"Sir, I Perceive You are a Prophet" - Jesus and the Woman at the Well

I have decided to turn my blog post Even the Dogs Eat the Crumbs: Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman into the first of a series I will be calling "Jesus and Women."  It will feature a number of women in the Gospels with whom Jesus interacted, because Jesus' relations with women universally elevated them, challenging the repressive honor-shame social mores of his day.  Today's post, then, is second in this new series.

The text is John 4:1-42, and since it's such a long one, I'll just summarize it.  Jesus passes through Samaria and sits down at the well, while his disciples go into town to get food.  A Samaritan woman approaches to draw water, and Jesus asks her for a drink.  She is surprised that he would be speaking to her, a Samaritan and a woman, and asks him about it.  Jesus replies, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."  She immediately becomes a little indignant and asks him who he thinks he is.  "You are not greater than our father Jacob, are you, who gave us this well, and drank of it himself?"  The source of friction between Samaritans and Jews is here apparent, because the Jews denied that the Samaritans had Jacob for their father.  Jesus sidesteps this to continue his metaphor of water as eternal life from God:  "Whoever drinks the water that I shall give him shall never thirst."  But the woman misunderstands.  She's tired of coming to draw water every day and, practically, thinks this "living water" sounds like the perfect solution.

Jesus asks her to bring her husband.  Since she is female, this woman probably has little to no education and thus is probably completely unused to thinking metaphorically.  Jesus may be asking for her to bring her husband because of this.  Or, of course, he may simply be communicating in this way that his intentions are innocent.  Or both.  "I have no husband," she replies.  Jesus then says she has told the truth, for "You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband."  By this the woman recognizes that Jesus is a prophet.  So (playing, as it were, the game of "what one thing would you ask a Jewish prophet if you had a chance?") she brings up the burning issue for Samaritans in her day: the conflict with the Jews over the proper place to worship.  Jesus then tells her, "The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshiper shall worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers."

The woman then expresses hope in the Messiah, and Jesus explicitly reveals to her that he is the Messiah.  She runs back to the village to tell everyone.  Jesus ends up staying two days, and "many more believed because of his word." 

The Women In the Bible website provides some historical background:

There had been a long-running conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans. Samaria had been the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel during the period of the divided kingdoms. In 721BC Assyria conquered Israel, and sent most of its people to live in Assyria. The Assyrians replaced the original people with five alien tribes who resettled the area (for information on this event, see 2 Kings 17:13-34).

Eventually many of the original population returned and intermarried with the five alien tribes. By the time of Jesus, Jews thought that the people who lived in Samaria were not true descendants of the great Jewish ancestors, and that their religion was not true Judaism but a mixture of beliefs. . .

[T]he temple on nearby Mount Gerizim had been the central place of worship for the Samaritans, rivaling the Temple in Jerusalem. Samaritans and Jews always argued over which of the two temples was the true place to worship. . .

Inclusion of the Samaritans among those whom Jesus favored was revolutionary, since there was bitter enmity between the Jewish and Samaritan peoples. 

David A. deSilva, in his work on the cultures of the New Testament, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity, talks about this passage as being primarily about "sacred space" -- which and what kind of places are to be considered holy.

"The early Christians radically changed Jewish maps of sacred space, largely depicting the replacement of the Jerusalem temple as sacred space with new configurations of sacred space located in the individual believer, the community of Christians and the presently unseen realms of God.  .  .

In John's gospel. . . Jesus sets aside limited locales of sacred space (the fixed centers both of Jerusalem and Mount Gerazim, the sacred site for Samaritans) in favor of sacred space that opens up wherever people worship God "in spirit and truth" (John 4:21-23)."  (pp. 291-292).

This is why the Gospel of John, which tends to organize the story of Jesus thematically rather than chronologically, places the cleansing of the temple midway through what is now Chapter 2.  This thematic arc operates like this:

• It begins with Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple, in a kind of prophetic indictment against that sacred space (deSilva, Ibid).
• It continues through the conversation with religious leader Nicodemus, to whom Jesus speaks of "everyone who is born of the Spirit" as being like the Spirit in having no fixed place of origin or dwelling.
• It concludes with this story of the woman at the well-- in which Jesus' includes the Samaritans among those who are able to learn to "worship in spirit and truth" rather than in a temple.

Kenneth E. Bailey, in his book Jesus Through Middle-Eastern Eyes, points out that in the Gospel of John the nighttime usually symbolizes spiritual darkness while the day represents spiritual light.  These are contrasted in this arc.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, while the Samaritan woman speaks with Jesus in the broad light of day.  Thus the respected religious leader is compared with the despised foreigner in one of the "last shall be first" reversals which are so common in the Gospels.

Bailey also notes that this woman is an outcast even among her own people, for the customary time for women to draw water was in the early morning or at sundown, and they generally come in groups to help one another with the heavy water jars.  This woman comes alone at the "sixth hour," which is around noon.  Tradition has it that this was an immoral woman whom Jesus then "catches" in her sin.*  But author David Lose, in his March 2011 article in the Huffington Post, Misogyny, Moralism and the Woman at the Well, points out that Jesus' words about "five husbands" need not be construed as implying that she was necessarily a woman of loose morals:

"Jesus at no point invites repentance or, for that matter, speaks of sin at all. She very easily could have been widowed or have been abandoned or divorced (which in the ancient world was pretty much the same thing for a woman). Five times would be heartbreaking, but not impossible. Further, she could now be living with someone that she was dependent on, or be in what's called a Levirate marriage (where a childless woman is married to her deceased husband's brother in order to produce an heir yet is not always technically considered the brother's wife). There are any number of ways, in fact, that one might imagine this woman's story as tragic rather than scandalous."

Women were not allowed no-cause divorces, as men were.  Nor could a rejected woman support herself without finding another man.  The fact that this woman had had five husbands and was now with a man who wasn't her husband was really more of an indictment on the unjust divorce practices** of her time than any fault of the woman's.  But the fact remains that the stigma of this fell much more on the woman than on the men who had put her in this position.  Jesus doesn't worry, however, about the fact that she has come to the well without friends, at a time when she would not have to face other women.  He simply asks her for a drink.

Kenneth Bailey points out (Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, p. 202) that wells in that area did not have buckets attached to them.  Travelers always carried soft leather "buckets" to draw water-- and Jesus apparently had let the disciples take it with them into town.  Bailey states:

"By deliberately sitting on the well without a bucket, Jesus placed himself strategically to be in need of whomever appeared with the necessary equipment.  The woman approached.  On seeing her Jesus was expected to courteously withdraw to a distance of at least twenty feet, indicating that it was both safe and culturally appropriate for her to approach the well. . . Jesus did not move as she approached. She decided to draw near anyway.  Then comes the surprise.

Jesus asks for a drink.  By making this request Jesus does four things:

1.  He breaks the social taboo against talking to a woman. . . In village society, a strange man does not even make eye contact with a woman in a public place. . . 

2.  Jesus ignored the five-hundred-year-old hostility that had developed between Jews and Samaritans. . . [Bailey later explains that Jews and Samaritans did not even drink out of the same vessels, so Jesus could have been considered defiled by drinking from her bucket]

3.  Jesus so totally humbles himself that he needs her services.  Jesus does not establish his initial relationship with her by explaining how she needs him and his message.  That will come later.  Rather, his opening line means, "I am weak and need help! Can you help me?" . . .

4.  Jesus elevates the woman's self worth.  Only the strong are able to give to others.  The woman's dignity is affirmed by being asked to help Jesus out of her available resources."

But Jesus does more than just speak to this woman and increase her dignity by asking her help.  He deliberately moves the conversation from the every-day (give me some water) to the spiritual: (the gift I bring is living water).  He converses with her on the same level as he has just a few verses before conversed with Nicodemus-- as an equal.  There is no real difference in his eyes between a scholarly, male Jewish religious leader and an outcast, lowly foreign woman.  When she fails to grasp his first teaching, he asks her to bring her husband-- but the lack of appearance of a husband does not cause him to shut the conversation down.  Jesus allows her to ask him the kind of question a woman in her position would want to ask a prophet. 

Then, by opening "sacred space" to include anyone who worships in spirit and truth, Jesus proclaims  the eternal kingdom open to Samaritans-- and not only that, but by referring to God as "the Father," Jesus implies that God can be Father to Samaritans as well as Jews.  As deSilva puts it (Honor, p. 197):

"The possibility of becoming part of God's family provides the basis for the alternative kinship group that Jesus begins to create within his own ministry.  The most well-known passage in this regard is Matthew 12:46-50. . . in which he redefines his own kin not as those born into his father Joseph's household but rather as 'whoever does the will of my Father in heaven,' that is, whoever is born into his heavenly Father's household."   

The language of being "born" anew into this family is also used by Jesus to Nicodemus in the passage just prior to the Samaritan woman passage.  "New sacred space" and "new alternative kinship" thus are interwoven into the message of Jesus being highlighted in this section of John's Gospel.  It is a spiritual kinship where the place of worship is no longer a physical place, but within every member of the family-- a kinship in which distinctions of Jew and Samaritan, male and female, become irrelevant, and the lowly outcast "gets it" more clearly than the privileged leader.

As author David Lose points out:

"[T]his story is not about immorality; it's about identity. In the previous scene, Jesus was encountered by a male Jewish religious authority who could not comprehend who or what Jesus was. In this scene, he encounters the polar opposite, and perhaps precisely because she is at the other end of the power spectrum, she recognizes not just who Jesus is but what he offers --dignity. Jesus invites her to not be defined by her circumstances and offers her an identity that lifts her above her tragedy. And she accepts, playing a unique role in Jesus' ministry as she is the first character in John's gospel to seek out others to tell them about Jesus."

When Jesus' disciples returned from their food-buying expedition, they didn't know what to think.  They'd expected Jesus might have to talk with the Samaritans (hard to avoid), but publicly talking with a woman?  Unheard of!  But though Jesus always cared about doing good, he rarely cared what people thought.  "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me, and accomplish His work," Jesus said.  In other words, "I know you came back with food for me, and I know you don't like the way I've been using my time while you were gone.  But this is what's really important.  I'm doing God's will, despite what you think."

In other words, "Let go of your traditions and let's make this about people and who they are in God's eyes."

Advice we would all do well to follow.

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*The "Women in the Bible" site linked at the beginning of my post speculates that Jesus was actually not talking about this woman's literal husbands at all, but speaking symbolically of the Samaritans as having "five husbands" because of the five "alien tribes" they intermarried with-- but given that the woman has just misunderstood Jesus' symbolic reference to "living water," I think it's unlikely that he would speak symbolically again, or that she would  have understood him if he did.  I believe it's much more likely that the woman actually had been married five times, as Jesus said.  However, the repetition of that number five does serve to make the Samaritan woman representative of her people in this passage. 

**For more on divorce practices in Jesus' day, see my blog post What About Divorce?

Speaking Strongly While Female

I don't generally watch Fox News.  But this discussion hosted by Megyn Kelly at Fox News in response to this Fox News discussion hosted by Lou Dobbs, has engendered a lot of Internet discussion among the blogs I frequent.   It's all about whether women are somehow hurting their children if they are the primary breadwinners in two-parent heterosexual families.

If you listen to the Lou Dobbs discussion, what it amounts to is four men reacting to a recently reported statistic that in four out of 10 married heterosexual families in the U.S., the woman is the primary breadwinner.  I listened to the discussion carefully and discovered that the ensuing conversation was entirely about everything that these men believe is going wrong in society, which they believe this women-as-breadwinners situation is either a symptom or a cause of-- or both.  However, as the men went on to discuss divorce, abortion and deficient public school education, they made no real attempt to connect any of this to the actual statistic they were supposedly discussing.  How exactly women being breadwinners was related to divorce, abortion, or the travesty which they consider public school education to be, was never made plain.  The idea seemed to be simply that the "natural order" of the world was being upended if even 40% of married couples had the woman as the primary breadwinner-- and apparently this supposed disruption is cause for great alarm and despondency.*

One of those involved in the discussion, Erick Erickson, then wrote a follow-up blog post in which he says:

"But we should not kid ourselves or scream so loudly in politically correct outrage to drown the truth — kids most likely will do best in households where they have a mom at home nurturing them while dad is out bringing home the bacon. As a society, once we moved past that basic recognition, we’ve been on a downward trajectory of more and more broken homes and maladjusted youth."

Erickson links to the Core Beliefs of the patriarchal Christian website Center for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) at the end of his article.  CBMW then supports Erickson's position in their own article.   But it is noteworthy that Erickson's article never actually cites any studies supporting this position-- and throughout his article he contrasts, not couples where the man is primary breadwinner with couples where the woman is primary breadwinner, but couples where the man is primary breadwinner with single-parent households.  In short, he is comparing apples and oranges.  His point appears to be that because children of single-parent households do not do as well as dual-parent households, therefore children should be raised in households where the man is the primary breadwinner and the woman stays home with the kids.  (Hannah at Emotional Abuse and Your Faith does a very good job at picking apart the arguments both in Dobbs' discussion and Erickson's article.)

But all of this is just background for what I want to talk about today.

My purpose in blogging about this is not to defend the position that women are not harming their children or upsetting the natural order if they become the primary breadwinners for their families (though of course I agree that they are not).  Rachel Held Evans has done a marvelous job of defending that position both rationally and scripturally in her post Why the Church Can Support "Breadwinning" Wives Too, and I don't have much I could add there.  What I want to talk about is what happened to Megyn Kelly when she confronted the opposing viewpoint in her Fox News discussion.

It appears that though Megyn Kelly of Fox News is certainly politically conservative, she is not of the CBMW camp.  She is married with a powerful and highly visible career, and according to this article she and her husband are now expecting their third child.  There is no way I can see that Ms. Kelly could not have felt that the main topic directly impacted her as a woman and a mother.  Her opening remarks, though said with a smile, are a challenge to the two men whose vocally held position is that women like her are harming their children by their life choices.

"What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you scientist in chief?" Kelly asks laughingly -- this last being in response to Erickson's assertion that "liberals" are being "anti-science" in ignoring the natural male dominance supposedly prevalent in the animal kingdom.  She then goes on to point out that the data does not actually support the idea that children in two-parent homes where the woman is primary breadwinner and the man is home with the kids, fare any worse than children in two-parent homes where this is reversed.   Erickson then states that he believes the studies were primarily focused on wealthy couples and could not hold true for the middle class, which "cannot have it all."  Why "not having it all" only applies to women who want to care for their children and be the primary breadwinner, but not to men who want the same, he never actually addresses except to insist rather vaguely that women in general are more nurturing.

Kelly calls Dobbs and Erickson out on their claim that they were "not being judgmental" in insisting that women who make the choice to have careers with young children at home were "imposing a worse future on their children."  She says it is "offensive."  To counter, Erickson states that it is a simple "statement of fact" that it's hard for a woman to work full time and nurture her children. Again, he does not state why this is only true for a woman and not for a man.

Kelly quite calmly states that the blog did offend her.  She holds up the documents showing the studies that support her position and accuses Erickson of claiming not to be judging while actually judging anyway:  "[You're saying] 'I'm not, I'm not, I'm not; now let me judge, judge judge.  And by the way it's science, science, science."  She does not raise her voice while stating this, though she is emphatic about it.  At this point the men begin to smirk, and Erickson chuckles to Dobbs as he re-enters the conversation, "Be careful."  The implication is "Watch out for the angry woman!"

As Dobbs begins the same argument he was making in his original video, listing all of society's ills and then linking them to women in being in the workplace, Kelly calls him on it:  "Why are you attributing that to women in the workforce?"

His reply?  "Excuse me, let me just finish what I was saying if I may, oh dominant one!"  He thus picks up on Erickson's jab and amplifies it.  This seems to me to be a direct attack on her for being a woman while being host (i.e., in charge of the discussion).  Would he have mocked a man in this way?

As Kelly, taken aback, asks, "excuse me?" Dobbs begins to talk about studies supporting the problems in single-parent households. But the fact is that this is not evidence that supports the position that there is any harm caused to children by women in two-parent families being a breadwinner, or even the main breadwinner.  Kelly quite reasonably insists that the statistics for the latter really do not support the point being made against the former, and reminds Dobbs that she had defined the discussion from the beginning as being about two-parent households where the woman works outside the home.  Dobbs then begins to insist that they have to talk about single mothers, that this is absolutely what the discussion is about.  As he attempts to wrest the conversation away from her onto a tangent that Kelly, as the discussion leader and moderator, has determined to be off-topic, she must fight to regain control of the exchange.

It seems to me that Dobbs is insisting that the conversation must include the problems of single motherhood because to him, it's all part of the same thing: the upsetting of the natural order in which men protect/provide and women nurture, and all of society's ills are part and parcel of the same.  Kelly, however, does not start from this presupposition, nor does she buy into it.  Dobbs begins to laugh at her as she forces the conversation back to what is to her the point-- whether women in two-parent homes being the primary breadwinners is damaging to the children.  She then turns the conversation back to Erickson, quotes his article, and then begins to cite long-standing studies that contradict his position.  Kelly is very emphatic by this point and its clear that she is a little ruffled.  Erickson replies that the studies she cites are "politically motivated" (while his own statements presumably are purely objective).

Erickson then cites a Pew Studies poll in which three-quarters of those polled agreed that "the increase in moms as breadwinners makes it harder to raise kids," as he paraphrases it.  Kelly points out that the public majority has been wrong in the past-- in the area of inter-racial marriage being harmful, for example.  Erickson admits to this but insists that it's still better in the majority of cases for the mom to be home.  After the studies that Kelly has cited, this frankly comes off as, "I've made up my mind; don't confuse me with the facts."  He insists that he is not, as Kelly puts it, "denigrating the choices made by others."  But to insist that another person's choice (Kelly's, for instance) is actually harmful to children is a denigration of her choice whether he likes it or not.  His position amounts to "What you're doing is wrong and damaging to the most vulnerable members of our society, but I'm not saying anything bad about you for doing it," which is self-contradictory to say the least.

David Hayward over at NakedPastor has responded to this with a cartoon and comments: Emotionally invested preconceived stereotype of women.  He points out some of the difficulties Kelly faced in that interview which a man would probably not have faced:

"She was the host and yet had to constantly fight to maintain moderating position. She literally had to verbally fight, along with raising her voice, to keep control of the interview. The reasoning of those two men is obviously not based on research but on emotion drenched in traditional mores. But it's typical of people who have issues with strong women to point to their style rather than content. She had content that she used a strong style to try to communicate. They used rudeness, along with a domineering attitude, interrupting, overtalking, to communicate no content."

Now, I'm not saying that Kelly conducted the interview with absolute perfection. But some of the comments on Hayward's blog included the idea that Kelly was "yelling" and had "become aggressive," and that this constituted a "weakness" in how convincing her point of view was.  I don't believe that those making these comments were being consciously sexist.  But the fact remains that according to the entrenched social attitudes that still prevail today despite all the strides forward that women have made in terms of equal dignity, women are expected to always remain "sweet," and any emphatic or passionate behavior is usually held against them.   A man who strongly, even angrily, confronts an injustice is often admired, while a woman who does so is considered "strident" or "aggressive."

But logically, someone's argument is not necessarily weak just because they are impassioned about it.  The question is why they have become impassioned.

The fact is that as a woman, Kelly had to fight to have what a man would be given without a fight-- the right to moderate the discussion as leader and host.   Her  raised voice in this case was related to trying to do the job she had been given-- even if that meant interrupting a participant who seemed determined to take over.

Also, is it appropriate to compare the level of calm of someone who has no direct stake in the issue at hand, with that of someone who is actually one of the subjects being attacked by a position being taken on that issue?  As a woman, Kelly was the only one in the conversation whom the subject of conversation directly and personally impacted.  What these men were saying amounted to a direct attack on the choices Ms. Kelly herself had made in her life.  Should she be faulted for getting upset about that?  Should the male participants be commended for not getting upset when their life choices were not under attack?  No one was telling the men, "Your having a career is hurting your children!" 

It's kind of like looking askance at a person of color for being unable to discuss Jim Crow laws without raising their voice, while a white person is able to remain dispassionate.  

Kelly should not have had to endure the condescension and mocking of those men.  She should not have had to force them to allow her the place of leadership to which she was entitled as host.  She should not have been subjected to laughter and raised eyebrows for using such force.  And she should not have been faulted for having emotions about a topic which could not help but be an emotional one for her.

Particularly when she was able to back up her position with evidence that the men in the conversation were sorely lacking.

Megyn Kelly is a conservative and I'm a moderate, and we may not actually agree on very much.  But we're both women who have careers and children at home.  And when it comes to having a right to speak strongly while female-- I'm completely on her side.


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*I am being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but I don't believe I'm actually exaggerating the emotional nature of the Dobbs video discussion. The men really were very alarmed and despondent about so many women being breadwinners as pointing to the anticipated demise of everything they hold dear.  It seems a bit hypocritical, then, that they would appear to treat Kelly's emotion in her video as if it were a point against her.

"You're Not Arguing With Us But With God"

A fellow member of Equality Central Forum (a forum for Christians who believe in full male-female equality in society, church and home) recently shared the answer she (her first name is Helen) received from a well-known ministry in response to a letter she wrote them.  Helen has given me permission to reprint and comment here on part of the letter she received.

This ministry (I'll give it a generic name: "Bible Preaching") promotes, among other things, the authority and leadership of males in all aspects of Christian life.   I quote here a few paragraphs of their response to Helen's letter:  

God’s Word and His law is the reason why women should not be in positions of authority over the man. You do not have a complaint against [Bible Preaching] as to this point, you have a complaint against God. For the Bible clearly states that wives are to be subject unto their own husbands, Colossians 3:18, (as opposed to any other man). If she is to be subject under his authority, how than can she rule over others? In Exodus 18:21 we see that it is MEN who fear God, that should be set over the people to rule. . .

You claim that you are a Christian and that you believe in the Bible as much as we do, and yet you have asked us to “focus on John 3:16 and not 1 Timothy 2:12.” Do you despise the command of 1 Timothy 2:12? It is a verse in the Bible which you claim to believe in, and yet you encourage us to disregard a part of it. This is wrong of you to do. You cannot choose which principles and commands that you are going to follow. . .  Please, I ask you, to repent of this mindset, to subject yourself unto God, and to desist from disregarding the verses in Scripture which do not correlate with your chosen lifestyle. Ultimately, as I have said, you are not angry with us for our beliefs and practices, you are angry at God. And from this, you must repent. (Emphasis in original.)

Notice what is being said here.  Helen is accused of "disregarding" 1 Timothy 2:12 simply because she says it should not be focused on in the same way John 3:16 is.  John 3:16 is one of the key verses in which Christ describes the nature of salvation:  "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believed in Him should not perish but have eternal life."  1 Timothy 2:12, on the other hand, is not about salvation, but is where Paul talks about his own policy with regards to a certain aspect of male-female relations, stating (in the ESV version that Bible Preaching prefers) "I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet." 

According to Bible Preaching, simply by stating that 1 Timothy 2:12 should not be as much of a focus as John 3:16, Helen is going so far as to "despise" 1 Timothy 2:12.  Are these really the same?  I hardly think so.  What I think is that the "privileging one's position" silencing technique is being used here:  in essence, "you-can't-disagree-because-GOD!" 

In other words, the Bible Preaching writer equates Bible Preaching's position with God's own position, using God's authority to render that position unassailable.  "You're not angry with us, but with God."  But what assumptions are implicit in such a statement?  Three at least: 

1.  "We are not interpreting the Bible, but just telling you exactly what it means."  

The problem with this is that the nature of reading anything not written by ourselves is interpretation.  Anyone who conveys a message to anyone else must encode the message in language and then speak or write it to the listener or reader, who, finally, decodes the message in his or her own mind.  Since pure-thought communication is impossible, the encoding/decoding process of language is the best way we have to convey thoughts to one another, but it is not perfect.   "I didn't mean that the way you took it!' can happen even between two close friends chatting over coffee.  How much more can it happen when the original message must be translated out of its original ancient language and conveyed into an entirely different modern language?

David A. deSilva, in his book Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity, puts it this way:

The readers of the New Testament shared certain values. . . and ways of ordering the world. . . Modern readers, too, are fully enculturated into a set of values, ways of relating and so forth.  Without taking some care to recover the culture of the first-century Greco-Roman writers and addressees, we will simply read the texts from the perspective of our cultural norms and codes. . . This task is essential as a check against our imposition of our own cultural, theological and social contexts onto the text. (p. 18, emphasis added.)

It's a mistake to think that we ourselves have no social/cultural perspective through which we decode the messages of the New Testament.  As theologian and minister N. T. Wright says in his essay How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?"  :

"There is, indeed, an evangelical assumption, common in some circles, that evangelicals do not have any tradition. We simply open the scripture, read what it says, and take it as applying to ourselves: there the matter ends, and we do not have any ‘tradition’. This is rather like the frequent Anglican assumption (being an Anglican myself I rather cherish this) that Anglicans have no doctrine peculiar to themselves: it is merely that if something is true the Church of England believes it. This, though not itself a refutation of the claim not to have any ‘tradition’, is for the moment sufficient indication of the inherent unlikeliness of the claim’s truth, and I am confident that most people, facing the question explicitly, will not wish that the claim be pressed. But I still find two things to be the case, both of which give me some cause for concern. First, there is an implied, and quite unwarranted, positivism: we imagine that we are ‘reading the text, straight’, and that if somebody disagrees with us it must be because they, unlike we ourselves, are secretly using ‘presuppositions’ of this or that sort. This is simply naïve, and actually astonishingly arrogant and dangerous. It fuels the second point, which is that evangelicals often use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ when they mean the authority of evangelical, or Protestant, theology, since the assumption is made that we (evangelicals, or Protestants) are the ones who know and believe what the Bible is saying. And, though there is more than a grain of truth in such claims, they are by no means the whole truth, and to imagine that they are is to move from theology to ideology. If we are not careful, the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ can, by such routes, come to mean simply ‘the authority of evangelical tradition, as opposed to Catholic or rationalist ones.’" (Emphasis added.)

To decide that we are not interpreting the Bible, but just "reading it straight," as Wright puts it, is to close our eyes to the nature of our own humanity.  It is to assume for ourselves an objectivity that we are actually incapable of holding or sustaining.  In fact, it is a kind of blindness, a "log" in our own eye that we have no way of seeing past in order to remove the "speck" from the eye of another (Matthew 7:5).

Bible Preaching's letter writer thinks he (or she) sees a speck in Helen's eye.  But in asserting that he or she is not interpreting the text being used to find the speck, the letter writer is unaware of the log that must be removed from his own eye before the presence of any actual speck in Helen's eye can be verified. 

2.  "Disagreeing with us is sin against God."

Notice how much shaming is going on in Bible Preaching's statements above.  Helen is accused of not subjecting herself to God, of disregarding God's commands, and of being angry with God.  And she is told-- twice! -- that she needs to repent. 

The writer of the Bible Preaching letter has taken it upon him- or herself to determine Helen's spiritual state, and then has set himself up as her spiritual authority by telling her she "must" repent.  This, in fact, is spiritually abusive behavior:

When religion, God or the Bible are used to uphold a person or movement's real or perceived authority in ways that control or coerce, bringing shame, harm or misery to those perceived to be under that authority, this is spiritual abuse.

The Bible Preaching writer answering Helen's letter actually has no authority over Helen of any kind.  But the letter assumes authority* and then uses it in an attempt to shame and silence.  And this leads us to the third and most damaging assumption of all:

3.  "We are God's spokesman; we know God's mind and speak with God's voice."

Perhaps Bible Preaching's writer didn't intend this implication.  But to say "You are not arguing with us but with God, and you need to repent," does in fact imply that Bible Preaching is God's spokesman on earth.  It implies, "We could not possibly be wrong about what we believe God is saying in this text.  We know what God meant, and we have the right to take it upon ourselves to enforce that meaning."  The Old Testament prophets spoke for God, but Hebrews 1:1-2 says:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.

There are no Old-Testament-style prophets in the New-Covenant kingdom which Jesus came to bring.  Instead, Jesus said, "But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth." (John 16:13, emphasis added.)   All believers have the Holy Spirit.  Bible Preaching is not the final arbiter of God's truth or God's message in the Scriptures.   Jesus's life, words and actions are God's ultimate message to us-- and the Holy Spirit is our ultimate Teacher of that message.

This is why Helen said that John 3:16 should be given greater focus than 1 Timothy 2:12.  She was doing nothing more than placing the emphasis of Scripture where Scripture itself places it.   This is not disregarding 1 Timothy 2:12, but seeking to put it in its proper place within the overarching message.  And that overarching message really doesn't have much to do with women being silent or not having authority.  Instead, it's about what Christ has done in and for His people, setting them all -- men and women alike-- free from bondage to become a "royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9).

God did not, to put it in schoolyard vernacular, "die and leave Bible Preaching in charge."  God sent His Son with this message:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."

If Christ did not come to condemn, who are we to communicate shame and condemnation to our brothers or sisters in Christ?  We Christians should bow in humility before the Son and His message, not turn ourselves into policemen to enforce what we think the message is about, on everyone else.

Particularly when the message is coming across as more about restricting women than about setting human beings free.

--------------
*Assuming and then abusing authority is probably actually much closer to what Paul meant in 1 Timothy 2:12 when he used the Greek word "authentein" to describe what he didn't want a woman to do to a man.  When Paul said it shouldn't be done to a man, did he mean it was ok to do it to a woman?  Is Bible Preaching's insistence on the letter of 1 Timothy 2:12 actually a violation of its spirit?

Sovereign Grace Ministries and Abuse: Time to Speak Out

For some time I've been watching with a heavy heart the progress of the lawsuit initially filed against Sovereign Grace Ministries in October 2012.  The original news articles have long since been archived, but the evangelical watchdog blog site The Wartburg Watch still has quotes from those early news reports.  In January of this year an amended lawsuit was filed.  The basic allegations were that various pastoral leaders of SGM covered up members' allegations of child abuse and sexual molestation from the 1980s on.

The current news is that due to statute of limitations issues, it has been ruled that most of the victims have brought their lawsuit too late, and the case has been dismissed.  What saddens me is that while this is not because any of the allegations have even been addressed (and some of the defendants will undoubtedly bring a new suit), supporters of SGM's leader Charles Mahaney have chosen this time to voice their support in a way that belittles the stories of the accusers and vilifies the victims. While ostensibly acknowledging that "There is no excuse, at any time or in any place or for any reason, for the use of children for sexual pleasure," the article states "we are friends with C.J [Mahaney]," and goes on to say:

He has also been the object of libel and even a Javert-like obsession by some. One of the so-called discernment blogs—often trafficking more in speculation and gossip than edifying discernment—reprinted a comment from a woman who issued this ominous wish, "I hope [this lawsuit] ruins the entire organization [of SGM] and every single perpetrator and co-conspirator financially, mentally and physically."

The problem with this quote is that it is not from some outside voice passing judgment on a "discernment blog" (which apparently means a blog set up to exercise "spiritual discernment" as to the orthodoxy of other ministries; this term is frequently used as a pejorative).  The Wartburg Watch has located the source of the original quote, and it is from a woman who was raped during an SGM home-group meeting at the age of 13.  It does not come from a discernment blog at all, but from a survivors' blog, meant to be a safe place for former SGM members to tell their stories.  For Mahaney's friends on the Gospel Coalition blog to quote this in the manner they quote it, conveys the message that they consider speaking against their friends' ministry, even if it comes out of pain, to be a more important issue than a victim's response to her rape.

However you slice it, this is outrageous.  If they didn't know where the quote came from, they shouldn't have quoted it.  If they did know-- then they have just treated a woman like garbage in order to make their powerful friend's ministry look good.

So I have to speak out too.

To the writers of the Gospel Coalition's message: look.  I recognize how hard it is to navigate the waters when someone you consider a friend has been accused of something like this.  But the fact remains that by coming out strongly on the side of the one with pastoral power at this point in the proceedings, you are contributing (whatever your protests to the contrary) to the re-victimization of the victims and the upholding of the power structures that made SGM ripe for these sorts of criminal abuses in the first place.

There are simply too many allegations by too many disparate people, for this to be merely a vindictive false attack.  And C. J. Mahaney, as the founder and leader of SGM, simply cannot hold himself aloof and claim ignorance.  The authoritarian structures that were set up and/or maintained by him directly caused an environment where abuse was aided and abetted-- and he had the power to prevent it, or at the very least stop it in its tracks.  He is the one who created the environment where leaders were given blanket endorsement and protection, while the people at the bottom were silenced.  Whether he likes it or not, by setting authority up as unassailable and himself up as the top authority, he made himself responsible for the behavior of his sub-leaders and well-being of his lowliest followers.  And you, as his friends, ought to have told him so.

As I have shared elsewhere on my blog, Sovereign Grace Ministries is one of the successors to the Shepherding Movement in which I spent my college years as part of Maranatha Campus Ministries.  I know very well the structures that uphold those in power while viewing with suspicion and disapproval anyone who dares speak against or even question them.

Virginia Knowles at Watch the Shepherd a former member of SGM, concurs.  She writes:

Unfortunately, this is not just a problem in SGM, but in a host of other religious organizations. It is the culture of shame and silence -- and women, especially young ones, are the most vulnerable to both sexual abuse and domestic violence. . . In both this lawsuit and my extensive research on abuse of authority (especially gender-based) these are some of the pastoral sentiments I've heard about...

"We're all sinners. Yes, he might have hurt you, but think of how you have sinned. You have no right to complain." (I call this phenomena "psychological socialism" and some day I will write more extensively about it.)
"He said he was sorry. You need to meet with him face to face so he can apologize. Be reconciled with your brother in Christ!"
"He has apologized to you! He's really sincere! Now you can forgive and forget! You must not gossip or slander him by telling anyone else about it. If you tarnish his reputation, he'll never be able to get on with his life, keep a job, continue his ministry, and provide for his wife and children."
"Counseling? Sure, come right into my office. Oh, you mean from professional counselors? Don't bother. They'll only give you ungodly psychobabble and lead you astray."
"Call the police? No way! Are you crazy? We don't need to bring another believer before the law. This is something the church should handle, not the worldly and godless secular government system. He just needs to see the light and repent. Jesus is enough."
"Oh, you don't want to tell anyone that anything has happened at this church! What sort of reputation will that give to our ministry -- and to God? We must protect our gospel witness!"
"You are a woman. A woman is not supposed to teach or have authority over men, but to quietly support and follow them. How dare you usurp my authority and question how I run my church [or this family]?" [edited for brevity, but you get the point.]

Hannah at Wine and Marble lived the SGM life for 10 years.  She explains how this climate is created in this kind of organization:

You stop thinking critically, because questioning things is ever-so-subtly frowned upon. It’s welcomed, objectively, but you feel slight displeasure or get sidelined because of suddenly busy schedules (because. . . they have slowly, subtly made you dependent on their approval for your confidence in your discernment and spiritual maturity). . .

You have the perfect storm for socially quick, manipulative personalities to rise quickly in the ranks of the church leadership, for the depressed and hurting to beat themselves up for their sins and keep accepting any critiques of their attitudes or actions, and the insecure to always, always second-guess their own instincts and instead choose to follow the advice and corrective teachings of those in authority over them.

It’s not brainwashing, but it’s a social immersion into a culture where you lose your sense of self, your boundaries, your privacy, and your ability to reason independently in a slow fade to submissive SGM church member, fiercely loyal to the great people and genuine culture of faith there.

It’s insane.

And so, in that world, your child tells you that so-and-so at care group touched their private parts. You are furious. You confront this person, you tell your care group leader. Your care group leader tells you that he’s going to bring this up with your pastor and get back to you (because no one thinks to call the cops yet), and the pastor wants to meet with you (maybe you’ve never had any one-on-one time with your pastor before, so you feel affirmed and like he’s taking it seriously)…and then you’re angry in the meeting toward your child’s molester, and you get confronted about your anger, and, and, and…

Suddenly, the SGM sin-confrontation system has kicked into high gear, and the child abuse has take a back seat (because, it’s only on the child’s word, and children are so sinful and need to be trained to love Jesus and not walk in their flesh)…

And it never gets reported. And your child is made to hug his/her abuser. And the abuser is seen as repentant and restored, and you think, well, maybe it’ll be okay. That process of rooting out sin is really thorough. And they have so much accountability–from their accountability partner and their care group leader and from the pastor.

And nothing is done about it.

So what should have been done about it?

Ministry leaders that really cared about their congregations should have been the first to investigate the first rumor of the sexual or physical abuse of children.  SGM's leaders did not.  If a reason was found to suspect a church leader of such a crime, the police ought to have been immediately brought in.  If a church leader was found to have committed such an offense, he ought to have been permanently removed from ministry and encouraged to show repentance by serving his time as a model prisoner.  SGM did none of these things.

When a lawsuit was brought against SGM, they should have responded in open shame and horror, with the top leaders offering to step down until the investigation was complete and the perpetrators properly dealt with in the courts.   Instead, SGM instructed its lawers to assert a First Amendment "clergy-congregant confidentiality" defense.  But this was not about a minister's right to keep secrets of private sins confessed privately.  This is about the cover-up by ministers of accusations brought by victims of heinous crimes.  

And the last thing that should ever have happened was for these victims-- some as young as two and three years old-- to be forced to verbally forgive their abusers face-to-face.

Zach L. Hoag's Blog calls it "A False Gospel of Reconcilation": 

The most grotesque allegations to come out of this lawsuit have to do with the culture of “gospel-centered reconciliation” in this movement, where victims of abuse – often, children – were simply told to “forgive” and “reconcile” with their adult church member/leader abusers. I mean, it’s better than you deserve, right? So get over it. And smack dab in the center of this demonic-gospel culture were leaders who rise to levels of immense influence over their cruelly “humbled” people, all the while claiming to be humble themselves. . . 

And this false gospel of reconciliation doesn’t stop here. It is not only reserved for churches fraught with sex abuse scandals. It rears its ugly head in all kinds of conservative evangelical circles, taking the similar shape of pain-denying theologies that counsel victims to get over it and get back together with those who harmed them. [Emphasis in original.]

Hoag compares this with the true reconciliation that Jesus preached:

The goal toward which the resurrected Jesus is working in the world right now is not some imaginary peace where people “reconcile” in name only while the abuse is never stopped and the wrong never righted. No, this is instead a total bending of the violent and unjust world back toward God’s shalom, until it is completely put to rights on the final day. . . And reconciliation, rightly lived as part of God’s cosmic work to restore all things, always subverts the empire of unjust power and control. It messes with thrones and powers and rulers and authorities. It takes them to task. [Emphasis in original.]

Now, unlike Zach Hoag, I don't think this is really about whether the group is Calvinist or not.  As I have said elsewhere on my blog, I think Calvinism can sometimes lead to too great a focus on authority in the church, but not always-- nor is it always Calvinism that falls into this mentality.  Maranatha Campus Ministries was basically Arminian, and yet they created an environment where abuse (not, as far as I know, physical or sexual abuse, but definitely spiritual abuse) was nurtured and grew.  On the other hand, Pastor Wade Burleson of Istoria Ministries is Calvinist, and yet I am certain nothing like this could ever happen in his church.  Here, in Burleson's own words, is why:

Jesus said that real leaders are servants, not masters. . . Let me be clear. Those kind of pastors - pastors that advocate an authoritarianism inherent in the pulpit, that stifle any and all dissent from the members of their congregations, that humiliate and denigrate the members who for the sake of conscience ask questions - could very well be considered great expositors of the Word of God and doctrinally orthodox. Yet those pastors display a character that is the antithesis of the character of Christ, an ironhandedness that is the opposite of genuine grace, and a disposition that should cause their congregations to realize that their pastors are but one step away from falling over the precipice of moral failure in terms of their church ministries or personal lives.

I think Burleson's diagnosis is absolutely correct.  It is authoritarianism that creates distance between a church leader and a congregation, so that members who bring complaints are viewed with suspicion while those with power are held to be above reproach.  It is this that creates a climate where power can corrupt, and absolute power can corrupt absolutely.

But the Bible actually teaches this:

Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care. . . not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. (1 Peter 5:2-3, emphasis added.)

And do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them.  (Ephesians 5:11.)

So what is the right thing to do when you are a pastoral leader in a position of power and authority, and a friend who is also in a position of power and authority becomes the subject of multiple allegations of abuse by his ministry and cover-up by himself?  

Ultimately, it isn't being a good friend to close your eyes to his wrongdoings.  And no matter how close of friends two or more powerful Christian leaders are, their first responsibility as leaders must be to care for the most vulnerable members of their flocks.  The leaders of the Gospel Coalition simply cannot refuse to listen to what biblical shorthand calls "the widow and orphan" when they come pleading for justice. (Isaiah 1:17, James 1:27.)

There's still time to do the right thing.  I hope these Christian leaders decide to do it. 

Sanctified Sexism

When asked whether reading a Bible commentary written by a woman would be placing a man under the teaching authority of a woman, the well-known evangelical preacher John Piper responded as follows:

It might be. Uh. He may feel it that way. And if he does, he probably’s not gonna read it. He shouldn’t read it. . . [But] It doesn’t have to be experienced that way I don’t think. And here, here’s my reasoning. 

The point of Paul in I Timothy 2:12 where he says. . . I don’t permit a woman to teach or have authority over men. That’s a key text. I Timothy 2:12. I don’t permit her to teach or have authority. And those two things together, I think, constitute the eldership office. Teaching and authority. . .

What is the dynamic between how men flourish and women flourish as God designed them to flourish when an act of authority is being exerted on a man from a woman.

And so I distinguish between personal, direct exercises of authority that involve manhood and womanhood.

Because it’s personal. She’s right there. She’s woman. I’m man. And I’m being directly, uh, pressed on by this woman in an authoritative way. Should she be doing that? Should I be experiencing that? And my answer’s, No; I think that’s contrary to the way God made us.  So that the, the personal directness of it is removed. And the man doesn’t feel himself, and she wouldn’t feel herself, in any way compromised by his reading that book and learning from that book. Because I’m not having a direct, authoritative confrontation. She’s not lookin’ at me, and, and confronting me, and authoritatively directing me, as woman. There’s this, there’s this interposition of this phenomenon called “book” and “writing” that puts her out of my sight, and, in a sense, takes away the dimension of her female personhood.

Whereas if she were standing right in front of me, and teaching me, as my shepherd, week in and week out, I couldn’t make that separation. She’s woman. And I am man. (Transcript of portion of John Piper podcast provided by Bible Literature Translation.)

Notice that though John Piper uses the text of 1 Timothy 2:12 to support his view that a man can learn from a woman through a book, his actual point is that he would "feel" himself "compromised" if she came into his office and spoke to him in person-- presumably even if she quoted exactly, in person, the same words he just read in the commentary.  The fact is that as far as I can see, the text of 1 Timothy 2:12 really doesn't distinguish between a woman being physically present, or just reading what she wrote in a book.  The traditional reading is more about (as he himself admits above) whether she's an  "elder."  But that really doesn't seem to be what Rev. Piper is talking about.

As long as he doesn't have to notice she's a woman, Piper says, he has no problem receiving teaching from a woman who would be considered enough of an authority on the Bible to have her commentary published.  Apparently it isn't authoritative teaching by a woman that's the problem.  It's authoritative teaching by a woman in front of him, in the same room.  And this is a problem even, it seems, if she holds no "eldership office" anywhere in any church, but is instead a doctor of theology. 

So is this really about Dr. Piper's interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12?  Or is it more about Dr. Piper's feelings about how women should act towards men? 

John Piper considers himself a "complementarian." Theopedia.com gives us this definition of "complementarianism":

Complementarianism is the theological view that although men and women are created equal in their being and personhood, they are created to complement each other via different roles and responsibilities as manifested in marriage, family life, religious leadership, and elsewhere. . .Complementarianism holds that God has created men and women equal in their essential dignity and human personhood, but different and complementary in function with male headship in the home and in the Church.  

Complementarianism, holding that women are equal to men in their ontological being, thus sets itself apart from the more traditional view held both by Christians and the whole of society from the beginning of recorded history until at least the beginning of the 20th century-- the view that women were simply inferior to men.  As the Encyclopedia of Women and Gender, Vol. 1 states: 

"Early philosophical speculation emphasized the inequality of the sexes on all dimensions of social importance. . . [I]n later centuries female inferiority was viewed as a function of divine fiat, physiological instability, or defects in the brain.  Though the rationale for this belief changed over time, its substance remained the same: females in every respect, were viewed as lesser beings."

This belief was certainly not confined to the church, as Charles Darwin and his fellow evolutionists unabashedly declared that women were evolutionarily inferior to men.  But it is this traditional attitude that women are inferior that forms the basis of what is called "sexism," just as the belief that certain races are inferior is the basis of "racism."  

Here is one of Dictionary.com's definitions of sexism:

"discrimination or devaluation based on a person's sex, as in restricted job opportunities; especially, such discrimination directed against women." [Emphasis added]

The online Social Science Dictionary simply says:

Beliefs which hold one sex superior to the other thereby justifying sexual inequalities. [Emphasis added]

A complementarian, therefore, should eschew sexism by principle.  Since complementarianism purports to base itself on Scripture alone for its view of the essential equality but functional differences between men and women, it seems reasonable to expect that those church leaders who publicly define and defend complementarianism in and for the church in general, would reject sexism, insisting that nothing but Scripture should define how men think of and act towards women.

Unfortunately, it's not always that simple.  

Human nature being what it is, most of us hold attitudes and ways of thinking which we have imbibed since we were children: attitudes that come from existing in our bodies in the societies and among the cultural mores in which we live.  Complementarians sometimes say that egalitarians, in rejecting "biblical" male-female roles and "male headship," are capitulating to "modern, feminist culture."  But the roots of sexism in American life lie far deeper and more entrenched than we may realize, and feminism (which has only existed for about 100 years) is really still the new kid on the block.  And complementarianism, of course, is itself informed by feminism when it re-examines the traditional Christian view and disagrees that the Bible supports the notion that women were created inferior.

So when the most public faces of complementarian Christianity in America today speak of men, women and male-female relations, Christians (complementarian and egalitarian alike) should be willing to confront them when the things they say, and the attitudes they reveal, show not so much a complementarian viewpoint as a sort of sanctified sexism-- a reflection of a deeply entrenched societal devaluation of women, a culturally imbibed societal expectation of favoritism towards men as the superior sex.

To do him justice, John Piper says this in the same podcast:

So, I think the point of that text is not to say that you can never learn anything from a woman. That’s just not true. It’s not true biblically, and it’s not true experientially, because the reason for saying that I don’t permit a woman to teach or have authority over men here is not because she’s incompetent. It’s not because she can’t have thoughts. In fact, the women in your church, and the woman in, the woman you are married to, have many thoughts that you would do well to know. [laughs] And to know, and learn, and to learn from. And so the issue there is not that she doesn’t have thoughts that you wouldn’t benefit from. Or that she can’t, uh, teach you anything.

The, the issue is one of how does manhood and womanhood work. 

Piper obviously believes that he believes men and women are equal.  He doesn't think he can't learn from a woman, or that women are incompetent to teach men.  But he can't seem to get past his discomfort in having a certain kind of experience of women-- an experience that gives him a feeling of being "directly pressed upon by a woman in an authoritative way."  Remembering that according to the complementarian injunction that a woman is excluded only from being a church elder, and not from being a theologian who comments on the Bible-- this is not about what she's teaching or where she's teaching or how she's teaching.  It's whether he has to directly experience a woman being an authority on a subject in his presence. 

It looks like sexism to me.  Sexism that's sanctified by its ostensible complementarianism, so that it slips under the radar as just part of complementarian doctrine.  But what Piper's words are really communicating, whether he intends it or not, is that he doesn't want women to get uppity in his face.  He doesn't want to feel, in the presence of a woman, that she might have more knowledge than him on a particular Bible text.  It makes him feel uncomfortable about his manhood.  

Is this, at its heart, about what Scripture says?  Or is it about how a man (raised in the 1950s and 60s when men expected to be deferred to by women) feels when a woman is not deferring to him? 

The same sort of thing happens in the most recent Pat Robertson controversy being picked up in the media:  the one where Pat Robinson (who became a married adult during the Father-Knows-Best 1950s) counsels a woman whose husband has been cheating on her that "men will be men":

"Here's the secret," the famous evangelical said. "Stop talking the cheating. He cheated on you, well, he's a man."

The wife needs to focus on the reasons she married her spouse, he continued.

"Does he provide a home for you to live in," Robertson said. 'Does he provide food for you to eat? Does he provide clothes for you to wear? Is he nice to the children... Is he handsome?". . .

"Recognize also, like it or not, males have a tendency to wander a little bit," Robertson said. "What you want to do is make a home so wonderful that he doesn't want to wander. . . ."

In another appearance back in January of this year, Robertson told a woman,

We need to cultivate romance, darling! ... You always have to keep that spark of love alive. It just isn't something to just lie there, 'Well, I'm married to him so he's got to take me slatternly looking.' You've got to fix yourself up, look pretty.

This certainly has a lot in common with traditional social attitudes towards male adultery, as illustrated in a Los Angeles Times article from 1987:

In a Parliamentary debate in 1857, the Lord Chancellor said that "A wife might without any loss of caste condone an act of adultery . . . but a husband could not condone a similar act on the part of the wife . . . as the adultery might be the means of palming spurious offspring on her husband." Englishmen could get a divorce for any evidence of adultery, while Englishwomen had to prove that the adultery was incestuous or otherwise unnatural.

Unflattering as it is towards men to say they shouldn't be required (or expected) to control their sexual urges, this mindset is part of traditional permissiveness towards male sexual behavior, while female behavior has traditionally been tightly controlled.  Though it may seem on its face to treat men as the inferior sex, what this attitude is actually rooted in is a devaluing of the woman to her sexual/reproductive functions as primary to her nature, while men are treated more as whole persons.  Not being expected to control himself is part of historically male autonomy, while being kept under rigid social control is part of historically female subordination.  So also is being told, in essence, to just be grateful for a roof over your head (which frankly, in this era when women usually contribute almost equally to the household rent, mortgage, grocery bills and clothing purchases, simply sounds ludicrous).

But what does this have to do with the Bible?  Where does the Bible say a man shouldn't be expected to control himself, or that it's a wife's job to stay pretty so that her husband won't stray?  On the contrary-- throughout the Book of Proverbs it's the man who is warned to not to be enticed by adulterous women, not the wife told to keep him from getting enticed! In fact, Proverbs tells men to choose to see the woman they married as beautiful, no matter how old the couple has become: 

May your fountain be blessed,
and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
A loving doe, a graceful deer—
may her breasts satisfy you always,
may you ever be intoxicated with her love.
Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife?
Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman?

Prov. 5:18-20, emphasis added.

There is no onus laid upon women anywhere in the Bible to stay forever youthful in appearance, or to take responsibility for keeping their husbands from adultery.  Women are instead told not to focus on beauty, but on "the hidden person of the heart."  (1 Peter 3:4).  And far from being expected to just be grateful for being provided for by a man, Proverbs 31 shows that Old Testament women (wealthy ones, at least) had their own incomes, businesses and land ownership!

So-- are Robertson's words complementarian (focused on Scripture as teaching male-female equality along with difference in role)?  Or are they just sanctified sexism? 

It looks like the latter to me. 

So here's my respectful request and challenge to complementarians:  Please, no more sanctifying of sexism.  If an attitude that one of your public spokesmen (however well-intentioned) is perpetuating about women has nothing to do with what you believe the Bible teaches, then please, speak up about it!  Egalitarians and complementarians might be able to find some common ground here-- an area where we can work together for the uplifting and honoring of all our sisters in Christ. 

Just because a preacher is well-known doesn't mean he can't make mistakes, or that his mistakes shouldn't be addressed-- or that he shouldn't be encouraged to retract them just as publicly as the mistake itself was public.

Perpetuating the notion that the heart of Christianity is sexist-- devaluing to women and treating them as inferior-- isn't doing any of us any good.  

Are you with me? 

Book Recommendation: Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley

But myth, to some extent, is where you find it; and you know when you’ve found it by the way it goes right through you — like the first heavenly, shocking mouthful of ice cream on a hot day, or falling in love. Robin McKinley

"She threw the door open and stood there, facing not the palace but all the worst-omened creatures of the inner and outer worlds, and she . . . shook her fists over her head and shouted 'Go away! Can you not see that you have already lost? There is nothing for you here!'

There was another clap of thunder as if all the thunder in the ether between the worlds had clapped itself at once, and Beauty had a dazzling glimpse of what had been the sorcerous army rolling about on the ground in confusion. . . She heard the laughter of the old woman behind her and heard her voice for the last time. . . 'Bless you, my dear, and your Beast, and bless Rose Cottage, for it is yours now.'"

In the book recommendations I have written so far on my blog (see my Topic Index for the others), I have focused on non-fiction.  But in my lifelong addiction to books, my first and best love has always been fantasy and fairy tale.  So not long after I wrote my defense of Beauty and the Beast, I decided to reread Rose Daughter* by one of my favorite authors, Robin McKinley.

Robin McKinley says this about her own work, and this work in particular:

Myths—and folk and fairy tales—tell the big stories, the stories about what it really means to be human, and never mind the tedious restrictions of science and rationality. . . 

Beauty and the Beast. . . [is]my story. Everyone has a story. If you’re lucky you know what it is. It may be easier if you’re a writer, I suppose; then—if you’re lucky—it may hijack you. Possibly more than once. (Ahem.) Although some writers I imagine write in search of their story; such a writer might feel sorry for me, I suppose, for having the journey over. For me it’s like having a garden I can always go to, where the roses are always blooming and it’s always sunny and warm but not too warm—this is a garden I can sit down in, as opposed to the real-life ones which always need weeding and deadheading and feeding and tying in and fluffing up or strapping down . . . 

Rose Daughter contains most of the elements of the original fairy tale:  A merchant, forced into bankruptcy, has three daughters, the youngest named Beauty.  He discovers that a ship he had thought lost at sea has returned after all.  Beauty asks him if he can bring back for her just one rose.  He is unable to do so, but when he becomes lost in a storm on the way home and finds his way into a magic castle with invisible servants, he attempts to take a rose from there-- only to be confronted with a terrifying Beast who insists that his daughter Beauty shall be ransom for the rose.  Beauty goes to the Beast's castle and is treated kindly by the Beast.  Every night he asks her to marry him, and though she pities him, she cannot bring herself to say yes.  At last he finds her weeping, and she asks if she might return home.  "I can forbid you nothing," says the Beast, "but take this rose with you.  As long as it is fresh, I am well, but when the last petal falls, I will be dead for love of you."  Beauty uses the last falling petal to return to the Beast, and as he lies dying, her promise to marry him revives him.

It is at this point that the book departs from the tradition, for Robin McKinley's Beauty is not just a a stock female heroine, interchangeable with any woman who could say "I'll marry you" to break the spell.  No-- Beauty is a heroic hero, and after she has revived the Beast, she must break the spell and complete the rescue of the Beast on her own.  This she does in the climactic scene I have quoted above.

Largely because of Beauty's heroic role, the beautiful and poetic prose of this 300-page-long version adds an additional theme to the theme of overcoming prejudice which is the main point of the original fairy tale.  More than anything else, Rose Daughter is a celebration of the small and ordinary triumphing over the great and powerful.  This theme is embodied in the roses that pervade every part of the story, from the scent of five-year-old Beauty's mother's perfume, to the plants around Rose Cottage (which the family escapes to after the father's financial ruin), to the carpets and wallpaper in the Beast's castle, festooned with beautiful but non-living blooms, and finally to the greenhouse which the Beast tells Beauty "is the heart of this place.  And it is dying."

Beauty sets herself to revive and restore the Beast's dying roses.**  As she does so, she comes into her own power-- the power of cottages over castles, of simple kitchens and quiet conversation over imposing drawing rooms and cruel witticisms, of the small magic of living things over great feats of sorcery.   In dreams she sees her sisters (who had been hard and shallow in the wealth of the city, but learn compassion and the strength of gentleness in their new country lives) find new, honest bridegrooms in place of the lords and dukes who once had sought their hands-- and who had deserted them when their father lost the money that would have been their dowries.  Even Beauty's merchant father is transformed by their new country life, finding a gift for ballad-writing that he had never guessed he had, and becoming happy in his new role as village poet.

In addition to the roses, Beauty welcomes back to the Beast's castle (a fascinating place of magically changing rooms) many small living creatures, such as butterflies, bees and bats, turning it from an austere and barren place into a place of renewed life.  Another theme of Robin McKinley's that flows through many of her books-- two entities naturally hostile to one another being brought together without either one needing to change their essential selves-- also comes to beautiful fruition in this novel, though exactly how, I will leave to be discovered. Just-- read the book.

I believe that tales of the fantastic are important and valuable because of the ability of symbolic images like roses and castles and beasts, to communicate the essence of certain kinds of spiritual truth that are the most difficult to express in mere words.   Rose Daughter is one of the best such tales I have ever read, that I expect to reread again several more times in my life, as I have already read it at least three times already.  Book-lovers know how some books can get under your skin and become part of you.  This is one of those books for me.  So I'll leave you with this thought of J.R.R. Tolkien's, from his essay On Fairy Stories:

The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.  

-------------------

*Interestingly, the words on the front cover of the paperback version of this book betray the publisher's mistaken buying-in to the common misunderstanding of the nature of this story (as I complained about in my defense): "Beauty can transform anything-- even the heart of a Beast."  The Beast's heart is pretty much the only thing Beauty does not transform in this book, nor does she need to.  She needs only look past the Beast's outer form and find the pure, gentle heart of an artist, a philosopher, and a gentleman in every best sense of that word.

**There is an amazing amount of gardening in this book.  But even though I don't have an especially green thumb, I enjoyed this aspect of it-- particularly since the idea of digging into the depths of things to restore what is being lost, was an especially appropriate image for this story.  Beauty spends most of her time in mud-spattered boots, with thorn scratches on her arms: a refreshing image of a woman for whom "beauty" is supposed to be her most important feature (which it decidedly is not). 

"In God We Trust," Prayer in Schools & Manger Scenes: Why We Shouldn't Fight for Them

According to many Christians in the United States today, such as Benjamin Hart, president of the Christian Defense Fund, there is "a relentless assault on America's religious institutions and traditions by our educational system, the courts and throughout our popular culture."  The authors of One Nation Under God: America's Christian Heritage state in their introduction:

"[O]ur schools have been wiped clean of Christian influence, [and] efforts are underway by anti-Christian legal groups to completely "sanitize" our nation of any Christian references by,

• Removing "In God We Trust" from our currency.
• Ending opening each session of Congress with prayer.
• Ending Christmas as a national holiday.
• And eliminating the rank of military chaplain from our armed services."

It is interesting that according to Charisma News, this perception among Christians is largely limited to evangelicals, with other groups tending to believe that Christianity is simply being asked to share the public square:

"The findings of a poll published Wednesday, reveal a 'double standard' among a significant portion of evangelicals on the question of religious liberty, said David Kinnaman, president of Barna Group, a California think tank that studies American religion and culture.

While these Christians are particularly concerned that religious freedoms are being eroded in this country, 'they also want Judeo-Christians to dominate the culture,' said Kinnamon.

'They cannot have it both ways,' he said. 'This does not mean putting Judeo-Christian values aside, but it will require a renegotiation of those values in the public square as America increasingly becomes a multi-faith nation.'"

But there is another issue which neither of these positions really takes into account.  Are such things as public prayers, public display of nativity scenes, the posting of the Ten Commandments in our courthouses, and putting "In God We Trust" on our coins-- all these outward symbols of Christian religious faith-- really things that Christians should spend their time crusading for in the public arena?  Do they even represent the Christianity which is demonstrated and embodied by Jesus and taught by Paul, James and Peter?

Or are they part of something else?  Something called America's Civil Religion?

Here is a definition of the concept of "civil religion" from the above-linked article:

"[T]his concept made its major impact on the social scientific study of religion with the publication of an essay titled "Civil Religion in America," written by Robert Bellah in Daedalus in 1967. . . Bellah's article claimed that most Americans share common religious characteristics expressed through civil religious beliefs, symbols, and rituals that provide a religious dimension to the entirety of American life. . . . Bellah's definition of American civil religion is that it is "an institutionalized collection of sacred beliefs about the American nation," which he sees symbolically expressed in America's founding documents and presidential inaugural addresses.  It includes a belief in the existence of a transcendent being called "God," an idea that the American nation is subject to God's laws, and an assurance that God will guide and protect the United States. Bellah sees these beliefs in the values of liberty, justice, charity, and personal virtue and concretized in, for example, the words In God We Trust on both national emblems and on the currency used in daily economic transactions. Although American civil religion shares much with the religion of Judeo-Christian denominations, Bellah claims that it is distinct from denominational religion. . . [T]he civil religion thesis claims that civil religion exists symbolically in American culture. . . civil religion is a distinct cultural component within American society that is not captured either by American politics or by denominational religiosity."

The article also points out that "the case [has been] made that civil religion constitutes a set of platitudes that substitute for either serious religious or serious political action."

It seems to me that "In God We Trust" on our coins is just such a platitude.  And most of these other things that we think are so important, are really just outward symbols and practices traditionally associated with white Protestant Christianity, which comprise a civil religion--and civil religion is by nature and definition an outward, social thing.  America's civil religion is about the hold of these traditions on the public expression of faith in our nation.  What it isn't about is heart change within human beings-- or, as far as I can see, about following Jesus or seeking the kingdom of God at all.

This, of course, leads to the questions: What does it mean to follow Jesus? And what is the kingdom of God?  I would agree with those who would protest that the Christian religion is meant to be a thing lived in public, not just about personal piety, and not just about going to heaven when we die.  The kingdom of God is about how we live on earth.  But-- and this is a big "but" -- It's not a human kingdom.  When Jesus preached the kingdom, He was making a radical political statement in His day that God is king and not Caesar.  But He also made it clear (by refusing to let them crown Him king, among other things) that He had not come to simply replace one earthly kingdom with another.

N.T. Wright's book Simply Jesus puts it this way:

"Now there is a completely different way to live, a way of love and reconciliation and healing and hope.  It's a way nobody's ever tried before, a way that is as unthinkable to most human beings and societies as-- well, as resurrection itself.  Precisely.  That's the point.  Welcome to Jesus's new world. . . .

The resurrection of Jesus doesn't mean, 'It's all right.  We're going to heaven now.'  No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. . .  God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven.  And God's 'being-in-charge' is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord."

The kingdom of God is about God reigning on earth, in and through the Person of Jesus Christ.  But Christ doesn't reign the way human kings reign, or even the way democratically elected political leaders reign-- through making and enforcing laws.  Laws exist to control outward behavior.  But Jesus primarily taught about His kingdom in parables, so as to reach the hearts and not just the behavior of His hearers. The kingdom of God, Jesus said, was like "yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough." (Matt. 13:33).  It is like finding a pearl of great price hidden in a field, and selling everything you have to buy that field (Matt. 13:45).  The kingdom of God is a seemingly insignificant thing, like a mustard seed (Matt. 13:31), that grows up to become the source of strength and life and peace.  The kingdom is something that happens on the inside of human beings when they come into contact with God, which then begins to make a difference in the world outside.

Following Jesus, He told His followers, is about being servants, not rulers (Matt. 23:11).  It's about taking up a cross (Luke 9:23), about laying down your life-- not about acquiring power to make other people do things-- no matter how much we believe the things we would make them do would be good for them.

However, America's civil religion is not about crosses-- except to put on display on the tops of hills and bluffs, so that people end up arguing about whether they should be displayed there.  America's civil religion is about putting "In God We Trust" on our coins-- not about giving away our coins to others.  America's civil religion is about putting nativity scenes in our parks-- not about contemplating the Incarnation and letting it astonish us afresh every Christmas morning.  Ultimately, America's civil religion is an outward thing, not an inward thing.

Gregory A. Boyd, in his book The Myth of a Christian Nation, says:

"We end up wasting precious time and resources defending and tweaking the civil religion-- as though doing so had some kingdom value.  We strive to keep prayer in the schools, fight for the right to have public prayer before football games, lobby to preserve the phrases 'under God' in our Pledge of Allegiance and 'in God we trust' on our coins, battle to hold the traditional civil meaning of marriage, and things of the sort-- as though winning these fights somehow brings America closer to the kingdom of God. . .  Now, you may or may not agree that preserving the civil religion in this way is good for the culture. . . But can we really believe that tweaking civil religion in these ways actually brings people closer to the kingdom of God, that it helps them become more like Jesus?" 

Now, it may be as Boyd says, that preserving the civil religion does have some value to the culture.  But is it really under so much threat as the Christian Defense League and other such organizations believe?  Have our schools indeed been "wiped clean of Christian influence"?  Does America really forbid prayer in its public schools?

In fact, no.  Actually, the United States' federal laws are fairly nuanced and balanced, and are not designed to restrict the freedom of children -- or even teachers-- to pray while at school.  As AsktheJudge.info points out, the only thing United States' law restricts is the power of school boards, administrators and teachers to lead prayers, to write prayers for children to recite, or to compel them towards religious feelings through a moment of silence.  It is not prayer which is restricted; what is restricted is any sort of external compulsion to pray.   But external compulsion has never been what Christianity is about in the first place-- it is only part of the civil religion.  And to the best of my knowledge, civil policies that compel students to pray for a minute or so at the beginning of class, or at the opening of a sporting event or a graduation, may make us feel good about ourselves as a supposedly "Christian nation," but they do nothing to change hearts or advance the kingdom of God.

Greg Boyd again:

"For example, does anyone really think that allowing for a prayer before social functions is going to help students become kingdom people? . . . Might not such prayer-- and the political efforts to defend such prayer-- actually be harmful to the kingdom inasmuch as it reinforces the shallow civil religious mindset that sees prayer primarily as a perfunctory religious activity? Might it not be better to teach our kids that true kingdom prayer has nothing to do with perfunctory social functions, that true kingdom prayer cannot be demanded or retracted by social laws and that their job as kingdom warriors is to 'pray without ceasing' (1 Thess. 5:17) whether the law allows for it to be publicly expressed or not?

In other words, rather than spending time and energy defending and tweaking the civil religion, might it not be in the best interests of the kingdom of of God to distance ourselves from the civil religion?" [Ibid., emphasis in original.]

So if we as Christians want our children to be free to pray Christian prayers in school, is it such a high price to pay to agree that they should pray on their own time, before classes or at lunch or recess, so that kids of other religions aren't forced to pray our prayers-- just as we don't want our kids to be forced to pray Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim prayers?  Is a public prayer by a teacher really so essential to our kids' faith?  Or could it actually be detrimental, as Boyd says?  Isn't private, heartfelt prayer on the playground better than external, get-it-over-with prayer in the classroom?

It seems to me that the Christian-like trappings of America's civil religion are really only symbols of the privileged place that has traditionally been held by white Protestants in our culture.  Changes in the hold that these traditions have on our culture are not signs that America is falling away from God, but only that it is becoming more inclusive of all expressions of religion and non-religion, in an increasingly diverse society.  And if we're going to promote real religious liberty, we're going to continue to attract more and more diverse sorts of people to come to our nation to live, work and worship.  Is religious freedom worth it?  I think it is.

So.  My fellow Christians, how do we best follow Jesus?  Should we defend human traditions as if they were the commands of God (Matt. 15:9)?

Holding onto privilege is sort of the opposite of laying down our lives or taking up our crosses, isn't it?  So why are we so anxious to keep and defend outward symbols and practices that ultimately have no eternal value?

I say let's seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, as Christ taught (Matt. 6:33).  I say it's better to allow diversity free expression within American culture, and to work for God's kingdom than to fight to keep our own.

No matter how "Christian" our civil-religious kingdom looks on the outside.