PreacherMike

ADDED at 10:00 a.m.: Thanks to someone for mentioning in the comments that the Oprah show with my sister-in-law, Pam Cope, and her work in Ghana is going to be repeated today. It’s a powerful story.

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Stackhouse argues that gender distrinctions “are a result of sin in fallen human society, not divinely ordered human relations.” Nothing about the creation or redemption threads of scripture would lead you to believe that men have a privileged place with leadership.

“How did I come to that sort of conclusion?” he asks. “Why do I think the Holy Spirit counts patriarchy as a sinful, oppressive structure to which he nonetheless accommodated himself and the church until such time as both church and society could do away with it? Because that is what I think the Holy Spirit has already done in one extremely important case: slavery.”

Christians have a consensus opinion today that the social conservatism in the NT regarding slavery was just such a case.

“Preachers on both sides of the slavery controversy marshaled powerful, Bible-based arguments that convinced millions of believers. Some fair-minded observers have concluded that the proslavery forces had the better of this debate, since a straightforward interpretation of the passages regarding slavery conveys no obvious condemnation of the institution and seems instead to encourage Christians in both roles, master and slave, to stay right where they are and simply to behave properly. Yet there is no important Christian leader anywhere in the modern world today who defends slavery. Not one.”

Again and again, Stackhouse shows that many passages in scripture — about polygamy, slavery, patriarchalism — are “God’s accomodation to something he does not like.” But imbedded in the gospel story is an eschatological vision of justice and equality that is already breaking in all around us.

He notes that not all that very long ago in the West patriarchy resonated with people because women were assumed to be fundamentally inferior in areas of leadership — more emotional, less rational, etc. “Thus, it made sense for men to dominate and women to submit, just as it made the same sort of sense for white people to dominate everyone else if everyone else was understood to be inferior and even subhuman.”

But — thankfully! — such reasoning is, for the most part, behind us.

“The complementarian position has become incoherent. Thanks be to God that many complementarians are not sexists who believe that women are inferior to men. (In regard to those who maintain that women really are inferior in these important respects, I will not pause to say much, except that the Bible, reason, and experience are against you. All you have on your side, from a Christian point of view, are misogynist texts scattered here and there in the tradition from the patristic period to our own.) To the complementarians who do believe that women are equal and yet see the Bible as restricting leadership to men, let me respectfully and fraternally ask, Why would God mandate that pattern forever? May I invite you to consider the Bible in the way I am suggesting, which does, I think, make better sense of the elements of both patriarchy and equality that many egalitarians and complementarians agree are present.

“My fundamental practical question therefore is this: What are Christians supposed to do when society itself shifts to egalitarianism? There is no longer a rationale for the woman to remain in the culturally expected role of dependence and submission, just as there is no rationale for the grown-up child to act as if he requires his parents’ direction as he did when he was young. When, under the providence of God and the ongoing, spreading influence of kingdom values, society opens up to the abolition of slavery or the emancipation of women, then Christians can rejoice and be in the vanguard of such change — as we have been in both causes. The irony remains precisely in Christians lagging behind society and still requiring a submissive role for women, a posture that now is a mirror image of the scandal that egalitarianism would have caused in the patriarchal first century.”

I agree, for the most part, with Stackhouse’s paradigm. It’s not a position I came to easily years ago. I entered kicking and screaming. It was frightening. It seemed to fly in the face of a couple “obvious” passages.

But I could finally no longer hold to patriarchal/complementarian thinking. It didn’t fit the gospel. I finally had to own up to my baptismal vows: that in Christ there is no Hutu or Tutsi, no Easterner or Westerner, no black or white, no male or female, no Jew or Gentile, no slave or free.

(And NOW . . . I’ll move onto other topics . . . for a while.)

I’m finally getting back to Finally Feminist by John Stackhouse.

After asking the question some of you are asking — “How can one be a Christian feminist?” — Stackhouse says this about himself:

“On the one hand, I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual, evangelical Christian man — and thus clearly not everyone’s idea of a feminist. Indeed, one might think that I would have a lot to lose in supporting the equal treatment of women in every sphere of life — whether one sees that loss as ‘legitimate authority’ or ’scandalous privilege.’ On the other hand, I am also a career academician, someone who has earned degrees from two secular universities, has held appointments at three more, and has had books published by the presses of yet two others. Someone with that sort of mainstream scholarly background can be expected to be a feminist, of course. But one might not expect such a person to be an orthodox Bible believer. In this book, then, I try to show how one can be both authentically feminist and authentically Christian. In particular, I try to show how the Bible, which has often been understood by both feminists and patriarchalists to be inimical to feminism, properly can be seen to support feminism in our time.”

Before this, he’s already cleared the air a bit by trying to strip away many social pathologies often associated by Christians with all forms of feminism. He follows his autobiographical note with these words: “The noun feminist can mean several things, but this is what I mean by it: someone who champions the dignity, rights, responsibilities, and glories of women as equal in importance to those of men and who therefore refuses discrimination against women.”

Stackhouse goes on to describe his upbringing, raised not just in a Christian home but in a “Focus on the Family-type home.” Traditional, in other words. Dad as the formal leader.

In his congregation, the Plymouth Brethren, anyone was allowed to suggest a hymn, pray out loud, or offer an explanation of scripture. Everyone, that is, who was male. “I began to wonder why my mother, who was otherwise so esteemed as a leader in our church, remained demurely silent week after week and year after year while Mr. So-and-So rose to bore us once again with his meanderings through Scripture and Mr. Such-and-Such followed with his interminable prayer. When young Bill or even younger Bobby was encouraged to lead in the service while their mothers and grandmothers silently looked on, my wonder deepened.” (Can anyone else identify?!)

Through college and graduate school, he continued to meet women who were gifted in prayer, faith, scholarship, and leadership. The older arguments (that women are too emotional, irrational, illogical, or defensive) or the newer arguments (that the old arguments were wrong and shouldn’t have been made but that God just doesn’t want women to lead at church and home, though maybe in society, and we shouldn’t question him) lost steam as he faced the world of Spirit-filled women around him.

And in addition to that, he entered an egalitarian marriage. (I would contend that many, many Christians are actually in an egalitarian marriage, even if they’d never admit it.)

So, back to scripture he went, searching for a model for understanding gender issues. I’ll pick up there tomorrow.