Habets - Reconsidering gender : evangelical perspectives

Two Theological Responses to Change

I n the last forty years, one of the most momentous social changes known in human history has taken placewomens liberation. A number of factors came together in the late 1960s to open the door for this revolution. First of all, women caught up in the education stakes and then gained a small lead. Girls today do better on average at school and now over fifty percent of graduates are women. When brute strength mattered more than brainpower in the workplace, men had a big advantage. Now that brainpower has triumphed, the two sexes are more evenly matched. Then the Pill became available. Women could, from this time on, control their own fertility. They could decide when to have a family and when they did not want to get pregnant.

As a result of these two changes, women joined the work force in large numbers and soon were involved in leadership positions at all levels. Now we are not at all surprised to meet a female judge, airline pilot, bus driver, managing director, builder, prime minister or president, mining engineer or professor. What this opening up of well paid work opportunities for women has meant is that for the first time in human history women can support themselves and, if they have children, their family as well. They are no longer dependent on men. This monumental social revolution has not been easy for women to work out in theory or practice, extremely hard for men to adjust to, difficult for business to implement, and hugely challenging for Christians in general (and evangelicals in particular) to respond to theologically and biblically.

For long centuries, Christians simply reflected and endorsed the prevailing cultural norms of society, arguing that women were subordinated to men in all spheres of lifethe home, the church, and every part of society. Theologians and clergy, along with everyone else until the turn of the twentieth century and often up to the 1960s, generally spoke of women as inferior and of men as superior and the Bible was interpreted to teach this. Many interpretations of key texts were demeaning to women. Tertullian interpreted Gen 3 as a reminder to women that each of you is Eve. You are the devils gateway: you are the first deserter of the divine law. Calvin concluded Paul taught that women are born to obey, for all wise men have always rejected the government of women as an unnatural monstrosity. And as late as 1957 Donald Guthrie in a Tyndale evangelical commentary wrote, that 1 Tim 2:13 teaches the superiority of men over women and verse 14 the greater aptitude of the weaker sex to be lead astray.

Profound Cultural Change and the Interpretation of the Bible

In the face of this monumental social change, all Christians, including all evangelicals, were forced to rethink their teaching on women and their interpretation of the key texts that they had appealed to in the past to subordinate women. Profound changes in how people see the world always force believers to rethink their theology. When a cultural worldview changes Christians have to distinguish between what they believe as those seeking to be guided by the Bible and what they tacitly believe as those living in a given culture. This has happened many times in Christian history. When everyone thought the world was flat, theologians read the Bible to teach this. When everyone thought the sun revolved around the earth, the Bible was read to teach this. When everyone thought the world was created in seven literal days about 6000 years ago, Christians read the Bible to teach this. Changed worldviews that are compelling have always forced Christians to rethink what the Bible is teaching. Importantly, these changes in worldview did not lead to the rejection of any biblical teaching, simply to a re-reading of what it actually said.

The change in thinking on women is of this kind. It was easy for Christians until modern times to think the Bible endorsed the subordination of women because they lived in a patriarchal context where men ran the world. And because the Bible was written by those living in a taken-for-granted patriarchal context, what they wrote reflected that world. Only when the world changed did Christians see clearly for the first time that there were profound and principled statements in the Bible that spoke of the equality of the two sexes in creation and in Christ.

Opposing Interpretations of what the Bible says on the Sexes

Confronted by the reality of this far-reaching and profound change in womens status and job opportunities, evangelicals developed after the 1970s two new and competing interpretations of what the Bible said on the man-woman relationship and now these two positions are firmly fixed in form and content.

Some evangelicals concluded that 1 Tim 2:1114, supported by 1 Cor 11:316; 14:3334; and Eph 5:2223 quite clearly taught that God had given headship to men. The Timothy text is pivotal to this position. On this basis it is concluded that two things indicate that woman was set under man from the beginning, that woman was created second and that she was deceived by the devil in the garden of Eden. Thus male headship is the unchanging and unchangeable ideal that pleases God. They say Jesus endorsed this headship of man by appointing twelve men and no women to be the first apostles. The many references to women leaders in the Bible such as Deborah and the prophet Huldah in the Old Testament, and Priscilla and Junia in the New Testament, are explained by arguing that their leadership was of a subordinate kind under a man. Finally, appeal is made to a supposed hierarchical ordering in the Trinity where the Father commands and the Son obeys, arguing that this prescribes how men and women are to relate.

To complete this novel post-1970s reformulated reading of the Bible, three important changes were made from the way in which womens subordination had been spoken of in the past. First, new language was introduced to make this theological position sound acceptable to modern ears. Rather than speaking of women as inferior or subordinate, and men as superior, as had been the case in the past, the terms different and role were used. What the Bible teaches is that men and women have different roles by which it is meant, men have the headship role, and women the subordinate role. Second, instead of the subordination of women being universal, in the home, the church, and society all of creation as one would think if womens subordination is grounded in the created order, the assertion is made that women are only subordinated in the home and the church part of creation . Third, and only from the 1990s, this reading of the Bible was called, the complementarian position, again to sound acceptable to modern ears.