Kriste Patrow, Events Coordinator at CBE

The doctrine of Trinity has been the cause of much theological controversy over the centuries. In the 4th century, a preacher named Arius argued that Jesus was less than God the Father. In response, the council of Nicaea developed a comprehensive statement of faith upon which subsequent doctrine and theology has been measured for centuries. The Nicene Creed affirmed the divinity of Jesus and the co-equal, co-eternal nature of members in the Trinity.

For centuries, Christians sang a hymn that affirmed this creed. Tantum Ergo Sacramenetum was written by St. Thomas Aquinas and was part of the communion celebration. Two verses read:

“Procendenti eb utroque, 
camper sit laudation.”
“Proceeding from each other,
Equal may they be praised.”

From early on, theologians set up no hierarchical pyramid of authority within the Trinity. Yet, in recent years, Evangelicals have reshaped the accepted teachings of the Trinity, importing hierarchy—the very issue the early church worked to eradicate! Here is what one scholar says:

“In his new book, Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity (Zondervan, 2006), Giles shows how a whole generation of conservative evangelicals has embraced a new-fangled version of the ancient Trinitarian heresy of subordinationism. They do not hide their motives. They are determined to see in God what they wish to see in humanity: a subordination of role or function that does not compromise (they insist) an essential equality of being. Therefore, they teach that just as woman is created equal to man but has a subordinate role at home and in church, so the Son of God is coequal with the Father in being or essence but has a subordinate role in the work of salvation and in all eternity. They even think—quite mistakenly, as Giles shows—that this is what the Bible and Christian orthodoxy have always taught.” Philip Carey (PHD Yale), Professor of Philosophy at Eastern University, St. Davids, PA.

Concerned about such developments, evangelicals from both sides of the gender conversation stand together in publishing an Evangelical Statement on the Trinity, written by William David Spencer in consultation with Aída Besançon Spencer, Mimi Haddad, Royce Gruenler, Kevin Giles, I. Howard Marshall, Alan Myatt, Millard Erickson, Steven Tracy, Alvera Mickelsen, Stanley Gundry, Catherine Clark Kroeger, and other theologians, exegetes, philosophers, and church historians.
You too are invited to add your name in support of the Evangelical Statement on the Trinity by signing at www.TrinityStatement.com/sign. Stand with us and help us hold up the measuring stick, crafted so faithfully by early church leaders, to this new doctrine.

According to one of the fundamental tenets of Protestantism, the priesthood of all believers (hereafter, PAB):

(1) All baptized believers are ordained by God as priests.

From here the rest of the argument quickly follows:

(2) Some women are baptized believers.

Therefore,

(3) Some women are ordained by God as priests.

We might thus simply ask our complementarian friends the following: If God has ordained someone as a priest, who are we to deny her ordination?

I suppose one might reply that PAB is purely a spiritual matter that does not pertain to our ecclesiological affairs. However, that reply seems to miss the original meaning of the doctrine, not to mention the context in which Luther himself re-discovered it. Whether or not Luther understood the egalitarian implications of the doctrine is another matter, but to the extent he didn’t, we could say that even he wasn’t being a consistent Protestant! (I am not in a position to say what his view on this matter was, so I am not claiming that he was, indeed, inconsistent.) It appears that, while Luther did make a distinction between priests and ministers, he saw the latter not as a God-ordained position, but simply as those whom we Christians choose from among us to do certain tasks. Since the latter is not based on divine ordination, I would assume that we choose people for these tasks based on our discernment of their natural abilities and spiritual gifts related to those various tasks. So, unless we are willing to state categorically that women are physically or spiritually incapable of performing certain tasks (a strong claim indeed!), then I cannot see how a Protestant would in principle be able to hold to strong complementarianism. I suppose one could deny PAB, but in so doing, one would cease to be properly Protestant.

Part of the answer may be that the ratio distortion of women and men in the church is similar with most denominations reporting many more women attending than men. However, the imbalance at home is not nearly as wide as on the mission field.

Considering many evangelical churches put emphasis on the leadership of men, does it make sense then, that single men are conspicuous by their absence in cross-cultural ministry? Most organisations recruit and commission people regardless of gender, trusting God that, through his sovereignty, he will accomplish his plan and purpose for the Kingdom.

Does the fact that single women far outnumber single men on the mission field suggest that the men are less obedient to God’s call? Or maybe women are better conditioned to accomodate the struggles and challenges of working under difficult circumstances?

And….does it matter whether we send out more single female missionaries than male ? Biblically, it matters if the reason is that there are men who received a legitimate call from God to serve him in this way and don’t obey. Trusting in the providence of our Creator should preoccupy all of us regardless of gender or status.

It would be good  to read people’s opinions and experiences in this area of experience.

(This post has used some thoughts from the blog of Tim Laitinen who comments on a range of observations and perspectives on American church culture)

Gregory of Nazianzus, who lived at the end of the fourth century stated, “To gar aprosleptom atherapeuton,” which in English means, “What is not assumed is not redeemed.” His words remind us that Christ came to represent all of humanity on the Cross. Thus, if we absolutize one aspect of Christ, such as his gender, ethnicity, or class, we run the risk of excluding people without those characteristics from Christ’s atoning work on Calvary. Because Scripture teaches that Christ is the Savior of the whole world (John 4:42), we diminish Christ’s atoning work when speaking of his gender as paramount. Perhaps that is one reason why Scripture speaks most often of Christ as the “Son of anthropos,” or humanity, rather than “Son of aner,” or male. He was a sacrifice of humanity, for humanity. Indeed, Christ’s sacrifice was for everyone, as the Scriptures note. Because of this, the whole church may take the whole Gospel to the whole world.

Recently a friend of mine received a very distinguished award from her denomination for her long-term leadership in promoting the “maximum baptismal role of women in the Church.” As I pondered our baptismal role, I remembered that many baptismal fonts from the early church had Galatians 3:26-28 inscribed on them. Why? Baptism, rather than circumcision, became the public expression of our covenantal relationship with God, attained through our union with Christ. Just as Christ rose victoriously over sin, we too rise out of the waters of baptism, symbolizing our rising victorious with Christ over sin. United to Christ in baptism, God does not look upon our sins, but sees that we are clothed in Christ, a reality that Paul summarizes in Galatians 3:27-29: “You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

To be united to Christ completely redefines our identity and status with respect to God. It also redefines our relationship to one another. In the same way Christ established satisfaction or peace between sinners and God, so too Christ builds peace between the members of his body—the Church. Because of this, theologians suggest that our christology (what we understand about Christ and our salvation in him) directs our ecclesiology (what we understand about the Church). Just as there is an intimacy or a union between Christ and each redeemed soul, there is also unity or mutuality between those who are redeemed by Christ. To be in Christ is never simply a statement solely about one’s redemptive status. For our redemption also directly influences our status in relationship to one another, as members of Christ’s body.

Paul boldly suggests in Galatians 3 that Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, males and females are all one in Christ. He wrote these words to a world in which nearly half of the population were slaves. How radical Galatians 3:28 must have sounded to first century ears! How radical our baptism remains today! Be clear about this! Our relationship with Jesus changes everything! That is the true meaning of baptism. Our significance and influence is not defined by our earthly parents but through our relationship to God from whom we receive our ultimate inheritance. And our sisters and brothers receive the same inheritance and gifts from God’s Spirit. These gifts never come in pink or blue, yellow, black, or white. Through the power of the Cross, expressed in Christian baptism, we no longer ascribe value, dignity, and worth according to social status, ethnicity, gender, or class. Hallelujah.

When I see lived before me what the promise of a little girl can offer to a family, I shudder to remember the countless baby daughters who have been sacrificed because of their gender, left in the rubbish heaps of previous centuries to die of exposure in exchange for the “greater blessing” a brother would offer. I (unsuccessfully) try not to stand in judgment, because I cannot understand the grinding poverty and insurmountable social structures that drove past (and, dreadfully, still drives some present) parents to accept this way of life and death. I thank God for his promise to someday right all injustices in holy judgment! And as I grow older, I am increasingly grateful for the multitude of remarkable women over the centuries who survived their cultures’ high cost of womanhood and who looked to Christ, instead of patriarchs, for their true identities and authority.

Many gifted daughters of God have found their strength and value in the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.” With gratitude for his mercy, these women devoted themselves to every realm of kingdom service: some in constant prayer, some in care for the sick and destitute, some in the teaching of his Word, some in the oversight of monastic communities. Every era of Christian history has been shepherded by faithful women laboring alone or alongside their believing brothers.

Take Macrina (324-379), for example. Following the deaths of her father and her fiancé (the latter of whom died when she was 12), she took on the leadership of a religious community at her family estate in Cappadocia. By instruction and example, she had such a profound influence on her younger brothers Basil and Gregory—future leading bishops of the Eastern Church who respectfully referred to her as “the Teacher”—that the three of them became known to history as the “Great Cappadocians.”

Or Clare of Assisi (1194-1253). A devout Italian teenager, she refused to accept an arranged marriage to a wealthy noble and instead took vows of poverty and chastity, choosing to spend her days in prayer, manual labor, and the spiritual guidance of the many women who subsequently joined her—eventually including her own sister and mother.

Or Fidelia Fiske (1816-1864). Her family thought her unmarried status and recent battle with typhoid rendered her unfit for the mission field. But seminary-trained and persuaded of her call, she left New England for what is now Iran. There she convinced fathers who had decided they could only afford to feed their sons to give her their daughters instead of forcing them into prostitution. She became mother, nurse, and teacher, training dozens of girls to minister in the name of Christ to other outcasts of their society.

Or Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922). Raised in India by a Brahmin father who lost his job for educating his wife and daughter, after her conversion to Christianity she became a Bible translator and social reformer. She wrote against the devastating traditional practices of child marriage, polygamy, and sati (in which a widow, considered part of her husband’s body, is burned to death with his corpse), and founded a still-existing mission to provide refuge for young widows.

Today, in the spirit of these foremothers, Baby Jovie begins her own journey. What a legacy of wise female leadership our Christian tradition offers my newborn niece! My prayer is that she will receive this gift with joy and humility, and leave her mark on all the baby girls (and boys)—of infinite value to Jesus—who follow her in the worship and service of our Holy God.

My interest in women and missions of the 1800s is reinvigorated, of late, by a number of experiences I’ve had lecturing at Christian colleges and seminaries around the county. When invited to speak for chapel services, I make an effort to learn something about the school, particularly the achievements of the founders and their graduates. In doing so, I have discovered the vast number of women alumni, who were also leaders on the mission field in the United States and abroad. And, they had the full support of the school’s founders. As I include these findings when I lecture, I am often surprised at the responses I receive… some of these Christian colleges appear almost embarrassed to learn of the number of women who held positions of significant leadership and who were trained in this capacity by their institution.

Most of our evangelical colleges and seminaries initially began as Bible institutes – and nearly all Bible institutes had many more women enrolled than men. Why? Because Christians in the 1800s, influenced by premillenialism, believed that Christ’s return was imminent – and therefore, they were far more concerned about the Great Commission than they were with gender or ethnicity. As a result of placing less emphasis on gender, women outnumbered men on the mission field, two to one. This led to one of the largest expanses of Christian faith in history – during what has been called the ‘Golden Era of Missions’ – which began in the early 1800s, in which women were the driving force.

Bible institutes trained men and women for evangelism, in anticipation of Christ’s immediate return. Over time, these institutes became today’s Christians colleges and universities which broadened their curriculum to prepare Christian men and women for professional service in many disciplines. In doing so, some lost touch with their evangelical moorings as it relates to women’s gospel-leadership.

As I celebrate the legacy of their female graduates who preached to men and women all over the world, I am frequently asked two questions:

1. If women were the driving force behind the Golden Era of Missions, what took the church so long to use women in this capacity?

2. What has happened since then? Why has their leadership been lost, and where are women gospel leaders today?

First off, it was during the Golden Era of Missions, with the enormous success God granted the gifts he had given women and slaves that Christians began to question the presumed ontological inferiority of both women and slaves. They did so from a thorough examination of Scripture. Their biblical research was published in more than forty-six biblical treatises between 1808 and 1930, from many branches of the evangelical church, in support of the shared leadership of women. These documents signified the emergence of the first wave of feminists – a deeply biblical movement. The advancement of women’s ontological and functional equality grew out of a commitment to biblical authority, evangelism, and an activism that came to characterize or identify the evangelical movement as a whole, beginning in the 1800s. And, it was the early evangelicals – both men and women, who were among the first to provide both a biblical and social voice for gender and ethnic equality. By doing so, they represented a radical departure from previous generations of Christians whose patriarchal and racist assumptions went unchallenged by Scripture.

Biblicists (those who affirmed the supremacy of Scripture), were early evangelicals who supported the evangelism of women and in doing so they not only challenged higher critical methods that undermined the authority of the Bible, they also resisted the ‘proof text’ method or plain reading of Scripture that gave support not only to slavery, but also to women’s exclusion from public ministry. Rather, evangelical biblicists sought to harmonize those passages that appeared in conflict with the whole of Scripture regarding the equal value (ontology) and service (function) of women and slaves. Thus, the first-wave feminists developed a whole-Bible hermeneutic that addressed gender and ethnic justice and advanced an ontological equality for women and slaves.

This comes to the second question – why Christian colleges (formerly Bible institutes) appear unfamiliar with the legacy of their earliest women students (who outnumbered male students two to one)… The truncation of women students in Bible institutes and leadership was the result of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Simply stated, modernists challenged both the inspiration of Scripture and the very miracles of Scripture and created uncertainty surrounding the fundamentals of the Christian faith, like the Virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ. They did so using higher critical methods. In response, some Bible institutes, wishing not to appear sympathetic with Modernists, reshaped their curriculum, omitting classes in Greek and Hebrew, and leaning towards the ‘plain reading of the texts.’ This opened the way to a plain reading of 1 Timothy in isolation to the other places in the New Testament where Paul clearly affirms the authority and leadership of women like Junia, Priscilla, Phoebe, Chloe, etc. Thus, the gains made both biblical and socially by the early evangelicals were stymied and linked to a liberal reading of Scripture. Christians for Biblical Equality has had to pick up the biblical scholarship left off by early evangelicals like A.J. Gordon, Katharine Bushnell, Frances Willard and Catherine Booth. Thankfully, the work begun by the early evangelicals has grown so quickly in the last twenty years that CBE is having a difficult time keeping track of the many Christian groups around the world exploring biblical equality both from a popular and scholarly viewpoint.

Fiske was said to be a precocious young girl, reading Cotton Mather’s Magnali Christi Americana and Timothy Dwight’s Theology by age eight. She came to Mount Holyoke in 1839, but her education was interrupted when she contracted typhoid fever. Forty students contracted typhoid fever at the same time and nine died. It was thought that she, as one not known for good health, would be on that list. Her father, sister, and mother helped her pull through, though her father and sister also picked up typhoid fever and died in the process. Her mother, Hannah, did not want her to drift too far away after her near-death experience, so for a short while Fidelia taught at the local schools. Once she had recovered, her mentor and good friend, Mary Lyon, encouraged her to return to school and finish her education. After completing her degree, she was overwhelmingly approved by the trustees to be a full time instructor at Mount Holyoke.

As is often the case, life changes quickly. A missionary on furlough named Justin Perkins wrote a book called Eight Year’s Residence in Persia. Fidelia read it with eagerness. The book described the world of Persia (modern day Iran) and the needs of the people in such detail (including full color artwork) that she wondered if she would be better serving Christ in that world.

Within little time, word came that Perkins was nearing the end of his stay in America and had not located someone to replace Judith Grant, a missionary in Persia who had started a day school for girls, but passed away a few years earlier. Mary Lyon called all the instructors and students of Mount Holyoke together for an emergency meeting, informing them of the need. Those interested were told to drop a note in a box. While Fidelia and others were certainly academically qualified, it was later recalled by Perkins that Fidelia’s note was the only one that said, ‘If I am found worthy, I would like to go.’ The others regaled the missionary with their curriculum vitas, but because Fiske saw it as a spiritual engagement, she became their first and natural choice.

With little time to work, she immediately sent out a letter to her mother asking for her blessing. She also sent out letters to other family members, asking for their opinions. All of them told her that she was not healthy enough to enter into a mission field. Some pointed out that she could be leaving her family for good if she did such a thing. With good intentions, they reminded her that she was not the type of person to go off on adventures (clearly ignoring the fact that her interest seemed to indicate otherwise). There was also the added point, being a single missionary woman in the field was nearly scandalous – a sentiment still living on in some circles today.

Heeding their concerns, Fidelia turned down the offer and tried to move on. The position was offered to another woman, whose family told her the same thing. It was then that Mary Lyon came back to Fidelia and asked her to reconsider. Fidelia asked to sleep on it – something she was not able to do easily. Very early in the morning she knocked on Lyon’s door. She was willing to go to Persia, but on one condition: Lyon had to help her convince her mother. On that snowy winter day, she took a sled ride with Lyon to her mother’s home and spent the weekend discussing the issue. By Sunday evening, her mother gave her blessing.

It was a decision that changed her life. She boarded a ship with Perkins and his family and journeyed off to Oroomiah, arriving in June of 1843. There she made the school of Grant into an effective boarding school modeled after Mount Holyoke. She entered into a hostile culture that found no value in women and saw no reason to educate their daughters. Given such a world, one of the first phrases she learned in their language was ‘give me your daughters.’

Fidelia spent fifteen years in Persia declaring the value of women. She convinced families to let her educate their young daughters instead of abandoning them or selling them into slavery. She became a mother and a teacher to these girls.

By 1858, her struggle with sickness got the better of her and she returned to America. During that time she toured New England, raising awareness of the work still needed to be done in international missions. She returned to teaching at Mount Holyoke for a while and later published several books, including a biography on Mary Lyon. She died in 1864.

Under the guidance of Mary Lyon, Fidelia was encouraged to get a quality education and had her individual gifts nurtured. She did not allow herself (or the girls she ministered to in Iran) to be pigeonholed based solely on their gender. Each of us could serve as a Mary Lyon to someone who needs nurturing. Organizations like CBE and its members call Christians to minister by giftedness, not by gender.

How do you do the same in your local congregation?

For more information on Fidelia Fiske, see Faith Working by Love here.

Have you found yourself sharing the Bible’s support for women’s gospel-service when someone asserts emphatically, ‘Can’t we just agree to disagree? This isn’t a salvation issue, after all!’ And, being peace-loving Christians, we are at first inclined to agree, until we remember someone like Lottie Moon.

Considered one of the great missionaries of all time, Moon’s refusal to obey male authority led to the salvation of many. Lottie’s male supervisor opposed her desire to build a church in Northern China, where she not only made massive inroads for the gospel, but where she also inspired the next generation of Christian missionaries – and all the generations since then!

Today, Lottie is celebrated as one of the greatest Southern Baptist missionaries to ever live. Why? Because she answered the biblical call of missions and evangelism! She even placed the call of Scripture ahead of human authority, particularly when human authority opposed the Word of God.

Consider also the life and work of Phoebe Palmer, regarded as the mother of the Holiness Movement. After leading thousands to Christ, Palmer told her critics that even Satan did not deny that her ministry was from God!

Our time here on earth is short, and the harvest is abundant. Women have been bringing the good news of Jesus since the empty tomb. Let us open doors for women and give the greatest message of all a much larger hearing!