I mentioned a few months ago that I had been thinking about diving back into the issue of women and the church. I wrote several paragraphs about it in A Break To Reset My Life. It’s important background to what is in this post. I also recently mentioned my concerns about The Angry Christian Men.
I have been thinking and praying about it all this time. Discussing it with David. Reading the posts in the archives that I would be pulling back out to republish. There are several reasons why I believe God is leading me to do this. In the past week, I also had a confirmation that it would be beneficial for others if I did so.
Here is a great example of why I got into this topic many years ago and why I’m coming back to it several years later. This is something I shared in the comment section of one of my archived posts from over ten years ago. I took a screenshot to share it with David when I came across it this week. I had forgotten about it. John Piper is discussing whether or not it is okay to read books written by women and learn from them.
I hope everyone reading this can see how utterly absurd this argument is. Piper is fine with a woman writing a book. He’s fine reading it. He’s even apparently fine with learning from the book written by the woman. He’s just not fine being aware that someone with a “female personhood” wrote the book he’s learning from. He’s fine reading the content from a book, but if the female author stood in front of him and said the exact same thing, it would be a problem according to his interpretation of God’s Word.
This is an example of the absurd lengths these men will go to in order to promote a view that simply doesn’t make sense.
I could give you many more examples. Some of them will come up in the posts I republish.
There are two ditches Christians fall into regarding women. There is the extreme feminist egalitarians who gave us a glimpse of their world over the past four or five years. No Bible-believing Christian wants anything to do with that. And then there are the hard-core patriarchalists who believe women should only deal with the home sphere. These are the angry Christian men discussing why women are to submit in all things, women shouldn’t vote, women shouldn’t hold office, women should be silent in church, women should never lead or teach, etc.
Both ditches bring about tragic results.
Just as we’ve been told in politics there are only two options, so we’ve been told over the past few decades that there are only two options in the body of Christ regarding women. Pick a side and shut up. So the thinking conservative voices have been squashed and silenced during that time.
Surely there is a better understanding of the Gospel and what it means for men and woman than the choices we’ve been presented with as the only options. We’ve been conditioned to believe there is nothing else and to even ask the questions make you a danger to be around.
Well, I’m asking the questions again. This time around I have more answers than I did the first time. This time I’m less intimidated by those on the conservative side who profess loudly that they know all the answers and if women would just shut up and do as they are told, everything would be perfectly fine.
Just as we’re told that socialism hasn’t worked so far because it hasn’t been done properly, so we’re told by the newest crop of eager patriarchalists that the only reason patriarchy hasn’t worked so far in the body of Christ is because it hasn’t been done properly. They are the ones who will do it properly.
In their case, they wouldn’t even consider reading the book that Piper would theoretically read. Whereas Piper was willing to overlook “her female personhood” in order to learn something (in print, only), these men would object to a woman writing such a book at all.
I’m not okay with that. I’m not okay with being silent as more traditional and conservative Christian men, women, and families are led astray. If I can help even a small number to feel less alone and avoid the coming trainwreck, it will be worth it.
Acts 2:14-36
In past studies of this issue I’ve noted that there are a number of incidents in the Scriptures where women are leading, teaching, prophesying, where there is clearly good things going on. You can look up Deborah, Huldah, Priscilla, and others by name in various accounts. There is only one incident in Scripture that I’ve noted where a woman has been clearly condemned for her actions. That is in Revelation where one of the seven churches are warned by the Lord that “you tolerate that Jezebel” and she is not condemned *for* teaching, but is condemned about *what* she is teaching, and the Lord mentions what that message is.
I cannot help but come to the conclusion that if all those other female leadership examples were wrong, you would find example of prophets denouncing them by name or showing up to “put them in their place” by perhaps striking them mute. But you don’t see that happening. You see Priscilla and her husband teaching Apollos (yes, that big name apostle guy, no less) “the way of God more correctly”. She wasn’t over there just making snacks for Aquilla and Apollos. She was there talking. “They instructed”. That’s what Acts tells us.
I think there has to be an acceptance that the Gospel doesn’t get nullified or is of no effect when the speaker is female. She is not the subject, the Gospel is.
The pattern I see in the Bible is: a woman’s faith, plus what God gave her, put into right action to produce good fruit–sometimes out of a very bad situation.
The one issue I see with the patriarchal view is the issue that there are women in scripture teaching, leading and discipling others. So, when you come to the view of some Calvinist and patriarchal churches that women can only teach women, that they can only teach men and women with a man. This doesn’t seem scriptural. God put all these women at the place he put them at the right time. So then how do square the scriptures talking about head coverings for women and that they should stay silent in church? Doesn’t make sense to me…