(That’s not one of my Photoshop specialties. That is from Mark’s Blog)

Mark Driscoll’s Brand of Complementarianism
If you have not read the previous post on why I hold to an egalitarian postion please start there.

Last October I wrote a piece called All the Innovative Dudes are at Home Watching Football. In it I addressed some issues I have concerning Pastor Mark Driscoll and his ruff and brash so called complementarian position. In the last 3 days I have had a couple of dozen hits on that post from The Hippie Christian Bulletin Board. This happens from time to time as it seems that Driscoll’s out of control antics have come up several times as an issue of debate there. On at least two such occasions my good friend Christian has left a link to my post in his responses to conversations there. Most recently the hits are all coming from a conversation over there that I somewhat reluctantly joined in because someone had read my post and concluded this type of conversation is “a waste of time for heresy-hunters.”

You may remember this past December in the wake of the Ted Haggard sex scandal Driscoll made these disparaging remarks about how a pastor’s wife should present herself:

Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.

You can read Driscoll’s comments in their entirety on his blog. I am still wondering what relevance those comments had to the tragedy that the Haggard family experienced or how his wife not ‘letting herself go’ might have helped with Ted’s temptation to lie with men.

Anyway, I honestly had no intention of writing anything about Driscoll again anytime soon and then this whole Hippie bulletin board thing came up so I started poking around on Driscoll’s blog again and I found a post on his banned church planting video. Which is also right here for your viewing displeasure:

The outlandish video was for a church planting conference that Driscoll could not attend. The entire thing was shot in a military cemetery. In it Driscoll discusses “the man, the mission and the message” essential in his estimate for affective church planting. The video was pulled from the conference and DVD copies were not distributed after the video was criticized by Bill Hybels for not including women as potential church planters. I am not a big fan of Hybels but I do commend Brother Bill for speaking out against this:

The Least likely person to go to church in the United States of America is a young man in his twenties. These are guys who have absolutely made a wreck of everything. They’re banging their girlfriends. They are guys who are blowing all of their money, staying up all night playing World of Warcraft, finding free porn on the internet and trying to figure out how to get a bigger subwoofer into their retarded car. Those are the guys who must first be gathered. They must get a swift boot in the rear. They need a good run through boot camp. They need to be told that Jesus Christ is not a gay hippie in a dress and that they’re dealing with the king of kings and the Lord of lords and there is a mission he has called them to. Sixty percent of all Christians today are female. I’m glad the ladies love Jesus; but if you want to win a war you have to get the men. And once you get the men you’ve got to know what to do with them. They want to know how to get married. They want to know how to have sex with their wife at least once a day. They want to know how to make money, buy a home, how to have children, how to pay bills, how to father their sons, how to encourage, love and instruct their daughters… The bottom line is the mission is to get the men because if you get the men you win the war.

According to Driscoll if you get the young men, the women and children and the rest of society will follow. Apparently nobody informed Jesus or the apostle Paul that you need to get brutish young men in order to “win the war.” (Again please see the previous post if you have not yet)

So Where are the Respectful and Thoughtful Complementarians?
I do not want to set up a straw man. I realize that Driscoll is a controversial figure and some of his rhetoric is way over the top. But what I am wondering is where are the complementarians that are respectful to women but still insist on different roles in the Church and in the home? Where are the complementarians who oppose ordination of women but have a thoughtful and well articulated reason as to why they take that position.

I know that Driscoll has a relationship to other prominent evangelical leaders who publicly take such a position such as John Piper, a member of the Together for the Gospel movement (also including the likes of John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul). But I do not see Piper or any of his associates making any effort to distance themselves from Driscoll’s ultimate fighting-esque approach to the complementarian position. To the contrary there seems to be a growing affinity between Piper and Driscoll.

Of course, I have no idea what any of these men may say to Mark Driscoll in private. And John MacArthur has stated some disapointment with Driscoll but mostly for the fact that he is too culturally savvy he swears and was labled as a “cussing pastor” in Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. Well personally I think Driscoll’s presentation of his message is antiquated and a bit barbaric not savvy or hip. And I don’t give a damn if he curses; I am more concerned that he start treating woman better and quit ridiculing other men for “singing love-songs to Jesus” or for generally being too effeminate in his estimation.

As far as misogyny goes, Driscoll uses “the feminine” as and insult for other men not conforming to his image of what a man should be. He constantly employs terms like “chick” and “chickified.” At best he could mean weak or soft which would be the original meaning for such slang, comparing a woman to a baby chicken. At worst it’s often a euphemism for Bitch in the contemporary culture of the young males Driscoll prides himself on working with. He also uses “chick” or “chickified” or other euphemisms for feminine in the video and in several places on his blog and in interviews as an insult for men who are not living up to his version of male. It would be similar if I constantly used derogatory terms for jews or blacks when I was disgruntled with my white friends but still insisted I was not antisemitic or racist. To say that female does not equal less than male in Driscoll’s system is to turn a blind eye.

So again I ask: where are the respectful and thoughtful complementarians? I should add Protestant complementarians. I can understand the Catholic and Orthodox positions. It is part of the faberic of their overall theology. However, what I have a much harder time understanding is the Protestant for whom “the priesthood of all believers” is one of the great revelations of scripture that the Reformation was founded on. Where is the man or woman who will say that Mark Driscoll’s use of anything and everything “feminine” as an insult or weapon against other men makes them sick but yet will argue for “different roles” for men and women? Do such people exist? Or is the vulgar sense that the feminine is something “other” even something “less than” truly lie at the heart of even the most polite presentation of the complementarian position?

Please think on these things.

Shalom,
Wayne

The Recent Synod Decision
As I mentioned previously, the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church met recently and a monumental proposal to fully include women in church office passed. You can read a summery of this year’s Synod – including this landmark decision – here. This truly is a big step forward in the life of the Christian Reformed Church.

Since 1995, “congregations and classes had been allowed to ordain women as office bearers under a system of local option.” Meaning basically that individual churches could ordain women but that it would not necessarily be recognized at all CRC churches. Our church is one that has ordained women and has had several women pastors on staff in recent years. Last year Erin and I were in an historic service in which the first ever African American woman was ordained in the CRC in our church!

I do not know what the future holds, or what denomination Erin and I will end up ministering in for sure; but I am really proud to be a part of the Christian Reformed Church at such an exciting and important time in its history.

A Case for an Egalitarian Position
Our Lord of course made his entrance into this world through one very special woman, Mary whom the Early Church honored with the title Theotokos (the God-bearer). Jesus traveled with many women, they even funded his mission:

The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.(Luke 8:1-3).

So much for Mark Driscoll’s suggestion that the young men are the ones we must have to “make money, make babies… [and] make the culture of the future.”

All four Gospels have the women: Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James and Joseph, Joanna, Salome and the other women disciples accompanying Jesus to his death while Peter and the others had abandoned him. And let us not forget that the first witnesses of the resurrected Jesus were women.

And then there is the Apostle Paul. In Acts 16 after being forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak elsewhere, the Apostle Paul has a vision that leads him and his companions to the district of Macedonia. There in the city of Philippi Lydia and a group of women gathered for prayer became perhaps the first ever European Christians.

In Romans 16 Paul asks the Roman church to welcome sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, who delivered Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul tells them to give to her whatever she requires. In the same chapter of Romans Paul asks the recipients of his letter to greet his friends Priscilla and Aquila who Paul says risked their necks for his life. It is interesting that when Paul mentions the couple and their acts of bravery on his behalf that he first mentions Priscilla. Still in Romans 16 Paul gives a shout out to a woman named Mary and another named Junia, a relative of Paul’s. Paul says she was imprisoned with him, prominent among the apostles, and in Christ before he was.

In 1 Corinthians 11 Paul tells men and women how they ought to where there hair and and sure some fundamentalists out there are still trying to apply that in their present context. But for the most part Christians recognize this as immediately pertaining to the cultural situation of the church at Corinth. And it sure helps to realize that shaved heads were the mark of the temple prostitutes in Corinth and Paul wants the believers to distinguish themselves. What is important to note is that when Paul instructs “any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head – it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved” (1Cor 11:5) he is still nonetheless assuming that women will be praying and prophesying in church.

Yes the task of interpretation gets a little more difficult when we get to passages such as the puzzling parenthetical comment in 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36 which says women are not allowed to even speak in church. And then there is the Paul of the Pastoral Epistles, especially 1 Timothy, which seems to be almost irreconcilable with the Paul of the seven undisputed Pauline Epistles (1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon) at least on issues concerning the role of women in the Church and home. Of course the traditional answer from biblical scholars is that 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36 is an interpolation (later addition by Pauls followers) to match the content of writings like those in 1 Timothy:

I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent… Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty (1 Timothy 2:12,15).

I tend to agree with the vast majority of biblical scholars that such passages are probably Deutero-Pauline. And that is helpful for explaining drastically different attitudes in the Pauline corpus about the role of women. However that does not help at all with the hermeneutical problem we are left with. It does not matter who wrote what or when; for it is still part of the canon of scripture to which the Christian community is called to bear witness.

So what does one do when there seems to be two different strains of thought in the biblical witness on one subject? Fundamentalists and sometimes even liberals attempting to be faithful to the biblical witness get to the task of synthesizing. Differences, discrepancies? There are none they would like to believe. However, I prefer a different approach. We can ask: How does this fit with the overall trajectory of the biblical narrative. For instance: I think the Church set a precedent for such situations when they decided they were going to interpret such passages as Colossians 3:22 and 1 Peter 5:1-7 – which both urge the submission of slaves to their masters – in light of such passages as Paul’s instructions to Philemon to receive his one time slave Onesimus as his beloved brother (Philemon 1:16) or the message of freedom in Christ which Paul championed. And let us not forget:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28).

You know taking the same approach with the issue of women in the Church and in the home it seems like there is also something in that verse that could be applied, to our understanding of both sexes in fact. Allow me to do what I am aware I do too much on this blog, offer a word from Jürgen Moltmann relevant to the subject at hand:

The fact that the Bible grew up in the world of patriarchy and slavery still does not tell us anything about the presence of eternity at that time or about the future in its past… No one reads the Bible in order to take over a world picture that is past and gone. No one has to adopt the social concepts and the patriarchal sexual hierarchies of the Bible. If that were so, for biblical reasons we should have to reintroduce slavery into Christianity, revert to absolute monarchy instead of democracy and so forth. (Experiences in Theology, 279).

Indeed, we could add to that list, oh say the polygamy of the Old Testament or the aforementioned long hair and veils for women and short hair on men of the New Testament. The former did not work out so well for the latter-day saints. And I can’t help but wonder how the latter would do in the Church today.

Right about now someone is saying: “Yeah but Men and women have different roles and God made it that way” Well yes there are a lot of generalized differences between men and woman. But they are generalizations and cannot be applied to all woman or all men. What I want to know is, why, when such generalizations are the case, does it continue to get attributed to God’s design and never to the fall? It was only after the fall that God pronounced an enmity between the sexes (Genesis 3:16-17). But this is part of what Christ came to undo!  And Paul knows that well when he reminds his readers in Galatians that in Christ they are now one.

Shalom,
Wayne