Male, Female, and Authority

INTRODUCTION

This topic is so wide and deep that I've avoided it.  However, some recent prep I did for a class on the Pastoral Epistles has prompted me to make a few observations.

Before jumping in to the details, there are four areas (at least) where most Westerners (including those who follow Christ) tend to be confused when discussing Authority:

1. As I discussed previously, a Biblical view of Authority focuses primarily on encouraging us to submit to those whose authority is legitimately delegated to them by God.  The Bible rarely focuses on the exercise of Power by those in Authority.
2. A culture (like ours) that does not recognize God, much less His authority, will logically infer that there is no difference between Authority and Power.  In such a culture, any assertion that certain structures of delegated authority exist will be reflexively denied/resisted.  I suspect this is one reason why even faithful Christians are often uncomfortable discussing male and female roles in the family and church ... we tend to focus on the horizontal relational aspects of this and lose sight of the fact that our primary relationship, the one that defines and frames all other relationships, is vertical (to God the Father, Son, and Spirit ... again, note the relationship among the Godhead, including roles & authority, discussed repeatedly by Jesus in John's Gospel.  For a scholarly treatment, see Ware's discussion of roles in the Godhead).
3. Associated with these first two is a tendency to assert that equality in Value necessarily requires equality in Role.  This is perhaps plausible in a Godless universe where no legitimate source of identity, role, or authority exists.  However, we are all "in God's image" and therefore equally valuable.  That does not mean we have, or can assume, the same roles.  As we will see, God (through general and special revelation) has clearly created gender-based roles.  Again, Ware's discussion of roles in the Godhead and its relationship to male and female being in God's image is relevant.
4.  God's guidance regarding gender-based roles in the family and church is not unclear.  I think just about everything that can be said on the topic has been said (and recorded at cbmw.org) over the past 25 years.  The issue is not lack of clarity; the issue is obedience.

A RECENT DEVELOPMENT

Widespread controversy over male and female roles in the family and church appeared in the past 150 years; this article provides a short summary. Prior to that point, the writings of prominent Christians either assume traditional roles or mention it only in passing.  It just wasn't an issue, unlike slavery (see Titus 2 and Ephesians 6 for a discussion of the primary non-church roles in the NT (husband-wife, parent-child, master-slave); note that these are instructions to those who are under Christ's Lordship; they are not to the unsaved).

There are several reasons for the recent emergence of feminism that I'll discuss; I'd be interested if you think there are other reasons.  I suppose I should state that I'm discussing feminism in a largely Christian culture; female roles in a pagan culture are a different topic. I recognize that the U.S. today could be considered neo-pagan in its morality, but Judeo-Christian concepts and frameworks remain influential.

• The death of God as the creator and sustainer of the universe
• The demise of scriptural authority
• The explosion in technology
• The unprecedented increase in wealth
• The change in work from labor-based to knowledge-based

The Death of God

The Enlightenment originated in the pursuit of "thinking God's thoughts after Him" (Kepler).  In this view, God was the ultimate knower and man has a limited and flawed ability to understand some of what God knows.  With the Enlightenment and the birth of modernism, man became the ultimate knower in pursuit of complete and perfect human-based knowledge.

In this secular framework, God is an unnecessary hypothesis.  Deism removed God from the universe after creation, and secularism tossed God out totally.

How does this effect our understanding of male and female?  Ultimately, that it is a mere biological accident that is sustained sociologically.  The endpoint we seem to be approaching is that gender is ultimately an existential issue ... if you feel male, you're male; if you feel female, you're female.  Since the center of the universe in the West is the Individual, the Individual's desires must overrule nature and command society's approval.

The loss of "created in the image of God", "male and female created He them" has destroyed the ontological foundation for making a distinction between male and female.  We, with our technology, will ultimately transcend the inconvenient chains of gender, especially those associated with reproduction and the raising of children.

This neo-skepticism pounded the final nails in the coffin of God in the 19th century when Marx, Freud, and Darwin provided human-centric understandings of the economy, the psyche, and the origin of species.

Undermining Scriptural Authority

As secularism erected an ever more sophisticated intellectual framework, Christians tended to run away from challenges to the Christian worldview.  Fundamentalists moved toward a presuppositionalist approach to truth (grounded largely in Calvinism) that eventually led to a withdrawal from arguments based in general revelation, including defending the historicity of the Gospel and other Biblical truth claims.  Liberals tended toward a secular approach to truth that eventually asserted that the Gospel (and the Bible) is better seen as sociologically constructed (vs. true history).  Fundamentalists ignored secular attacks on traditional, nature/Bible-based understandings of male and female; in effect rebelling against the command to be "salt and light."  Liberals adopted (and adapted to) shifting cultural mores, which most recently include promotion of homosexuality and other types of gender confusion, with polygamy potentially emerging as the newest "alternative lifestyle."

Among the specific items that reinforced the demise of scriptural authority were:

• knower.  Both implicitly deny that God can, as the creator of man and of language, communicate clearly to us; even in a fallen world.
• The astonishing increase in and widespread acquisition of technical knowledge.  The technical knowledge of our society is far beyond the dreams of the most educated person of a few hundred years ago.  We tend to think that intelligence equals wisdom, and that technical expertise provides the foundation for a superior morality.  This is seen, for example, in "sex education" where technical instruction is presumed to lead to wise sexual choices.  It is seen in church movements that use the tools of marketing and therapy to rob the Gospel (and God's word in general) of its power.  These movements reinforced the societal drift toward grounding knowledge in the individual knower's experience instead of God's revelation.
• Finally, the demise of Biblical authority in the culture and the church established a negative feedback loop where both society and the church emphasized Biblical knowledge less and technical knowledge more, resulting is less Biblical knowledge and a lower view of scripture ... which led to less emphasis on acquiring Biblical knowledge.

Technology

Technology has freed women from housework.  The PBS reality show "Frontier House" showed vividly just how much work was required to do maintain a household prior to the invention of the washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and the dish washer, along with the widespread availability of an electrical infrastructure to power them.  Without this technology, most women would not have the option of working outside the home.

Unlike the Amish, I think the invention of these technologies is part of fulfilling God's stewardship mandate to "subdue the earth."  This cannot be said about other technologies that are used to undermine God's command to "multiply and fill the earth."  These include various abortion technologies, and surgical, hormonal, and emerging genetic technologies that enable the gender-confused to attempt to impose their feelings on their bodies.

The technology that has been perhaps the most influential is birth control.  Birth control pills separated reproduction from sex and catalyzed the sexual revolution.  The negative effects of this on men, women, and children are well documented (see recent blog posts), and one reason for an emerging backlash in some areas (eg, single sex dorms).  Ironically, the strongest negative effects have been on children (50+ million aborted since Roe v Wade) and women (single motherhood is displacing married parents).  The seemingly repressive Biblical sexual roles and mores, not surprisingly, protect those who are most vulnerable.

Increasing Wealth

Biblical values spawned a massive increase in wealth.  These include the rule of an objective law (in imitation of a personal and rational God who writes His law on the heart and on tablets of stone), private property rights (man in the image of God with a specific task and organizational structure (family) that owns property), faithful stewardship of God's gifts, and the belief in a personal God who has made Himself known to his image (which spawned the scientific revolution underlying modern technology; see Pearcey & Thaxton's "Soul of Science").

With this explosion of technology-based wealth came an increasing amount of leisure time and a focus on self-fulfillment.  When combined with the sexual revolution, fertility rates quickly dropped below replacement level across the West, a trend that is now seen in all urban populations around the world.  This tends to result (in the short term) in more wealth, helping to establish a self-reinforcing cycle of having fewer kids to obtain more wealth and leisure.

Changing Work

Finally, work (and wealth) has changed from being labor-intensive to being knowledge-intensive.  In 1800, 90% of the US work was on the farm, in 1900 it was 40%, in 1950, 10%, and today it is 2%.  As farm work declined, manufacturing increased.  But, as with farm work, technology displaced humans.  Manufacturing as a percentage of the  workforce dropped to 30% by 1950 and is 9% today.

Bottom line: approximately 10% of the US workforce is in a traditionally labor-intensive job (farming, manufacturing), and those jobs are so technology-intensive that the male strength advantage is relatively insignificant.

Summary

All of these factors (philosophical, religious, sociological, technical, economic) created an environment more favorable to female liberation from the traditional ties to husband and family.  Even secular sociologists are beginning to express concern about the growing imbalance between male and female wealth-producing capability.  For example, the male-female college graduate proportion was 60-40 in 1970; today it is 40-60.

THREE WAVES OF FEMINISM

Sociologists generally recognize 3 waves of feminism in the West.  They are:

• 1800 - 1920 - focus on equal rights in property, inheritance, voting, education
• 1960-1990 - focus on workplace equality and liberation from marriage and children
• 1990-present - focus on gender politics/power, lesbianism, feminine spirituality (eg, Goddess worship)

I think Christians in general see the first wave as being a generally good thing, despite its tendency to undermine the Biblical structure of husband-wife "oneness" as the basic building block of society.

However, the radical individualism that blossomed in the West in the 1960's directly and forcefully attacked the Biblical understanding of gender-based roles in the family, and, by implication, of gender-based roles in the church.  Although the term "women's lib" seems quaint today, the term "liberation" is perhaps the most accurate way of describing second-wave and third-wave feminism.  Asserting freedom from men and children was relatively easy; living it turned out to be impossible.  Even if you had your tubes tied, you still had to live with the emotional fallout of promiscuity (and/or the gender confusion of lesbianism) and growing old without children.  Many women tried to pursue men, career, and children simultaneously, with predictably disastrous results (see Venker & Schlafly's just-published "Flipside of Feminism" for details).


FEMINIST THEOLOGY

The effects of secular feminism on theology were predictable.  New interpretations of scripture proliferated to explain why (a) traditional Christian orthodoxy was wrong, or (b) male and female roles/differences are ultimately cultural/societal, not universal and unchanging.

It is impossible to even scratch the surface of this topic without a book-length treatment (several such books are available for free at cbmw.org; these have detailed (and fair) presentations of various feminist understandings).

However, the following are examples of some of the novel interpretations that emerged in the decades after 1960:

• Galatians 3:28 ("In Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, slave nor free") means that the coming of Christ's kingdom has re-established a hypothetical pre-Fall order which included no distinctive male-female roles (see below for more on this).  This interpretation ignores the context of this passage which is discussing who can inherit salvation.
• Ephesians 5:21 ("submit to one another out of reverence for Christ) means that "mutual submission" must be practiced in the family and the church with regard to male and female roles.  This seems strange in light of the roles that are discussed in this section of Ephesians: husband-wife, Christ-church, parent-child, master-slave. It is clear in the context that "submit to one another" is referring to submission that is in accordance with your role(s).
• Ephesians 5:23 ("husband is head of wife as Christ is head of the church") uses "head" (Greek kephale) as a synonym for "source", not "authority."  Not only is this not consistent with the context, but the Greek support is extremely weak (ie, the one use of kephale for "source" is in the 5th century BC, and that is for a river's source; in human relationships it always means "authority").
• The Trinity are in mutual submission - this is a recent (1990's) assertion.  See the article by Bruce Ware (linked in #2 of the INTRODUCTION above); I don't see how anyone can thoughtfully read the Gospel of John and come to this conclusion.
• The redemptive thrust of the Bible moved away from divorce and slavery (two results of the Fall); in a similar way, it moves us away from gender-based roles.  This ignores the fact that Genesis 1 & 2 clearly describe gender-based roles prior to the Fall.  A similar rationale has been offered to justify homosexual relationships.
• The NT context is addressing (a) uneducated women, or (b) women who are false teachers, or (c) other cultural/contextual issues.  This is not what the text says (or can be reasonably inferred from the text); Paul clearly grounds these differences in creation.
• Pentecost restored the Garden by undoing the effects of the Fall.  This assumes equality before the Fall (previously discussed).  And, unlike Adam and Eve, we still know "good and evil."
• Selective literalism ("aren't you inconsistent by not requiring, for example, women to wear head coverings?").  Paul points to the Fall to highlight what appears to be a created structure (male & female roles).  A similar line of reasoning is often heard in justifying homosexual behavior.
• Pragmatism ("aren't you cutting yourself off from half of your potential leaders?").  God is the one who defines who can fill what roles; this is a question of whether we accept God's authority.  A similar line of reasoning could be offered for bisexual behavior.

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS

Well, make that "some of what the Bible says."  The reason why the orthodox Christian understanding of male and female roles in the church and family was largely unquestioned for over 19 centuries is that the Bible is clear on the topic.  Here's a cursory listing of a few of the fundamental passages:

• Christ (through the Spirit (per John 16)) makes it clear that male leadership (a) in the home is grounded in creation as a type of Christ and the church (Eph 5:31-32),  and (b) in the church is grounded in Adam being created first with Eve as his helper (1 Tim 2:14).  The implication of the Greek word for "authority" in 1 Tim 2, by the way, is neutral or positive in tone; it does not have a negative (eg, "domineering") implication.  Associated with this is "women remaining silent in the church" (1 Cor 14:34-36).  See cbmw.org for a detailed discussion of how this coheres with such passages as Acts 21:9 (Phillip's virgin prophetess daughters) and 1 Cor 11:5 (concerning women praying and prophesying).  I have to say that I don't really see how you interpret 1 Cor 14 as being "silent in the discussion of the meaning of a prophecy", which seems to be the dominant understanding of CBMW.
• Genesis 2-3 makes it clear that there is a clear distinction in male-female roles prior to the Fall.  This distinction is made clear in numerous ways, including: Adam was created first (from dirt), Adam was given specific directions regarding his purpose and prohibited behavior prior to Eve's creation, Adam names those under his authority (including Eve), Eve is created from Adam (not from dirt), Eve is created as a suitable helper for Adam, and "a man" leaves the authority he lives under (his parents) and unites with his wife.
• In the Fall, Satan approaches Eve, thereby undermining the authority/responsibility structure created by God.  And, it appears that Adam is present, but silent, thereby shirking his leadership/protection responsibility.
• In the Fall, Adam is held responsible.  In Gen 3, Adam, then Eve, then the serpent are questioned, with the punishments handed out in reverse order.  And, in the NT (Rom 5:12, 1 Cor 15:21) Adam is held responsible for the Fall.
• Two of Eve's three curses involve a distortion of the relationship between her and Adam.  First, she will desire to possess or rule over her husband (the Hebrew for "desire" appears only one more time in Genesis (4:7) and is "sin desiring to have Cain"; the implication is a desire to reverse the creation order with Adam being a helper to Eve).  Second, she will be ruled by her husband in a domineering sense.  The continuing existence of all three curses are all too clear to this day.

RESTORING UNITY

Perhaps the most tragic and destructive result of this controversy is that it tends to set male against female and husband against wife.  This presupposes the core issue is "who's in charge" or "who submits."  That is not what is revealed in nature or in God's Word.  God makes it clear that the church is to be unified; a perfect bride for Christ. Likewise (per Gen 2 and Eph 5), the center of being male or female is that "it is not good to be alone."  While some may be called to the life of a single person, God's creative intent is for a unified male-female entity, just as Christ and the church a unity (Eph 5).

Unity, then, provides the fundamental framework for discussing roles in the home and the church. If Biblical roles are abandoned, unity will surely disappear.

As with all distortions of God's creation, the fundamental solution is the Gospel and its power to change lives. Neither the desire to live out God's purposes, nor the power to do so is possible without the Good News that makes us "slaves to righteousness" (Rom 6:16-17, 1 Cor 1:24-25).


SUMMARY

The only thing more fundamental than the male-female distinction is being created in the image of God.  It should not be surprising that, in a fallen world, the most easily distorted things are the foundations, and, because they are the core of our identity, distorted foundations are often the most difficult for us to clearly see.

Attacks on a Biblical understanding of male and female, and on distinctive male-female roles in marriage and the church, will probably increase in intensity and frequency for the foreseeable future.  Christians in Europe and Canada have already been persecuted by the government for defending a Biblical understanding of sexuality.  More worrisome, perhaps, are attacks from within Christianity (in a broad sense).  The latest is the statement by Zondervan that they will cease publication of the 1984 NIV, and will replace it with a revision of the TNIV that deliberately distorts the clear meaning of numerous passages in pursuit of a "gender neutral" translation.

Regardless, God's Word has always called His people out of the world.  And, the Gospel has always provided them with the power to live a life under His authority.

Culture Observations - June 2011

1. Catholic University is switching back to single-sex dorms; reasons include less binge drinking (18% vs. 42%) and less promiscuity/depression.  Expect lots of backlash; sexual "liberation" of various sorts is the foundation of the post-60's Western culture.  It won't (and can't) be replaced by nothing ... which means a Biblical understanding of male and female may begin to get a more thoughful hearing in the near future. (search Google news if you don't get the entire article with this link)

2. Seems like almost all Americans have been (consciously or unconsciously) seduced by the radical individualism that is the core identity of our time, despite everything from ancient writings (the Bible) to current research indicating that such an identity is poison to social, economic, and spiritual health.  Like all fundamental sins, the issue is not knowledge ... it's an unwillingness to live the way we know we should, in accordance to the "law written on the heart".  This column by Tony Perkins clearly describes why economic capital depends on human capital, and human capital depends on stable (ie, sacrificial) families.  For example, the economic difference a mom makes in, say, 4 children (between them being wards of the state, and them being a key part of a family as a mother/father) is far more than almost every father will earn in a lifetime.

3. Which brings us to ... another liberal mugged by reality: David Mamut's new book sounds intriguing ... I liked "The Spanish Prisoner" a lot, not the least because it's a bit quirky.  Some other favorites from folks who : The Content of Our Character (Shelby Steele), The Dream and the Nightmare (Myron Magnet), The Destructive Generation (Collier & Horowitz).

Bottom line: it takes a lot longer to both build and destroy human capital than it does for economic capital.  This country has spent over 40 years pursuing changes in culture and policy that have destroyed large chunks of our human capital.  An unprecedented revolution in information technology is the primary reason this destruction has not already triggered an existential crisis.  Ironically, this same revolution (by enabling sophisticated obligation structures like derivatives) may trigger the reckoning.  Regardless, human capital can only be rebuilt slowly and at great sacrifice.  We're about to find out if this country is willing to face up to the fundamental causes of our economic crisis, and then, whether we're willing to begin the long and difficult task of rebuilding.