As some friends who differ with me on the role of women in church leadership have engaged me on the topic, I am struck by their basic premise; that the permanent subordination of women is God’s ideal. I am indebted to Kevin Giles and the late David Scholer for much of my thought formation on this subject and they have certainly said it better that I ever well and some of their ideas and writing are excerpted below.
My friends tend to judge fellow evangelicals who disagree with them on this matter to be “theological liberals,” or at least implicit liberals. It seems that they cannot differentiate between the interpretation of Scripture and Scripture itself. For them, if I debate their interpretation of the key texts on which they base their case for the permanent subordination of women, then I am by definition rejecting the authority of Scripture.
As Giles says, “What this means is that the methodological challenge to interpret Scripture rightly in its given historical and cultural context and to apply what is said rightly in another historical and cultural context is solved by assuming and asserting that “my interpretation” tells you exactly what the Bible says. When (one) claims that one’s interpretation of God’s word is God’s word without any caveats, then, by implication, one is claiming to speak for God. (One) is asserting that what (one) says the Bible says is what God says, and, thus, if you disagree with him, you are disagreeing with God.”
The Roman Catholic Church has neatly solved the challenge of interpretation the same way. At the end of the day, it is the Pope who tells the faithful what the Bible is saying on any matter. In both the Protestant and the Catholic versions of this system, the inerrancy is not in the Scriptures, but in the interpretation given by someone claiming to speak for God.
As long as those who prefer the permanent subordination of women use this argument, there is really no way to find common ground on the question of the status and ministry of women. In order to have a beginning dialogue, we must agree that the issue is not the authority of Scripture, but how Scripture is to be interpreted and applied.
I don’t reject the authority of Scripture; but I do reject an interpretation of the Scriptures that supports and promulgates the concept that God’s unchanging ideal is the subordination of women.
I continue to hear two different ways of interpreting Scripture to prove the subordination of women. There has been a consistent historical interpretation of the biblical texts on women. For at least seventeen or eighteen centuries, most theologians and teacher said that the Bible taught that men were “superior,” women are “inferior,” and women were more prone to sin and error than men. For these reasons, women were the “weaker” and subordinated sex. In this historic position, men and women were differentiated not simply by their roles, but because God made them men and women. Women were seen as being second in rank or status because Eve was created second. That is, women are subordinated on the basis of the timeline of creation, not on the basis of a supposedly Creator-given, pre-fall hierarchical social order in which woman were subordinate to men.
To their credit, most contemporary evangelical hierarchists, as well as all evangelical egalitarians, reject this historic interpretation that women are ontologically inferior to men, even though it held sway for the better part of eighteen centuries and was adopted by some of the greatest theologians of the past.
Now as Giles points out, there is the novel post-1970s interpretation of a selected number of biblical texts on women that is now adopted almost word for word by all contemporary evangelical hierarchists and rejected by all egalitarians. This view point generally says men and women are equal, but role-differentiated, which, when simply said, means that women are permanently subordinated to male authority. Typically the hierarchists argue that women’s subordination is not a consequence of sin or a reflection of cultural values, but, rather, is predicated on a hierarchical social order established before the Genesis fall. They state (with solemn and grave faces, no less) that this is the ideal that is pleasing to God and, therefore, is unchangeable. Why this humanly devised theological construct should be judged the only true interpretation of Scripture is truly puzzling.
The Bible never suggests that men and women are role-differentiated, and actually says much to the contrary. Instead, we are differentiated in our very being as man and woman by God’s creative act as described in the first chapter of Genesis. Giles points out that the term “role” refers to the part a person plays. It belongs to the world of the theater and the study of humanistic sociology, not the Bible. At creation, man and woman were both bearers of the image of God and both were given authority to rule God’s world. The idea that there is a once-given, unchanging, unchangeable hierarchical social order established before the fall that permanently sets men over women is simply a figment of (largely) male imagination. It speaks more of the male will to hold power than of anything found in the Bible. The Bible makes the subordination of women a consequence of the fall (Gen. 3:16).
The gender equality of the two differentiated sexes, and marriage between them, are definitely Creator-given, but social ordering is not. Social ordering is always a human construct that human beings can change. History proves this point. “Created second” only speaks of chronological order, not social order or hierarchy. In addition, the whole Bible is predicated on a forward-looking eschatology where the “new creation” Christ inaugurates introduces something altogether new (2 Cor. 5:17). The perfection of creation lies in the future, when the new creation will be brought to its consummation on the last day. In the Garden of Eden, the Devil was present and sin possible. This will not be the case when the new creation is fully realized. Evangelical hierarchists may think they have the very highest view of Scripture, but, by making their theory the channel through which the Bible’s teaching on women is to be interpreted, they dishonor Scripture by not allowing Scripture to speak in its own terms.
