The New Testament has some seemingly clear instructions for women not to be the leading authorities in church and family life (1 Cor. 11:1-16; 14:33-35; Eph. 5:22-33; 1 Tim. 2:11-15). In many circles, evangelical Christians have turned away from those instructions and patterns, adopting modern egalitarian/feminist approaches. The best I’ve been able to see, that is a very problematic thing to do, especially if you try to keep on believing that the Bible is infallible. Last summer I asked a woman in ministry for a basis for her setting those problematic passages aside. She referenced this book. So I decided I should read it.
(I read it on Kindle, and I’m not sure if I got the page numbers exactly right in what follows.)
It was a much more enjoyable read than I expected. Among academics, Stackhouse is probably one of the most honest that I’ve ever read when he comes to discussing his personal feelings and judgments about difficult subjects. There are a lot of aspects of modern feminist struggles that I never took the time to appreciate. Also, his desire to honour the truthfulness of all of scripture is evident, along with his desire to see more and more people in the world won for Christ.
However, as much as I learned from Stackhouse, and as much as I enjoyed his gentle and respectful spirit, I was left with some serious questions:
His driving force toward accepting egalitarianism (feminism) and rejecting paternalism (complimentarianism) is basically that he just plain sees women as equal, both in identity and in their rights to aspire to the same roles as men. He writes the book assuming that I will see this too, and that he just needs to get those pesky aspects of scripture out of the way for me. But while equality of identity and worth are clear in scripture and in my mind, equality of roles does not seem so clear-cut and obvious to me at the start, like it does to him. So I’m either right, or I need someone to explain more of the basics to me.
In chapter 11, Stackhouse outlines his central interpretive argument: that there tends to be “doubleness,” patriarchy and egalitarianism side by side in many passages of OT and NT alike. He takes the patriarchy to be accommodating, and the egalitarianism as ideal. Stackhouse posits that such duality is based on God’s willingness to accommodate the sinful institutions and views of a society, in order not to distract from the central message of his salvation. That was fine then, he says, and it is a fine thing to do today, e.g., when a female missionary goes into a strictly Muslim country. However, he claims that our North American culture has reached a stage where a conservative approach to gender roles actually hinders the furtherance of the gospel instead of speeding it. Our culture has come of age, and it is time for the church to embrace this beautiful thing called feminism. (Page 71)
(Stackhouse views himself as doing something different from Webb’s approach in Slaves, Women and Homosexuals. Webb’s approach looks for a trajectory, while Stackhouse looks for a duality. At a more basic level, it is a similar kind of effort to see something deeper in the scripture than what is found at the level of a basic reading.)
As I struggled to understand why Stackhouse says what he says and assumes what he assumes, I realized that a big part of my struggle is based in the difference between his background and mine. He grew up in a strict Brethren setting where rigid male headship was enforced. And he grew up in a time when feminism was still struggling for a footing. I grew up in quite the opposite setting, where male headship was the subject of jokes, and feminism was celebrated. And I watched my church decline and close, along with many others. When I look around at the few churches in my region that are thriving at reaching people with the gospel, they tend to be churches that hold to complimentarianism (paternalism). I see most families around me dealing with various kinds of disintegration and dysfunction, and I don’t see the wide embrace of feminism as having helped that in many ways at all.
Furthermore, Stackhouse came to his conclusions in a time before the feminist movement got lumped together with the gender-fluidity movement. Stackhouse sees eschatology (end times) as ultimately producing a world of equality between sexes. That seems obvious to him, and he assumes it will seem obvious to his readers, too. But it also seems obvious to him that the sexes would remain distinct, as two sexes. More and more of Western culture sees even that as too conservative, now, as elementary school students are encouraged to consider whether they are really a different gender from their biological sex. If Stackhouse is going to base his argument on what seems obvious to our culture, then he will have to make a more watertight argument that the sexes are still distinct.
Endnote 1 to chapter 10 is fascinating. Stackhouse critiques his allies Fee, Bruce, and many others for trying to resolve the issues according to technicalities, like the meaning of kephale “head” in Ephesians 5. He says that such an approach “seems to me to miss the patriarchal forest of the entire Bible for the particular textual trees.” Egalitarians should make careful note of that: one of their champions is stating that the plain reading of scripture is a patriarchal reading.
Another way that this book is a help to a complimentarian is in how Stackhouse seems to have read much complimentarian material, and not only agrees with some aspect of it, but also points out the challenges inherent in other aspect of it. For example, he points out on page 76 that complimentarians are weak at explaining exactly what male leadership in the home looks like. Exactly how should male leadership/headship be exercised, e.g., in decision making? That is a challenge for us (soft) complimentarian husbands to get our heads around, and I appreciate Stackhouse for making the challenge more explicit.
In chapter 11, note 3, Stackhouse references the argument from naming in genesis 2. I’ve come up with this argument myself, and have looked for a long time for anyone in the literature to address it, and I’m grateful Stackhouse “names” it. The argument is basically that in Genesis 2, since Adam names Eve “woman,” then that is evidence of his position of authority over her before the fall. (Many egalitarians try to argue that the first mention of male authority over woman only comes as a consequence of the fall in Genesis 3. Stackhouse then makes some bad rebuttals against it, saying that Adam didn’t even really give Eve a name at first, just called her woman. But God didn’t give day a name at first either, really, he just called it day. And clearly God has authority over all that he made. Anyway, this is an interesting avenue for further research.
On page 96 Stackhouse discusses the Trinity. He says complimentarians get the better side of argument from trinitarianism. Nevertheless, he says that in Gen. 1, with the introduction of male and female created in God’s image, he says that there is no explicit reference to the Trinity at all. He neglects to see the brilliance of man created male and female in the image of the one who says “let us make man in our image.” He then takes issue with the inner-trinitarian analogy in 1 Cor. 11:3, just because it’s jarring, basically.
On pages 99-102, Stackhouse makes some suggestions that alarm me. He seems to be suggesting that the very identity of God as “lord” was an ancient accommodation. The transcendence of God was what God was trying to get across, but “lord” was good enough for that culture. But where does that leave us today. To say, like Rauschenbusch, that we need a “democratic” view of God? (Rauschenbusch, Walter. A Rauschenbusch Reader: The Kingdom of God and the Social Gospel. Benson Y. Landis Ed. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1957. Page 122) To abandon the most basic Christian creed, that “Jesus Christ is Lord”? If this essential rejection of absolute authority is what is at the heart of much of egalitarianism, then egalitarianism is much more theologically dangerous than what I ever imagined. But maybe I’m misreading Stackhouse. (John Frame makes some interesting arguments that might get right to the heart of what has led Stackhouse astray on this point. He says that while modern theology has carved out the categories of God’s “transcendence and immanence,” the Bible never seems to express God’s greatness or closeness in exactly those same ways. Rather, whenever God’s “transcendence” is expressed in the Bible, it tends to emphasize his majesty and lordship. Such authoritative dimensions get left out of the concept of transcendence today. (John Frame. The Doctrine of God: A Theology of Lordship. P&R Publishing, 2002.)
On another topic, Stackhouse nods to the insight of the complimentarian position again. On page 113, in rejecting homosexuality, Stackhouse says that “there is something crucially complementary about marriage of a man and a woman (versus same-sex unions) just as God created humanity in his image as “male and female” in Genesis 1.” Then he admits that he doesn’t know what the difference is between male and female. His subsequent rejection of homosexual practice bespeaks his age. He has appealed to the spirit of the age so much up to this point, that he sounds out-of-tune to be saying things that are so culturally odd today.
Overall, I would recommend this book to careful readers of both the complimentarian and egalitarian side of Bible-believing church life. May Stackhouse’s irenic spirit and rigorous scholarship set an example for us all.
However, I have to confess that Stackhouse leaves my soft complimentarian (paternalist) position unshaken. Indeed my position is better informed on many points now than it was before I read this book, and I hear various particular challenges clearly, for living and teaching consistently. Yet my complimentarianism remains intact, and I feel more motivated than before to challenge egalitarianism’s claims.
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