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.

C.S. LEWIS ON WOMEN PRIESTS AND PASTORS

Should not appointment to Church leadership depend on ability and not sexuality? While the late Christian thinker, C.S. Lewis, admitted that “We men may often make very bad priests,” he argued that the same logic also applied to being a bad dancer:

·       He may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for that is that men should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the ballroom should henceforth ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. (God in the Dock, “Priestesses in the Church”, 239)

Lewis applied this analogy to the Church. The Church should be like the ballroom and not ignore sexual differences. Consequently, if a woman showed more pastoral promise than her male counterpart, the male should attempt to get up-to-speed. However, Lewis assured us that his judgment didn’t rest upon any consideration of female inferiority:

·       No one among those who dislike the proposal [of women serving as priests] is maintaining that women are less capable than men of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else seems necessary for the pastoral office. (235)

Lewis cited the example of the Middle Ages in support of his claim:

·       The Middle Ages carried their reverence for one Woman to a point at which the charge could be plausibly made that the Blessed Virgin became in their eyes almost ‘a fourth Person of the Trinity.’

How then did Lewis justify barring women from the priesthood? The priest had to “represent God,” and only the male could do this. Lewis anticipated the thinking of the female-priest proponent:

·       Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride.” (237)

Well, what’s the matter with these arrangements? Lewis countered that this would envision a “different religion.” He cited the fact that this scenario would violate the “masculine imagery” of the Bible:

·       We know from our poetic experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. (237)

This might be so, but it probably wouldn’t impress the egalitarian thinking that has been seeping into the Church.

Lewis adds that to dismiss sexual role distinctions is to transform male and female into “neuters”:

·       To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters. (237)

Lewis also argued that our marriage to our Lord was to parallel earthly heterosexual marriage:

·       One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical [non-sexually distinct] figures. (238)

According to Lewis, if human marriage is based on sexually-based role distinctions, so too should the Church’s relationship to her Savior. This would make a male priesthood mandatory.

Why didn’t Lewis base his stance more directly on Scripture? He could have cited:

·       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)

Since the Father and the Son share the same Divine Essence but yet are distinguished in terms of role, this same relationship pertains within the oneness of husband and wife, even in view of their role distinctions.

More to the point, Paul argued in favor of a sharp male-female role distinction based upon the order of creation and the Fall:

·       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 2:12-14; also 1 Cor. 14:34-35; Eph. 5:22-31)

Paul’s reasoning grounds these role distinctions in two considerations that will not change until Christ’s return. I do not understand why Lewis didn’t ground his case in these Scriptural evidences. Perhaps someone else can provide some illumination.

My Response to Emergent Church Guru, Tony Jones

Tony,

I think we have to choose our battles carefully and not confront every expression of hypocrisy. However, some are so egregious that they must be addressed for the good and unity of the church – something you say you care about. However, you charged:

• Those who continue misogynistic [women hating] practices [by maintaining any role distinctions] in the church are not being faithful to the Bible or the Spirit of Christ, they are perpetuating retrograde and archaic beliefs and are doing great violence to women and men and the cause of Christ.

Indeed, Scripture teaches much about the essential equality of male and female (Gen. 1:26-27; Gal. 3:28) and the mutuality of husband and wife (1 Cor. 7:1-10; Eph. 5:22-30). However, your insinuation that the church is “not being faithful to the Bible or the Spirit of Christ” in terms of maintaining role distinctions is Scripturally insupportable. Here are some verses you might consider:

• 1 Cor. 11:3 I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. (Note that even though Christ subordinates Himself to the Father, this doesn’t imply any inferiority. Likewise, the wife subordinating herself to her husband is in no way demeaning. In fact, the greatest shall be least!)

• 1 Tim. 2:11-14: A woman should learn in quietness [of spirit] and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.  For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. (Note that this role distinction was not relative to the churches of Paul’s day but to the creation order and the Fall! Also 1 Cor. 14:34-38)

Jesus Himself appointed no women among His 12! Will you also charge Jesus with misogyny?

Is the Bible’s teaching on role distinctions injurious to women as you charge? I don’t think so! Instead, it dignifies them (1 Peter 3:7). If you choose to disagree and claim that there must not be any role distinctions among people – child/parent, subordinate/supervisor – that all role-distinctions are demeaning, then you must prove this!

You claim to be concerned about Scripture, but you show no respect for it. You claim to be concerned about the welfare of the church, but you consistently tear down the “Bride of Christ” with your charges.

Christian Feminism

Feminism has hurt women more than it has helped. It has demeaned female gifting and has informed the woman that, for her to have value, she must be able to compete with a man and have a career. Raising children has been relegated to an inferior position. Consequently, women are more depressed and dissatisfied that ever. (Please read this testimony by a woman writer raised by a feminist: )

However, I also think that we must try to understand Christian women who have revolted against their biblical role, even though their response – placing feminism and its modern interpretation of freedom above the Bible – may be troubling.

One Christian feminist responded to me that God had led her to a modern feministic way of interpreting the Bible, and that this had given her a sense of freedom:

I sometimes get messages from mostly young women asking about specific bible verses pertaining to women. Always, they explain how they are trying to follow and honor God and understand these verses as somehow demonstrating God's love for them. But over and over, they keep coming back to a question they can't shake: "why does God hate me?" Sometimes they specifically say, "I wish God hadn't made me a woman" because trying to follow what they had been taught God requires of women is killing their spirit. It breaks my heart because I used to feel exactly the same way.

But as I found the courage to embrace other ways of understanding these verses, I was granted an enormous peace - the sort of peace that only God can bring to us. I started understanding that the enormous pain I and other women feel under the teaching of the unique subordination of women didn't come from my rebellion. It is actually the rebellion of the Holy Spirit in me refusing to accept a teaching that I wasn't made for. Along with peace came freedom. The freedom that Jesus came to give us. Freedom to be the person God created me to be.

Here’s my response:

Thanks for your candid response. I am grieved that, for you, the Bible's hierarchical male/female, husband/wife role distinctions provoke the question, "why does God hate me."

I'm wondering whether we must all be head-honcho in order to think that God loves me. Would this also pertain to being a pastor or an elder? Must the church rid itself of all role distinctions so that everyone might be assured that "God loves me?"

Perhaps this is the way of the world? I worked for years as a probation officer and resented the fact that I was repeatedly passed over for supervisor. Finally, I got the position and for the next six years I was absolutely miserable.

I had erroneously equated social rank with my value as a person. I also equated my rank with the degree that God loved me. The lower the rank, the less I was in the eyes of God. How tragic we see things in such unbiblical ways!

Please understand that I too regard it as tragic when Christian women lament, "I wish God hadn't made me a woman," but I wonder whether this is because of the biblical role of the woman or because of the negative appraisal society has placed on this role.

In light of the fact that the feminists have undermined the female role and gifting, it is no surprise that many now lament the fact that God had made them a woman. Rather than feeding into this demeaning of women, I think that it is our role as Christians to honor the woman for who she is – the blessing that God made her to be. This should start with husbands:  

·        Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers. (1 Peter 3:7)

God will tolerate no less than this!