Gender & The Bible

I spent at least 3 hours early this morning helping my good friend think through and respond to this short article by Mrs. Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Rev. Billy Graham, on gender and the Bible from yesterday's washingtonpost.com religion section called "On Faith."

Please take the 3 minutes to read what she has to say. I do believe hers represents the majority position in Western evangelicalism today, though I don't believe it's the Bible's position. I'm not going to post my 5 page response here, but only the summary and conclusion.

Positively, I found a lot I could agree with like women being oppressed historically, the Bible being God's Word, and salvation being found in Jesus Christ alone. I was blessed to see her end the article with the gospel.

Negatively, I found the article, first, extremely vague. For instance, what does she mean by "equality?" And, who's her opponent? What view is she writing against? Societal discrimination? Evangelical complementarians? The Qur'an? The Upanishads? I don't know. If she's not writing against someone, but simply teaching what she thinks the Bible says, does she know that her view has substantial disagreement from more than just backwoodsy, beer-drinking, wife-beating, Tony Saprano types? I don't know that either.

Second, her appeal to Jesus and the early church completely lacked any exegesis, any precision in interpretation, and worst of all, it lacked any explicit teachings by either Jesus or the apostles--most damning to a position wanting to be biblical. Instead she rests the entire weight of her argument on a biased reading filled with implication and innuendo.

Third, she says nothing about the texts that explicitly challenge her view (1 Cor 11:3, 7-13, 14:34-35, 1 Tim 2:11-14, Eph 5:21-33, Col 3:18-19, 1 Pet 3:1-7). In fact, we don’t even know what her view is in light of those texts because she treats these key biblical texts, the ones that actually address the gender issue, as if they didn't even exist.

Conclusion: Because of the problems stated above, her article ultimately fails to convey what the Bible actually teaches about gender, the very goal she was setting out to do.

So, what does the Bible teach about gender? Briefly...

First, the Bible does teach that as God's image-bearers, men AND women have the same essence (i.e., the image dei), and are therefore, equal in value, worth and dignity. Neither one is more the image of God than the other (cf. Gen 1:26-28).

Second, despite this equality, the Bible also teaches that men and women have different roles in the home and in the church (cf. 1 Cor 11:3, 7-13, 14:34-35, 1 Tim 2:11-14, Eph 5:21-33, Col 3:18-19, 1 Pet 3:1-7), which by the way, is NOT based on the Fall or sin and therefore, was NOT reversed by Jesus.

In the same way, despite having different roles--the husband as loving leader, the wife as submissive helper, and male, not female or mixed gender, leadership in the church--men are not more worthy, more valuable or superior to women, nor are women less valuable, less worthy or inferior to men. The two genders were meant by the God who created them to complement each other.

Men and women are both equal in value and different in roles. The first pertains to essence, what they are. The second pertains to function, what they do. To steal a line from Mrs. Lotz, only when THAT complementarian message is “read, applied, obeyed, and lived out” from the Bible will women be “treated with respect and honor as co-heirs with Jesus Christ in the Kingdom of God.”

Now, just in case you think I'm making this distinction up, where else do we see equality in essence, in value, in worth, in dignity, but difference in roles? Do you know? Give up? The...Trinity. The Father is not more equal than, not more valuable than, not more worthy than, not more dignified than the Son or the Spirit because all 3 are equally God. Yet, the Son still submits to the Father (John 5:30, 6:38, 8:28, 12:49, 14:10), and the Spirit still submits to the Father (John 14:16, 26) and the Son (John 15:26, 16:7, 14) because while each one is equally God, each one also has His own unique and different role.

One last thing. If Christians like Mrs. Lotz can devise an argument that uses vagueness, imprecision and innuendo while ignoring relevant texts to conclude that the Bible teaches her evangelical feminist / egalitarian position, than the Bible can be made to teach anything. Therefore, at it’s core her whole article is a direct attack on the authority of Scripture to dictate what's true and virtuous.

There's a lot more that could to be said about her article and the gender issue, but I'm convinced very few people read posts this long anyway. So, for more on this, see Wayne Grudem’s book Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? (which is on sale here for 40% off until Feb 15th).