Lecture 9: Male and Female, Part 1: The Egalitarian Position

The lecture, section by section

1. Irenic theology and the belief scale

   Patton begins with the program’s method, named tonight: irenic theology, from the Greek word for peace. Not apologetics, not polemics, no warring against a view: every position within the great tradition of Christian history gets represented well, on the conviction that if a position is right, the truth will prove persuasive. Then he introduces a tool he promises to use from now on, the belief scale. Every belief sits somewhere between zero and ten, with negative numbers for disbelief: ten means certainty, zero means undecided, and anything above zero shapes how you live. Very few things deserve a ten. The Trinity, the love of God, the death and resurrection of Christ: tens, because without the resurrection there is no gospel and no church. Conditional unity: Patton gives it a five. Last week’s compatibilism: a six. And he argues the honesty is itself evangelistic: the unbeliever who hears a Christian claim ten on everything dismisses a fanatic, but the Christian sure of a few great things and openly unsure of the rest earns a hearing for the things that matter.

2. The topic, and the temperature

   Tonight’s subject is what it means, theologically, to be a man and a woman, a question that inevitably reaches the debated issue of women in ministry, the subject of a shelf of current books and a recent annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. The teachers set expectations plainly: this is a non-salvific issue; you can leave undecided and be no less a believer; the program exists for exposure, not forced conclusions, and sometimes the goal is that a student who arrived a ten leaves a five. The two positions given serious scholarly representation within evangelicalism today are egalitarianism and complementarianism, and this session lets the egalitarian make the whole case.

3. What the class likes, and does not

   Before any text is read, the teachers survey the room. What do the women like most about being women? Nurture, nesting, intuition, and the breadth of roles open to them. The men, in a discussion that took a fraction of the time: leadership, named by about half, physical strength, and male bonding. What do the women like least? Unclear boundaries in relationships, false assumptions, differing and high expectations, and, to broad laughter and broad agreement, hormones. The men: unrealistic expectations and a lack of intuition, with one man wondering aloud whether men’s distance from their emotions is a loss. The board full of answers hangs over everything that follows: the differences are real, felt, and cherished and lamented at once.

4. Genesis 2: the helper and the song

   The text is read from verse 18: it is not good for the man to be alone; I will make a helper suitable for him. The naming of the animals is read as pedagogy, not trial and error: God is not testing whether an elephant might do; he is teaching Adam, parade by parade, that nothing made so far corresponds to him. Then the deep sleep, the rib, and the presentation, and Adam bursts into the Bible’s first poetry: bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. The teachers hear the joy of a taught contrast finally resolved, the same reason they save the right position for last: after every wrong answer, the right one lands with delight.

5. Alone with God, again

   The teachers press the detail the course keeps returning to. At verse 18 Adam’s only relationship is with God, face to face, sinless, perfect, and God calls him alone, and calls it not good. So the personal-relationship-only gospel misreads the garden: we were never designed to relate to God in isolation, and John’s test confirms it, for the world knows Jesus’ disciples by their love for one another. The verse is therefore bigger than marriage: it declares that man in general is incomplete without woman, a truth about society and the church, not only about husbands and wives.

6. Leaving father and mother, rightly read

   Verse 24 is Moses’ own commentary, not Adam’s speech: for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. Patton warns against reading the leaving as a command, telling of a husband who knew this one verse and wielded it against his wife’s contact with her parents. The Hebrew is deliberately over the top, almost exaggerated: the bond is so great a man would even forsake his family, which the fifth commandment forbids actually doing, and which Israel’s own family-clustered life never practiced. Jesus plays the same note when he says no one can be his disciple without hating father and mother: not a command to hate but a hyperbole of priority.

7. Carthage, Tertullian, and the turn

   A tour of church history shows there has never been an easy consensus. A synod at Carthage ruled that a woman, however learned and holy, may not teach in an assembly of men. Clement of Alexandria, by contrast, praised women who by God’s grace performed deeds of manly valor. Tertullian addressed women with words that still make a class wince, calling woman the devil’s gateway, the unsealer of the forbidden tree, the one who persuaded him whom the devil dared not approach. Then the teachers spring the turn: the next quotation, requiring quiet submission, forbidding a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, grounded in Adam’s priority and Eve’s deception, is not Tertullian. It is Paul, in 1 Timothy, the very text Tertullian was reading. And that sets the whole debate’s real question: when Scripture speaks this way, inside a patriarchal system running from the Old Testament into the New, is it speaking culture, which God regulated but never endorsed, or theology, which binds every age?

8. Egalitarianism defined

   The egalitarian position: the Bible teaches that all people are of equal value; therefore women are not in any sense, functionally or ontologically, subservient to men; ministry positions are held according to gifts, not gender; and mutual submission calls husbands and wives, and men and women, to submit to one another equally. The names attached are no lightweights: N. T. Wright, Gregory Boyd, Stanley Grenz, Gordon Fee, Craig Keener. Whatever one concludes, this is a position argued by serious scholars from the same Bible.

9. The egalitarian case: culture and curse

   Argument one: patriarchy is a cultural phenomenon God chose to regulate rather than overturn, exactly as he did slavery. The household code of Colossians addresses wives, husbands, children, fathers, and slaves in one breath, and no one concludes from slaves, obey your masters that God endorses slavery; he was working within a culture, slowly. Argument two: male domination is a result of the fall, reversed in Christ. In Genesis 3:16 the woman’s desire for her husband and his rule over her are curse, not creation, and the same desire-and-mastery vocabulary reappears in Genesis 4 when sin’s desire is for Cain: the fall bent the relationship into a contest of control and domination. Galatians 3:28 announces the restoration: neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, all one in Christ, so Christians of all people should lead in dismantling the bent system. In the discussion the class notices the door this logic opens: the same argument could in principle reach the parent-child relationship, and the teachers grant the door stands open technically even though the position never walks through it.

10. The egalitarian case: prophetesses, history, and dignity

    Argument three: the Bible itself shows women leading. Micah 6 names Miriam alongside Moses and Aaron as sent before Israel; Deborah judged Israel; Huldah the prophetess was consulted by men and women alike; and at Pentecost Peter declares Joel fulfilled: your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit, prophets and prophetesses speaking God’s own words with God’s own authority. Argument four: history since the canon closed confirms it, from Catherine Booth and Joan of Arc to Amy Carmichael, Corrie ten Boom, Elisabeth Elliot, and Joyce Meyer: God uses women effectively, whatever systems stand in the way. Argument five, the position’s edge: despite every claim to the contrary, it is hard to see how telling women they may never exercise spiritual leadership over a man does not demean their ontological value. Call it functional all you like, the egalitarian says; a permanent, gender-based exclusion says something about being.

11. The complementarian responses

    Each argument receives its answer. To culture: God does reform some things slowly, but a husband’s leadership is a family relationship, no more cultural than children obeying parents, and the household codes put the family relationships first and the cultural institution of slavery last. To the curse: the evidence runs the other way, for Adam was created first, Eve made as his completer, and Adam named her, and in that world naming conferred authority, which is why God had him name the animals; after the fall God summoned Adam first, the head and representative, and it is the Adamic nature, not the Evic, that the race inherits. The curse distorted existing roles rather than inventing them: her desire became a contest for control, his rule became domination and abuse. To the prophetesses: Deborah and her era are the exception that proves the rule, for the book of Judges runs on the ironic question of where all the men have gone, Gideon hiding and doubting while women act, down to Jael driving the tent peg through the enemy commander’s head. Women did prophesy and do lead; the debate is only whether they hold ongoing spiritual authority over men. To history: effectiveness is pragmatic at best; God blesses ministries in spite of shortcomings, never because of them, and the flourishing house churches of China, so many led by women, raise honest questions about where experience sits on the stage of truth without settling the doctrine. To dignity: saying people are prepared for particular services is no dishonor and no ontological hierarchy; men are not prepared for childbearing and are not thereby devalued. Equal in being, different in role.

12. Where the session leaves it

    Two corrections close the hour. First, the map: egalitarianism and complementarianism are not the polar extremes; the pure patriarchy of the Islamic world stands far beyond, and complementarians present their view precisely as the middle road. Second, the aside on God himself: God is neither male nor female; Scripture’s masculine language for God is followed because Scripture uses it, not because God has chromosomes. The teachers have shown neither hand yet, on principle. Next session complementarianism gets its own full defense, and Dyke, at the end, will give his view.

1. Patton argues that being a ten on everything makes a Christian sound like a fanatic, while honest uncertainty earns a hearing for the essentials. Where on the belief scale do your own convictions on this topic sit, and has your number ever been set by culture or upbringing rather than by the text?

2. The session’s hardest turn is discovering that the quote we winced at belongs to Paul. Sit with that honestly: what do you do when Scripture itself says something your instincts resist, and how do you tell the difference between submitting to the text and submitting to an interpretation?

3. The whole debate hangs on culture or theology. Take one passage from tonight, the household codes or 1 Timothy 2, and argue both readings to yourself as fairly as you can. Which reading carries the burden of proof, and why?