Mike Winger Video 2.2 (Genesis 2)

1. My walk through Mike Winger's videos on women in ministry and leadership continues. He spends over an hour in his second video on Genesis 2. He goes through a lot of small arguments that various people make here and there. He seems especially to engage two resources.

First, I am glad that he has continued his dialog with Philip Payne. It seems to me he argues with him over small points. I went to those points in Payne's book and didn't get the same feel as you get from his video. I didn't disagree with Winger on most of his points in relation to these small points. There are so many arguments that have been made by so many people on both sides -- some are stronger than others.

The other source he engages significantly in this video is Two Views on Women in Ministry in the Zondervan Counterpoints series. It features Tom Schreiner and Craig Blomberg on the complementarian side and Linda Bellvue and Craig Keener (Asbury professor) on the egalitarian side.

You may be surprised to know that I agree with a great deal of what Winger says about the details of Genesis 2. In fact, he reminded me of some of the same reactions I had to various ideas in seminary. At Asbury, Don Joy was particularly fond of the suggestion that the initial 'adam of Genesis 2 might have been androgynous -- both male and female. I thought this was funny then. Joy had asked the Bible faculty at Asbury about the concept before he published his book Bonding. They told him they didn't see it, but he published it anyway.

I would say, though, that I don't think it's as outrageous as it might seem. I just don't think it's the right interpretation.

2. I do want to get to some key points of disagreement, though, before getting into minutia. Fairly early on in the video, he says that both complementarians and egalitarians both agree on the centrality of Genesis 2 for the debate. Let me say as an odd duck that I have never really felt this way. In my booklet, Why Wesleyans Favor Women in Ministry (2004), I didn't mention Genesis at all. I do mention it in my more recent, A Biblical Argument for Women in Ministry and Leadership because it is part of the debate, but it has never been the central part of the debate for me.

Why? Two reasons.

The first is something that I discussed in one of two posts I made in preparation for this one. We are in a phase of biblical studies and biblical theology that is characterized by what I have called "flatness." For most, it is a "pre-modern" or "pre-reflective" perspective. That is to say, it is based on a deficient understanding of how to read the books of the Bible in context.

I may actually be more annoyed at the prevalence of these "narrative" readings among post-liberals for whom it is a postmodern reading. These narrative readers deliberately minimize contextual readings in favor of reading the Bible as a single story. I am perfectly fine with this as long as you acknowledge that you are reading the Bible out of context to do so. 

The pre-modern reads the Bible as one book from God to us without awareness of context. But the post-liberal to a large extent ignores historical difference. For some, it's a matter of principle even. In my Who Decides What the Bible Means? I set out as legitimate 1) original meaning interpretations, 2) orthodox-consensus readings of Scripture, 3) church-community readings of Scripture, and 4) individual spiritual readings of Scripture -- the key being that the Holy Spirit is directing these readings.

3. But if we construct a biblical theology, it is clear that a Christian reading of Scripture must privilege New Testament conclusions on Old Testament issues over the original meaning of the Old Testament. [At this point, a number of evangelical Old Testament scholars break out in hives.]

For example, there is nothing in Leviticus to suggest that animal sacrifices (or the temple) will ever stop being offered. In this regard, Hebrews provides the authoritative perspective on those sacrifices. They were illustrations of the one effective sacrifice of Christ. Similarly, circumcision is the assumption of the Old Testament. But Paul tells the Galatians they will have fallen from grace if they get circumcised.

Finally, as I show in the previous post I mentioned, the New Testament has distinct interpretations of Old Testament passages that go well beyond what those passages meant originally. For example, we would not get the impression that Lot was greatly distressed about the sins of Sodom from Genesis, but 2 Peter 2:7-8 portray him as a righteous man vexed by the sins of the city. We can take 2 Peter to be making an inspired point through Lot without thereby changing our inductive interpretation of Genesis 19.

What are you getting at Ken? What I am getting at is that I am most concerned with what the New Testament has to say about men and women more than with what Genesis 2 by itself says. This is not because Genesis 2 isn't significant. It is because Christian theology prioritizes New Testament revelation as more complete and more precise. 

(Mind you -- I know I am creating challenges for myself hereby. Winger already mentions in this video that 1 Timothy 2:13 uses the order of Adam and Eve's creation to support 2:12. I will defer that discussion for later.) 

Let me illustrate this principle of NT privilege. Colossians 2:16 tells the Gentile Colossians to stand their ground about anyone who condemns them because they do not keep the Jewish Sabbath. Romans 14:5 similarly tells the Romans to decide as a matter of their own conscience whether they will consider one day above another -- a clear allusion to the Jewish Sabbath. In short, Paul did not consider the Jewish Sabbath to be binding on Gentile believers. For him, it was a matter of personal conviction for them.

Now this is a straightforward observation, in my opinion. But it causes all matter of hives for the Flatlanders. "But, but, but." One person said to me once, "But the Sabbath goes back to creation!" (Gen. 2:3). "I know," I responded. "Isn't it crazy? Paul doesn't care."

4. So what does Genesis 2 say? Here let me invoke two posts I did recently in my Science and Scripture series, one of which mentioned different approaches to Genesis 2-3 in that regard and the second of which did some preparatory work on questions of genre. I'll leave the New Testament use of Genesis 2-3 for later in Winger's series.

First, Genesis 2-3 in context was an expression of the messed up state of the world. That is its point. I argued in the second post just mentioned that a comparison of Genesis 1-2 suggests that these are not to be taken as rigid history but as more "archetypal" -- expressing fundamental things. The reason is because Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 present a different order of creation. This doesn't mean one is wrong. It means that we are wrong to expect them to be literal presentations. They are doing something more profound. They aren't exactly poetry, but what they are doing is as "poetic" as it is literal, in my opinion.

The later of the two creation presentations, Genesis 1, puts male and female together as co-regents of the earth with no fall mentioned.

The second presentation in Genesis 2-3 culminates in three expressions of the state of the world. Men work hard to get the soil to yield its fruit. Both men and women will die even though God had intended for them to eat from the Tree of Life and live forever. Women will have painful childbearing and they will find themselves dominated by their husbands. And of course there are consequences for snakes too.

This is the point of Genesis 2-3. These chapters express the fallen situation of humanity. They are "etiological." They answer the questions, "Why do men have to work so hard on the land?" "Why do people die?" "Why do women have such painful childbirth?" "Why are women dominated by men?" (And why don't people and snakes get along?) [1]

In the process, the point of Genesis 2 is to picture the world before it was this way. As I have argued, it is probably not a video tape. If it were meant as a videotape, it would contradict the order of Genesis 1. Rather, it expresses that 1) men did not have to work hard before the Fall, 2) women did not have a painful life before the Fall, with their husbands dominating them and, of much less importance, 3) snakes and humans weren't on such bad terms before the Fall. 

For this reason, if there is hierarchy in Genesis 2, it is not the point. Indeed, the point is the harmony of Adam and Eve before the Fall, their peaceful cooperation. Their co-regency. The point of the way it is presented is the oneness and unity of Adam and Eve before the Fall -- the one fleshness of them and the distinction of them from the animals -- not Adam's authority over Eve. That almost goes against the point.

Shocker -- I am willing to say that there could be a light assumption of Adam's primacy in the way Creation 2 is presented. What I am saying is that, not only is that not the point. I am saying that to emphasize it is to miss the point of the story, which is the harmony of the two prior to their act of disobedience. 

In such a thoroughly patriarchal world, how might you present a pre-Fall situation that did not have man and woman at each other's throats? That is what Genesis 2 is about. It is the structure of the ancient world without the conflict, struggle, and bitterness. It is God meeting them in their assumptions and moving them from there. It gave an idyllic picture that was the opposite of dominance.

But God wants to do more!

5. So the street warfare that Winger engages in is all fine and good. I agree with him on almost every minute point of interpretation. But, at the risk of playing into his hands, I believe that this is a spiritual struggle. There are women who know they are called. There are men who know women are called. Some of the interpretations of some can be a little "creative," shall we say. (And Winger fully acknowledges that there are some crazy complementarian interpretations out there too.) 

But is because they see the trajectory of Scripture. They see the whole council of God. One of the problems with fundamentalism, in my opinion, is that it can get so involved with the verse-by-verse street warfare that it misses the Spirit of Scripture. It misses the big point because it is arguing about some detail of the letter. This is what the Princeton Calvinists did with slavery in the mid-1800s.

This is not putting experience above the Bible. Interpreting and applying the Bible is a complicated thing -- look at how many thousands of interpretations and applications there are out there. A little guidance from the Holy Spirit seems in order. Indeed, Bible technicians, "letteralists," can be dangerous because they can miss the heart of Scripture while focusing on the details (cf. Matt. 23:23-24).  

[1] I have no problem seeing the snake as Satan, but this was not part of the original meaning of Genesis 3. Not only is Satan not mentioned, but the understanding of Satan does not seem to have come into play until after this time -- later in the post-exilic period. It is not until the first century BC that any surviving Jewish writing equates the snake with Satan.

William Webb's Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals

1. More than one person has recommended William Webb's 2001 book to me, Slaves, Women, & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. I suspect they have done so in part because Webb articulates positions similar to ones I have articulated over the years. I would like to blog through it over the next couple weeks.

On a very minor note, I'm not too fond of the title. I would have preferred "Slavery, Gender, and Sexuality" or some such. Indeed, his use of a particular word at one point in chapter 1 made me think, "Hmm. This book is nineteen years old."

I'm sure he didn't mean it, but the title ironically implies a male perspective (as well as that of a free heterosexual). It is a book that is going to talk about women (and the others). The title ironically implies a position of dominance in order to talk about egalitarianism.

2. Having said that, the introduction suggests that he is going to express in probably more convincing terms the kinds of positions that I have argued my whole teaching career. When I look at the list of instructions from the Bible on pages 14-15, I see passages to which I have referred throughout my teaching to make similar points.

The question he poses is, "Which of these instructions from Scripture are still in force for us today exactly as they are articulated?" Here are just five of the some forty scriptures he gives:

• "Be fruitful and multiply."
• "Greet one another with a holy kiss."
• "Sell your possessions and give to the poor."
• "Love the LORD with all your heart."
• "Use a little wine because of your stomach."

The question he raises in effect is how we know which we apply to today completely as stated and which we modify in some way in our application.

The book moves in three parts. The first section lays the groundwork--"Toward a Hermeneutic of Cultural Analysis." He will set out culture and present what he calls a "redemptive-movement framework." This is similar to what I have called a trajectory in Scripture and that some call "progressive revelation."

The second section lays out criteria. Webb will set out 18 criteria to determine what components within the biblical text have ongoing application in a straightforward rather than indirect form. Key to this task is to find internal criteria, that is to find the principles for such hermeneutical discernment from within Scripture itself.

The last section both corroborates the ideas with reasoning outside the Bible and he also plays the Devil's advocate against his own perspective.

3. Chapter one is titled, "The Christian and Culture." He starts giving the familiar comparison of culture to the water in which a fish might swim. "What awakens us to culture is contrast" (21). In other words, we best realize that we are in a context by seeing how our context differs from other contexts.

Sometimes, he argues, Christians are to be counter-cultural. At other times, they go along with the culture ("paracultural"). "It is necessary for Christians to challenge their culture where it departs from kingdom values; it is equally necessary for them to identify with their culture on all other matters" (22). The key is to know what kingdom values are, which is not always as easy as you might think.

As an aside, I was reminded of discussions we had in 2007 as we were putting together the initial outcomes for the Wesley Seminary curriculum. Norm Wilson suggested that the phrase "kingdom values" was complicated because of the tendency to confuse them with values that are really Christianity played out in our culture. To put it another way, kingdom values never exist in the abstract. We can only observe them played out in particular times and places--"contextualized."

Here is a key point--kingdom values are always contextualized in Scripture as well. "Within the text of Scripture we find portions that are transcultural (e.g., love for one's neighbor) and portions that are cultural, or more accurately, portions that contain significant cultural components (e.g., slavery texts)" (23).

He does mention something that I think is important here. In one sense, this language is misleading. "In one sense all of Scripture is cultural" (24). Indeed, I do not like the term transcultural. I prefer to use the term, "omnicontextual." Every word of the Bible--and anything else--is cultural in the sense that we cannot escape culture or contextualization.

Nevertheless, he uses terms like "cultural confinement," "cultural relativity," and "culturally bound" to refer to parts of the Bible that would not translate well into other times and places.

4. The chapter ends by setting out the spectra of positions on "the women's issue" and "the homosexual issue." Again, don't really like the way this is phrased.

The spectrum on the role of women
1. Strong patriarchy

• No instance of women in leadership over a man

2. Soft patriarchy

• Women in lower ministry positions, just not senior leadership, ok in secular society

3. Evangelical egalitarianism

• Women in any role, mutual submission in marriage

4. Secular egalitarianism

• equal rights rather than submission of some kind, work can take priority over family

The spectrum on homosexuality
1. Marital heterosexuality only

• traditional position

2. Covenant adult

• Homosexuality can only be expressed in a monogamous, covenant (we would now say marital) relationship

3. Casual adult homosexuality

• any expression involving consenting adults

So those are the categories Webb will be using. More to come...

Modeling after the New Testament Church? 3

... continued from Saturday
_____________________
This entire line of questioning brings up a very important question. To what extent are the biblical narratives description and to what extent are they prescription?  Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, in their well known book, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, suggest that stories in the Bible do not tell us how to act unless we can show somehow that their authors intended us to take them that way. [1]  For them, our default sense should be that the biblical stories are simply telling us what happened, not that we should act the same way.

On the one hand, you can see the common sense of what Fee and Stuart are saying.  If the purpose of Luke-Acts is simply to tell us how things happened, then the story does not make any claims about whether things should have happened that way or not.  Just because Judas betrayed Jesus doesn't mean that we should.

This is a very important point because there is a kind of false but very common intuition in the church today that our goal should be to do everything the way the New Testament church did.  If they had deacons then we should have deacons.  If they ran churches by a board of elders then we should.  If they didn't eat with Christians who were doing immoral things then we shouldn't.

The problems with this approach go well beyond the fact that description is not prescription. There is of course the point Fee and Stuart are making.  Just because the stories of the New Testament describe the church acting a certain way doesn't in itself mean that we are being instructed to act that way. They cast lots to chose the highest leadership of that moment.  Should we do that at our top church conferences--identify two or three final candidates and then roll the dice?  They sold all their extra possessions and redistributed the resources to those in need?  Should we do that as well today?

Maybe we should.  As we'll see at the end of this chapter, there are often are good reasons to think that biblical story tellers meant for us to imitate certain characters and actions in the story and avoid others.  Nevertheless, Fee and Stuart's basic point seems valid.  We have to be discerning in which parts of the story are models and which parts are simply the story.

However, there is a more significant reason why we should not just blindly imitate the New Testament church when it comes to the how they did things.  Even though the Bible is for us, it was not originally written to us.  The way the early church structured its leadership, as well as the way they did many other things, had to do with certain underlying goals and principles. But the specifics of how they accomplished those goals and principles had everything to do with the historical and cultural context in which they were playing them out.

Anyone who has spent any time in another culture knows that while the underlying principles are the same, the "how" to accomplish them often differs widely.  In that sense, doing today exactly what they did in the early church may not get to the goal at all. Does men greeting one another with a kiss in church today accomplish the same goal as it did in the early church? Does subordinating wives to husbands have the same connotation today as it had in the early church?

In the end, it is foolish to think that we should structure churches or manage our money with the same specifics as the early church or ancient Israel did.  Unless we live in the third world, most of us live in a dramatically different cultural context than they did. Doing the specifics of what they did doesn't accomplish the same purpose as what they did if those specifics do not do the same thing today. We might actually end up working at cross-purposes to the biblical purposes!

A great example of this principle is the Jewish practice of not eating meat and cheese at the same meal. They take this practice from Exodus 23:19, which says not to cook a young goat in its mother's milk. We do not know for sure why the Law prohibits this. Perhaps it had something to do with the Canaanite religion that surrounded ancient Israel. What is certain is that it had nothing to do with eating meat and cheese on the same plate.

So Jews continue to do something today that almost certainly has nothing to do with the purpose of the practice in the Bible. When Christians try to apply aspects of the Bible today that had everything to do with their ancient context, they end up looking just as foolish, perhaps even immoral at times. Those who used the Bible to argue against abolishing slavery in the early 1800s were of this sort, as we can see clearly today in hindsight.  Today, those who insist a husband must be the head of the wife may very well being doing the same.

You are welcome to meet in house churches if you want or only use the kinds of instruments that existed in the first century.  Women can cover their heads with a veil.  But these actions don't have the same meaning today that they had back then.  Such practices come off as awkward at best and work at cross-purposes to the gospel at worse...

[1] How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 118-19.

Christians, Women, and Leadership

I think I make a post like this one at least once a year.  Here's a summary of my argument for total egalitarianism.

1. If we were starting from scratch, what would we think given only a few starting points like

• God does not show favoritism.
• God is love.
• God wants the world to be reconciled to him.  

Let's also throw in some obvious truths about men and women from experience and reason as well:

• Gender is not a predictor of spirituality, insight, or leadership capacity.
• Some women are more spiritual, have more insight, and have greater leadership gifts than some men.  In other words, general trends in terms of gender are irrelevant when it comes to individual persons and situations.  Even if you could show certain trends relating to gender in terms of spirituality, insight, and leadership capacity, such a finding is irrelevant to the question of whether an individual woman or man is more spiritual, has more insight, or is more gifted as a leader either in general or in terms of a specific.
• In cultures where "the gig is up" on the idea that men are always smarter than women, that women can never lead as well as men, to take a position that assigns leadership roles purely on the basis of gender likely creates an obstacle to the gospel.  If we take this position, we had better have a good reason. 

So the stakes are high before I even come to the gospel.  Male genitalia are not particularly known either for their spirituality, insight, or leadership capacity.  Quite the contrary.  And since "God is no respecter of persons," a person who starts without any bias would come to the Bible expecting it to affirm a fully egalitarian position.

2. Everyone finds some things strange in the Bible.  Christians have always found some verses in the Bible that are "unclear."  So you're telling me Jacob put striped branches in front of sheep and goats when they were mating so that they would have striped and speckled offspring?  Whaaaat?  So you're telling me a woman should veil her head when she is praying or prophesying because of the angels?  Whaaaaat?

If a person really understands #1 above, passages like 1 Timothy 2:12-15 should have the same effect.  So you're telling me that women have come to be in transgression because of the sin of Eve but they will be saved through childbearing?  Whaaat?  I thought we were saved through the blood of Jesus Christ!

When there are examples of women ministering in Acts and Paul (you know the drill--Priscilla, Phoebe, Junias...) and Paul lays down the principle that men and women are equally sons of God, when Acts 2:17 puts the prophesying of women as a sign of the age of the Spirit, verses are at hand for us to find "clear" on the principles.  We know the original context impacts how we apply some verses.  When #1 is so overwhelming, what perversity would lead us to see 1 Timothy 2:12 as the clear verse, when the principle of the kingdom is at hand?

3. We know where it's headed.  In the kingdom, there will not be marriage.  Women will not be "given" to men (Mark 12).  In other words, there will be no differentiation of gender authority in the kingdom.  If we can move things closer to the kingdom now, especially when it is makes overwhelming sense, why wouldn't we?

4. No verse prohibits a woman from leadership over men in general.  I'm arguing for complete egalitarianism, but I want to start by separating out the argument.  The household codes of Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter have to do with, well, the household.  They are about the relationship between wives and husbands.  I believe the most likely interpretation in fact of all the notorious women passages in the New Testament fall into this category.

a. The only OT passage that explicitly subordinates wives to husbands is Genesis 3.  This is a consequence of Eve's sin.  Since Christ atoned for all sin, this is not a good argument for anything.  You could argue that it is built into the creation but, as in #1, this is simply not the case.  Naturally speaking, many individual women are regularly more intelligent, more spiritual, and have greater capacity to lead than many individual men.  "Let's stick with the Fall when we can transition to the kingdom."  That makes no sense at all.

b. I'll assume for the sake of argument that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 were originally in 1 Corinthians (there is an issue).  "Let them ask their own husbands at home."  Mention of the Law and subordination.  OK, we're talking about wives here.

But what kind of talking are we talking about here?  In 1 Corinthians 11, women prophesy in church.  They are to veil their heads to show they are under their husband heads.  So apparently, whatever silence 1 Corinthians 14 is talking about is not spiritual speech but disruptive speech.  They are asking questions, questions they should ask their own husbands... rather than someone else's?

Whew.  I'm glad I have an answer for that verse, because #1 is really making me sweat.  I mean, I don't think God is stupid, but it's really hard to see any intelligence in the "men can only fly the plane because they have a penis" argument.

What's even more important about 1 Corinthians 11 is that wives are both speaking for God to a congregation while also being in proper relationship to their husband-head.  This implies that subordination of a wife to a husband does not preclude women in spiritual leadership.

c. When we then see that 1 Timothy 2 is likely also talking about the husband-wife relationship, we reach our first egalitarian goal.  We see that the Bible does not prohibit a woman from taking leadership--spiritual or otherwise--over men in general.  We of course see women even in supreme leadership in the Bible.  Huldah is the supreme spiritual authority in 2 Kings 22.  Deborah is the supreme "political" leader in Judges 4-5.

1 Timothy uses words for man and woman in 2:12-15 that normally mean husband and wife when they are used in close proximity.  Adam and Eve were husband and wife, and they are the supporting argument, both in terms of birth order and who was deceived.  Wives are the ones who have babies.  The relationship that 1 Timothy uses to support its instruction is thus framed in terms of a husband wife relationship.

I can't think of any verse that prohibits women from leading men in general elsewhere--the subordinate issue is always a husband-wife issue.  I'm frankly puzzled that so many interpreters of this verse can't see it.  It's pretty obvious if you're thinking like people thought in the first century.

Whew.  I'm glad I have an answer for that verse, because #1 is really making me sweat.  I mean, I don't think God is stupid, but pretty much anyone on the street is going to think he is if he sees genitals as the secret to competent leadership.

5. The real issue is thus the husband-wife relationship.  With the previous point, there is no more argument against allowing those women whom God calls into leadership to take any role to which God calls them.  "What if their husband-head disagrees?"  Then he'd better repent because he has to obey God first.  His soul is in danger.  We have to be wise in the working out of principles.  Sometimes the gospel is hindered when we are unbending--even when we are right!

In fact, Jesus says that God allowed divorce to be "on the books" in the OT because Israel was not ready.  I guess God is pragmatic even in Scripture sometimes.  I suppose that makes sense if he actually wanted to help the people he first sent Scripture to--ancient Israel, Corinthians, Thessalonians, Romans.  I know from cultural anthropology that they didn't think like me and that actions had different meanings in different places.  I guess, whether I like it or not, I can't just blindly apply the words of Scripture directly to me without considering such things, because it explicitly tells me it was written to them... and I'm not them.

My argument for full egalitarianism, including the home, involves many of the same points I made above:

• the kingdom trajectory--There will be no husbands and wives in the kingdom.
• spiritual common sense--In other words, #1 applies here just as much as in the previous section
• the cultural argument--There was nothing distinctly Christian in the first century about wives being subordinate to their husbands.  In fact, it won't be so in the kingdom.  This was the assumption of the ancient context of the Bible.  It is when the Bible empowers women and equalizes men to them that it was being unique.
• the blinders argument--Those who argue against egalitarianism are blind to their own cultural situation.  

a) Sincere opponents would be appalled if they heard the arguments against egalitarianism made 100 years ago and are thus blind to the fact that their position has already shifted considerably, in keeping with the common sense of #1.  In other words, they have already violated their own "no accommodation" rule historically.  They are now more sophisticated than before, but this is just feet dragging on the inevitable egalitarian conclusion.
b) The husband-wife subordination issue was massively impacted by the post WW2 era when women were empowered.  So called "secular feminism" has pushed traditions like mine away from its historical positions and practices because of the association of egalitarianism with social groups its people tend to oppose.  In short, complementarians are riding cultural waves every bit as much as egalitarians--they are simply riding a different wave.
c) They are unaware of the way in which we can get verses out of focus.  I used to do this with jewelry verses.  "No woman could possibly wear an earring without it being a matter of ungodly pride."  "Any man wearing a wedding ring must really be proud of that gold jewelry."  The truth is, I was so focused on an individual tree (verse) that I couldn't see the forest.  I now realize how absurd my thoughts were.  Complementarians are so fixated on some rather "Whaaat?" verses that they can't see the bigger principles of Christianity and how they would most naturally play out.

• the stumbling block argument--It's a hindrance to the gospel.

I'm not worried.  Our grandchildren will wonder why this was an issue.  Were we stupid?  We feel the same way about those fundamentalist Christians who argued for slavery as an institution 100 years ago.  What were they thinking?  How could they not see the obvious ideal?

Of course slavery continued for 1800 years after Christ.  There is no guarantee of inevitable movement toward the kingdom.  But let me speak prophetically.  Even the Roman Catholic Church will be ordaining women by the year 2050.

Order in Society (Pastorals cont)

We find some miscellaneous teaching in 1 Timothy and Titus that also fits into the category of an orderly society. For example, along with the instruction about widows, 1 Timothy 5 also has instructions about how to treat older men and women. You are to treat older men in the church with respect, like you would treat your own father. As the church is your family, you should treat younger men like brothers, older women like your mother, and younger women like your sisters (5:1-2). By extension, you should take care of widows with no one else to care for them.

However, if the widow has children or grandchildren, they are primarily responsible (5:4). 1 Timothy 5:8 is a key expression of family values in the first century: “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” While such strong words sound rather extreme to our modern ears, the principle of taking care of our own and those within our reach remains strong even today.  In keeping with this saying, those of us in the Wesleyan tradition could see a person’s intentional neglect of family going to such an extreme that it could lead to loss of faith.  For most of us, it is an apt reminder of our responsibility to help those we can, especially those who most depend on us.

Titus has similar instructions, except they are directed at these individuals.  Older men are to be “temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love and in endurance” (Tit. 2:2).  Older women are “to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good” (2:3).  They are to train the younger women to “to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands” (2:4-5).  Again, we have argued that it is not the specific structures of ancient society that apply to us today as Scripture but the principle of living at peace with each other in a manner most appropriate to our cultural and social contexts.  We are to work out the best ways to “love our neighbor” in our social context.

Young men are to be self controlled (2:6).  Titus 2:8 gives the bottom line of all this social instruction, very similar to 1 Peter 2:12.  The goal is “that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us.”  This underlying principle makes it clear that the specifics of the instructions here have everything to do with the shared social values of the first century Mediterranean world.  To apply them directly to today in every respect thus has the ironic consequence of bringing the opposite effect.  If we artificially put women in a particular social location, rather than giving them fully equal opportunities to men, we give the world a great deal bad to say about us.  Indeed, we create a situation where the world’s values are more Christian than ours!

1 Timothy and Titus also have teaching on slaves.  Slaves are to be subject to their masters (Tit. 2:9), just as wives are to be subject to their husbands.  They are to try to please them and not talk back to them or steal from them (2:9-10).  They are to be fully trustworthy.  Again there is the same goal as with family relationships—to make Christ look attractive to the world (2:10).  They should treat them with full respect so that God’s name is not slandered (1 Tim. 6:1). Slaves with believing masters are to treat them even better than they would unbelieving masters (6:2).

Women in 1 Timothy, Closing Remarks (W)

If you ever go to modern Israel, you will find some interesting practices in relation to the Old Testament Law.  One fascinating one is the fact that you cannot get both meat and dairy products with the same meal or in the same store in Israel.  I once saw a young man ushered right out of a restaurant that primarily served lamb meat because he had brought in pizza from across the alley.  Pizza has cheese and was not allowed in the same shop.  Why, you ask?  It is because of a verse in Exodus that forbids boiling a goat’s kid in its mother’s milk (23:19; 34:26).

Now whatever this verse was originally about—probably against some Canaanite practice—it was not about eating pizza and lamb meat in the same meal.  It highlights the fact again that the books of the Bible just were not written to us originally.  When passages seem to make the least sense to us, we are often looking at words that spoke directly to the time they were written but not so clearly to our time and context.

I am convinced that the teaching of 1 Timothy on women falls into this category of things locked up in the past, despite the fact that many segments of the church are comfortable with its instructions.  For example, most Christians today would be hard pressed to think of why it would be preferable for a widow not to remarry or why she would need to get remarried because of an inability to refrain from her sexual desires.  We assume these instructions made perfect sense in their first century context, but it is not at all clear they do now.

And most Protestant churches have not seen any virtue in a man needing to be married only once to be an effective leader, especially if his first wife died.  True, the Orthodox Church still holds to this requirement, and many Protestants still have problems with a minister who is divorced.  But it is not clear what intrinsic reason we could come up with today that would make much sense.  Why would a widowed minister who remarries be less wise or less effective than one who remained single?

The position of many segments of the church today on women, both women ministers and women in the home, also strikes of the Jewish rule against eating pizza and meat in the same meal.  I like to think of it this way.  Let us say we are on a plane whose pilot is incapacitated, and we have a choice between having a woman take over who actually knows how to fly a plane or having a man take over who has no knowledge of flying whatsoever.  Of course we would have the woman fly the plane, because she is the most competent to do so.

In our current context, insisting that a man be the senior pastor or the head of the home simply because of his genitals makes about as much sense.  Let us speak plainly.  This is plain irrationality.  It makes a mockery of the idea that God is all-wise and omniscient.  It makes a mockery of God and Christ before the world.

And what is worse, this headship for its own sake, this genital-based leadership—not a theory you will find in any book on leadership, mind you—is headed in the opposite direction of the kingdom.  It is, in the words of Colossians, to submit to the “elemental spirits of the world” (Col. 2:20) rather than see the trajectory of the kingdom, where wives are not given to men in marriage (Mark 12:25) and there is not “male and female” any longer (Gal. 3:28).  It is to approach blasphemy, as if Christ only died for some sins but not all, not the sins of Eve.  Indeed, we can tell we are in the age of the Spirit precisely because our sons and daughters prophesy (Acts 2:17).

We have shown in these two volumes that no Scripture, rightly interpreted, prohibits women from any level of leadership and ministry in the church, indeed, that we find such women in the New Testament.  Let us be clear on this score.  Paul did not see husband-headship in conflict with the prophetic ministry of a woman, which 1 Corinthians 11 proves. And, therefore, the silence of women in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, if these verses are even original, cannot be about spiritual speech but only about disruptive speech. 

Now we see that 1 Timothy 2:12 is also about the husband-wife relationship and thus does not have any bearing on a woman’s prophetic ministry.  And in any case, surely Paul’s central writings and Acts have a better claim to stand at the center of our understanding, rather than some interpretation of a writing that is in so many ways the exception in the Pauline corpus rather than the rule.  All we have left to debate is whether husband-headship is timeless or, like eating pizza with meat, is a feature of Paul’s ancient context.  Since it is irrational to base leadership on genitals—physical organs not particularly known for their wisdom—I have little doubt personally where God is leading his church today.

Ephesians on Wives

Excerpt from chapter 7 of second Paul volume:
___________

Ephesians 5:22-33 goes on to talk not only about the relationship between husbands and wives in the church but, even more significantly, about the relationship between Christ and the church. Indeed, most of what Ephesians says in these twelve verses is perhaps more about Christ and the church, only using the husband-wife relationship as a metaphor for this more significant relationship. As far as the husband-wife relationship, Ephesians assumes the standard relationship of wife to husband in the Mediterranean world and then sanctifies it, makes it holy. There is nothing uniquely biblical or Christian to say that “the husband is the head of the wife” (5:23). Again, Aristotle had said very similar things three hundred years before when he spoke of the “rule” of the husband in the household.

What is distinctly Christian in Paul’s day was thus the heightened value he gave to women, not the subordination of the wife to the husband, willingly or not.  Ephesians actually has very little to say to wives here. It merely seems to tell wives to submit to the authority of their husbands as all must submit to Christ’s authority (5:24), then it moves on to give instructions to the husband. In the last chapter, we asked whether this structure was more a matter of ancient culture or what God’s ideal might be for the present. While various Christians will disagree, we argued that because such structures will not exist in the kingdom of God, God would be pleased for us to abolish them now.

There is no reason for such structures either in relation to the intellect or potential leadership ability of women. The only reasons anyone might suggest are either cultural or simply because it is the rule. But in Western culture, giving women the same potential authority as men is not a detraction from the witness of the gospel.  In our context, husband headship simply for its own sake actually diminishes the world’s estimation of Christ. And the example of Jesus and Paul quickly suggests that God does not usually make rules for their own sake, especially when the rule is a potential hindrance to the gospel. We thus take the prophetic stance that taking the household codes out of their own world and applying it to our quite different one is contrary to the gospel and the trajectory of the kingdom.

Ephesians admonishes husbands to love their wives, even to the degree that Christ loved the church and sacrificed himself for it (5:25). Some women have suggested that they would willingly submit to their husbands if they had this attitude.  Certainly both husbands and wives should have this kind of love for each other. At the same time, we want to challenge such women in the same way we might have challenged slaves before the American Civil War. The woman who responds in this way is like the slave of the early 1800s who might have said, “If my master treated me like a brother or sister, I would gladly serve him.”

But the full gospel today goes way beyond, “masters, treat your slaves as if they are your brothers.” It is time for us to play the gospel out in a fuller way than even the New Testament church did in its day. It sells the kingdom short and can bury your God-given potential in the ground. Some of those most opposed to women in ministry are not men, but women who enjoy not having to take the lead, even though they have more spiritual wisdom than their husbands several times over. God does not expect every woman to lead any more than he expects every man to lead. But every woman and man should heed the charge of 1 Thessalonians 5:19 not to “put out the Spirit’s fire”!

If God calls you as a woman to lead, you had best not disobey. If God has given you the greater wisdom in a moment of decision, why impoverish those who might benefit? If you as a husband can see your wife's greater wisdom in a moment of decision, what value is there in resisting it? Clearly we must be sensitive to our circumstances. God is a God of peace. But God also is not a God of timidity!

Josephus on women?

Trying to finish Josephus' Against Apion today, about a week late (so this will constitute my notice from my Year with Josephus blog). One quote seemed worthy of singling out here and not only on the other blog, although on closer examination, it is probably a gloss or interpolation, something added to Josephus and not from the original text itself.

I had thought this was interesting background to 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which I also consider an interpolation into 1 Corinthians. But as it turns out, it seems more likely that some Christian interpolated this quote into Josephus perhaps based on 1 Corinthians 14!

"The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed; for the authority has been given by God to the man."

LaCelle-Peterson on Women's Identity and Vocation

I did a brief review of a new book by Kristina LaCelle-Peterson, professor at Houghton College in New York: Liberating Tradition: Women's Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective. The link to it is over to the right under the "Books I'm Reading" section.

Kind of funny, you read through a book to do a thumbnail and you get 100-120 words to do it. I'll probably say more here than I could say! But, hey, free book!

I thought it was a great book. I hate to say that I have not made it a priority to read books on gender issues. I wrote a little booklet, Why Wesleyans Favor Women in Ministry that you can get at cost from my denomination (on side also). But great books like John Stackhouse's Finally Feminist are sitting, waiting, pleading, on my shelf.

There were a number of items in the book that I hadn't really thought about and that was great. I wrote in my very brief review that both pulpit and pew should read this book or one like it. Even if you don't change your perspective, you'll at least hold whatever position you have after realizing other ways to look at issues rather than ignorantly by default.

I suppose the chapter I enjoyed the most was entitled, "Mistaking the Industrial Revolution for the Garden of Eden." Here she shows how the so called "traditional family" and traditional family roles propagated by groups like Focus on the Family and John Piper are really post-industrial developments.

For example, the idea of a wife as someone who is there at home when you come home from work and who provides a nurturing and environment safe from the perils of the outside world where the husband works... well, before the industrial revolution everyone was at home and everyone worked at home.

There were a number of things about Genesis 1 and 2 that Kristina points out, like the fact that "subdue" in 1:28 is plural, meaning that the command is for the woman as well, not just for the man. And there is the old misconception of Luther and others that Adam wasn't actually there when the serpent tempted Eve. Not so, the Hebrew says Adam was "with her."

She also has a chapter where she goes through "female" metaphors of God, such as passages in Job and Isaiah where God speaks of His womb. Another on the importance of inclusive language. If you disagree, I dare you to read the book.

A good book, a good read.

Monday Thoughts: "Other-ism"

I read/watched three different things this weekend that point to the same same social phenomenon--we tend to belittle the intelligence and of course value of the "out group." When we are talking about those who are "in group," we accentuate the positive and ignore the negative. When we are talking about those "out group," we accentuate the negative and ignore the positive.

No doubt I am also guilty... and no doubt you can see my myopia far more clearly than I can (thus, myopia :-). But of course, that doesn't mean we do not correctly see the stupidities of the past either.

This is the stuff of prejudice, racism, and sexism. I find a woman who does something less than intelligent and conclude, "All women are unintelligent." I find a black person who does something violent and conclude, "All black persons are violent." Meanwhile, I find a smart white male and conclude, "All white men are smart."

Three examples of "other-ism" stood out to me this weekend in reading/watching:

Anne Hutchinson
I was looking at Neil Elliott's Liberating Paul and he gave examples of how Paul's writings have been used to keep slaves in line in the South, women in line in Puritan New England, Jews in line in Nazi Poland, rebels in control in Guatemala.

The first one that stood out to me was the story of Anne Hutchinson. She ticked off the preachers of Massachusetts by meetings in her home. At these meetings, she and other women evaluated sermons, which eventually led to her trial and ultimate banishment from the colony (her family was then killed by Native Americans in Rhode Island).

It is fairly clear that John Winthrop and others who had it in for Hutchinson thought that women were by nature less insightful than men. Modern complementarians have done a good job of "cleaning up" the obvious stupidity of their ancestors. Those who used to say women shouldn't teach and shouldn't be leaders did not think that women were as intelligent and were more gullible than men.

In our day, however, this is so patently false that no one would dare suggest this in any forum where they might easily be shown a fool. So the modern complementarians, riding on the fumes of their forebears, have modified their position--it is not that women are in any way less spiritual or intelligent than men. It is, well, uh, not God's plan for them to lead. Yeah, that's it. It just isn't the way God designed things. They're equal, but just have different roles ordained by God and, yeah, that's what the Bible says too.

Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts. In an age where the naked truth that women are as smart and spiritual as men, this propped up version of the old "women are stupid and sin-laden" will evaporate away soon enough.

The Kite Runner
My wife has just finished reading this novel destined to be on future high school reading lists (sorry to my children and their friends--Harry Potter will not be on the list). So we watched the movie version last night.

There is so much in this movie to expose the "other-ism" among Christians. The movie is set first in the days before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then in 2000 under the Taliban. The other-ism in this case deals with a boy born out of wed-lock, the same boy as a Pashtun, a girl who had slept with another man previously, a man who did not have a beard.

Certainly we as Christians do not believe that Islam understands God as well as we do. However, the things that we say from our pulpits about Islam often indicate such a wholesale ignorance it is beyond words This year especially I have heard among freshmen the idea they must be hearing in their homes and churches that suicide bombers being good representatives of all Muslims in the world.

I found a statement left on a white board in a classroom that sums it up well: "Radical Islam is to Islam in general as the KKK is to Christianity." Can you imagine how stupid we would think someone was who assumed that all Christians had the same views as members of the KKK? That's how stupid we sound to most Muslims, especially American Muslims.

The Keys to the Kingdom
The faculty reading group I'm in is reading this 1940's novel to finish out the year. It's about a Catholic priest in Scotland who lives his whole life surrounded by Christians who aren't particularly good representatives of Christ. His father dies in the aftermath of visiting a nearly Protestant town to report how many salmon he's caught that month.

A woman is raped, has a child in a place where nuns can take care of the child, is forced to marry a man in town to make the situation "right." I'm not done and others say the novel is not clear about who the rapist was, but so far I wonder if it was a priest.

This priest become missionary doesn't fit in, in part because he doesn't do things the way everyone else does. There is a certain raw value and "get along" aspect to out-group people that consistently causes him problems with the in-group.

Maybe Rodney King put it best: "Why can't we all just get along?" That doesn't mean we aren't convinced we are right about what we believe. It means that those who disagree with us are just as valuable in God's eyes as we are.

Classroom Snippets: Paul from Early to Late

Today in 1 Corinthians we read through chapters 12 and 13 together. I enjoyed it much (although I've decided that yesterday was the low day of the entire semester--it's only up from here to the end).

One point of interest was 1 Cor. 12:13:

"For by one Spirit we all were baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, even all were given one Spirit to drink."

This verse is of course reminiscent of Galatians 3:28, which is also in a baptismal setting. And it is similar to Colossians 3:11, which is in the context of putting on the new person. The evidence is not conclusive, but we can understand why some think some comment of this sort was made as part of the baptismal ceremony.

But what is missing here and in Colossians: "not male and female"! I actually date 1 Corinthians to around the same time as Galatians. But regardless of dating, the question quickly arises, "Why does Paul leave this line out, especially if it is a formula?"

One suggestion, and of course not one we can prove or disprove, is that some of the problems at Corinth have come from women exploiting their new found equality with men in Christ. Perhaps some of the rhetoric in Corinthians, which seems to "put women in their place," is actually Paul's response to a particular problem at Corinth. This is of course the danger of absolutizing the text as it stands and appears to us--we sometimes lack critical information to let us know the proper tone and trajectory behind the text.

So in class I did my usual dual pictures of bodies on the board, one representing the early Paul and the other representing the Paul of Ephesians. The first body is the body of Christ. The second is the body, the church, with Christ as the head. In the early Paul, women are more involved in ministry, there is more prophecy, more charismatic operation. In the Paul of Ephesians and the Paul of 1 Timothy, there is institutionalization and the establishment of a "deposit" of teaching.

These are of course interpretive constructs, but we all have them. These are the theological structures we build alongside the text, particularly as we move toward appropriation of the text.