Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. … Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were making an appeal through us. (2 Corinthians 5:18-20).
As ambassadors for Christ who have experienced the joy and peace of salvation we deeply desire to share the message of redemption with the whole world. Jesus gave His disciples the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20). Who was to obey this command? All believers – men and women – are privileged to share in the task.
In our first post on “No Battle Between the Sexes” (4-4-19) we looked in the Bible at the story of creation. We saw that humans were created equally in the image of God. They were to serve with mutual respect and authority and rule the earth together (Gen. 1:28). The Holy Spirit empowered “both men and women” for taking the gospel to the nations on Pentecost (Acts 2:17-21).
Unfortunately, since Adam and Eve listened to the devil and ate the fruit and fell, men sought to maintain power and control over women. In this now sinful world, the mutual oneness of Adam and Eve has been replaced with anger, doubts, suspicion, prejudice, and a lust for power. The human race inherited the sin (Rom. 5:12). In spite of the fact that God clearly commissioned Adam and Eve as equal partners in the garden, throughout history women have been treated like second class citizens as men seek illegitimate rule over them. God was meant to be the ruler, but men began to interpose themselves in a hierarchy of leadership.
Throughout much of history, there hasn’t really been a “battle between the sexes”. Men have just ruled and women have submitted. Somehow it hasn’t been noticed that nowhere in the Bible does God say that males are superior to females. Nowhere in the Bible does God command any human to subjugate any other human.
Right at the heart of the hierarchical understanding of the man-woman relationship is an appeal to tradition.[1]
In this second essay on the “battle between the sexes” we will demonstrate that besides erroneously appealing to the Bible for their authority over females, the hierarchalists/complementarians also appeal incorrectly to history. Modern complementarians base their authority over women on a softer sounding subordination argument. They say that women are “equal in essence, but different in roles.” Of course those roles are always in subordination to men so their argument is a logical fallacy.
The issue of whether or not men and women are equal is clouded because people don’t study the history of the Church let alone the history of theology. But, the complementarians are wrong, the Church has not always said that women are equalto men but subordinate in roles. Far from it. A short survey will suffice to demonstrate this.
Early Church – John Chrysostom– God maintained the order of each sex by dividing the business of life into two parts, and assigned the more necessary and beneficial aspects to the man and the less important, inferior matters to the woman.[2]
Middle Ages – Thomas Aquinas – … Woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness (of the Image of God, my note) in the masculine sex, while production of woman comes from defect in the active force.[3]
The claim that the Church has always taught ontological equality for women is therefore not true. The question of ontology was not discussed at all either for the Trinity or for male/female relationships. It is a new practice thought up by the present complementariansto confirm what is most important to them, the subordination of women. Further, Thomas Aquinas says that women do not have an equal amount of the image of God.
Reformation – John Knox – … If women take upon them the office which God hath assigned to men, they shall not escape the Divine malediction.[4]
Twentieth Century – John R. Rice – I have no doubt that millions will go to Hell because of the unscriptural practice of women preachers.[5]
Twenty-First Century –
History is still being distorted as evidenced by the Southern Baptist Convention.
Members of the Southern Baptist Convention like to say that women have never been pastors in all of history. It’s so obvious, they say, that women shouldn’t be pastors, you can’t even question it. Like their other complementarian brethren they ignore history, but in this case what is worse is that it is their own history.
Actually, thousands of women were ordained in the SBC before 2000 when the SBC limited the role to men. What changed? As of the late 1990’s there were over 1,200 ordained women pastoring in the SBC. Then in 2000 the SBC clarified their statement, limiting ordination and ordained roles to only men in all SBC churches. According to Kelly Ladd Bishop, “The restriction of women in the SBC was a systematic effort started in the 1980s by a small group of powerful men, with the intention of keeping women down. They’ve sold their agenda to Christians as gospel and the word of God.”[6]
And so, the SBC tries to appeal to tradition to say that women can’t be pastors. Are they hoping that as time passes people will forget that they ordained over 1200 women as pastors? Complementarians are so used to discarding any history that they don’t like; they must think that others aren’t very observant.
The distortion of history is also demonstrated in the way that women’s stories have been neglected. Male-authored church history books leave these stories out. However, in spite of the way that women were marginalized, especially by the institutional Church, women rose above their circumstances and founded monasteries, schools, hospitals, and mission societies.
Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845) is an example of a woman who was an excellent wife and mother who nevertheless found time to change the world around her. Most people remember her chiefly for the prison reforms that she helped bring about in the nineteenth century in England. But, Elizabeth went beyond her work at Newgate prison and became active in reform for mental asylums, the convict ship system, nursing standards, education for working women, better housing for the poor including hostels for the homeless, and she founded soup kitchens.
She did all of this on top of being an active and devoted mother of eleven children, Bible teacher for the children in her neighborhood, and a sometime minister in her local Quaker congregation. We could multiply the stories of women like Elizabeth Fry by the thousands. These courageous women were not interested in a “battle between the sexes”. These women just went about following in Jesus’s footsteps caring for the poor and neglected.
It is time to learn from the Bible and history that men and women working together will accomplish more for the Kingdom of God. When Christians realize that the one in charge is the one who is Spirit-gifted to be in charge, the gospel of love, forgiveness, peace, and joy will advance to the nations. Let us lay aside the supposed “battle between the sexes” and serve humbly together.
Christians can “have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:5-7).
It’s not about who gets to be the boss; it’s about who gets to serve (Matthew 20:28).
[1]Kevin Giles. The Trinity & Subordinationism(Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2002). 6.
[2]Ruth A. Tucker, Walter Liefeld. Daughters of the Church: Women and Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1987). 124.
[3]Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica(Matriti: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1955) Vol. 2, 416. As quoted in J. Lee Grady. 10 Lies the Church Tells Women(Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2006). 20.
[4]Quoted in: Tucker, Liefeld. 177.
[5]Quoted in: Tucker, Liefeld. 404.
[6]Kelly Ladd Bishop, “The End of Women’s Ordination in the SBC”, April 4, 2019 on her website, http://kellyladdbishop.com/archives/580
