From all appearances, most of Christianity would seem to support the dominance of men and the subordination of women. Our view is that this does not represent God's intention of male/female roles and relationships either in creation or in the teaching and example of Jesus but rather represents the situation after sin entered the world. We see the majority structure as being the post-fall situation uncritically inherited through the Christian cultural meme and overlaid with a veneer of proof texts from the Bible as translated by those who are locked into the post-fall mode of thinking.
What follows is an introduction to a complex field of study and we invite visitors to embark on their own quest to learn what the Bible says. At the end of this article we suggest a link that is a good starting point.
We are approaching the end of what much surely be the most bloodletting century in the history of the human race. And we cannot believe that this honours the Creator in any way.
For any thinking Christian, the close of the century has to lead to some hard questions. Among these are ‘Has Christianity failed?’ and ‘What can Christians do now?’
The macro view of war is that it has gone beyond being just an extension of politics. It is now an extension of business. War is good for business. Each generation of war machine officers is blooded in battle as each improved generation of weaponry is tested. In death and destruction fortunes are made. And more still as that which has been powdered is rebuilt by construction companies from the greedy and hungry destroyers’ lands.
How very clear is the imbalance between the money spent on war and the money spent to alleviate the suffering on the ground.
The war industry must be tackled at this macro scale - and by Christians. The Intelligent Christian invites comment and discussion on this subject.
But war happens at the micro scale as well and it is at this human one-to-one scale that Christians can immediately make an effect. We suggest that a more intelligent approach be taken by Christians, particularly Christians who work in politics and the military.
It is our view that the micro scale is where we are supposed to begin our emphasis. This is the fine scale phenomenon that feeds back onto the large scale system, just as do yeast, salt and light.
Why are we looking at gender? Feminists have said that violence is male. They are right. Yes, there are women in the military and we may be familiar with the respectable patrician women who support the war machines and enjoy the lifestyle their profits enable, but most violence is done by men. This too is on all scales, from the nuclear family to global conflict and self-similarity provides us with a clear focus. The gender issue relates very much to the conduct of war and the prevention of war, as it does to violence on every other scale.
We have said that structure can speak louder than words; structure can speak louder than the word of God; and structure can, in some instances, become the word of God. In terms of the powerful thinking tools gained from modern thinking in science, structure becomes the initial conditions that sets the system.
Structure, in turn, derives from thought. This is the process of reification. What people think forms the structure. The structure then sets the system and interacts with itself and so on. Self similar pockets of order develop within the system in various scales. Careers can be made studying the unfolding system but the real interest, and the proper focus of high intellect in our opinion, is in the initial conditions.
There are times when we have to agree to disagree if we are to get along. We do this where we live in order to get along with those of differing religious beliefs. Again seeing self-similarity over scale, some of us may have to agree to disagree on the subject of gender within Christendom. I say this because Christianity bifurcates broadly into two camps: male domination and gender equality. I hasten to say here that there are many male/female relationships that behave biblically even thought the participants might articulate male dominance as their understanding of scripture. On the other hand there are many that do not. An initial exploration of this can be found in Battered into Submission, written by the Alsdurfs, a Christian couple in the USA. It looks at wife abuse justified by reference to Ephesians 5:22.
There was a very disturbing albeit brief report in the magazine published by Tearfund, an evangelical relief agency based in England. The report stated that along with the massive increase of evangelicalism in South America was an increase in child abuse among evangelicals. The report was slim and did not mention whether the abuse was sexual or battering. Our guess is that it was battering children into submission. It made me feel that the tradition of male domination and the mould pressing tendency of this present world Paul cautions us against in Romans 12:2 may well be a virus that infects and spreads with Christianity as presently understood and practiced in the majority.
The boards of most Christian organisations and churches are, from our observation, composed mainly of men. The men of choice are mainly successful businessmen (first choice) or successful professionals (second choice). I think this is important to examine because the board of an organisation becomes the initial conditions of the system. And I suppose the rationale for such a composition is that an organisation requires a board composed of people who know how to run organisations and manage money.
Recently I was on holiday visiting friends in the United States. Their eleven year old daughter attends school at a Christian school run by a charismatic denomination known for pastoral control over all aspects of the organisation. She told her parents she had been praying and believed God was leading her to continue at the school. This part of her spiritual maturity impressed me.
I had a private conversation with this young girl and asked her how things were at the school. She immediately told me of a disciplinary incident, as if she had wanted to tell someone about it. One of her classmates had taken to the habit of wearing the shirt of his uniform outside his trousers (something like English schoolboys, I think).
On two successive days the boy was told to tuck his shirt in. On the third day he was given a detention.
Now, from the point of view of the pastor and the board I suppose this was a minor disciplinary incident. The girl saw it differently. For her it was an important justice issue. Why? Because there had been no warning given to the boy that a detention would follow if he did not comply. To the children it was another example of the school being run by fiat, not by systems.
I think it would be entirely biblical and appropriate if this eleven year old girl were to be invited to join the board of the school.
You see, boards are composed mainly of males who have won the testosterone wars - the winning headbutters of their particular hills. In the main they have never made the inward journey and examined which part of Romans 12:2 they are in. They are mostly mould pressers. Is there an alternative? And are any alternatives biblical? The study of gender in the Bible requires a fair amount of both concentration and a willingness to iterate one's own thinking paradigm. This article can only begin to open the subject.
Here is a sampler of some gender passages and an egalitarian understanding.
The bifurcation I mentioned begins in Genesis and our understanding of the Creator’s intention for male and female and what we term ‘the fall’.
If Genesis 3:16 is understood as prescriptive then male dominance becomes axiomatic in the discussion. Men are the bosses and women fawn sweetly all over them. But if Genesis 3:16 is understood as descriptive of the disruptive consequences of sin then the way is open for seeing male/female equality as an integral component in God’s intention.
We take the latter view and what follows is a fair representation of the egalitarian school.
In Genesis 3:16 what the New International Version (NIV) translates as ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing’ is actually a ‘multiplying I will multiply’ construction which is used elsewhere in Genesis as a blessing amid difficulty statement. It is found in the angel’s message to Hagar in 16:10, ‘multiplying I will multiply your descendants’. Also in 22:16 in God’s response to Abraham’s obedience in being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. (But for visitors who are not familiar with this passage, God did not ask Abraham to go through with the sacrifice!)
The NIV rendition ‘with pain you will give birth to children’ may better be rendered ‘along with toil you will give birth to children’. Here the word translated pain is the same word as is rendered toil when applied to the man in 3:17.
‘Your desire’ in 3:16 uses a word that is rare in the Old Testament. It does appear in the Song of Solomon, many years later but, closer, it appears in 4:7 where the Lord says to Cain, ‘But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you —— ‘.
This makes it more likely that the desire the woman had for the man after the ‘fall’ was the desire to control him. However, the man, possibly because of his greater physical strength and the need of the woman for protection, shelter and food for bearing and raising children, will rule over the woman.
This is not what the creator intended. In Genesis 2:18 God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him’. The term suitable helper is a misleading rendition. The Hebrew term is ezer kenegdo. Ezer appears something like twenty times in the Old Testament and generally it means a strong helper. In many of the instances it refers to God being the helper of Israel. Hardly a secretary/charmaid!
The word kenegdo is constructed from three words and it occurs only here in the Old Testament. Literally it means ‘like face to face him’ or ‘like opposite him’. This makes it more of an equality description. In fact, taken together, ezer kenegdo, leans toward a strong, perhaps stronger, person like the man and a person with whom the man deals face to face.
This then is the basis for the egalitarian school of thought. If the fall changed male/female roles and relationships and ‘The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work’ (1 John 3:8b) then we should be prepared to see in Jesus’ redemptive work a return to God’s intended male/female roles and relationships.
It is in New Testament translation and interpretation of ‘the gender passages’ and smaller passages and items that we can see the effect of the aforementioned bifurcation.
Traditional translations, exemplified by the NIV, slant the translation of these relevant parts of the New Testament towards male dominance. And because these passages are for the most part read and used by today’s Christians without serious reference to the culture into which they were originally addressed, it is all too easy to précis them as ‘men are the bosses and women are the servants’. Or words to that effect. But in whatever terms they are couched, that is what they mean. Even recently I heard a television preacher thundering that wives should obey their husbands. It is far too common.
1 Timothy 2:12 to 15 is one of the gender passages. Cathie and Dick Clark Kroeger, founders of Christians for Biblical Equality (see Links) have done some pioneer work on this passage. From their study of the cultural context they conclude that the passage is not concerned with the roles of women in the church but it is in fact a strong prohibition against women bringing into the church teaching and behaviour from their previous religious experience. In the time and place of the day that was proto-gnosticism. Proto-gnostics held that women were created before men and that the first woman had some part in bringing forth the first man. This act is authentain. Authentain is the word the NIV translates ‘to have authority over’. In fact, by reversing the subjects and predicates of the statements in this passage you get a fair representation of the proto-gnostic teachings. You can try this as a good exercise in Bible study.
The Ephesians 5:22 instruction takes a different hue when one understands the predominant form of marriage in the Roman world of that decade. It was called sine manu, without hand, and was the brainchild of Augustus who was attempting to reduce marital breakdown. With sine manu the woman was ‘lent’ to the husband by her parents and she returned to her parents’ home for three nights each year. The parents had the right at any time to remove the woman from the marriage and marry her to someone else. In this context a wife submitted to her parents and to the state.
So, for a Christian woman to submit to her husband was really to deny the state or her parents any right over her marriage. It was therefore an empowering act for Christian women - virtually an act of civil disobedience.
This has been a quick look at a few of the major gender passages. There are others and many smaller but no less significant passages and word usages.
For more information on the male/female roles and relationships in the Bible visit Christians for Biblical Equality at http://www.cbeinternational.org