more on same-sex marriage

Further to my previous post with links to the same-sex marriage debate I’d like to recommend one other.  My friend Jonathan McLatchie has an excellent post here.  Although general in scope, it addresses the Scottish situation.

what happens when eve tells adam what to do and adam lets her…

The whole of Scripture demands careful reading.  Nothing is insignificant.  This is nowhere more true than in the opening chapters of Genesis.  These chapters are laden with symbolism.  The narrative of Gen 1-3 is pregnant with the big issues of human history.   In a couple of previous blogs (here, here and here) we reflected a little on the text of Scripture which gives the account of ‘the rebellion’ or ‘the fall’.

Gen 3:1-6 (ESV)
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” ​​​ And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

I thought today I should reflect a little on one of the human failings that facilitates the fall, a creational irregularity that contributes to the rebellion.   In Gen 2 we are told that Adam is created first and then Eve.  This is significant.  Priority in creation conferred leadership (1 Tim 2:13).  Moreover, in the Genesis account, Adam was the source of Eve; she came from his body (Gen 2:21).  This too is significant.  The narrative point is that source and origin confer rights; the woman,  coming as she does from the man is intended to reflect the worth of the man in her submission to him (1 Cor 11:8).   Furthermore, we are expressly told the woman was made as a help for the man and not (at least in the most formal sense) vice versa (Gen 2:18).  A point again plainly stated in the NT (1 Cor 11:9).  We could add further indications of male leadership.  For example, Adam names Eve.  To name in the ancient world was an indication of authority (a bit like the implied authority of parents in naming their children still is today).

This male leadership is sometimes called patriarchy or more often today it is known as complementarianism.  It is called complementarianism as a way of recognising that males and females created by God are different and have different callings in life, callings which were never intended to be in conflict but to be complementary.  Now it is not my intention to try to tease out these different callings or roles.  I want simply to observe as the previous paragraph has made plain that fundamental to this distinction is the calling of men to lead.

Of course, even as I wrote the previous sentence, I realised how utterly reprehensible it is to the modern ear.  It is considered impossibly oppressive.  It is thoroughly retrograde and unpardonably recidivist.  Patriarchy may have been the basis of every civilization in all of previous history but we are enlightened, we know better.  Any half-human, half-moral, half-intelligent person knows that the only right position is full egalitarianism.  That is, male and female are not only equal in value and importance (which no complementarian denies) but any suggestion of gender meaning role differences is toxic and grotesque.   The patriarchy or complementarianism of Genesis 1-3 does not stand a prayer in our modern world.  It has as much credibility as claims that the world is flat.  I know this.

Yet, while the Bible does not claim that the earth is flat, it does teach again and again, in both old and new Testaments that God has conferred leadership on the male.  In fact, implicit in the narrative we are considering is that the misappropriation of roles by both Adam and Eve contributed to ‘the rebellion’.  The narrator is careful to inform us that the serpent spoke to Eve.  It is Eve that is beguiled and deceived.  Then Eve urges Adam to eat the forbidden fruit and Adam follows her bidding.  The point is clear, both acted outside their God-given callings.  Eve took the lead in a critical decision to disobey God and Adam in culpable weakness allowed her to do so.   Sin entered the world because neither maintained their God-given roles.

This, Paul forbids women to teach in the church for two reasons, one formal the other material.  The formal reason, that is, the essential reason, is that because of male priority in creation God has placed the responsibility of leadership and therefore  teaching in the church to the male (1 Tim 2:11-13) .  We may add to this a material reason, or if you like a reason evident from observation, namely, that given Eve was deceived by the serpent, and Adam was not it is clear that God knew what he was doing in placing leadership in the hands of the male; women seem more easily duped (1 Tim 2:14).  If you disagree with the latter comment then your beef is not with me, but Paul.  In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, your quarrel is with the Holy Spirit.

What is my main point in this post?  It is that reneging against biblical gender roles and the great rebellion go hand in hand in the biblical narrative.  The modern drive for a full-blown egalitarianism in society is simply an indicator of its defiance of God and his revealed pattern in creation.  This defiance by society is already having tragic consequences.  Neither men nor women feel sure of  their identity and responsibilities.  Their image is increasingly shaped by the media – the least responsible culture-conditioner imaginable.    Men are shoe-horned into caricatures of  either machismo-ism or homosexual effeminacy.  The new ‘metrosexual man’ is as concerned with his looks, dress and smell as his female counterpart, probably more so.  Meanwhile women discover their ‘freedom’ has pretty well turned them into the sex-objects of the worst kind of male fantasy; a new kind of sexualized woman: the hard-hitting Lucy Lui; the Terminator’s Sarah Connor; Sigourney Weaver’s ‘Ripley’;  Kate Beckinsdale’s  Underworld ‘Selene’; or Uma Thurman’s ‘The Bride’ in Kill Bill.  The list goes on.  The female who is more deadly than the male is part of C21 lore.

In the new egalitarian society boys don’t grow up to be men, they remain ‘boys’ with all their boyish evasion of responsibility.  All are charmingly irresponsible and befuddled Hugh Grant’s.   They marry later, if at all.  They father children but do not raise them.  Women wear the trousers and carry the responsibility.  They study, achieve, provide the income and keep the home (not so egalitarian in reality).  Men become touchy-feely while women are stoical and hard.   The role reversal works out at so many levels.    But the net result is marriage deeply suffers and society begins to disintegrate.  The net result is the rebellion deepens.

Of course, there are other factors that play into the troubles of society, but the setting aside  of a responsible complementarianism, as in Gen 3,  is undoubtedly one.

What a loss of complementarianism means for the church will be the subject of a future post.

patriarchy and jane fonda

This blog first appeared on a previous blogsite.  I feel it is worth reiterating.  Too many churches seem committed to a policy of pragmatism on the role of women in church life.  It represents a tacit abandonment of biblical authority in the church whose final end is apostasy.

For a few years it appeared Jane Fonda – the Angelina Jolie of my generation – had become an evangelical Christian. Embracing biblical faith was an astonishing volte face for the liberal leftist ‘Hanoi Jane’. Tragically her faith in its initial form was not to last. All too soon she saw conflict with her liberal left feminist agenda and something had to give. What gave was her commitment to a biblical faith. She saw quite clearly that biblical faith was not compatible with her militant feminism and regrettably her feminism trumped her faith, at least in its biblical manifestation. She still describes herself as a Christian but finds the Gnostic gospels more appealing and more in line with her liberalism and feminism.

I admire her honesty. She faced the message of the Bible squarely, saw its patriarchy was not merely a cultural context but a conviction, and rejected its message. In this she shows more integrity than an army of evangelical feminists and their acolytes who manage by hermeneutic sleight of hand to convince themselves that the Bible supports their egalitarian agenda. This despite the following and much more besides.

The Bible is composed of two testaments. The NT writings are written exclusively by men. The OT is probably written exclusively by men (two books are named after women but are written in the third person).

In a world of both male and female deities the Deity of the Bible, OT and NT, is emphatically masculine. In the OT, Yahweh is accompanied by male pronouns. He is King, not Queen. When he takes on human theophanous form he is invariably male. In the NT, God is ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ both demonstrably male titles. He is also ‘Spirit’ always defined in masculine terms. When God becomes human in Jesus he becomes a man.

In Genesis we discover that when God creates human beings he creates a man first. More, the woman he creates is derived from the male and is made to be a ‘helper’ of the man. In fact from Genesis forward patriarchy is inescapable. The concern of the early chapters of Genesis is with the male children. Genealogies are traced through males. God calls Abraham, a man, and promises that through him and his seed (Jesus) the whole earth will be blessed. The major players in Genesis thereafter are male – Isaac, Jacob and his twelve sons (with his daughter gaining only a fleeting mention). The tribes of Israel are named after the sons not the daughter.

The same could be said of the rest of the OT. Moses the leader of God’s people is male. Aaron the leader of the priesthood is male. Indeed only males were allowed to be priests. The Judges in Israel who led before a King was given were all male bar one, Deborah, and she only reluctantly became a judge because of the weakness of the men. In fact she makes explicit that her leadership brings shame on the men (Judges 4). When God appoints a King he appoints, as the title reveals, a male. And all the prophets reveal that the Messiah to come will be male.

In the NT the Messiah arrives and is indeed male. When he chooses his alternative Israel he chooses twelve apostles to represent the twelve tribes – all are male. Leadership in the NT church was male – elders had wives not husbands. The public teachers of the church were male… but here I will stop for we get into disputed territory.

Now of course I am not saying women had no place or are not prominent from time to time in the biblical narrative. Think of the four great women specifically included in the genealogy of the birth of Christ. However, they are there for a specific purpose and are the exceptions that prove the rule. My point here is not to address the relative roles of men and women in Scripture but simply to point out the highly disputed, yet indisputable fact of patriarchy in the Bible, or male leadership, a fact only too obvious to Jane Fonda.

god’s women

It ought to be crystal clear to any who read Scripture (though I know it is not) that God has placed authority in this present world in the hands of men.  In both OT and NT God’s model of order in society involves male leadership.  Yet any who infer from this that women are either inferior or unimportant are not reading their Bible.   The reality is, often God uses women to accomplish his purposes.  Examples of this are peppered throughout Scripture.

One example lies in the preservation of the child Moses.  Moses in God’s purpose was to be a strategic leader of God’s people.  He was the leader used by God to redeem his people from Egypt.  He prefigured in many ways God’s coming Messiah. In the OT, Moses is a towering figure.  Yet, in God’s ways,  Moses would be who he became because of women who protected and shielded him. He owed his life to godly women who risked theirs to preserve his.  All Pharaoh’s (Satan’s) attempts to destroy Moses (and for that matter the divine seed, Israel) were thwarted by women.  His mother hid him in a basket made of bulrushes in defiance of Pharaoh’s decree he should die at birth (Ex 2:2-3).  The midwives, ordered to kill all male children outwitted Pharaoh’s orders because they feared God more than the King (Ex 1:17).  Moses’ sister watched over him as he lay in the basket at the banks of the Nile (Ex 2:4).  God, with heavenly irony, even ordered that Pharaoh’s daughter would find the basket and take care of the child; Pharaoh’s own house is orchestrated by God to protect Moses (Ex 2:6).

In the narrative, Pharaoh’s impotence to destroy the people of God and thwart God’s purpose is exposed.  Women, considered weak in their culture, yet strong in faith and in the Lord, are used to ‘confound the mighty’.  God delights in using the weak of this world to destroy the strong.  He uses the things that ‘are not’ to bring to nothing the things that ‘are’.

It has always been thus and will continue so to be.  Thank God for godly women.