IS IT ILLEGITIMATE TO MAINTAIN ROLE DISTINCTIONS?

Scripture teaches the legitimacy of role distinctions, even within the Trinity:

·       But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. (1 Corinthians 11:3 ESV)

This doesn't mean that the Father is greater than the Son or even that He is more important. This merely means that there are role distinctions.

It should also be obvious that there are role distinctions between parents and their children. This doesn't mean that God loves parents more than children, but that He has designated parents as authorities over children.

Likewise, there are role distinctions between elders and congregants and even between wives and their husbands:

·       Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Ephesians 5:22-25)

Likewise, the Bible prescribes role distinctions between male and female within the church:

·       Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (1 Timothy 2:11-14)

This distinction is not grounded in the alleged unruly behavior of certain women but, instead, in both the creation order and in the Fall.

Paul even specified that this distinction applied to all the churches:

·       As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. (1 Corinthians 14:33-35)

Nevertheless, there is room for interpretive disagreement about the meaning of "keep silent." Perhaps, it only applied to contentious talk? Certainly, it was permissible for women to pray and sing in church, and even to prophesy.

Radical Equality vs. Christian Mercy

Radical equality (RE) and Christian mercy (CM) are different, although both recognize our responsibility for the rest of the human race. While RE disdains distinctions based on race, nationality and even family in favor of a radical human collective, emphasizing the oneness of all humanity, CM requires that mercy begins with and radiates outward from personal, faith and familial relationships. A husband’s primary duty is to his wife and then his children. The son’s primary responsibility is to his parents, to honor and care for them. To provide for other senior citizens, at the expense of one’s own ailing parents, is unacceptable.

I occasionally would counsel others. Sometimes, we find this more gratifying than counseling or comforting our own spouses. However, whenever I would counsel, I would almost hear a voice reminding me not to neglect my own wife. To do so would be hypocritical.

Is this chauvinistic and narrow? I don’t think so. Love for those closest to us – parents, spouses, children, and even neighbors – is a measure of the genuineness of our love. This is a saying that merits some attention: “If you want to know about the character of a person, just ask his maid.”

This speaks volumes. It warns us that there are many who speak magnificent words about helping humanity, but their home life reveals something very different about them.

If charity is real, it must begin at home. Charity that is only exercised at a distance - for those who are not our relations - is not charity at all but a self-centered show of piety. If charity and mercy are real, they must be demonstrated where rubber and road make contact – at home.

Love must start at home and with our spouse. If we love our spouse, we are doing the best thing for our children, providing for them a joyful and loving family life. A neglected wife tends to become a clinging or perhaps bitter mother.

Love is meant to radiate out like a warm bonfire. Loving our children is perhaps the best way to love our neighbor’s children. When we bully our children, they will bully other children. Instead, when we love them, they will pass this love on to other children.

Of course, this is an over-simplification, but I think that it does point out that love and mercy are best produced and expressed through relationship and not through social programs promoting RE. If we want to start a charcoal fire, we do not light the edges. Instead, we concentrate in the center, and once the center catches fire, it will spread to the periphery.

It is also the same among Christians. If Christ is the fire, then He will ignite it in the center - among us. It will then spread to the periphery where others will be attracted to its warmth. Christ suggested that the love – our oneness – we share will positively impact others:

• “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:20-21)

When I write against the present genocide against Christians, even Christians recoil. They claim that instead, we have to be concerned about the persecution of all people. Although this is true, it must start at home, among us. If it doesn’t, we make any claims of love suspect and vacuous.

Today’s Secularism and the Death of Liberty

We eventually loose what we take for granted. (Which Founding Father claimed that the price of democracy is constant vigilance?). Our liberties require moral responsibility – the very thing that we increasingly find burdensome. Therefore, we reject the source of our liberties and expect to retain them.

The theologian Jurgen Habermas has pointed to the source of our liberties:

• Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source.

This is because God loves us individually and has created us to be like Him (Gen. 1:26-27). This bestows on us great intrinsic value! Even the Deist, Thomas Jefferson, was unable to conceive of these rights without God:

• And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? (Notes on the State of Virginia)

In contrast, the secularist thinks that he can take what he wants from the Bible and reject its Author. He wants to retain the notion of liberties and equal and human rights without its Source. However, history has another verdict. It shows us that pre-Christian humanity has consistently rejected equality. Even the anti-Christian philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche observed:

• Another Christian concept, no less crazy: the concept of equality of souls before God. This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights. (Will to Power)
  
  

However, the today’s secularist refuses to acknowledge such a debt. In light of this, it is interesting to note that the most renowned philosophers of the classical world also disdained the biblical assertion of human equality and liberties. Dinesh D’Souza wrote:

• Aristotle, too, had a job for low men: slavery. Aristotle argued that with low men in servitude, superior men would have leisure to think and participate in governance of the community. Aristotle cherished the ‘great-souled man’ who was proud, honorable, aristocratic, rich. (What’s so Great about Christianity)

Well, aren’t human equality and human rights self-evident? Perhaps, but secular materialism, by its very nature, must deny these. How? Materialism is the belief that only what is material – energy, matter, space (the things of science) - exists. If this is so, we are constrained to regard humanity merely materialistically. However, when we do this, we undermine any possible basis for equality, since some people are strong, others weak; some are intelligent and some are not; some are healthy, while others are not; some make positive contributions to society, while some are a burden. Therefore, the materialist is intellectually unable to treat all with the same positive regards.

Consequently, we will loose what can no longer rationally defend. Even now, our freedoms of speech, privacy and religion are being whittled away in favor of a monopolistic, demanding Secular State.