Women Kept in Silence
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It's long been an important tenet of Christianity that women should not teach men or have authority over men. This was used for millennia to relegate women to a second-class status in culture, politics, and of course churches. Today this attitude has become difficult to hold on to, but conservative Christians are doing their best.
John Piper, a Christian preacher, was recently interviewed for his views on the subject -- specifically with regards to female evangelists like Beth Moore. He was directly asked "I'm a guy. Is it wrong for me to listen to Beth Moore?" and his answer reveals a lot -- both by what Piper chose to say and what Piper chose to ignore.
No. Unless you begin to become dependent on her as your shepherd-your pastor.
This is the way I feel about women speaking occasionally in Sunday school. We don't need to be picky on this. The Bible is clear that women shouldn't teach and have authority over men. In context, I think this means that women shouldn't be the authoritative teachers of the church-they shouldn't be elders. That is the way Rick Warren is understanding it, and most of us understand it that way.
This doesn't mean you can't learn from a woman, or that she is incompetent and can't think. It means that there is a certain dynamic between maleness and femaleness that when a woman begins to assume an authoritative teaching role in your life the manhood of a man and the womanhood of a woman is compromised.
What I just said is unbelievably controversial. There are thousands, even millions of people that think this idea is absolutely obscene. That is the language people used back in the 70's when I was fighting battles over biblical manhood and womanhood. It isn't obscene. It is recognized profoundly in a lot of young people today, as well as older people. ...
I want to learn from my wife and I am happy to learn from Beth Moore. But I don't want to get into a relationship of listening or attending a church where a woman is becoming my pastor, my shepherd or my authority. I think that would be an unhealthy thing for a man to do. I could give reasons for that biblically, experientially and psychologically, but I have given the gist of it.
Source: (via: Friendly Atheist)
Anyone familiar with the verse in question, 1 Timothy 2:12, knows that it says more than John Piper seems willing to admit here. The first part is about teaching and authority ("I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man") but there is a second part with an even broader command: "she must be quiet."
Notice, though, that John Piper doesn't actually expect women to "be quiet." So while he's insisting that women adhere to (his interpretation of) the first part of the verse, he's also implicitly insisting that women can completely ignore the second part of the verse. His justification? Well, he offers none -- he seems to hope no one will notice the problem.
Rachel Held Evans noticed this contradiction and points out how critical it is for the debate between those who claim to be upholding the entire Bible against those who are allegedly just "picking and choosing" what to follow:
Why is that complementarian women are forbidden from assuming leadership in churches, and yet permitted to speak? Nowhere does the Bible spell out this distinction between teaching and speaking or between leader and "shepherd-pastor." Does Piper's response not "reinterpret apparently plain meanings of biblical texts" and rely on a bit of "technical ingenuity"?
I am reminded of Scot McKnight's observation in The Blue Parakeet that "anyone who thinks it is wrong for a woman to teach in church can be consistent with that point of view only if they refuse to read and learn from women scholars. This means not reading their books lest they become teachers."
Complementarians often say that what's at stake in this debate is the authority of Scripture, an authority that is compromised whenever Christians fail to live by "every word" of the Bible. But Piper's response reveals that not even complementarians live by every word of the Bible. Complementarians do not require women to cover their heads in prayer (1 Corinthians 11:5) or to abide by the Levitical Purity Laws that make them ceremonially unclean during their periods.
Of course conservatives, literalists, fundamentalists, and "complementarians" (Christians who believe that women and men have "complimentary" but different divinely-ordained roles in marriage, family, church, politics, culture) are selective in their reading of scripture, even as they denounce "selective" reading in others. Of course they pick and choose. That's always been obvious, but usually the conservatives rationalize their selective reading by insisting that certain verses must be treated as metaphorical, allegorical, or anything that would allow them to ignore its plain, literal meaning.
Here, though, such excuses won't work so well. There's no basis for reading the first half of a verse so literally that women must be denied any positions of authority while ignoring the literal meaning of the second half so they can allow women to speak. It might be acceptable if they admitted that they are picking and choosing then gave an argument for their choices -- that would at least create some basis for debate and discussion.
But they don't and the reason why is clear: because it would open them up to being wrong. Instead they deny that they are picking and choosing and instead attribute their entire position to God, thus immunizing their position against critique or disagreement. That's the inherent problem with all conservative, literalist readings of scripture: the abdication of personal responsibility and fallibility when it comes to ones interpretation and final theological position.
But Rachel Held Evans sees through the tactic and recognizes that the goal of these conservatives isn't to preserve the "authority of scripture," as they like to claim, but rather to simply preserve the authority of men:
I believe Piper's selective interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12 reveals the fact that the true ethos of the complementarian movement is not an effort to apply the Bible to the letter, but an effort to preserve a male-to-female hierarchy. In actuality, it's less about preserving the authority of Scripture and more about preserving the authority of men.
We can see the same thing throughout society and throughout time. Whenever some privileged group wants to justify their privileges and authority, whether generally or against dissenters, they consistently argue that their privileges are somehow natural and normal. They don't make an argument which allows for the possibility of social structures changing to benefit others; instead they make an argument which depicts their privilege and authority as something akin to gravity: it's the sort of social arrangement which naturally develops and which must necessarily exist.
Sometimes they depict it as the natural consequence of "freedom," thus any effort by minorities to achieve equality must necessarily be totalitarian and un-American. Sometimes they depict it as the natural consequence of following God's laws and God's will, thus any effort to achieve equality must necessarily be anti-God, anti-Christian, Satanic, etc.
Whatever the details of the argument, a major purpose is to establish boundaries for how their opponents think about the issue and, hopefully, prevent them from imagining that the situation can be different. We see this above in the effort by conservatives to depict themselves as the only ones staying "true" to scripture while others are just "picking and choosing." Anyone who accepts that framework will automatically lose the debate; to make progress it's necessary to change the terms of debate and reveal that the conservatives' portrayal of themselves is false.
However, getting the conservatives to recognize this is easier said than done. It seems to me that they've lied so long and so often about what they are doing that they've convinced themselves -- and even the possibility of being mistaken about such things would shake their self-image so much that it will be dismissed without even a first thought, much less a second.
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