Monday, September 21, 2015

"When complementarianism gets silly"


This article was plugged by the Aquila Report:


A few comments:

This article is in response to Piper's answer to a question regarding policemen. As I've indicted in a post, I wouldn't frame the issue the way Piper does. 

When does complementarianism get silly? That's the question raised by an interesting (and at times quite heated) debate in August over women in the workplace. I'm commenting on it, not because it was heated, or because by doing so I'm hoping somehow to ingratiate myself with the arbiters of acceptable thought - I would have thought the ship had pretty much sailed on that one - but because I live under a woman head of state, grew up under a woman Prime Minister, recently voted for a woman Member of Parliament (who also happens to be a member of my church), and have hundreds of women in my church whose jobs and everyday lives often involve them telling men what to do.

The obvious danger here is to baptize the status quo. At a de facto level, there are many women in positions of authority over men. But that doesn't address the de jure question of what that ought to be the case. 

The New Testament instructions on how maleness and femaleness should be applied seem, at least to me, to focus almost entirely on relationships in the gathered church and in the household. This could be taken as an argument from silence, but it is a fairly important silence: we have women in the New Testament who run their own businesses (Lydia), act as benefactors to men (Phoebe), precede their husbands when named together (Prisca), have households, presumably including male slaves (Lydia, Chloe?) and act as a “mother” to single men (Rufus’s mother), not to mention the women in the Old Testament who lead Israel into battle (Deborah), kill enemies (Jael), advise kings (Huldah) and save nations (Esther), and there is no indication that any of them shouldn’t have done these things because they were women. When transposed into a modern key, therefore, I cannot see warrant in Scripture for saying that women should not manage men at work, tell men what to do, govern the country, or (in John’s language) influence men in personal and directive ways.

i) I agree with him that we have Biblically sanctioned cases in which women sometimes take the lead. To take one example, if a woman is a businesswomen, then she clearly has the right to tell her employees what to do. If it's her business, then she's the boss. Mind you, that's not coercive so long as employment is voluntary. 

ii) To restrict the relevance of gender to relationships in the church or the family is fallacious. Those represent special cases of a general principle. After all, if there was no underlying principle, why would those instructions even be applicable to church and family? What's the common, overarching principle? It must be grounded in something broader than two particular instances–otherwise, there's nothing to justify its force even in those two instances. That would be ad hoc. 

In the UK, it is far from a hypothetical scenario: our Queen, our only female Prime Minister and my current female MP have all been conservative and Christian, and presumably it will only be a matter of time before a pro-life, Republican woman has a shot at the Oval Office, even if it isn’t Carly Fiorina. What then, I wonder?

Sure, if it's a choice between a liberal male candidate and a conservative female candidate, we should vote for the woman. 

1 comment:

  1. "we have women in the New Testament who run their own businesses (Lydia), act as benefactors to men (Phoebe), precede their husbands when named together (Prisca), have households, presumably including male slaves (Lydia, Chloe?) and act as a “mother” to single men (Rufus’s mother), not to mention the women in the Old Testament who lead Israel into battle (Deborah), kill enemies (Jael), advise kings (Huldah) and save nations (Esther), and there is no indication that any of them shouldn’t have done these things because they were women."

    (Andrew) Wilson's examples has little traction against Piper's argument. He assumes what he needs to prove.

    I don't think Piper would consider most of this list of examples as necessarily contradicting his definition of 'exercising authority' over men. As for Deborah, this has been engaged with in the past.

    Note that in past ages where Piper's kind of distinctions were followed, society was often structured to facilitate this. For example, in Victorian England, a matron would direct the maids but not the male servants - they would instead have a man over them. The man and woman of the house delegated the exercise of authority with sex considerations in mind. Often a female of high rank in society would be like Esther - not a reigning Queen as such, but rather one who if needed would have others (men) do the practical exercising of authority over men on her behalf. It would be unseemly for a woman to do so herself.

    This is not unlike today if a woman hires a contracting company for a building project. They provide their own foreman who exercises the day-to-day authority over the workmen. She doesn't have to touch it. The woman-foreman interaction needn't be construed as contrary to Piper's continuums. In fact I remember he even gives this as a positive example of his own mother in RBMW.

    A customer who communicates her wishes regarding the details of the service she requires does not necessarily exercise authority (in Piper's sense) over the one she is paying for the service.

    Likewise, in the OT we see examples that imply a similar distinction between who the master and mistress of the household exercised authority over. It is common to see the mistress of the house directing the female servants.

    If a woman head of household was widowed, she may have a male servant head up and direct the affairs of the men-servants in her household. This is not inconsistent with Piper's outlook, and undercuts a lot of the assumptions Wilson brings to the table in this list of examples which assume a gender-blind societal structure.

    Note also, the affects of the Fall put strain on the natural workings of the world. A woman whose husband dies is left in a position she would not be in in an unfallen world. That fact does not do away with the ideal God created.



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