Biblical Leadership Roles and Supporting Your Partner

Dan on Roles, Leadership, and Supporting Your Partner
http://rachelheldevans.com/mutuality-dan

by Rachel Held Evans
June 5, 2012
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This afternoon I’m thrilled to introduce you to my amazing husband Dan. Dan is a loyal friend, a wise and supportive partner, an entrepreneur, a videographer, and a professional out-of-the-box thinker. He’s also one of the most creative, funny, and intelligent people I’ve ever met (though I suppose I’m a bit biased). You can thank Dan for the fact that this Web site exists and runs so smoothly, as he’s the one who works behind-the-scenes to keep all my technology afloat. Some things I respect most about Dan include his uncompromising integrity, his seemingly natural inclination to "rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep," and his ability to identify obscure actors in movies without checking IMDB.

Earlier today, we examined the concept of submission in the context of Peter and Paul’s Christian remix of the Greco-Roman household codes. This afternoon, Dan shares a little about what a pattern of mutual submission looks like in our marriage. Last year, during the infamous “year of biblical womanhood,” Dan kept a journal. The following post is adapted from an excerpt he wrote during the last month of the project. (You’ll be able to read more from his journal when the book comes out!)

Enjoy!

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Recently, my mom made note of how proud she was that I’m able to support Rachel in her successful career, something she said that “many men couldn’t do.”

When viewed in the context of the yearlong "Biblical Womanhood" project, it highlighted a strange absurdity. During the experiment, I acted as the hierarchical leader of our relationship, but at the same time, I continued to play a supporting role in Rachel’s career. At first, I didn’t know how to respond to my Mom's compliment other than, "Thanks Mom." But after processing it a bit, trying to resolve my cognitive dissonance, it hit me:

Our roles aren't static. Our roles change depending on context.

At its core, (yearlong projects aside), my relationship with Rachel isn’t a hierarchy; it’s a partnership. What kind of person doesn’t want success for their partner? A weak, insecure, person. What kind of man doesn’t want success for his wife? A weak, insecure man.

I’m not supporting Rachel like a passive piling supports a dock. I’m supporting her like the Saturn V supported Apollo 11. I want her to succeed in her pursuits, and will do everything in my power to make it happen. And she wants the same for me.

When I’m working on a film project, who’s taking the supporting role and feeding everyone? Rachel. When I took a year to buy, renovate and sell an investment property, who supported me throughout? Rachel. When Rachel’s working to finish a writing project by deadline, who’s supporting her by keeping the house clean and the laundry done? Me. Our life decisions are made in tandem. We’re the ones leading our lives. We aren't battling over who's leading who.

To be “a leader” is meaningless without context. A leader of what?

Too many of us have succumbed to the idea that “leaders” are a specific type of people or that “leadership” is a character quality to be obtained like political capital - the more the better. But I view leadership differently. Leadership isn’t a goal. Leadership is a role that comes and goes. Wisdom and strength are what we should pursue. Not leadership.

In the context of roles, wisdom is discerning when to lead, and strength comes from consistently practicing wisdom. Leadership is a role that changes hands depending on context. In that light, it's important to learn how to lead, not because you want to be “a leader”, but because when wisdom and strength have placed you in a position of leadership, you don’t want to screw it up.

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What do you think? What does "leadership" look like in your marriage and relationships?

What about "support"? Are they static positions you hold or versatile roles that you play?

Who’s Who Among Biblical Women Leaders

Who’s Who Among Biblical Women Leaders

http://rachelheldevans.com/mutuality-women-leaders

by Rachel Held Evans

June 6, 2012

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This is the fifth post in our series, One In Christ: A Week of Mutuality, dedicated to discussing an egalitarian view of gender—including relevant biblical texts and practical applications. The goal is to show how scripture, tradition, reason, and experience all support a posture of equality toward women, one that favors mutuality rather than hierarchy, in the home, Church, and society.

The reason I want to highlight the “who’s who” among biblical woman leaders today is this: Later, we will be discussing 1 Timothy 2:11-15, the passage in which Paul forbids Ephesian women from teaching in church. Unfortunately, when it comes to womanhood, many Christians tend to read the rest of scripture through the lens of 1 Timothy 2:11-15 rather than the other way around. By highlighting the many female leaders and teachers in scripture, I’m hoping to set the stage so that we see 1 Timothy 2 for what it is—an anomaly. It’s hard to argue that Paul’s statements there are meant to be universally applied when so many women from scripture are honored by God and praised by their community for teaching and exercising leadership.

But before we begin, a disclaimer: There is no doubt that the Bible was written in a patriarchal culture. As a result, men are named significantly more often, men serve as protagonists in the biblical stories more often, and men hold positions of leadership more often. In addition, there are stories and laws found in scripture regarding women that are profoundly troubling: women are identified as property (Exodus 20:17, Deuteronomy 5:21, Judges 5:30), rape laws require fathers to be paid for damages and the female victim to marry her rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), virginity expectations focused almost exclusively on girls, women are valued less in vow redemption (Leviticus 27:1-8), the birth of girls represents a greater impurity assessment in the Levitical Purity Codes (Leviticus 12:2-4), women are considered spoils of war (Numbers 31:32-35, Deuteronomy 20:14, Deuteronomy 21:10-15, Judges 5:30, Judges 21:11-23), adultery laws subjected women to more scrutiny and punished them more severely than men, polygamy was common, owning concubines was common, and impregnating slave women was common. Furthermore, stories surrounding women like Tamar of Genesis, Dinah, Hagar, the dismembered concubine of Judges 19, Jephthah's daughter, Tamar of the Davidic narrative, and so on reveal the profound inequity that characterized day-to-day life for women living in the ancient Near East.

Sometimes egalitarians, in their enthusiasm for advancing the equality and dignity of women in the Church, gloss over such passages or try to explain them away. I’m not interested in doing that. I can’t do that. I’ve tried, and frankly, it feels like I am dishonoring the suffering and the bravery of these women by pretending their oppression wasn’t really so bad. (I spend a lot more time discussing and wrestling with the “texts of terror” in A Year of Biblical Womanhood.) Still, it’s astounding that, in the midst of such a patriarchal culture, so many women are honored as leaders and teachers in scripture. This speaks volumes about the remarkable wisdom, resourcefulness, courage, and godliness it would take to teach and lead in such times, and says a lot about the value God places on women even when the world does not.

What follows is not a comprehensive list by any stretch. There are far too many women of valor found in the Bible to list in a single blog post, so I’ve tried to focus specifically on teaching and leading.

Deborah

In the midst of the violent and turbulent aftermath of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, “the Lord raised up judges” to provide leadership for the kingless people (Judges 2:16). One such leader was Deborah. At the beginning of Judges 4, the text reports that “Deborah, a prophet, the wife of Lappidoth, was leading Israel at that time.” As both prophet and judge, Deborah exercised complete religious, political, judicial, and militaristic authority over the people of Israel. She was essentially Israel’s commander-in-chief, said to issue her rulings from beneath a palm in the hills of Ephraim. Judges 4-5 famously recounts Deborah’s successful military campaign against Sisera. With the help of Deborah’s doubtful military commander, Barak, and another very gutsy woman named Jael (who exhibited her “gentle and quiet spirit” by driving a tent peg through Sisera’s skull), the Canaanite armies are defeated. Israel’s victory is punctuated in scripture by the Song of Deborah—one of the ancient Near East’s oldest military poems. Under Deborah’s continued leadership, the people of Israel enjoyed forty years of peace before the cycle of violence began again.

Miriam

The prophet Micah identifies Miriam as one of the three leaders sent by God to bring Israel out of Egypt (Micah 6:4). Like Deborah, Miriam is identified as a prophetess, and she seemed to have held special responsibilities in leading the Israelites in worship. Her song, in Exodus 15 is especially beautiful. Ironically, there are complementarian churches that forbid women from reading Scripture aloud in church, even Scripture like Miriam’s song, Deborah’s song, the reflections of the Shulamite girl in Song of Songs, the Prayer of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1-10, and, of course, the Magnificat—all of which reflect the thoughts and ideas of women.

Huldah

Described as Israel’s last good king, Josiah reigned for thirty-one years during a final period of peace before the Babylonian exile. About halfway through his reign, Josiah learned that the long-lost Book of the Law—the Torah—has been discovered in the temple. Upon hearing the words of the Torah read aloud, Josiah tore his robes in repentance and summoned a prophet, for he saw how far Israel had strayed from God’s ways. It’s important to note that contemporaries of Josiah included the famed prophets Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Nahum, and Habakkuk. But Josiah did not ask for help from any of those men. Instead he chose Huldah, a woman and prophet who lived in Jerusalem. “Huldah is not chosen because no men were available,” writes Scot McKnight in The Blue Parakeet, “She is chosen because she is truly exceptional among the prophets.” Huldah first confirmed the scroll’s authenticity and then told Josiah that the disobedience of Israel would indeed lead to its destruction, but that Josiah himself would die in peace. Thus, Huldah not only interpreted, but also authorized, the document that would become the core of Jewish and Christian Scripture. Her prophecy was fulfilled thirty-five years later (2 Kings 22).

Other Prophetesses:

The Bible identifies ten female prophets in the Old and New Testaments: Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, Noadiah, Isaiah’s wife, Anna, and the four daughters of Philip. In addition, women like Rachel, Hannah, Abigail, Elisabeth, and Mary are described as having prophetic visions about the future of their children, the destiny of nations, and the coming Messiah.

When the Holy Spirit descended upon the first Christians at Pentecost, Peter drew from the words of the prophet Joel to describe what had happened, saying, “Your sons and daughters will prophesy...Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy" (Acts 2:17–18). Thus, the breaking in of the new creation after Christ’s resurrection unleashed a cacophony of new prophetic voices, and apparently, prophesying among women was such a common activity in the early church that Paul had to remind women to cover their heads when they did it. While some may try to downplay biblical examples of female disciples, deacons, leaders, and apostles, no one can deny the Bible’s long tradition of prophetic feminine vision. And I believe this prophetic vision is as important today as it was in the days of the early church. We would do well to heed the words of Jesus: “Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward” (Matthew 10:41). For more on this, see “...Your daughters will prophesy...”

Ruth

I remember attending a conservative Christian conference as a twenty-something, where a speaker told a room full of teenagers that a girl initiating a friendship with a boy was a violation of biblical principles that require men to be the leaders in a relationship. (One of the other girls in attendance started crying because she had invited a boy to prom!) I didn’t realize it then, but that speaker really needed to re-visit the book of Ruth, in which Ruth and Naomi hatch the plan to get Boaz’s attention, and in which Ruth is the one to approach Boaz under the cover of night and essentially ask for his hand in marriage.

Other women who showed leadership in their personal relationships with men include Sarah (God told Abraham to “listen to your wife Sarah”), Rebecca, Rachel, Tamar, Leah, Abigail, and Bathsheba.

The Shulamite Girl

Another great example of a woman exhibiting leadership in her marriage is the Shulamite girl of Song of Songs. There’s too much to say about her here—I spent much more time on Song of Songs in my book—but suffice it to say, this girl knows exactly what she wants, and isn’t afraid to tell her lover to make it happen!

The Shulamite girl is the first to speak in the poem, declaring, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (1:1). She actively seeks out the handsome shepherd in his fields, saying “Why should I be like a veiled woman beside the flocks of your friends?” (v. 7). When the two are separated, she goes out into the streets, looking for him, and at one point is accosted by the city guards. When she finds him, she brings him into a private room. There, she says, “I held him and would not him go” (3:4). It is she who initiates a sexual encounter in a vineyard in the countryside, and it is she who offers her lover a frank invitation to drink her wine and to enter her “garden” to taste its choice fruits. Indeed some of the most beautiful lines of the poem—and arguably of the Bible—are hers: “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death” (8:6).

Alise Wright wrote a great post for our Week of Mutuality about the inconsistency of preaching mutuality in the bedroom, but not in other areas of life. (See “You don’t have to take your clothes off to be egalitarian.”)

Esther

Esther was something of an unwitting biblical leader, but an incredibly brave and wise one nonetheless. She was forced, along with perhaps thousands of virgin girls from Susa, into King Xerxes harem, where she became one of the king’s favorites. Despite some recent (and truly horrendous) complementarian interpretations that say Esther’s story is about godly submission in marriage, it is Esther’s defiance to her husband in speaking to him without being summoned (at the risk of death), that ultimately saves the Jewish people. (I wrote more about Esther and complementarianism in a post entitled “Esther and Vashit: The Real Story”)

Rizpah

Rizpah a sort of Old Testament Antigone, who protested the massacre of her sons by publicly mourning, night and day, at the site where their bodies had been left to the elements. She cried out for months, “from the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies,” keeping watch over her sons and fending away wild animals and birds (2 Samuel 21:10). Her unrelenting despair won the solidarity of a war-weary people and finally moved King David to grant the men a proper burial, thus ending the famine that had swept the land. She serves as an amazing example of the effectiveness of prophetic protest.

Mary of Nazareth

I loved what Mike Zosel wrote about Mary in his response to John Piper’s call for a “masculine Christianity”:

“God did not consider woman’s flesh as something to be despised or ignored or covered up. No. God selected it to be the very vessel of our salvation in Jesus Christ. God saw fit to honor women by entering the world through one of them. God partnered with a woman, in her flesh, to become flesh... So, all of this talk about the Church’s ministry being a ‘masculine ministry’, as if women are primarily ‘alongside’ men (read: nonessential)? Please. In order to bring salvation to all men, even God needed the help of a woman. In fact, God could never have done it without her!” (Read the rest here.)

In addition to being charged with the task of bringing the Son of God into the world, Mary exhibited great leadership in the formation of Christianity. In the Magnificat, we see that Mary boasted a strong familiarity with scripture as well as a striking prophetic vision for what it meant (Luke 1:16-55). Mary’s clear passion regarding justice for the poor and marginalized undoubtedly influenced the teachings of not only Jesus, but also his brother James. (I realize Catholics will disagree with me on this!) It was Mary who urged Jesus to perform his first miracle, and it was Mary who must have provided information to the writers of the gospels concerning Jesus’ birth.

Martha

Martha was one of Jesus’ closest friends and disciples. According to the gospels of Luke and John, she opened her home to Him, shared meals with Him, and stood by His side as He raised her brother, Lazarus, from the dead. John reports that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (John 11:5). That Martha’s name appears before her brother’s suggests that this woman garnered considerable respect among the earliest followers of Jesus.

Mary of Bethany

Rabbi Eliezer wrote in the first century that, “Rather should the words of the Torah be burned than entrusted to a woman...Whoever teaches his daughter the Torah is like one who teaches her obscenity.” (JT Sotah 3:4, 19a)

Jesus unabashedly defies this tradition by teaching the Torah to women, perhaps most notably Mary of Bethany. The fact that Mary is described by Luke as “sitting at the feet of Jesus” clearly identifies her as a disciple. And when Martha challenges Mary to get back to the more traditional role of serving from the kitchen, Jesus gently admonishes Martha to allow her sister to stay put.

“Martha, Martha,” he said, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” This is one of many, many examples of Jesus defying social norms to welcome women into his ministry. Any woman who is a follower of Jesus should remind herself now and then that, no matter what others may say, our esteemed status in Christ’s Kingdom cannot be taken away from us.

“The Women” (female disciples of Jesus)

When referring to the earliest followers of Jesus, the Gospel writers often speak of two groups of disciples: the Twelve and the Women. The Twelve refer to the twelve Jewish men chosen by Jesus to be his closest companions and first apostles, symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Women refer to an unspecified number of female disciples who also followed Jesus, welcoming him into their homes, financing his ministry, and often teaching the Twelve through their acts of faithfulness and love. Just as Jesus predicted, most of the Twelve abandoned him at his death (John 16:32). But the women remained by his side—through his death, burial, and resurrection. (For more on why Jesus’ choosing of the twelve male disciples should not exclude women from leadership see Daniel Kirk’s post, “On Jesus Choosing Twelve Males”)

Mary Magdalene

According to the gospels of Mark and Luke, Jesus cleansed Mary Magdalene of seven demons, after which she became a devoted disciple. She is mentioned by Luke in the same context as the Twelve as one who traveled with Jesus and helped finance his ministry. All four gospel accounts identify Mary Magdalene as among the first witnesses of the empty tomb. She is the one to breathlessly describes what she has seen to the male disciples, who initially discount her declaration, “I have seen the Lord!”, as the babblings of a foolish woman.

It has been noted that Mary’s announcement, “I have seen the Lord,” is the same credential used by Paul to insist on his own authority as an apostle:” 'Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lored?” (1 Cor. 9:1). For her valor in twice sharing the good news to the skeptical male disciples, the early church honored Mary Magdalene with the title of Apostle to the Apostles. That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in his kingdom that Jesus ever delivered. (For more, see “Women of the Passion, Part 4: Mary Magdalene – Apostle to the Apostles)

Tabitha

A stalwart force in the first-century effort to restore the dignity of widows was a woman named Tabitha. Likely a widow herself, but with means, Tabitha lived in the port city of Joppa at the time when Peter and Paul were busy spreading the gospel throughout Asia Minor. She was a renowned philanthropist, known throughout the land for “always doing good and helping the poor” (Acts 9:36). She was also a master seamstress, making robes and other clothing for the many widows in her care, presumably imparting on them the skills of the trade.

When first we hear of her in Luke’s book of Acts, she has succumbed to an illness, her body washed and prepared for burial. So critical was Tabitha’s ministry to the early church that Peter himself was summoned to her bedside, and when he arrived, he found widows from all across Joppa weeping together in Tabitha’s home. They showed him all the clothes she had made for them. Peter sent everyone out of the room and fell on his knees to pray. Apparently, God agreed that Tabitha was indeed indispensable, for Peter turned toward the body and said, “Tabitha, get up” (v. 40). Tabitha opened her eyes and sat up. Peter took her by the hand and helped her to her feet. Then he called for the widows, who ran into the room to find Tabitha alive. It is one of just two resurrection stories in the book of Acts. To Tabitha belongs the worthy distinction of being the only woman in the New Testament identified with the feminine form of the word “disciple”—mathetria. The word literally means “pupil,” or “apprentice,” which may suggest that at some point, Tabitha studied directly under Jesus, like Mary of Bethany.

Junia

Although her name appears just once in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, the Apostle Junia is perhaps the most silenced woman of the Bible.

“Greet Andronicus and Junia,” Paul wrote in Romans 16:7, “my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.” Junia is the first and only woman in Scripture to be explicitly identified as an apostle. (Mary Magdalene’s status as apostle is debatable.) Apostles in the New Testament were disciples of Jesus devoted to spreading his teachings abroad. In addition to the original twelve apostles, the Bible speaks of apostles who served as traveling missionaries, teaching and leading the early church as it endured persecution and struggled through religious growing pains. Paul, Timothy, Barnabas Silas and Apollos were all apostles, as were Andronicus and Junia.

The fourth-century bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, said of Junia, “To be an apostle is something great. But to be outstanding among the apostles—just think what a wonderful song of praise that is! . . . Indeed how great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle” (emphasis mine).

But as time went on, the mention of a female apostle in Scripture became inconvenient for the increasingly hierarchal Church, so a medieval theologian found a creative solution to the problem: he turned Junia into a man. "Andronicus and Junia" became "Andronicus and Junias." This was no small error. The masculine name Junias does not occur in a single inscription, letterhead, work of literature, or epitaph in the Greco-Roman world, while the feminine name Junia is everywhere. None of the Greek manuscripts suggests that a masculine form of this name should be used, and for the first thousand years of church history, Christian theologians ranging from Chrysostom to Origen to Jerome all identified the apostle Junia as a woman. But the myth caught on, especially after Martin Luther used Junias, rather than Junia, in his German translation of the Bible and identified the pair of former prisoners as male. To this day, one can find English translations of the Bible that turn the apostle Junia into a man. She’s just a little too inconvenient. (For more on this crazy story,check out Junia is Not Alone by Scot McKnight and Junia: The First Woman Apostle by Eldon Jay Epp.)

Phoebe

In Romans 16:1-2, Paul writes, “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon in the church in Cenchreae. I ask that you receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and give to her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me.”

Phoebe was one of many women in the early church to play an important role in directing the churches that met in their homes. Phoebe is not mentioned alongside a husband, so there’s a good chance she was single or a widow. She is identified as a deacon, which in the New Testament referred to a teacher and leader in the church, whether that person was a man or woman. (Yep, a “deaconess” is something we made up much later on.) In Paul’s letters, deacons are connected to ministry and service of the word (1 Corinthians 3:5-9).

In The Blue Parakeet, Scot McKnight notes that “it is possible that Phoebe, a benefactor or wealthy patron of Paul’s ministry of bringing the gospel to the Roman Empire, was responsible for getting his letter to the right people. Most today think Phoebe was Paul courier for the letter to the Romans. Since couriers were charged with responsibility to explain their letters, Phoebe probably read the letter aloud and answered questions the Roman Christians may have had...Phoebe, to put this graphically, can be seen s the first ‘commentator’ on the letter to the Romans.”

Again, how ironic that some complementarian churches forbid women from reading Scripture aloud in church when a woman may very well have been the first person to read the book of Romans aloud!

Priscilla

I was once asked if there was a marriage in scripture that I especially admired and would want to emulate in my own relationship with Dan. I immediately thought of the marriage between Priscilla and Aquilla. Complete with rhyming monikers, Priscilla and Aquila were the it couple of the early the church, always described as doing something interesting together— traveling, planting churches, teaching new converts, running a business. It’s unusual to find texts from the ancient world in which a woman’s name precedes her husband’s, but in the letters of Paul, Priscilla is often named before her husband, Aquila. Really, the two names appeared to be somewhat interchangeable in the minds of the early Christians. What a team these two must have made!

When Paul set out on a mission trip across Asia Minor, he took the couple with him, leaving them in Ephesus so they could minister to the church there. In Ephesus, Priscilla and Aquila met Apollos, “a learned man, with a thorough knowledge of Scripture” who was preaching in the synagogues. They invited him into their home and together “explained to him the way of God more adequately,” making them some of the earliest known teachers of Christian theology. Apollos would go on to be one of the most influential apostles of the day. It appears the couple then planted a church in the region, for when Paul writes back to the Christians in Corinth, he passes along greetings from “Aquila and Priscilla and the church that meets in their house.” (It’s hard to imagine that Priscilla, a gifted teacher, would have been prevented from speaking in her own home!)

Paul always spoke affectionately about Priscilla and Aquila, calling them his “co-workers in Christ Jesus,” and noting in Romans that the two “risked their necks” for him. “Not only I, but all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them,” he writes (Romans 16:3-4). Some scholars are convinced that Priscilla wrote the mysterious, anonymous letter to the Hebrews found in the New Testament. They’ve got some interesting evidence to support that conclusion, but the jury’s still out. My personal theory is that Priscilla and Aquila wrote it together.

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Additional Resources: Women of the Passion Series, Women of the Torah: Matriarchs and Heroes of Israel (Ancient-Future Bible Study: Experience Scripture through Lectio Divina) by Stephen J. Binz, Women of the Gospels: Friends and Disciples of Jesus (Ancient-Future Bible Study: Experience Scripture through Lectio Divina) by Stephen J. Binz, Junia is Not Alone by Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible by Scot McKnight, Women's Bible Commentary: Expanded Edition by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules by Carolyn Custis James, Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuteroca... Books, and the New Testament by Carol Meyers, Toni Craven and Ross Shepard Kraeme.)

Yes, Relationships Between Equal Married Partners Does Work Better (And it's Biblical!)

It’s not complementarianism; it’s patriarchy
http://rachelheldevans.com/complementarians-patriarchy

by Rachel Held Evans
May 3, 2012
Comments

Russell Moore is concerned that too many evangelical marriages are complementarian in name only.

The dean of the School of Theology and senior vice president for academic administration at Southern Baptist Seminary recently said this at the Together for the Gospel Conference is Louisville, Kentucky:

“What I fear is that we have many people in evangelicalism who can check off ‘complementarian’ on a box but who really aren’t living out complementarian lives. Sometimes I fear we have marriages that are functionally egalitarian, because they are within the structure of the larger society. If all we are doing is saying ‘male headship’ and ‘wives submit to your husbands’ but we’re not really defining what that looks like...in this kind of culture, when those things are being challenged, then it’s simply going to go away...”

He’s right. Whenever I speak or write on this topic, I hear from men and women who say that they went into their marriages expecting to impose upon them the hierarchal structure advocated by the complementarian movement, but who found that, practically speaking, a relationship between two equal partners just worked better than a relationship between a boss and a subordinate.

“It just didn’t fit,” they often say. “Hierarchy felt awkward and imposed. It made so much more sense to work together as a team, to settle into roles based on giftedness rather than gender.”

This is exactly what happened to us. Even though Dan and I were both raised in a complementarian culture, our marriage was “functionally egalitarian” long before we began reevaluating our interpretation of those passages of Scripture so often used to support hierarchal-based gender roles.

We make decisions together. (No one holds a trump card.)

We share household chores. (No one gets out of doing the laundry or helping with the yard work based on gender.)

We don’t impose gender-based absolutes on one another. (I like football more than Dan, and nobody’s particularly concerned about that. Roll Tide!)

We don’t have a single leader. (Dan likes to say that “leadership” requires context. It’s not something you are; it’s something you do. So depending on the circumstances, sometimes I lead, and sometimes Dan leads. Sometimes I support, and sometimes Dan supports. We see our gifts, particularly our spiritual gifts, as complementary. We function best—as individuals and as a team—when we do what we’re good at and what we love, and when we cheer one another on. We also function best when our leadership looks more like service than authority, just like Jesus said.)

Moore is right. Complementarians are losing ground. And they’re losing ground for several reasons:

1. They are losing ground because more and more evangelical theologians, scholars, professors, and pastors are thoughtfully debunking a complementarian interpretation of Scripture and doing it at the popular level through books like The Blue Parakeet (by Scot McKnight), Discovering Biblical Equality (by Ronald Pierce, Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, Gordon Fee), How I Changed My Mind About Women in Church Leadership (by a who’s who of evangelical leaders), through evangelical colleges and seminaries that celebrate women’s giftedness to lead and are producing record numbers of female graduates, and through organizations like Christians for Biblical Equality.

2. They are losing ground because their rhetoric consistently reflects a commitment to an idealized glorification of the pre-feminist nuclear family of 1950s America rather than a commitment to “biblical manhood” and “biblical womanhood”—terms that many of us recognize as highly selective, reductive, and problematic. This reactionary approach often comes at the expense of sound biblical interpretation. (I touched on this in a post about Mark Driscoll’s interpretation of Esther and Vashti a few months ago. We’ll be talking about this a lot more in the weeks and months to come.)

3. And they are losing ground because, at the practical level, evangelicals are realizing that complementarianism doesn’t actually promote complementary relationships, but rather hierarchal ones.

Complemenarianism is patriarchy—nothing more, nothing less. (Though sometimes it is referred to as "soft patriarchy.") This was made crystal clear when John Piper announced months ago that Christianity is inherently masculine. Such a view can hardly be described as “complementary” when it excludes one gender entirely! We experience the same discomfort when we realize that, based on the “complementarian” understanding of gender, Fred Phelps would be more qualified to speak to your church on Sunday morning by virtue of being a man than someone like Lois Tverberg or Carolyn Custis James or Christine Caine. When a man with no biblical training whatsoever is considered more qualified to teach than a woman with a PhD in theology or a woman whose work in New Testament scholarship is renowned the world over, we are not seeing complementariaism at work, but patriarchy. (And, I might add, we are missing the Apostle Paul’s point to Timothy about teaching entirely—but that’s a topic for another day.)

Furthermore, as Russell Moore himself has observed, even married couples who identify as “complmentarians” are functioning as equal partners rather than forcing a hierarchal pattern onto their relationship that is highly prescriptive regarding gender. This should come as no surprise seeing as how a truly complementary relationship is one in which differences are celebrated, but not forced. If your marriage is like mine, this means that the complementary differences between you and your spouse often fall into gender-influenced norms (I am more emotional; Dan is more even-keeled), but not always (Dan is better at nurturing relationships than I am; I am more competitive). Rather than trying to force our personalities and our roles into prescribed molds based on gender, it just makes more sense to allow our natural difference to enhance and challenge one another. We lead where we are strong; we defer where we are weak.

Complementarianism isn’t working—in marriages and in church leadership— because it’s not actually complementarianism; it’s patriarchy. And patriarchy doesn’t work because God created both men and women to reflect God's character and God's sovereignty over creation, as equal partners with equal value.

In June I’ll be running a more in-depth series on the Bible and gender in which we will tackle some of those passages of Scripture that are used to promote hierarchy in the home and in church leadership, because I realize and respect the fact that that, particularly among evangelicals, it’s not enough to say that hierarchal-based gender roles don’t work; we must also be able to show that they are not required by Scripture. So stay tuned for that discussion!

See also:
Complementarians are Selective Too
Esther and Vashti: The Real Story

What do you think? Are complementarians losing ground? Should it be called “complementarianism” when it’s really just patriarchy?

John Piper on Men in Ministry, and the Masculinity of Christianity

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2012/02/12/john-piper-on-men-in-ministry-and-the-masculinity-of-christianity/

by Ben Witherington

February 12, 2012

Alert reader of this blog, Craig Beard sent me the following link which presented a precis of John Piper’s recent address at a conference on the ‘Masculinity of Christianity’.

Here is the link -

http://www.christianpost.com/news/john-piper-god-gave-christianity-a-masculine-feel-68385/.

God and Jesus, on this showing are not in favor of women in ministry, or for that matter female images of the deity either, despite the fact that there are many such images in the Bible. If you take time to read the article there are several things that come to light.

John Piper is concerned, as are other Reformed writers and thinkers, for instance some in the Gospel Coalition, with what is perceived to be the stripping of male dignity and honor in our culture. He seeks to rub some healing balm in the wounds of men who have been assailed about their male chauvinism and macho approaches to women and life in general, especially in this case, men who are ministers. But as I have mentioned before on this blog, the problem with the church is not strong women, but weak men who can’t handle strong women, much less tolerate women in ministry. So, they have to provide rationales for these views. And to do so requires all sorts of exegetical gymnastics, ignoring of contexts, and even dubious theology and anthropology.

Here is some of what Dr. Piper said recently -

• God’s intention for Christianity is for it to have a “masculine feel,” evangelist John Piper declared on Tuesday.
 
• “God revealed Himself in the Bible pervasively as king not queen; father not mother,” Piper said at this year’s annual pastors conference hosted by the Desiring God ministry.
 
• The "Second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter; the Father and the Son create man and woman in His image and give them the name man, the name of the male.”
 
• “God appoints all the priests in the Old Testament to be men;
 
• The Son of God came into the world to be a man;
 
• [Jesus] chose 12 men to be His apostles;
 
• The apostles appointed that the overseers of the Church be men;
 
• And when it came to marriage the [apostles] taught that the husband should be the head.”

“Now, from all of that I conclude that God has given Christianity a masculine feel. And being God, a God of love, He has done that for our maximum flourishing both male and female.”

I decided to let this percolate for a while before I reacted. Let me be clear that this sounds like a classic over-reaction to what is perceived to be the malaise of our culture. It’s like the reaction of a certain Pacific Northwest pastor who decided to lecture the ‘men’ on the campus of a Christian University in Seattle on true manhood, by associating ‘real men’ with those who focus on getting their wives naked and eating red meat. That’s real manhood.

It’s an interesting portrait of true manhood since: 1) Jesus and Paul and many early Christians probably never ate red meat, and 2) Jesus was never married nor interested in objectifying women and treating them as sex objects. But back to Dr. Piper. What Dr. Piper says is not merely bad theology in various ways, its dangerous theology. If I am hearing him right, it sounds closer to Mormon theology than Christian theology. Why do I say that?

Well let’s start with the orthodox Christian point that GOD IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE IN THE DIVINE NATURE. The Bible is clear enough that God is ‘spirit’, not flesh and gender is always a manifestation of flesh. In the book that Laura Ice and I wrote some time ago, entitled The Shadow of the Almighty we made reasonably clear that:

1. there are plenty of both masculine and feminine images and metaphors applied to God in the Bible; 
2. that interestingly enough it is not true that God is much called Father in the OT. In fact such language is rare, with almost no examples of God ever addressed as Father in the OT in prayer or entreaty, and, 
3. connecting such language with culture and human anthropology is a huge mistake on both sides of the ledger.

Just as it is wrong to say that the father language in the Bible is just a bad outcropping of the thinking of those who lived in an overwhelmingly patriarchal culture and couldn’t help themselves, so it is also equally bad theology to suggest that the reason for the Father and King language in the Bible is because this tells us something about the divine nature or even the divine will that ‘Christianity’ have a masculine feel.

In fact the Father language for God is much more plentiful in the NT than in the OT (for example about 145 times just in the Gospel of John). Is NT Christianity meant to be somehow more patriarchal than OT religion? One of my concerns here is the false suggestion that we should draw an anthropological conclusion on the basis of some of the theological language. Really? Really? I find this an amazing chain of illogic on so many fronts.

Let’s start with the fact that one of the probable reasons why we have so much more Father language in the NT compared to the OT is because of the unique relationship Jesus had with God who was, to judge from the metaphorical use of the language ‘only begotten’, to be seen as the only non-adopted child of God. Now none of us have such a relationship with God. We are at best sons and daughters of God by adoption. Not so Jesus. In other words, you can’t draw anthropological conclusions about all of us based on the masculine imagery used of God the Father and his Son. That dog simply won’t hunt.

But there is more to be said as well. Jesus had a human mother. He could not and would not address God as mother lest he dishonor the one who was actually his mother. And this leads to a further point– the language of Father and Son when applied to God the Father and Jesus is, wait for it, metaphorical language trying to indicate the special and intimate nature of the relationship of these two. It is relational language and it tells us nothing about the inherent divine nature of either the Father or the Son. It tells us nothing about the gender or masculinity of God. It tells us that God the Father and God the Son are family, intimate. Why do I say this?

Because, unless you are a Mormon and think God literally, sexually begat the Son, then you realize that this language has nothing to do with gender or sex. Nothing. It is simply making clear the intimacy of the relationship between two members of the Trinity. Were there something inherently gendered to the relationship we would expect the same to be true of the relationship of God the Father with the Holy Spirit, and yes, it’s heresy to genderize the Spirit and talk about the Spirit as a woman. No member the Trinity, in the divine essence, has a masculine or feminine DNA.

Now there was a further good reason that God-talk in the Bible avoided genderizing God, especially when it came to female language. This was because most pagan female deities were so highly sexualized in both image and concept that they were seen as deities of fertility. But the God of the Bible is not a fertility God, not a God of the crop cycle, not an Astarte or an Aphrodite or an Artemis.

The God of the Bible is a God of history, a God of grace rather than a God that is simply part of nature, like the pagan deities who manifest themselves in all too human or animal ways by copulation and propagation. In other words, the ‘regenderizing’ of the God language in an attempt to rescue the floundering masculinity of Christian males is a ploy of desperation which does dis-service to the nature of such language in the NT which is relational without being genderized.

And at the anthropological level we must take seriously what Paul says, namely that we are not carrying on the old fallen patriarchal heritage of OT times, because frankly in Christ there is no male and female (Gal. 3.28).

It was the original curse, not the original blessing that was pronounced in the following form— ‘your desire will be for your husband and he will lord it over you’. The effect of the Fall on human relationships is that ‘to love and cherish’ became ‘to desire and to dominate’ which entailed unilateral submission of females to males, something that was never God’s original creation plan. You won’t find a single statement in Gen. 1-2 (before the curse of sin, and fall of man) about the silence or subordination of women to men. Eve is simply the necessary compliment and suitable companion to Adam. What you will find is statements making clear the inadequacy of the man without woman who is the crown of creation, for the text says ‘it is not good for man to be alone’. This is never said about the woman. Patriarchy is not an inherently good thing, an inherently God thing, and it should not be repristinized and set up as a model for Christian ministry.

Let’s deal with some of Piper’s ‘subordinate’ arguments. Jesus picked twelve males. Of course Jesus operated in the context of OT Israel didn’t he? And the Twelve were quite specifically sent to the lost sheep of Israel which was still living under the Mosaic covenant, were they not? You will notice that after Acts 1, the 12 as 12 literally disappear from the landscape of early Christianity and the telling of its tale. And you will also remember that Jesus had said that even at the eschaton the role of the 12 was to be in relationship to OT Israel, sitting on judgment seats judging the 12 tribes. The choosing of the 12, in short, is no paradigm for "Christian ministry" of the sort that John Piper and I do [that is, "minister"] - which is to say, ministry in relationship to an over-whelmingly Gentile audience!!! Ministry to a group of people who never lived under the old covenant, and as Paul makes clear, never should!!

Now I could go on about how Jesus also chose female disciples (see Luke 8.1-3) and how they were the first and crucial witnesses to the Easter events last at the cross, first at the empty tomb, first to see the risen Jesus with Mary Magdalene commissioned to go and proclaim the Good News to the remainder of the 12, but you can get all that from reading my Women in the Ministry of Jesus.

More importantly I would want to stress that there were women apostles. The 12 were not all the apostles, as the example of Paul himself shows. Romans 16 is clear enough that the husband and wife team of Andronicus and Junia were noteworthy apostles. Acts 18 is clear enough that Priscilla and Aquila both taught the notable Christian evangelist Apollos. 1 Cor. 11 is clear enough that women can share inspired speech and prayer in worship, yes speaking out loud, to the glory of God. Romans 16 is also clear enough that there were women deacons too.

In short, roles in ministry have nothing to do with gender, whereas some roles in the physical family do, as the household codes in Paul suggest. One of the great problems in modern conservative Christianity of all forms is the muddling up of the physical family with the family of faith. Roles in ministry are and should be determined by calling, gifting, not by gender. And there is a good reason for this. It is the Holy Spirit who determines what gifts and graces a person is given, for the common good. It is not male leaders who should decide this issue, or for that matter female leaders.

Did Paul and other apostles appoint overseers to congregations? Yes apparently they did according to not only the Pastorals but other Pauline letters. Were they all men? Nope. Euodia and Syntyche in Philippi are Paul’s co-workers there, and the term ‘sun-ergoi’ is precisely the term Paul uses for his fellow leaders of congregations. In any case, he would not have addressed the issue of a private squabble between two church members in a public letter like Philippians.

No, he addresses the problem and asks for crisis intervention precisely because these two women were some of the leaders in that church. One of them may even have been ‘the Lydian’ referred to in Acts. In other words, Acts and Paul and other parts of the NT make clear enough that there were women in ministry in the early church, just as there should be today.

What about those household codes? Just a final word about them. Paul is a wise pastor and he must start with his converts where he finds them, and then correct things as he goes along. One of the dominant institutions of the Greco-Roman world he must deal with is the patriarchal household structures, and if you bother to compare what Paul says to what Plutarch or other pagan writers say it is clear enough that Paul is putting the yeast of the Gospel into the existing fallen structures of society and working to change them in more Christian directions. For example, when Paul says things like the body of the husband belongs to the wife alone, this was a radical notion in those days (1 Cor. 7). He is eliminating the prevailing sexual double standard which was typical of the patriarchal system.

Or for example when Paul places more strictures and responsibilities on the husband/father/master than you ever find in the secular literature, he is changing the nature of the game and ameliorating the harsh effects of the existing patriarchal system. Paul addresses both children and slaves not as property but as persons who are moral agents and can respond positively. And yes, Ephesian 5.21 does show where all of this is meant to end up– with mutual submission of all Christians to all other Christians in love, not merely unilateral submission of females to males, or wives to husbands.

Christ himself, who indeed was a male, provides the model of true submission for us all. He did not come to be served but to serve, and what characterized him most of all is what Phil. 2.5-11 says characterized him– he stripped or emptied himself and took on the role and function of the most submissive member of that society– a slave, and died a slave’s death.

In short, John Piper is not helping the cause of either orthodox theology or orthodox praxis or orthodox anthropology with his pronouncements. And it is a great shame and pity.

If Jesus is “Masculine,” the Holy Spirit is “Feminine”

http://kylearoberts.com/wordpress/?p=569

by Kyle Roberts

February 6, 2012

Rachel Held Evans has awoken me from my bloggging slumber.

She threw out a gauntlet recently, challenging men to respond to a statement John Piper made at his recent pastors conference devoted to the theme, “masculine Christianity.”

John Piper has caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the blogging world recently with his proclamation at a recent pastors conference that, “God has given Christianity a masculine feel.” God, Piper said, revealed Himself in the Bible as “king not queen; father not mother.” Furthermore, “the second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter; the Father and the Son create man and woman in His image and give them the name man…the Son of God came into the world to be a man; He chose 12 men to be His apostles; the apostles appointed that the overseers of the Church be men; and when it came to marriage they taught that the husband should be the head.”

Piper concludes that “God has given Christianity a masculine feel.” I say that Christianity that has given God a masculine feel.

Granted, there are plenty of male-oriented images, allusions, and references in Scripture that are male-oriented. (It doesn’t surprise anyone to learn that the Bible’s authors are mostly — or exclusively — male in mainly patriarchal contexts). “Father” and “Son” are unmistakably male references. The term “masculine,” however, is a highly ambiguous, socially constructed, and culturally dependent term. Further, as Scot McKnight points out, the Greek word for ”masculine” (andreia) never appears in the New Testament (see McKnight for the lone exception, which does not save Piper’s argument).

But I want to focus on another issue. Piper bases much of his argument for a “masculine Christianity” on the idea that God is revealed as male. God (Yahweh) is the eternal “Father”; the eternal “Son of God” becomes incarnate as a human male in Jesus of Nazareth. What do we make of this language? Is “Father” and “Son” supposed to be interpreted literally, or do these terms denote the familiarity and intimacy of the relationship itself? This question flings us headlong into a debate regarding the nature of religious language. Piper’s literalistic hermeneutic involves a univocal view of language, such that “Father” becomes exclusive of anything “feminine” and is used to prioritize the male over the female. It’s a handy move if you want to retain patriarchy. But is God actually gendered as male and therefore exclusively or primarily masculine (whatever that might actually mean?). Any literal ascription of gender to the eternal divine being (think ‘ontological Trinity’) has generally been ruled quite out of bounds in Christian orthodoxy. The notions of divine simplicity, unboundedness, incorporeality, etc., long have prevented theologians from taking gender references to God literally.

Of course, in the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity quite literally becomes in-fleshed in the Jewish, male body of Jesus of Nazareth. Christians rightly take joy and comfort in the particularity of the incarnation for, in Jesus, God was and is reconciling the world. In and through Jesus God heals creation from the inside out. What is not assumed is not healed; therefore God becomes a unique human individual in order to heal all of humanity. The Jewish flesh of Jesus makes sense given that Jesus was to be the Messiah and his mission was to announce and embody the kingdom for Israel and on behalf of the world. But there is nothing really to suggest that the incarnation required incarnation as a male. Perhaps, as some have suggested, the Logos became a man because, to have become incarnate as a woman, and to have sacrificed oneself for the world as a woman, would have been rather unsurprising and unremarkable to first-century observers. That’s just what women do. But when Jesus, this Jewish Rabbi who had come from the right hand of God, willingly set aside his “rights” and his power in order to lay down his life in solidarity with and for the salvation of humanity, he made quite an impression (Phil 2:1-11).

Furthermore, according to orthodox theology, we must be careful when conceptually transferring from the human particularity of Jesus to his divine nature. The Council of Chalcedon asserts the two natures of Jesus are related “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence.” The human nature of Jesus, having the particularity of male humanity, does not imply that the divine nature of Jesus becomes distinctively male – or most certainly — “masculine.” The incarnation, by the logic of the creed, does not imply that “God is male.”

Furthermore, Piper’s focus was on God the Father (Yahweh) and the Son of God. But has he forgotten the Holy Spirit? Irenaeus suggested, quite memorably, that the Son and the Spirit are the two hands of God in the world. If the Son causes us to think of God in terms of maleness and “masculinity” (again: a constructed notion), then the Spirit might draw our attention to more “feminine” aspects of God. The Spirit (“ruach” in the OT and “pneuma” in the NT) suggests creative and re-creative (nurturing, sustaining, and life-giving) activities. In Genesis 1, the Spirit hovers over the waters and spirit gives life to human and animals. The Spirit re-creates the earth (Isaiah 44:3), the Spirit comforts (Jn. 14), teaches (Lk 12:12) and heals. Images of the Spirit in the Bible include breath, wind, and wisdom (the latter is often personified in Scripture as female). The prevalence of what could be seen as female allusions in Scripture’s depiction of the Spirit led some early Christians to refer to the Holy Spirit in explicitly female language. The fourth-century Syriac Christian, Aphrahat, wrote, “By baptism we receive the Spirit of Christ, and at that moment when the priests invoke the Spirit, she opens the heavens and descends and hovers over the waters, and those who are baptized put her on” (Demonstration 6:14). Several medieval theologians felt free to play a bit fast-and-loose with gender distinctions in the Godhead, certainly allowing for a female dimension in God. But while some early Christians were happy to speak of the Spirit as “she,” our age is one that has largely forgotten the importance of the Holy Spirit altogether. As Elizabeth Johnson points out in She Who Is (Crossroad Publishing, 2002), the marginalization of the Spirit in the church corresponds to the marginalization of women in the church.

So, if one wants to speak in terms of “masculine” and “feminine” traits in Scripture and in God, one should do so hesitantly. Our talk about God must always take into account the mystery of God and the anthropomorphic and metaphorical nature of theological language–yes, even Scripture’s inspired language. To the degree that the terms “masculine” and “feminine” are helpful distinctions, the “two hands of God” in Jesus and the Spirit ought to cause us to be inclusive in term of how we speak of them in God and with respect to God’s relation to us. We should not make a habit of saying that God is, in any literal sense, either male or female. Granted, Jesus was a male. But his Jewish, male body was resurrected and has ascended. There is no way to know what resurrection and ascension imply for gender particularity.

In any case, if one wants to insist that Jesus was “masculine,” keep in mind that Jesus redefines what it means to be a human, and therefore he redefines what it means to be male and female. We dare not define Jesus’ “masculinity” in the image of our culture’s ideals. Furthermore, if Jesus is ‘masculine,’ the Spirit is “feminine” We (both male and female) are created in (the Trinitarian) God’s image; we don’t create God in our image.

God has not given us a Christianity with a masculine feel. Rather, Christianity has created a God with a masculine feel, to the extent we have forgotten that (1) God is not literally gendered (except in the incarnation) and (2) The Spirit and the Son — the two hands of the Father — suggest a diversity that just might validate the diversity in human creation and thereby give value equally, not just to both sexes, but to all configurations and combinations, in individual persons, of what society has traditionally called “feminine” and “masculine.”

The Rhetoric of Masculine Christianity

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/02/13/the-rhetoric-of-masculine-christianity/

Scot McKnight

February 13, 2012

Lindsey Hankins is working on a second master’s degree and aiming at a PhD in the gendered rhetoric of martyrdom so her take on the masculine Christianity discussion provides insight. This is her response to the John Piper claim.

At a recent Desiring God conference, John Piper contended the church and its ministry ought to have a “masculine feel.” Piper argues this is simply a biblical given. In his own words,

"God revealed himself in the Bible pervasively as King, not Queen; Father, not Mother. The second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter. The Father and the Son create man and woman in his image, and give them the name “man,” the name of the male. God appoints all the priests in the Old Testament to be men. The Son of God came into the world to be a man. He chose twelve men to be his apostles. The apostles appointed that the overseers of the church be men. And when it came to marriage they taught that the husband should be the head." [emphasis mine] 

Setting aside for now the problematic conflation of predicates (i.e., ontological being as “male” and “female” and “masculinity” and “femininity” as characteristics) and a shaky exegesis of the Hebrew adam, it is true that this glaringly selective biblical portrait smacks of men. In fact, no woman can be found. Well, Eve is there but, sadly, her name seems to have been lost in translation. Yet—and this may be jarring to some readers—the fact of the matter is that Piper is actually on to something.

Whether he is aware of it or not, Piper has stepped squarely into an age-old thread of Christian thought.

When the elderly bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, stood awaiting his martyrdom within the Roman amphitheater he’s said to have clearly heard a voice from heaven saying: “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man.” Perhaps similar to present-day beer commercials in which manliness can be enacted or lost [e.g., losing one’s “man card”] ancient gender constituted a never-ending pursuit of virtue in which, as arguably the chief virtue, courage and manliness were practically synonymous: in both Greek and Latin the word for virtue—andreia and virtus, respectively—found their root in words for maleness—andros and vir. In other words, the very vocabulary of the time belied a belief that virtue or holiness were inherently masculine.

Clearly this put ancient Christian women in quite the bind: if manliness was holiness, what was it to be a woman? A pernicious and prevailing view of much of Christian history has been that women, qua women, were, to borrow Aristotle’s verbiage, “deformed males” (The Generation of Animals, 737125). If we are to take the irascible Tertullian at his word, women were “ianua diabolic” or “the gate of the devil” (On Female Dress, 1.1). The golden-mouthed Chrysostom wrote in the late fourth-century that Eve had obviously been at fault for the garden debacle simply by virtue of being, well, a woman: “…the woman taught once for all and upset everything…for the female sex is weak and vain, and here this is said of the whole sex” (On the Epistle to the Ephesians, 42.148).

But how did the early fathers speak about those obviously holy women—and there were many—who surrounded them? As almost a contradiction in terms, the presence of these women often necessitated a rhetorical sex change to accommodate the father’s pre-conceived misgivings. With more than a little back-bite to it, Clement of Alexandria hoped that at least some women could push past their inferiority: “Women must seek wisdom, like men, even if men are superior and have first place in every field, at least if they are not effeminate” (Miscellanies, PG 8.1275). Yet to do so, to pursue holiness and a life of virtue, women needed to in essence lose their womanhood. Praising Melania the Elder, her relative Paulinus of Nola remarked: “What a woman she is, if one can call so manly a Christian a woman!” (Let. 29.6). Concerning Olympias, Palladius wrote that she was “not a woman but a manly creature: a man in everything but body” (Dialogue, 56). And Melania the Younger, because of her great piety or “manly deeds” was claimed to be “like a man” by her male admirers since “she had surpassed the limits of her sex and taken on a mentality that was manly, or rather angelic” (Life of Melania the Younger, 39).

While these comments sample only the early period of Christian thought—and in that are but a drop in an ocean of similar sentiments—this notion of masculinity as equal or synonymous to holiness has clearly lingered on to the present. Against Piper’s hope that this “masculine feel” he wishes for Christianity would, as divinely instituted, be “for the maximum flourishing of both men and women,” historically this has manifestly not been the case. When holiness is equated to masculinity, it is rather difficult to side-step notions of femaleness—or “femininity”—as ontological inferiority. If by nature weaker physically, emotionally and spiritually as compared to men, the logical—and lived—conclusion against all lip service to the contrary has been that women do not share equally with men in the imago dei. As Milton would pen in his seventeenth-century Paradise Lost: “He for God only, she for God in him” (4.299).

Piper notes that his vision is “liable to serious misunderstanding and serious abuse” and I could not agree more. His claim is fatally flawed in its rather naïve assumption that masculinity is, somehow, an extra-cultural reality. Read in light of these aforementioned church fathers, there just might be an over-abundance of male activity in church history and Christian mission simply because women were told in every possible way they were not as human, not as fully human, as the men next to them. Even more troubling, his statement that “The Son of God came into the world to be a man” seems to infer—especially in light of the greater arc of Piper’s vision—that it was maleness which God redeemed, not humanity.

Yet the most important issue is not that Piper’s view would be misunderstood. The absolute fundamental problem would be that it would be mistakenly taken as good news. The fact of the matter is that Piper is “on to something” insofar as he is rather seamlessly capitulating to a long-standing tendency in church history. When women are intentionally excised from the biblical narrative, Piper is right, Christianity sure starts to sound masculine. What the church needs now is not by any means a “masculine feel.” The church has had this broken and un-balanced “feel” for millennia and far from producing a “flourishing [for] both men and women” it has too often been complicit in a systematic de-humanization of half its constituency. When masculinity becomes the virtue par execellence the value of what it means to be a woman or “feminine” is mortally undercut. What the church desperately needs now is a prophetic voice reminding us to value both men and women as equally and wholly made in the imago dei. At the risk of sounding patronizingly obvious, this can not happen when the biblical text is intentionally re-written to exclude women and it can not happen when one aspect of God’s view of humankind is exclusively staged to norm the other. Christianity ought to have a cruiciform feel, not a masculine one.