"Falling into the Holes in Their Own Thought"

(Cross-posted from Bible Literature Translation)

I have been following a blogsphere conversation that Bible Literature Translation (among others) has been involved in, particularly in its Noting Abusive Theologians post, where blog contributor GaudeteTheology noted:

In my class on the History of Systematic Theology, my classmates and I were shocked to learn from our professor (not from any of our books) that Paul Tillich had extramarital affairs, including sexual contacts with his students which certainly today would be considered sexual harassment at best, abusive at worst. It generated an important discussion about the extent to which we could rely on the intellectual work of a theologian whose life showed such serious failings in his ability to “walk the talk,” on the one hand; and the extent to which all of us are sinners, and thus all theologians are sinners, so why do we expect anything different, on the other. . . 

(I do not recall whether the discussion broke out along gender lines; I do recall that another woman student and I were among the most vocally horrified, and that our professor, a man, was rather strongly making the case that we shouldn’t be surprised or concerned.)

[M]y immediate response to learning of this theologian’s persistent sinful patterns of behavior was to question whether and how it reflected on the value of his theology. It seems a screamingly obvious question to me.

This last week Fred Clark at Slacktivist contributed more to this discussion.  Clark's post is in response to Roger Olson's recent question, "Should a theologian's life affect how we regard his/her theology?" Leaving aside for now the issue of whether all sins should be viewed in the same light (whether we should, as Clark thinks Olson does, put excessive beer-drinking in the same category as advocating the slaughter of peasants), I found Clark's post very helpful in providing an alternative to either dismissing a person's theology because of his personal life, or dismissing a person's personal life because of her theology.

Clark says:

It is, rather, a vitally important matter of identifying the way these men fell into the holes in their own thought so that we can avoid falling into those holes ourselves. We can’t shrug off Yoder’s sexual abuse or Jefferson’s slave-owning as, in Olson’s compartmentalizing phrase, “sides to their personal lives that we cannot be proud of". . . 

Did Luther’s anti-Semitism “affect” his theology, or did his theology foster his anti-Semitism? Yes, both. Did George Whitefield’s slave-owning shape his otherworldly revivalism or did his otherworldly revivalism rationalize his slave-owning? Yes, both. 

The inability to recognize that cause and effect can flow both ways makes it unlikely that Olson will be able to “use it but highlight those areas” where the taint of this “scandalous action” can be identified as a discrete, separate compartment of thought. That’s not how humans work.

I think it is important to avoid the ad hominem fallacy when considering this question. After all, the truth or falsehood of a statement is not changed by the nature of the person who makes it. But (and this is an important "but") individual statements of truth or falsehood don't exist in a vacuum. They are each one bit of a whole system of thought subscribed to by the person making them. And often, human beings being what they are, inconsistencies and even outright contradictions can exist within a person's system of thought. These inconsistencies and contradictions often come from unexamined assumptions and prejudices within the person who is writing or speaking. The cognitive dissonance thus created is often assuaged by some small cheat, such as an unacknowledged change in the definitions of the words being used. For instance, Thomas Jefferson's idea that all people are equal is one tenet of his thought. The idea that certain kinds of humans aren't really people is another tenet of the same man's thought: the one that justified both slaveholding and the ongoing rape of certain of his female slaves. Both ideas have to be taken into account in order to make proper sense of Jefferson. The fact that equality depends on how "people" are defined is a weakness in his system of thought that needs to be recognized. In fact, it's a weakness that he either introduced or allowed, in order to justify his personal behavior to himself.

We can't ignore Jefferson's weakness relating to who gets defined as fully human, if we want to avoid falling into similar traps in our own thinking.

Roger Olson's reasoning on the subject is as follows:

If we were to discount the value of every theologian whose life was in some way scandalous our library shelves would be much less burdened down. And perhaps our theological thinking poorer. And I didn’t even mention all the German theologians and biblical scholars who supported National Socialism! 

Having said all that, I have to add this. If those German theologians allowed their pro-Nazi sympathies to infect their writings we would all, I suspect, decline to use them in our courses. So, to the extent that a theologian allowed his infidelities, racial prejudices, wrong political views, to affect his scholarship, I believe we must inevitably either 1) discard his scholarship, or 2) use it but highlight those areas where the scandalous parts of his life affected it. 

However, to the extent that the theologian’s scandalous actions did not affect his theology (or biblical scholarship) I see no reason to make much of them. They should probably be mentioned in a biography but there’s no need to reject his whole theology because of them.

Olson's writing here, I think, reveals his tendency to think in just the sort of binaries I have asserted we should try to avoid-- that either a theologian's theology has been affected by his personal life, or it hasn't; and that it's possible for it not to have been. And where it has been so affected, if it's not too pervasive it's possible to cut away those places like a bit of mold on a piece of cheese, leaving the rest good and usable. However, if the taint of the theologian's personal life is too pervasive, the entire theology must be discarded.

But I'm afraid we humans really don't work that way. We are all a mixture of bad and good acting and thinking. Our thinking does affect the way we act, and the way we act does affect our thinking-- and this is particularly true of the kind of people whose words, spoken or written, are wise enough to have been remembered down through the years. Wise people don't usually leave their actions unjustified by their thinking, because they are thinkers and they can't function that way.

Therefore, it's important to take a theologian's private life into account when reading his or her writings, and note where cognitive dissonance may have been compensated for by changes in definitions and other such things. 

If Tillich abused young women at Union Theological Seminary, then his attitude towards women certainly affected what he wrote (or didn't write) about Eve. The key is to keep that in mind when reading his Systematic Theology and other works.

N. T. Wright's Complementarianism

[Cross-posted from Bible Literature Translation]

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the Interview with N. T. Wright on First Things on the subject of sexuality.  N. T. (Tom) Wright is, as this website puts it, "Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and was formerly Bishop of Durham in England." I have read several of his books and lectures and have found him to be in general an articulate scholar and a convincing writer on Christianity and the Bible.

The interview linked above is a portion of a longer interview, and it focuses on Wright's (negative) views on gay marriage.  The puzzling thing about the interview is how it departs from Wright's usual reasoned discourse to compare those who believe marriage can and should be extended to same-sex couples, to Nazis and Stalinists.  This is not the kind of approach I'm used to reading from a man I highly respect.  Several other blogs, such as Sarah Over the Moon and Slacktivist, have taken issue with this approach.* Several posts at Bible Literature Translation, such as this one by Suzanne McCarthy and this one by J. K. Gayle, have focused on some of the implications of Wright's thinking, focusing in particular on this quote from the interview:

With Christian or Jewish presuppositions, or indeed Muslim, then if you believe in what it says in Genesis 1 about God making heaven and earth—and the binaries in Genesis are so important—that heaven and earth, and sea and dry land, and so on and so on, and you end up with male and female. It’s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together. The last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and the new earth, and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and his church. It’s not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that. It’s an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male-plus-female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God’s intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth.

This paragraph from Wright's book Surprised by Hope is also appropos:

Heaven and earth, it seems, are not after all poles apart, needing to be separated for ever when all the children of heaven have been rescued from this wicked earth. Nor are they simply different ways of looking at the same thing, as would be implied by some kinds of pantheism. No: they are different, radically different; but they are made for each other in the same way (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female. And, when they finally come together, that will be cause for rejoicing in the same way that a wedding is: a creational sign that God’s project is going forwards; that opposite poles within creation are made for union, not competition; that love and not hate have the last word in the universe; that fruitfulness and not sterility is God’s will for creation.

Wright's views against same-sex marriage, then, are rooted in his insistence that the very meaning of marriage is about male and female-- and that men and women, males and females, themselves are representative of something larger, some overarching pattern of complementary binaries in God's plan for creation and re-creation, and there can be no deviations from that pattern:

If you say that marriage now means something which would allow other such configurations, what you’re saying is actually that when we marry a man and a woman we’re not actually doing any of that stuff. This is just a convenient social arrangement and sexual arrangement and there it is . . . get on with it. . . If that’s what you thought marriage meant, then clearly we haven’t done a very good job in society as a whole and in the church in particular in teaching about just what a wonderful mystery marriage is supposed to be.** Simply at that level, I think it’s a nonsense. It’s like a government voting that black should be white.

It's not my purpose here to give a complete Scriptural and philosophical defense of gay marriage. Though I am no longer at all convinced that the passages of Scripture that are used to deny gay marriage address committed, faithful same-sex unions at all, I think I've got a lot more still to study and learn about that topic.*** But I do want to talk about the subject of binary thinking and exclusionary definitions such as Wright displays in the quotes above, and how they relate to the concept of "complementarity" in male-female relations, particularly in marriage.

Before he started blogging at Bible Literature Translation, J. K. Gayle blogged at Aristotle's Feminist Subject, where he said this in 2009::

We are suspicious of binaries. And we are suspicious not because binaries cannot or do not exist in nature. But we are suspicious of binaries because the binary is the fundamental structure of patriarchy. The would-be pure and precise division of the binary helps and has helped and will continue to help males to be dominant over females. In contrast, there's feminine discourse, which tends not to be reduced to the "either / or" but, rather, tends to be "both and" and "more."

And in 2011 he said:

[A]lthough we in the west tend to speak in terms of categories, that are binary, as if they are natural, our practices are ancient, going back to the man Aristotle, who profoundly believed that females naturally were inferior to males.

The idea of binaries as exclusionary, either A or Not A, shows more the influence of Aristotelian categories on Western thought than it reflects the mindsets of either the ancient Hebrew or New Testament Greek writers. This Aristotelian way of thinking is certainly not the only way to approach the texts. Even if not consciously intended by Wright, the Bible's concept of binaries brought into union definitely implies a "both-and" kind of relationship in many instances, rather than the exlusionary either-or. As Rabbi Rachel Barenblat says on her blog Velveteen Rabbi:

This is what it means to say that the Jews accepted the Torah for real at Purim: we accepted the deepest Torah, the highest Torah, the Torah in which there is no longer a distinction between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" because to God on high it's all one. At this level of spiritual elevation, there's nothing which the sitra achra, the "other side" -- in a word, evil -- can grasp. Once you get to this high place, evil has fallen away. This is the point at which we're connecting not with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which presumes binaries) but rather the Tree of Life.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was what kept Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life.  God did order the world in Genesis 1 through binaries, but that doesn't mean there's only "either/or" and never "both/and" or "more."  The presence of a pattern does not exclude combinations or exceptions.  Also, the binaries of Scripture are generally principles or patterns, not laws or rules. There are very real, very human humans who have an extra X chromosome, or who present as one sex but have the hormones of the other. And God created them.

I must disagree with Wright that presence of an exception or combination somehow denigrates or damages the pattern or principle. Just as the existence of the platypus is not bad just because it doesn't fit the pattern of either a land creature or a water creature, the existence of humans and human relationships that don't fit the male-female pattern do not destroy the pattern. The Genesis binary patterns are beautiful, but they are not set forth as law, and not fitting into them is not disobedience.

God did divide the light from the darkness and call one "day" and the other "night," -- but His presence became manifest, walking in the Garden, in the "cool of the day": i.e., twilight.

It's outside my pay grade to speculate on or judge the motives of another person, so I will simply note that clinging to a patriarchal, exclusionary binary pattern when it comes to marriage seems to cause contradictions within Dr. Wright's own teachings.  Most of us egalitarians love to quote his teaching Women's Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis:

If those in Christ are the true family of Abraham, which is the point of the whole [Galatians 3] story, then the manner of this identity and unity takes a quantum leap beyond the way in which first-century Judaism construed them, bringing male and female together as surely and as equally as Jew and Gentile. What Paul seems to be doing in this passage, then, is ruling out any attempt to back up the continuing male privilege in the structuring and demarcating of Abraham’s family by an appeal to Genesis 1, as though someone were to say, ‘But of course the male line is what matters, and of course male circumcision is what counts, because God made male and female.’ No, says Paul, none of that counts when it comes to membership in the renewed people of Abraham.

 But sometimes we don't notice what Wright is not saying in that essay.  He's not saying he's an egalitarian.  He's only saying he doesn't think women should be restricted in church ministry.  He makes it clear, though, that he is not saying anything about his views on marriage, and that "ticking the box" of women in church ministry does not necessarily meaning "ticking a dozen other boxes down the same side of the page."  In fact, when it comes to marriage, this piece written by Andrew Wilson on the Confluence Blog defines Wright's view as follows:

Wives and husbands, along with everyone in the church, are called to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ, but not in identical ways. The church submits to Christ by recognizing him as head, and following his leadership. Christ submits to the church by loving her, taking on the form of a slave, giving himself up for her, and presenting her holy and blameless. So when Paul compares the wife to the church and the husband to Christ, he is saying that the ways in which their ‘mutual submission’ is expressed will be different: the woman will follow her husband’s lead, and the man will exercise his leadership by serving his wife, as Christ-like leaders always do. (This view is very simply expressed by Tom Wright in Paul For Everyone: The Prison Letters).

Wilson then directly quotes Wright:

Paul assumes, as do most cultures, that there are significant differences between men and women, differences that go far beyond mere biological and reproductive function. Their relations and roles must therefore be mutually complementary, rather than identical. Equality in voting rights, and in employment opportunities and remuneration (which is still not a reality in many places), should not be taken to imply such identity. And, within marriage, the guideline is clear. The husband is to take the lead – though he is to do so fully mindful of the self-sacrificial model which the Messiah has provided. As soon as ‘taking the lead’ becomes bullying or arrogant, the whole thing collapses.

This is a very "soft" complementarianism to be sure, but it is complementarianism all the same.  And Wright does insist in his "Women's Service in the Church" teaching that there must be no blurring of the male-female binary:

But once we have grasped this point we must take a step back and reflect on what Paul has not done as well as what he has done. In regard to the Jew/Gentile distinction, Paul’s fierce and uncompromising insistence on equality in Christ does not at all mean that we need pay no attention to the distinctives between those of different cultural backgrounds when it comes to living together in the church. . . the differences between them are not obliterated, and pastoral practice needs to take note of this; they are merely irrelevant when it comes to belonging to Abraham’s family. And this applies, I suggest, mutatis mutandis, to Paul’s treatment of men and women within the Christian family. The difference is irrelevant for membership status and membership badges. But it is still to be taken note of when it comes to pastoral practice. We do not become hermaphrodites or for that matter genderless, sexless beings when we are baptised.

And yet in the very same essay, Wright says this:

I notice that on one of your leaflets you adopt what is actually a mistranslation of this verse: neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. That is precisely what Paul does not say; and as it’s what we expect he’s going to say, we should note quite carefully what he has said instead, since he presumably means to make a point by doing so, a point which is missed when the translation is flattened out as in that version. What he says is that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no ‘male and female’. I think the reason he says ‘no male and female’ rather than ‘neither male nor female’ is that he is actually quoting Genesis 1, and that we should understand the phrase ‘male and female’ in scare-quotes.

So does Paul mean that in Christ the created order itself is undone? Is he saying, as some have suggested, that we go back to a kind of chaos in which no orders of creation apply any longer? Or is he saying that we go on, like the gnostics, from the first rather shabby creation in which silly things like gender-differentiation apply to a new world in which we can all live as hermaphrodites – which, again, some have suggested, and which has interesting possible ethical spin-offs? No. Paul is a theologian of new creation, and it is always the renewal and reaffirmation of the existing creation, never its denial, as not only Galatians 6.16 but also of course Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15 make so very clear. Indeed, Genesis 1—3 remains enormously important for Paul throughout his writings.

What then is he saying? Remember that he is controverting in particular those who wanted to enforce Jewish regulations, and indeed Jewish ethnicity, upon Gentile converts. Remember the synagogue prayer in which the man who prays thanks God that he has not made him a Gentile, a slave or a woman – at which point the women in the congregation that God ‘that you have made me according to your will’. I think Paul is deliberately marking out the family of Abraham reformed in the Messiah as a people who cannot pray that prayer, since within this family these distinctions are now irrelevant. . . 

Remember that the presenting issue in Galatians is circumcision, male circumcision of course. We sometimes think of circumcision as a painful obstacle for converts, as indeed in some ways it was; but of course for those who embraced it it was a matter of pride and privilege. It not only marked out Jews from Gentiles; it marked them out in a way which automatically privileged males. By contrast, imagine the thrill of equality brought about by baptism, the identical rite for Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.

Wright is saying that men are still men and women are still women in Christianity, and that they should be fully who they are; that women should not try to be just like men in the way they minister. But he is also saying that the whole "there is not male and female" is a reversal of the text of Genesis 1, "male and female He created them."  He uses this as justification for Paul's support of women in all areas of ministry.  The distinctions that would make a man say, "I thank God I was not born a Gentile, a slave or a woman" are all distinctions of privilege, whether of race, economics or gender.  These privileges must now be laid down, for they are irrelevant.  Equality has been brought about by the substitution of baptism for circumcision.

And yet it is that very privilege, that very distinction, which Wright upholds in male headship in marriage.  If the husband, despite being "fully mindful of the self-sacrificial model which the Messiah has provided," still assumes that leadership belongs to him by right, he is acting according to a distinction of privilege which man assumed over woman as a consequence of the Fall in Genesis 3:16. We read in Philippians 2 that privilege (as the equal of God) was the very thing that Christ laid down, in order to take the form of a slave-- which constituted, at the Crucifixion, a complete emptying of privilege.  Galatians 3, as I have insisted elsewhere, cannot mean something different for women than it means for Gentiles and slaves.  If a free Jewish man could not say to a Gentile or slave, "Be happy with the level ground at the foot of the cross, but being free and Jewish means the privilege of leadership belongs to me alone," then a free Jewish man could not say it to a woman either.  Not even if she were his wife.

Like Wright, I see a pattern of binaries in Genesis 1, and I also see a pattern throughout the New Testament of things that have been separated brought back together.  What I don't see is exclusive binaries that deny the right to exist of anything outside them.  Nor do I see God endorsing the upholding of patterns of privilege and marginalization-- which must die if the promised union is ever to be complete.

I know I don't have Wright's credentials or education, but Paul did say God had chosen the foolish and the weak things of the world to confound those who are strong and wise.  Sometimes not having privileges also means we are free from being blinded by them.

I very much appreciate the opportunities I've had to learn good things from Dr. Wright.  There have been logs in my own eye that his teachings have definitely helped me to remove.  So I feel emboldened to point out this speck in his.  May God be gracious to us both.


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*Sarah Over the Moon wrote a very good follow-up piece yesterday.  Suffice it to say that I agree with her whole-heartedly that no matter how much many of us may like and respect N. T. Wright, Christianity has no superstars other than Christ, and no Christian leader should ever be considered exempt from examination and critique of his or her views.

** Here, I think, Wright misquotes the passage, for Paul never says marriage is a mystery. He says the union of Christ and the church is a mystery.  Human marriage is supposed to look towards that union, but it is not that union.

***My basic approach to the gay marriage question is to rely on the litmus test once set forth by Augustine. “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought." Love of my LGBT neighbors means listening to them and trying my best to understand their perspective.  The question in my mind in regards to any practice must be, "Does it harm the self, the other, or the creation?"  And if not, is it not love of my neighbors to allow them to enjoy the same kind of committed union that gives me such comfort and support?