are these communities blooming – because they seem to be Word-focused (i.e., really serious) – because of music, technology, and cultural connections? 

I am truly concerned about this trend.  As a pastor, I have had more couples come where they want to have the woman’s obedience to her husband stressed in their wedding ceremonies.  I have heard of this from others too.  This is seen by people thinking along these lines as a key part of the wholesome renewal for the Church and a means of combatting divorce and chaos in homes – getting women back in line.  I am surprised to see a number of younger people “going for it.”

Matthew 5

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ [a] 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

There is a whole industry set up to violate these words of Jesus – it’s called pornography. We know it hurts the relationship between the genders by encouraging men to treat women and girls as sex objects, rather than as persons created in the image of God. Yet what effect does pornography have on the self image of women and girls and how they value themselves? It’s not something I have heard Christians talk about much.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. In his book “Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction” (Page 88 and 89) Patrick Carnes says the following:

“A girl reads the sexually explicit magazines in her father’s pornography collection and becomes convinced about how to get a man’s attention. As an adult, she acts like the women in those magazines to attract the attention of the opposite sex.”

When I was growing up, a couple of my female friends showed me their fathers’ pornography.  At age fourteen, one of them acted out some of the things that were  described in her father’s magazines.  Later on, at age eighteen she married an extremely unstable man. I think if she had known a better experience in her family when learning what it means to be female, she would not have married him. Another girl who showed me her father’s pornography had the attitude that taking off as much clothing as possible was the ultimate thrill in being female. Even as an adult, she considers women with larger breasts to be of more intrinsic value than women with smaller breasts, and that’s what she has indirectly conveyed to her daughters.

When we talk about the cost of pornography, we cannot limit it to the way it causes men to treat women. We also have to take into account what it teaches women and girls about their value as human beings. It teaches them that their primary worth in this life is the sexual pleasure their body gives to men. It glamorizes being a sex object, and many women and girls, including Christians, accept this lesson without ever questioning it. In addition, many women come to accept the idea that their husbands’ using of pornography is normal. Again they accept this lesson without ever questioning it.

This is the  legacy of pornography in our culture. It not only causes men to view women and girls as sex objects, it causes women and girls to look at themselves as sex objects. What can we as Christians do to undo the lessons pornography teaches women and girls, and to show them how Jesus wants them to be viewed ?

This post written by Curtis Freeman is reproduced with the kind permission of Wade Burleson from his blogsite, a valuable resource for egalitarians. http://kerussocharis.blogspot.com/

Getting a Trinitarian conversation going among Baptists is more important than one might first expect given that most Baptists these days are, and for some time have been, functionally Unitarians. For example, in The Baptist Hymnal (1991) out of 666 hymns only 20 are Trinitarian (a ratio of 1:33), but 268 of these 666 hymns are Christological (a ratio of 1:2.5). Baptist worship in the South clearly tilts toward Unitarianism of the Second Person (i.e., a faith in Jesus alone to the near exclusion of the Father and the Spirit), just as on occasions in the past it has leaned in the direction of Unitarianism of the First Person (i.e. a faith in the Father alone with a subordinate role for the Son and the Spirit). To put the matter pointedly, most Baptists are Unitarians that simply have not yet gotten around to denying the Trinity. Non-Trinitarian faith is not necessarily anti-Trinitarian, yet it is reason for concern nonetheless.

All this may seem counter intuitive, but it’s true. I often tell incoming students at Duke that they will hear the Trinity invoked more in the first week than in their entire life in Baptist churches. They later surprisingly tell me that they thought I was exaggerating at first, but after a week they came to see that I may have underplayed the way in which our community draws from the life of the Trinity in prayer, worship, study, and living. It has thus become one of my life goals to help the wider Baptist family retrieve a faith and practice grounded in the life of the Triune God in whom we live, and move, and have our very being. To the end that your conversation (on Wade Burleson’s blogsite) has served to raise that awareness I am grateful.

However, like you, I am concerned about embracing a Trinitarian doctrine that is not well grounded or tested. For several years now this new doctrine of the eternal subordination of the Son (ESS) has been surfacing among Baptists and other evangelicals. As I’ve read some of the replies on your blog and other blogs criticizing you, I’ve encountered the very odd claim that ESS is the historic doctrine of orthodoxy. A simple fact check of the history of the doctrine of the Trinity will reveal that ESS is not a historic doctrine at all, but a very new one. Nor is it part of the received wisdom of the Christian tradition, but in fact is a matter of contemporary speculation. Doctrines do change, and sometimes innovations are received as wisdom. But ESS has yet to be tested and proved by any but a very small and unrepresentative group. The doctrine of the Trinity doesn’t belong to Baptists or Evangelicals. It is the faith shared by all Christians. And until ESS has been tested by the whole Church, it seems prudent to wait.

One of the major concerns about ESS is the supposed distinction between functional and ontological subordination. While it is true that the incarnate Son in his earthly life was submissive to the Father, the suggestion that this subordination extends to his eternal exalted state is worrisome. As Kevin Giles has argued, very persuasively I think, this appears to be a new iteration of Arianism. To be fair to the proponents of ESS, they are not Arians in one important respect: they believe in the Son’s eternal generation (the aspect or Origen’s thought appropriated in the Creed of the Council of Nicaea, “eternally begotten of the Father”), but they also believe in his eternal subordination (the aspect of Origen’s thought not appropriated by the Nicene defenders of homoousios). I suppose that makes them only semi-Arians. [Thanks to my friend and colleague Steve Harmon for this qualification.] The burden of proof, however, is on those proposing this new doctrine of ESS to show that it is not a new form of an old heresy. I’ve yet to be convinced. Until this is worked out it seems wise to wait until this new doctrine of ESS has been thoroughly examined and tested.

Beyond the question of the orthodoxy of ESS, which is still very much in question, I am suspicious of the not so subtle political agenda of ESS which is attracted to Trinitarian theology, not as an account of the life in which we live and move and have our being, but as an argument that underwrites complementarian views. I am just as suspicious of those who use Trinitarian doctrine to support the complementarian social agenda as those who engage in social Trinitarian speculations to underwrite feminist convictions. Miroslav Volf, one of our best Free Church theologians on the Trinity, has called for caution in the use of such speculative Trinitarian theology which can easily be co-opted by ideologies of the right and the left. His cautionary word seems wise regarding ESS. I am suspicious that the real energy behind this new ESS doctrine is really a thinly veiled attempt to elevate complementarianism to de fide orthodoxy, so that complementarian gender relations are set forth as the only acceptable model for Christians and that egalitarianism is heresy equivalent to denying the Trinity. This utilitarian use of Trinitarian doctrine is (in my opinion) based on dubious scholarship and bad theology.

I share the goal of helping our wider Baptist family retrieve the wisdom of the vast storehouse of orthodoxy. As bad as functional Unitarianism is, however, the possible embrace of a semi-Arianism masquerading as orthodoxy used for political ends may be even worse.

Yours in a common faith,

Curtis

Curtis W. Freeman
Research Professor of Theology
Director of the Baptist House of Studies
Duke Divinity School
Box 90966
Durham, NC 27708-0966