Are Women to be Feared?

I'm sick of the misogynistic undertones in Bible study materials, sermons, Christian books, Christian radio, etc. I will NOT acquiesce to this perversion that implies that because I am woman I am more vulnerable to sin, I am to be feared, and therefore I should shut up. Try to pretty it up, but pretty misogyny is still misogyny.

This time it was coming from Beth Moore's Living Beyond Yourself.

Acts 13 details the account of Paul while in Pisidian Antioch. After Paul addressed the synagogue and gave them the Gospel, he and Barnabas were invited back to the synagogue the following week to speak further. On the next Sabbath almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. The Jews, however, were jealous and were riled up in anger. Paul's response to the angry Jews sat favorably with the Gentiles who were there, so the Gentiles honored God. The word of God then spread throughout the region.
Because of this, the jealous Jews "incited the devout women of high standing and the leading men of the city" (ESV) to stir up persecution against Paul and Barnabas.

So from this, Beth Moore takes a huge leap and assumes that these women were Christian God-fearing women, although every commentary I have read understands them to be simply "Women of influence, and connected with families of rank", or "proselytes to the Jewish religion."
To be clear: These were NOT Christian women.

And on that basis, she completely ignores the fact that the Jews also incited the leading men of the city (because, like these prominent women, they also had positions of power), and she constructs a whole theology of women around that error. She begins by asking some questions:

"Who did the Jews incite first?" (you are supposed to answer "God-fearing women")

"How did Paul describe these women?" (You are supposed to answer "God-fearing" or "devout and prominent")

And now that she's laid the groundwork for her theological construct, she makes the grandiose claim that,

"For reasons we may never know, God entrusted to womankind a most wonderful and terrible gift: the power of influence."

(Forget that it was only certain women that were incited - those of positions of prominence. And forget that they were incited along with the leading men of the city. Accuracy doesn't matter here, I guess. The only thing that matters is that we women fear ourselves enough to allow our voices to be stifled.)

She continues,

"This is the foremost quality highlighted in our earliest heritage....To whom did the serpent go when he sought the ruin of Adam and Eve (see Gen. 3:1)?"

It is assumed here that the serpent went to Eve because she "could talk Adam into anything." But isn't it equally possible (or more) that Satan went to Eve, not Adam, because Even, and not Adam, was only told of the command of God INDIRECTLY, and because of that fact she would be more vulnerable to deception? I think that makes sense considering the fact that she was mistaken about what God actually said (see Gen. 3:3).

Last time I checked, Eve didn't have to talk Adam into anything. He was right there with her the whole time Satan was deceiving her, and he didn't correct one word of Satan. There is no scriptural basis for this claim.

She adds this just to drive it home:

"Consider the power of feminine influence."

And then come the ramifications for believing women are so easily used of Satan because of this "influence" that is intrinsic to womanhood.

"At worst, it cripples and kills. The line between influence and manipulation is extremely fine. Influence is so easy to use, it's frightening. Maybe it's the reason God exhorts us to 'gentle and quiet' spirits. We need to think before we speak and act. Scriptures are not provided because we are so lowly, but because we possess such an awesome gift."

Let me just say...Give me a break! Men are just as influential as women. We all need to think before we speak because "the tongue has the power of life and death" (Pro 18:21). The "gentle and quiet spirit" she is referring to simply means a spirit that is at rest and unafraid, peaceable. Men should cultivate the same quietness and gentleness of spirit. It does not mean women can't have a voice or exert any kind of tangible, prominent influence over others. The leading men of the city were also incited. Does this mean that men shouldn't lead either since it is so obvious that leading men are easily used by Satan and should be feared for their influence?

Perhaps she didn't intend it, but this is just another way to sugar-coat the silencing of women.

We women have no more power or influence than men do. Some women, as well as some men, have more influence than others due to positions of power they may have, but women are not to be feared any more than men are.
As far as I can tell, none of this is based on any shred of scriptural fact.

I like Beth Moore. A lot. But this I cannot accept.

   

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Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church condones domestic violence

Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church condones domestic violence

Speaker Panel, Some Clarification, More Questions

 

Well, I just had the opportunity to listen to the panel discussion of DG 2012 Pastors Conference, and was delighted to hear someone define "masculine virtues."  A few were listed - initiative, sacrifice, and mission - though I am not sure if this was intended to be an exhaustive list or not.

 

As these men would have it, "feminine virtues" are basically the counterparts to these "masculine virtues": response, acceptance of man's sacrifice, and helping him fulfill his mission (garden, tilling the field, discovery).

And I am sighing right now as I think of the implications of this - that education - scientific, theological, philosophical discovery - is a masculine pursuit.

If we were to be completely honest, we would have to concede that the patriarchal tendency to restrict education to males in parts of Asia is the next logical step here. This was, after all, foundational to Kevin Swanson's implied suggestion on Generations Radio that women need not be educated because men don't find education in a woman a necessity. But lest I trail off here on another rabbit trail, I will get to the point.

I want to see the biblical basis for this, because if this were true, we should be able to find it spelled out in the Creation account.
In the Creation account we do find the subjugation of mankind (man and woman) to God, and the subjugation of the earth to mankind (man and woman); so why do we not see the subjugation of woman to man?
Yes, I will concede that just because it is not clearly spelled out does not mean that it can’t be there in the details; and at the same time, just because you can make it fit there in the details doesn’t mean that it was intended by God for you to do so.

Yet what we do see clearly is that God gave the command to fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over the animals (Gen 1:28) to both men and women. He made no distinction in roles until sin was introduced to the world – and even then, it was not prescriptive language. Once sin was introduced and turned Creation on its head, man became subject to the earth which he was taken from, and woman became subject to man whom she was taken from.
Furthermore, we have several Old Testament examples of women in ministries of their own, ordained by God, presumably apart from their husbands – even ministries in which they had authority over men. Deborah is one clear example of this; Huldah is another. Then in the New Testament we have Priscilla, Junia, and Phoebe – all women who defied the traditional roles of women.

I don’t believe God is schizophrenic. 

I thought they put a mighty clever spin on God's explicit command for mutual submission (Ephesians 5:21): submission here, say they, can be qualified as the delegating (or deferring) of tasks to a spouse who is more suited. Ha-ha. If this were the case, then reading in Ephesians 5:22, “wives, to your husbands,”(and you'll notice that vs. 22 is grammatically dependent on vs. 21), the submission of wives to their husbands would also refer to a deference of tasks which are more suitable to her spouse. Well, sometimes women are more suited for leadership roles than are men.

So much for that interpretation.

Now, I have to be honest here. At first I was all up in arms over John Piper's answer to the question of  where femininity fits into all this emphasis on masculinity in the church, (paraphrasing, of course), and at first when he said that "there is room for femininity" within this masculine feel of the church, my knee-jerk reaction was to think, "well there you go - masculinity is obviously superior to femininity if masculinity has primacy (but femininity can find room within it?). This is not equal but different; this is unequally different. So it is not sexual complementarity; it’s feminine complimentarity.
But then the word "flavour" in regards to femininity rolled off John Piper's tongue in passing, and I think I got a better understanding of where he is coming from.

The best analogy I could give is like tea: masculinity is the hot water, and femininity is the tea leaf. The the strength of flavour in the tea leaf only comes out when it is steeped in hot water. So it is with femininity - or so I think these men would say. You need both to make a cup of tea, neither is more important than the other - but without the chief element of hot water (or masculinity), you can fill your cup overflowing with as many tea leaves as you want (femininity), and in the end, you're always going to land yourself with nothing but the product of a botched-up attempt at making a cup of tea.

Basically then,femininity must be enveloped in masculinity.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here...as much as it is not in my nature to do so...the Bible does say that the creation of the world shows God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature— that we can understand Him from what has been made (Romans 1:20) — and this would appear to be consistent with the intimate enveloping of a woman in a man’s masculine strength, no? (*sighs*)  Isn’t that the archetypical peak of the fantastic male-female romance portrayed in every fictitious romance novel. Exaggerated 'differences' between the masculine and feminine certainly seems to be the erotic norm; perhaps then there is some truth to this masculine primacy then? But then reality sets in and the problem remains: not all men have this strength, do they? And not all women are smaller than their husbands. And this would also have pretty awkward practical implications on prescribing the marriage-bed relationship that some men wouldn’t find very convenient. Not to be too graphic here, but this would mean that any other sexual position that deviated from the traditional position of ”masculine enveloping the feminine” would be aberrant sexual behaviour. 

There goes Mark Driscoll’s plans for the evening.

But seriously – in practical terms – what is the application here? In worship, for example, how do we steep the worship program in masculinity? Who gets to decide which song is masculine and which is feminine?
(And on a side note, I am annoyed, to say the very least, at the assumption that females gravitate more toward the “Jesus is my girlfriend” tunes.)¹

Furthermore, if masculinity is strength, logic, whatever, are you implying that men who lean more on the “feminine” are less masculine? What do we do with children from whom we see a habitual pattern of deviating from these stereotypes developing? Would we do things like this to straighten them out?

And in this framework, any drive or initiative that I have as a woman, apart from my husband (not necessarily against my husband) in missions or otherwise, is frowned upon. Because in this structure, my husband must have the drive, be the initiator, and I have to support him in his mission or I am rebelling against my created purpose as a woman. I am pretty much limited to being his appendage.

And finally, there are also the theological implications. What are we saying about the Trinity here, and should we really be trying to poke and prod around the doctrine of the Trinity where God does not explicitly speak? Do we leave nothing to mystery?  Do we not have any fear of the Lord before us that we can so easily project our own fallible conceptions on to the Divine Trinity? I think it's pretty presumptuous for all these men to make such flippant statements about God. At least, it doesn't seem like they are all that concerned about not saying anything that the Bible doesn't say. Quite the contrast from the ancient Hebrew people who were afraid to even speak the sacred name of the Lord lest they pronounce it wrong and blaspheme His name!

Apart from the lack of sufficient biblical basis to prop up this doctrine – at least, insofar as I have heard or read – we have to acknowledge that ideas have consequences - things can get pretty dangerous in this territory. If we can’t give a clear and concise application then I would have to assume that it’s not really that important to God. If it were, he would surely have spelled it out for us. He would have clearly commanded men to “lead”, for example, or there would be gender-specific commands for men only to be courageous (and women, to behave in a counterpart-ive manner to man's courage, which mitigates feminine courage - at least to a degee), or he would have commanded men to tell their wives what to do, and he would have made it clear that, at least within the context of family and church, the logic, instinct, and reason of men trumps those of a woman where they conflict. Or for women, there would be explicit commands to sink all of her individuality and initiative into her husband’s mission. But we don’t find that.

 No, to be fair, I realize that John Piper acknowledged that these masculine and feminine "virtues" are not so rigid that one could not appropriately possess some "flavour" of the opposite sex; but then, to what extent exactly can masculinity be possessed by woman, and femininity by man,  before it becomes deviant? Most of what was said in this panel discussion regarding masculinity and femininity is too ambiguous to actually be tenable. Who is going to micromanage our homes and churches (and even workplaces!) to make sure we aren't blending the genders too much?

This is all very suspiciously legalistic, if you ask me.

I suppose I have a long way to go before I will be secure in my beliefs here. But I don't think these men are as secure in theirs as they would like us to believe either.But on a positive note before I go, there was much of value in the rest of that discussion. I can;t wait for it to be available so I can go back and re-listen.

1 Indeed, in my marriage it is I who gravitates more toward songs with 
  theological depth and soundness. My husband, on the other hand, 
  gravitates more toward music with a "rocker" slant, regardless of the 
  theology. Many times I have remarked to him about the theological shallowness 
  (or blatant errors) in some of his music.