The Wild Gun of Equality (BOOK EXCERPT)

**I continue to devote nearly all of my writing energy to my book project, Unladylike: A Call for Resistance to the Injustice of Inequality. The book is due out in November through Civitas Press, a small independent publishing start-up. I'll be posting excerpts from time to time as the work progresses. Here's a bit from a chapter that deals with the Bible battle over Christianized misogyny. This part highlights the paradox that Christianity has become. The breaking of rank that Jesus exemplified in how he treated women is frowned upon in many corners of the modern church in today's 21st century. It's not only paradoxical, it's outrageous. This is why I am writing this book. I hope it will inspire women and men everywhere to a kingdom vision of equality between men and women that shatters traditionalistic strongholds of thought and action (or rather inaction).   

The Wild Gun of Equality

            Whenever I blog about the issue of women and inequality in the church I get a lot of comments and sometimes email from someone who feels compelled to correct me. Like this one, an email from an acquaintance who respectfully wanted to remind me what the Bible teaches in case I had forgotten. He cited a few Bible verses including 1 Timothy 2 that says women must not teach or exercise authority over men, “for it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve, and it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman…”  He went on to offer a popular interpretation of this passage:

The role of the woman is a submissive role in the intimacy relationship within a marriage arrangement. The man acts as a PROVIDER of love and provisions, the PROTECTOR of the  family, while the woman is a RECEIVER of that but also a CARER for the children and the household. The role of teaching in the Church, preaching about moral standards, if given to a woman, she might be affected by the feeling of intellectual supremacy the post given her, and with the responsibility of a congregation, she may feel that she IS a PROVIDER and a PROTECTOR instead. This will affect her own mind and hence her own relationship with her husband. I would say that this would introduce confusion

The view the emailer describes here is what is known in the world of Bible scholarship as the complementarian view. This is the idea that women and men are equal, but have different roles determined by divine order. A classic book that fully explains complementarianism is Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood by John Piper and Wayne Grudem. In chapter one, the authors clearly define complementarianism:, “When the Bible teaches that men and women fulfill different roles in relation to each other, charging man with a unique leadership role, it bases this differentiation not on temporary cultural norms, but on permanent facts of creation.”

They insist that if a woman has authority over a man that it will “generally offend a man’s good, God-given sense of responsibility and leadership and thus, controvert God’s created order.” 

 I used to be fine with this kind of theology. I accepted the idea that women are equal with men in the world of church, but we aren’t allowed to teach or preach over men because the Bible says so. It’s God’s will. I recently was shuffling through some old Bible study papers that examined what the Bible has to say about women. One question asked if there was a proper place for women with spiritual gifts of leadership and teaching to express their gifts within the context of the local church. I wrote, “Absolutely, and beyond Sunday school and women’s ministries. I personally think we do well to allow women to teach from the pulpit. I’m not hung up on it, and I won’t be divisive about it, but woman is also made in God’s image and we can have unique perspectives from God’s word to offer. As long as a woman is under authority, not a wild gun, then let her teach. Let her minister in her gifting and fulfill her calling.” I was always the diplomat, ever careful to not rock the boat or buck up against the system. I read these words today and I am somewhat incredulous, Did I really think like that? But there it is, documented in my own handwriting that women need to mind their roles and not be wild guns slinging authority over men. Oh, God forbid.

A few years ago, after I’d had my world rocked with Pastor Rose Swetman's  proclamation, “it’s not an issue of theology, but an issue of justice,” I participated in a synchroblog that focused on the equality of Christian women. A few bloggers offered up their own definition of complementarianism like this one from Mad Reverend:

Complementarianism is a complicated series of intellectual gymnastics justifying the assignment of authority to men on the grounds that authority is but one among many roles played by human beings.

I think Mad Reverend gets it right. Telling women they are equal, but cannot have authority over men because of God’s divine order is like telling a Black man in the 19^th century that he can’t be free because it’s God’s divine order. God’s created order does not inherently posses nor express the dehumanizing message that one human being has fewer rights than another. Jesus was the great Liberator who broke all social and religious constructs when he mingled with the marginalized and elevated their stature by affirming their humanity. It the well-known Bible story of Mary and Martha,  so many have supposed that Jesus affirmed Mary’s devotion because she was in a posture of subservient devotion to him. Martha entreated for Jesus to send Mary back into the kitchen to her rightful role, but Jesus defended Mary, telling Martha that Mary had chosen a good thing. Mary broke rank with her culture by staying with the men, by putting herself in a place of learning at the feet of Jesus when women at that time were clearly meant to be remain detached from the world of men and learning. She had no authority in her religious context nor cultural context to be a student of Jesus’. Martha was defending the traditional role that Mary was meant to occupy; Jesus defended the breaking of protocol, the shattering of the veil of inequity between men and women. Jesus, I have often said, acted like a feminist in that he treated women as peers. Jesus was a wild gun.