"These people do not know that while Barak trembled, Deborah saved Israel, that Esther delivered from supreme peril the children of God … Is it not to women that our Lord appeared after His Resurrection? Yes, and the men could then blush for not having sought what the women had found." –Jerome, after criticism for dedicating his books to women link
I love blogging. There are so many good thinkers out there and I am thrilled when they choose to come to our blog and share their thoughts with us. I never know which blog post will resonate with out readers. Last week's post The Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: If You Can’t Explain It to Me, You’ve Got a Problem garnered over 500 comments which I truly didn't expect. So, I decided to continue on with the discussion.
Courtney Reissig, a Neo-Calvinist and self-styled complementarian, wrote a post for Her.Meneutics called Amen to Women in Politics. As I read the article, it became clear to me that the complementarian position is not clear. This post helps to explain why I believe that position will become less and less influential within the Christian community as whole. It certainly is not supported by the secular society which looks at the Christian community's attempt to explain this the same way they look at that Duggar family getting ready to do a TV show on how to counsel child sex abuse victims.
As insane as it sounds, the couple are said to be pitching a new show that will center on their counseling victims of sexual abuse — like their daughters, Jill and Jessa.
Understanding the history of the development of the doctrine of the Eternal Subordination of the Son during the last century
This is the crux of the matter. If you do not understand what is being pushed here, you will not understand why the notion of comp theology is on the big screen. The real problem lies with what came first-the chicken (female subordination) or the egg (the subordination of Jesus?) In 2006, Ben Witherington wrote a post discussing the historical development of this doctrine during the 20th century. The Eternal Subordination of Christ and of Women.
In the later part of the twentieth century the doctrine of the Trinity captured the attention of theologians more than any other doctrine, and this interest has not waned. At no time in history, since the theologically stormy days of the fourth century, has there been so much discussion on this topic. Books on the Trinity by Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox theologians continue to be published.
The co-equal nature of the Trinity vs. the hierarchical nature of the Trinity.
He says that this interest exhibited itself in a strong affirmation of the co-equal nature of the members of the Trinity which led to an understanding that humans, too, are co-equal in relationship.
it is no surprise to find that some of the best contemporary expositions of the doctrine of the Trinity understand the Trinity as a charter for human liberation and emancipation
However, during this same period, there was an equal push by some evangelicals to perceive the Trinity as a hierarchy.
Paradoxically, in this same thirty-year period in which the co-equality of the divine persons has been powerfully reaffirmed and the implications of this teaching for our human social life recognized, many conservative evangelicals have been moving in the opposite direction. They have argued that the Trinity is ordered hierarchically, with the Father ruling over the Son. The Father is eternally “head over” the Son just as men are permanently “head over” women. In this model of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity, rather than being a charter for emancipation and human liberation, becomes a charter to oppose social change and female liberation.
Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology (1994) is the key to the development of hierarchy.
This was summed up by Wayne Grudem in a book which has profoundly affected evangelical thinking.
This new teaching on the Trinity came to full fruition in 1994 with the publication of W. Grudem’s, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Zondervan, 1994). Two chapters in this book outline his doctrine of the eternal subordination of the Son in function and authority. The impact of this book on evangelicals cannot be underestimated. Over 130,000 copies have been sold and the abridged version, Bible Doctrine (ed. J. Purswell; Zondervan, 1999), with exactly the same teaching on the Trinity and women, has sold over 35,000 copies.
However, Witherington disagrees that Grudem's assumptions have a strong basis in history as he suggests.
These words disclose the key issue; that is, the Son is eternally set under the authority of the Father. Grudem insists that this understanding of the Trinity is historic orthodoxy (cf. his latest book, Evangelicals, Feminism, and Biblical Truth [Multnomah, 2004] 405-43). It is, for him, what the creeds and the best of theologians have maintained throughout church history.
This hierarchical understanding of the Trinity has now almost won over the conservative evangelical community. Most evangelicals seem to believe this is what the Bible and “the tradition”—that is, the interpretive tradition—teach. However, I am also an evangelical, but I am convinced the opposite is the truth. The Bible (Matt 28:19; 2 Cor 13:13; etc.) and the interpretative tradition summed up in the creeds and Reformation confessions speaks of a co-equal Trinity where there is no hierarchical ordering.
In Grudem's camp, the subordinated role of women is the battle of our age.
The issue is not really the Trinity at all. What has generated this novel and dangerous doctrine of the Trinity is “a great cause,” the permanent subordination of women. For some evangelicals “the woman question” is the apocalyptic battle of our age.
They are convinced that the Bible gives “headship” (“leadership,” in plain speak) to men. If this principle were abandoned because of cultural change the authority of the Bible would be overthrown and the door would be opened to homosexual marriages, the ordination of practicing homosexuals, and believe it or not, the obliteration of sexual differentiation.
To bolster support for this “great cause” the doctrine of the Trinity has been redefined and reworded to give the weightiest theological support possible to the permanent subordination of women.
Witherington carefully outlines the faulty reasoning.
What has to be noted in all this is the circular nature of this reasoning.
1. A novel theology was first devised to theologically ground the permanent subordination of women based on the argument that men and women are equal yet differentiated by their God-given, unchanging roles; and then
2. the wording and ideas used to develop this novel case for the permanent subordination of women were utilized to develop a novel doctrine of the Trinity that spoke of the Son as equal, yet eternally subordinated in role or function; and then
3. this novel doctrine of the Trinity was quoted to theologically justify and explain the permanent role subordination of women.If this line of reasoning is correct, then this means that the doctrine of the Trinity has been reformulated in terms of fallen male-female relationships to support what was already believed: women are permanently subordinated to men. Instead of correcting sinful human thinking, the primary doctrine of the Christian faith, the doctrine of the Trinity, has become a theological justification for such thinking. In the end, the doctrine of the Trinity, rather than being seen as a charter for human liberation, has become a charter for human oppression.
Ontological versus functional equality
Those in Wayne Grudem's camp do not believe that Jesus is subordinate to the Father in terms of the nature of his existence. He is co-equal in that regard. He is subordinate only in the fact that he is submissive to the Father in his function. In their line of thinking, this makes it OK.
The definition of subordination
It is my opinion that the complementarian crowd mess up in this area. They appear to believe that by merely making Jesus different in function, then the Trinity is still coequal. However, this does not play well in reality. Let's take a look at the definition of subordination. Here is the one from Merriam Webster.
Full Definition of SUBORDINATE
1
: placed in or occupying a lower class, rank, or position : inferior <a subordinate officer>
2
: submissive to or controlled by authority
3
a : of, relating to, or constituting a clause that functions as a noun, adjective, or adverb
Here are some synonyms for subordination.
Inferior, minor secondary, submissive subservient, unequal
Here are antonyms.
First class, important, main, primary
It is obvious that the Subordination of the Son folks came out the gate already behind. Words matter. And these words are particularly difficult to downplay.
CBMW promotes the idea that women will be subordinate to men in eternity.
The following statement would be amusing if it didn't sideline women. It appears that they don't know much about the new creation but they most certainly know that women will be subordinate forever. End of discussion.
There is so much that we cannot yet know about life in the new creation. We can be confident, though, that “God must have some very profound eternal purpose for manhood and womanhood.”52 There is every reason to believe that gender-based distinction of roles will remain. The social fabric of gender-based distinctions of roles was weaved in a pattern that accords with the prelapsarian decree of the Creator. In the new creation, that fabric will not be discarded or destroyed. The stains will be removed and rips mended. The fabric will be cleaned and pressed. But the pattern established in God’s “very good” creation will remain.
Let's call it what it is: eternal female subordination.
I want to give special thanks to TWW reader, Leila, who came up with a better term for complementarianism
Here’s one that’s better because it annoys the heck out of hardcore comps. “Female subordinationist.”
I have no idea why it would annoy the heck out of them because that is precisely what they are proposing if they understand the definition inherent in subordination.
So why promote women in politics?
I am afraid that I do not get female subordinationist, Courtney Reissig's, *rah rah* piece on women in politics. I continue to hope to see a woman in the White House before I go home to eternal subordination to the likes of Wayne Grudem, CJ Mahaney, et al., I believe that the sidelining of women in government, business, and the church has hurt each of those entities as well as out society. Secular society is changing. So is the church. At the same time there has been a full court press to develop doctrines to keep over 50% + of the church from sharing their wisdom and experience with the rest of the church.
Here is what she had to say.
While the numbers of female officials in the US are slowly edging up, their voices have long been rallying for social good and change. Throughout history, women fought for protection from harsh factory conditions. They have defended rights for pregnant women and mothers. They stood alongside men in efforts to abolish the slave trade. Today, they continue their work to bring hope to a society in desperate need of redemption and restoration.
It is not good for the man to be alone, God said (Gen. 2:18). We all benefit from the work and voices of female leaders, who stand alongside men to bring change to a broken world.
However, that change is only for anything that is not involved with the church.
She claims that being a stay at home mother is excellent preparation for being a political leader. However, she shows naivety when she discusses a number of women who have not fulfilled that role in any traditional way.
As a complementarian, some may be surprised that I applaud female leadership in the public sphere. While I believe that leadership in the church rests on qualified, male pastors, I don’t carry that belief into the culture because I don’t think the Bible does. Many fellow complementarians are with me on this point. As women like Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton pursued the presidency in recent elections, evangelicals noted that while Scripture clearly speaks directly to spiritual leadership in the home and church, it does not make the same kind of clear statements on women in governmental leadership. Additionally, many point out the examples of women leading as queens and judges in the Bible.
I should be one of those who get it. I have stayed at home full time.Yet, I am so supportive of those who have not. Each of us are called into different paths.
Reissig pushes Nikki Haley as a model female governor. Yet Haley does not represent Reissig's believe in homemaking. Here is Haley's career path.
Haley worked for FCR Corporation, a waste management and recycling company,[16][17] before joining her mother’s business, Exotica International, an upscale clothing firm, in 1994.[18] The family business grew to become a multi-million dollar company.[18]
Haley was named to the board of directors of the Orangeburg County Chamber of Commerce in 1998.[19] She was named to the board of directors of the Lexington Chamber of Commerce in 2003. Haley became treasurer of the National Association of Women Business Owners in 2003 and president in 2004.[19] She chaired the Lexington Gala to raise funds for the local hospital.[18] She also serves on the Lexington Medical Foundation, Lexington County Sheriff’s Foundation, West Metro Republican Women, President of the South Carolina Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners, Chairman for 2006 Friends of Scouting Leadership Division campaign and is a member of the Rotary Club in Lexington.[20]
Now, let's take a look what would happen if a Christian woman of Haley's experience showed up in your average, female subordinationist church. She would not be allowed to teach a Sunday school class on the Christian and politics. Instead, they could have the 29 year old guy who read a book on it teach. Why? Women are not allowed to teach a mixed class. Does that truly make any sense?
As Christian woman participate and lead industry, the military, social welfare programs, participate in think tanks, manage large groups of people, teach courses in psychiatry, psychology, disease prevention, etc., it is going to become more and more difficult to sideline them in church and say "Take care of the 2 year old class while the men make the important decisions for the church."
Everybody except those who believe in the subordination of women get it. Men are the leaders of the church and the experience of women does not make any difference. That makes no sense to most people.
Because I said so
I made a point in explaining to my kids why they could or could not do things. Other mothers would use the "Because I said so" mantra. "Because I said so" does work with intelligent, thoughtful people. Years ago, I discovered a problem in a church which I believe dealt poorly with some boys who were molested. Having some experience in dealing with child abuse, I tried to intervene. The elders rejected our concerns. One elder attempted to blame one of the molested boys, saying that he should have know better.
I have watched those church leaders and others screw up in handling child sex abuse, domestic violence, etc. I am firmly convinced that women on those elder boards would have made a difference. The men were more concerned about their dadblasted *authority* then they show for those who were wounded.
I find it amusing when a group of men come up with theories about the way life is going to be in heaven. Its kind of like John Piper telling us why bridges collapse. They have no proof; merely a set of proof texts and utter trust in their own imagination. Such proof texts sideline 50%+ of the Christian population. What if they are wrong?
So, I look forward to anyone out there who thinks they can explain to me why a woman with a vast amount of experience and sensitivity should sit quietly and listen to some guy who read a book and listened to some sermon.
Deeply admire the folks here who are persevering in their faith…walked away twenty-five years ago, but am still looking back.
One thing I would like to point out is that, in my experience, complementarian men tend to take their views toward women in the home and church…out into the wider world, applying them consciously or not to all women.
Following through to the logical conclusion, these men are often patronizing, dismissive or downright contemptuous of women in general, and bosses and coworkers in particular.
Ken can pull the “no true Scotsman” all he wants, but the reality is that complementarianism is poison aimed at restricting women in all walks of life.
Daisy wrote:
Owen BHLH has moved on up the ladder, Grant is serving [his time] as kephale of CBMW. This is such earth-shattering news, that Target is a “progressive” company. How in the world will the girls find the pink and purple stuff while the boys find the non-pink and purple stuff?
Honestly, this pearl-clutching by Grant is about as silly as the pearl-clutching by the ninny nannies at the school that suspended the boy who chewed his pop-tart into the shape of a gun. I never knew a kid who looked at the signs at Target’s toy aisle to see which toys they liked and wanted.
While Grant is working through his angst over the astonishing discovery that Target is a “progressive” company (everyone in retailing and Minnesota already knew this) that is more concerned with marketing than with the CBMW sensibilities, ISIS is enslaving women and executing those who refuse sexual favors. Talk about a disconnect from reality. CBMW pretty much sums that up.
@ Daisy:
Paul uses the story of Eve’s deception as a red-flag warning to people about the consequences of falling prey to deception and false teaching. Not Paul and not anyone else anywhere in the Bible says that women are more prone to deception. That is a lie put out by the patriarchalists and not denied by the so-called “complementarians.” I confronted this one head-on in one of our elder encounters. Backpedaling ensued. Still nothing, however, on the Magic Male Authority verses.
Gram3 wrote:
Do you recommend any?
@ Daisy:
Poo-poo on Grant Castleberry. As a child of the late ’60s and early ’70s, my ” superheroes” were the Lone Ranger and Tonto. I always rode bareback, so I was always Tonto! I even had the fringed outfit! Yeah, I had Barbie dolls, but my Barbies rode horses, drove Tonka trucks, and kicked GI Joe’s behind! I also had Swiss Army knives.
I didn’t care then how the toy aisles were labeled, and I don’t care now!
Velour wrote:
I like Biblehub.com but others like Biblegateway.com
Gram3 wrote:
Thanks for the quick reply, Gram3.
Nancy2 wrote:
Exactly! Same here. We girls could even fish and shoot.
Gram3 wrote:
You’re giving Grant ideas! ISIS is the CBMW ‘playbook’.
@ Gram3:
Thanks. That makes sense.
Gram3 wrote:
I could bet he’d cite Genesis 3, where the serpent deceived the woman and she ate.
(And then she gave to her husband, and *he* ate, and that is why husbands must keep tight control over their wives, I guess, so that their wives don’t mess up everything. Hah. What I’ve always found interesting about the passage is that the eyes of both of them were not said to be opened until after the *man* ate! So maybe if he had turned down the fruit when his wife offered it to him, things might be different somehow…?)
Gram3 wrote:
No, God allowing Deborah to be a judge was a judgement upon Israel. Or something like that. Some comp friends tried repeatedly to explain it to me, but it never made sense to me.
Velour wrote:
Bait our own hooks ….. My daughter and I shoot, too. I’ve shot more venomous snakes than my husband has ever seen. He says that I “draw” snakes. Uhm hum.
But, telling girls like us that we can’t do something is just a dare, at best.
We don’t have to go into a church building and form a line behind the men to pray and worship. God is everywhere.
refugee wrote:
Maybe men should do the cooking since we ladies are so bad at deciding what to eat!
refugee wrote:
It didn’t make sense to you because it’s not true. Read Judges chapters 4 and 5.
@ refugee:
40 years of peace sounds like a pretty favourable judgement to me. They must have done something right!
Gram3 wrote:
LOL! Thank you for that delicious word picture this morning. Pearl-clutching sums it up nicely. These are the sort of guys who do not have enough serious grown up things to do.
Ken wrote:
Ken, you could not be more wrong about this. Boundaries are CRITICAL in a good, healthy marriage. Co-dependency destroys people and it is not healthy for marriages. AT ALL.
Yes, the “Christian” model for marriage these days is co-dependency, and it it nearly killed me.
Marriage is a one-flesh union, and yes, it is about unity, but the individual people do not disappear. I am still me and my wife is still my wife.
Townsend and Cloud talk a lot about knowing the difference between our responsibility TO others vs our responsibility FOR others. This is Biblical and very important. If a spouse is making decisions out of fear, either of retaliation or of letting the other spouse down, it means boundaries are being violated. One person’s will is being imposed on another. This is not mutuality or “one flesh”. It is one person dominating. If a spouse is making decisions out of love, freely given, then that is the one flesh union in action.
This kind of thing that you are talking about is so destructive and it really does harm people. Townsend and Could’s book is amazing and should be the go-to book for people getting married (or in any other close relationship really). My only frustration with it is that they are soft on divorce for abuse. But it’s a natural conclusion if you follow the rest of the principles in the book.
Ken wrote:
Yes. Hierarchy of authority based on a person’s being (not circumstance or gifting) is inherently oppressive because it necessarily devalues the persons being on the bottm. Go tell a black man that he must submit to a white man because he is black and see how far you get with that.
Jeff S wrote:
Exactly. I think Ken is mistaking the vast differences between interdependence and co dependent. In order to be “interdependent” one must first be independent.
In fact, when one enters the Body of Christ as a new beliver it is a good thing to want to encourage and help them to grow, mature and be responsible for themselves as adults in all areas of life. That is a good thing. They can go on to help others. Only those who want power over others would want them to remain co dependent on others and not responsible for themselves whether spiritually or materially.
Ken, I wish you could see what the effects of real mutuality look like. I read what you are saying and it seems that it’s all on faith that your understanding of scripture is the best way, without any real evidence other than “this is what I think the Bible says”.
Well, I’ve tried it both ways. I’ve tried being the complementarian husband, and it was OK. Ultimately the marriage dissolved because of my wife’s behavior, but that was far beyond gender role stuff. Comp/Egal wouldn’t have fixed a thing, though not trying to take on her sin for myself would have saved me a lot of pain.
But now I’m in a marriage without hierarchy, and let me tell you it’s a dream. Mutual service and constant submission to one another. It is a Christian marriage, hands down.
But the real point is this: my wife didn’t think she’d find a man who would treat her as an equal. She didn’t expect it and she didn’t even hope for it. But the way it makes her COME ALIVE is like nothing I’ve seen. She glows.
I’ve seen what service does to a woman. They love it, it makes her happy, just like it does all people. But when I can assure her in subtle ways that she is just as important as I am, and that her voice carries the same weight, it unlocks something beautiful and amazing, way beyond the server/protector model does. I still server her, as she serves me, but respecting her voice as important as mine- that is something that comps will miss every time, and they don’t even know it.
refugee wrote:
Could be. But if it is possible to derive a female vulnerability to deception that exceeds a man’s vulnerability to deception from those verses, it is possible for me to derive all manner of things from the Bible. And that is not a very high view of scripture. Maybe Ken will let us know how he gets to his conclusion. It may also have to do with almighty “gar” I mentioned earlier. The fact remains that Paul uses Eve as a type of deceived *humans* in 2 Corinthians.
I suspect the reason that Target capitulated to culture is that Target has so many female shoppers. Retailers have never, ever been known to capitulate to culture and cave to market pressure.
@ Lydia:
Actually, my wife and I read boundaries together within the first few months of dating. How’s that for romantic? :p But setting up healthy boundaries has made us far more interdependant than we ever could have been otherwise. We trust each other completely.
@ Gram3:
I would think that he had 1 Tim 2:14 in mind.
Jeff S wrote:
Not a small number of Christian “leaders” and “great theologians” said exactly that, and they said it was due to God’s Created Order. That is how God ordained people to relate. And God ordained that hierarchy for the benefit of the darker “races.” Or it was due to God’s curse on Canaan. Who did not live in Africa. But whatever gets to the “right” answer need not involve reasoning from the scripture.
Jeff S wrote:
So, it is the almighty “gar” then.
Gram3 wrote:
Targeting “Target” is one tiny example of why I am so weary of the us/them dichotomy of evangelicalism. It goes like this: “Target is the ‘world’ but I must go into the horrible world and be a real Christian who won’t buy unisex clothes”
(Nevermind that church camp t-shirts are unisex!)
It really does become that ridiculous.
Estelle wrote:
I think we can conclude that God’s Good and Beautiful Design is for women to rule over men because of Deborah’s peace and the constant warfare and gross sin under male judges and kings. The people sinfully demanded a king. Not a queen, as God had clearly designed. So he gave them a king instead of a queen, and look at the mess. That’s what the Bible plainly says. 😉 Eisegesis with a generous dollop of imaginative speculation can be so fun!
Lydia wrote:
I’m certain that no CBMW churches would “blur the genders” by passing out unisex tees or allowing the kids to wear unisex shorts or unisex jeans. Have you heard that some girls are wearing jeans that lap left over right? That is the sad state we have reached!
Gram3 wrote:
Yep, and now most people realize how clearly wrong they were. And yet they use the same logic for women.
I actually recently read a lot of the leaders in the South about their justifications for the Civil War, and their attitude toward slaves sounded eerily similar to modern comps.
Ken wrote:
Correction: One of the effects of feminism has been to make men treat women as though they were people.
There, fixed it for you. You’re welcome.
Unfortunately, this comment is so ridiculous and indefensible, it’s beyond my capacity to fix.
I can’t believe you went there…
Whoops, missed a closing tag on that last comment; the last part wasn’t supposed to be in bold.
Lack of sleep. Jet lag. Sorry.
Gram3 wrote:
Actually, I’ve seen lines crossed not just blurred. I’m sure you have as well. I’ve seen plenty of “blue” church camp tees on boys and girls. But I’ve yet to see pink on both sexes.
Bridget wrote:
I have been in several Female Subordinationist churches that allowed the little boys to use the play kitchen, teaching the little boys that they are no different from the girls. They have a unisex gyms where the girls wear shorts. It is shocking the way these comp churches have capitulated to culture!
Ken wrote:
Really, Ken? Women are more prone to deception? You seem like a sensible guy through many comments then you say something like this. I, and others, ask you for your proof, or text, and you return with comments but never with justification for what you say. For me, anyway, it is getting quite difficult to take you seriously.
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
I think it was meant to be 😉
Bridget wrote:
Oh, never mind proof text. Let’s just go with what Ken said and pretend that women are more easily deceived.
The serpent deceived Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. However, Adam KNEW better, but intentionally ate the fruit anyway. That would indicate that women sin because we can be tricked into it, while men sin deliberately. Which is worse? Being tricked into committing sin; or intentionally, deliberately committing a sin? Who would you rather have lead you: someone who tries to do good but fails, or someone who deliberately does evil?
Ken wrote:
There speaks the pot to the kettle!
Dee has already pointed out that the CBMW’s head honchos can’t decide exactly what the word “complementarianism” means, or how it looks in practical terms. And you seem to keep insisting that there is no single definition, since each couple can work that out for themselves. So why do complementarians speak with such a divided voice? If this is so earth-shakingly important, why can’t gender comps nail it down?
Ken, I realize that you’re trying to answer a lot of questions from a lot of people at once. And I know that you have a life apart from this blog. I don’t mean to harp on this issue. But Dee raised it several weeks ago in her original article on the CBMW, and as far as I remember, no one who defends gender comp has addressed it. If any of them (not necessarily you) can at least consider the questions, “If complementarian couples are allowed to figure it out amongst themselves, then why make it of such primary importance? Why not allow mutualistic marriages?”, they might be taken a little more seriously.
One of the affects of complementarianism is forcing a lot people to be something we are not.
Another affect of complementarianism is marriages that are based more on pretense and falsehoods than love and respect.
@ Nancy2:
Spot on! This isn’t even controversial.
Lydia said to Ken:
That’s what crossed my mind, too: Communism. Like gender compism, it sounds like it might work, in theory anyway. Seems like a reasonable arrangement. But in practice, it tends to break down.
I wonder: Perhaps one reason why the two ideologies sound so similar is because they’re promoting basically the same thing. Namely, benevolent dictatorship. The thing is, in The Real World, benevolent dictatorships don’t last. Eventually, they either dispense with benevolence, or they cease to be dictatorships. But the two concepts cannot coexist, at least not for very long.
Some might argue that they’ve seen complementarian marriages that work long term. I would argue back that such marriages are no longer complementarian from a functional standpoint. In such a marriage, the husband has given up on being the “head” in order to be a husband and partner. He has stopped trying to be “over” his wife, in order to walk beside her, shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm. And that is a mutualist marriage, not complementarian.
Bridget wrote:
This is a huge subject, and I can only be relatively brief, at the risk of being misunderstood. But at least eveyone will know where I am coming from.
I do indeed have 1 Tim 2 : 14 in mind and the Genesis text on which it is based.
I am very well aware that deception is not confined to women, 2 Cor 11 as Gram3 rightly points out. I’ve known women with trememdous discernment.
I also don’t think we should let experience determine our interpretation of scripture. Scripture is the canon judge experience, not the other way round. But it is hardly irrelevant either.
That said, over the years circumstances seem to have driven me down a path of having to discern things in the church, like it or not.
Example: the charismatic movement of the latter half of the 20th Century. So much good, and yet little by little deception crept in, such as inner healing, and then word of faith, then the at best mixed Toronto phenomenon.
Example: Move on a bit, the Willow Creek thing. I spent vast amount of time reading aroud this (gram3 I must apoologise for failing to detail this as once promised, I don’t think I could face it all again). The incorporation of secular psychology, worldly management techniques, pseudo-Christian mysticism. I’ve witnessed the effect of taking on board this philosphy first hand and more than once and in different countries.
Example: Female house-group leader who said to my wife “It doesn’t all have to come from the bible, you know”, making it clear the matter was closed. The issue was something pretty seriously off, and I couldn’t get my wife to go any more. She said ‘what’s the point if the bible isn’t decisive on these issues’? Not long ago we tried out a fellowship nearby. Mrs Pastor gave a sermon – biblical, good. Second week: last 20 minutes, Dallas Willard and pseudo-Christian mysticism. That was the point the bible was closed and discarded. What would be the point of going again? Just be a pain in the neck fighting these influences?
There is a point where you get too tired of it. I might be sounding all judgemental, but it’s not the road I would ever choose to go down.
This covers some 40 years on and off. I could multiply examples, but will spare you! These abberations seem to be something women fall for more than men. I wasn’t looking for a justification of a certain view of 1 Tim 2, but even my addled brain finally saw that we ignore it at our peril. Little genesis three’s can and do still happen.
I know I’ll never find the perfect church and if I did I’d ruin it. But you could despair. Is there a church, however imperfect, where the ‘overseers’ do just that, and don’t tolerate gross religious error and deception going on right under their noses? Or if you attempt to point it out, however graciously, slap you down because they don’t want the boat rocked and we need to be ‘tolerant’.
So now you know, and I must away. You are more than welcome to disagree, but I hope you do so a tad sensitively!
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
Yes, that is what our marriage seems to be evolving into. And yet my husband still thinks it’s complementarianism “done right” at last, now that he is paying attention to his role of loving and washing his wife in the Word and such. He stubbornly believes in the system, and I don’t think I’m going to be the one to argue him out of it. It’s like he has a “deaf spot” and can’t hear certain things.
@ Serving Kids In Japan:
Reading backwards through the thread, it strikes me that Ken reminds me a lot of my husband’s attitude. He engages in discussion, and yet he doesn’t engage. It’s as if he has the same “deaf spot” I mentioned above.
It reminds me of the fictional land of Xanth, where there is a chasm of forgetfulness. The magic of the chasm is so powerful that people who live near it can’t even think about it — they think around it, but there is a blank spot in their minds and they don’t even realize they are thinking *around* it. They aren’t even avoiding it, because they’re not aware there’s something to be avoided.
Jeff S wrote:
Actually, I find that romantic. I believe our relationships are somewhat contractural (think covenant and vows) 1 Corin 7 seems to affirm that in some ways. Setting boundaries on major issues is wise.
Gram3 wrote:
I can’t even picture what you mean by jeans that lap left over right. Don’t all of them do that? Or was that the point you were making, and I’m just too thick this morning to catch it.
And I have ordered tee shirts that come in a feminine cut (more close fitting, I think, and something is different about the sleeves) as opposed to a masculine cut (the traditional tee shirt fit, sort of loose and boxy) on occasion, when both styles were available. Although before that I usually ordered “Youth Large” (which is definitely unisex) because our petite kids (no tall/broad genes in our family) would swim in “Adult Small” shirts, up until recently.
@ refugee:
Comp doctrine is a lot like Calvinism. It sounds great but does not hold up well when analyzed both scripturally and with everyday life. Therefore, some don’t like to talk about it. And there are plenty of comps and cals who are wonderful people. Many are friends and we don’t discuss it.
Jeff S wrote:
This is beautiful.
And yeah, there’s very little hope out there for women. The teens have no hope at all that they might find men who treat them as equals. They have no interest in marrying at all, and I’m sure that lack of hope is a factor. They were born into a church where the predominant teaching was that they were to support their father’s vision, and then their husband’s. It’s in their bones; all the talk in the world doesn’t seem to dispel it.
Reminds me of the old Carly Simon lyric, “You say we’ll soar like two birds in the sky, but soon you’ll put me on your shelf. I’ll never learn to be just me first, by myself.”
refugee wrote:
Speaking only for myself, I had a huge deaf spot and blind spot on this issue. In my case, it was due to being totally turned off by some feminists and being totally disgusted by the acceptance of abortion on demand as a sacrament. And I hated the way that some talked about men like Gloria Steinem’s famous fish-with-a-bicycle remark, whether it was apocryphal or not. I knew I was not about that view of women or of men.
Imagine what that rhetoric sounds like to a good man who is not like that. The bad men don’t pay any attention to it, but the good men think that is what female rights is about: putting them down. They also associate, like I did, the idea of female rights with a demand for abortion rights which is then perceived as a rejection of motherhood. Some of the rhetoric used to support female ordination sounded, to me, like the strident feminists, and I rejected that. But then the association was formed, and it became impossible for me to even consider the arguments advanced by *any* person advocating for “egalitarianism” or mutualism.
IMO, that is why the CBMW tactic/strategy of tying mutualism to [secular] feminism has been so effective with conservative women with good husbands and fathers. It can also effective with women who have had bad husbands and fathers because they can be persuaded that this System guarantees a good husband who will also be a good father. I applaud the brilliance of their marketing concept because it appeals to both the good-heated and the bad-hearted while sounding pure itself.
Until your husband can separate his emotional response to “feminism” and his desire (I presume) to uphold Biblical authority from the substantive issue of whether the Bible, in fact, teaches Female Subordinationism, he will not be able to hear the textual arguments. That is how super-glued the concepts are. For me, it took not one but three traumatic encounters with the reality of what this System really is to force me to investigate. To force me to do what the Bible tells us to do: search the scriptures to see if what the teacher says is so.
In the meantime, your husband can become a practical mutualist while still maintaining the purity of the “complementarian” position which is untainted by “feminism” and what that entails. Give him some time, and pray that you don’t have to go through what I had to go through in order to break the spell.
@ refugee:
(And most of the young men of their acquaintance either don’t seem to be the marrying kind — bearing similar scars from leaving legalistic “faith” — or, while they treat our teens as equals among equals, have a certain underlying… I don’t know what to call it? arrogance?
It’s the attitude that caused me to break it off with my first boyfriend in high school. He was sweet, but condescending. He liked to call me “little girl” and acted protective. It got old.
The young women of my acquaintance want to be treated as people: individuals with thoughts and feelings of their own. As long as they’re “one of the guys” they get along just fine, but anything closer than that… it’s as if they are expected to defer to the other party, but they are on unequal playing ground, and the other party usually doesn’t feel the same pressure to defer to them. (A deferential young man who considers the feelings of the young woman he’s interested in gets a lot of flack and razzing from his fellows, too. Is it unmanly of him? Is he weak?)
@ Gram3:
This is a clear explanation. Thanks.
refugee wrote:
Female garments traditionally lap right over left and male garments left over right. Jeans were initially male work attire which were adopted by females because they were practical. So now females are wearing male garments! Oh the humanity! I remember when jeans were not a fashion item as well. The point I was making was that all the hysteria about “blurring genders” is happening already in their own pews. Maybe their own wives and daughters are wearing gender-blurring jeans and tee shirts. They are all just too young to know the fights that went on about women wearing jeans and how inappropriate it was for a young lady to do so.
refugee wrote:
Deborah and the “No Available Men” Argument
newlife.id.au/equality-and-gender-issues/deborah-and-the-no-available-men-argument/
I’ve heard gender comp preachers try to wiggle out of the Deborah in the Old Testament example by saying she was an exception or whatever. Which is still a stupid argument.
If God was fine with a woman being leader in one example, you’d think this would go to show he’s fine with women today being in leadership as well.
@ Gram3:
Of course, there is nothing feminine to our Western eyes about a ‘thobe”. Or the ruffled shirts and velvet jackets men wore in the 1700’s :o)
Around the turn of the 20th century, pink was considered masculine for men.
Gram3 wrote:
That is because the left often uses the same divisive tactics as the right. They are more alike than different in this way. Both sides have an attitude of “either you agree with us or you are one of ‘them'”.
The only thing I can figure is that such an approach keeps certain politicos in business.
Jeff S wrote:
Yes, gender complementarianism is codependency with a biblical veneer, and is actually opposed in the Bible!
But gender comps pressure men and women (but women especially, way more so than men) to be codependent, and especially in romantic relationships such as dating or marriage, which makes women vulnerable to attracting or marrying abusers.
I cannot emphasis this point enough, but it keeps flying over a guy like Ken’s head.
I am a never-married woman who is in her 40s, and gender comp (codependency) was very harmful to me.
These teachings aren’t just harmful to married couples, but to single adults as well.
(Gender comp teachings get into odd ball stereotypes about genders and too-strict rules about dating, which serves to keep marriage-minded Christian adults single, rather than helping them get married, ironically.)
I (an unmarried woman) am now trying to overcome some of the negative impacts gender complementarianism had on my life. (I won’t go into detail, because it would make this post very, very long.)
A woman being codependent is very attractive to men who are abusive, users, or controllers.
Most such men are on the prowl for women with the very traits gender complementarians teach women they should have.(This fact is stated repeatedly on blogs, articles, and books about domestic violence and stalkers. I’ve experienced it first hand in my own life.)
Robbers, muggers, and other criminals also love to target women with gender comlementarian (codependent) traits, which security expert DeBecker explains in his book “The Gift of Fear.”
Losing yourself totally in antoher person, meeting all their needs all the time (just two of the traits of codependency) is UNBIBLICAL.
The notion that you need to supposedly lose yourself completely in a romantic partner or romantic relationship also sends a false, secular message that an adult is supposedly not complete and of themself but needs a spouse.
You are nobody until somebody loves you, is sometimes how Hollywood or popular singers portrays that message.
Christians sometimes teach this in gender comp teachings as well, that you are a nobody until you are in a marriage, that you are not complete unless you marry someone, but the Bible says each individual is complete in Christ alone.
I have heard TV preachers (who are themselves married) preach that you are not complete unless you marry another person, they have said on their shows that it takes a man (one half) married to a woman (one half) to equal a whole, and to fully express God!!
I am over 40 and never married, how do you suppose such statements make me feel?
Also, the Bible does not teach that concept anyhow.
@ Gram3:
LOL
Jeff S wrote:
I was engaged to a guy once.
This was back when I was still kind of sold on gender comp beliefs (I had some doubts but was still pretty much behaving in line with gender comp views), so I tried being the gender comp fiancee to this guy I was engaged to.
My ex never, ever met my needs. The several years I was with this guy, it was always about him and what he wanted, and how he wanted it, and when he wanted it.
He never expressed an interest in my life, my thoughts, my career – nothing. I did all that to him, but he never to me. (He also ripped me off financially.)
I kept waiting for my ex to give me support or encouragement (I never got any from my family – my family puts me down a lot), but he would never give me any. But he would expect me to give that stuff to him, which I did.
I gave my ex emotional support whenever he was down and in the dumps about his job or whatever.
The one-way street of that situation was awful. I gave and gave, and he took and took. This went on for years. I thought I was being a biblical girlfriend to the guy.
There are many reasons why I finally broke the relationship off, but that was definitely one, the constant taking by him and no giving.
I felt as though I was being used, taken for granted. It created sadness, resentment, etc.
But the gender comp advocates for this position, where the wife/ girlfriend is supposed to be the supportive little lady whose only role is to buck up the man’s ego (or his job).
The men don’t seem to be taught or encouraged so much by preachers or churches who teach gender comp to encourage their GF or wife on in her life or to pursue her dreams.
Yes, I sometimes hear gender comp preachers tell men to appreciate their wife or love her, but I don’t see anything directed to men as what is directed at the woman about this stuff, like, to be a support or source of encouragement in fulfilling ambitions in life or going after a new job, etc.
Gram3 wrote:
That reminds me of
Top Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained
http://spectrummagazine.org/article/alexander-carpenter/2011/02/28/top-ten-reasons-why-men-should-not-be-ordained
Bridget wrote:
Granted I sometimes lose patience and can only bear to skim his comments, but from what I have seen, he will sometimes make appeals to culture.
Where upon he blames feminism for a lot of the problems with culture and marriages.
The argument isn’t being made from the Bible but from culture.
That can work both ways, though. I have seen how gender comp views have damaged marriages, dating, etc. They certainly damaged me.
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
The funny thing is, some gender complementarian Christian married couples live out egalitarian/ mutual marriages but still claim to be gender complementarian.
Which ticks off some of the head phoo-baas in gender complementarianism.
I think one of them went so far as to say gender comps should start to come down harder on these gender role teachings and call the whole thing “patriarchy” instead.
Ken wrote:
It is not controversial to claim that men are prone to sin on purpose then blame God and their wives….. YET God wants them to be in authority over women? Where is the “Good News” for women in this? That we will get relief in eternity because we can then escape? Until then, we women are prone to deception (nevermind the cross/resurrection as that did not even help the problem) and should stay in our roles in marriage and the body because we cannot be trusted. Yet, the sinning on purpose men….should be trusted. This sort of makes God out to be a moral monster.
Do you consider that your interpretative grid is way off for both genders?
This makes sense…. how? Yet you insist it is truth based upon interpretation
Daisy wrote:
It says “they shall become as one” — which I always thought looked something like 1 + 1 = 1
Daisy wrote:
Russ Moore said that “comps” are wimps and we need more patriarchy. I believe this was in a paper for the Henry Institute. It was a few years back when he was double/triple dipping at SBTS.
Now he represents the SBC politically concerning “Liberty” and “Ethics”. (I know! What a hoot!)
Some do not know that Moore got his start in DC politics working for a democrat congressman who was not re-elected.
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
Ken, like a lot of gender comps I’ve seen and heard since my teen aged years, seems to think gender comp is fine and peachy because it has its motives and heart in the right place.
As I said on an earlier page in this discussion, it’s still sexism. I don’t care if your intentions are good, sexism is still sexism, and so it is insulting and wrong, even if it’s done with a smile.
Even sweet, gentle, kind- hearted- with- good motives gender complementarianism can mess up a person’s life, it sure did with mine, and I’m not even married.
Secular culture has studied the problems with “smiley faced sexism,” which is sexism that is similar to what gender comps promote in articles such as-
The Problem When Sexism Just Sounds So Darn Friendly…
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/benevolent-sexism/
refugee wrote:
I’ve not read this book myself, but I’ve seen it recommended on another site or two. Maybe this would help?
How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals by Alan F. Johnson
refugee wrote:
I still would like to marry but no longer will limit myself to Christians or conservative Christians. I’m fine now with dating or marrying a Non Christian. My criteria now is ‘will the guy treat me well,’ not ‘what are his religious views.’
Guys saying they believe in X (whether Jesus or whatever) is not a guarantee that the guy will be caring, loving, faithful, etc.
Too many examples of Christian church going (and yes, gender comp) men who beat on or cheat on their wives to ignore.
Lydia wrote:
And I have a picture of my grandfather in a dress as an infant. Obviously the people in the 19th century were totally BlurringTheGenders. It was those dang wimmin who were running things back then!
Gram3 wrote:
Point 1.
I think that was addressed in a page here the other day:
LAYING DOWN MALE PRIVILEGE FOR JOY
http://juniaproject.com/laying-down-male-privilege-for-joy/
point 2.
I’m pro-life, but. As I got older, one of the turn off for me, and a weakness I’ve seen in Christian gender comp teaching, is how they go the opposite course, way opposite extreme, and put motherhood on a pedestal to a point that not even God himself has done in the Scripture.
So what happens as a result of all that is that never-married celibates, such as myself, are either marginalized or demonized in church sermons and Christian literature, we are shamed for not marrying and/or not having children.
Then I’ve read of married ladies who either don’t want to have children, or they or their spouse is infertile, and they feel shamed or feel like trash by Christian culture (in particular gender comp culture) for not having children.
Gram3 wrote:
Unless they are in an IFB church. IFBs are hard core on this stuff. Women and girls HAVE to wear skirts and dresses all the time.
About the only exception or concession I’ve seen IFBs make in this area – culottes (as defined on the internet as “women’s knee-length trousers, cut with very full legs to resemble a skirt”).
Women/girls can wear these (what are IMO, sorry if this offends anyone who likes these) usually odd looking, unattractive, huge, baggy shorts called culottes, when they are in gym class or other physical activity.
Lydia wrote:
Yes. This a billion times over, especially point 1.
I have a friend (or had I should say, I guess we’re not friends anymore) who is totally like point 1.
I shifted some of my political and religious views over slightly to a more moderate position several months or a year ago, and she now demonizes me for it.
She thinks that moving one mili-meter to the center equates to being a full left wing, atheist, Democrat. And I’m none of those things.
Lydia wrote:
Are unmarried women immune to al this? I’ve never been married. I don’t have a man “over me” or to “be my head” or “covering” or whatever. So I guess I’m okay on my own?
I just do not think gender comp squares away all possible exceptions to their views. Not all women get married or say married, for one.
So you can’t go around as a gender comp teaching this trash that women need a husband to lead them, or keep them out of deception, because some women do not have husbands, hello!
Daisy wrote:
STAY married, not “say” married.
Also, that is “all” not al.
@ Daisy:
I played basketball in school. On one of the teams that we played against occasionally, there was a fundy girl who played guard. She wore her church approved culottes instead of the standard gym shorts. When she got knocked down, or went to the floor scrapping for a loose ball. …. Woo hoo…. She was way more indecent in those culottes than the rest of us in our mid-thigh length gym shorts!
Lydia wrote:
And culture. Don’t forget culture and horrible secular lady feminists (who probably have mustaches).
He has pointed to problems in culture.
Culture, high divorce rates, I think what he termed “gender confusion,” etc, can be rescued via gender complementarianism.
(Not the Gospel, not via Jesus, and/or the inner working of the Holy Spirit, but gender complementarianism.)
Even though gender comp is not working for actual gender complementarians, who have had to abandon it, such as…
Shedding Complementarianism (by Elizabeth K. Casey)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2015/08/10/shedding-complementarianism-by-elizabeth-k-casey/
Nancy2 wrote:
I can believe it!
@ Daisy:
Why do you think the Mohler and company were advocating young marriage? BTW, it would then be perfectly ok for her to work and put him through seminary.
@ Gram3:
I found a painting of my father as a toddler in a dress with long curls. He obviously did not want it displayed. :o)
It was explained to me that it was all about ease the of changing cloth diapers. What motivation to graduate into pants! But it was very typical way back then to dress all baby/toddlers like that.
Lydia wrote:
Yeah, they make exceptions to their own rules about gender, which goes to show it’s less biblical and (hello, Ken, if you are still reading) based on culture / situational considerations. Not the Bible.
It’s interesting how most Christians ignore the hordes of us singles who want to marry but can’t find a partner….
But the gender role obsessed ones have picked up on the cultural trends that some people are either not marrying at all, or not until older (as compared to previous generations).
They they spazz out and start propagandizing in their blogs and magazines to college kids to marry real young.
They don’t care about us 40 somethings who want to marry and who wanted to marry back when we were in our 30s, no, they fixate on whomever today’s college kids are. And teens.
They tell you to get married in your 20s, but when you can’t meet a mate, they refuse to help fix you up.
Churches refuse to put on social functions and Christian married couples refuse to fix ladies like me up on dates (notice: not all singles want to be fixed up, please ask them first).
Dating sites are filled with pervs (including Christian males who act like juvenile, vulgar pigs), so that’s not a solution necessarily.
Lydia wrote:
Until the 1940’s the preferred color for boys clothing was pink according to the Smithonian:
… a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-start-wearing-pink-1370097/?no-ist
Parts of this page seem applicable to this thread; here are some snippets:
—–
The Church’s ‘Intersex’ Challenge
How should we respond to those who don’t seem to have been created male or female?
She [book author theologian Megan DeFranza] then plumbs Jesus’s claim that “some are born eunuchs” (Matt. 19:12), suggesting that the Bible contains resources for recognizing those who do not fit the standard understanding of male and female.
And she provides a hasty overview of how we ostensibly went from one sex (male) in the classical period, to two in modernity (male and female), to the postmodern proliferation of sexes. (One theorist proposes five sexes, while another suggests hundreds.)
… Genesis, then, is only the beginning of the narrative through which Christians understand their personal identity. As she puts it, “Sex identity as male or female may be essential to personal identity. But there are more essentials than these two.”
Not only does DeFranza’s account try to reframe how we should think about Genesis. It also has implications for our understanding of Christ, the Trinity, and the coming kingdom of God.
——-
Source:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/august-web-only/churchs-intersex-challenge.html
Ken wrote:
Oh Ken. I do totally & utterly disagree with you. The only time I see women being more gullible than men has been women in the church who have been expected to be the empty headed little christian housewife or daughter, who have been starved of the education & intellectual experience necessary to become a discerning thinker.Has it ever occurred to you that the many little ‘genesis 3’s’ you have seen have been in this context? Out in the real world we see that women, provided with the same educational/educational opportunities as men are precisely as discerning as men. In fact sometimes it’s the other way round & we see men’s discernment capacities fade in a rush of testosterone if a female so much as smiles at them. It’s also the case that many women with true intellectual gifts don’t bother to try & lead anything in the church as they get knocked back for being unfeminine – hence you’re left with less than top class thinkers leading all sorts of women’s groups. Sad but true.
@ Daisy:
Really interesting stuff Daisy. As the Manager of an LGBTQ project for young people my organisation is just about to commission some training from the NHS’s flagship specialist mental health trust (Tavistock & Portman) who are also on the leading edge of understanding & helping gender issues. One of our requested subjects to cover are intersex conditions, their level of occurrence, origins, best practice in how these are handled, & how we could help young people diagnosed as such deal with the massive demands of adolescence, development of identity & of a realistic expectation of what medical intervention could have for them. Such a hard thing for any young person to deal with & so many terrible mistakes made in previous years about how to handle these, ending in so much suffering or tragedy.
@ Ken:
Just skimming over some of the examples you gave.
Maybe I just watch too much TBN (American Christian network, you can watch their programming on their site and see it for yourself), but there are lots and lots of MALE deceivers on that network.
There are a lot of self professing Christian men who teach ridiculous garbage and the Christian men who are deceived by it.
Probably the best examples are the greedy tele-evangelists we have who preach the “prosperity Gospel,” if you mail them ten dollars, God will pay it back by giving you ten million.
A lot of Christian MEN believe in this stuff and preach it, not just women.
There are way more male con artist preachers on TBN than lady ones.
Beakerj wrote:
Yes.
Such women either leave church totally or they may stay in a church but use their intellect and gifts outside the church, in para-church groups, secular charities, etc.
And those charities have not fallen apart with women as members or leaders.
More and more women are leaving the church in part because they are not being allowed to use their gifts and talents.
I find Ken’s comments also troublesome for him, because women outside of the church have not shown themselves to be more prone to being deceived than men.
Some women work as fighter pilots, lawyers, judges, police officers, doctors, and other occupations where a person has to be competent.
So, Ken might say (I dunno, but just guessing) that women can make great pilots, judges, doctors, school teachers and university professors, but not be allowed to teach Sunday School class to mixed gender adults.
That sounds very… stupid and like special pleading.
Why are Working Women Starting to Unplug from Their Churches?
http://blog.tifwe.org/working-women-unplugging-from-church/
@ Ken:
The problem with your response is that you complain about how Willow Creek ignores or downplays the text and then you don’t demonstrate your POV regarding women being more easily deceived from the actual text. So, it’s OK for you to get your ideas from your experiences but not for Willow Creek to go outside the text? I don’t get it.
It sounds to me like you have a huge confirmation bias problem. How do you account for the multiple horrible deceptions perpetrated upon the church by males? Surely you hold Bill Hybels as accountable as Lynn, or do you think she led him astray?
You are, of course, perfectly OK to hold whatever view you wish. But if you want to castigate others for departing from the text, then you should at least make your case from the text.
@ Beakerj:
I am glad you found the article useful.
I think it goes to show too that trying to categorize people the way gender comps do may not be possible.
@ Gram3:
I’ve raised that same point 2 or 3 times above, like here:
http://thewartburgwatch.com/2015/07/27/complementarians-or-eternal-female-subordinationists-why-i-still-dont-get-it/comment-page-3/#comment-211468
Ken says that culture needs gender comp (culture has gone down the garbage can without gender comp put into practice), but then he seems, in other posts, to say people should only go by the Bible.
It looks like he wants it both ways with his own views:
Appeal to culture when it’s convenient for his side, and only to the Bible in other instances.
Or maybe I’ve misunderstood him.
I do think his so-called biblical views have ramifications when lived out in life by real people. That is one point I’ve raised several times over.
I do think when lived out that gender comp can and does make women more vulnerable to domestic abuse.
@ Gram3:
Women have not even begun to catch up with men when it comes to false teaching/deception. They have not had the same opportunities. Ken should give it some time. :o)
Maybe Ken believes that men deceive on purpose and women deceive out of ignorance? Wouldn’t that fit his exegeses?
@ Daisy:
Ken also needs to define what he means when he uses the term “culture”. If he means a male dominated, male rule culture, he’s right. Without gender comp, that culture is going down the garbage can.
Gram3 wrote:
That is so true, Gram3. Her work has never appealed to me. She gives pat answers, no thinking skills.
All of the people who subscribe to this comp nonsense have major “daddy issues” in my experience: An absence of a good, loving father in their lives. They flail around looking for the *rules* to live by, a container of legalism to fence them in, when life is far more gray.
Daisy wrote:
In my experience, the NeoCals/gender comps all had abusive or non-existent relationships with their own fathers. They all have *daddy* issues. I wonder what Ken’s relationship was with his father? I haven’t heard of him mention a father in his life as a guiding example of how to do marriage and relationships.
(I have heard of Gram3, Mirele and others mention how their fathers raised them.)
Besides setting women up for domestic abuse, comp doctrine also sets up daughters for same and for insecurity problems. And then there’s the issue of sexual abuse. Duggar family, Gothard, Doug Phillips, and on and on.
At my former NeoCal church, the senior pastor told me in an elders meeting that if a father in a church family *permitted* a convicted Megan’s List sex offender at church to touch the family’s children that the “father’s decision was final and his wife had no say.” All of the elders agreed with him.
Me: “The criminal code requires that fathers AND mothers protect their children. A mother is not criminally off the hook by abdicating responsibility to her husband. If her children are harmed, she can be prosecuted for felonies and land in state prision! Her children can be taken away and put in the foster care system!”
Honestly, I have NEVER seen dumber arguments than all of theirs. They are as dumb as rocks! (Law enforcement, Attorney General’s office, etc. were incredulous: “What kind of church do you go to? What did the pastors tell you? They told you that a father could permit a registered sex offender to touch his children and the mother had no say?”
(Additional info: The sex offender was a friend of the pastors/elders that they had secreted into the church and I had discovered him on Megan’s List while doing research for a prosecutor on Megan’s List about another sex offender in the same city. The pastors/elders said he was ‘coming off Megan’s List’. His supervising law enforcement agency and the Attorney General’s Office called that ‘all lies’ and ‘total lies.’ And we wonder why the church has NO CREDIBILITY with unbelievers. Because even they have more good sense!)
Ken wrote:
Ken wrote:
Ken do you realise how sexists these comments are. Words like ‘old biddies’ and ‘bit of an old woman’ are a put down to women. The reason people are leaving the Church is because it no longer reflects their lives. A woman can be a CEO of a multi-national organization but then she gets told that she has to remain silent in Church and ask her husband, when she gets home, if she doesn’t understand something. REALLY!!!!!!!!!!
And maybe a feminised version of Christianity is what the early Church was like. A Church full of love and compassion, not one of male only headship that more represents the ‘Pharisaical’ruling class that Jesus went up against.
@ rhondajeannie:
Interestingly, in the Female Subordinationist world, it is the Leaders like Piper and Grudem who come across like the stereotypical old biddies. Who is more of a busybody concerned about nothing important than the CBMW crew? The Target toy aisle is what should concern us? Seriously?
Lydia wrote:
More disturbing in Ken’s summation is that it appears to be acceptable to purposefully deceive, as long as you are male!
Beakerj wrote:
Although even at my former NeoCalvinist church, it was frequently wives who sounded a dire warning to their husbands that their was something *terribly wrong* with that church, that the families shouldn’t go there, that they should leave. It was frequently wives (including very conservative women) who left first and went to other churches.
@ Gram3:
Ha Ha. …. Old biddies! Yea, Piper is a classic. I wonder if he keeps smelling salts in his blazer pocket! He’s more stereotypical “feminine” than I could even pretend to be!
rhondajeannie wrote:
Here’s some good blog articles by (conservative Baptist) Pastor Wade Burleson undoing all of the comp rhetoric that has been taught in our churches of late as though it was *The Gospel*:
http://www.wadeburleson.org/2015/06/artemis-redux-women-and-i-timothy-29-15.html
http://newlife.id.au/christian-living/wade-burleson-christian-leadership-hebrews-13/
http://www.wadeburleson.org/2012/03/memo-to-mars-hill-men-suppression-of.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106932178
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vhhQo2vXCA
@ rhondajeannie:
“Feminized version of Christianity”:
Sounds like Ken thinks Christianity is a “Boys’ Club”. …… no gurlz allowed in church or in heaven.
Bridget wrote:
What is most disturbing to me is that Ken and others of like mind take a straightforward recounting of the Creation and Fall and from that come up with a conclusion about female nature. However, we must conclude that a propensity toward being deceived resides somewhere on the X chromosome. Perhaps males only get half a dose and are therefore more fit to teach. And maybe females who have the full dose of gullibility are more fit to teach other gullible women and naive children. That sounds extraordinarily reasonable to Female Subordinationists but not to anyone else who see how ridiculous that line of reasoning is.
Clearly and plainly, women are saved by bearing a child. God has spoken. We must not read other places in the Bible which contradict this. It is plain. Childless women and men are simply not among the elect. This is a clear, logical, and good and necessary inference directly from a plain reading of the text. No pearls and braids, and kissing all around no matter whether the kisser or kissee is male or female. The text is clear.
Daisy wrote:
That’s TERRIBLE, Daisy. You didn’t deserve to be treated that way. I am so glad you are out. Hey, if you get married to a good guy (of any faith), I promise to come to the wedding!
Gram3 wrote:
Ruh-Roh. I am hosed.
I guess I need to fornicate now with some rando guy I pick up at a bar, in the hopes of getting pregnant. Outside of wedlock.
Velour wrote:
Thank you, Velour 🙂
I hope to still get married. Some day.
Yes, my ex was like that. He would just declare things, how they were going to be once we got married.
He was ticked off or offended or something that I wanted to keep my last name had we married.
BTW, me wanting to keep my last name is not due to a feminist statement of any sort, but that I was in my 30s at the time (40s now).
I’ve had the same surname my whole life. I can’t imagine going by another name at this time, since this one is all I’ve ever known. 🙂
@ Daisy:
Pretty much. Of course, in this system, you were hosed when your dad gifted you with his X chromosome. Blame it on dad. Funny thing is they used to blame women for not bearing sons, too. It is always the woman’s fault.
@Daisy,
You are welcome. You are a dear and I really value your insight here, transparency, candor and wit.
I am sorry that Christians – in the church and your family – have been so terribly uncaring toward you. This was my experience in the church, not with any particular situation I was facing. But I was the Christian who did care for other people and so they would come and tell me their pain and secrets and tell me that I was the *only* Christian that they could talk to without me quoting them Scripture verses all of the time (I find it unhelpful), etc. I know that there is a crisis here because I ended up shouldering the load for this, and was happy to do it, but it really grieved me that others would so emotionally stunted they couldn’t/wouldn’t do that.
@ Daisy:
I’ve married twice and changed my name twice — the first time was in 1984. People who’ve known me all my life still call me by my maiden name. That name stuff change is just a legality.
For what it’s worth, you definitely made the right decision when you ditched the fiancé. He’s a user and a loser!
Jeff S wrote:
I’m sorry if I seen to be a pain in the neck on Eph 5. One of the things that fascinated me on the discussion here on this is the vehemence with which my insistence that mutuality does not apply in marriage in this passage has been greeted. I’ll change my mind if someone can persuade this understanding is wrong. Douglas Wilson, incidentally, is sympathetic to the mutual view.
I think you would have to agree I’ve been given a fair amount of grief for arguing for this! I’ve not been given any grief for arging that the sacrificial love, nourishing and cherishing is also not mutual. Why is that? That doesn’t seen to be so controversial!
I wonder if some people are hearing something I am not saying, namely an implicit command for husbands not to submit to their wives, and for the wives, once they have submitted that’s all there is to it. The bible is always balanced: Sarah might have called Abraham lord, but God once told him to ‘hearken to the voice of his wife’.
I can’t remember your exact wording, but you described your arrangements at home with your wife, and it made me smile as what you described is more or less complementarianism in Kenville. Yet you don’t want to be thought of as ‘complementarian’ because clearly some (and I would suggest this is very much a US phenomenon) have run off with it and made it into an idol.
It’s a real shame the complementarity of male and female always seems to get ‘bogged down’ in issues of authority and submission, whereas it is much more wide-ranging and enriching than that. I try to avoid using the word authority in this context because the bible doesn’t.
Maybe we need a ‘Strange Mire’ conference on the subject.
@ rhondajeannie:
Well I’m sorry if you found this offensive. Old biddy is a term of affection in British English. The point is that I was beíng critical of men; perhaps I should have said old and effeminate. I don’t think anyone likes to see that in a man if they are being honest. If you think even saying that is sexist, then I hope you will at least complain the next time someone says a pastor should ‘man up’ and deal with the abuse going on in his congregation.
One of the marks of feminised church imo is the absence or playing down of certain doctrines. The goodness and severity of God. Judgement. The doctrine of hell. You can’t just have love, grace and compassion; you have to have the other side as well, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and someone being described as God-fearing is not something you are likely to hear amongst today’s evangelicals.
Beakerj wrote:
I don’t think I fit the stereotype you depict here. For example, both daughters are getting a university education. The older incidentally, has a great deal of spiritual discernment, she’s not easily fooled. And likes asking the most awkward questions about the bible you could imagine.
Going completely off topic, predestination. The following is a youtube link to David Pawson on Ephesians. If you want to cut to the chase and get to predestination, it starts just after 27:50. If it doesn’t bless you, I’ll eat my hat! Seriously, if this topic has been like a dark cloud hanging over you (too), I think you will find it very liberating and encouraging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J8Nu0AusUY
Gram3 wrote:
The missus and I are toast.
That verse is so indicative of their entire view of scripture. Literal, until they don’t like it.
Gram3 wrote:
The crazy thing is that this has been spelled out in The Creation, or actually The Fall narrative.
Whether a Christian believes that The Creation and Fall are actually literal events or pretty much symbolic (or some other thing besides symbolic that I can’t think of right now) the truth hiding within The Fall narrative is uncanny.
Fallen Adam is always there to blame Fallen Eve. Always. It is far easier for him to do that than to own his own shortcomings or imperfections.
Ken wrote:
Because you are not making an assertion which does not burden you. Do you think that a wife carrying and bearing and raising a child is not sacrificial? That doing things for her husband when she does not feel like it so that he is nourished and cherished is not mutuality of those things?
The problem, I think, is that you have decided a priori that there are roles which have rigid and high boundaries. And that cannot be demonstrated grammatically or contextually from Ephesians 5. You are reaching, in the text, way beyond 5:22 to the verses on children and slaves in order to derive your *inference* about non-mutuality. At the same time you are *ignoring* the grammatical fact that 5:22 depends on 5:21 to supply anything like a verb and that the verb is not imperative in any case.
Where did Jesus or Paul tell us to conform ourselves to a female version of Christ and a male version of Christ? They did not, and we should not, either.
Ken wrote:
When you say, emphatically, that submission and sacrifice are not mutual, then it seems reasonable to conclude that you are saying that husbands are not to submit to their wives. That would be mutuality, and you are arguing against that.
Ken wrote:
So, feminism is love, grace, compassion …. cherubs on fluffy white clouds?
While manliness (true holiness) is judgement, fear of God, wisdom …. hellfire and brimstone?
I don’t even know where to start.
Ken wrote:
Thanks for clearing that up. In America, it is a description of a woman who is a busybody concerned about trivialities. There are probably other connotations as well, but none of them are affectionate. It is something like “dirty old man.”
Ken wrote:
Then why in the world do you maintain that women are more easily deceived than men? I hope you are praying that your daughters do not marry the guys who believe that your daughter must submit to them and that your daughter is more easily deceived and your daughter is a rebellious Jezebel by nature. If that happens–and it is not always apparent what someone is until it is too late–I think you may start to re-visit your certainty about what you have been taught and the conclusions you have drawn from your observations.
@ Ken:
Douglas Wilson ….. are you talking about the same Douglas Wilson who said this:
“When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
And this:
“Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based on mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. …….. Slave life was to [the slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.”
?????????????
Gram3 wrote:
With the danger of doing it all to death …
Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.
You will, I hope, have noticed that I did not say women are gullible, nor that men are never deceived. It was the expression Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived that kept comming to mind whilst looking at/escaping from charismatic errors, and Willow Creek, the latter in particular.
John and Paul Sanford, Agnes Sandford come to mind. (Unbelievable resistance to examining their teachings critically here when they cropped up.)
We heard a sermon in the house-group from one of the Willow leaders, Nancy? – it’s a long time ago. Consecutively translated into German. I believe I am correct in saying she didn’t quote from the bible once (possibly one verse out of Proverbs, but this wasn’t the basis of the talk); she did quote from a New Age guru whose name was familiar to me from the kind on input Willow Creek is happy to consult. The whole thing was an appeal to the emotions.
Journaling comes to mind, mysticism and trying to conjure up a Christ (‘another Christ’ and ‘another spirit’ from 2 Cor 11) using spiritual disciplines, so-called. From what I read, the women in particular were falling for this.
I think Hybels himself has fallen for the temptation in the wilderness. Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Just mix in some psychology, add some mysticism and spiritual practices not sanctioned by the NT, and you can have a church of 60,000, a world-wide ministry and influence, use the same tactics (“vision”) as senior management of the secular corporate culture, you can successfully ‘market’ the gospel to your chosen demograhic in a way that will meet the customer’s needs. Oh, and ignore 1 Tim 2 it’s out of date for sophisticated, modern women. (Joyful submission to female leaders is a condition of membership).
Cf 2 Cor 4 : 2 We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God where tamper is to adulterate, to mix in other things with the word.
Why did Satan go for Eve, rather than Adam? Could it be that in some respects, women are more prone (Daisy missed the comparative there) to particular forms of spiritual attack?
Why did God blame Adam for the fall of the race, and not Eve? They were both guilty, but Adam had a greater responsibility, I think derived from the order of creation; and this is Paul’s reasoning too.
Men it seems to me are deceived by power: they become ‘superlative apostles’, and have international ministries of deception. Benny Hinn, Rodney Howard-Browne; Toronto and the Brownsville revival crowd. The new apostles and prophets.
It would be a fruitless exercise guessing who gets deceived or deceives most, pointless in fact, but I still maintain we ignore 1 Tim 2, however unpopular it may be and however it may sometimes be (ab)used by inadequate men, at our peril. There is an element of spiritual warfare involved here, although I don’t want to fall for the temptation to overdo this and go beyond what is written.
Gram3 wrote:
Remember these quotes from Ken???
“The wife is to submit because (For …) the husband is the ‘head’, there is no mutual headship.”
“It stikes me that Christ through his apostle is asking more of the husband here than the wife,”
“This means the wife will give account if, rather than ‘submit’, she was assertive or semi-independent”
“v 22 is the example of the wife submitting. cf Col 3 : 18 for those hung up about the verb. The reason for this is obedience to Christ, and the ‘headship’ of the husband. (v 23)”
And MY favorite:
“at the end of the age hubby will have to give an account differently from his wife, he carries the greater responsibility.”
Ken wrote:
But you do go beyond what is written. You *infer* from 1 Timothy 2 and the almighty gar that Paul was giving a reason why all women should be banned from teaching and usurping authority over all men for all time. It is equally plausible-and I would argue more plausible from the circumstances in Ephesus and from Paul’s introduction to the verses in question–that Paul was addressing a woman or women (it is not clear which) who was engaging in said false teaching and spreading it in the congregation. If that is true, then you are making a particular instruction given under particular circumstances universal in scope and effect. That is a big leap in both logic and sound exegetical practice. Other than the gender question, which other issue makes it acceptable to do that? You have objected to John MacArthur’s habit of doing that on the charismatic issue, yet it is fine for you to do it on this issue. I do not get your reasoning.
For your interpretation to be true, we would have to say that all men are barred from teaching because there were male false teachers. Or we would have to say that women, by nature, are more easily deceived and it is their nature which disqualifies them from teaching. A better approach which fits both the instant text and also the rest of Paul’s and Jesus’ teaching and practice is that there were women at Ephesus who were teaching false doctrines who needed to be quiet and learn from people who knew more, like Timothy. And Priscilla who was at Ephesus teaching and exercising authority over men like Apollos.
If you are consistent, then women must be absolutely silent in churches. Women are saved by bearing a child. A man who is not married and who does not have children cannot be an elder. Men who do not greet one another with a kiss are capitulating to culture and rejecting the clear instruction of the Bible. Why is your hermeneutic so “pick and choose” when it comes to clear and plain instructions?
Nancy2 wrote:
I may be the only one commenting on this who regularly attends female led churches. From personal observation of that, I would have to say they preach a domesticated God. I think that is a fair description.
I could never imagine one of the harder sayings of Jesus ever really getting a look in. You don’t have to be a hell-fire and brimstone type to see the danger of that.
Anyway, you may rejoice and all breath a collective sigh of relief, because I am off on my hols (that’s vacation to you!) which is much needed. So you now know why there will be an absence of replies….
Ken wrote:
I don’t know the answer to this question, and neither does anyone else. If the answer to that question were important, God would have given it to us. You are free to speculate that it was due to Satan’s knowledge that God had, for some reason, made the female version of Adam somehow defective in a way that the male version of Adam was not defective.
Maybe Eve the Temptress drew the serpent into her web and that’s why he approached her. Maybe she was the one he encountered first. Maybe he was working in reverse alphabetical name order. Give me some more time and some alcohol and I can probably do as well as Ortlund does, for example.
Ken wrote:
You already have, Ken. That boat sailed a loooooooong time ago.
@ Gram3:
Gram, I’ve got to go, but I think it most unlikely that women were teaching in Ephesus, that wasn’t the problem. It was … men!
Still, I wish you well and hope you stay well!
Ken wrote:
Where have I suggested anywhere that any portion of scripture be ignored whether it is “popular” or “unpopular?” It seems that you want to focus on how unpopular it is with women who want to ignore it but are relatively unconcerned with how popular it is with men who want to put women into a box which God did not design us to occupy. A box which conveniently puts males in a place of relative power and privilege which may not be questioned because Creation Order. A box which limits the exercise of gifts which the Holy Spirit has given to the church for its edification. A box which, in effect, makes the Holy Spirit irrelevant in the life of a woman and replaces his ministry with a man’s authority. An idolatry box.
Ken wrote:
No, that is not Paul’s reasoning. That is your understanding of Paul’s reasoning. Paul’s entire argument does not start in verse 11 and does not end in verse 14. But Paul’s entire argument does not support the Female Subordinationist dogma, so his entire argument is ignored. Just like in Ephesians 5. Just like in 1 Corinthians 11. Just like in Romans 9. Just like every other proof-text that is used by every other proof-texter.
Paul is unequivocally stating that women are saved by bearing a child, and Paul states unequivocally that men should greet one another with a kiss. The Female Subordinationist churches are filled with rebellious and unsaved men. Clearly and plainly.
Gram3 wrote:
I don’t know if I read this string of comments and then forgot, or if I missed them in the torrent of discussion, but this comment so spoke to me today. “Soul-crushing” — yes! But one way that female subordinationism is sold to the suborder (primary submitter) in the relationship is to be told that you are so very special, cherished. And so, of course, you feel guilty if sometimes you feel resentful at your restrictions, because you are being held high in men’s regard. You are special. You are cherished. You are fulfilling your godly role. Godly(TM) men don’t look down on you when you do that, no, they’re more likely to put you on a pedestal (honestly, I remember hearing this “pedestal” idea presented to the whole congregation by the hyperest-patriarchal elder in our former congregation).
You know what I realized? Being on a pedestal results in something like Chinese foot-binding. It limits your movement excessively. You can’t move your feet at all. You are completely constrained.
But you can’t be resentful, because that would mean you were ungrateful for god’s blessing and his lovingkindness and his working out of his wonderful plan for your life.
And a man like Ken (forgive me for presuming, Ken, if this does not describe you) is bewildered at the discontent and “kicking against the goads” of the women around him, when all he wants is to live a godly life and honor God with his choices, attitudes, and actions.
Gram3 wrote:
Heh, heh, heh. Nice one. 😀
Reminds me of this line from Jerry Seinfeld: “Maybe comets killed the dinosaurs. Maybe they just tripped and fell. Either way, we’ll never know for sure. We couldn’t solve the Kennedy assassination, and we had tapes of that. Good luck with the stegosaurus.”
Ken wrote:
Like where Grudem inserts “symbol of” to make the woman’s authority over her own head transfer to the man? Like the rampant speculation in RBMW and everything that CBMW puts out? Like making the Eternal Son subordinate to the Father? That kind of tampering? Is it OK to tamper with the text as long as we like the tampering that is done?
refugee wrote:
I loved reading this. You have an amazing way with words, Refugee. I can tell it comes from deep thinking, true feeling, and bitter experience.
May God be good to you as you heal, and find your way out of the wilderness.
refugee wrote:
…and being completely constrained, means giving up on any gifts God might have instilled in you, that don’t fit on the pedestal.
I thought all good gifts came from God? If so, then what is godly about burying your talents because they don’t fit someone’s idea of godliness? If a woman is a born athlete, she should channel it into… what? Gardening? Hanging wallpaper? If a woman is born to be a gifted speaker, she should harness that gift to… what? Speak to other women? (I guess a home Bible study would fit this, if the materials were approved by the elders of her church.) Oh, wait, I get this one. To teach her children at home. If a woman is a born administrator, well that’s perfect then! She can run her home to perfection.
Ken wrote:
I don’t think I missed anything, Ken.
Women, Eve and Deception
http://equalitycentral.com/blog/?p=528
refugee wrote:
Which means that the men would not cherish and value their wives unless their wives were under their authority. Which says something very bad about the character of men who are called to imitate Christ. The System is quid pro quo and transactional. I trade my agency for your love. You give your love if I give up my agency. Or, in the other direction, I will only submit to you if you love me perfectly and in the exact way I want. Both of those approaches twist marriage and any relationship among Christians into something that looks nothing like Christ.
The System says very bad things about both men and women and puts both under bondage to the System and to the gurus who sell it. And when women and men wake up to the deception of the System, their trust in the gurus is shot to pieces.
Daisy wrote:
I have got to get back to the equality central forms. I really miss those people.
They are some of the most sensible, logical, and even most polite people I know.
And the true scholars over there, male and female, mind boggling.
I wish Ken didn’t have his prejudices firmly in place against such people cause I think he’d really like them and could learn something from them.
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
I agree with SKIJ’s comment.
I think Ken has gone beyond the Bible, reading things into it that is not there, and allow his personal animosity or dislike for women being in leadership color how he reads the Bible.
Gram3 wrote:
It was in the middle of taking a Biblical Greek college course that “women will be saved through childbearing” took on a whole new meaning.
Amazing what happens when you discover Greek prepositions have a number of meanings, and when you translate from the Greek into English, you need to consider the best fit.
And so “through” can mean “because of” (as in bearing children is a woman’s means to salvation — but on careful consideration, one would have to discard such meaning, as it would mean that Christ’s work on the Cross was not enough to save her in itself)
Or “through” could mean “through” or “during” in the context of some of the greatest suffering I personally have ever experienced. If I had lived in Paul’s time, I most likely would have died in childbirth. Death in childbirth was probably a fairly common thing in those times.
On the other hand, reading all of 1 Timothy, and focusing on chapter 2, that “childbearing” sentence seems so out of place, even in context. It doesn’t seem to have much relation to what comes immediately before or after. And looking at Bible Gateway, I get confused when I read the passage and its alternate translation notes:
A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
a – a wife
b – over her husband
Although I do detect a logical fallacy, in pondering the above. I learned in logic class that [a woman cannot teach or assume authority over a man] is not the logical equivalent of [a man has authority over a woman].
And in the main translation on Bible Gateway, it would support the idea that all women must submit to all men. It’s just the fine print that says a wife should not teach or assume authority over her husband.
(and I have to believe that Paul is addressing something specific here, maybe a continuation of a conversation, so that we are missing some of the parts that Timothy already knows. Because if you take it literally and apply it universally, it means I can’t show my husband how to make a cream sauce, so he can cook something for himself if I go off to a women’s retreat or something. That would be teaching, not only a man, but a husband!)
Mara wrote:
I started out egalitarian … and, Daisy, I have no animosity to women in general or particular whatsoever.
Bye!!
Ken wrote:
Are you kidding? Women (and men) have written a lot about 1 Tim 2 in truck fulls precisely because this is one of the “clobber passages” used to assault Christian women.
Here is just one page of a million about it (that you really need to read):
DEFUSING THE 1 TIMOTHY 2:12 BOMB
http://juniaproject.com/defusing-1-timothy-212-bomb/
And go to the side bar of that page where you can find this link:
5 REASONS TO STOP USING 1 TIMOTHY 2:12 AGAINST WOMEN
Daisy wrote:
Answering Ken, actually, but too pressed for time to go back and find his original comment.
Why *did* Satan go for Eve, and not Adam? I’m not sure the Bible spells out his motives. Where does the Bible say that women are more prone (yes, I got the comparative there) to particular forms of spiritual attacks? I do believe that such an interpretation is reading into the text.
After all, there are other stories in the Bible of men being deceived. Aaron led the Israelites in the worship of the golden calf.
“Particular forms of spiritual attacks”. I am stuck on this. The only direct conversations I remember people having with Satan were in Genesis (Eve and the serpent) and the temptation of Jesus. You can’t draw a guiding precept from this comparison, that women are more prone to deception; Eve was a plain human being, and Jesus, though a man, was God incarnate and, to my understanding, incapable of sin.
Why did God blame Adam, and not Eve?
I can think of several reasons. When God questioned Adam, the man shifted blame (“this woman *You* gave me” — IOW, it’s YOUR fault, God, and HERS — “SHE gave me the fruit and so I ate” — um, he could have stood up then and there, when she gave him the fruit, and said something like, “No, dear, don’t you remember? We’re not supposed to eat this fruit. Let’s go ask God to help us fix this.”).
The woman was deceived, yes, but if you read Genesis 3 carefully, you’ll see that she received garbled instructions in the first place. “You must not eat the fruit, and you must not touch it.” Now, who gave her those instructions?
Ken wrote:
But American churches teaching a hyper masculine manly man God (which they do frequently) is A-Okay?
Preachers(I think it was Piper who did this) saying that the faith should have a “masculine feel” is not distorting the Gospel and turning some women away?
Church must avoid becoming Fight Club to attract men
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11360543/Church-must-avoid-becoming-Fight-Club-to-attract-men.html
@ refugee:
The grammar is difficult, but verse 15 is connected to the clobber verses grammatically. So it is illegitimate to either ignore it as unimportant or to pervert it the way that Kostenberger and Schreiner do by saying that women will be saved (or will evidence their salvation) by keeping to their roles.
I believe Paul is referring to The Childbearing by which all of us who are in The Child will be saved. Since I am a conservative, the meaning must be consistent with the other teaching of the Bible. Paul is obviously referring to the Creation account where Eve’s deception led to her sin, Adam was not deceived but fell into sin. But then God promised to send The Seed who would crush the Deceiver’s head by a woman.
Rather than inferring some special propensity to deception, I think Paul was correcting the content of the false teaching at Ephesus where the Ephesian Artemis cult was so dominant. I also think he was reminding Timothy that this woman false teacher(s) were not beyond the scope of God’s redemption of humanity in Christ. Paul was deceived and fell into great sin. But he was taught, he learned, and he was not condemned. Similarly, this woman or women could be saved through The Childbearing if they continue in the faith. That is consistent with what Paul teaches elsewhere about deception, salvation, perseverence, and learning. It does not require us to import foreign ideas into the text or context or to engage in speculation.
So the order is: Paul was deceived, Paul was redeemed. There are men (the ones who were fighting instead of praying) who were deceived, and there were women who were introducing and propagating false doctrines into the church, probably from the Ephesian Artemis female supremacy cult which included the “fact” that Artemis was born first and that wisdom resides in the female. That woman or women needed to be silenced, and Paul instructed Timothy to permit them to learn the truth. But even though they were destructive false teachers, they could be saved through The Childbearing, which was also an allusion to the false teaching of the Artemis cult that Artemis is the savior of women in childbirth.
Ken wrote:
You have an odd way of showing it.
refugee wrote:
The text doesn’t say. One would have to speculate. I only see four talking characters mentioned so far: God, the serpent, Adam, and Eve. There might have been some other talking character who has not been mentioned (like C.S. Lewis’ talking animals in Narnia, perhaps), but that is pure speculation, so we won’t pursue that avenue any farther. Or further. Whatever the word is.
I think we can eliminate the serpent as the instruction-giver, since as Chapter 3 opens, he’s asking the woman what the instructions are.
That leaves God and Adam. If God gave her the instruction personally, she was the one who added to it, which puts a lot of blame on her shoulders. (Because it appears that she believed she would die if she touched the fruit, and when she did touch the fruit, she didn’t die. Did she even know what “die” meant, I wonder? And because touching did no apparent harm, she went on to eat it, and to give it to her husband.)
If Adam passed on the instruction from God, and added to it, then couldn’t you say he is partly responsible for her mistake? (Remember, she believed that just touching the fruit would make her die; and it didn’t. So what was she to believe about eating the fruit? Maybe he’d gotten that part wrong, too?)
I could preach a whole sermon (if I were a man, huh) about how adding on to God’s clear instruction (“and you must not touch it”) reminds me of the legalists (well-meaning or not) who keep adding on to what we must or must not do in order to “walk in a way worthy of the gospel”.
@ Ken:
You are a good guy Ken.
Let me define what I mean by prejudice.
The prejudice I see is the one that decides that if a person is egalitarian they got that way from gender/feminist studies only and that they could not possibly have gotten any of it from true Biblical scholarship and study of language.
Sorry if I used too strong of a word to say this.
I can get long winded and try to be concise. Sometimes my in-a-nutshell word choice needs to be explained.
Gram3 wrote:
Oh, that makes sense! Now the verse doesn’t sound like an ill-fitting non sequitur.
refugee wrote:
There was something I wanted to say about this, but I forgot what it was. If I can remember the point I wanted to make, I’ll come back to it later.
But yes, in the meantime, I’ll say I agree with what you said there.
When I began doubting gender complementarianism, one thing of a few that had me cling to it longer than I should have was this point you raised.
Being told that it’s really not THAT bad being told to submit to men, because Christian men mean to HONOR you with this teaching, and they have your best interests at heart.
In reality, gender comp can and does hurt women and girls, though.
Even some of the very Christian guys who claim they respect women and put them on a pedestal end up exploiting girls and women, like Douglas What’s-it (he was leader of a Christian home school movement, or whatever it was), who molested his live-in teen-aged nanny.
He was big on this “women and children first” shtick and was enamored of the Titanic news story, where the men let the women and kids have the first life boats.
In his real life though, he was letting down his wife and molesting a female nanny.
Some Christian gender comp men are a little more open with their disdain for the female gender, though, such as pastor Jack Schaap, who went to prison for improper activity with a teen girl on several occasions.
I’ve read or seen a few of his anti-women rants online, when he was still in the church and acting as preacher. His attitudes towards women are nasty and sexist.
Daisy wrote:
Doug Phillips, Esq.
(Sometimes people confuse him with Doug Wilson, who is alive and well and continuing to teach, mixing sound scripture with his own take on hierarchy.)
refugee wrote:
It is a pet peeve of mine that people make Paul sound like a moronic misogynist because they refuse to read his arguments the way he made them. He was trained in rhetoric and logic and the Torah and the various oral traditions. He was not as illogical as the Female Subordinationists would have us believe by their “analysis” of his words.
@ refugee:
If only Female Subordinationism were Doug Wilson’s only outrage. He is a boiling stew of Bad Theology.
refugee wrote:
And just to point out how much Bible teaching involves speculation and reading into the text, I will point out here how much I’ve read into the text, even in this cautious approach.
Because I am speculating when I said “she was the one who added to it”. God might have told her, in person, not to eat the fruit or touch it. Or He might have told her not to eat the fruit. Or He might not have talked to her directly, and Adam passed on the instruction not to eat the fruit.
Adam might have added “or touch it”, as a sort of extra safety measure for his wife. After all, if you can’t pick it up, you can’t eat it, right? She might have added “or touch it”. They *both* might have been talking over God’s instruction together (sort of a husband-and-wife proto-Bible study without the Bible, of course), and decided that it would be prudent not even to touch the fruit.
(And here, again, I descend into the well-meaning legalistic mindset once more. The reasoning goes something like this: God said specifically not to eat the fruit. Therefore, for an extra measure of safety, let’s not even touch the fruit. That will keep us safe. Hey, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s make a rule that we won’t go within ten feet of that tree… even better! Let’s make it 100 feet! No, wait, I think we ought to build a fence to show us the boundary. Oh, we can see the tree through the fence, what if *looking at* the fruit is a sin, or leads us to sin? Let’s build an 8-foot stone wall so we can’t even *see* the tree! Oh, wait… we can still *think* about the fruit. What in the world can we do to remedy that?)
My point is that so much of Bible teaching and preaching is speculation and inference, presented as gospel truth.
Gram3 wrote:
Sad. He can sound very good, reasonable even. I was forced to sit through a sermon of his recently (someone was listening to streaming audio without headphones, partly because they wanted me to hear how reasonable and biblical the teaching was, I suspect, after hearing me talk about some of the things Wilson has done or said that I find troubling).
Gram3 wrote:
I am amazed that gender complementarians (as Ken shows in the exchanges on this thread) remain blind not only to how harmful gender comp is, but that they/he remain blind to the fact that they/he do the very things they accuse the “other side” (mutualists, feminists, whomever) doing.
He’s actually reading stuff into the Bible that isn’t there, and ignoring the parts that don’t support his views on gender roles, he’s allowing his views on this stuff to be colored by secular culture.
Gram3 wrote:
I find this interesting, because some gender comps (not all, but some) preach at women that women want love but men want respect, and-
They lecture women that they must, or should, grant their husband respect, even if they don’t want to or feel like it.
(These gender comp preachers teach women that respect is not based on any sort of merit, that husbands just deserve it for being a husband and nothing more.)
To be fair, some of the gender comps teaching this message do tell the husbands the same message in reverse: that you should love your wife, even if you don’t feel like it or she’s being difficult, that she does not have to “earn” your love.
But: Most of the gender comp preachers I’ve seen or heard over the years (on TV, blogs, You Tube sermons etc), generally only stress this to the wives: that you must do “X” for your husband, even if he has not earned it or is being a jerk.
Another annoyance of mine, that is a bit related: the many, many conservative Christians (usually gender comp as well) who get into this stuff about how all men are visual and all women are touchy feely and emotional.
So, they tell women that husbands are always deserving of sex no matter what, that they must in effect trade sexual acts if they want love, closeness, (non sexual) affection, emotional support, etc, from a husband.
I find this distasteful.
Ken wrote:
Yes, Ken, you really do. Your views do. You’re blind to it, though.
You’re also blind to how harmful your views are to women, they were/are harmful to me. I’m having to detox from the years of trash programmed into me by gender comp teachings.
And, btw, I started out as a gender complementarian.
I am not a feminist or liberal. I’m right wing, vote Republican, and a social conservative.
On the whole childbearing stuff, I think the first thing we should think is “wow, literally taken, that scripture defies everything Paul has written elsewhere”. So we should be VERY cautious about how we interpret the surrounding verses. We know women are not saved through childbearing.
I can honestly say I don’t know what these verses meant, and I’m skeptical of many of the egalitarian arguments I’ve read as well. But I do know this: nowhere else in scripture is Eve’s roll in the Fall discussed. This is a very special verse, and probably there is a huge amount of context we are missing.
But, a potential answer to this that I’ve not heard egalitarians offer, but I think is very plausible, has to do with Artemis. Artemis the Goddess who was so revered in Ephesus that they build one of the 7 wonders of the world to her. Artemis, had btw, as one of her main responsibilities the role of “midwife” and women would cry out to her in the pain of childbearing. Another point about Ephesus is that women did hold office and have leadership positions in the culture.
What I have read, and I do not know how accurate this is, but it is certainly reasonable, is that Ephesian women who converted to Christianity were bringing in Artemis influence and conflating the Artemis origin story with the Christian one. So Eve becomes the heroine, Adam the secondary character who ultimately undoes Eve, and now we have a new, un-Christian rendering of the Fall.
If the above is true, then this scripture can be read as “Women in the church at Ephesus are assuming responsibility they shouldn’t in the church because they are conflating pagan teaching with Christian teaching. Eve was NOT the primary player in the fall, Adam came first, and Eve was deceived. And you need to stop appealing to Eve as your aid in childbearing- it is faith in the Lord that saves you.”
Now who knows if this is true, but it’s more plausible than “Even though there are examples in the Old Testament of women leaders, and I myself have worked with women teachers, leaders, and apostles, I do not permit women to lead or teach (unless it’s through a book or medium which hides the fact they are female), and the reason for all of this is because Eve was deceived centuries ago. Also, you are saved by having babies, regardless of what I’ve said elsewhere about the need for faith and that getting married isn’t preferable”.
Ken wrote:
I understand that my marriage operates exactly the same as many ‘complementarian’ marriages. But actually, labels aren’t important to me. Call it what you will. The one, singular difference between my marriage and the marriage of other complementarian couples in my church is that they insist there must be a power imbalance whereas I insist that we must strive to avoid it.
There are only two things that all complementarians agree on with respect to what a comp marriage looks like. One is that the husband gets the tie breaker vote, because they logic that you must have some way to break a tie. Never mind that this idea is found nowhere in scripture and doesn’t actually seem to be the kind of detail that God would define our relationships around.
And the second thing that all comps agree upon is that no matter how a couple lives it out, at the very least we must declare a power imbalance between husband and wife. If you were to assess my marriage vs a good, healthy comp marriage, the reason mine would be ungodly and theirs would be fine is because they, at least in word, maintain power imbalance.
And for me, that is everything. I believe strongly that a woman in a power imbalanced relationship will NEVER reach her full potential as a wife, because there is at least some small part of her that is being diminished.
Jeff S wrote:
Well stated. What is that concept, that the simplest explanation is usually the most likely to be the truth?
Ken wrote:
If I were to agree that there is a “feminised” church and “the other side”, wouldn’t the clear answer be that you need BOTH SIDES, not just one?
Anyway, all I hear from today’s evangelicals is about fear of the Lord and warnings about the effects of sin. I don’t know where this idea that evangelicals are soft on sin has come from, even though everyone says it . . .
Ken wrote:
The truth is ‘we don’t know why Satan went for Eve,’ do we? Or, did God explain this to you somewhere? It is a fact that ‘Eve was deceived.’ But God did not then say, ‘therefore all women are more easily deceived.’ Do you not see the assumption you are reading into the text?
@ Jeff S:
I is very hard for me to believe that people will sit and hear over and over that we cannot “earn” our salvation and then buy into that passage meaning that women should stay in their proper “roles” as the meaning of “the childbearing”. Of course, some say it is really talking about sanctification which does not help matters because then we have a bigger problem of devout women who cannot bear children and those who remain single.
Historical context and the Greek grammar really help us understand better a totally one sided convo. Ignoring the huge implications of the Cult of Artemis/Diana and the huge temple, seems totally ridiculous considering what we have read about it in Acts. There was a devoutness there concerning this cult and one of the few places where women had any power.
The language in 1 Tim 2 starts starts as singular. A woman. It goes on with “gune and “aner” translated as “she” and “they” which could mean that singular woman and her husband (she might have been teaching him) or it could mean that particular woman and the others who have been part of the cult who were now participating in the Eph church. It is natural to bring methods/teaching into a new environment.
Ken wrote:
Maybe God held Adam responsible because God directly told Adam not to eat from a certain tree and he did it anyway. Eve (not all women) was received.
@ Jeff S:
I’ve written a *lot* about the syncretism between the Ephesian Artemis cult and how the beliefs of that cult correlate with the seemingly odd verses in 1 Timothy. Actually, Paul talks about Eve’s role in the Fall in 2 Corinthians as well where he expresses fear that the Corinthian church will fall prey to deception just as Eve did. Eve, for Paul, is a type of people who are deceived and a warning about the consequences of falling for deception.
However, all of this contextual evidence is dismissed, and they say they don’t have to provide an explanation for verse 15. Or they come up with something as ridiculous and convoluted and obviously ad hoc as Schreiner and Kostenberger.
Bridget wrote:
Well, the Female Subordinationists “know” it because it advances the narrative that Paul is saying that women are more easily deceived and that is why they are prohibited from teaching. It is a huge circular argument when you trace it out. But logic is not their strong suit, and that is why I think they have so much difficulty with Paul’s arguments. Either that, or they don’t care much what Paul was actually communicating.
Jeff S wrote:
That notion denies the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit to bring reconciliation and unity in Christ. They have no ability to conceive of a relationship that is not based on hierarchy.
Gram3 wrote:
Ah, thanks for the correction 🙂
Gram3 wrote:
…and Christianity. Paul addressed all kinds of syncretistic problems like the Judaizers in Galatia and Jerusalem and the hedonistic and showy pagans in Corinth.
Gram3 wrote:
Are there any good resources for understanding first century Ephesus?
Jeff S wrote:
The reason it is important is because the Female Subordinationists will *never* reference that verse, even though the topic of false teaching creeping into the churches is the topic of both letters. It is intellectually dishonest, at the very least. I discovered it by searching for “eve” and then read every reference. Same for kephale. They are misrepresenting the Biblical data.
Gram3 wrote:
I thought logic was a ‘masculine’ quality, according to them.
Why are they having trouble with it?
Are they running on emotions, like what they think women do?
Lydia wrote:
Like I told Gram3 above, I’m working on it!
I will start hitting the bars and night clubs and pick up some studs for one night stands, so I can have a kid out of wedlock, thus ensuring my eternal salvation. / I joke.
@ Jeff S:
When this question came up for me years ago, I looked online for secular sources about Ephesus. I didn’t even think about Diana/Artemis but was looking for the cultural context into which Paul was speaking. As Refugee pointed out, his argument in Chapter 2 seemed like a complete non-sequitur. I knew that could not be the case and that I needed to run it down. That is when I found out the info about Ephesian Artemis. And then it dawned on me how stupid I had been because of what Paul went through in Ephesus which Luke recorded on some great detail! Duh!
Also, some people have linked to Wade Burleson’s article(s) which I thought were very well done and which matched what I had learned from the secular sources. Then I re-read 1 Timothy several times and found the weird verses matched what we would expect someone coming out of the Artemis cult to believe.
@ Gram3:
Yes, this somewhat matches my own recent journy on the subject. I was just hoping to find a “here’s what first century Ephesus was like” textbook, preferably one with no Biblical bias. It seems to me significant that the two biggest hammer verses for gender hierarchy both come from letters to the same place which we know worshiped a female goddess . . .
Mara wrote:
I’m pretty sure they teach logic at Cambridge, but Nick would know for sure. So, in the case of Grudem, I think he is operating on emotion or raw prejudice or some personal issues he is projecting onto the text. I’ve often said that RBMW could be used as a logic textbook in the sense of how not to do it. Ortlund is my very favorite in that book.
I can tell you from personal experience that men who are bent by this way of thinking do not care about logic. They cannot refute using logic or the text, so they resort typically to ad homs. These are people with terminal degrees. I can also tell you from personal experience that fear will keep people from even examining the texts. For decades.
Jeff S wrote:
Yes, that was my purpose, too. I did not want to have a gender-war bias creeping in from either direction. At the time, I just wanted to resolve my own questions which arose from actually sitting down and examining his argument which made no sense at all. The sticking point for me was that his reference to the supposed Creation Order is not grounded anywhere in the Creation accounts. So, either he is logic-impaired or he was not making a Creation Order hierarchy argument. OK, so then what argument was he making? That was when I discovered the reference to Eve in 2 Corinthians. But that still did not explain the argument, and so that made me look for more evidence that would make his argument make sense logically while not being inconsistent with everything else he taught.
@ Jeff S:
The other thing I found is that the Mediterranean people frequently “adopted” gods and goddesses of their conquerors for practical reasons, obviously. I had never thought about that because I was not trained in history or classics. My guess is that the Ephesian women were no more eager to give up their privileged position than the Female Subordinationists are to give up their privileged position.
Yes, that stuff has always been cause for me to be wary of using that one verse. At fist, I thought it maybe just was an addition to the text, but nothing seemed to bear that idea out. So I figured it must have some context we were missing.
So to that I say, be very wary about basing a very important doctrine on a single verse that immediately precedes another verse where it sounds like Paul totally went off the rails!
It was only recently I decided to look more into Artemis, and it was really eye opening. The idea that she was a symbolic “midwife” and then Paul talking about bearing children make me thing this is very related.
Gram3 wrote:
We can look at modern culture to see the effects of grafting culture into the church. The Catholic church has experienced this with Mary worship, where Mary was granted significance way beyond the text. It is not a stretch AT ALL to think that a culture used to revering Artemis would transfer a lot of the attitude over to Eve.
Jeff S wrote:
This is a canon of sound hermeneutics which is curiously ignored only when it concerns this one issue. Don’t make certain doctrine out of an uncertain text. So we have certain doctrine being made out of 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 11. This is something else they will never admit to.
Jeff S wrote:
Gram3 wrote:
Well, I have to correct them. They assume, they don’t know. Knowing is based on facts, not assumptions.
Jeff S wrote:
Some believe that the Marian dogmas originated in the elevation of virginity within the Ephesian culture. So, Mary not only conceived as a virgin, but she remained perpetually a virgin and was untainted by original sin, etc. I think she would be mortified by the veneration/worship. On the other hand, I think that Protestants have minimized her radical obedience and humility and the unimaginable shame and pain she endured. Some do not honor her enough, and some do not honor her properly.
Bridget wrote:
Definitely. Facts which do not advance the narrative are irrelevant, however, as I discovered to my utter shock when I attempted to bring logic, textual data, and a consistent hermeneutical method to bear on this issue. I have since discovered that many others have had the same experience I had. It did not go well because the Narrative and the System it supports are all that matter.
Ken says that women are more prone to particular forms of spiritual attack.
Let me see here ….. “Now, the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field….”, yet the serpent has to have quite a conversation with Eve to convince her to “eat of the fruit”. But, Eve only had to give Adam some of the fruit and he chewed down ….. apparently with no questions or arguments.
When we consider Gen. 3:1-6, who seems to be more easily deceived?
@ Jeff S:
I did pretty much what Gram did. Look at secular sources from around that era. Archeological sources are interesting about the temple. It was considered a wonder of the world back then. I wish I could share links but that was at least 4 computers ago. :o)
Sources on that religion at that time are all over the place as to the focus– which seems to be typical of pagan variety.
Gram3 wrote:
Another problem is the way Genesis is read as a sort of science manual on creation. I studied it from the literal pov and saw I could drive mac trucks through their interpretation with creation order, deception, naming, etc. All the tricks they read into it.
However, I eventually came to the conclusion that reading Genesis in this way is a horrible distraction from its larger theme which is most important: We need God’s wisdom and His rescue.
I cannot think of a better way for evil to distract us from the wisdom and rescue of God than to have us looking for a creation caste system and roles. Although I do understand it and believe one can analyze it as literal and not find Eve as Adam’s assistant. One problem they have is that the “human” (Adam means human) was simply a human in Chapter 1. We do not have sexes formed until chapter 2. So we have language that says “they” were “created” in chp 1 and then the sexes were “formed in the next. If we want to take it to that extreme. It is there.
I personally think Adam/Eve are archtypes for a narrative. But I know that is not very popular.
There has been yeoman’s scholarship done on Ezer kegndo that is downright fasctinating and would put that understanding to shame if people really wanted truth.
Ken wrote:
First I’ve heard of it Ken…it’s least offensive use is to describe a fairly harmless old lady, but in the context you used it in it was a definite put down.
P.S. Thanks for the link, I’m away from home right now but will have a look at it on Monday when I get back.
@ Gram3:
How can that be, when the Artemis worshipped in Ephesus was actually a many-breasted fertility goddess, and *not* the virgin huntress of the Greeks and Romans?
@ Beakerj:
Yep, same as in all of the other countries (former British colonies) where all of those who have responded to this little bit of sophistry live…
@ Ken:
Ken, i call b.s. on your trying to make out that this tetm, and the others you used,were meant as anything other than insults.
You make the most amazing statements sometimes, like equating these few women you met in various church circles with ALL women, at all times and everywhere, and then tacking a proof text onto your observations and claiming that the Bible says so. It is the opposite of logical and carefully thought through. In my consideted opinion, it is utter foolishness, aside from the statements of your personal expetience.
But i doubt you will reply to this comment, or others like it, holidays or not.
@ numo:
Goes double for “The Willow Creek church I went to was bad, therefore *psychology* is bad” and similar.
It just does not follow.
As for craziness in charismatic circles, sure, there’s plenty, but by no means is it confinec to women.
Gram3 wrote:
I totally agree. That is why I think arguments that women are better at xyz or bring balance –blah, blah don’t help. Culture/Environment tend to influence thinking and as more women gain power in areas not typical we see the same types of abuses. It is about individuals and what they do with resources/talents and/or spiritual gifts– whether male or female.
Perhaps if we want to read Genesis literally, we can say Eve’s biggest mistake was “turning” to Adam instead of God and following him out of the garden. After all, she admitted her part. Adam blamed God and Eve for sinning on purpose. Imagine the biggest mistake being that she “turned” to Adam and he ruled over her because of it. God was there for her, too. She chose to follow Adam over God. And the rest is patriarchal history with murder not far behind.
numo wrote:
IIRC. Ephesian Artemis incorporated aspects of Roman Diana. However, I say that not having read the material for a very long time. As I said above, there was a lot of syncretism as various conquerors brought in their gods and goddesses.
@ numo:
Here’s the wiki which at the bottom ties in Ephesian “Our Lady” Artemis with Greek Artemis. I can’t remember if this was my starting point or what. But it typical that I would start and work my way through the citations. There is a connection or at least a postulated connection between ancient Cybele and Ephesian Artemis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis
Gram3 wrote:
Here is an article that Pastor Wade Burleson (conservative Baptist but fair-minded), The Wartburg Watch’s Echurch pastors on Sundays, wrote about women in church leadership and Artemis:
http://www.wadeburleson.org/2015/06/artemis-redux-women-and-i-timothy-29-15.html
Beakerj wrote:
By the way, Beakerj, I have added your menu suggestions to Nick’s (aka “God) Yorkshire Pudding recipe at the top of the page under Interesting and Cooking.
Would trifle be an acceptable dessert or something else?
Interesting page (I’ve not read the whole thing yet).
Biological Determinism and the “Oughtness” of Manhood By Aaron Sathyanesan
http://www.cbeinternational.org/blogs/biological-determinism-and-oughtness-manhood
Snippet from the page:
——
In it [in his new book, The Lost World of Adam and Eve], he [John Walton, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College] meticulously explains how, rather than the popular assumption that the creation of Eve involved God performing a surgical procedure on Adam’s side while he was in a ‘deep sleep,’ the text in Genesis 2:21 actually depicts a vision that Adam experiences where Eve is revealed to be made from his half—literally, his other half. Walton then goes on to say:
“Genesis 2:24 is responding to the question of why a person would leave the closest biological relationship (parents to children) in order to forge a relationship with a biological outsider.
The answer offered is that marriage goes beyond biology to recover an original state, for humanity is ontologically gendered. Ontology trumps biology” (emphasis mine).
Jeff S wrote:
From CBE page, by Aaron Sathyanesan:
Blogger Sarah Arthur recounts a particularly poignant story of a college panel discussion she attended where a Bible scholar was making the case for child-bearing as God’s plan to save women (1 Tim 2:15).[5]
A teary graduate student then stood up and asked the question, “I have just learned that I can never have children. Where is there room in your gospel for me?”*
———-
And Ken doesn’t see any problems with gender complementarianism and gender role teaching 🙁
*Source:
http://www.cbeinternational.org/blogs/biological-determinism-and-oughtness-manhood
Nancy2 wrote:
Like what? Can he be more specific?
If so, he’ll end up with another Christian Talmud for Women, like the one Grudem came up with.
Wayne Grudem on What Women Should Do in Church
http://newlife.id.au/equality-and-gender-issues/wayne-grudem-women-in-church/
I don’t think the Bible has a “List ‘o stuff women are more easily deceived by.” So someone needs to come up with one (not really).
Gram3 wrote:
Excellent. Great point – never thought of it that way.
Can I just say that this entire discussion has been excellent? Great stuff, Gram, refugee, daisy…. who else am I missing?
Ken, I’m not that far removed from seeing things your way – I’m fairly new to this discussion – but it’s pretty clear to me who’s bringing the preconceptions to the table in these texts. It’s kind of disconcerting to me, since, as I said, not that long ago I never questioned any of it. Rather jarring, honestly.
Daisy wrote:
Case in point. Dudes are playing manhood-measuring games in seminary with theology, and later, real people on the outside are dealing with the affects.
Sad. Wrong.
@ Gram3:
Yes, that Artemis is Cybele, not the Greco-Roman goddess.
Mara wrote:
If so, I imagine that one of those emotions is blind, primal fear.
@ numo:
Or maybe a very local deity, Cybele, the Roman Great Mother and some aspect of Artemis… in any case, not Artemis/Diana the virgin huntress.
Daisy wrote:
Astonishing, how some people just don’t think things through, and consider how people other than themselves might be affected by foolish ideas.
Incidentally, does Ms. Arthur mention whether this oh-so-brilliant bible scholar had an answer for the student who questioned him? Or did he just ignore her as “one of dem uppity wimmin-folk”?
Daisy wrote:
Uhmmmmm ……. getting tricked into thinking that we are subservient to men????
Nancy2 wrote:
Yep. That’s the big one. The one that seems to be the hardest to shake off.
@ numo:
Here is a page with some info on the various Artemis goddesses and how they are similar and how they differ:
http://www.mythindex.com/greek-mythology/A/Artemis.html
My reading is that various local peoples had their local gods and goddesses, and their myths and characteristics got transferred either by the dominant people, like the Greeks or Romans to their own gods, or the local people “adopted” the conqueror’s gods and goddesses into their system and matched them with their pre-exisiting gods and goddesses. It is hard to trace the exact myth corresponding to each, but it is clear that the early church was launched in a very confusing environment. It is not hard for me to imagine that Cybele merged into Ephesian Artemis who merged into Greek Artemis who merged into Roman Diana.
IIRC some translators translate the incident in Ephesus recorded in Acts as being driven by Diana or Artemis. As a practical matter, syncretism is a good idea for the local conquered peoples *and* for the conquering people who want a calm populace. I believe that is one reason that the Romans had so much trouble with the Jews who refused to syncretize their Yahweh with the Roman gods.
@ Gram3:
I do not think the Greek Artemis and Roman Diana have much of anything to do with the Artemis thst was wordhipped in Asia Minor, or with Cybele (whom she appears to be), or with the Magna Mater of the Romans.
The Greek Artemis has nothing to do with fertility. She and Athena are both virging goddesses; Athena is patroness of learning, while Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. I think the distiction might become clearer if you read some of the Greek myths featuring Artemis, as well as looking at Greek and Roman sculptures that depict Artemis/Diana.
I guess my academic background is showing (art and art history). 🙂
@ Gram3:
Let me be clear regarding some history: the Middle Eastern and Asiatic (as in Asia Minor, Persia, etc.) deities are a whole different deal to the gods worshipped in Greece and Rome.
Ephesus was a Greek colony in Asia Minor. It seems that the Greeks who settled there adopted and adapted aspects of the worship of Cybele, as the Romans did with the Magna Mater. But these goddesses and corresponding gods were also viewed as a bit outlandish and “exotic” by both Greeks and Romans. Because the Greeks colonized Asia Minor, they took on some aspects of the local cultures, as the Romans also did. But that does not mean that there was not a separate thing going,on, in Greece itself, regarding the cult of Artemis. That predates the Greek colonization of Asia Minor, and continued on as a separate thing in both Greece and in Greek colonies outside of Asia Minor.
Hope this is helpful. Some of the online sources i looked at were quite confusing, while a couple were error-prone. Unfortunately, incorrect “information” often spreads from one or two sites to many, because people copy and paste things without having any real idea that what they’re using is incorrect.
I this case, as in many others, it pays to go to the library and check on info. that’s in reputable books.
@ numo:
Also, http://www.ancient.eu looks like reliable site for quick encyclopedia lookups. Wiki is highly problematic, imo, though i use it, too.
Ken wrote:
I have never heard anyone say ‘man up’ because that type of language is more likely to come from the likes of the CBMW.
I have been spiritually abused to the nth degree by a certain complementarian denomination. I don’t think these men should ‘man up’ what they should do is be true to their calling and seek out the perpetrators of this abuse. But no they have to look after their ‘mates'(Aussie slang for friend) and the best way to do that is cover it up.
For all the comps obsession with CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, I don’t think they read Prince Caspian too closely. Aslan gently rebukes Lucy for not following him, Aslan, when she first catches a glimpse of him on her return to Narnia. Instead she allows herself to be overruled by elder brother and High king Peter and the others. They all end up in a very sticky situation which could have been avoided if they had been prepared to listen to Lucy, who was closer to Aslan than anyone else.
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
From the same page:
The panelist replied after a very long pause, “I don’t have a theology for that.”
Source:
Biological Determinism and the “Oughtness” of Manhood
http://www.cbeinternational.org/blogs/biological-determinism-and-oughtness-manhood
And consider (from the same page):
—–
Gavin Peacock, director of international outreach at CBMW wrote in an official blogpost titled “Building a Marriage Culture”:[3]
—
“Work hard and aim to be the main breadwinner. There may be a temporary season, if you’re studying or in transition, where that is not so. Or you may be physically disabled, which prevents this permanently. But the desire and aim should still be there.”
—
So, the “desire and aim” to “be the main breadwinner” should “still be there,” even though a genetic condition left you paralyzed waist down.
Worse, Peacock declares:
“A husband is no man if he lets his wife defend the home…”
Pause for a moment.
And think about how dehumanizing that is—the claim that if a male cannot perform a certain “manly” function contingent upon a certain physical ability, then that man is not really a man.
Nancy2 wrote:
Heh. Well, I saw through that years ago. I’m no longer tricked on that one 🙂
@ Gram3:
The kids worked on a project this summer about South American mythology and I have never seen such a confused mess in all my life. There was quite a bit of lap over and adapting there, too. And I am not talking about just the sources but the actual beliefs. They were not allowed to use wiki as source of info except to gather citations.
@ numo:
Yikes, This source says about Ephesus:
“After Christianity became the dominant religion of the region, Ephesus declined in culture and intellectual pursuits. The Emperor Theodosius had all of the Temples and schools closed and women were reduced to second-class citizen status, no longer allowed to teach men or work independently in the arts. Worship of the ancient mother goddess Artemis was forbidden and the Temple of Artemis was destroyed by a Christian mob, the ruins used as a quarry for building materials for other local projects such as churches. The streets, once adorned with statuary, highly maintained and lighted by the oil lamps at night, fell into decay and darkness as the attention of the now-Christian citizens of Ephesus was directed toward the Second Coming of The Light of the World, the new god Jesus Christ.”
http://www.ancient.eu/ephesos/
@ Estelle:
thank you for pointing that out!
Daisy wrote:
Typical. To which, the proper response would be, “Then you have no theology worth following.”
Or, to borrow a line from “Meet the Robinsons”: “You mean, you haven’t thought this through?!?“
Daisy wrote:
There is no room in their doctrine for partnership. Why in the heck can’t they co-defend the home? This all or nothing/black and white thinking is not from God but from the darkened minds of men who want to define order as best suits them. This thinking sounds a bit like the all or nothing that is presented in The Resolution for Men.
http://frombitterwaterstosweet.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Resolution%20Guys%20%5BTRG%5D
rhondajeannie wrote:
Perhaps it is colloquial, because people around here say it ‘all the time’ and not related to anything religious. As in, he (the dad) needs to man up and get over to the school and put a stop to this (mess) they are doing to his kid. This is applied to some man who wants to avoid conflict and just hang back and let ‘his woman’ take care of it (whatever it is).
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
Yes. This is the problem with the whole cookie-cutter doctrine. All the parts must fit into their right molds and categories. If they don’t fit, the problem is with the parts not the doctrine. When the parts obviously cannot be blamed in any conceivable way, then they have no answers or no workable doctrine/solution.
This is not Living Faith. It is lifeless machinery.
okrapod wrote:
In my field of work, Foster Care, it is something we say to the dads who hesitate about stepping up to be dads to their children.
We are women telling me to man up and take care of their children and stop dumping it off on and blaming the mother. In turn, we also work with the mother and tell her the things she needs to do in order to be a mom.
@ Lydia:
Sad about women becoming second class citizens. Worth nothing this was 300 years or so after the book of Ephesians was written.
numo wrote:
That is what I was saying, but not very well. A multitude of sources say that the Ephesian Artemis myth is confusing because some characteristics of Greek Artemis and later Roman Diana were incorporated into Ephesian Artemis’ myth. That type of syncretism is what conquered people do. Ephesian Artemis, according to the sources I read, was a goddess of contradiction who both saved women in childbirth and also killed them. There is a dispute about many aspects of her, including the significance of the “breasts” on her images, who her parents were, her relationship to animals (huntress or protector), etc.
If people are concerned about the fine distinctions between the various Artemis goddesses of the various peoples, then I think there are lots of sources freely available which they can read and reach their own conclusions. It is fascinating and brings a richness to understanding the challenges faced by the early apostles and teachers of the church.
numo wrote:
There are several older books available online for people to read. I posted that link because it summarized some of the issues surrounding Artemis and who she was and where the myth originated. For me personally, it was important to read older sources which predated the current gender war.
numo wrote:
Which is why I use it as a starting point and try to read the links in the citations. Also the talk page sometimes has interesting information.
rhondajeannie wrote:
I think I was the one who used that phrase. The reason I use is because it is used in Female Subordinationist subculture and we had a tragic/funny incident where it was used as a weapon that ended up working like a boomerang. Anyway, the reason I use it against the ManlyMen is because they talk about being protectors and nurturers, etc., but they don’t really do that when it comes to their own Systems, as you know only too well. The Village is another example. T4g and TgC with Mahaney is yet another example. Dever and Mahaney. The list goes on. They are all talk and bluster.
@ Jeff S:
Jeff, My question is what equality for women looked like in Ancient Ephesus. If there is one thing about history (my love!) it is that even some of the best sources can be pushing an agenda by emphasizing one thing over another even though what they say is technically true—- but compared to what? Other parts of the ancient world? I saw this problem in a lot of my college political science and history textbooks. History is so much more nuanced and we need to read lots of sources outside one particular area/issue to get a better feel.
It is interesting that depending on the translation, Acts 19:28 mentions Great is: Artemis or Diana
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
And I think as you or someone else asked Ken a few times, if their gender views cannot be held consistently or with all people in all situations, how can they find it biblical, fair, or applicable?
There was a similar paper published about a year ago that discussed how American gender complementarianism cannot easily be lived out by women in some third world, war torn nations –
Or the lessons of American gender comp looks ridiculous, as it’s applicable first and foremost (and only?) to married, middle class, mothers.
It was discussed here:
On Being a Woman After God’s Own Heart
http://www.cbeinternational.org/resources/article/being-woman-after-gods-own-heart
Mara wrote:
I’m also reminded of women who live alone, the news stories I’ve seen in years past of widowed women, for example, who fend off robbers.
There was such a story a few years ago about an 80-something woman who lived alone. One or two guys were breaking into her home. She had a shotgun and used it on them. She did not have a husband to “protect and defend her.”
I’ve heard well-meaning yet ignorant gender comp preachers say this stuff on their shows, that a women needs a husband for “protection” and so on. I am sorry to be a broken record (but for those who may be new here), I’m over 40 and have never married.
If God really requires a woman to have a husband to be protected or benefit in other ways in life, I am hosed in this theology.
(And I did not intentionally avoid marriage. I’d like to marry but haven’t been able to meet the right guy.)
@ Daisy:
If a woman needs a husband to protect her, then only single men should be allowed in the military …. No husbands and no fathers. We have had a lot of husbands who are/were not protecting their women because they are/were deployed or in training. Married men should be kicked out of the military and ordered to stay home and babysit their wives. Women in the military should be completely out of the question.
I guess widows and unmarried women whose fathers are deceased should be put in church group homes to be provided for and protected by the church. That would probably please the CBMW. It appears that they believe women are just property, of which God instructed men to take special care. Make sure we’re fed and petted and had our shots, but keep us muzzled and leashed! Don’t let us slip our collars and get runned ober.
I see this more at the church we are at now than I ever have anywhere.
Ignorant doesn’t even come close to describing these guys,
Personally, I think BHLH Owen, Wayne Grudem, Bruce Ware, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Gavin Peacock, et al should be sent to boot camp, or even Q-course so we can see what kind of men they really are! I’d love to take photos of Mark Driscoll undergoing Jump-Master training at Proving Grounds in Yuma, AZ.
@ Gram3:
I misunderstood your post – my apologies. Agree completely on the histotical aspect, and what people do.
@ Gram3:
I like to check out the talk pages myself. Often they’re much more intetesting than the entries!
numo wrote:
And the reason I typically refer to her as *Ephesian* Artemis is because of the distinction, even though the myths have become confused to the point where she is a virgin while also representing the Ephesian version of Mother Earth. I think the connection of Ephesian Artemis/Cybele with the Amazons is also fascinating, in view of Paul’s use of authentein in 1 Timothy 2:11-12. The earlier English translations did not feel the need to expand authentein to broadly mean “have authority over” but rather understood it as something with a bit more force and self-will.
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
He probably didn’t have the nerve to tell her she was obviously not one of the Elect.
@ okrapod:
*sigh* I keep getting accused of all-or-nothing thinking by an all-or-nothing thinker.
It is very frustrating.
Gram3 wrote:
Hmmm. So I checked and the Geneva Bible of 1519 used the word ‘usurp’ in place of have. So I checked the definitions of usurp and it appears that the word has changed meaning somewhat over the years. Three meanings were listed, one archaic. There is a meaning listed as archaic which means merely to encroach or infringe upon someone’s rights. Two meanings not listed as archaic are both defined as doing something illegally or by force. Apparently the meaning which did not include something necessarily illegal or by force dropped out of use just leaving the other two. I would think that with time the use of the word ‘usurp’ would drop out from the translation in scripture and the word ‘have’ would take its place as not necessitating something illegal or by force.
The reason I think this sounds reasonable is partly that I do not see how some woman in the early church could be doing something illegal or by force without something more than a mild correction from the apostle, and in this case his statement is a mere explanatory statement of practice, not instruction to throw somebody out of the church or to exercise discipline on a particular person.
I have, of course, heard sermon material in the past making much of the idea of usurpation, but the reasoning was scant and never have I heard an explanation of how some woman in the early church could actually get that done if we understand usurp as the two remaining current definitions of that word as requiring seizing power illegally and/or by force. I can see how a woman could be in a teaching position and the writer of the epistle might consider that as encroaching on somebody else’s rights as in the archaic definition of usurp.
Nobody misunderstand my position in this. I have no objection to women teaching in church, and I think that authoritative is different from authoritarian. If her knowledge is authoritative then she has much to offer the people, male and female alike. I am merely talking about how she got to the teaching position in the first place and whether the authority lies in the person doing the teaching (be they male of female) or whether it lies in the material being taught rather than the person.
@ okrapod:
One of my questions (because I am a geek when it comes to reading the dictionary snd suchlike) is what “usurp” was understood to mean during yhe early 1500s. The inherent problem being that 1) English dictionaries did not exist thrn and 2) people who compile dictionaries have to go by whatever they know is the earliest recorded usage, while in reality, the word might have bern around for some time already *and* meanin (s) might have altered prior to that 1st recorded instance.
Which leaves me exactly where i started, really.
Meanings
@ okrapod:
I may be totally missing your point, but here’s what I think the issue is and how we got where we are. The word meaning is key here because for the Female Subordinationist view, the word must mean something quite neutral like “have authority over” which does not connote anything inappropriate or sinister. On the other hand, the egalitarian position is the original word in Paul’s day in Koine connoted forcible action that was at least inappropriate. And that view seems to be upheld by the translations of “usurp” which is inappropriate or illegitimate seizure of a position that does not rightfully belong to that person.
The problem that the Female Subordinationists have with the older translations of “usurp” is that it can be argued that Paul is only addressing females taking or seizing authority that is not theirs at Ephesus. Those were the false teachers Paul references earlier, and they were the same females he instructed Timothy to allow to learn quietly. However, if the word merely means something quite neutral like “have authority over” the argument that it is a universal prohibition of women teaching even good doctrine to men or having any authority whatsoever over men is a bit easier to make, at least if people do not look beyond their ESV or other more recent translations. I cannot personally think of an instance where “usurp” is used in a neutral sense. ISTM that the woman/women at Ephesus were seizing authority in the assembly before the assembly recognized their ability or gifting.
If I missed your point, let me know and I’ll try again.
okrapod wrote:
I think that Timothy probably had a real situation on his hands. Perhaps the women were influential in the assembly. Or perhaps their false teaching was taking hold, as Paul’s later remarks suggest. Timothy might have felt like he was on the horns of a dilemma, not knowing what to do. This assumes, as I believe, that Paul was addressing women (in this case) who were genuinely deceived and Timothy knew they were deceived. So then, the question is, what do I do about this? Paul gives him some practical advice, IMO, that the women should be allowed to learn with they implicit provision that they learn with a submissive and quiet attitude. I think the next step, if the women did not do as Timothy instructed, would be to put them out of the assembly because they had demonstrated that they were not interested in learning but only in taking over.
@ numo:
Well, that is pretty much the point. Except I have heard preachers grab the word ‘usurp’ and run with it in this scripture, saying that this just proves that women teachers are grabbing authority away from men and that the attitude necessary for usurpation is a great evil in the female soul. Then gram3 noted the use of usurp had dropped out in more recent English translations and she seemed to be saying that the newer translation gave the passage a broader meaning. I gather that the broader meaning was seen to be detrimental to women.
So I said, well, maybe not. Since we do know that at least one understanding of the word usurp is now archaic, perhaps the change in the words used for the translation does not represent a change in meaning but merely reflects a change in the english language usages.
So since the archaic meaning is ‘softer’ than the idea of somebody usurping a throne (one of the illustrations for another meaning of the word per the dictionary) perhaps it never was some great statement of hideous women doing terrible things to poor pitiful men, perhaps it was just that what the women were doing was seen by the writer of the epistle as being inappropriate.
But if we conclude that the use of the word usurp in the first place is a put down, and then assume that discontinuing the use of the word usurp is also a put down, really? No way to win that one.
Gram3 wrote:
The archaic meaning was illustrated by: the church has usurped upon the domain of the state. This in contrast to: King Whoever usurped the throne. The one use does not presuppose anything illegal or violent whereas the second usage does. The firs and softer meaning is the one that is said to be archaic.
The church has usurped the domain of the state could very well be the women have usurped the domain of the men. If that is all that the earlier translators were trying to say then it hardly merits some of the nasty comments I have heard about the use of the term (see comment to numo above.) And, the meaning is not far from the way the passage is being translated now.
@ okrapod:
My Webster’s College Dictionary says:
Usurp – to seize and hold (a position, office, power, etc.) by force or without legal right
If the men at my church are so worried about women seizing control of their church by force, then the men can have it all to themselves as far as I’m concerned!
Nancy2 wrote:
Oh, me too.
@ okrapod:
Well, I would say that a church/state idea was not in Paul’s thinking in the first century whereas someone illegitimately seizing a throne would have been a live issue at that time. I can’t think of a religion that tried to usurp governmental authority and succeeded. The Jewish wars were in the future at that point, and Christianity was hardly a threat. So, it seems much more reasonable to conclude that Paul had the stronger form of the word in view.
My understanding of the notation of archaic is that the definition is no longer in wide use. It does not mean that the other definitions could not be the ones the translators had in mind when they first translated Paul’s word into “usurp.”
@ Gram3:
What I am trying to say is that we should start with what Paul’s word meant in Paul’s context. It did not have a neutral meaning. So whether the meaning of “usurp” has softened is irrelevant. I disagree that the church pushing the state out of its rightful place or the state pushing the church out of its rightful place is neutral in any sense. In most (all until modern times??) cases where that has occurred, it was also violent.
Gram3, Okrapod and Others,
Here is (Pastor) Wade Burleson’s excellent article about what was going on at the time in the culture that Paul was addressing to Timothy. (Wade is pastor on Sunday’s Echurch here at The Wartburg Watch.)
http://www.wadeburleson.org/2015/06/artemis-redux-women-and-i-timothy-29-15.html
I do not think usurp in either form fits authenteo. That word is only used once in the NT in that passage in 1 Tim. And it is not an easy one to translate because we really don’t think in those sorts of terms anymore. Some secular usage has been found in Greek to denote a sinister compelling action which would fit with the false teaching angle of 1 Tim 1 and the situation in Ephesus. Calvin translated it as “domineer” which gets closer but not quite.
We have an instance of John Chrysostom using it in one of his homilies saying that “men should not authenteo their wives”. So for it to be a power domain thing does not really fit with 1 Tim as Chrysostom was about as misogynist as you can get when it came to women functioning in the Body.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=1QIseKlznwkC&pg=PA201&lpg=PA201&dq=calatytis+&source=web&ots=AF3DWiR_5i&sig=wtXCql3Y_JXBjtfUXRwA8p9wNO8&hl=en&
Ben Whitherington catalogs some Greek secular usage of authenteo in his book about 1&2 Timothy. He says it is used as a euphemism and not that often even in secular Greek. He finds one reference that is sort of like our slang of “hit man”.
@ Lydia:
Yes, and in no case is it a passive possession (as in “have authority over”) but an active taking, as in seizing or laying hands on in the violent sense. This is another instance where Grudem has been very successful in changing the narrative such that people believe this is always the way it has been interpreted/translated.
@ okrapod:
Unfortunately, John Knox’s screed against the “monstrous regiment of women” (including Elizabeth I) pretty much bears out the cliches about usurpers of both sexes (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, for instance, though Shakespeare’s tremendous insights into both characters is miles off from Knox’s awful depictions of so-called usurping women).
All this stuff is very alien to me; not something that was part of my Lutheran upbringing, that’s for sure!
As this thread ticks steadily towards 1500 comments, I thought I’d try and help the cause (this will be 1453 unless someone else is typing at the same time as me).
On the “feminised” church
I think the real problem is the infantilised church. That is, church that is timid, pathologically risk-averse and afraid of doing anything because it “might offend” some hypothesised “vulnerable people”. We need to be clear here: it is not really about protecting the vulnerable, but about using “the vulnerable” as an excuse to avoid topics that the dominant members of the congregation find uncomfortable. Difficulties are not faced openly and resolved, but swept under the carpet and the default way of dealing with them is to make strenuous efforts to pretend they don’t exist. Nobody really knows who is in charge and nobody openly takes, or assigns, responsibility for any decisions. But this behaviour isn’t feminine, it is childish.
Of course, authoritarian churches represent a flip side to this that is equally infantilised. A tiny minority have complete power. Complexities and difficult relationships are dismissed by crude black-and-wide rules and accusations. But again, this behaviour isn’t manly, it is childish.
Now, the far fringes of the young, rebellious and reformed sub-culture don’t draw any material distinction between woman and infants, but I think the tendency to conflate the two can spill over into more wholesome sub-cultures if they’re not careful. Specifically, I think there’s a gravitationally-collapsing circular logic in first, defining women as “emotional” as distinct from logical, rational or clear-thinking; second, thence citing instances of that behaviour as “feminine”, and finally taking that as evidence that women are indeed “emotional”, and so on ad infinitum.
The key here is referring to men whose behavioural drivers are nurturing and parental as “feminised”, and women who are bold and visionary as “rebellious”. At a stroke, this throws out all the empirical data that might otherwise challenge the theory that God created men on mars and women on venus. Eventually we cross a kind of logic event horizon from which nothing can escape, and we become honestly convinced that women genuinely are not capable of leading or making adult decisions in a group context. That being the case, we are being kind to women when we protect them from their own foolish desire to lead or teach.
This same “logical event horizon” also sometimes creates a crude (and false) either/or. That is, if you don’t believe that every man is properly rational and strong (etc) and every woman is properly emotional and weak, then you must be saying that all women and all men are identical. But the topic of gender-dependent characteristics will need to go in a different essay.
Nick Bulbeck wrote:
Along the same lines a young NeoCal demonstrated how far over the “logical event horizon” he had gone when he informed me that if Galatians 3:28 were to be interpreted as applying to anything other than salvation, he would be obliged to marry same sex couples. I think he was parroting Piper. How does one have a rational discussion with someone of this mindset?
@ JohnD:
A woman certainly cannot have a rational discussion with someone of that mindset, because we are obviously not rational!
Nick Bulbeck wrote:
So, how does a female who is using logic and reason communicate with a male who refuses to use logic and reason (while knowing how to do so) all while the male is insisting that the female’s concerns are motivated by emotional issues? Or is this just evidence that the event horizon has been crossed? I have written off these guys, but I’m wondering if you thing there is a way forward.
JohnD wrote:
This is either a person who cannot think or refuses to think about what he is saying or parroting. It sounds like something from Grudem or Piper. I think they miss the point because they need to miss the point.
Gram3 wrote:
Expedience rules. I have it on good authority that the sermons this young man preaches are mostly prepared by a woman.
Rational argument may not get anywhere but satire might.
Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is cited on our church’s website as authority for all things complementarian,with backup from a Driscoll book (that may or may not have been ghostwritten and/or plagiarised).
In RBMW Piper winsomely and graciously teaches us that: “To the degree that a woman’s influence over a man is personal and directive … it will controvert God’s created order.” RBMW p42
The traffic lights at a major intersection near the CBD are inoperative from time to time. Frequently the traffic officers who then control it are women. The day will come when one of those women traffic officers points at me and raises her hand instructing me to stop. That will be “personal and directive” and “contovert God’s created order.” Do I: a)sin by obeying the personal and direct order of a woman, or b) maintain the purity of God’s created order, ignore the female traffic officer and drive through the intersection. If people are killed and injured my defense will be that not “controverting God’s created order” is the greater good, and dead and injured people are merely collateral damage in pursuit of that greater good.
There is a particular elder that I would want to call in my defense. Who better than the country head of one of the international Big Four auditing firms to defend Female Subordinationism? The mind boggles.
JohnD wrote:
You can’t. Took me ages to figure that out. Many of these types are pastors!
JohnD wrote:
Agreed. It is better to get a point across with those struggling with the teaching. Piper would just call satire, sin. Thousands of young pastors would then believe it.
JohnD wrote:
Ahh yes, that very strange group. The ones who espouse that Eve was more powerful Jesus. According to them and their ilk, Jesus’ blood was good enough to atone for Adam’s sin, but not for Eve’s. Thus, Eve is more powerful than Jesus.
They don’t believe in Jesus after all, do they?
The Gospel can’t possibly be carried to cowgirls, women police officers, women surgeons, women attorneys, because…well…they’re women.
We have to hear these bizarre beliefs from men who had poor (abusive) to non-existent relationships with their own fathers and haven’t resolved their *daddy issues* (Driscoll and the rest of them).
A man on one of the blogs about spiritual abuse recently used a new term for this War on Women: Shehad (the pronoun “She”, and “had”, sounds like Jihad). As Christian men from around the world have pointed out that this new form of NeoCal/Christianity in America has more in common with radical Islam’s beliefs than with The Good News.
@ JohnD:
I could make an argument that RBMW is satire itself and is aimed at debunking male supremacy. Why else would its argumentation be so weak and its eisegesis so strong? And, ironically, its appeal be to emotion (Feminism!!!) instead of reason. I’ve said it before: RBMW is a tutorial on the plausible use of logical fallacies and eisegesis. They are masters of it.
Gram3 wrote:
+ 1,000,000!
Gram3 wrote:
Perhaps the question is, how does anybody using logic and reason communicate with anybody who is not? The latter will use any trick they can to win points, including throwing in outlandish non sequiturs and ad hominem distractions, because they know that arguments are not won with logic. Arguments are won by getting under your opponent’s skin, especially if you can discredit them by doing so in front of others.
Jesus instructed us to be as innocent as doves and as shrewd as serpents. You don’t win at tennis by using a squash rakkit. When you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t play by the rules of decency and fair-mindedness, and who will only use the scribshers to their own advantage, you have to be aware of this. Some study of the techniques used by con-men, psychics and mediums* helps. And undoubtedly, we need to rediscover some of the forgotten and despised manifestations of the spirit – knowledge, wisdom and discernment of spirits, for instance.
* “media” is, I deem, confusing in this context, and is arguably incorrect anyway since the english language is evolving away from archaic plurals.
Nick Bulbeck wrote:
Nick, I didn’t see you mention it here, but on an older thread, you brought up how so many hymns are sort of feminine or touchy feely, the hymns that talk about “Jesus is my boyfriend.”
I wish I could remember where I saw it, but I just saw some blog post about a week ago that talked about that for a few paragraphs.
Whoever wrote it did a survey of hymns and found that the ones considered “feminine” by people (the touchy feely ones) had been written by MEN, and the songs that sang of God or Jesus in more masculine, tough guy, warrior terms had been written by WOMEN. (All caps for emphasis, not shouting).
Ah, I found it!! Here it is:
The “Feminization” of the Church
newlife.id.au/equality-and-gender-issues/the-feminization-of-the-church/
Go down that page and look for the section under this sentence (this is about half way down the page, so you’ll have to do some scrolling to get there):
“And with regards to “manly” music, here’s his response:”
Here is how that part concludes:
JohnD wrote:
I was driving home from the store a couple of weeks ago, and the lights at a major intersection were out.
There were two police officers standing the intersection, one a man, and the other a woman, directing traffic.
The woman cop was directing my side of the traffic.
I know John Piper probably would’ve been in a pickle there, or felt so conflicted or icky, about taking direction from a woman cop. Not me.
Gram3 wrote:
Mmm-hmm, yep, a lot of gender comp is built on fear or disgust. (Not the Bible.)
I’m a social conservative, so no, I’m not thrilled with all of our nation’s current conditions, but I’m no longer so keen to jump on the “remember the good old days, the 1950s, when things were so much better, when all women were married by 21 and stayed at home all day baking pies while dad worked at an office” type rhetoric that gender comps and other conservative Christians are into.
It’s an appeal to emotion, to tradition.
They make secular feminism, homosexual marriage, no-fault divorce, etc. (which no, I’m not a total supporter of all that, either, necessarily), into a big boogeyman.
American Gender comps (as I tried telling Ken above) are creating another, new set of problems for people, ones that are totally unnecessary, and they do so in part because they are trying to fight what they see as an erosion of Judeo-Christian morals in culture in the U.S.A.
Nick Bulbeck wrote:
A great example of what we are facing in the conservative churches here is on display over at the SBCVoices thread. These guys are pastors. They are condescending, arrogant, and lack basic reading comprehension skills, never mind logic. These are the kinds of fossilized and necrotic (yes I know it is difficult to be both) thinking that reasonable people have to deal with over here. Have any suggestions of how a reasonable person might explain to these men why the Gospel does not entail disgracing a woman because she does not obey self-appointed rulers? How do you communicate with people who have so distorted the Bible and the Jesus of the Bible?
The reason I cite that particular thread is that it illustrates how a perfectly sane discussion degenerates because the individuals cannot get past their paradigm to look at the facts. The facts must be made to fit the paradigm. The way they treated Lydia was shameful enough by accusing her of the very thing they were doing, but what that “pastor Tarheel” said about Mirele was just beyond the beyond. These are supposed to be my people–the conservatives–and I see absolutely nothing of Jesus in them. What is the basis for communication? We are not talking about the same anything. Sorry for the rant, but this is just such a good example of the process I went through with these guys. Especially the winsome tag line from Leeman. He wants to keep learning. And never coming to a knowledge of the Truth.
@ Daisy:
Danvers can be summed up as an appeal to outrage.
Gram3 wrote:
Here is how their thinking goes. If mirele is not a Christian and comments here then it is Dee’s responsibility to make her one. If that won’t work then mirelel’s comments need to be limited or argued against. See at that point mirele should not be allowed to have any influence. They really do think like that.
You should have seen their anger and cruelty toward a former rabid YRR pastor who became an athiest. This guy was a major defender of Calvinism in SBC blog life and led the charts against the Trad statement. And he was the typical arrogant mean YRR.
They treated him like a Benedict Arnold. They took it personal! They cannot even have conversations with people like that. Muff said it best: they lost their humanity.
Chris actually made more sense when he got out of that movement- and left ministry. I really hope he can work through the determinism to Jesus Christ.
@ lydia:
I missed the story of that YRR pastor, but the fact that he lost his faith is sad. The fact that they went after him, not to bring reconciliation but to score points, is worse. Perhaps their attitude was because he showed that their system does not guarantee what they seem to think it guarantees. For the rest of us, the story should be a sober warning to ground our faith in Christ.
lydia wrote:
What I say here has not been true at this blog (which is great), but I can testify that if you admit online in other forums or social media to being
1.) someone who is in a faith crisis, or
2.) you’ve totally left the Christian faith,
a lot of Christians will sling mud at you. You will not be shown love or understanding.
I’ve had this happen to me with other Christians on other sites. The minute they find out you’re not a true blue Christian anymore but are somewhat identifying as agnostic, or some other Non-Christian position, they immediately dismiss any and all thoughts and views you hold from there on out.
They are very arrogant and assume you do not or cannot possibly understand anything about the Bible or Christianity.
They seem to think that someone who once accepted Christ but who is now having doubts (or someone who is now atheist) cannot understand the Bible any longer. Which is not so.
Gram3 wrote:
I’ve said it on this blog before, and I’ll say it again — it was this book that turned me into an egal. (I was looking for good arguments to explain to a friend why complementarianism was God’s design. We laugh about it now.)
Daisy wrote:
Daisy, if you want to read something that will give you a good laugh, read poor ole Tim Bayley’s post about how he “gnashes his teeth” in situations where compliance with a female LEO is required.
http://baylyblog.com/blog/2007/04/what-feminism
He totally contradicts himself. “If a female police officer pulls me over and
tickets me, I’ll respect and submit to her, not because she has a gun
and a radio, but because she has been placed over me by God, bearing
the sword in His behalf.
Still, I will recognize that her authority is contrary to God’s
creation order in the matter of sexuality, and it will grieve me
causing me, like Lot, to gnash my teeth.
So God has placed her in authority over him, but her authority is contrary to God’s order. The mental gymnastics these guys perform is more entertaining that Cirque du Soleil.
Gram3 wrote:
Even more, Danvers could be summed up as an appeal to indignation at loss of automatic privilege.
Leila wrote:
And as another manifestation of The Woman Thou Gavest Me Is to Blame. Everything bad is the result of feminism, yet I don’t see these guys advocating for much of what feminists of the past gained for women: the right to vote, hold property, inherit, attend professional schools, work in their chosen field (including homemaking), and so many others. As you say, it boils down to needing a plausible reason to maintain their privileged position without the competition from competent women. It is fear, no matter how much they talk about male courage and protecting females. That is their con which was exposed so well in the case of Karen Hinkley.
lydia wrote:
I’m not sure any of those things represents much of a change.
Anger and cruelty – it’s all about doctrine anyway, not love. All counterfeit movements have a particular brand identity and attract (among other people) a certain range of counterfeit christian: someone who wants to self-identify as “christian” but doesn’t want to change, and therefore needs a movement that sanctifies what he’s already like. In this case, “angry and cruel” lies well within the range.
Rabid YRR to atheist – I wonder whether the man changed at all. When you’re all about rules, authority, hierarchy, structure and dogma, then whatever the rhetoric, you’re not about love and therefore you’re not about God. Perhaps he just became honest. If so then – FWIW – I’d respect that.
Nick Bulbeck wrote:
Maybe so. His story would be interesting in the present context in conservative American evangelicalism of all YRR all the time. Was it the rules? The certainty that he found required a walk of faith? A cruel god he could not worship? I wonder what it was. I knew of a “regular” Reformed guy who became an atheist because of textual problems he encountered and could not resolve to his satisfaction. He never thought about it until he got to a conservative Reformed seminary and did some reading. How he avoided those issues at the university, I have no idea.
Leila wrote:
The commands of the Lord are not burdensome. They do not cause you to gnash your teeth nor create dilemmas that God does not help resolve.
If the police lassie’s holding of an office of authority is contrary to God’s creation order, and God is bothered about this, then God shouldn’t have given her the sword on his own behalf. Personally, I’m sceptical about whether God is conflicted in that way, though. On the other hand, if the police lassie has usurped the sword, with the complicity of a sinful culture corrupted by whatever, then one should refuse to submit to her, and accept whatever persecution follows with rejoicing as one suffers for the cause of Christ.
Daisy wrote:
That is probably a defence mechanism. They have never thought deeply about the issues and are not equipped to have the kind of discussion that would follow. As soon as the conversation goes beyond Christianese babble they are out of their depth. Also being real as opposed to superficial unnerves them.
The most rewarding conversation I had this past week was with a friend of many years with whom I once led a home group. He is grappling with the same issues and may or may not be agnostic. He also describes how conversations are shut down and speaks of his frustration with Christians who do that.
The last two verses of Acts speak of Paul living in a rented house in Rome for two years and welcoming all who came to see him. I have little doubt that a significant number of those that he welcomed were discussing their doubts with him. It seems some people only follow Paul when he is misinterpreted to be making rules that suit them.
Gram3 wrote:
Yes, How does the determinism of election work in that situation? He sold out to being a pastor and I think even wrote resolutions for the convention, etc. The part that really bothered me is that Chris had commented there a lot as a very welcome YRR pastor. That was sort of his community.
And I honestly thought it was like so many of us who wander back to certain communities were we spent so much time and thought we had friends….even though we have changed…only to find we are not welcome anymore.
@ Daisy:
I am not a big fan of Greg Boyd but I love the way he deals with “doubt”. A huge failing of much of evangelical xtianity is that it does not allow room for doubt. They automatically put doubt in the category as having no faith. How can we grow and mature without doubts as in questions about how things work? Doubt should spur us on to seek truth and “practice” faith …..usually with love revealing itself through others.
Nick Bulbeck wrote:
Me too. I am running across quite a few YRR to athiest in my ground zero neck of the woods. Mostly 20 somethings who got involved as teens and totally sold out to that paradigm through the gurus like Piper, Driscoll, etc. Basically they bought into the determinism and “Sovereignty” meaning God’s control 24/7. When life does not work that way in application it can be a huge wake up call. The problem is, they were introduced to this god when their brains were developing. So their only logical choices, in their minds, are the determinist god or no god.
We have lots of work to do. Knowing a Savior who gave us Human responsABILITY is vital
Nick Bulbeck wrote:
One would think that the Boylys would want to suffer for Christ. To stand against the female usurpation and reclaim God’s rightful order. Great point.
Gram3 wrote:
Women have made some very significant advances in the last 50 yrs. or so besides the ones you mentioned, Gram. Some I was unaware of until several months ago when PBS broadcast a documentary about women and their contributions. For example, for 70 yrs. women were excluded from running in the Boston Marathon until a woman dared to run along with the men. The 1950’s and 60’s brought about new careers for women and opportunities previously denied them thanks to Title 7 (LBJ I think). One of the choices for women was as a “stewardess” however only if she was single, 21-16 yrs. old, between 5’2″ to 5’6″ tall and had a good figure. At the ripe old age of 32, they were fired. IIRC, Barbara Walters was one of the first women given the job of an anchor in the 1960’s.
If the comps want to call them “feminists” and associate that word with only negative advances, they need to be reminded of the positives. Although it may be those positive advances for women will not be appreciated by men who would rather turn back the clock.
I don’t see that happening.
Lydia wrote:
I don’t know his story, but it sounds so sad on many levels. To lose your faith and also the people you had known as part of the community. Guess I should read there more, but I just got burned out a few years ago with the bad attitudes from supposed pastors. I’m someone who appreciates pastors–the real servants.
Wowwie. I’m not one to throw around the word, but Subordinationism is a *Heresy* in the eyes of the Orthodox, and not “Orthodox teaching” in any way!
Athanasius, who gives us the best understanding we have of the Trinity (look up the Athanasian Creed, it’s good!), spent his career as Bishop of Alexandria fighting against Subordinationism and Arianism.
On Scot McKnight’s blog today he deals with Piper’s recent response to a woman who sought his advice on whether it would be permissible for her, a complememntarian, to become a policewoman.
You will find it here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2015/08/17/that-complementarian-non-negotiable/
I particularly enjoyed his reference to Deborah.
JohnD wrote:
This is bordering absurdity when someone approaches a pastor for permission to embark on a particular career. Piper is obviously overstepping his career choice.
@ Victorious:
I often wonder if such church goers have forgotten they live in America and they are totally free to seek the Holy Spirit without a church/state mediator. We seem to be digressing….
Piper is so flowery and exhausting:
“Notice the terms he uses for a husband’s role: “benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for, and protect women.” And a woman’s role: “a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men”
Ok, lets analyze! Note the all the adjectives and adverbs. Let us strip them away. He must lead, provide for and protect the woman. A woman is “free” when she sees her job as making him feel like a strong leader. So female freedom consists of making the male a leader. (When does he have to grow up?)
Now, lets discuss the particulars of “provide” and “protect”. It could get dicey. :o)
How is any of that a shoulder to shoulder partnership to subdue the earth? Sounds like a manipulation/ entitlement relationship to me. “Eve, you are not making me feel like a leader. Love, Adam.”
Now, who decides who and what is benevolent? The leader? And she must affirm what he decides is benevolence? Who gets to define? (see it really gets tricky) What happens if said male role is interrupted due to an accident or health issues.
These guys need a Talmud.
@ Lydia:
He should have answered her that her career choice was hers to make and outside of a pastor’s job description. Or he start another list of 81 careers women are allowed to choose. ….smile
numo wrote:
Your complaint about my use of the word ‘biddy’ would ring more true if anyone had called out Law Prof on calling me a ‘fool’. And Daisy has said some things that I could find offensive if I wanted to, though I am not that thin-skinned; and I realise she is attacking anything that identifies with complementarianism, regardless of any nuance or difference or emphasis. This is always a problem with stereotypes and gender politics, and I don’t think I fit the stereotype she imagines.
I think you will just have to take my word for it that I was not intending to be insulting.
If you had read a tad more carefully, you should have noticed that I said we should not use experience to determine our doctrine, though it is not entirely irrelevant to it. Once I left my initial egalitarinism behind and started to think about what the NT said on the subject, I arrived by and large at the view I still have. My reading around Willow Creek was extensive, and I was not looking for reasons to bolster my understanding of 1 Tim 2, but there were so many examples of this (women following doctrines of demons and seducing spirits) it was impossible to miss it. If I could find it all again, I think at a minimum you would have to concede this is a real problem.
As far a psychology is concerned, to the extent Freud and to some extent Jung were the root of this as a modern phenomenon, it hardly bodes well for the tree. Does the church really have to go to this poluted stream to find advice on modern living?
I think Serving Kids dismissed my suggestion there is an element of spiritual warfare in this a bit too quickly. One clue to this is in the sentence Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty, where the word saved does not mean ‘became a Christian’ in the loose evangelical (mis)use of the word. It can carry the sense of deliverance, rescue, ‘saved’ from activities she should not be involved with by substituting these with something else, namely running the household and bringing up a family. This is a means of effecting salvation, not obtaining it in the first place. Even in this sense it presupposes continuing in the faith.
So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, rule their households, and give the enemy no occasion to revile us. For some have already strayed after Satan. In the context of the verse, women with too much time on their hands can stray into gossip, damaging a fellowship. So the spiritual warfare has a very earthy outworking.
There you go, I did reply!
Mara wrote:
Not everybody is in agreement with your first sentence … 🙂
As for the second, I have indeed read more on the complementarian side than the egalitarian side, but I have at least familiarised myself with other views on this. Confirrmation bias is not confined to any one side of this issue, nor to episcopalians. But I don’t think I am prejudiced on this, that would imply an unwillingness or inability to try to understand differing views, or to resort to stereotypes. To be honest, ocaasionally I do see this amongst those of the egalitarian brethren!!
Ken wrote:
And among the comps?
@ Bridget:
With any subject, once an element of winning the argument starts to matter rather than getting at the truth, bias and defensiveness will set in. I don’t think this is confined to any one side.
Even the term ‘female subordinationist’ is pejorative – no-one could really ever argue that is a good thing (except a fringe oddball). It muddies the waters if the alternative to egalitariamism is subjugation. But if you (meaning people) do frame the issue in this way, it’s a neat way of avoiding just what the apostles meant by the term translated as ‘submit’ in the pages of the NT!
@ Ken:
Your characterization of women being led astray more easily makes me want to tear my hsir out.
Also, beakerj and others (including me) have explicitly discussed healthy therapeutic approaches, like cognitive behavioral therspy, in past replies to you. But afaik, you have never responded to any of those posts. Contemporary psychology andmpsychiatry are FAR more than you make them out to be, and psychoanalytic theory has been in eclipse for several decades now. You seem to want to ignore all of this in order to continue hsmmering home your point about how *you believe psychology to be entirely evil.*
Please, Ken – do your homeeork. I am not talking through my hat, and nor are beakerj or Bridget or Dee. You are mistaking psychoanalysis for all of psychology and psychiatry, which is an ertor on your part, as well as being a dangerously nartow approach.
Ken wrote:
I’ve interacted with you before and came to that conclusion.
Though I profoundly disagree with you, I appreciate you trying to keep things civil through all our disagreeing.
numo wrote:
But of course, men are much wiser and much stronger spiritually!!!
If we ladies are not lead, fed, taught, and protected by our menfolk, there’s no end to the sordid sorts of sin traps to which we can succumb.
@ Ken:
Also, while i agree that both Freud and Jung have their problems (and thus many Freudian and Jungian approaches), by no means is *evetything* either man said or wrote off-base. You are also dismissing some truly goid and gifted psychoanalysts – like Karen Horney, who has been mentioned by several of us in previous replies – entirely out of hand.
Do you know Horney’s name, or anything about her, or have you read any of her work? My guess is no.
Also, have you ever taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or some vsristion thereof? If so, you have dealt with Jungian theory put to work. (I,don’t think it is the be all and end all re. personality types, but it is a surprisingly nuanced test, even if over-hyped in the media and popular culture, albeit often presrnted in a very simplistic, dumbed-down wsy.)
Also, thereis very real scientific/medical research in play hete, and I wish you could/would acknowledge thst. Real psychopharmacology (again, as opposed to the image of docs making free with scripts for addictive drugs) is an important branch of medicine and deserves to be acknowledged as such, there are dedicated people in the therapeutic community, whose positive contributions you ignore and/or toss aside completely in your many posts inveighing against what you perceive as the many evils of both psychology and psychiatry. You really need to give it all a secondmlook, with an open mind as to what is actually being said and done.
And yes, i agree that there are many people with distorted views out here, but by no means are *all* of the people in the field working from ertoneous assumptions about humsn behavior or neurology or any other aspect of it all.
Some more names for you: Erik Erikson, Abraham Maslow, Jean Piaget. And Viktor Frankl, who was in a death camp and subsequently wrote a small but extremely powerful book, Man’s Search for Meaning. While you might not agree with all of his premises,I cannot imagine that you would be unmoved by his story, or his conclusions, all of them related to the suffering he endured during his time in the camp. It is something entirely different than what it sounds like from that description, btw. Well worth your time, and that of evetyone else who might be unfamiliar with it.
Ken wrote:
Oh yes! The more diapers we have to change and the more children we have to tend to, the less time we have to even think about sin!
Barefoot and pregnant is the only way to go!
Ken wrote:
Without defending Willow Creek or your experience with that movement, I would like to hear your explanation of the many, many men who have fallen and followed doctrines of demons and seducing spirits. They aren’t female, so what happened? You have absolutely no evidence that what Paul was saying is that *all* women are *more* disposed to gossip or following after Satan if they have too much time on their hands. There is zero in the text that tells us that. There *was* however a disdain for marriage among the followers of Ephesian Artemis. Again, you are totally ignoring the cultural context and making Paul’s pastoral instructions into a treatise on gender and biology and behavior and spiritual status. In other words, you are reading back your interpretation of your experiences surrounding Willow Creek into the text, as far as I can see, because women are not saved or sanctified by keeping to their supposed roles. They are not kept from the wiles of Satan by staying in the house, for pity’s sake. That’s what they do in the Middle East and India and how many other traditional cultures, but are those women protected from the wiles of Satan by having lots of babies and rarely leaving the house?
Some food for thought for all of us in this article.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
Touches on a bit of healthy psychology IMO.
@ Bridget:
When my daughter was 17, an over protective new mother of a toddler asked me how I dealt with keeping my daughter safe while allowing her to learn. I told her that the best way I could describe it, was that I always let my daughter have just enough rope to hang herself with …. but I kept her close enough so that I could get to her in time to cut that rope, just in case she did hang herself.
Bridget wrote:
This is a hugely worrying trend. The university used to be a place where ideas could be discussed openly, robustly, and sometimes offensively. But the ideas could be tested. I think we are ripe for authoritarianism, and it seems that most people either don’t care or are perfectly fine with it as long as it is their preferred ideology or their preferred tribe is the one in power. Very concerning for the future of America’s culture which is largely the story of a land with people who are free to make their own way without overbearing nannying whether that is from the state or the church or the school. Being offended has become a profession for people who, I suppose, never learned a real one. Gramp3 sees this a *lot* with younger guys who are so fearful and brittle.
Bridget wrote:
Oh, and the ISIS article at The Atlantic is also well worth reading. Most people do not really understand what drives ISIS. I certainly don’t have a good understanding of it, anyway.
Nancy2 wrote:
I haven’t gone through all the posts on the previous page of this thread.
This is actually what Ken believes?
The Bible does not teach that the only role a woman must play is to marry and have kids. Paul says it is better to stay single and celibate (1 Cor 7)
I have never married nor had kids, so I don’t have a household to run or kids to tend to. If this is what Ken is pushing, I find it offensive, and it’s not biblical.
Not all women marry or crank out kids. Some who marry, they or their spouse are infertile, so they are unable to have a kid.
If two married adults want to stay childless, that is within their rights as adults. People can choose to stay childless if they like, it does not make them horrible or selfish.
Some people are simply not fond of children and/or have no interest in kids, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Women were not put here to make babies and “run households.”
@ Gram3:
We must be talking in circles with Ken or some other comp guy who was here, because I already pointed out on some earlier thread or post that there are a lot of false male teachers and men who are conned by them.
American Christian TV is filled with false male teachers who bilk Christian men out of their money.
Some guy recently did a video exposing the frauds in Christianity, and I believe all (or most) of the Christians he brought up were MEN.
John Oliver Exposes Shady Televangelists Fleecing Americans For Millions
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/17/john-oliver-exposes-shady-televangelists-fleecing-americans-for-millions.html
Benn Hinn is a man. Rod Parsley is a man. Tilton is a man. Jim Bakker is a man. Steve Furtick is a man. Mark Driscoll is a man. Robert Morris is a man.
All false teachers and/or greedy con artists, who are ripping off lots of prone- to- deception Christian men.
@ Daisy
That quote I referred to is from the comment that Ken submitted at 8:25 this morning!
Ken wrote:
Gender complementarianism is actually Female Subordinationism.
(I also think gender comp is the same thing as codependency for women.)
Gender comp teaches male hierarchy; it does not simply stop at teaching that men and women “complement” one another.
The phrase “gender complementarianism” is misleading and hides what most of its adherents really believe, or where its views logically lead.
Daisy wrote:
We’ll have to wait until/if Ken responds about what he believes. What I have heard elsewhere to “explain” this is that there is a *special* form of deception to which females are subject. That is why the serpent approached the Woman in the Garden. The serpent supposedly knew that the female was created with this defective discernment and so approached her with his lie. That is basically the “complementarian” narrative that they eisegete from the details of the actual text where we are not told *why* the serpent spoke to the Woman first or *why* she believed his lie. We are certainly not told anywhere in scripture about some supposed inferior discernment on account of XX chromosomes.
There is probably some nut out there (and I don’t mean Ken or JS) who thinks the serpent was attracted to the Woman because of the obscure verses about the Sons of God being seduced by the Daughters of Man or something. Men and serpents are helpless putty in the hands of a deceitful and deceived female. That’s why we need to keep them covered up and at home so they don’t cause trouble.
Gram3 wrote:
I’ll have to check that out.
Gram3 wrote:
Maybe I’ll start making up reasons why Adam took the fruit from Eve and ate it — something that was innate in his being before sin had even entered the world (supposedly). 🙄
@ numo:
I second the recommendation of Victor Frankl’s book. Very powerful. I gave one to every person on my staff.
My takeaway? Having something(s) in life one wants to accomplish is a survival technique that is extremely powerful.
@ Bridget:
Yes great article!
WBridget wrote:
Maybe I’ll start making up reasons why Adam took the fruit from Eve and ate it — something that was innate in his being before sin had even entered the world (supposedly).
While Eve was goofing off instead of cooking supper, Adam was working hard in that garden and subduing all of the animals and all that. He was hawngry somethin’ fierce ….. jest couldn’t hep hisseff!!!
Gram3 wrote:
I don’t think it’s a big stretch to think that the serpent pointed to the Tree of Life when he assured her that surely they would not die. It’s reasonable since the two trees were both in the midst of the garden and one was available to them while the other was off-limits to them. Even so, we are not told either Adam or Eve ever availed themselves of the Tree of Life.
That’s how I see the deception taking place.
I suppose the overarching problem I have with The Comp Thing is not so much gender-specific roles as gender-wide roles. As is often said: there is no such thing as an average person.
I don’t support the idea that a woman can do everything a man can do. Which woman, and which man, are we talking about here? I support the idea that a woman can do everything God has gifted and equipped her to do, and/or everything the Holy Spirit is anointing her to do. (But, you say, how is that different from a man? – er… who said it was meant to be different?) And I don’t believe the Holy Spirit is constrained by our interpretation of the Bible. Just as the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath – about which the strictest legislation was spelt out in the Mosaic law – so the Son of Man is lord of his church, and of the roles he is and is not free to assign to anyone in it.
Consider: as the Holy Spirit ponders what to do among us today, he might feel led to study the following scripture from Galatians:
@ Nick Bulbeck:
And, of course, there is a missing end-blockquote tag in that comment. Bah.
@ Nick Bulbeck:
The html-minded among you will realise that there was a single forward-slash missing from the comment. There is an urban legend about an unmanned NASA spacecraft that crashed into the sea shortly after launch because of a single minus-sign missing from its navigational software. While the missing minus-sign is actually a myth, my missing forward-slash is not.
Nick Bulbeck wrote:
Well, some say they believe this, but they don’t act like they believe it.
Victorious wrote:
Could be what happened, but for some reason God did not inspire that detail. The problem is that the Female Subordinationists make universal dogma out of what they think *might* have happened and read those details into the text. Then they take that read-into interpretation and interpret other verses and then make more universal dogma that includes even more speculation. Yet you cannot get one of them to actually show you what they know is in the text in the text itself. Which is odd, IMO, when we are talking about people with a conservative, sola scriptura POV.
Gram3 wrote:
True, but we do know from scripture that Eve was deceived…nothing more. I see being deceived as an unintentional sin as the OT differentiates between intentional and unintentional sin. I don’t think anyone gets “tricked” willingly.
On the other hand, we are told that Adam disobeyed and blamed both God and the woman. And Job 31:33 reads “Have I covered my transgressions like Adam, By hiding my iniquity in my bosom.”
So aside from my logical, reasonable (smile) speculation, those are the facts and the comps can’t deny what’s written.
@ Victorious:
Yes, those are the facts. And Paul recounts those facts in 1 Timothy 2, just as they happened. Then the Female Subordinationists read into Paul’s recitation of the actual facts that females cannot have authority because the male was created first (they make up the Order of Creation) and that females are more easily deceived or, as Ken say, more open to the attacks of Satan.
I think that there is culpability for sin, but ISTM that, as you said, there is a qualitative difference between sinning after being deceived and willfully sinning. If I were like the Female Subordinationists, I might argue that males are inherently rebellious against clear commandments of God and have a propensity to turn away from God and toward women. Therefore, men should never be allowed to teach or be in the presence of women because they will be turned away from God.
Eisegesis, as I’ve said so many times, can be quite entertaining and imaginative. And if you can get enough people to buy into your re-vamped narrative, you can make a lot of money and have a lot of influence.
Victorious wrote:
But they can ignore facts, like the content of Genesis 1:26-28 and Deborah and Phoebe and Junia and Jael and Abigail and Priscilla. They can make up “facts” that are readily believed which negate the actual facts of the text. They can throw out enough of these made-up facts that the new narrative is assumed to be the facts. And, as I’ve discovered, de-programming people from “facts” is difficult when there is significant cost attached to abandoning those “facts.”
@ Gram3:
You know, Gram…my local newspaper posted a list of 21 of the most famous Supreme Court decisions. Among them was one I’d not heard of called the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision of 1896. It was a 7-2 decision that upheld the “Separate but Equal” segregation laws in states. I found the court used similar crazy reasons to restrict blacks that comps do in their equal but different restrictive mandates for women. And all while depriving blacks of the same accommodations as whites, they insisted blacks were not inferior.
That decision didn’t get overturned until 1954!
Short overview here: http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson
It took
Nancy2 wrote:
Do you have any better explanation of the meaning of the word saved in 1 Tim 2? I’ve forgotten the technical term for this, but child-bearing here is intneded to cover the whole process of family life without spelling this out in detail.
Is it any coincidence that there are streams in the feminist movement that decry having children, or want to make this a life-style choice? Having children may not be compulsory, but it is the general intention of the Creator, and again, is it coincidence that in societies that have significantly rejected Christian truth, family has been replaced by materialism, career and power, or in some cases being an eternal adolescent?
Try this for an example of this mentality, googled at random under anti-natalism:
Although these arguments may not be used by feminists per se, I have chosen this name for a class of arguments which pertain to the special burden of women in childbirth and child raising. Being pregnant is a marathon, giving birth is a traumatic experience, the physical labor needed to take care of babies and toddlers is constant, as well as the loss of time and money associated with it; women bear most of the brunt in all these categories, which is a profound injustice. Child-raising has always been the mechanism by which women were kept socially inferior, and it has been argued that this is still true today. If we wish to eradicate the gender binary, we must stop supporting natalism and its inherently sexist assumptions about the role of women.
Additionally, if the quiverfull doctrine is correct, abortion and all other reproductive controls, which are considered favorably by feminists, must be evil.
See how love of neighbour/others, in this case children, has been replaced by self-love, they are now not a blessing but almost a curse.
@ numo:
My root objection to psychology is when it is used as a substitute for an honest admission of sinful behaviour and/or a means of sanctification. I have been influenced by Jay Adams on this, in particular the shifting sands in the psychological world are hardly a ‘rock’ to base your life on. One set of theories replaces another. Secondarily, this can also lead to us being obsessed with ourselves, introspective, ‘me and my problems’ as though the world revolved around us. (There may be times when this is in order, but not as a way of life.)
I had a friend in the theology department when studying, and we hit it off because he too had come through a similar process of disentanglement from house-church charismatic experience. His wife was a professional psychologist. So of course I said psychology is bunk …
In the ensuing discussions, we remained friends, had to agree to disagree on this amicably – and he did realise my initial response was designed to elicit a response! It became clear to me we were not always talking about exactly the same thing, and I think he had some sympathy with my objections above, even if he did think some psychology could be of assistance in bringing problems to the surface.
Life is too short to get to involved with all this. There may be a genuine scientific element to psychology, but some of it – the vague descriptions of different personality types – to me don’t seem much more useful than astrological houses or the four elements and humours and all that stuff; a kind of gnostic special knowledge of what makes people tick.
Doubtless you will not find this a satisfying answer. I was quite happy to read and discuss the ideas of Freud and Jung at university – Marx as well!! – but they don’t particularly grab my interest to delve too deeply. History is something else …
@ Victorious:
Plessy was necessary in the wake of the Civil War in order to keep former slaves in their proper place. IMO the decision indicates the underlying attitude toward black persons which was not one of equality. There was equality before the law (theoretically) just like there is equality before God with the Female Subordinationists. But there was no real way for black persons to live as equals. They were subordinated “equals” just as females are subordinated “equals.”
Once it was believed that black persons were not persons or not citizens, it became very complicated to determine what they could or could not do. Very similar to the complications surrounding what a woman can or cannot do in the Female Subordinationisst spectrum. Their individual views on those issues differ, but their underlying presupposition is the same: God created male and female with status boundaries, and violating those status boundaries is a violation of God’s will.
The only question is which activities by woman violate her status as a “biblical woman.” And so we get lists like Grudem published about women’s roles and their relative acceptability. For which there was absolutely no biblical warrant for any of his decisions. And it is why we are discussing John Piper’s ridiculous pontifications on the other thread.
I think if people would study the history of not only slavery but how the presuppositions about black persons played out after the Civil War, they would see many similarities (and also dissimilarities.) R.L Dabney certainly recognized the parallels between the status of black persons and women before the Civil War. He warned about what would happen if women were freed and if black persons were freed.
@ Ken:
The word is metonymy. Schreiner and Kostenberger make this claim, and their paper is online if anyone wants to read it and judge their reasoning for themselves. JS also pointed to an article by D.A. Carson who also thinks the same thing. Their reasoning is convoluted and must first *assume* that there are divinely-ordained Roles. Their arguments beg the question. There is no logical or textual necessity for reading “saved” as a metonymy for “female roles.” It is far more logical to read it, along with the other verses, as a refutation of Ephesian Artemis cult doctrines surrounding childbirth, female supremacy, etc. But that does not yield the “right” answer, so they ignore the cultural context. Which violates another *concservative* hermeneutical principle.
I don’t know what you mean by “saved” having some special meaning in that text. It means saved, rescued, made whole, healed, etc.
And their arguments do not get around the larger hermeneutical questions which I addressed to JS. One verse that is grammatically linked and rhetorically linked to another verse cannot have a separate designer hermeneutic applied to it when the “what it plainly says” hermeneutic is rigidly applied to 2:11-12. That destroys the integrity of Paul’s argument and looks exactly like the special pleading hermeneutic that it is.
What is the reason for a switch in hermeneutic between 2:11-12 and 2:15?
Why do you read the Woman Question through the lens of the most radical “feminists” out there? How does what some females say invalidate a mutualist interpretation? If that is so, then the Complementarian/Female Subordinationist view is invalidated by the biggest misogynists out there. Unless you want to invoke some more special pleading.
Gram3 wrote:
Gram, I am going to have to be quick!
I’m glad you’ve noticed I have never claimed men cannot be deceived; it is very clear from the bible and experience that they can be. I would also say again I have known Spirit-filled women with a great deal of discernment.
In my experience – limited but not non-existent – all those I have met who were demonised, involved in some occult practice and/or needed ‘deliverance’ ministry were with one possible exception, female. There is of course a link between these three. The divination/spiritualism field seems over-populated by women. Those involved in inner healing and similar pseudo-christian mysticism were women. The significant infiltration of this in Willow Creek was largely through women teachers. Devotees of co-dependency seem to be largely women.
I’m not saying this is confined to women, and there are plenty of big name superlative apostle male deceivers and deceived around today. But I would suggest that in some areas women do seem to be more prone to this particular kind of deception than men. It’s an opinion, you don’t have to agree with it, but I have found some echo of 1 Tim 2 but the woman was deceived and fell into transgression in all this.
It is not as though, in trying to avoid being hung-up about women being teachers, I have never been open to this as a possibility. (If you think I have never ever been willing to countenance this, you would be wrong.) I can only say when 1 Tim 2 is relegated to Ephesus, the kind of things I have listed above seem to follow in its wake. My latest experience of this was not very long ago, and I’m afraid I thought ‘here we go again’.
Nancy2 wrote:
@ Gram3:
Given what Ken said, I wonder:
1.) What activities are there that a woman should not be involved in from which childbirth would save her?
2.) What is there to save a man from activities that he should not be involved in, or does Ken believe that men in general just naturally more pure than women’s?
3.). How many children does Ken believe a woman should have to keep her from getting involved in activities she should not be involved.
Gram3 wrote:
Would that line of reasoning imply that a couple of bad presidents invalidate democracy and justify monarchy?
@ Ken:
In the New Testament, whether to marry and have children are depicted as choices left up to each person.
As the Bible teaches it, there is no shame and nothing wrong in staying single and childless, for whatever reason. It’s not up to you to sit in judgement as to why someone chooses to forgo either one.
The church today has turned marriage, the traditional family unit, and natalism into idols and thus marginalize anyone who does not or who cannot do either. -Just like Mormons and Muslims, who also go on and on about “family values” and guilt women into marrying and/or having children.
If your religious views about “family” and “parenting” echo those of Islam and Mormons, you might want to ponder that your views are more influenced by worldly assumptions and biases than by the Bible.
The Bible is actually very supportive of celibacy, singleness, and remaining childless – Jesus came from a culture that shamed women for not marrying/ not having kids. He removed that shame, but you want to keep it in place.
This is a PDF:
US Protestant natalist reception of Old Testament “fruitful verses”: A critique
http://chesterrep.openrepository.com/cdr/bitstream/10034/254075/35/john%20patrick%20mckeown.pdf
Gram3 wrote:
Yes, I take it that a lot of gender comps would confess to being sola scriptura, yet they point to what they see as a break down of culture to prove their points.
Just as Ken was doing in a post I replied to right above, where he seems to argue that nasty feminists won’t have children because they are selfish or immature or materialistic. Well, that’s pointing to culture to attempt to prove some kind of point, it’s not arguing from the biblical text itself.
I don’t think the Bible says remotely or vaguely if not out right anywhere (certainly not in the NT) that NOT having children makes a person selfish, immature, materialistic.
The Bible is silent either way, IIRC, on motives people may have for not having children.
Gram3 wrote:
It is interesting that if you buy into assumptions about the biblical text, it can be hard to move away from them.
A lot of people think that the Bible says there were three Magi that visited Jesus, when the text itself does not specify how many there were.
People just assume there were three Magi, that there was one gift per Magi, there were three gifts, so they assume there must have been three guys, but the text is silent on exactly how many there were.
Victorious wrote:
Yes, I’ve noticed for several years now that the reasoning some Christians use to keep women at second tier (while simultaneously insisting that golly no, they sure don’t view women as second class!) is akin to how white Americans (some Christian, some not) found ways to keep black Americans at second class status. It’s the same reasoning.
The Christians would sometimes appeal to the Bible, though, on top of other rationales.
Ken wrote:
And, btw, I agree with gists of the quote you provided.
Women have in fact been often relegated to nothing but brood mares (baby making machines) by secular culture, and certainly by most of Christian culture, particularly groups such as Quivering families, fundamentalists, and some conservatives.
Women are more than their biology, more than being able to get pregnant. I am worth more than my potential to crank out kids, Ken.
There is nothing wrong with having “self love,” either.
The Bible says you are to love others as you love yourself</b. Healthy self esteem / self love is necessary before someone can reach out to and help others.
Gram3 wrote:
That’s a very good point, and as someone who usually disagrees with secular, left wing feminists, I have to say I do sometimes think some of their criticisms of Christianity’s teachings about women is absolutely correct.
Just because you may normally disagree with most of what your ideological opponents believe or teach, does not mean they are wrong about everything all the time.
In the past couple of years, since my faith crisis has hit, I’ve spent more time reading up on what critics of the Christian faith have to say, everyone from yes, left wing feminists to agnostics and atheists, and they sometimes have very valid, reasonable gripes with how Christians are living or teaching the faith.
One small example: atheist blogs and sites howl and ridicule Christians for sweeping Christian sin under the rug or trying to justify it, like these churches Deb and Dee blog about who excuse or cover up pedos in the midst.
If there is one thing atheists and other Christian critics respect, it’s Christians who tackle this stuff, own up to it, say “yeah, that’s bad.”
I just think the Kens of the world (and other gender comps) make a big mistake when they decide to up front totally disregard and distrust every thing secular feminists (or whomever) have to say.
Sometimes your critics are correct some of the time, after all.
You can re-evaluate your behavior and positions by really listening to what your opponents have to say.
Gram3 wrote:
That is what I would like to know.
There are so women and men who don’t marry or have children and get devote their lives to the care of others.
If child rearing is so important and central to the Christian life, why do we have so little information about the Apostles wives and children and how the Apostles lived with their wives, treated their wives, etc.
@ Nancy2:
I may be misunderstanding your question and Ken’s position, but here is the gist of what Schreiner, Kostenberger, and Moo (sorry I said Carson above) argue. The word rendered “childbirth” stands as a representative for all that a woman does or is or her “roles.” That is because childbirth is something that is reserved for females as a whole, though certain females may be unable to bear children. Males cannot give birth.
Notice, however, that they first assume that there are female “roles” that extend beyond the biological facts of carrying, birthing, and nursing a child. They smuggle all sorts of other things into “childbirth” after first assuming that Paul is using it as a placeholder for those things. To say the least, this is purely speculative theology and a designer logic and hermeneutic.
The content of “female roles” is a matter of dispute. The only thing that they all agree on is that females must be in subordination to their husbands and females must not occupy any positions of authority in the church. Those are non-negotiables.
To continue the explanation of what female roles have to do with being saved, they bring in their *interpretation* of what Paul said about the Woman first being deceived. They interpret Paul to be saying that women are more prone to deception–at least spiritual deception–than males, and that is the reason (the almighty “gar”) females are not permitted to teach or to exercise authority over males. It gets a little dicey because they equivocate on whether male means husband or male in the church or males in general. You really need to pay attention and diagram their arguments.
So, if women are more prone to spiritual deception and that is the reason for the prohibition of female authority and teaching, then deception is tied to roles and the unique female “role” is childbirth, then they conclude that women are saved from spiritual deception if they keep within the bounds of their role(s) which are defined variously but always *not authority over males.*
Gramp3 and I call what they do here lilypad exegesis using hermeneutical skyhooks with speculative smoke and logical legerdemain. It sounds truthy, but makes no sense when you apply a consistent conservative hermeneutic and forego eisegesis. It is essential to break down what they say into its parts and examine each part to see if it is substantiated in the text and whether it makes logical sense. As Lydia said on the Piper thread, they paint a grand picture that sounds right to people until the things they assert are tested.
Daisy wrote:
I actually agree that someone who says that having kids is bad or OppressiveToWomen or BadForThePlanet is just as wrong as the Quiverfull crowd who say that having children is sanctifying. Both of these positions come from a rigid ideological POV and do not allow for any kind of thinking about the various issues involved.
There are people, I am sure, who are selfish and refuse to have kids so that they can indulge their leisure and the pleasure. That has absolutely nothing to do with which sex should be in authority over the other sex. I think there are people who selfishly have kids, too, like the Duggars who sacrificed the welfare of their older kids to satisfy their own desires to be seen as super parents. But that also has nothing to do with whether one sex should rule the other sex. People are selfish and sometimes people are not selfish.
If Ken is arguing that people like me support mutualism because we don’t want to have kids or hate kids or hate motherhood or whatever, then he is very much mistaken and disproved by the facts of my life.
Bridget wrote:
In fairness to Ken, I think he is not saying that having kids is mandatory but that the attitude of being closed to having children for selfish reasons is wrong. I’m trying to filter out my own negative reactions, and he may be saying that childbearing is central to the Christian faith and walk. As you say, that is a difficult position to prove from the record we have. OTOH, the entire Female Subordination enterprise is built on proving things which do not exist in the text until they are put there. Which we learned from JS is OK and which Ken agrees is OK.
Bridget wrote:
Another thing I find insulting about gender comp emphasis on marriage and natalism is that they downplay or disregard how celibate, single, childless adults do care for others, as though it does not matter.
I helped my father care for my mother the last few years of her life, before she died. She was too weak to bathe herself, etc, so I did that sort of thing for her.
But in Ken’s world, that kind of thing just doesn’t matter. Your care of someone else only matters if it’s a kid you gave birth to.
Hmm. Do adopted kids matter in this, if a celibate single woman adopts an orphan and cares for that child, does that count, or does a woman have to marry, have intercourse, and carry a baby for nine months (have a biological off spring)?
Anyhow, singles (men and women who don’t marry or have kids) do care for other people in other ways, whether it’s assisting neighbors or friends.
You don’t have to marry or have a child to contribute to society, to help other people.
Gender comps are so narrowly focuses on the nuclear family, they have a tendency to ignore people who aren’t part of one.
What of senior citizens who live alone, who could use another adult to come over and bring them groceries once a month, or mow their lawn for them?
Gender comps tend to forget about people like that, they are so oddly fixated on ‘marriage and kids.’
Gram3 wrote:
Depending on how the “it’s oppressive to women” is framed, I can see how it is true.
In the Duggar family, they keep a woman perpetually pregnant. That limits her life – she will be unable to pursue anything else in life, like taking college courses or whatever. I think having too many pregnancies too close together can damage a woman’s health.
Then you have Christians who teach a woman’s only role or godly aspiration in life is to have children, which diminishes never married, celibate ladies like myself, and women who are infertile and who have miscarriages.
Gram3 wrote:
If that is what be is saying, then I can respond with the reality that I personally know of no Christian couples that did/do not want children. I just don’t see his selfish femenists argument in the Christian world. Now the world at large is another story altogether, and I am not concerned if everyone does not want children. I’d be more concerned about women having children if they don’t really want them. That is a disaster for the children.
Gram3 wrote:
I just don’t see that to the degree Ken seems to. Why were monks, priests, and nuns so prominent in past history if childbearing has always been so central to the faith?
Bridget wrote:
They married Christ (or the church) so they got a pass? :o)
Gram3 wrote:
Al MOhler was promoting this theme years back. He was calling any couple who decided not to have children, selfish. Even non Christians.
Is it my business he only had 2 but could afford many more? of course not.
@ Daisy:
What I had in mind are women who resent the real burden that childbearing is and covet the perceived freedom that men have from that burden. IMO that is the reason for the cult of abortion on demand, though not the only reason. That is the reason that it is an untouchable sacrament, however, of Radical Feminism. I do not deny that there is a lunatic fringe. I *do* deny that the lunatic fringe represents me in any way at all. I love men, I love “manly” men, and I love women and “girly” things. I do not want to be a man, and I am what most except Female Subordinationists would consider ultra-feminine with kids and grandkids and some competence in the domestic arts. So the Kate Milletts do not represent me, and I resent it when arguments are made against mutualism by invoking the EvilFeminist, as if she would have any part in the discussion regarding marriage and mutuality at all in any case.
Bridget wrote:
That is how I see it. I have a friend of long-standing who decided with her husband not to have children. They did not tell me why they decided not to, but they have been a great aunt and uncle to her sister’s kids. It is none of my business why people have kids or don’t have kids or marry or don’t marry or have 1 kid or 10 kids. The important question is whether they are prepared to do what it takes to be good parents and provide for all the needs of all their children. People have variable capacity to do that, and they need to figure that out.
Bridget wrote:
I imagine there were multiple reasons. It freed them to serve the Lord, as Paul pointed out. They lived under very harsh conditions. To me, the Bible is clear that being married can be a blessing and a burden. Being single can be a blessing and a burden. The question to me is not whether you are single or married, child-free or have lots of kids but whether you are actively living as an icon of Christ and seeking to care for your kids and call them to repentance and faith and a walk of their own with Christ.
@ Lydia:
FWIW, the day any man carries a baby, gives birth, and then cares for a baby is the day that he can say how many kids I need to have or whether I am selfish at the 1 kid level or the 2 kid level. Presumably 2 kids is not selfish because Mary Mohler stopped at 2.
This may be one reason I find strict gender roles so ridiculous.
My Scandinavian heritage doesn’t support it.
Strict gender roles comes from other cultures. And I’m sick to death of men forcing their preferred cultural preference on others. They think that a faulty ‘thus saith the Lord’ stamp on it gives it some sort of authority.
It doesn’t. Gender roles are cultural, not biblical.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/07/invasion-of-the-viking-women-unearthed/1#.VdzdY7PbK72
I have one man in my life mention “a woman’s role” blah, blah, blah. That was on our third and last date.
My father, grandfather, uncles, cousins, and brother would never dream of talking that garbage. My husband has never talked it, either. If he ever does, we’ll be playin’ out some roles.
@ Daisy:
Daisy, may I answer a number of your posts in one?
I think you might have missed the phrase whilst having children is not compulsory … in my post above. You will also not find any mention of marriage being compulsory, nor any putting down of singleness. I think you are imputing to me what others say on this.
Yet marriage and family life is the norm, in the sense that the majority do get married and have a family. I think it fair enough for pastors to preach a positive view of this, of taking responsibility, though in the end if a couple choose not to have a family, it is their business and nobody else’s. There may be good and noble reasons for this, as there are for staying single, but a life of material luxury and ease isn’t one of them.
In complaining that women have been ‘relegated’ to being baby making machines, you are coming (unintentionally?) close to denigrating motherhood. There is a stream of feminism that does just that. The link I quoted led on to a review of books on the benefits of childlessness, and the whole thing was mind-bogglingly selfish. (One wonders whether when those who espouse this view are very old, they will feel guilty for criticising those who did have children, those children now being the ones who nurse and care for them, including some of the less pleasant tasks that they themselves spent a lifetime avoiding.)
I might add culturally, Europe is demographically below replacement level in its birthrate, some countries worse than others, there is a significant minority who opt out of family life, who view it as something negative. This is storing up huge probems for the future in terms of healthcare and pensions, with too few younger people to support the increasing number of elderly – who are also currently living longer. I wonder is the quiverful people in the States have noticed this and are overreacting to it. The answer to no children is to breed like rabbits, as it were.
I have encountered love yourself heresy (and I do not doubt that is what it is) more than any other single piece of false teaching, both in the UK and Germany. Jesus gave two commands in Matt 22 : 38-9: first, love God and second, your neighbour as yourself. The text has been subtly changed to you shall love your neighbour and yourself, to give three commands. If agape love is by definition putting the interests of others before yourself, if you love yourself you will put your interests before those of God, and before those of your neighbour. Self-love and loving your neighour are mutually exclusive. We, as fallen humnan beings, don’t need to be commanded to love ourselves, we do it by nature. Jesus wants to turn this around so what we would naturally seek for ourselves we start to seek for our neighbour; to bless rather than be blessed. A disciple denies self, doesn’t love self.
(There is a legitimate self-respect, and it is right to look after yourself and not spend your life being walked over. I’m not referring to that. I was tempted to have a conversation with Serving Kids under this theme earlier under the heading ‘self-esteem’, but wanted to avoid a heated and acrimonious discussion caused by not really talking about the same thing when using an expression like self-esteem.)
Ken wrote:
????
What are you talking about? Whom has changed the above text? I have NEVER heard of this.
@ Ken:
Totally agree with my understanding of what you are saying here. I would only add that there should be a corresponding affirmation of the lives which single people can live as unto the Lord as well. Being single is a good thing. So is being married. The issue is how do you live your life and for whom. I know some single men at the church which disfellowshipped us who serve the Lord greatly. Same for some of the single women. They could not do the things that they do if they had a family with all of the responsibility that entails.
About the baby-making thing. I do not think you understand. I don’t know if you can understand because of the cultural distance and because, frankly, you are a male and the issue has no cost to you. Complementarians/Patriarchists/Female Subordinationists effectively make women into baby-making machines when they over-emphasize the importance of motherhood *at the same time* as they emphasize a woman’s proper place under her husband’s authority. The takeaway is that, if you are not a mother, then you simply have no significance whatsoever.
It would help your case if you would give equal attention to the selfishness of males as well as females. Not everything that is wrong in society is the fault of women, but you make it seem so by constantly talking about “feminism.” You don’t want to be lumped in with the nuts like Doug Wilson, and we don’t want to be lumped in with the Kate Millets.
Ken wrote:
I don’t have the time now to read the rest of your post, I just skimmed and this grabbed my eye, I may or may not later read the rest and reply.
No, self love and loving your neighbor are not exclusive.
The Bible says you must love others as you love yourself.
Mark 12:31,
“The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
I finally love myself now, I finally for the first time in my life have self esteem, which in turn means I finally have healthy boundaries, too.
Having boundaries means I can help people when and where I choose, without being manipulated or taken advantage of by other people (such as the truly self absorbed or con artists), which would waste my time.
Having self love or self esteem is not the same thing as being selfish.
Ken wrote:
Okay, I’ll bite on this one for now.
Ken, I am not denigrating motherhood. Had I married younger, I was open to the possibility of cranking out a kid myself.
But yes, your brand of Christianity does relegate women to being nothing but baby making machines.
By making as much out of mommy-hood as you do and placing this absurd premium on it, by denigrating being infertile or child free, you turn it into an idol.
You also end up judging, condemning, and-or shaming women who don’t want kids (which is their right, baby making is not a command in the NT), and you marginalize women who do not or cannot have children.
You and your brand of gender comp basically places so much emphasis upon a woman’s usual biological ability to have kids, you assume every women who can SHOULD have kids and tell them it is their only “godly” role. If they do not or cannot have a kid, you accuse them of being a secular feminist, being selfish, materialistic, etc, which is very insulting and sexist.
Sometimes secular feminists are absolutely correct in some of their criticisms of Christians, and this is one area they are totally correct.
BTW, pointing to your issues and misgivings with feminists is not making a case for your position.
You are sola scriptura yes? Then why do you keep pointing to problems you have with secular culture to support your views?
Telling me what you feel is wrong with culture or with feminists is not proving your case from the Bible why all women are selfish or in error for not marrying or not having children.
Daisy wrote:
This!
Amen, Daisy!
How can we give to others when we are all tapped out ourselves? We do have to take care of ourselves.
Daisy wrote:
You really do need to read all of it to understand what I am getting at – and what I am not getting at. Unless you do, I don’t think you are in a position to comment and will end up criticising something I haven’t said.
Gram3 wrote:
It’s nice to agree for once!
I’ll repeat something I said on the other thread:
Men are still sinful, we live in a fallen world very far gone from original righteousness, and injustice is part of that less than perfect scenario, …
I meant, and should have said, that men here means men = males. Some feminists treat men as the enemy (and I’m not denying they can be mistreated by men), but the real enemy is sin. The rebellion against God, and all the consequences this entails in selfish and loveless behaviour.
I’m not sure I mention feminism all that much, rather the stream within it that is antinatalist. This is relevant in a thread with ‘saved through childbirth’ being a point up for discussion. The fact that the bible sees children positively rather than negatively.
Not knowing the cost of childbearing made me smile. You should see the long-term assault on my poor bank account whilst she was building the nest! Still ongoing. They don’t actually ever seem to go away. 🙂 And, unless you are going to be an absentee father, the cost in terms of involvment and time and energy that children necessarily entail. I know physically it’s harder for the wife, but a lot of the rest is pretty mutual. But you did mention the cultural distance, Europe may be very different from the States.
I’ll give you an example of this just for interest. In Germany, a woman who is pregnant has a right to return to her employer after up to 3 years – a colleague is about to do this and will return in 3 years from giving birth. One colleague of mine was away for a total of 9 years with a right to return – she had 3 children. Another male colleague is about to have a year’s parental leave with a right to return to the same job, and the state will continue to pay a significant part (but not all) of his salary. There is also a generous (especially when compared to the UK) child allowance (Kindergeld) for each child, and I believe some additional payments to help offset the cost of having children. (We missed out on this, no-one told us about it. Several thousand Deutschemarks as then was.) Employers are obligated to provide these benefits; if parents want to take advantage of these rights, employers cannot refuse them. Management has to ‘manage’ the problems this causes. So they should, the amount they pay themsleves …
All this to try and enable both work and family, but it has not had the desired effect of solving the demographic problem. A generation largely more able to provide for children than ever, but don’t want them. Strange, isn’t it.
Velour wrote:
I don’t mean the text is literally changed, it is read as though it said love God, and your neighbour, and yourself, to make three instead of two commands. But there are only two commands. The mode of loving your neighbour is to redirect the love of self we all naturally have onto others. Start to love your neighbour as you already do love yourself.
I’m not talking about accepting yourself – strengths and weakness – as God made you and being content with that rather than say what others think you should be.
The nail in the coffin for the self-love I have in mind is in 2 Tim 3.
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress.
For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money,… lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with ‘me’, money or pleasure, but it is when these are put first before a love of God, which usually finds expression in how we treat others that we sin.
Ken wrote:
You or the other Ken (???) bring up your experiences with Willow Creek and assorted other female wacky preachers to justify your (his) assertion that women are more easily deceived and that is why they should not teach or have authority over men. So, yes, you do bring up “feminism” a bunch.
Regarding the cost of bearing a child or being the one to bear the consequences of conception, you can only speak to the economic costs of raising a child. There is much more cost to females than financial of the unbalanced teaching regarding childbearing. There is the social stigma in the church that women bear if they do not have an acceptably-sized family or if they are single. It is not unlike the stigma that “barren” carried in the biblical culture.
There is the cost to her body which extends well beyond the birth. I will not go into that, but it is a fact. The availability of cheap birth control is a relatively new thing, but prior to that, every intimate encounter with her husband carried a risk for the woman–her health and possibly her life. There are other costs, such as the ones Gramp3 and I have addressed with Christian men and women in the Third World and which I will not detail here, to the woman of marital intimacy that are not borne by the husband. You really have no clue, and I wonder if you want to even think about how what you say sounds to real women.
If a man conceives a child with a woman and abandons her, who do you think carries the responsibility for the financial burden of that? Either the woman, her family, or society in general. A man can relatively easily opt-out of his cost, but a woman not so much. At least over here, a woman abandoning her child in any way experiences much more social disapproval than an man who behaves similarly.
When you speak so flippantly about those kinds of costs–as if there is some sort of parity between male and female costs–you diminish the contribution that women make to furthering the human race *and* you simultaneously diminish the contributions that single or childless women make to the human race.
While I agree with you on anti-natalism and feminists who are anti-male, I find the things you say about women and childbearing and deception and so forth to be either uninformed and based on presupposition or tradition. Or frankly sexist. Just as sexist as the anti-male feminists whom we both decry.
Gram3 wrote:
Yes, a woman lays down her life in the birthing process; i.e. willingly give it as a sacrificial act for the sake of bringing children into the relationship. And when the husband lays down his life as a sacrificial act, the mutuality clearly reflects Christ’s sacrifice for the church.
Ken wrote:
I read the parts that I read. Did you read my commentary on your quoted bits, which showed up in my posts to you?
Ken wrote:
That’s your personal opinion that I have not seen (that you equate self-care with selfishness). I can’t speak for men, but for many women including Christian women, we are taught to give to everybody else and to NOT take care of ourselves.
Then we have the NeoCal/YRR/Acts 29/9Marx and their insufferable proof-texting and their “doctrines of men”, demanding comp submission of women and more nonstop giving with no boundaries. They have more in common with radical Islam than with our freedom in Christ. They are suffocating and destructive and completely un-Biblical.
Frankly, women do need a break from this constant demand to give to others, especially women in comp churches.
Velour wrote: – quoting Ken
I didn’t love myself for years, and one reason of several I did not love myself was due to the gender complementarian beliefs Ken is defending on this blog.
He does not get it and never will because he is not a woman and is not subjected to the mistreatment, sexism, and marginalization that we face.
Ken does not notice the sexism in gender comp because it does not affect him personally.
He doesn’t care that gender comp has and continues to hurt women.
I had to dump gender comp (and other things) to even begin to having self love.
Gender comp taught me that women are flawed, not as good as men, and that God loves men more than women, and when men fail, women are somehow to blame, especially if it’s sexual sin. That’s gender comp, Ken.
Daisy wrote:
I know plenty of decent men who don’t subscribe to the comp doctrines and would never dream of it. From what I have seen the men who do subscribe to comp doctrines have one or more of the following in common:
*rigid personalities
*an abusive or absent father in their own life (no proper role modeling of a loving father)
*control issues
*sexual predatory behaviors (easy to use comp doctrine to justify encroaching on others)
*domestic violence issues (same as ^ above…)
*unresolved mommy issues (however it’s usually daddy)
*insecure
*unresolved grief/anger
*lack of empathy
*lack of ability to love others
*fear of change
*legalism and authoritarianism (if you follow x, y, z rules everything will turn out ok)
*immaturity
If anyone is interested, Wade posted a wonderful article entitled “Be in Awe of Jesus and Love Yourself” in which he states:
…. the man or woman that hates himself cannot love others. But the man or woman that becomes captivated by the love of God in Jesus Christ cannot help but love himself. Ironically, when you love yourself deeply, you are able to love others radically.
http://www.wadeburleson.org/2014/02/be-in-awe-of-jesus-and-love-yourself.html
@ Gram3:
It was this Ken, and holds true for his statements about psychology and psychiatry as well.
I lived in the charismatic subculture for a long time; if anything, it was men who tended toward some dangerous extremes, which they thrn imposed on entire congregations, or tried to. Everything from Promise Keepers to complimentarianism,to slightly diluted Gothardism to the evils of the shepherding movement, which last was invented by a small group of charismatic men.
Velour wrote:
That is precisely what I did not equate. In both self-love posts, I tried to make it clear what I was aiming at, excluding legitimate care of yourself.
Let me try a third time:
Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, … This kind of nourishing and cherishing is legitimate, and it is as a bonus in a man’s own interest. Yet the thrust of the passage is that husbands should love their wives, a specific example of loving your neighbour as yourself, rather than aiming to love yourself.
The self-love I reject is this kind:
Do nothing from selfishness (self interest or selfish ambition) or conceit, but in humility count (esteem) others better than yourselves.
Let me quote John MacArthur, even though I several problems with him:
“… a generation of people who are not only proud, but they’ve turned pride into the virtue of all virtues, who are in love with themselves, and who seek to fulfill every whim, and every desire, and every ambition, and every dream, and every hope; who seek to be everything that they can be, who seek to set value on all that they are, and all that they say, and all that they do…
If you love yourself, if you’re into self love, and self esteem, and making sure all your little needs are met, making sure you’re indulged with all your fantasies, and dreams, and schemes, and hopes, and ambitions; you’re going to lose your life [soul in older versions].
Take the latest Tony Jones thread. Did he treat Julie lovingly both when married and subsequently? Is his desire for custody of the children a result of agape love, wanting to put their best interests above those of himself and Julie? Or is this the result of self-love, it’s for his benefit; whom does he really only care about? Has he only ever acted in both his family life and his ‘ministry’ in accordance with what benefits him, narcissitic if you like, but this is the younger brother of self-love? Me first, others second.
Do you now get what I mean by self-love? And all the psychologists in all the world who say ‘you cannot love others until you love yourself’ will never be able to make this anything other than the sin and evil that it is. We all do it in various ways, but that never makes it right.
@ Ken:
Okay, what you call “self-love” has absolutely nothing to do with love. It is ego-stroking, narcissistic self-centeredness where all that matters is ME, ME, ME!!!
That is not at all what we are talking about.
Daisy wrote:
Daisy wrote:
I do know what it is like to be mistreated, unfairly treated, and to some extent marginalised. This is not something unique to women.
I had a mother, have a sister, wife and two daughters. You cannot possibly maintain that sexism, unfair discrimination or objectification of women could never affect me personally. Because I love them, it would affect me. I would be concerned with any false doctrine that hurts people.
A gender comp that devalues women is not something I would ever defend. The complement of the submission of a wife is the love, sacrifice nourishing, cherishing, honouring and considerate behaviour of a husband. That excludes absolutely if lived out the mistreatment of women.
The only reason I would defend complementarianism is because I think it is in the NT. Even Gram3 and myself are almost in complete agreement on this, the difference is largely confined to how much, if any, the word ‘head’ has an element of authority in it.
Can you not stop for a moment and consider that there is a range of views on this subject? You are constantly stereotyping. I wouldn’t dream of reading Evan’s blog and then accuse Gram3 of mocking the bible ‘like all egalitarians’, because not all egalitarians are devotees of RHE, there are extremes on the fringes of both views. And I’m not a Duggar or a Phillips.
@ Ken:
I think the problem in communication here is that you apply “self-love” too indiscriminately to behaviors or decisions which may not be motivated by “self-love” at all. Or, the same *decision* may be motivated by different *motivations* or even motivated by other-love considerations. To ascribe one person’s motivation to all persons who make that same decision is unfair and inaccurate.
For example, it is virtuous for males to desire a position of “headship” over females, but for females to desire to have a direct and unmediated relationship with God and for females to desire to have their own personal agency which they *freely* can lay down for others is *not* virtuous. It is deemed “feminism” that is lumped together with the grasping self-seeking of *certain* feminists who are anti-male and have rejected the interdependence of male and female and the complementarity of the sexes.
The result is that you are advocating for female virtues and male virtues instead of Christian virtues which consist of *all* Christians imitating Christ in the totality of his character. There is not a female imaging of Christ that is different from male imaging of Christ, our Head, the one into whom we are commanded to grow up into as we mature in him. The interposition of male “headship” hinders maturity and does not reflect the rest of the Bible’s record of Christ’s teaching or Paul’s teaching.
@ Gram3:
My experience with charismatics and Willow Creek only seemed to confirm my existing understanding of 1 Tim 2, it was not the cause of it.
I wasn’t in any sense being flippant with the costs of bringing up children, neither financially nor the effort involved. I’m going to answer your point on this by quoting my mother: women make far too much fuss about all this these days. I’m not giving details as it is too personal, but she was in a very good position to make that statement. I still have the utmost repect and honour for her.
I really do think there is a huge cultural distinction between Europe and the States. Europe if anything has tended towards becoming quite anti-children for some of the population for one reason or another, and I know of no church that would preach the need to have large families. If anything you might be looked at askance if you had more than 3 children (I know this from experience!). They might encourage couples to have children rather than not have them, but not prescribe a certain number.
I heard MacArthur recently strongly preaching to the singles in his congregation that not only should they get married, and as soon as possible, they should do so while young. Frankly I almost winced at it. I can’t imagine anyone I know in the church scene on this side of the pond saying this. He appeared to be trying to make it a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I’m not convinced he was really anything other than serious, he came over as too dogmatic – unless I’m barking up the wrong tree here. Advise them to do this, yes. To harangue them to do it, definitely no.
Ken wrote:
Actually I agree that the semantic range of “head” may include the idea of authority because patriarchs provided and protected their clans while *also* being the one in authority over their clans. I think it is a long leap to say that “head” *always* means one thing and one thing only when used as a metaphor for something else. I believe that Grudem and Piper and the other Female Subordinationists make this long leap into illegitimate totality transfer.
In other words, I believe that a conservative hermeneutic demands that we understand what Paul means by “head” by looking at his explanation for “head” which he provides in the immediate context of “head.” And, in addition, he defines “head” in Ephesians 4 which precedes the “submission” participle. So, you and the Female Subordinationists are defining “head” via a participle while ignoring the way in which Paul explicitly uses and explains his understanding of “head” in the context of this letter. That is a violation of a conservative hermeneutic, and is exactly the kind of thing that cults do when they derive their aberrant doctrines from misused prooftexts.
You have a complete human right to assert that “head” means “authority” in this instance, but you do not have conservative hermeneutical grounds to do so.
Ken wrote:
And that is exactly what confirmation bias looks like. How do you know that your *interpretation* of your experience at Willow Creek was evidence which supports your prior belief? Conversely, how do you know that your prior belief about female propensity to spiritual deception did not determine your interpretation of your experience at Willow Creek?
ISTM that a much more valid approach to both the question of “What caused the trouble at my Willow Creek church” and the question of “What, if anything, does it mean that the Woman was deceived” would be to first look to the Bible if the Bible is our authority, and certainly if we uphold sola scriptura. And it follows from that that we should use the commonly accepted hermeneutical principles to derive the *meaning* of the texts so that we can *apply* that meaning to the instant case: Willow Creek.
If the text informs us that women are more easily deceived or prone to spiritual deception than men, then we might have evidence for our conclusion that Willow Creek lapsed into whatever it lapsed into due to the spiritual deception of women. That evidence from the Bible would not be sufficient to prove that was what happened at Willow Creek, but it would be evidence that the spiritual deception of women *might* have had something to do with Willow Creek’s problems.
But you have not demonstrated from the text of the Bible that the Bible teaches us that women are more easily deceived. The text tells us that *one* Woman was deceived by the serpent. It does not tell us why the serpent approached the Woman first. It does not tell us why the Woman believed the serpent. It does not tell us that the deception that Woman fell into is the inheritance of every one of the Woman’s female descendants but none of her male descendants. The text does record Paul using the Woman, Eve, as an example of *both males and females* who fall into deception and the consequences of that.
So, in short, your presupposition of a special female propensity to spiritual deception is not supported by the texts we have and is, in fact, refuted in the only explanatory text which is Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthian church not to be deceived as Eve was deceived. You are elevating your presupposition above the Biblical evidence.
And that is *one* reason, but not the only one, that your assertion about female character is so offensive and repugnant to the females reading here. I hope that you can at least start to think about that.
Ken wrote:
Except, there are indeed some people who “hate their own flesh”. Some people in the world hate their bodies enough to starve themselves, or lacerate themselves. Others are so convinced of their own worthlessness and unlovability, that they find themselves in despair of anyone — perhaps even God — valuing or even noticing them. That, as I understand, is one aspect of depression.
I would qualify Paul’s words here, by saying that most men don’t hate themselves or their own flesh. That is, those who are emotionally and mentally healthy. I don’t think this verse can be unequivocally applied to people with some mental illnesses. I suspect that such people do not, in fact, love themselves naturally. And as such, they are ill-equipped to love God, their spouses, or anyone else. First and foremost, they need to learn that they have value, and to love themselves accordingly, which might not be as easy as it sounds to the rest of us.
Ken wrote:
Ken, I get the feeling that you’re not really listening to Daisy, or what she’s telling you about her experience. From what I can tell, her experience with depression — and being unable to love herself — left her utterly debilitated. And it wasn’t a knowledge of the Bible or Jesus that helped her out of that. It was learning to love herself that eventually helped her to really care for others, in ways that didn’t leave her codependent and despairing.
(Daisy, if I’m putting words in your mouth, please let me know. Your experience is valuable for helping us understand things we haven’t gone through ourselves.)
@ Ken:
You missed the point. There is a difference between self-care and self-love (i.e. self-seeking).
thisbrother.wordpress.com
‘Ancient Bible Scholars Weigh in on the Meaning of the Word “Head”‘
Serving Kids In Japan wrote:
Regarding the no man hates his own flesh, I was only trying to clarify what I mean by self-love, or rather what I don’t mean!
Regarding Daisy, my complaint is that she has not been listening to me! I’m aware of her situation regarding marriage and that this is a sensitive issue. With that in mind, believe it or not, I have tried to tone down replies to her when this has been the theme. But she has been guilty of imputing views to me I don’t hold, and that I have clarified I don’t hold, because she lumps everything labelled ‘comp’ together with presumably what she has seen in the States. She has admitted only skim reading posts or sometimes (I think) not reading them at all. That’s fair enough, she doesn’t have to, but she ought them to be more careful what she goes on to say later. It can get very wearing having to keep repeating things – all the more so having already made an effort to clarify things.
Yet it seems rude not to say anything at all.
As an epilogue on the self-love thing, if she has found a way to be set free from the ‘fear of man’ (being something I can relate to), then I’m glad. My encounter with codependency was psychologists engaging in all out war against Ephesians 5. So we are coming at this from different angles.
Incidentally, I liked the irenic tone of your post!
Gram3 wrote:
I agree the word head needs to be determined from it’s use in Ephesians. Paul initially says he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, where the enforced submission of the spiritual authorities and rules to the head is not mutual, and head cannot really mean anything other than head in the sense of authority, pre-eminent over. This is for the church, so the nature of this authority is benign.
I think this parallels 5 : 21f, in particular because of the contrast of submit and head. Inbetween you point out Eph 4, where the function of Christ as head is to enable the edification of the church. So I see no reason not to include this meaning in chapter 5 as well.
Gram3 wrote:
My pre-Willow Creek experience simply consisted of seeing Paul’s prohibition of women teaching elders due to Eve’s deception and Adam’s abdication of responsibility as custodian of the ‘word’.
Incidentally, I didn’t have a bad experience with Willow Creek, having initially been impressed with them and their evangelistic zeal, I gradually became aware of very serious deviations from scripture in their practice, and ended up bowing out. (It has the most incredible deadening effect on your faith, the internal spiritual content seems to disappear e.g. you don’t need to pray any more, and it’s all about going through the outward motions. It can take a long time to shake it off.)
You make it sound as though I am claiming I have biblical support for women being more prone to deception. I phrased the issue a bit more tentatively than that. But it is true that, as with the preceding charismatic years, the preponderance of women in the pseudo-Christian activities of Willow did make me wonder if in some areas of spiritual life, women are more prone to deception. If I could find it all again, I think you would at least say ‘I see what you mean, Ken’.
It could have been that this massively successful church, though having female leaders, demonstrated that Paul’s prohibition was local and temporary, though I have always found that a bit difficult to believe. In the event, it seems a little Genesis 3 has occurred there.
This also happened in the local church, it’s not just theory about a church on the other side of the world. The bible was sidelined, and I couldn’t get my better half to go any more. She rightly said, what’s the point.
I have never maintained that men are in any sense deception-proof, but it does remain true that Adam was not deceived, but the woman was utterly deceived. The whole marketing the gospel and making it meet customer’s felt needs is a deception, and men are propagating it too. There are some for whom this is apparently their religion and their God.
I’m only giving an opinion that experience backs up a certain understanding of scripture, and hence I have more likely to have understood it correctly rather than got it wrong. But it’s not decisive.
Ken wrote:
Did Adam fail to protect Eve?
@ Nancy2:
To be more accurate, the man failed to protect the woman. Being formed first, he had the command of God before the woman was created, but then failed to keep it himself when she was deceived. I’ve no doubt you’ve heard sermons on how the woman distorted and added to the word, and how Satan in the form of the serpent denied it. He (the man) is implicitly responsible for failing to keep the word given him, and instead listened to the woman.
Adam’s failure of responsibility is why the fall is attributed to him and not the woman. His sin was deliberate, hers due to deception.
I think it wise to let the NT shed light on this, this helps avoid speculating about what exactly went on.
I take it as literal history narrated partly in figurative language.
Woman sinned because she was deceived. Woman was deceived because man failed. Man sinned deliberately. So, instead this justifying woman becoming educated and developing the ability to discern and accept personal responsibility, this only serves to stress that woman (who sinned because she was deceived) must submit to man (who failed and sinned deliberately)?
you sir are very obtuse.You think is you use sugary words than the problem is over.CAn you describe to me how is the having to defer to the man decision in in all her personal or non personal matters is a complement to her without implying that she has inferior abiliyies to think for her self ?I think you should start from opening a dictionary about what a complement means .
farah wrote:
Well said. The truth is that they do not care about the dictionary meaning. They give old words new meanings and hope that they can fool women and men with their clever words. It is the opposite of the way that we should use language which is to build up one another instead of tearing one another down so that we can feel superior.