“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Shakespeare illuminates our lived experience with this profound metaphor, inviting us to question the stages we stand upon, the stories we live within, and the characters we perform. While “the Bible is a script that is waiting to be performed,” the present social order has a script of its own, casting us onto a rival stage to perform a rival drama.

Jarena Lee offers a poignant example of this dynamic. In her 1836 autobiography, she defends her calling to preach the gospel, “as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach.” While Lee is thoroughly convinced her character should preach within the biblical drama, she knows this act is unseemly on the world’s stage. Catherine Mumford Booth perceives the same in her 1859 Female Ministry: “The first and most common objection urged against the public exercises of women, is that they are unnatural and unfeminine.” The public ministry of a woman is assumed to be out-of-character—unseemly, unnatural, and unfeminine. On the world’s stage, an actress must not stand in the actor’s pulpit.

In 1988, white evangelicals in the United States coined the term “complementarian” to describe a contemporary ideology derivative of the ancient social performance of male authority and female submission. To understand the roles we perform, I will turn to Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter, whose poignant works on race illuminate the unseen imagination energizing both racial and gendered social order and hierarchies.

Jennings, in The Christian Imagination, powerfully argues “that Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination,” and, therefore, “people’s social performances of the Christian life [are] collectively anemic.” Rather than accepting Christ’s invitation into a narrative of radical joining within the covenant family of God, Western Christianity often performs division and dominion, thereby perpetuating the present evil age. How else can we explain a Church that was instrumental in the trafficking and enslavement of millions of Africans made in the image of God? Jesus said, “a good tree cannot bear bad fruit” (Matt 7:18 NRSVue), and we can be sure that the toxic fruit of slavery and White supremacy throughout church history has been possible only because the tree has grown within the soil of toxic imagination.

What Jennings calls the “diseased social imagination,” Carter calls “modern racial reasoning.” Carter reminds us that a renewed mind rejects the logic of separation and domination to inhabit a new world: “To enter into Christ’s flesh through the Holy Spirit’s Pentecostal overshadowing is to exit the gendered economy and protocols of modern racial reasoning” (italics mine). The stage on which we play is thoroughly racialized: White players and Black players must perform the social dynamics of race in this drama, while modern racial reasoning upholds a “gendered economy.” The tendrils of division and domination touch both race and gender, energizing both subtle and extremist expressions of racism and misogyny alike. Furthermore, I argue that racializing logic depends on an ancient gendered imagination sprouting from the post-fall garden of Genesis 3:16. Because men came to imagine separating from and taking authority over the gendered Other, they could also imagine the possibility of enslaving the racial Other.

I contend that complementarianism, which casts women and men into roles of submission and authority, is an ideology built upon the same diseased social imagination that allowed colonists to cast Europeans and Africans into the roles of White and Black…

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https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/the-complementarian-imagination-race-gender-exclusion/

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“A woman must learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”

1 Timothy 2:11-12

Would you believe egalitarians1 read 1 Timothy 2 more “literally” than complementarians do?

While the standard complementarian reading softens Paul’s language and forces him to say things he did not actually say, the standard egalitarian position is a careful exegetical reading of every single word in the passage.

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The Egalitarian Position

Most egalitarians/mutualists claim that Paul is concerned about an Ephesian woman who is a recent convert to the Christian faith. We don’t pull that idea from thin air. Rather, we allow the literary context to inform our reading. A chapter earlier, Paul explains an error taking place in Timothy’s Ephesian church:

Some have turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions.
1 Tim 1:6-7

Egalitarians believe the singular “woman”2 at the center of 1 Timothy 2:11-12 belongs to this group of “some” meaningless talkers. This woman doesn’t yet understand the faith she has accepted, but she has taken it upon herself to teach and “make assertions” anyway.

How should an apostle respond to a teacher who doesn’t know what she’s talking about?

A woman must learn in silence with full submission.
1 Tim 2:11

She—like everyone else—must learn silently before teaching loudly. Paul goes on:

I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.
1 Tim 2:12

She who teaches and makes assertions without first understanding is not permitted to teach or domineer a man. She must engage in a time of silence.

Why have I just used the word “domineer” in place of “have authority”?

The Greek word often translated “have authority” in this passage is authentein, a word which occurs nowhere else in the New Testament and is rare in other Greek manuscripts.

Authentein is not what Jesus has when he says “all authority [exousia] in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt 28:18). Instead, authentein communicates force, compulsion, and even violence. When Jerome translated 1 Timothy 2:12 in the Vulgate, he translated authentein with the Latin dominari, “to dominate.”

Authentein is not pastoral authority, it is the opposite: domineering or domination.

In 1 Timothy 2:11-12, Paul is correcting an Ephesian woman’s uneducated teaching and inappropriate behavior. While this specific passage is about “a woman,” the universal teaching is this:

Nobody should “make assertions” without understanding what they are talking about, and nobody should domineer others in the Church.

This is a careful reading of the literary context and specific language and grammar used in 1 Timothy 2. This reading uses precise exegetical tools to interpret the Scriptures. Put another way, this position reads Paul’s words literally and takes a high view of Scripture.

The complementarian reading is different.

The Complementarian Position

While complementarians claim to be reading the verse literally, their reading can’t possibly take Paul’s actual words seriously.

Instead, the complementarian interpretation operates on assumptions.

Complementarians often claim that egalitarians do not take the Bible seriously. That’s (usually) not true. Egalitarians and complementarians simply read this passage differently. Neither side is utterly discarding it. Our fundamental difference is this:

Egalitarians believe 1 Timothy 2:11-12 was written to address a specific situation in the ancient Ephesian church. This belief is based on what Paul says throughout the rest of the letter and on Paul’s support of female ministers throughout the New Testament.

Complementarians, on the other hand, believe 1 Timothy 2:11-12 applies to all women in all churches for all time.

If this is the case, why don’t complementarians actually insist that their women “must learn in silence with full submission,” for they are “to keep quiet”?

Complementarianism does not demand female silence, even as it claims this passage is clear about women’s roles in the church. If complementarians practiced the clear implications of reading “keep quiet” literally and applying it universally, they would not permit women to sing in worship teams or choirs, to teach Sunday school, VBS, or Awana, or to create women’s ministries or women’s small groups.

If complementarians actually practiced the clear and literal reading of this text, their churches would crumble as a majority of their volunteers suddenly resorted to silent learning.

Paul also says he doesn’t permit a woman (or, in the complementarian reading, “all women”) to teach or domineer over a man (or, “any man”). An observant reader notices what he does not say:

Paul does not say women cannot be ordained, pastor, preach, or serve on elder boards.

I admit that egalitarians must make an assumption for our reading to make sense. We have to assume that the woman in 1 Tim 2:11-12 is one of the people called out in chapter 1 for teaching without understanding.

Complementarians also make an assumption when they claim this passage is about pastoral ministry, even though it says nothing about pastoral ministry. In their defense, the next passage, 1 Timothy 3:1-7, regards qualifications for elders or bishops. Complementarians often claim these qualifications are directed toward men.

They are not.

Our English Bibles say “he” and “his.” The original Greek does not. The pronouns throughout this passage are all gender neutral.

1 Timothy 3:2 does use a male idiom, stating that an elder must be the “husband of one wife.” Does this mean that elders must be men? Complementarian scholars Douglas Moo and Thomas Schreiner don’t think so. Moo says “it would be going too far to argue that the phrase clearly excludes women,” and Schreiner says husband of one wife “does not necessarily in and of itself preclude women from serving as elders.”

More importantly, 1 Timothy 3:12, ten verses later, uses the same phrase again, this time for deacons rather than elders. Schreiner convincingly argues that women can be deacons because Phoebe is a deacon in Romans 16:1, and because 1 Timothy 3:11 specifically addresses female deacons. If “husband of one wife” doesn’t restrict women from being deacons, it doesn’t restrict them from being elders.

“Husband of one wife” is an idiom pointing to Paul’s desire that elders and deacons — male and female — would be faithful and temperate. “Husband of one wife” is about restricting abusive and unfaithful pastors, not faithful female pastors.

Let’s return to 1 Timothy 2:11-12.

That passage is not explicitly about pastoral ministry or church elders. If this passage is for all women in all churches for all time, it restricts women from doing much more than pastoring, preaching, or leading. If we read these words literally within the complementarian framework, then no woman can teach or exercise any authority over any man in the church.

Can complementarian women be church secretaries, taking calls and answering male questions? Can they write in church bulletins, instructing men when the church potluck takes place? Can they type worship lyrics into presentation software, telling men what words they must sing to participate in worship? Can they serve as greeters at the door, telling fathers how to check in their children for Sunday school?

As long as complementarians insist this passage applies to all women in all churches for all time, they are forced to soften Paul’s language, claiming that Paul doesn’t really mean complete silence, and he doesn’t really mean all teaching and all authority over men.

Complementarians cannot take the actual words of Scripture seriously, or else their churches would fall apart.

Conclusion

Let me conclude with 1 Timothy 3:6, where Paul says an elder:

must not be a recent convert, or they may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil.

This is what the entire passage is about:

A recent convert must first learn in silence.

This is excellent exegesis.

Then, he got an idea.

“I’ll plant a garden!”

Donning long pants, high socks, and gloves, he braved his way into the yard to clear a patch, till the soil, put down fertilizer, plant seeds, and water the ground.

Now, how will the poisonous plants react?

Will the ivy recognize that he’s trying to plant a garden, and respectfully stay out?

Or will it find the perfect environment to thrive in and quickly overtake the garden?

When the Garden is Contaminated

Jesus planted the Church as a fruitful garden in a world of poison ivy. We are supposed to be a community of people with access to the Tree of Life, offering God’s healing fruit to a world poisoned by noxious plants.

There is plenty of poison in the world, but this article will specifically focus on a specific plant that poisons our world and infiltrates our churches:

According to the CDC, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men will experience physical violence by their intimate partner at some point during their lifetimes. About 1 in 3 women and nearly 1 in 6 men experience some form of sexual violence during their lifetimes. Intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and stalking are high, with intimate partner violence occurring in over 10 million people each year.1

Our marriages are contaminated. In an average church of 100 people, there are likely 12-13 women who have experienced domestic violence, and another 7 men who have been victimized.

Our sexuality is poisoned as well. In that church of 100, there are likely 16-17 women who have been sexually violated, and another 8 men.

The Church is not immune.

We were planted in the poisonous yard to transform it, which means we must be a garden without protective walls. A hospital with locked doors cannot heal anyone. Unlocking the doors, however, means disease will inevitably come inside.

We live in the garden to heal the effects of poison, but a garden without walls is always vulnerable to contamination from the outside.

A 2001 study found that 93% of male sex offenders consider themselves “religious.” Geneece Goertzen says, “being a member of a church does not exempt a woman of faith from abuse or provide her with a refuge from violence when it occurs.” Even Focus on the Family reports:

1 in 4 Christian marriages are abusive. Spouses in abusive Christian marriages tend to stay married longer than non-believers because they believe leaving is a sin.

In addition, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination is facing a crisis of sexual predators in its churches.

The garden has been infiltrated. The poison ivy found a place to thrive.

When “Wives submit” and “Only men can pastor” become poison

Sexism, sexual violence, and domestic violence are rampant in our world and our churches.

Because 1 in 4 Christian marriages are abusive, we can safely assume that every single church has domestic abuse victims sitting in their pews.

What happens when we preach to the secretly battered woman in our pews that submission to her abuser is God’s will for her life?

What happens when we tell the undercover sexual predator in our pews that women are under his God-given authority?

More than 4 out of 5 women have been victims of sexual harassment and/or assault. Every woman has stories about men who made unwelcome comments, stared, followed them, or terrorized them.

It’s no wonder 86% of single women and 74% of married women report that they have worried about becoming a victim of sexual assault (whether this is a frequent, occasional, or rare concern).

What happens when we tell these terrified women — women who cannot trust men with their bodily safety — that their only biblical option is entrusting the safety of their souls to the care of men in spiritual authority over them?

Complementarianism doesn’t have to be sexist. It just has to create an environment for sexism to thrive.

“Is Complementarianism Sexist?” is the Wrong Question

When the yard is filled with poison ivy, I don’t have to plant poison ivy seeds in the garden. The poison will find its way in.

We can argue about whether or not complementarianism is inherently sexist, but that’s like arguing whether the gardener is planting poison ivy seeds or not.

It actually makes no difference. Whether or not the gardener plants the seeds, the garden will be infiltrated by the invasive plant.

So the question isn’t “is complementarianism sexist?”

No, the question is this:

In a world where sexism and sexual violence are already rampant, do churches create environments for sexism to flourish, or environments for sexism to die?

The Church doesn’t have to plant poison ivy seeds to be a part of the problem. All we have to do is create the conditions for the already existing plants to thrive.

In a sexist world, the Church must rely on the Spirit’s power to transform poison ivy into fruitful trees. Complementarian and egalitarian churches alike are called to participate in Christ’s work to heal the world of sin, including sexism and sexual violence.

We have allowed sexism to thrive in the name of Jesus.

It’s time we help human beings thrive in the name of Jesus.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus tells a beautiful story of a generous soul who finds someone left for dead, bandages their wounds, carries them to safety, and pays the price for their care.

This is what it means to be obedient to one of Christ’s greatest commands — to love your neighbor as yourself.

In their bombshell 2019 report, Abuse of Faith, the Houston Chronicle (HC) uncovered over 400 abusive pastors, leaders, and volunteers of Southern Baptist churches.

400 “robbers” have left their victims for dead by the side of the road.

Where are the Good Samaritans?

400 or 10,000?

In my previous article, I argued that the SBC’s abuse crisis is not just a few “bad apples.” The problem is systemic, a true failure at the denominational level.

While it may be fair to claim that 400 abusers across 47,000 SBC churches doesn’t appear to be a systemic issue, the truth is that 400 is barely scratching the surface.

Reporter Robert Downen, part of the HC team that uncovered this scandal, explained how difficult it is for a case to make it into their reporting in an episode of Beth Allison Barr and Savannah Locke’s All the Buried Women podcast.1

The 400 cases that appeared in the HC were:

• Reported to police,

• Investigated by police, and

• Reported by an active local news agency that named a Southern Baptist Church in the report.

But if a Southern Baptist sexual assault didn’t meet those criteria?

Downen says, “Think about all of the steps that a case would have to go through just to land on our radar, and we were still able to find 400 with a team of three that only spent a few months looking.”

Using these three criteria, it becomes apparent that 400 represents a minuscule fraction of the abuses actually occurring across the SBC. In order to appear in the HC report:

1. The survivor would have had to report their abuse.

The US Department of Justice reports that only 23.6% of sexual assaults were reported to police in 2024.2 Women are less likely than men to report a crime committed against them, and victims aged 12-17 are far less likely to report than older adults. Because the SBC sexual abuse crisis primarily harms women and children, it’s likely that fewer than 1 in 5 abuse victims at SBC churches report their abuse.

For every single case reported by HC, there are likely four more that were never reported to authorities.

2. The police would have had to follow up on the report.

A 2019 study conducted under a grant by the National Institute of Justice found that only 18% of rapes and sexual assaults of girls and women reported to police end in an arrest. “Forty-two out of 100 languish as ‘inactive’ cases, while 30 more are closed by ‘exceptional clearance’ – a designation that is supposed to mean that police have enough evidence to arrest a suspect but can’t do so for reasons outside their control…”3

Of the 1 in 5 cases that actually reach authorities, only 1 out of those 5 result in an arrest.

For every case reported by HC, there are likely 24 more that were never reported, not investigated, or did not end in conviction.

It may be easier to understand this math by working backwards.

If there are 25 sexual abuse cases, statistics indicate just 5 out of those 25 are likely to report to police. Then, out of the 5 reported to police, only 1 of those 5 is likely to result in an arrest.

In other words, out of 25 sexual assaults, only 1 is likely to end in the arrest of the rapist. That one would have the potential to land on HC’s radar. But the other 24?

We’re not finished yet.

3. The local news would have had to report on the case.

Even if the police looked into the case, three additional things had to happen for the case to end up in the HC report:

1. A local news agency had to report on the conviction.

2. The report had to name the church in connection with the conviction.

3. The news agency still needed an active website in 2019. Downen points out that approximately 2/3 of rural newspapers have closed over the past twenty years.

It is true that cases could have been reported by a local news agency even if they didn’t end in an arrest. It’s also true that cases that did end in an arrest could have gone unreported, could have been reported without naming the church, or could have been reported by a news agency that closed before 2019.

How many stories went untold?

When Will You Care?

With Downen’s conditions in mind, the Houston Chronicle’s report likely represents fewer than 1 in 25 sexual abuse cases in the SBC.

400 cases of sexual abuse out of 47,000 churches may not feel systemic, but what if there are 10,000 cases?

I don’t know if there are 10,000 men who have abused women and children in SBC churches. I don’t know if there are, and I’m not claiming there are.

But I am pointing out that it is within the reasonable realm of possibility, and I’m begging for your attention:

If there were 10,000, then would you care?

Downen does not venture into making estimates, but he does conclude:

Once you understand the dynamics of abuse and the dynamics of what got those numbers, the 400 number should be almost paralyzingly terrifying, because if we were able to find that many, think about how many are out there.

And I can tell you that in the wake of our reporting, the number of people that — just in the first few weeks — reached out to us was proof of that. Hundreds… hundreds and hundreds of people coming forward and saying, “This happened to me and I thought I was alone.”

“I thought I was alone.”

The SBC’s failure to prevent abuse means these callers were not alone. There are thousands of women who have been abused in SBC churches.

The Lord requires that we act justly, love faithfulness, and walk humbly with God. It is our responsibility, as her sisters and brothers in Christ, to ensure she is never left alone in her cries for justice.

This is not really about numbers. I don’t know if there are 400 or 40,000 sexual abusers in the Southern Baptist Convention, but I do know that it is the SBC’s responsibility to love every single survivor with the gracious love of the Good Samaritan.

When Southern Baptist leaders pass by even one, leaving her to suffer on the side of the road, they fail to love their neighbor as themselves.

If there is even one case of sexual abuse in our midst, Christ’s parable calls us to bandage their wounds and pay the price for their restoration.

Before the Good Samaritan did any of those things, he was first “moved with compassion” (Lk 10:33).

He saw one suffering survivor, and he cared.

To the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, I ask you in the name of Jesus:

When will you care?

Five years after the Houston Chronicle revealed 400 sexual abusers and 700 victims in Southern Baptist churches, Al Mohler reflected on the crisis:

We do not see the kind of institutionalized abuse structures in Southern Baptist life that we have seen in some other situations, including the Roman Catholic Church … But that’s not something that’s really, I think, very smart to say in public if it looks like we’re trying to minimize in any sense the horrors in our own situation nor our responsibility to deal with it.1

In the eyes of SBC leadership, the problem is not systemic. It’s just bad apples misbehaving in an ideal system.

That’s a curious claim.

See, when bad actors cause harm in an ideal system, the ideal system corrects the problem and returns to the ideal. When bad apples grow on healthy trees, those branches are pruned. So why isn’t the SBC taking action?

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

This series is committed to looking underneath the SBC’s abuse crisis. What are the systemic, institutional, and ideological roots of this abuse?

Complementarian theology claims to protect women. Who does the SBC protect?

Protecting Male Abusers, not Female Victims

Christa Brown’s church threw Tommy Gilmore a going-away party after she reported his abuse to a pastor on their staff. Gilmore, a sexual predator who abused a 16-year-old in his youth group, went on to become a children’s pastor in one of the SBC’s largest churches.2 In the Houston Chronicle’s reporting on the SBC’s abuse crisis, they found:

In case after case, Southern Baptists with a sex offense or troublesome behavior in their past have had no problem finding jobs as preachers, youth group leaders or volunteers at churches across the country.3

Predators are free to continue their lives and ministry without consequence. Victims, on the other hand, face horrible mistreatment from hundreds of SBC members, pastors, leaders, and presidents. These complementarians don’t protect women. They kick them while they’re down. Jennifer Lyell, abused by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor David Sills, had to hide in a secret room at the annual Southern Baptist Convention because of the horrible treatment she received from Southern Baptists.4

When advocates for abuse reform are told to be “charitable” towards SBC leaders, but SBC leaders are rarely corrected for their horrendous treatment of survivors, the problem is systemic. When advocates and survivors are accused of harming the Church, but sexual predators are not, the problem is systemic. When a denomination is under fire for failure to listen to women, and they respond by disfellowshipping churches that give women a pulpit to speak from, the problem is systemic.

In 2022, the SBC Executive Committee received a damning third-party investigation from Guidepost Solutions, but rather than apologizing, repenting, and correcting the problems, many SBC pastors sought to discredit Guidepost based on a tweet unrelated to its investigative credibility.

This is not a culture of men eager to protect women. It is a culture of men eager to look the other way to protect the tree.

SBC messengers (delegates to the annual national convention) overwhelmingly voted for abuse reform, including an internal database of offenders, but SBC leadership has continually failed to support, fund, and implement the database. As far back as 2008, Executive Committee president Morris Chapman claimed a database was impossible because it would violate “local church autonomy.” Christa Brown uncovers this lie:

SBC attorneys had specifically told SBC officials that they could indeed establish a clergy abuser database without violating their beliefs. And even as Chapman was declaring they couldn’t keep a database, the Executive Committee was already keeping a list of clergy sex abusers but holding it secret. This deception was something we didn’t learn about until years later, after hundreds more kids and congregants had been sexually abused.5

They claimed a database was impossible, all the while hiding a secret database of over 700 offenders for years. SBC leadership is more interested in defending the tree than healing the poisoned victims.

There is still no publicly available database, and little is being done to prevent abuse in local churches. Five years after the Houston Chronicle broke the story of 400 SBC abusers harming 700 victims, the SBC’s Lifeway Research reported that only 58% of SBC churches require background checks for staff and volunteers working with youth and children.

If you walk into a random SBC church, there is a 42% chance the church has no idea whether or not there is a literal registered sex offender working in their youth or children’s ministry.

The same study found only 36% of SBC churches train volunteers on reporting sexual abuse. They have had years to work towards prevention and reform, and SBC churches are still not safe for women and children.

This is a systemic crisis.

But is it a theological crisis?

The Role of Complementarianism

How do our beliefs impact our behavior?

More specifically, how does a belief in male authority and female submission contribute to abuse?

The World Health Organization found that “Gender inequality including harmful gender norms are key drivers of violence against women."6 The UN says that "Violence against women is deeply rooted in discrimination and inequality between men and women."7 The CDC found that "States with a high degree of gender inequality also report higher prevalence estimates among women for completed or attempted rape using physical force.”8

The Australian Human Rights Commission pushes the point home:

Violence against women is not the result of random, individual acts of misconduct, but rather is deeply rooted in structural relationships of inequality between women and men.9

Violence against women thrives in environments where men believe they have authority over women. How much more when that authority is believed to be God-ordained?

There are absolutely kind and loving complementarian men. But, as Dr. Beth Allison Barr says:

The best complementarian, who treats women with respect, is still complicit in a system that has wrongly denied God’s call on women and wrongly prohibited women from serving in leadership roles (in home, the church, and broader society). They have contributed to dehumanizing and harming women whether they recognize it or not.10

My argument is not that every complementarian man will inevitably abuse women, or that egalitarian men will never abuse women. There are benevolent complementarian men who love women well, and there are wicked egalitarian men who exploit their advocacy for women to draw women near and abuse them. Individualism cannot make sense of a systemic crisis.

If this crisis were an aberration, the result of abusers taking advantage of a godly system, godly men would have done something to prevent further abuse by now. If the problem were bad apples, the tree would have been pruned. Instead, bad apples are celebrated and protected while poisoned victims gasp for air throughout the orchard.

The SBC crisis shines a light on the dark side of complementarianism, revealing an ideology that enables, empowers, and excuses abuse by Christian men who believe they have God-ordained authority over women who must submit to them.

The all-male SBC leadership is using their male authority to protect the tree, not the women and children. This is no ideal.

The problem is systemic, and the problem is theological.

Coming Monday, April 13th:

This series has required hours of research, reading, conversations, and, of course, writing. I am so grateful for paid subscribers who allow me to continue this work. If you’re able to contribute just $5/month, it goes a long way! Consider upgrading your subscription today.

10

Marginalia with Beth Allison Barr

The Making of Biblical Womanhood vs. From Genesis to Junia

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is Godly.” Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood…

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2 months ago · 272 likes · 41 comments · Beth Allison Barr

Do you remember Mad Libs?

Kooky sentences come flying out with no rhyme or reason, completely beyond our control, because the words were chosen before the story ever began. The words we put in shape the sentences that come out, no matter how nonsensical.

Our imaginations work the same way: what has gone into our minds pre-determines what we’re capable of imagining. The Mad Lib can only use the words it has been given, and our imaginations can only conjure up what they have seen before.

When we imagine masculinity and femininity, we may think we’re making objective observations. But, more often than not, our “sentences” about gender automatically use the words society filled in before the story ever began.

If these examples seem unnecessarily crude, pay attention to how your nervous system reacts when we switch the genders:

Neurons that wire together fire together, and the associations that have been made for our brains are extraordinarily strong, no matter how simplistic and sexist they sound when they’re spelled out so crudely.

We are socially conditioned to associate certain adjectives with maleness and others with femaleness. Certain roles are masculine, and others are feminine. Despite decades of feminist attempts to unwind these subconscious associations, they persist, both in our subconscious and in our society.

We have still never had a female president. We still associate men with authority, and a study found that, globally, only 5.5% of CEOs were women in 2021.1 We still consider a woman’s tears a sign of heightened emotion, while failing to recognize a man’s anger as “too emotional.”

A study found that British parents estimated their sons had an average IQ of 115, and their daughters had an IQ of 107, despite the fact that, as Mary Ann Sieghart points out, “young girls develop faster than boys, have a bigger vocabulary, and do better at school.”2 Sieghart also cites a study that found American parents “are two and a half times more likely to Google ‘Is my son gifted?’ than ‘Is my daughter gifted?’ even though girls make up 11 [percent] more of the gifted and talented [programs] in US schools.”3 We assume male competence, but ask women to prove their intelligence before we believe it.

When the Mad Lib asks for an “authoritative gender” or “intelligent gender,” society keeps writing down “men.” The word was filled in before we ever started the sentence.

As Mahzarin Banaji, Chair of the Harvard Department of Psychology and expert on implicit bias, says:

“I see that men do certain kinds of work and women do other kinds of work. If I had seen in my world that women were largely construction workers and engineers, that’s what my brain would have learnt; and if I had seen in my world that men largely took care of children at home and cooked and cleaned for them, then that’s what my brain would have learnt.”4

Our assumptions are byproducts of our experiences. Because we overwhelmingly experience male leadership, male agency, and male decision-making, we expect male leadership, male agency, and male decision-making. We then hire and promote male leaders, give men greater agency, and allow men to make decisions, and the never-ending cycle continues.

Then we pick up a Bible.

We read, “Wives, submit to your husbands,” and “I do not permit a woman to teach or lead a man,” and our imaginations nod along. Once we’ve associated women with fragility, indecisiveness, and lower intelligence, we have no problem assuming they should follow the lead of the men we assume to be authoritative, decisive, and competent.

Our minds are not a blank slate when we turn to Ephesians 5 or 1 Timothy 2. No, our imaginations are already primed to receive certain messages before we ever open the book. As Randy Richards and Brandon O’Brien write in Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: “Before we can be confident we are reading the Bible accurately, we need to understand what assumptions and values we project onto the Bible.”

If we do not erase the gender words society has pre-filled in for us, opening ourselves up to receive new words from God, we cannot exegete objectively. Exegesis is the process of deriving meaning from the text, whereas eisegesis is placing meaning onto the text. When we place our preconceived notions, our assumptions, and our socially constructed imaginations onto the text, we will only ever see what’s visible to us through biased lenses.

And eisegesis doesn’t stay confined on the page. We place meaning on people, whether that meaning is true of the individual or not.

It is true that there are differences between men and women. But viewed through Christian eyes, these differences are supposed to create mutuality, not opposition. In Christ, there is no “opposite sex.” There is only bone of bone and flesh of flesh. Together, we display the fullness of the Image of God and what it means to be human.

But we fail to see this mutuality, because we continue placing meaning on people. A man, simply because he is a man, is supposed to perform authority, agency, decision, logic, intelligence, and potentially even violence. A woman, simply because she is a woman, is supposed to be kind, beautiful, gentle, supportive, helpful, nurturing, meek, and mild. These categories simplify the world, saving us the inconvenience of loving our neighbor as our neighbor.

The task of the Christian is to exegete — not eisegete — both Scripture and human beings. Rather than reading our preconceived notions onto people and texts, we are called to see them. To really see them.

We take up our crosses and die to our assumptions and preconceived imaginations, and we’re resurrected with Christ to see a new world. In baptism, we leave the broken story that separates men and women and puts hostility between them, and we ask for new eyes to see New Creation possibilities.

If Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords, and if women can say, with men, “it’s no longer I who live, but Christ in me,” then Christ’s authoritative lordship is embodied in women, too. If women and men alike are branches grafted onto Christ’s vine to produce the fruit of the Spirit, then men should be just as loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled as we expect women to be.

Our imaginations and assumptions are made up of what we have seen. Because we have seen a fallen world, we’ve assumed its gendered ideas are gospel truth. Our task, now, is to see the unseen. Once we have seen the coming Kingdom of God, our imaginations can be renewed by the Spirit until we behold men and women through God’s eyes.

For too long, we’ve allowed social conventions to finish our sentences for us. It’s time to give God the final word.

This is a stand-alone article, although it certainly has many implications for our examination of the Southern Baptist abuse crisis. If you’re looking for part 3 of the series, Underneath South Baptist Abuse, it is still coming soon, and we will examine the systemic nature of the crisis. Make sure you’re subscribed, and be on the lookout!

Followers of Christ — those of us commanded to take up our cross and deny ourselves — should always be ready to stand against the abuse of human beings made in the Image of God, even when it comes with personal risk. How much more should we stand against assault when it’s done through the abuse of the Christian faith and Scriptures? When the faith and message given for life and life more abundant become weapons of mass destruction, we cannot remain silent.

Tommy Gilmore twisted the Scriptures to demand Christa Brown’s submission to him, as if it were a requirement of her faith. Then the youth pastor sexually assaulted his 16-year-old student dozens of times. Hundreds of SBC pastors and volunteers have done the same. In 2019, the world learned that 400+ SBC pastors, leaders, and volunteers had abused 700+ innocent people. Most of the victims were children.1

To love the Church is not to protect it from consequences. That’s enabling. Loving the Church does not mean being “charitable” to sexual predators and their enablers.

To love the Church is to seek the Church at its most Christlike, and that means leaving no stone unturned when faced with a crisis of sexual assault. Those committed to seeing an SBC that honors Christ as Lord must be willing to question everything: SBC history, local church autonomy, those entrusted to lead the SBC, and even theological frameworks like complementarianism.

In the wake of this crisis, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), briefly considered his theology:

We have to face the question that is now raised, very much in public, as to whether or not complementarianism is a cause of the abuse of women and girls, and here’s where you need to hear me say, it can be and it sometimes is. Sinful men will use anything in vanity and in anger — in sin of every form — sinful men will distort anything and will take advantage of any argument that seems to their advantage, even to the abuse of women.2

Is complementarianism underneath Southern Baptist abuse?

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The Solution is the Problem

In the sermon quoted above, Mohler exhorts SBTS students to understand that complementarianism is thoroughly biblical. But Mohler is wary of abuse through the weaponization of Scripture and faith. He acknowledges that complementarian theology “can be and sometimes is” the “cause of the abuse of women and girls.” A moment later, Mohler says that the SBC has “often failed to hear the cries of women who have spoken of their abuse,” saying that “we have work to do.”

The SBC has work to do. Mohler is absolutely right.

Just then, he immediately — immediately! — refuses to do that work:

Rightly understood, complementarianism produces husbands who love their wives as Christ loves the church … Complementarianism also is represented in women living out, even with the word ‘submission’ that is used repeatedly in Scripture without any embarassment, and learning to do that [submit] in joy.

Mohler, feeling the weight of hundreds of clergy sexual abuse cases — hundreds of Tommy Gilmores and Christa Browns — responds by implying it could have been avoided if the Tommy Gilmores in the SBC just loved their wives. Meanwhile, he argues complementarianism “rightly understood,” ideal complementarianism, complementarianism at its best, leads to Christa Browns who submit in joy.

To be fair, I’m quite sure Mohler didn’t have abuse victims in mind as he spoke of submission in joy, although it is notable that he applied that description to “women,” not just to wives. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he’s only talking about wives. In that case, Mohler’s solution to the SBC’s Tommy Gilmore problem is a complementarianism that includes wives submitting in joy.

The obvious question stands before us: is the wife of a sexual predator still expected to submit to him, and to do so joyfully?3

My stomach turns at those words. “Submit in joy.” In a denomination where women and children are commanded to submit to men, hundreds of men have sexually abused hundreds of women and children. In joy?!

If the solution is an “ideal complementarianism” where women submit in joy, the solution is the problem.

The Myth of the Ideal

In 2018, Mohler commissioned and released the Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.4 The report refers to an antebellum Southern Baptist notion of an “ideal slavery [in which] masters put the welfare of their slaves before profits, did not yield to desires of sexual assault and abuse, and mistreatment of slaves was rare and discountenanced by all respectable whites.”5

Southern Baptists did not see slavery as inherently sinful. In fact, the report quotes antebellum SBTS trustee, Iveson L. Brookes, as saying slavery is “an institution of heaven.”6 Naturally, an institution from heaven must be protected, so early SBTS trustees, faculty, and leaders defended slavery by “denying that abuses, violence, assault, and rape were in any way commonplace or systemic.”7

This is a simple defense mechanism: when confronted with systemic evil in your own institutions, individualize the problem and never admit that the system itself is responsible for the wickedness inside.

In the antebellum Southern Baptist imagination, the problem was not the existence of the plantation house, but that individuals sometimes didn’t know how to behave at the plantation house. Slavery, in this framework, is a heavenly institution where the benevolent master cares for the people he has purchased as if they were property.

In 2015, three years before this report, Mohler wrote a piece on “the heresy of racial superiority,” where — even as he rejects racism outright — he falls victim to the same century-old propaganda:

James P. Boyce and…John A. Broadus were titans of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

But there is more to the story. Boyce and Broadus were chaplains in the Confederate army. The founders of the SBC and of Southern Seminary were racist defenders of slavery …

By every reckoning, Boyce and Broadus were consummate Christian gentlemen, given the culture of their day. They would have been horrified, I am certain, by any act of violence against any person.8 (emphasis mine).

How is it possible that Mohler sees these men as “racist defenders of slavery” and “consummate Christian gentlemen”? How can he call racial superiority a heresy while believing that chaplains of the Confederate army would be against violence? These men sacralized the war to preserve slavery.

Mohler is blinded by the myth of the ideal that forces him to live in paradox. We have seen that he also believes in an ideal complementarianism, a “rightly understood” complementarianism where husbands love their wives and women submit in joy.

Evil has been discovered in that house, too.

When the Ideal Causes Evil

We now know, with great clarity, that there is no “ideal slavery.” There is no such thing as a benevolent master. A man who forces others to submit to him against their will is wrong, regardless of how benevolent he believes himself to be.

So let’s peek under the curtain of ideal complementarianism.

Christa Brown’s church threw Tommy Gilmore a going-away party. He went on to bigger and more influential churches, eventually landing at First Baptist Church Atlanta, the SBC megachurch led by two-time SBC president, Charles Stanley. Gilmore served for decades as a children’s pastor there. A children’s pastor!

He then took on the same role at First Baptist Oviedo, Florida. On a personal note, FBC Oviedo is the church I attended during undergrad. As far as I can tell, Gilmore had been gone for approximately six years by the time I arrived, but the senior pastor who employed Gilmore was my senior pastor. I served on the worship team for the college ministry. Many of my friends had been teenagers when Gilmore was employed at the church. Do I know any of Gilmore’s victims personally?

Gilmore, a sexual predator, continued on in ministry in the SBC — working with children for decades — with little repercussion. He faced no jail time, was never banned from ministry, and most terrifying of all, was continually given access to children in SBC churches.

Meanwhile, in Christa Brown’s memoir, Baptistland, she says Southern Baptists “felt it was their right to deliver vile name-calling, vitriol, and even threats, publicly, privately, and anonymously. Just as Gilmore had raped me in the name of God, so too they wielded their verbal viciousness in the name of God.”9

Why do Baptists treat Brown with such contempt? Shouldn’t their ire be directed at the sexual predator who assaulted her dozens of times when she was a 16-year-old in his youth group?

To understand this dynamic, we have to understand the SBC’s narrative on gender roles. The SBC has a script and demands that men and women play their parts. Men play an authoritative role, women play a submissive role, and there are consequences for stepping out of these roles. Especially for women.

Gilmore may have played his role incorrectly — even wickedly — but he never stopped playing his authoritative role, so he never got kicked off the stage.

Brown, on the other hand, reflects back on her life:

Both family and church wanted me to be docile, muted, submissive, and deferential. That was my expected role—to not cause trouble—to be compliant. As an adult, it was a role I could not fulfill, a script I refused to follow.10

She transgressed her supposedly God-given role, and the consequences were sickening. Along with name-calling and vitriol, threats poured in: “We’re gonna cut off your head”11 and “My holy mission is to see you destroyed.”12 This wasn’t just an internet mob of pseudo-Christians. No, Brown recounts the way

scores of church and denominational leaders…sought to silence me. They employed multiple tactics, from threatening to sue me, to calling me ugly names, to publicly smearing me, to impugning me on social media, to “stalking” me with anonymous phone calls and messages.13

These are pastors and SBC leaders treating Brown with such evil contempt. And it’s not just local church pastors. This happened (and happens) at the highest levels of the denomination:

Paige Patterson, a seminary president and former SBC president…called me an “evildoer” and said that I an other child rape victims in SNAP were “just as reprehensible as sex criminals” … Another SBC president, Frank page, used Baptist-controlled media to publicly castigate me and other survivors as “nothing more than opportunistic persons” … Still another former SBC president, Jerry Vines, used a national Christian news network to accuse me and other survivors of making “false charges” … an SBC Executive Committee member maligned me as “a person of no integrity” … an internal email from Executive Committee president Augie Boto came to light in which he described me as being part of a “satanic scheme.”14

In ideal complementarianism, women “submit in joy.” Brown refused, and the SBC still seeks to silence and destroy her. When a denomination is filled with men — including pastors and presidents — who are willing to go out of their way to verbally abuse any woman, let alone a survivor of sexual abuse by an SBC pastor, we must examine the system. Why do these men feel they have the right to speak to women this way? Why aren’t they standing up to protect a woman who was assaulted by an evil man?

At what point do we stop assuming abusers and slanderers are “bad apples” acting within an “ideal” system? I’ll say it again: In a denomination where women and children are commanded to submit to men, hundreds of men have sexually abused hundreds of women and children. When do we question the tree producing the bad apples?

“The Ideology that Drove Him”

In 2015, Mohler condemned Dylann Roof, the shooter who killed ten Black churchgoers at Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof, Mohler says, was

a young man whose worldview was savagely warped by the ideology of racial superiority — white superiority — and the grotesque and wretched ideology that drove him is now inseparable from the murders he is charged with committing.15

Mohler is right. An ideology that ranks some human beings above others is “inseparable” from acts of evil committed against those ranked in the lower tiers.16

Complementarianism is not white supremacy. That needs to be clearly stated. However, Tommy Gilmore’s worldview was also savagely warped by an ideology that told him his role as a male pastor meant women must submit to his authority. The ideology that drove him is also inseparable from the sexual assaults he committed.

In Mohler’s own estimation, the SBC is a tree originally planted in toxic, heretical soil that ranked some human beings as superior over others. The tree is still producing bad apples who viciously act out their superiority complex over women and children.

At what point can we hold the tree responsible for the apples it produces?

I am haunted by chapter 2 of Christa Brown’s Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation. Brown’s memoir details the horrors of her Southern Baptist youth pastor sexually abusing her over and over again at age 16.

Reading her story, my stomach sinks. My soul screams. A phantom Christianity hovers over the pages of Brown’s story, sending chills down my spine.

I was a loyal and proud Baptist for nearly two decades. I grew up in Sunday School and youth group, went to Lifeway’s Fuge camps every summer, found an SBC church as soon as I went off to college, felt my call to ministry in SBC churches, led worship in SBC churches and at their Fuge camps, and even attended New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for a couple semesters until I ran out of money. I am still in pastoral ministry, although in another denomination, and I would not be who I am today without the Southern Baptist Convention. I’m not writing because I desire to tear down the SBC, but because I desperately care that Christ’s gospel is never intertwined with the desecration of human beings made in God’s Image.

But this article is not my story.

This is the story of Christa Brown, at the time, a 16-year-old “naive, nerdy, idealistic, true-believer church girl” (p. 71). It is also the story of Tommy Gilmore, “a grown married man,” and Brown’s youth pastor turned predator. This story is a far cry from the SBC I thought I knew as a child and into young adulthood.

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One night on a dark, silent Texas road, Gilmore pulled over and asked Brown if he could kiss her. Brown refused, and Gilmore told her to “pray about it” (p. 72). As she continued to reject his advances, Brown says Gilmore would stand over her and pray: “Lord, please help Christa know and accept your will for her life so that she will submit to becoming my helpmeet in accordance with your holy plan” (p. 73).

Gilmore eventually went on to sexually assault Brown — again, a student in his youth group — at least weekly for several months, and I’m horrified by two things:

First, Gilmore’s abuse of Brown — a desecration of the Image of God.

Second, Gilmore’s treatment of Christianity and the Bible — a desecration of the sacred faith and the Holy Scriptures.

In abusing Brown, Gilmore ripped Christianity from its physical reality and projected a Christian specter to create intentional fear in his victim. His weapon of choice?

The Bible.

Brown says “it was my reverence for scripture that made me all the more susceptible to his twisting of it” (p. 73).

When Brown was confused at how Gilmore’s behavior could be Christian, he would quote Proverbs 3:5: “lean not unto thine own understanding.”

When she wanted to refuse his access to her body, he would quote 1 Corinthians 6:19: “ye are not your own.”

He would quote Romans 12:2: “be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed … that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God,” claiming that “the idea of one-man-one-woman was a standard of ‘the world,’ and God’s will wasn’t limited like ‘the world’ was” (p.78).

He gave himself freedom to do what he wanted with John 10:10: “I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”

When Brown didn’t understand how Gilmore could have two “wives,” he would quote Isaiah 55:9: “my ways [are] higher than your ways.”

Gilmore would call his abuse the will of God before quoting 1 John 2:17, “He that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”

When Brown protested against Gilmore, he quoted Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ.”

And when Brown feared that this liaison was wrong, Gilmore admonished Brown with Philippians 4:6: “Do not be anxious about anything.”

For years, even before the assault began, Gilmore turned to their shared faith to groom his victim.

As Brown describes, “sometimes I think every single thing that ever happened in that church was a setup and part of the grooming for abuse. After all, as far back as I can remember, I was taught to be submissive and trusting of … the whole God-ordained chain of command: God, pastor, husband, wife, child.” (p. 59-60).

She laments:

A part of me understands—viscerally knows—the horror of how, for love of God, someone could be convinced to do almost anything. That’s the girl I was—the girl who would do anything for God (p. 80).

I am haunted — horrified — by Gilmore’s abuse of Brown through his abuse of Christianity. His religious gaslighting of Brown blurred the lines between “faithful Christian” and “submissive victim” until they were one. Gilmore turned plowshares into swords, and his abuse torments me secondhand, because the Bible I love became the double-edged sword he used to slice Brown in two. The Bible held in such high esteem by Southern Baptists all over the world was weaponized to assault an innocent young girl. This tension, this contradiction, is too much for me to bear. I crumble under its weight.

Gilmore manipulated, spiritually abused, sexually assaulted, and physically traumatized Brown. But Brown was not the only victim in this story. To get to Brown, Gilmore first robbed Jesus of his compassionate flesh, story, and teachings. This predator broke Christ’s body, poured out his blood, and projected a transparent ghost of a deathly messiah before his victim, all to pervert Christian virtue and scare her into submission to his own wicked desires.

That ghost didn’t just haunt Brown. It haunts us.

As this series continues, we will further examine Brown’s story and the stories of other survivors, but we will also seek to unravel the ways these ghosts threaten to haunt all American evangelical Christians. What goes the gospel of the Kingdom require of all of us in light of a massive abuse crisis across a Bible-believing denomination?

Without further ado, if Apollos sat down with Priscilla at the end of her rich life and asked her to reflect on her life and ministry, what might that conversation look like? I hope this gives you a renewed appreciation for this incredible woman of God!

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Apollos: Today I have the honor of talking with my good friend and favorite theologian. Priscilla, I’m so grateful you agreed to do this!

Priscilla: Yes, I’m grateful to be here, Apollos. You know better than anyone how I love to talk theology!

Apollos: I promise we will get there! First, would you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Priscilla: Oh, where to begin? Let’s see. I was born to a Jewish family in Rome¹ and grew up studying the Scriptures. I was married to Aquila when I was young, just as he was taking a bigger role in his parents’ work making tents.² But I suppose those aren’t really the things anybody wants to hear about. I have been so blessed in my life. The Lord has been so good to us. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been hard. But it’s been good. We’ve had the opportunity to travel with Paul, to help plant the church communities in Corinth and Ephesus,³ and for years now we’ve been serving the Messiah back in Rome.⁴

Apollos: Your story is incredible, and please, greet Aquila for me.

Priscilla: Oh I will, I will. He will be so glad to hear from you.

Apollos: He should have joined us! He knows he’s welcome anytime.

Priscilla: Oh yes, I know. But you know Aquila. He prefers to stay in the background. I admire him so much. He really is content just working with the tents. When Paul told the community at Thessaloniki “to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands,”⁵ I’m quite sure he had Aquila in mind. [Laughs]

Apollos: [Laughing] Yes, I bet!

Priscilla: [Laughing] We really do make a good team.

Apollos: Yes, he has such a wonderful heart for the Lord. But let’s talk more about you. You’ve had such an amazing life, and our readers will learn so much from you! You said you grew up studying the Scriptures. I know how you love to set your mind on the Spirit⁶ and think deeply about the things of God. So that’s always been a passion of yours?

Priscilla: Oh, yes! I’ve always yearned to be a tree by living waters, nourished by my meditations on the words of God. I delight in the Torah⁷ and have been that way as long as I can remember. My parents thought it a little odd that a young girl would want to study like the students of the rabbis, but I simply couldn’t get enough.

Apollos: Your mind, truly, is a gift to the Church.

Priscilla: Oh you’re too kind, I don’t know about that. God’s wisdom is a gift to me. And He’s taught me a lot.

Apollos: [Laughs] Yes I know!

Priscilla: [Sheepishly] Oh, right. Sorry about that.

Apollos: Just in case anybody hasn’t read Luke’s account of our meeting⁸… I should share that I met Priscilla when I came to Ephesus as a teacher. I was pretty sure of myself, having studied in Alexandria. I had a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures, and I wanted everyone to know it! I taught with great fervor.

Priscilla: You’re too hard on yourself. You were enthusiastic about what God was doing!

Apollos: Yes, I suppose that’s true. But in all my enthusiasm, I did not know the baptism of the Messiah, only the baptism of John. You and Aquila came to me and were so encouraging and so kind, and you invited me to your home. I graciously accepted and then…

Priscilla: We ambushed you, didn’t we?

Apollos: No, no… Aquila didn’t! [Laughing]

Priscilla: [Laughing] Oh, stop it! I simply wanted to explain the way of God more adequately! I’m sorry.

Apollos: Priscilla, please. Please don’t apologize. I am indebted to you. When I went to Achaia,⁹ your teachings were a gift.

Priscilla: You have done wonderful work for the Lord, Apollos. What I said to you that day… I had been having conversations with Paul about baptism. It’s funny. Years later, when I was back in Rome and we received his letter, I couldn’t believe it when I started hearing familiar words in the middle of the letter. Phoebe read that “all of us who were baptized into the Messiah Jesus were baptized into his death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as the Messiah was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may walk in newness of life.”¹⁰ John’s baptism was powerful – even our Messiah was baptized by John – but being buried with the Messiah so we can be raised to live a new life? That’s the beauty of baptism.

Apollos: That’s truly beautiful. But we’re skipping too far ahead! How did you end up in Ephesus?

Priscilla: Well, Aquila and I actually went to Corinth first. In 49, Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, so we went to join Paul in Corinth.¹¹ We…

Apollos: Wait. How did you know Paul?

Priscilla: Oh, we didn’t! But we had heard bits and pieces of his story. We wanted to learn… actually, let me back up. I haven’t told you yet how I came to follow the Messiah. I already told you I loved to study the Torah and the Prophets. Of course I loved to go to synagogue – I was there as often as I could be, soaking up every word. Anyway, there was a noble family at our synagogue, and they lived a life I couldn’t fathom. Every year at Passover they made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast days. Oh how I longed to join them! It’s funny – I had no idea how much I would end up traveling one day. [Laughs] But every year they would return, and we would all be so anxious to hear about their journey. One year, oh it must have been around 33, and anyway, their faces looked… different. We could tell something had happened while they were there. They told us of a prophet who was…different… from other prophets. But they didn’t say much. They were upset, asking a lot of questions, talking about the religious leaders in Jerusalem. They shook their heads at what Rome was doing in Jerusalem. We came to find out the religious leaders had accused this prophet, Jesus, and Rome had him crucified. Of course, you know that. But I’ll never forget the moment I heard about it. I somehow, I don’t know, I just knew this mattered. I felt the weight. But the story wasn’t over. As they were preparing to come home, word began to spread that the body was missing. Some said he was taken. Others said it was a conspiracy. When they got on the ship to Rome, Jesus was all anybody was talking about.

Apollos: I am on the edge of my seat! What happened?

Priscilla: Well, they spent a lot of time on the ship with a couple who had similarly made the pilgrimage for Passover. They said this couple was quiet for the first day. Like they had seen a ghost.

Apollos: What happened to them?

Priscilla: Well, they finally began to open up, very slowly, on the second day of the journey. They said there was no conspiracy. They said the body wasn’t taken. But they wouldn’t say anything else. My friends tried not to put too much pressure on them. They were clearly going through something. Finally, they said four words. Barely audible. Like a whisper from their hearts, not their throats. “We have seen him.”

Apollos: Wow…

Priscilla: I remember hearing this story for the first time. Like it was yesterday. I knew it was the truth. “We have seen him.” I can’t explain it, I just knew I could trust them.

Apollos: The Spirit at work.

Priscilla: Yes. But of course, in Rome, everything was still rumors, and we didn’t know the whole story at all. Over the next couple years, life basically went back to normal. We began to hear more stories of Jesus of Nazareth, and I knew He was the Promised One. When I heard how he taught the Scriptures, I was astounded. Every time I heard his name, I longed to hear more. That’s exactly what happened one day in probably 36 or 37. I went to the market and there was a young slave gathering people around himself. I found that very odd. But I heard him say the name, and I dropped my goods and joined the gathering. The boy said he was from Jerusalem. He was just sold to Rome a couple months ago. He said he had known a man named Paul, a Pharisee who had given up everything to serve this Jesus. The boy said Paul taught Jesus to the Gentiles. I looked around at the crowd of Romans listening to this young man and was proud that the Gentiles wanted to know about the Messiah too. Honestly, when Claudius expelled us, we were scared and didn’t know if we would survive. But when we heard we could go where Paul was going, there was an anxious excitement. We knew Corinth was our next stop.

Apollos: That is truly unbelievable. Tell us about Corinth!

Priscilla: We actually arrived there before Paul!¹² We found a group of disciples, but it was very disorganized, very confusing. Nobody seemed to be on the same page. I knew Jesus was my Messiah, but I was, of course, still passionate about Torah. Aquila and I ate according to the Torah, and honored the feast days, and kept the Sabbath, and remained convinced that Gentile converts were to be circumcised to follow Israel’s Messiah. How could it be any other way?

Apollos: Right, so what changed?

Priscilla: Well, I met Paul. He came to Corinth, and to make a long story short, persuaded me. It’s like he said in his letter to us in Rome: there are Gentiles who live as if the Torah is written on their hearts, and there are Israelites who boast in the Torah, but dishonor God by breaking the Torah.¹³ Paul brought me back to Deuteronomy and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and showed me that the Torah is about a transformed heart. It’s about the Spirit of God. “A person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code.”¹⁴

Apollos: That is profound. We are indebted to God for Paul’s wisdom!

Priscilla: Yes, but it was a hard truth to accept. It took time. Aquila and I didn’t view the Torah that way. Not at first. Paul explained to us that the Torah gave us a glimpse of God’s righteousness. But Jesus was the true display of God’s righteousness! Sorry if I’m getting excited!

Apollos: Please, Priscilla! I’m feasting on your enthusiasm!

Priscilla: When Jesus submitted himself to death on a cross, Paul’s letter to the Romans says that God handed him over “to demonstrate His righteousness.”¹⁵

Apollos: Jesus is the full righteousness of the Lord we had never really seen before. That is so beautiful, Priscilla.

Priscilla: So I had to die to the Torah,¹⁶ at least the way I knew it, and it was painful. I mean, it really hurt. But dying to Torah didn’t mean Torah was bad. No, “the Torah is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good!”¹⁷ It’s just… I thought I could get to God on my own strength in the Torah. What Paul helped me see, thanks to the Spirit at work within me, is that I had to be “released from Torah to serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.”¹⁸

Apollos: And you certainly served in the Spirit in Ephesus. Tell me about your time there!

Priscilla: Oh yes, by the time we went to Ephesus, I had soaked up everything Paul had to say, and my heart was on fire for the Messiah. It was a great honor that Paul left Aquila and I there to stabilize the new church as he went back to Jerusalem.¹⁹ That meant a lot to us. And, to be honest, Ephesus changed everything for me. You know, it was difficult to be a church leader in Corinth, and sometimes it’s difficult in Rome. Men don’t trust women. They think they are being dishonored to sit under my teaching.

Apollos: [sadly] They don’t know what they’re missing.

Priscilla: I gained a lot of confidence in Ephesus, though, and probably wouldn’t be who I am today without that experience. The Ephesians worship Artemis. Women and religious devotion are not strangers. No Ephesian is surprised to see a woman ministering in a temple. When we served the Gentiles, they welcomed my ministry in every way. I really gained my voice there.

Apollos: We need your voice! And you have been back in Rome for quite some time now, yes?

Priscilla: Yes, we returned as soon as it was safe to do so. We are so grateful to host the gathering in our workshop every resurrection day, and honestly, most other days of the week, too.²⁰

Apollos: And that community is surely grateful for you. And now you’re working on something new, I hear?

Priscilla: Well, I can’t speak much about it, but yes. I have been commissioned to write an exhortation of sorts that I must keep brief.²¹ But I have to be careful. It’s important I remain anonymous, because some still don’t want to learn from a female theologian.²² I can’t put my name on it.

Apollos: Your secret’s safe with me, and I look forward to reading it! Can you tell me a little bit more?

Priscilla: Well, it’s really about many of the things we’ve talked about today. See, “in the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”²³ I get to think about my studies of the Torah, since I was a little girl, and write about Jesus fulfilling and exceeding our wildest dreams. I hope to take disciples of Jesus beyond elementary teachings, and to help them reach maturity.²⁴ To help my fellow Israelites see that, while Moses’ covenant is a blessing from God, Jesus is the guarantor of a better covenant.²⁵

Apollos: It will be a blessing to all who receive it.

Priscilla: It’s a blessing to me to get to write it, and to send my greetings from Italy to my brothers and sisters in the Messiah.²⁶

Apollos: Please send my greetings to Aquila and the saints in Rome!

Priscilla: Of course, of course. Thank you for this wonderful conversation, Apollos. It’s always a pleasure.

Apollos: Any time. Will you leave us with a blessing?

Priscilla: Oh, I would love to. “May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus the Messiah, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”²⁷

¹ Gaventa, B. R. (2024). Romans: A Commentary (First Edition). Westminster John Knox Press. (p 64-66). See also Acts 18:1-2.

² Acts 18:3

³ Gaventa, p. 64-66. See also Acts 18:1-2, 18-19 and 1 Cor 16:19.

⁴ Gaventa, p. 64-66. See also Romans 16:3-5.

⁵ 1 Thessalonians 4:11

⁶ Romans 8:5-6

⁷ Psalm 1:2-3

⁸ Acts 18:24-28

⁹ Acts 18:27

¹⁰ Romans 6:3-4

¹¹ Acts 18:2

¹² Nelson, J. E. (2024). Judge Deborah and Pastor/Teacher Priscilla: Templates for Contemporary Biblical Women’s Leadership. Religions, p. 1–16. See also Acts 18:2-3.

¹³ Romans 2:15, 23

¹⁴ Romans 2:29

¹⁵ Romans 3:25

¹⁶ Romans 7:4, cf. Galatians 2:19

¹⁷ Romans 7:12

¹⁸ Romans 7:6

¹⁹ Acts 18:19-22

²⁰ Gaventa, p. 553-555

²¹ Hebrews 13:22. Many scholars believe Priscilla could be the author of the book of Hebrews. I take that view here.

²² Bilezikian, G. G. (2017). Beyond Sex Roles: Priscilla as the Author of Hebrews. Priscilla Papers, p. 37–38.

²³ Hebrews 1:1-2

²⁴ Hebrews 6:1

²⁵ Hebrews 7:22

²⁶ Hebrews 13:24

²⁷ Hebrews 13:20-21

The Image of God is made to desire the One we image. Without God, we are moons without a sun, mirrors in a dark room. At the center of what it means to be human is a desire for the divine. We long to behold God, to be near God, to reflect God, to love and be loved by God.

As Augustine famously prayed, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”1

To be human is to want.

It’s easy to portray desire as the villain. It’s the “desires of the flesh” (Gal 5:16) that produce the “works of the flesh …. sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing…” (v. 19-21).

I’ve often heard it said that pride is the cause of sin. I’m not so sure. Eve desires the fruit before she takes it. Cain desires the approval God gave Abel and takes his life. Perhaps James reflected on Cain’s motivation as he wrote, “You desire and do not have, so you murder” (James 4:2). James also said this:

Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
James 1:14-15

It is not pride that gives birth to sin, but desire. Ephesians 4:22 says the old self is “corrupt through deceitful desires.” It’s no wonder so many ascetics, desert saints, and monastics have renounced the things of this world to pursue holiness. Desire appears to be the enemy.

Should Christians respond by dulling all desire? If desire is the enemy and the cause of sin, should we rid ourselves of longing until our lives are marked by cold apathy and indifference?

No, the Scriptures call out to our longing: Wake up, o sleeper! (Eph 5:14). The desert fathers knew better than to simply renounce desire. Anthony the Great said: “Renounce this life, so that you may be alive to God.”2 Even in his renunciation, Anthony desired life with God.

Walter Brueggemann says:

The work of obedience then, is not to squelch desire or deny it… Our work rather is to critique distorted desire and refocus desire on the true and faithful subject of our proper delight and longing.3

Our problem is not that we desire, but that our desire is misdirected.

The Desire Paradox

It is because we have an innate desire for God that we can sin. Our ungodliness is the direct result of being made for godliness. Why? We can only be godly if we have the capacity to desire God, but this capacity for desire is also the very thing that opens us up to corruption. It is because we are capable of godliness that we are also inevitably drawn into ungodliness.

Ronald Rolheiser hauntingly paints the human condition:

We are not easeful human beings who occasionally get restless, serene persons who once in a while are obsessed by desire. The reverse is true. We are driven persons, forever obsessed … [by] an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else.4

Rolheiser concludes: “Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire … what we do with our unrest.”5

God has placed this unquenchable, all-embracing ache within us for good, giving us an innate desire to want God. But a crackling fire in a hearth becomes destructive and deadly when it escapes into the living room. Desire is of God, from God, and for God. When it escapes from that context, when we turn away from God, we replace our godly desire with longing for cheap substitutes, and we sin.

We think we’ll find God as we scroll.

We think God is at the bottom of the bottle, in the dessert we told ourselves we wouldn’t order, in the next sexual escapade.

We think God will arrive with another zero on our net worth, that God is hiding in a new house, or that a new car will drive us right to God’s doorstep.

We’re convinced God is in the next word of affirmation, even though the last one didn’t satisfy.

We think God’s in the job promotion, the next social media follower, the adoration and devotion of others.

Desire is our fiercest enemy and our greatest ally. We desire wrongly because we were made to desire rightly. We take what God has given and aim it in the wrong direction.

Thais Gibson says “every behavior we enact is actually a subconscious strategy to get closer to God.”6

Every behavior. We act because we’re trying to fill the empty space God placed in our souls. We’re desperate, longing, pining for the divine we cannot reach, so we reach for a drink, a risk, a fling. We sin because we desire, and we desire because we were made for God.

A Surprising Answer

If Rolheiser is right, that “what we do with [our] madness is our spirituality,”7 then what is our spiritual formation? What should we do with our madness, our desire, our unrest?

The desert fathers didn’t just escape the world, they went into God’s presence. It’s not enough to quit drinking, social media, porn, or whatever addiction or vice has you in its grip. The ache will still be there.

The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous offer a surprising answer, because our restless hearts inevitably lead to some kind of addiction. We are all addicts in a sense, finding vices to calm the madness and anasthetics to numb the ache. We all find predictable, recurring solutions to give ourselves the illusion of peace amid the fires of our restlessness. The steps are not just for alcoholics. They are for anyone who puts bandages on their soul instead of re-joining the soul with the God it was ripped from.

The first step diagnoses our universal problem:

1. We admitted we were powerless over ___________ — that our lives had become unmanageable.8

The steps begin with the alcoholic’s admission of powerlessness over alcohol, and we all must admit our own helplessness over our vices and faulty solutions to the madness and unrest. Our out-of-control desire makes human life unmanageable. We are mad, incapable of overpowering our vices or healing our restless hearts.

Steps two and three bring our hearts to rest in God. Once we’ve admitted our weakness and the out-of-control nature of our lives without God, we…

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Read those words again, slowly.

By our own strength, we cannot liberate our minds and bodies to desire rightly. So we come to believe there is a Power greater than ourselves, who can restore us to sanity. God heals the madness. How? By drawing our souls back into the divine presence for which they were made. We lay down control, turning our will and our lives over to God’s care.9 Only in God, our hearts finally find the ever-elusive rest we were made for.

The solution to the madness is not willpower. It’s surrender.

The only way to fill the emptiness is to offer our empty bucket to the source of Living Water. The only way to heal the ache is to bring it out into the open before the Great Physician. We can’t save ourselves. We’re powerless.

The solution is to stop trying to find solutions. We bring ourselves before God in complete vulnerability, naked and unashamed. We plead with God to see beneath the mask, to search the deepest recesses of our souls, and to know any offensive way within us.

In our surrender to God, the steps walk us through repentance before God and those we’ve harmed, finally bringing us to the purpose of human life in step 11:

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

What is the cure for our addictive unrest? A spiritual awakening,10 the opposite of numbing our desires. Our desires come alive as they meet the God they were made for. Through prayer and meditation, we come into union with the divine and the Spirit empowers us to enact God’s will instead of our own subconscious strategies.

May the ego, with all its restless and aching madness, die with Christ, and may we come alive to the resurrection of life in the presence of God.

I pray you receive the true desire of your heart.

One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.
Psalm 27:4

Story One

Had Ruth lost her mind?

Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth faced tragedy after tragedy and found themselves widowed, mourning, and desperate. Naomi advised her two daughters-in-law to return to their people, to find new husbands, and to start over. To save their lives. Orpah does the sensible thing and returns home. She “is a paradigm of the sane and reasonable; she acts according to the structures and customs of society.”1

By all objective measures, Ruth makes an insane and unreasonable decision. She remains with Naomi, even when it likely means her suffering and untimely death.

From a cultural perspective, Ruth has chosen death over life. She has disavowed the solidarity of family; she has abandoned national identity; and she has renounced religious affiliation. In the entire epic of Israel, only Abraham matches this radicality, but…Abraham was a man, with a wife and other possessions to accompany him. Ruth stands alone; she possesses nothing.2

When the two widows arrived in Bethlehem, Naomi informed her of a kinsman redeemer in town, and Ruth went to gather gleanings from his harvest. Eventually, lying on the threshing room floor, Boaz agreed to redeem her, with one caveat. Boaz whispered in the darkness to avoid alerting anyone to the scandalous conversation taking place:

“Though it is true that I am a near kinsman, there is another kinsman more closely related than I.”
Ruth 3:12

We don’t know the name of “another kinsman,” but here in Ruth 3, he is introduced into the biblical story.

In the following chapter, Boaz goes to the city gate, hoping for a chance encounter with the man. When the next-of-kin passes by, Boaz invites him to converse before ten of the town elders, and begins by offering a parcel of land for sale. As far as the unnamed stranger is concerned, this is a real estate deal. He agrees to purchase the land, and Boaz turns up the dial on the agreement:

“The day you acquire the field from the hand of Naomi, you are also acquiring Ruth the Moabite, the widow of the dead man, to maintain the dead man’s name on his inheritance.”
Ruth 4:53

This is not just real estate; this is a marriage proposition.

The man’s response is the reason he is a stranger to us:

“I cannot redeem it for myself without damaging my own inheritance.”
Ruth 4:6

Ironically, as Phyllis Trible points out, this man acts to preserve his own name, and that is the very reason his name is not found in the Scriptures. He has written himself out of the biblical narrative. In Trible’s words, this kinsman “dies to the story in order to live to his own inheritance.” I can’t help but wonder if he, like the Rich Young Ruler, goes away sad.

Ruth, on the other hand, was foolish in the eyes of the world. She died to “the sane and reasonable” and evidently lived in another world altogether. She wrote herself into an alternative story and found her name inscribed in the lineage of the Messiah.

Story Two

Had Paul lost his mind?

The Apostle insisted that the Lord’s Supper is to be a scandalous gathering of people who do not belong together, seated around Christ’s Table in beautiful belonging. At this table, masters cannot demand to be served. The wealthy cannot minimize the poor. As the dishonored, the enslaved, and the ostracized receive the body and blood of the Lord into their own bodies, those who stand above them in the world lose all claim on them. Christ is in all, and all are in Christ. “The Lord’s Supper becomes a profoundly subversive political event.”4

This is not what was happening in the Corinthian church. In fact, Paul says:

“When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper.”
1 Cor. 11:20

The Corinthian church thinks they’re participating in the Eucharist, and Paul alerts them their practice is a sham. Why?

There are divisions among them (v. 18). Some aren’t eating at all, while others are becoming drunk (v. 21). Those who “have nothing” are “humiliated” (v. 22).

In the Corinthian church, those who are destitute, who “have nothing,” are not being embraced as equals around the Lord’s table. The rich in the church are eating their fill and getting drunk, while the poor do not get to share in the meal. What’s going on here? Richard Beck helpfully summarizes the work of Ben Witherington:

It appears that the Corinthian church was treating its communal meal, eaten prior to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, as a private dinner party followed by a convivium (i.e., drinking party). It was normal practice in Roman dinner and drinking parties to rank guests according to social status. Generally, high status guests ate with the host in a separate room where they were served first and were given the best food and drink. Lower status guests were seated elsewhere in the house, were served last, and were served food of lesser quality. It appears that the wealthy patrons of the Corinthian church had imported these social practices into the life of the church.5

The wealthy Corinthians were eating and drinking their fill, while the poor were left with the crumbs that fell from the table of the wealthy. Surely, they believed Paul was a fool to suggest that people of completely different statuses should dine together. It simply isn’t done. It would appear that the Corinthian church had forsaken the Lord’s supper and re-created a traditional Roman meal.

These Corinthian Christians, like Ruth’s next-of-kin, have written themselves beyond the bounds of the biblical narrative. They have abandoned God’s script to perform on Rome’s stage. They remained loyal to the sane and the reasonable when the gospel demanded more of them.

Story Three

Had Gregory of Nyssa lost his mind?

The 4th-century Cappadocian Father and bishop, the brother of Macrina the Younger and Basil of Caesarea, stood apart from every other Church Father for one reason: Gregory of Nyssa was the world’s first abolitionist.

Gregory was the first writer to fully recognize the inherent depravity of slavery and to call for the liberation of all enslaved people. In a world that understood slavery to be an unquestioned part of the status quo, Gregory asked questions. In a world that saw slavery as sane and reasonable - as natural as we see cars, the internet, cell phones - Gregory alone is foolish and unreasonable enough to perceive a radically new reality.

Gregory lived during a theological zenith, with remarkable contemporaries like his brother Basil the Great, his fellow Cappadocian Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Ambrose, and Jerome.

And yet, only one of these theological giants was able to see slavery for what it is.

“The world would have to wait another fifteen centuries…before such an unequivocal stance against slavery would appear again.”6 What is it that Gregory could see that the first eighteen centuries of Christianity failed to perceive? We see the answer in Ruth’s nameless next-of-kin and in the wealthy Corinthians.

When it came to slavery, Christians for eighteen centuries failed to look over the wall of “the way things are” in order to see the way things could (and should) be. It was insane and unreasonable to suggest the world would keep turning if every enslaved person was liberated. Those held captive by this lie failed to trust the Spirit of God and failed to perceive the New Creation breaking in to turn the world upside down. They failed to exit the sane and reasonable narrative to enter the surprising and subversive biblical narrative.

The gift of Gregory of Nyssa is “an exegetical imagination that reads against rather than within the social order.”7

Here is Gregory of Nyssa, from his homily on Ecclesiastes, on the impossibility of purchasing another human being:

“I got me slaves and slave-girls.” For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as the human nature? … “God said, let us make man in our own image and likeness.” If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power.8

J. Kameron Carter points out that, while “Gregory’s Cappodocian contemporaries and fellow champions of Nicene orthodoxy…were also theological readers of Scripture and interpreters of reality, [they] in contrast to Gregory accepted slavery as a part of the social order.”9 Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, and Augustine each argue that, while slavery is sinful, it must simply be accepted as an unfortunate consequence of the present sinful reality. They found a way to be at peace with sin, and to “read Scripture in such a way as to theologically—yes, theologically—accept it.”10

Refusing to be at peace with sin, Gregory of Nyssa became the only sane and reasonable thinker on this issue because he was willing to be insane and unreasonable. He lived in an alternate reality, reading and inhabiting the Bible against the grain of the social order.

The Story of God and Us

How are you writing your name out of the biblical story to avoid damaging your inheritance? What is the social custom you’re afraid to transgress to embody the radical call of the gospel on your life? What sin have you made peace with, simply because it’s the way things are and always have been?

If we want to be made new, it’s not enough to read the Bible. We must move in to the story of Scripture. It’s time to throw away the script we’ve been handed, trusting Jesus will welcome us onto Israel’s stage to perform God’s story in the world.

To follow Jesus is to follow a man who appeared to have lost his mind. Nobody touched lepers. Jewish rabbis simply didn’t eat with tax collectors and sinners. It was insane and unreasonable to allow a sinful woman to wash your feet. No good Jewish man messed with the Sabbath or conversed with Samaritan women. And then there was the outburst at the Temple.

To follow a man who seems to have lost his mind requires a denial of the self - a denial of the sane and reasonable - to be crucified to “this age” that we might “be transformed by the renewing of the mind” (Rom. 12:2).

Those with a renewed mind look insane and unreasonable to the untransformed. The world will always assume we’ve lost our minds when we’ve really had them transformed.

We are not supposed to be paradigms of the sane and reasonable, acting according to the systems and structures of society. We live in a resurrected reality, and we have stepped onto an alternative stage to perform an alternative script. The Church is the light of the world, and light doesn’t blend in to the dark.

This isn’t permission to be a jerk. This is permission to love your neighbor - your “Naomi,” the “Corinthians with nothing” in your city, the “enslaved” in your world - even when it makes you look like a fool. They’re going to say you’ve lost your mind when you love your neighbor more than financial security, social rank, and the status quo.

That’s okay.

A community that believes dead people come back to life should appear insane and unreasonable from time to time.

They remembered Paul’s arrival in Ephesus a decade ago, when he spent two years proclaiming Jesus in their lecture halls. Miracle after miracle took place, Greek and Jewish Ephesians were turning to Jesus, and Demetrius the silversmith had had enough. Paul was persuading the people that gods made with hands are not gods, and craftsmen like Demetrius were losing precious sales. The only option was to remind the people of their loyalty to Artemis, the goddess of Ephesus’s famous temple. Demetrius riled up the crowds who grew into a frenzy, chanting “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”1

Artemis was the center of religious life in Ephesus, and the introduction of faith in a Jewish Messiah created an obvious tension that did not subside. In fact, ten years after this uproar, Paul wrote to Timothy in Ephesus because some new converts just couldn’t get past their old religious imagination. They converted to Christ, but tried to bring Artemis with them.

This is the background for 1 Timothy, Paul’s letter to Timothy in Ephesus2. Paul urges Timothy to “instruct certain people not to teach different teachings and not to occupy themselves with myths and endless genealogies that promote speculations…” (1:3-4). And why is this?

“Some people have deviated from these and turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions” (1:6-7).

The problem in Timothy’s Ephesian church is that new converts want to be teachers even though they do not yet understand what they are teaching.

We also know that Paul is not thrilled with the women in Ephesus, specifically. 1 Timothy 3:11 reveals some of Timothy’s female deacons had likely fallen into “malicious talk.” In 4:7, “godless myths” are a concern along with “fables of old women.” Paul is concerned about young widows in the church who “go about from house to house [as] gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not say” (5:13).

We don’t have to speculate about the context of 1 Timothy. Paul tells us what he is concerned about!

In 1 Timothy 2, Paul says men should pray with lifted hands, not in anger or argument. But what about the women?

They “should dress themselves in moderate clothing with reverence and self-control, not with…expensive clothes” (1 Tim 2:9). This makes sense, as Dr. Sandra Glahn notes that:

“Descriptions of Artemis’s cult and those associated with it include an emphasis on wealth and honor, with women officeholders coming from the upper classes and appearing to have some autonomy in their benevolence.”3

Wealthy deaconesses in the Ephesian church, perhaps young widows, appear to be flaunting wealth and teaching what they should not teach because they have not yet learned. In response, Paul says women should clothe themselves with good deeds, not expensive clothing, and then offers Timothy wise counsel for one specific woman4. If there is a woman who is teaching in the Christian church, even though she does not yet know good Christian doctrine and has yet to repent of the influence of idolatry, then…

“A woman must learn in silence with full submission” (1 Tim 2:11).

Notably, there is only one command in 1 Timothy 2:11-15. It is not that women must be silent. It is not that women must not teach. It is not that women must not lead. Paul’s only command in this passage is that a woman must learn. We shouldn’t overlook the radical nature of this command, coming from a Pharisee raised to believe religious education under the rabbis is for men.

This woman desires to be a teacher (ie 1 Tim 1:6). But to become a teacher, she must learn. This is Paul’s command. In the meantime, while she learns, Paul says: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority5 over a man, she is to keep silent.”6

Someone who has not yet learned cannot yet teach. Someone who is not leading like Christ is not permitted to exercise authority. She must first learn, in silence, how to be Christlike.

The following verses raise a lot of questions:

“For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. She will be saved through childbirth, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”
1 Tim 2:13-15

Complementarians generally argue that we know 1 Timothy 2:11-12 offers permanent instruction for all women in all churches because verses 13-15 root Paul’s words in God’s created order. God made man before woman, and woman, not man, was deceived. Therefore, women are not permitted to teach or lead men. This is not contextual, they argue. This instruction is rooted in how men and women have always been.

There are three points in these verses:

1. Man is formed before woman.

2. Woman, not man, was deceived.

3. Women will be saved through childbirth.

Beginning with the first point, we must ask: does God give man authority because he was created first in Genesis?

Here’s the problem:

No good reader of Genesis comes away thinking that first is superior to last.

Genesis 1 says God’s last creation - humanity - rules over God’s first creations. The Image of God, the final creation of day six, is to rule and subdue the animals and land. If woman was made to submit to man because she was formed from him, then man was made to submit to dirt. First-ness is not authority in Genesis or in the Kingdom of God. Genesis consistently foreshadows Jesus’ teaching that “the first shall be last.”

• Abel is righteous, Cain is wicked

• Isaac is chosen over Ishmael

• Jacob is chosen over Esau

• Joseph and Benjamin are Jacob’s favorites

• Judah - the royal line - is the fourth born, not the first

Paul is a Pharisee. He knows Genesis never prioritizes being first. He knows not to equate Adam’s first-ness with fitness to teach or lead.

So why point out that Adam came first?

Remember the point of 1 Timothy. Ephesians are teaching what they do not yet know. They have false theology that must be corrected.

Paul is correcting the false teaching described throughout the rest of the letter! He just said that a woman must learn, and now describes what she must learn.

The Ephesians knew that when Zeus’s twins were born, Artemis, Zeus’s daughter, was born before his son, Apollo. Artemis was born first with a supernatural knowledge for midwifery, allowing her to guide her mother through the long, arduous birth of Apollo. The Ephesians worshiped the goddess of midwifery who protected their women through the travails of childbirth.7

In the Ephesian origin myth, Artemis comes before Apollo. Perhaps this “godless myth” (4:7) had been transported into Ephesus, where Christians began to believe God created woman before man. Paul corrects false teaching: Actually, “Adam was formed first, then Eve.”

Paul then points out that “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” Is Paul arguing that Eve’s deception and transgression mean women are permanently disqualified from teaching or leading men?

Here’s what we know for sure:

Paul does not believe women are uniquely susceptible to deception because of Eve. Here’s 2 Corinthians 11:3:

I fear that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, so y’all’s8 minds might be corrupted from sincere and pure devotion to Christ.

This verse is not addressed to women alone. Paul is also concerned that Corinthian men might be deceived and corrupted like Eve.

Furthermore, in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, Paul blames Adam, not Eve, for sin. Are only men sinners because “sin came into the world through one man” (Romans 5:12)? Of course not!

Paul doesn’t think women are uniquely gullible any more than he thinks men are uniquely sinful.

So why include Eve’s deception?

If women in Ephesus are teaching that Artemis was born with supernatural knowledge, they need to understand that women can be deceived, too. Paul is correcting false teaching, explaining what “a woman must learn” before she can teach. If an Ephesian woman believes she is qualified to teach because she shares Artemis’s supernatural knowledge, she must be reminded that women can be deceived, too. She is not exempt from having to learn before teaching.

This brings us to the strangest, most confusing line in the passage, which finally makes perfect sense in light of Artemis worship in Ephesus:

“She will be saved through childbirth, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”

Does Paul believe women earn salvation by giving birth? Of course not! To interpret this verse literally is heresy, so every egalitarian and complementarian reads this verse contextually. I must ask why we think this verse is contextual if the rest of the passage is a permanent prescription. In verse 15, Paul is correcting false teaching, just as he did in verses 13-14.

In a society that looked to Artemis to save women through childbirth, Paul reminds the Ephesians that the same God who created Adam and Eve is the Author and Sustainer of life. The Ephesians should not look to Artemis for salvation through childbirth, but to God alone. It would be tempting for Ephesians to worship Jesus and make an offering to Artemis during pregnancy. Just in case! We do everything we can to make sure our children are safe, right? And in an ancient world where childbirth was lethal for many women, it was reasonable for a pregnant woman to make sure Jesus and Artemis were looking after her. Paul corrects this idolatry: Jesus will preserve your life through childbirth.

Verses 13-15 are not Paul’s reasons why women cannot teach or lead men. Verses 13-15 are Paul’s correction of false teaching in Ephesus. Paul is laying out good Christian doctrine for “a woman [who] must learn.”

Paradoxically, she can’t teach or lead now because she must learn in order to teach and lead later.

Two final notes.

First… I have argued that Paul says a (particular) woman cannot teach or lead a man because she has not yet learned that God created man first and that the first woman was deceived. But if I’m wrong, if Paul restricts female teaching and leadership because God created man first and because the first woman was deceived, we have an ethical concern.

Restricting women because man is first is explicitly hierarchical language. The assumption that women are vulnerable to deception, while men are not, is an assumption that women are slightly inferior to men. If Paul assumes that women are less qualified to teach or lead because they are second, and because they are easily deceived, we have made Paul into a man who places women slightly below men. Once we have done that, we can look to modern harmful assumptions about female inferiority and justify them as biblical.

Paul did not believe in female inferiority.9 He knows women are the full Image of God. It is crucial for us to understand that verses 13-15 are not the reason women cannot teach or lead. Verses 13-15 are Paul’s correction of false teaching, making it possible for a woman to teach once again.

Finally, in case it’s helpful, here is a paraphrase of 1 Timothy 2:11-15 that reflects the context we are missing by reading as 21st century Christians on the other side of the world:

Because this woman does not yet know the truths of Christianity, she must first learn in silence and with full submission. She has been teaching false doctrines and godless myths while claiming authority she does not rightly have. Therefore, I do not permit her to continue teaching and dominating men. She is to remain silent until she has learned the truth and repented in humility. For she is wrong to say women come before men, like Artemis before Apollo. It was Adam who was formed first, then Eve. And she is wrong to claim men are easily deceived but women have supernatural knowledge like Artemis. For Adam wasn’t deceived, but Eve was deceived and became a transgressor. She is also wrong to claim that Christ's disciples should turn to Artemis for protection during childbirth. No, she will be saved through childbirth and should continue in faith, love, holiness, and self-control.

Two helpful resources:

Nobody’s Mother by Dr. Sandra Glahn

Dozens of excellent articles on 1 Timothy 2 from Marg Mowczko:

https://margmowczko.com/?s=1+timothy+2

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This post is the final installment on a series debunking the myth that Christianity has always been complementarian. I argued that Jesus was not a complementarian, that the Church Fathers and Reformers were not complementarians, that complementarianism is a modern ideology built in reaction to 20th century feminism, that female ordination is traditional Christianity, and finally, that 1 Timothy 2 was not Paul’s argument for complementarianism.

If you’ve benefitted from this series, would you consider upgrading your subscription? I am so grateful for paid subscribers who allow me to continue this work. Just $5/month goes a long way! Consider upgrading your subscription today.

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7

Inchristus 'Stack

Christa L. McKirland on Authority

This podcast is a fine introduction to Christa McKirland‘s upcoming release addressing the nature of authority, the structures of and roles within the church, and some very keen insights on 1 Timothy 2:11-15. Listen carefully and learn from one of the sharpest minds I know…

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a year ago · 1 like · Paul D. Adams

At the dawn of Christianity’s introduction to Ireland, St. Brigid arrived in the town of Kildare to found the monastery where she served as abbess. There, Brigid and nineteen other nuns tended to a sacred fire each night, with Brigid herself stoking the flames every 20th night.

From the 5th century until the 16th century, the nuns of Kildare tended to these flames, nurturing its life for a millennium. The Brigidine sisters left every 20th night open in memory of St. Brigid, and still, the fire burned, until the British invaded Ireland and shut down many of the monasteries. The crown quenched Brigid’s flame.

While Church history is filled with brilliant women of God who excelled in faithfulness to Christ and embodied the virtues of the Kingdom of God, I want to examine the life of this one lesser-known saint.

I could have discussed any number of women from the Scriptures themselves. It’s easy to recognize that nearly every man in the Bible is a complicated mix of positive and negative actions and attributes, with notable exceptions being Abel, Enoch, Melchizedek, Daniel, and of course, Jesus. But did you ever notice that the Scriptures portray many women in an exclusively positive light?

I could write about Deborah, the most celebrated leader in the book of Judges. Contrary to all the male judges, there is not a negative word said about her. She has a husband, and yet she was the authority, and the “sons of Israel went up to her for judgment” (Judges 4:5). This incredible woman led the people of God to 40 years of peace.

I could desribe Huldah, the prophetess consulted by kings of Judah. Like Deborah, she was married, and yet men came to her to learn the things of God. In Huldah’s time, “the word of the Lord” was proclaimed by a woman.

We could consider Anna, the New Testament prophetess who lived in the temple for decades with a stunning devotion to God. When the newborn Messiah entered the temple, she rightly discerned that this child was the redemption of Israel.

Or how about Mary, the sister of Martha, who filled a decidely male role by sitting as a student at the feet of Rabbi Jesus?

Then there’s Mary Magdalene, a disciple of Jesus who remained with Him through the end and became the “apostle to the apostles” as the first witness of the resurrection.

I could also talk about Priscilla, a church-plant extraordinaire, a teacher of teachers, and a confidant of Paul.

Or we could consider Phoebe, Paul’s trusted friend and the first expositor of the epistle to the Romans.

How about Junia, who was not just an apostle, but was named in the Scriptures as a particularly excellent apostle?

There’s also Lydia and Nympha, who hosted churches in their homes.

We could also consider the fact that John wrote a personal epistle to the chosen lady who oversaw a church congregation.

The Bible does not criticize any of these women for leading, teaching, pastoring, prophesying, evangelizing, or proclaiming the word of God, and each of them deserve articles in their honor.

But today, it’s time we meet Brigid.

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St. Brigid of Kildare is quite literally a legendary person. What we know of her life is largely based on hagiographies - intentionally exceptional biographies of the saints. These narratives stretch the truth, not to be misleading, but to present inspirational models of the Christian life for us to follow. There is a lot we don’t know for sure about Brigid, and we can never know how true the legends are, but here’s what we can know. Either:

1. A female saint actually did these extraordinary things, or
2. Later Christians thought it was valuable to have stories of an exceptional female leader to emulate.

From a young age, Brigid committed herself to chastity to honor Christ, but her father wanted her to marry. Rather than submitting to her father’s plans for her, legend has it she burst her own eyeball (!!) so male suitors would lose interest. Once her father saw what she had done, he gave permission for Brigid to take the vow of chastity. Once the vow had been sworn, God miraculously healed her eye.

This was not the only miracle in Brigid’s life. Other stories exalt her as a pinnacle of radical generosity sharing God’s abundance. When she gave away the milk from her family’s cows, the milk would never run out. She would give away bread and there would somehow always be enough.

The book of Isaiah prophesies that a day will come when nations “will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4). One day, a beggar came to Brigid’s door asking for money to buy food. She didn’t have any food to give, so instead, she gave him her father’s sword so he could sell it to buy bread. Brigid transformed a sword into bread for the needy.

This Irish pioneer founded the double monastery at Kildare in the earliest days of Christianity in Ireland. When she first arrived in Kildare, the legend says she didn’t have enough money to buy land for the monastery. She met a landowner and told him her problem, and he responded that if she threw her cloak on the ground, she could keep whatever land it covered. As the story goes, she dropped the cloak to the ground and it began to multiply and spread until it covered acre upon acre.

As the abbess of a double monastery, Brigid didn’t just lead a group of nuns. A double monastery consisted of monks and nuns, and in these double monasteries, “the supreme rule was in the hands of the abbess, and monks as well as nuns were subject to her authority.”1 We know that Brigid was the spiritual authority over this Christian community, just as many abbesses were all over the Christian world. She presided over both male and female followers of Christ who served there.

Brigid’s devotion to Christ was indisputable. She was a potent voice for Jesus, perhaps the most powerful woman in all of Ireland in her day, and well-known as “Mary of the Gael” and “the feminine face of God.” Just as Mary had brought Jesus into the world, Brigid was honored for bringing Jesus into Ireland.

This is where the story gets really interesting. Brigid was ordained a bishop in the Catholic Church. We don’t know exactly how this happened, but one story says that when Bishop Mel came to ordain her as an abbess, he accidentally read the ordination rites for the bishopric. When somebody rebuked Mel for ordaining a woman to this exclusively male office, Mel responded, “No power have I in this matter. That dignity has been given by God to Brigid.”

You may argue that this is a false ordination, but when the Synod of Kells met centuries after Brigid’s death, the Catholic Church felt it necessary to revoke her bishopric due to her gender. You can’t revoke something that hasn’t been given.

Baylor University historian said that “women were ordained for the first thousand years of church history. It is not until the central Middle Ages, when they begin to redefine what it means to be ordained, that women start getting pushed out of ministry.”2 Brigid’s ordination was accepted until this period, until the Church redefined ordination to be exclusively male. Notably, this same period saw the disappearance of double monasteries in the western Church. While the first ten centuries of Christian history saw the radical empowerment of women all over the world, the Medieval Church finally quenched the flame.

When Brigid arrived in Kildare, she lit a flame that burned for 1,000 years.

Despite rampant misogyny, women rose to participate in ordination, leadership, preaching, and ministry for the first 1,000 years of Church history. These women were unstoppable seeds of the gospel, bursting through rocky soil that tried to hold them down. Their flame, vibrantly bringing Christ’s light and warmth to the world, has been a persisten subversion of the status quo, a beautiful portrait to expand our imaginations in gospel light. Challenges to the status quo aren’t usually well received, and Church history is filled with attempts to extinguish the flame of women in church leadership.

Today is February 1st, the annual feast day of St. Brigid, celebrated in anticipation of spring. Just as spring brings new hope and life, so Brigid brought flourishing to Ireland, and so she reminds us that flames that have died can be resurrected once again.

After 400 years of silence, Brigid’s flame was re-lit in Kildare by Brigidine sisters in 1993. It continues to burn brightly to this day. Her fire is a perpetual reminder of the light that shines when a woman of God lives up to the authority God has given her.

May we re-light the flame of women in ministry, that the world may see their light and give glory to God.

Sources:

https://brigidine.org.au/about-us/our-patroness

Farmer, D. H. (1997). The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (4th ed). Oxford University Press.

https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/research/spotlight-research/boss-brigit

https://whatshernamepodcast.com/brigid-of-kildare/

Sandra Glahn's Substack

Women Pastoring: What the Visual Record Reveals

Several years ago, some colleagues and I founded The Visual Museum of Women in Christianity. With the help of volunteers, we’re capturing images from around the world that document women in the visual record of the church. Often the written record emphasizes decisions about problems and debates—certainly not the whole story. Imagine if someone read only…

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a year ago · 44 likes · 1 comment · Sandra Glahn

I see you. We are one in the Body of Christ. We are family. Brothers. Anything that separates us pales in comparison to our unity in the Messiah.

I see how you love the Scriptures, how you passionately pursue God’s truth. I see your faithfulness to God. I see your commitment to truth. I see your humility in submitting to the Bible as an authority higher than yourself.

I see your desire to obey God’s commands. I also know your commitment to godliness. I know how you pursue discipleship, sanctification, and the formation of your soul to honor God in all you do.

I care deeply about your holiness, just as I care deeply about mine. I care about the witness of all God’s church. Even when we differ, I want us to shine - together - like a city on a hill.

God has saved sons and daughters who are being conformed to the Image of His Son. It would be foolish for me to care only about my own holiness, or to only care about the holiness of those Christians who agree with me on everything. Every Christian must have a desire that all of God’s Church would reflect the glory of Christ.

I want you to radiate with the splendor of Christ’s holy character.

And what is Christ’s holy character?

The complementarian website, gotquestions.org, describes Christ’s character this way:

His attitude was that of a servant. He “did not come to be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45). Kindness and selflessness characterized His personality. Jesus was submissive to His Father’s will when He came to earth and subsequently went to the cross … He grew up in a normal (sinful) household, yet, Jesus “was obedient” to His parents (Luke 2:51).

The article goes on to include that “Jesus was a strong but meek leader,” noting that “people were amazed at the authority with which Jesus spoke,” before this beautiful admonition:

All believers should desire to emulate Jesus’ character traits through the power of the Holy Spirit. The things that drew people to Jesus should be the very things that draw people to us. (Italics mine)

I hope you agree that this statement deserves a hearty, “Amen!”

As the article powerfully lays out, some of Jesus’ many godly attributes are:

•Servanthood
•Strength
•Sacrificial kindness
•Leadership
•Submissiveness
•Authority

Maybe you’ve already spotted the apparent paradox here. Because every Christian is called to emulate Christ, all of us should strive for a Christlike character that embodies servanthood and strength, sacrificial kindness and leadership, submissiveness and authority.

This is where I must press you as your brother in Christ.

In your conformity to the Image of the Son, you must never assume servanthood, sacrificial kindness, and submissiveness are traits for female discipleship, nor that strength, leadership, and authority are traits for male discipleship.

These are all traits of Christ, which makes them all traits for Christlike discipleship.

The enemy would love nothing more than to convince men of God that only some of Christ’s attributes are to be emulated.

The devil prowls around like a lion, slithering into our consciences like a crafty serpent, and hisses half-truths by twisting the words of God. “Wives, submit to your husbands” is a command of God. But wouldn’t it be like the enemy to manipulate God’s good command to tempt you into sin? Wouldn’t the enemy be thrilled if you were so focused on your wife’s submission to you that you yourself failed to “submit to others out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21)?

You, man of God, must be willing to submit to other believers. Men and women. This is a command of the Lord, and it is an indispensable practice in being formed in Christlikeness.

The enemy would also love to persuade you that you are owed your wife’s service.

You, man of God, must serve your wife and the women in your church. Christ came to serve and not to be served. Christians do not ask to be served, they follow Christ in service.

You, man of God, are commanded to outdo others in showing honor (Romans 12:10). Christians do not ask to be honored. No, in humility you must consider your wife more important than yourself (see Philippians 2:3). You must strive to give her more honor than she gives you, even as she strives to give you more honor than you give her. You must go out of your way to honor the women in your church, even as they honor you.

The enemy celebrates when men of God scoff at their calling to mirror Christ’s submissiveness, sacrificial kindness, and servanthood, and he rejoices when women of God are devoid of strength, leadership, and authority.

Culture will tell you that women are to be meek, submissive, and gentle. The serpent will lie until you believe these “feminine” traits are beneath you. By God’s power at work in you, may your Christlike strength shape you to be a meek, submissive, gentle servant.

And when you see a woman emulating Christ with strength, leadership, and authority, the world will tell you she’s out of line. May you have the Kingdom of God clarity to see and celebrate her godliness.

In Christ, by the grace of the Father and the power of the Spirit, we are all - male and female - being transformed into Christ’s image from glory to glory!

You and I are both committed to the Scriptures. Yet, we disagree on our interpretation of a few commands of the Lord.

You may be right that wives are called to unique submission to their husbands, and I may be wrong that marriage is a covenant relationship of equal, mutual submission. You may be right that 1 Timothy restricts all women from eldership in the Church, and I may be wrong that those words were unique direction for one leader in one ancient church.

Even as we disagree, may we both remember that Paul sums up all of God’s commands this way:

“All the law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14).

Even if the complementarian framework is correct, every command from the Word of God must fit under the umbrella of “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Assuming you are right about Ephesians 5:22, “wives, submit” must always remain under the greatest command: “love your neighbor [including your wife] just as you love yourself.”

If your wife submits to you in ways that you do not submit to her, you are going to have an extra hurdle in your path towards Christlikeness. You are going to need an abundant outpouring of God’s grace to shield you from ever assuming you are more important than she is. The enemy would love to persuade you that, because your decisions carry more weight, you matter more than she does. You must resist the lies of the devil.

Likewise, male-only eldership must fit within the circle of loving the women in your church just as you love yourself. If men alone are permitted to serve as elders in your church, you’re going to need the Spirit of God to work within you daily, to remind you that your masculinity does not place you in superiority over your sisters in any way. Christians do not assume superiority over others, but love all their brothers and sisters as equals in deed, not in word alone.

History bears the unfortunate truth that far too many men of God have given in to Satan’s lies, falling short of Christlikeness by failing to give their wives and sisters the honor, dignity, and love God requires. May you, by the grace of God, be different.

I’m praying for your sanctification, for the sake of Christ’s Church and for the glory of God.

Your brother,
Nick

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God searched the garden as Adam hid his nakedness. “Where are you?” God’s voice fluttered through the leaves, and Adam staggered out from the bushes, still hiding behind fig leaves and deflection. Standing before his Creator, he betrayed his bone of bone and flesh of flesh, turning his back on Eve and severing their harmony and unity.

God diagnosed a problem then and there. He saw a sickness underlying Adam’s blame-shifting, and offered Eve a forewarning:

“Your desire will be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”
Genesis 3:16

While Eve will long for Edenic unity and harmony, God knows Adam has already separated himself from her to stand above her. She desires him. He desires “rule.” She wants garden unity. He wants control.

This is the Hebrew Bible’s origin story for a virus that has plagued human history: the cursed assumption that men are fit to rule over women.

Most men don’t make misogynistic claims aloud anymore. But viruses mutate to survive, and the misogynistic pathogen lives on in our silent assumptions.

How Sexism Spreads

Misogyny has been forced underground. Feminist movements of the 20^th century made it wildly unpopular to be blatantly sexist in the United States, so the narrative can only spread in silent assumptions.

Philosopher Michael Novak offers us a helpful framework, describing three levels of belief.

The first level is public belief: what you say you believe. This is deeply influenced by your audience - public belief is what you want other people to believe you believe. Public beliefs don’t reflect who you really are, but who you want people to think you are.

The next level is private belief: what you think you believe. While public belief is about convincing others, private belief is about convincing yourself. Private belief is what you want to believe you believe. Private beliefs are more likely to reflect who you really are than public beliefs, but they are still unreliable.

The final level is core belief: what you truly believe. Core belief is what your actions prove you really believe. No matter what a person or institution says, their actions prove what they really believe.

Integrity is the integration of your public, private, and core beliefs. When our actions don’t match our words, we are dis-integrated, and our character disintegrates.

Although there are extremist outliers, most men do not publicly disparage women. Misogyny has largely disappeared from society’s public belief, but our actions betray us. We’re dis-integrated. The systems and severity of a misogynistic world remain, even as sexist speech disappears.

Instead of cutting down the tree, we’ve made it invisible.

Like an invisible virus, sexist ideas are more “caught” than “taught.” I don’t think there are many fathers who sit their sons down and tell them women are inferior. But I do think nearly every boy “catches” sexist assumptions merely by breathing the air we’re living in.

defines misogyny as “the persistent insidious belief that men’s ideas, wants, needs, and experiences are more important than women’s.”1 Misogyny is a systemic narrative that casts men to play the central roles while women offer support from the sidelines.2 Men and women are performing these roles on misogyny’s stage everywhere and every day, so we normalize these performances, assuming they are just the way men and women are. We think we’re watching God’s created order. We’re really watching a stage show.

Living on misogyny’s stage, men catch the idea that we know better than women because we are natural leaders and thinkers. Nobody tells us women aren’t as smart or capable as men, we just notice that presidents and CEOs and pastors are like us. We notice that the doctors are men and the nurses are women, that the superintendents and principals are men and the teachers are women.

In many cases, we notice that dad seems to have more say than mom, even though mom is around a lot more.

We notice that the superheroes and main characters of all our favorite movies are men, and that women are either love interests or side characters in need of rescue.

We catch the idea that playing with “girl toys” or watching “girl shows” is beneath us.

We overhear enough “locker room talk” to teach us there must be a certain way men are supposed to think about women.

Ironically, we’ve been deceived into believing women are more easily deceived.

We come to assume the female mind is controlled by fleeting impulses and strong emotions, even though our own minds are constantly controlled by fleeting impulses and strong emotions.

From a young age, the narrative tells us to objectify women,3 to assume they exist for our pleasure and our service. We learn that women need us, assuming they are childishly dependent upon our protection, and never realizing that they wouldn’t need a man’s protection if men would stop harming them in the first place.

I’m not saying all of these assumptions control the life of every man in America. I don’t think all men are evil bigots. But because we’re Truman Show characters on misogyny’s stage, every man has several of these assumptions running through their subconscious imagination, whether they are aware of them or not. We think we’re seeing objective reality, but we’re actually surrounded by a performance of gender, orchestrated by powers and principalities hidden from our sight.

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Sexism at Work in Me

Few men admit that sexism or misogyny could still affect them in 2026. So let me go first.

I don’t fit the mold of a sexist. I have been advocating for female ordination and equality in marriage for a decade. I don’t try to lead my wife or tell her what to do. I don’t think I have any kind of tie-breaker over her. I’ve always been loyal to my wife. I don’t consume pornography. I’m intentionally raising my sons to empower women.

As far as my conscious, rational thoughts go, sexism is not an issue for me.

But we all live on misogyny’s stage.

Even as a man who has done the work to root out sexism, I can’t assume I’m free of it. It still hides in my automatic assumptions, split-second thoughts, and gut-level reactions. It exists like an intrusive thought, a survivor from ages past, a sin that so easily entangles (Hebrews 12:1), an invisible weapon of the powers and principalities.

Men, unless you have been completely transformed by the grace of God and His Spirit at work within you, there is sexism at work in you. That doesn’t mean you’re evil or that you hate women. It means you live in a society that puts on a misogynistic show, and you must consciously choose to play another part every day of your life.

Puritan theologian John Owen said we must be killing sin or it will be killing us. Sexism is entrenched in the male conscience, wrapping its tendrils around us and poisoning our thoughts. If we do not struggle against this beast, it will be killing us, and women will face the consequences. This sin destroys our character by filling us with pride, arrogance, lust, entitlement, and silent contempt for half the Image of God.

Do not let Sin run rampant within you. Do not give Satan a foothold. Misogyny is a problem for women, but it is not a female problem. This is a male problem that men must solve.

Every man who has been baptized into Christ must die to sexism.

Misogyny’s Fruit

Trigger warning: sexual violence.

When systemic sins of racism and white supremacy and brought into the light, the darkness lashes out in denial. “I’m not a racist!” “I dont’ have a racist bone in my body!”

I can only assume a similar impulse rises up in many men when challenged with their own sexism. So let’s examine some trends.

A recent study found that 5.5% of the world’s CEOs are women. The United States has had two chances to elect a female president, and both times we elected a man who loudly sexualizes women and who has now been found guilty of sexual abuse in the court of law. This is a problem in the world, but the evangelical church plays on misogyny’s stage, too. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination and the denomination I was raised in, disfellowships churches who empower women but claims local church autonomy prevents them from holding churches accountable when they employ sexual offenders as pastors. They can overstep local church autonomy to protect congregations from female preachers, but not from male abusers. These actions only make sense if the SBC has accepted misogyny’s narrative.

A recent CDC study found that nearly half of women have experienced sexual violence, nearly a third have experiened public verbal sexual harassment, and more than a fifth have been raped.

If men have overcome sexism, we would see evidence. Instead, we see Sin at work in the world, the consequences of the curse tearing through our society and our relationships.

So… What About Complementarianism?

American men rebuke sexism in the light of day, but the statistics reveal that many continue believing sexist thoughts and acting out misogynistic impulses in the dark of night. In the world and in the church, we face a crisis of hypocrisy. Our actions don’t match our words.

By the 1980s, American Evangelical Christianity had seen the feminist movement and knew they had to pivot. The majority Church had always taught female submission based on female inferiority, accepting misogyny’s narrative instead of renewing their minds in accord with the biblical narrative. But female inferiority was no longer an acceptable public belief.

This moment offered the church an opportunity. If sexism is a sin that has run unchecked, and if feminism brought that darkness into the light, we should have responded with humility and repentance. We should have acknowledged our sins, rebuked misogyny, repented of our errors, and committed to following Jesus on the narrow path away from sin. We should have recognized the ways we’ve performed the curse of Genesis 3, and we should have reclaimed Genesis 2 harmony and unity in Christ.

That’s not what happened. Denny Burk, the current president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), the institution that coined the word “complementarian,” describes the reaction this way:

In 1986, John Piper, Wayne Grudem, Susan Foh, Wayne House and a handful of others met in Atlanta, Georgia to strategize a biblical response to a rising tide of feminism that they perceived within evangelicalism. A year later in 1987, they met again, this time in Danvers, Massachusetts to finalize a theological statement of principles for a new organization that they wished to found. That statement became known as The Danvers Statement, which summarizes the Bible’s teaching about male and female roles within the church and the home. In 1988, a year after The Danvers Statement was published to the world, the term complementarian was coined as a label for their position. (Italics mine)4

Instead of taking the opportunity to repent of sin, evangelicals met “to strategize.” Anytime I’m confronted with my sin, my gut instinct is to strategize. Strategizing is a protective mechanism to avoid admitting my flaws, to shield me from the hard work of repentance.

This strategizing session developed the Danvers Statement, which preserved traditional Christianity and remained on misogyny’s stage with its claim that “distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God.” On the other hand, the statement also (rightly) departed from much of traditional Christianity by claiming that men and women are “equal before God as persons.”

In 1988, complementarianism became a new American theology, a modern development reacting to American feminism.

Presented with an opportunity to reject the roles misogyny wants us to play, the Danvers Statement instead baptized these roles as “ordained by God.” It’s important to clarify that complementarianism is not a bigoted, backwards, old-fashioned fundamentalism surrounded by an enlightened world of male and female equality. No, complementarianism performs the same roles the world performs5. Complementarianism is not a uniquely oppressive system. It just accepts the premise of a pre-existing system that Christians should reject.6

J. Kameron Carter’s words sum this up brilliantly:

Christian thought has tended to ventriloquize the American social order rather than witness to an alternative form of sociopolitical existence. Theology’s failure [leaves us] with no live alternative by which to (re)imagine the world.7

Because complementarianism embraces the roles misogyny casts men and women into, it exists like a puppet controlled by the invisible hand of “the American social order.” As a theology that hasn’t looked beyond the way things currently are, complementarianism has been unable to behold the gender dynamics of New Creation. A theology that only looks to “all things old” can never imagine “all things new.”

Scripture profoundly and beautifully subverts the misogynistic metanarrative, but when you’ve only read the Bible while standing on misogyny’s stage, it’s natural to assume the Scriptures take that story for granted as well. May we have eyes to see that God actually calls us into a radically new, radically different, radically uncomfortable biblical narrative. But the only path to resurrection is death. We must die to old stories to be resurrected within the story of Scripture. It is impossible to perform the roles of misogyny and the Kingdom of God at the same time.

It hurts to repent. It’s painful to reject the story you’ve always known. But the Church exists, in part, to reveal an alternative social reality. What if we were the shining city on a hill, revealing the way things ought to be? What if we rejected misogyny’s narrative and allowed God to completely baptize us into Scripture’s narrative? What if we were a community completely free of sexist assumptions? What if the world knew us as a unique people who treat every single person with surprising dignity, regardless of gender, race, social status, financial status, or political party? Can the Church be the counter-reality that reveals the brokenness of misogyny and re-makes the world by the power of the Spirit at work in us?

What if Christian homes modeled the mutual submission of Ephesians 5:21 as husbands gave their wives more honor than themselves (Romans 12:10)? What if young men could catch Christlikeness, not sexism, from the narratives that surrounded them? What if the church was one place where boys never saw women harmed, disparaged, minimized, infantalized, or shoved to the side? What if Christian communities modeled a new world for Christian boys and girls? What if young men raised in our churches didn’t have any silent assumptions about female inferiority? What if young women in our churches were free to be who God has made them to be?

In a world that malforms men and abuses women, may the Church be an alternative reality, liberating the male imagination from the chains of sexism, and freeing women from misogyny’s abuses.

It’s time to play our part in the story God is telling in the world. Let’s step onto Christ’s stage.

Misogyny is a prison the Church has been unable to escape.

As conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted on X, “Traditional gender roles are not a ‘trend.’ They were the norm everywhere on Earth for all of human history until 15 seconds ago.”

Exactly.

There is nothing distinctly Christian about these roles. They existed before Christianity, and they continue to exist in places where Christianity has no influence. When these gender roles are present in the Church and in Christian homes, they reveal our failure to see beyond walls constructed long before Jesus and the apostles came along. They are capitulation to the way things have always been.

Three and a half centuries before Jesus walked the earth, Aristotle posited that “the female is, as it were, a deformed male.”1 Women, in his view, were somehow defective or incomplete, falling short of the ideal masculine human. This belief didn’t stay confined to the realm of philosophy, but overflowed into the structures of real life:

“A husband and father, we saw, rules over wife and children … the male is by nature fitter for command than the female, just as the elder and full-grown is superior to the younger and more immature…”2

The man of the household was the master over all others because he was superior to all others. Aristotle’s vision profoundly influenced the Roman world, and no good Roman doubted that husbands had authority over their wives or that the public sphere was solely reserved for men. In the Roman world, wives were to submit to their husbands and women were restricted from authority in the public sphere. This was not a Christian idea, but a Greco-Roman norm that predated Christianity by centuries.

Explicit misogyny has permeated world history, and followers of Jesus are called to be the storytellers helping people imagine a new world in Christ. Our role is to see beyond “the way things have always been,” to envision New Creation reality. When we can’t see the Kingdom, we are bound to emulate the world around us. But once we’ve been captivated by Jesus’ vision, we are free to participate with Him in making all things new.

When it comes to misogyny, Church history reveals we have fallen short of our calling.

The following quotes come from the incredible work of Marg Mowczko. If you haven’t discovered her site, your time would be best spent closing out of this tab and reading as much of her work as you can.

Here is a small sampling of misogyny espoused by the heroes and legends of Church history, from the 2nd Century through the Reformation. While these men were theological giants who admirably modeled the way of Christ in many ways, they failed to rise above the common misogyny that surrounded them.

Irenaeus:
•“Both nature and the law place the woman in a subordinate condition to the man.”

Origen:
•“God does not stoop to look upon what is feminine and of the flesh.”

Augustine:
•“Woman was given to man, woman who was of small intelligence.”
•“The woman herself alone…is not the image of God; but as regards the man alone, he is the image of God…fully and completely.”

Thomas Aquinas:
•“Woman is naturally of less strength and dignity than man.”
•“Woman is defective and misbegotten… the production of women comes from a defect.”3
•“Woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates.”

Martin Luther:
Woman has “a mind weaker than man … she did not equal the glory of the male creature.”

John Calvin:
“All women are…inferior in consequence to the superiority of the male sex.”

Complementarians are correct to say historic Christianity taught female submission in the church and the home. Unfortunately, for most of Church history, female submission was directly linked to a belief in female inferiority. It was, therefore, a Greco-Roman value, not a Christian one.

While complementarian logic says women are called to submit despite their equality, the traditional logic of the Church says that women must submit because they are inferior. The Church Fathers and Reformers did not hold to modern complementarianism, and while complementarians rightfully rebuke their past language of inferiority, they attempt to keep the fruit while cutting down the tree.

John Calvin, in his commentary on 1 Timothy 2:12, said:

“Woman…is formed to obey; for the government of women has always been regarded by all wise persons as a monstrous thing; and, therefore, so to speak, it will be a mingling of heaven and earth4, if women usurp the right to teach. Accordingly, he bids them be ‘quiet,’ that is, keep within their own rank.”5

While Christians are called to “an exegetical imagination that reads against rather than within the social order,”6 it is obviously possible to read the Bible in a way that confirms what we already believe, rather than conforming us to the Image of the Son. Calvin was pulled along by his Aristotelian misogyny in his exegesis of 1 Timothy. He claimed women must be quiet, not merely because the Bible said so, but because they must “keep within their own rank.” Calvin read with a hierarchical hermeneutic and tried to sanctify his discrimination as biblical.

The Bible does not teach that women are unintelligent, fleshly, defective, or second rank. Yet some of the greatest theologians in history taught these things because they failed to escape “the futile conduct inherited from [their] ancestors” (1 Peter 1:18).

These men were not evil. They were and are a gift to the church. But they had a log in their eye that kept them imprisoned in the world’s misogyny long after Jesus had unlocked the door. They were blind to Jesus’ vision of an alternative society that equally values all people, so they perpetrated the gendered hierarchy of Rome. When they spoke about women, they were not transformed by the renewing of their minds, but were utterly conformed to the patterns of the world.

The renewal of complementarian minds has distanced them from the blatantly misogynistic language of the past. Praise be to God. But has that renewal transformed their reality, or just their words?

Complementarians claim female equality, but they emulate the ancient gender roles of the Roman forum and Roman homes. They preserve the hierarchy of misogyny while distancing themselves from the language of misogyny. Complementarianism performs misogyny even as it rejects misogynistic speech. Like the Church Fathers and Reformers before them, they are not evil. They are prisoners to an ancient lie.

Jesus stands before them, holding the unlocked door wide open: “The truth will set you free!”

For most of human history, female inferiority was a safe public belief. The men quoted in this article defamed women with no fear of repercussion.

We still have a long way to go, but the world is slowly catching up to Jesus’ empowerment of women. The Holy Spirit at work in the world has made blatant misogyny unacceptable, and while there are extremist outliers, it’s generally not acceptable to slander women today, thanks be to God.

The world has changed, so if a person or an institution still wants women to “keep within their own rank,” it’s no longer prudent to publish that in a Bible commentary. Instead, if core beliefs about female inferiority persist, they must be hidden beneath carefully curated language about equal dignity and separate roles.

That is precisely what has happened, and we’ll turn to that story in part 3.

I made the claim that complementarianism can only claim separate roles but equal dignity because it is built on this shaky foundation, valuing the equal dignity of the female soul while paradoxically subjugating women to men. I proposed a Christian alternative: a community that affirms equal dignity must offer equal agency. In a church that follows Christ’s example, male and female words must have equal authority, their work must be equally valuable, and their agency must be equally powerful.

Part 2 of this series (still coming soon!) will make the argument that the Church Fathers and Reformers were not complementarian.

But before we can get there, I need to clear some things up.

Since posting part 1, I’ve received some really helpful pushback that reminded me this is about so much more than complementarian vs. egalitarian. This is about our fundamental vision of what it means to be human in a Christian imagination. This is about discipleship to Christ and the purpose of human life.

I had to come back to a formative book for my faith: Dr. Haley Goranson Jacob’s Conformed to the Image of His Son: Reconsidering Paul’s Theology of Glory in Romans. Dr. Jacob notes that Paul equates sin with a loss of glory in Romans. In Romans 1:23, humanity has exchanged the glory of God for images of idols (notice we traded “glory” for “images” - we’ll come back to that.) In Romans 3:23, all humanity has sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.

Sandwiched between chapter 1 and chapter 3, Paul says eternal life is given to those who seek glory and honor by doing good (2:7), and in fact, glory and honor are given to those who do good (2:10). What is this glory and honor? It’s certainly not the hidden dignity of a invisible soul.

No, for Dr. Jacob, Paul’s theology of glory rests on Psalm 8, where the psalmist says to God:

You crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands.
Psalm 8:5-6

To be crowned with the glory and honor that Paul speaks of is to receive dominion over God’s creation. God has set all things under our feet. Human glory is not internal and invisible. Our dignity is our royal vocation.

This is why, in Romans 8, creation eagerly longs for the revelation of the children of God. Humanity has exchanged and fallen short of our glory. We have cast our crowns into the dust, and creation is desperate for us to pick them back up. Romans 8:21 says “the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Creation’s freedom from decay depends upon human glory. Why?

Our dignity is our royal vocation to rule creation with God. This rule is not a domination that enslaves creation, but a cultivation that sets creation free from decay. It’s the rule of a tiller, not a tyrant. Human “rule” is glorious care for creation with the God who makes all things new.

In the beginning, humanity was created in the Image of God to “have dominion over” creation (Genesis 1:26). The first thing God ever says to humanity is “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion” (Genesis 1:28). The Image of God is not a priceless soul. It is the physical human being who visibly reveals God by gloriously caring for God’s creation until creation is free from decay.

Dr. Jacob quotes Dane Ortlund:

Paul would define glory as that which visibly represents a beautiful God. One thinks, for example, of the theophanic cloud of glory that was the tangible representation of Yahweh. [There is a] close connection between image and glory… Glorification, then, is the restatement of the divine image. It is to be rehumanized.

Human beings are glorious because we are the Image of God. Image and glory are intertwined. But we have exchanged that glory for images of idols. We have fallen short of our glory. As Dr. Jacob claims, our sin makes us “sub-human.” But thanks be to God, we are “rehumanized” as we are “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29) and “called,” “justified,” and “glorified” (Romans 8:30). To be the Image of God is to be glorious.

All of us … are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:18

Humanity visibly represents the glory of God in the world as we rule creation with God. We don’t participate in Adam’s fallen glory anymore. Christ has liberated us from the dominion of Sin and Death, freeing us to reclaim our rightful dominion by participating in the Second Adam and the Lord of all creation. As Dr. Jacob says, humanity’s “exalted status [is of] those who participate in the sovereign rule of Christ.”

Our glory is inseparable from our rule, and our dignity is inseparable from our agency as the Image of God, which is restored as we are conformed to the Image of the Son.

Dignity belongs to all human beings, not because we possess a priceless soul inside, but because our “outside” looks like God. An “image” of a deity must be honored as the deity itself. A statue of Baal or Zeus would be treated with utmost respect, because how you treat the “image” is how you treat the god. But the image of Yahweh is not like the statues of Baal or Zeus. Those statues have no life and no agency.

Yahweh breathed life into His dusty statues and gifted them the freedom and power to rule over creation. The Image of God is embodied and active. Human glory is inseparable from human agency.

Men image God as they act in godliness in a unique way.

Women image God as they act in godliness in a unique way.

Children image God as they act in godliness in a unique way.

Those with mental or physical disabilities image God as they act in godliness in a unique way.

As Ian Lasch says, “autistic people, by virtue of being autistic, show us something about the Image of God that we can’t see elsewhere.” Autistic agency, though it looks different from neurotypical agency, reveals a dimension of God that we would otherwise miss. Neurodivergent glory is part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world.

We’re finally ready to return to complementarianism.

It is true that female agency may look different than male agency. Female glory looks different than male glory. So why do I take issue with complementarians claiming different roles but equal dignity for men and women?

Women, because they are women, reveal something about the Image of God that we cannot see in men. I take issue with a complementarianism that obscures the female Image of God from view by restricting her God-given right to dominion with Christ.

God instructed the first male and female to “have dominion” and “subdue.” Female glory is human glory. God gives “glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, both the Jew first and the Greek. For God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:10-11). The glory of ruling with Christ is for everyone. God shows no partiality - He does not consider gender before he calls us to rule.

Women and men are conformed to Christ’s image (Romans 8:29), which means women and men are predestined, called, justified, and glorified (Romans 8:30). No complementarian disputes that women are equally justified, but we must also affirm that men and women are equally called and glorified as well. A woman’s God-given glory is her God-given agency to rule. To rob her of agency is to dehumanize her, to make her something less than the Image of God.

God doesn’t just create women in the Image of God, but also glorifies women. Those we have dehumanized, God has rehumanized.

If women are fully human, then a woman’s “exalted status [is of] those who participate in the sovereign rule of Christ.” Complementarians have been so focused on the role of women, they have missed the rule of women. Men and women do not exist in a hierarchy of authority and submission. They are co-rulers competing to give honor away as they mutually submit to one another (see Romans 12:10 and Ephesians 5:21).

Women stand beside men to rule creation with Christ.

They are crowned with glory and honor.

What God has given women, let no man take away.

If you’re nodding along with the claims I’ve made here, but you feel stuck because you also see God’s Word restricting women from teaching and holding authority over men in 1 Timothy 2, I hope this is helpful:

There has never been a female pope. Bishops, cardinals, and presidents of denominations and seminaries are almost always men. The overwhelming majority of pastors and elders throughout Church history have been male. Even in today’s egalitarian denominations, male pastors still constitute the majority. In 2014, just 27% of United Methodist pastors were women. My denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, has ordained women since its founding in 1908. Still, in 2019, just 9% of Nazarene pastors were women.

I once had a well-meaning agnostic friend tell me, “I don’t know, when I think of a minister, I just think of a man. Something about a woman in that role just doesn’t feel right.” No religious reasons. No Bible verse. Just vibes.

Most Americans equate “pastor” with “male,” because in most cases, pastors are male. It’s no surprise, then, that we assume the global Church has always taught that men and women have different roles despite their equal dignity. So, can we say that Christianity has always been complementarian? Or is that a myth we need to bust?

“Equal in dignity but different in roles” is the heartbeat of complementarianism, and it’s a logic that makes perfect sense to us. But that’s not true for all people everywhere. It is a logic built on our unique understanding of what it means to be human.

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What is a Human?

Fish don’t know the water they’re swimming in, and most of us (people living in the post-Enlightenment west) live blissfully unaware that we have a very strange definition of what it means to be human.

The internet commonly attributes this quote to C.S. Lewis: “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

Lewis never said that, but it’s popular because we like it. It agrees with our definition of a human being: a human is valuable because of the eternal and invisible soul within, in spite of their visible but decaying body.

This is not biblical Christianity, but it has unfortunately become popular Christianity.

For centuries, the western church has taught this conflation of Jesus and Plato, combining the Jewish Messiah’s Kingdom of Heaven with the Greek philosopher’s abstract invisible realm of “forms.” These ideas were condemned as heresies over 1,500 years ago, yet they continually pervade pop theology2.

Our answer to “what is a human?” is different than Jesus’ answer, and that’s a problem. While Jesus, like us, affirms the equal dignity of all human beings, He doesn’t have a priceless soul in mind. His anthropology was built upon the Hebrew Scriptures which start the human story with God playing in the dust to shape the divine image from the newborn earth’s raw material. The first human was not a soul given a body, but a clay sculpture animated by the breath of God.

In the Hebrew imagination, human beings are the Image of God, male and female3, equally reflecting God’s glory as living dust breathes God’s breath and images God in the world. We are not individual souls, but bodies, created equal in dignity as the physical Image of God.4

In Genesis 1:26, God says “let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion…” “Let us” and “let them.” Just as God has power and freedom to create, so humanity, in God’s likeness, has power and freedom to care for creation. Human dignity is fulfilled in human agency. Dignity always comes with agency.

Biblical Dignity

When the Hebrew Scriptures talk about dignity, they use the word “kavod,” which metaphorically means glory, honor, and dignity, but literally comes from the word for “heavy.”

In the ancient world, making purchases by weight was common (think weighing your deli meat or produce!) The heavier something is, the more value it has.

In the Hebrew imagination, and therefore the imagination of Jesus and the apostles, “heavy” became a metaphor synonymous with worth, value, honor, glory, importance, significance. When somebody has dignity, their presence and their voice weighs something. They matter. Their presence matters. Their voice matters. A person with dignity has agency.

When a king was honored and respected, he had the freedom and power to do what he wanted. His dignity matched his agency. A slave, on the other hand, lacked honor and freedom and power. His lack of dignity matched his lack of agency. Nobody in the ancient world believed kings and slaves were equal in dignity, because their inequality in agency was apparent.5

Because we have assumed that human dignity is the inherent ethereal worth of an invisible soul, we have come to believe we can claim all humans are created equal in dignity, even as we treat people with unthinkable inequality.6 The ancient world was unjust, but at least they were honest.

The Scriptures ask more of us. In the Hebrew imagination, there is no disconnect between a person’s dignity and the actual treatment they receive in real life. If we believe people have have equal dignity, we also give them equal agency. Because “God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11), we also should not show partiality (James 2:1). “Love your neighbor as yourself” is not just hollow kindness. It is God’s will to restore humanity’s interconnectedness. Because the lowest slave was made for the same agency as the highest king, God says the highest king should love the lowest slave the same way he loves himself. Similarly, Paul says “husbands should love their wives as their own bodies” (Ephesians 5:28). If a husband doesn’t subjugate the agency of his own body, he is not to restrict the agency of his wife either.

Complementarian Dignity

The foundational claim of complementarianism is that male and female roles are equal, yet different. I actually don’t disagree. “Husband” and “wife” are “equal, yet different.” “Father” and “mother” are “equal, yet different.”7

So what’s the problem?

Complementarians do not offer equal agency, so they cannot claim equal dignity. To claim equality within a biblical worldview, male and female words must have equal authority, their work must be equally valuable, and their agency must be equally powerful. That is simply what it means to be equal.

In the church, if only men are allowed to be pastors or elders, then male agency is expressed while female agency is silenced. In this scenario, men act out their freedom and power while women cannot.

In the home, if a wife must submit to her husband’s authority, if he has the tie-breaker in a disagreement, and if he can teach her, but she can’t teach him, then he has freedom and power while her agency is restricted. If there is not equal agency, it is dishonest to claim equal dignity.

Complementarian dignity is hollow. It celebrates the equality of invisible souls while subjugating real bodies and real lives. To claim equal dignity, there must be equal agency.

Why Jesus Can’t Be a Complementarian

Complementarianism only works if you have defined dignity as internal and invisible. Jesus and the apostles did not. Jesus believed all people were equally the Image of God, so He actually treated all people as the Image of God. Jesus didn’t ignore beggars, nor did he bow to Pilate or the high priest. He actually gave lepers and lords equal agency. Prostitutes and princes are on even ground before Jesus.

When Jesus appears before the most powerful man in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, the Jewish Messiah reminds the Roman Prefect of his lack of agency: “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). But when Jesus meets the Syrophoenician woman, she challenges Him and He listens to her voice and changes His mind8. When He meets the woman at the well, He listens to her and sends her back into her village with a newly empowered voice9. When Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and Martha reminds them of how traditional gender roles are supposed to work, Jesus emphasizes Mary’s agency to choose the better thing10.

Jesus doesn’t just believe men and women are equal in dignity. He gives them equal agency.

The Scriptures tell us that our love for one another is “not in word or speech but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18). When Christian men claim female equality while silencing women and robbing them of agency, they falsely love in word and speech while quenching love in deed and truth. Noisy gongs and clanging cymbals.

To be like Jesus is to restore the voice and the agency of those who have had their voice and their agency restricted. If all people have equal dignity, all people have equal agency. This is not about intrinsic value. This is about lived reality. Let’s love our sisters as ourselves.

Edit: Since posting this article yesterday, I’ve realized it’s important to define what I mean by “agency.” I’ve been thinking about what it means for my young children to have full Imago Dei dignity, despite the fact that their physical and mental limitations limit their agency, and despite the fact that I must limit their agency to keep them safe. What does it mean to say a person with a physical or mental disability still has complete dignity, even if they lack a certain agency?

Here’s where I’m leaning right now: Christian agency is not a libertarian freedom to do whatever I wish (“Don’t tread on me!”) Instead, it’s a person’s freedom to be who God has created them to be. My 3 year old doesn’t have agency to drive the car or use the stove, but I’m quite certain God did not create him to do those things at age 3.

On the other hand, if agency is a person’s freedom to be who God has created them to be, we ought to view children and people with disabilities through a brand new lens. One of my favorite quotes is from Ian Lasch, who says: “Autistic people, by virtue of being autistic, show us something about the Image of God that we can’t see elsewhere.” If an autistic person’s unique agency as an autistic person is stifled, they are not free to be who God has created them to be, and we will miss out on a beautifully unique view of the Image of God. If I am overprotective as a parent and stifle my children’s agency more than is necessary, they are not free to be who God has created them to be, and I have robbed them of dignity. I should be able to see something unique about the childlike Image of God in them.

Let’s bring this back to the topic at hand. In Genesis 1, “female” is the Image of God just as “male” is, and they are both called to “rule” and “subdue,” together. If a woman’s freedom to be who God has created her to be is stifled, she is not free to be who God created her to be, and we will miss out on what is uniquely feminine in the Image of God.

There’s rarely anything funny about kings taking a stand and rulers conspiring. When powerful people take what they want, powerless people are left to suffer and die. It’s not funny. And yet…

He who sits in the heavens laughs.

Why?

In John 15, Jesus paints an image in our minds: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Four chapters later, Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate with His life on the line, and utters words that few people on death row would be courageous enough to say:

“You would have no power over me…” (John 19:11).

Jesus knows that Pilate is a severed branch lying on the ground, powerless to produce fruit. God knows that kings taking their stand are chaff scattered in the wind.

Many powerful men have believed they could play god. But that’s just it. They’re playing god, like school children bossing each other around on the playground.

Can we envision tyrants as small children, pretending to be powerful, playing god? Can we laugh, with the One who sits in the heavens, as kings take their silly little stands, and as rulers make their goofy little plans?

We need laughter.

Every other minute, we learn of another “powerful” person who has unleashed harm and death. Their destruction is very real, so perhaps laughing feels wrong. Real lives are destroyed. Real people are killed. That absolutely deserves to be lamented and grieved.

When tragedy strikes, the mighty often sit back and laugh, terribly unmoved by their acts of evil. They steal, kill, destroy, and laugh without concern as their victims wail and mourn in ashes.

So, whose side is God on? Does he mourn with victims? Or laugh with oppressors?

In the movies, when the bad guy is just about to kill the good guy, the good guy may start to laugh in the face of death.

Why?

Because he knows something the bad guy doesn’t know. Then comes the twist: Help bursts into the room, a trap door opens up, or the monster catches the bad guy.

God laughs because He knows something the bad guys don’t know.

The wicked plot against the righteous
and gnash their teeth at them,
but the Lord laughs at the wicked,
for he sees that their day is coming.

Psalm 37:12-13

When Jesus breathed his last, the bad guy thought he had won. Jesus woke up and laughed.

We laugh in the face of life and cry in the face of death. But in the upside-down Kingdom of God, a truer reality emerges. Sarah laughed at the very thought of life emerging from her “dead” womb, but perhaps she should have laughed at the absurd idea that a womb could overpower God’s life-giving power. Isaac - named for his mother’s laughter - is a testimony to the power of life and a mockery of the power of Death. God’s ability to create life is power. Death is nothing.

A baby screams because she’s powerless to accomplish anything on her own. She makes loud demands until someone does her bidding. When I say “no” to my 3-year-old, he often tries to push or hit me because he has no actual power to control me.

Despots who get loud, make threats, and perpetrate violence are not powerful. They are infants throwing tantrums, and their supposed power is hilarious. They are a mockery, an embarrassment, a humiliating spectacle standing before the Lord of lords and Creator of all.

Rulers, kings, and tyrants unleash very real harm and death into the world, and God certainly grieves with us. Every precious human life lost is a beloved and priceless son or daughter of God. But God also laughs. Because God knows Death is nothing, and those who wield it are powerless.

God grieves because God suffers death with us. But God laughs because death is not the end.

Pilate brought Jesus into the illusion of Death’s permanence. But Death, like Pilate, has no power over Jesus. He’s the very Source of Life. As long as Death is the only weapon tyrants have, they have nothing. Jesus overcomes Death simply by taking a breath. Every breath we take is a mockery of Death. Each time we laugh, we put Death to shame. One day, the “dead in Christ will rise” (1 Thessalonians 4:16), and those who Death had conquered will also begin to breathe once again.

Jesus is victorious over Death, and wicked rulers have nothing left. The good guy has stormed in to steal the bad guy’s weapon. Colossians 2:15 says Jesus’ crucifixion disarms the powers and authorities by making a public spectacle of them in their defeat. He doesn’t just overcome Sin and Death. He laughs at them. He humiliates them. He makes a mockery of them. His cruciform judgment is the revelation of their utter stupidity. Fraudulent kings are court jesters, playing silly games while the King laughs at their nonsense. They act as if the world is in their hands, and the Creator just chuckles.

The emperor has no clothes. We usually pretend we don’t notice, so we fit in, and so the emperor doesn’t kill us. But the correct response is to laugh at his nakedness.

To be clear, every human being is worthy of dignity as the Image of God. We don’t make a mockery of human dignity. We laugh at the amusing spectacle of powerless people believing they can play god in a very public manner. We don’t mock the emperor’s humanity, we laugh at his attempt to show off his royal robe when he’s actually marching through the streets naked. We laugh at his attempts to intimidate us with a gun that has been emptied of bullets.

The spiritual forces of darkness and the human agents of evil only threaten us with the illusion of Death’s finality. The world quakes at their empty threat. We do grieve the loss of precious human life, but we also remember the truth:

Tyrants are children playing god, dead branches scattered on the ground. It’s hilariously embarrassing.

We laugh with God in resurrection light.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good glass of eggnog, the warmth of a room dimly lit by a Christmas tree, and the magic anticipation of early Christmas morning.

But I was a little grumpy about Christmas.

Sure, Christmas was a special time of year, but I was never quite sure how my faith fit into it. Christmas seemed so theologically insignificant next to Easter, and I couldn’t understand why we poured more time, energy, and money into celebrating Christ’s birth than His death and resurrection.

But something changed in 2020.

In the midst of the chaos that consumed that year, I found rare moments of stillness lulling my own newborn son to sleep. I would put in an earbud and carry him in circles as he drifted off to sleep.

One particular day, reeling from a pandemic, a hostile election, and the death of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, O Holy Night began to play. I didn’t think much of it until I heard these words:

Long lay the world, in sin and error pining.

In 2020, I had come to know exactly what it looked like for a broken world to lay in wait, in sin and error, pining for somebody - anybody - to bring salvation. My heart began to ache for all things new in a way that it couldn’t until I was deeply unsatisfied with all things old.

I’m not ashamed to tell you, in that otherwise mundane moment in my son’s nursery, that I began to weep, for the first time, because of the theological beauty of Christmas. It is a thrilling hope that this weary world can rejoice in the arrival of a God who absolutely will not leave us to suffer alone. He is Emmanuel.

In the incarnation, the Word of God rang out “let there be light” a second time. The Word took on flesh to dwell among us, to embody God’s plan to redeem all things and make everything sad come untrue. And if the Light of the world came into that weary world, He can come again into our weary world.

Christmas is God’s promise to never leave or forsake us, but it’s also more than that. Christmas is how we know God.

John says no one had ever seen God until God’s only Son made him known (John 1:18). It wasn’t until the incarnation that humanity saw God. If we want to know who God is, we must look to the Babe in the manger, the Suffering Servant on the cross, and the glorious Second Adam rising to eternal life in a garden.

James Cone, reflecting on the work of Karl Barth, said that “we know who God is, not because we can move beyond our finiteness but because the transcendent God has become immanent in our history.” We can’t think high enough thoughts to conjure up God in our minds, but the eternal Word of God became “immanent in our history” to reveal God in a way we could see. We know who God is because the Word became flesh.

But Jesus isn’t just fully God. He’s also fully human. Jesus doesn’t just reveal who God really is. He reveals who we really are.

Because this Word - this full revelation of God - was in the beginning (John 1:1), we know Jesus didn’t come into existence on the first Christmas. He was and is before humanity. In fact, He is the prototype for humanity, the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), and every human has been created in His image that pre-existed all of us. Adam did not come before Jesus. No, Adam was an image of the eternal Jesus. Jesus Himself claimed to pre-date Abraham, but He could also say “Before Adam was, I AM” (see John 8:58).

Before the incarnation, humanity had a lot of thoughts about who we were. In the incarnation, we saw for the first time who God believes we are.

The incarnation is the divine revelation of God and humanity.

We don’t learn who humanity is by looking around at each other. We learn who humanity is by looking to the Nazarene.

500 years before the birth of Jesus, Israel returned from Babylonian captivity and prepared to rebuild the Temple. God reminded the people:

“Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; so what kind of house could you build for me?” (Isaiah 66:1)

When God came to dwell among humanity, He didn’t inhabit the most exorbitant temple, but the tiny infant body of a human being in Bethlehem. In this little body, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” (Colossians 1:19)

Mary was the architect and artist Michelangelo could only dream of being.

In June, I had the opportunity to walk through the ornate St. Peter’s Basilica, a glorious cathedral that feels like the perfect place for God to dwell. The scandal of Christmas reminds us that “the Most High does not live in houses made by human hands” (Acts 7:48), the Most High is pleased to dwell only in a human body.

In other words, Michelangelo’s great basilica pales in comparison to the Italian man begging for spare change out on the sidewalk. There is nothing on earth more glorious than humanity.

Isaiah 66, after challenging Israel’s assumption that God could dwell in a temple, goes on to say:

“This is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit who trembles at my word.” (‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭66‬:‭2‬)

God will look past 1,000 temples to get to the humblest of humans. We - as humans, as the Image of God - are the only kind of vessel in which God’s fullness is pleased to dwell. God has made humanity alone in the divine image, crowning us with glory and honor.

It’s no wonder the New Testament goes on to call humans the temple of God, filled with the very Spirit of God and conformed to the image of the Son of God. It’s no wonder C.S. Lewis calls humans “possible gods and goddesses,” sensing what the apostles knew, that we are creatures made to “become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

Next time you look in the mirror, remember:

You are the very kind of vessel God was pleased to dwell within. Jesus is overjoyed to call you His own, to tie His reputation up with yours. You are the masterpiece of the Creator, made to reflect and magnify the glory of God in the world. You are part of the body of Christ on earth as He is in heaven, filled with the very Spirit of God, and loved by God with an everlasting love.

May you believe it, and in Christ by the Spirit, may you live as who you already are.

John takes this one step further:

“Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” (1 John‬ ‭4‬:‭20‬-‭21)

We can’t claim to love God while hating people He would be pleased to dwell within. We can’t claim to love God while hating the very masterpieces God has made to be “imaged” in the world.

But this certainly leads to some discomfort. What about the people who really don’t look like God?

Matthew 25 says whatever we do for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned, we have done for Jesus. The King of kings and Lord of lords doesn’t want us to associate Him with wealth, majesty, and power. He doesn’t look like St. Peter’s Basilica. He looks like the beggar on the street.

When we see people as poor and shameful, hopeless and neglected, criminal and oppressed, hungry and humiliated, naked and despised, Jesus says, “Look closer. It’s me.”

In other words, if we think somebody doesn’t look like God, the problem is not the other person. The problem is our vision of God.

This isn’t an analogy. It’s not just a cotton-candy affirmation of the dignity of all people. God really looks like “shameful” people, and Christmas proves it.

God makes the abstract concrete as Christ is born in a lowly manger, raised in the irrelevant town of Nazareth, and finally humiliated in dying a criminal’s death. The First truly becomes last as The Most High God becomes the lowest of humanity. Jesus, in the manger and on the cross, is literally hungry, thirsty, naked, and poor. The First became last and gave us eyes to see how the last can be first in the Kingdom of God. Our eyes - and our judgments - deceive us. But God, in a manger and on a cross, gives us new eyes and a Kingdom imagination to perceive the glory of God in the most unlikely people.

Jesus reveals the glory of humanity at the precise moment we anticipate horror and shame. It’s not in His miracles or His resurrection, but on the cross that He is “crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death” (Hebrews 2:9). He humbled Himself, made Himself nothing, and died as a slave, and therefore, He received the Name that is above every other name. God is in the least and the last.

It is good and right for us to focus on the cross and resurrection. But the incarnation is also God’s gift of salvation. Athanasius says Christ “assumed humanity that we might become God.”

When the fullness of God came to dwell in a human body, God affirmed that a human being is capable of the divine. If the infinite and eternal Word of God can dwell in the flesh of a specific man in a specific time, then anything is possible for us as specific people living in specific times. You too, in your specificity, can be filled with the Spirit of God and conformed to the Image of the Son.

The wall between humanity and divinity is shattered by a baby in a manger. The chasm between heaven and earth is permanently bridged as Heaven’s King inhabits a body made from dust. Humanity and divinity have come together, and nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. The incarnation does not only prove that God can descend, it also proves that humanity must be able to ascend to “become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). If the divine could be human then, a human can be clothed in Christ’s divinity now.

These are radical statements, and they should surprise us. Christmas is a radical surprise. But I also don’t want you to hear what I am not saying. Here is all I mean:

It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.
Galatians 2:20

When I worship God, feed the hungry, pray for the sick, or love my neighbor and my enemy, I don’t just act like I think Jesus would act. Christ lives in me. The divine and human come together again. Being the Image of God requires something of me, and I’m still not left to handle it alone. Emmanuel is with us, working within us, doing in our lives what we could not do on our own.

In the incarnation, God came to dwell in the body of Christ. In us, God continues to dwell in the Body of Christ.

This Christmas, may we be filled with the Spirit of God and conformed to the Image of the Son, that we may be the Body of Christ on earth as He is in heaven.