Janice

Hi Cheryl,

Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.   And I thank God for you and your wonderfully logical mind.

whenever I have passionately stated my case for believing that women are allowed in scripture to teach the bible to men, I have been accused of letting my emotions cloud my judgment and my thinking.

I’d been trying to find a way of expressing what I thought when I came across this comment at Wade Burleson’s blog It says what I wanted to say so well I decided to copy it.

It’s an easy out that lets us write off those different from us without having to think about their actual positions. It is also very unhelpful for true dialogue and understanding

And that is one amazingly cute little puppy.  Is it yours?

Lin wrote,
Many of the abusers I knew in Christendom were not public false teachers they were private spiritual abusers.
Hey!  I knew a fellow like that.  He said all the right things from the pulpit.  But then there was the rest.
He took advantage of my spiritual immaturity by telling me he’d been praying and believed God was telling him that I was the right person for a particular job that he wanted filled.  Stupid me.  I was flattered and took the job.  When it turned out all wrong he wouldn’t give me a way out that didn’t involve shutting the project down.  More pressure.  I quit anyway because I felt so bad. 
Then there was a Bible study that was being held in his house.  His wife was a member of the group.  He was out somewhere one evening and came home before the study session was over.  No matter.  He called his wife out of the study to get his dinner ready.  That demonstration of the sort of servant heart he had gave me another inkling that something wasn’t quite right.
Lastly there was the problem of the assistant minister.  He’d been hired by the previous rector to run a new Sunday evening outreach program.  Soon after that rector retired and this new, charming, fellow with the impressive resume was hired.  After 18 months or so the new rector told the Parish Council that the money for the assistant’s stipend was running out so he would have to be dismissed.  I suggested that maybe we could do some fund-raising or let the congregation know that we needed them to give a bit more but the new guy wouldn’t consider those options.  Then he did the closed meeting thing.  He said that he had something to say about the assistant minister that everyone present would have to swear never to mention to anyone else.  If someone felt they couldn’t keep it secret they should leave the room.
Well.  What are you going to do?  Wonder what on earth can be so terrible that everyone gets sworn to secrecy about it and then want to know what it can be?  Of course. 
I figured the only person I’d tell would be my one flesh husband so I stayed and could hardly believe what I heard.  It was nothing!  It was so nothing that I can’t even remember precisely what was the terrible thing that the assistant was supposed to have done; something about answering back to the charming, talk-the-talk, rector.
To cut a long story short the rector eventually got his way and a majority of the parish council agreed to dismiss the assistant and ask him to leave his parish supplied housing even though his wife was 8 1/2 months pregnant at the time.  I asked for an assurance that the assistant and his wife would at least be told about the decision before the next Sunday morning service so they would be prepared in case they got a deluge of phone calls afterwards. 
The assurance was given but not acted upon.  I checked with the assistant.  I checked with the rector’s warden.  They both said that no such notice had been given.  Subsequently, when I directly asked him, that lying sod of a parish priest told me to my face that the notice had been given.  My husband and I finished up the year at that church because I was teaching Sunday School to the junior high school group and my husband was in charge of entertaining the littlies.  And then we left.  So did the other assistant minister and the youth worker who each had their own stories to tell of bullying and intimidation. 
The lying, bully, rector is now a bishop.  The dismissed assistant minister worked for a few years in a pastoral role in higher education and then went into business.  I’ve googled him a few times and never found any mention that he was ever an ordained priest.  The youth worker and the other assistant minister left at the same time we did.
Me? For several years I couldn’t bear sitting through a service anything like what I’d been used to in that parish.  We went high church instead and thereby learned something precious about God’s love for His people and the variety they can bring to their expressions of worship.  But thinking about it all now I think the most valuable thing I learned is that priests, also, are sinners – and might even be sociopaths.

I read a fair bit of that blog and all I can say is there’s not much evidence there of the fruit of the Spirit.  What I do see is a contemptuous attitude comparable to the ones shown to Don on the Touchstone site.
Matthew 5:21-22 (You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment’. But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca!’ shall be in danger of the council.)
Gill’s Expositor says that ‘raca’, “is expressive of indignation and contempt … and denotes a worthless, empty headed man; a man of no brains; a foolish, witless, fellow”.

(Doofus, anyone?  Sanctimonious cretin?  On your blog sweetie?  Completely clueless?  AIRHEAD?  Just “plain stupid”?)
What Jesus is saying in verse 22 indicates that those who are angry with another person without cause are in danger of the judgement, i.e., will be condemned as murderers by God (because those who did not kill with their own hands were left to the judgement of God) but those who treat others contemptuously shall be condemned as murderers by human judges, (i.e., in Jesus’ day, the sanhedrin).  I presume that’s because whereas anger is in the heart and can only be seen by God, treating another person with contempt is something that can be witnessed and testified to by other human beings.
Now it’s all very well and ordinary to get upset with other people.  What matters is how you respond.  This person’s response is so sub-Christian that it can’t be regarded as Christian at all.  That’s not a good position to be in if you want to take the high moral ground.
I think the best thing we can do is pray that s/he will learn how to respond lovingly to people with whom s/he disagrees.

Soon I hope to get the hang of putting a line of space between paragraphs with HTML.
Sorry.

This 1985 paper by Harold Bussell (which I found through the link at Cindy’s post on evangelical Christians’ vulnerability to cults states,

A close examination of every major cult today, with the exception of Eastern cults, reveals that they all began in an evangelical church or with a leader from an evangelical background. …
Their foundation always began with an identity by opposition. …
Evangelicals also tend to couple their definitions of spirituality with leanings toward legalism. … We often forget that perfect communities come about at the expense of human freedom. …
We have failed to distinguish between biblical absolutes and cultural issues. Morally, the Bible is always absolute; culturally, it is relativistic. Fornication was wrong in Jerusalem and in Corinth; however, whether one could eat pork depended on in which city he lived. This gives a sense of security on the surface but not a security rooted in God’s word and grace. Cults are usually legalistic and hold high standards against the use of tobacco and alcohol and against other worldly habits. …
We seek out those who will reinforce our own likes and dislikes. The result is a blindness to the richness of diversity God offers to us within the body of Christ and a blindness to our own tendencies mentally to write off the other members of the body of Christ. We subtly remove … our responsibility to “love one another (John 13:35). Each cult offers both uniformity and identity by opposition

I’m Australian.  When I was a kid we used to say that whatever the Yanks are doing we’ll be doing in 20 years’ time.  I think we’ve caught up more than I’d like.
Until March this year I thought the only churchly male vs. female issue here was whether women should be ordained but at a meeting planning activities with a group of theology students who were going to visit one of the men present said he was feeling hesitant about allowing female students to speak at the local university.  When I asked why he cited 1 Timothy 2:12 which surprised and disturbed me.  If he’d said he was hesitant about the women speaking at a church service I might have let it slide but to get twitchy about women speaking during an outreach at a secular university struck me as decidedly peculiar.
Since then I’ve googled far and wide, discovered the complementarian/egalitarian divide and learned that in the USA this verse has been used to justify the dismissal of at least two women from church run organisations.  In one case it appears possible that the verse was used as a strategem to get rid of a woman who had a history of causing problems.  In the other case it appears that the verse was used  truly ideologically, i.e., the authorities at that institution really believe that no woman, no matter how well qualified in her subject, should teach any man.  My understanding is that because both women were working for church run organisations they have no recourse under US law.
What I see is a new kind of opposition identity being formed.  Its roots are in (sexual) politics.  It reminds me of the fascination with end times stuff that was going on 20 odd years ago, before the USSR fell apart, when people were planning to go bush and grow their own food so they could survive the Tribulation without using a Bankcard.  The ones I knew were so obsessed that they seemed to have no energy left for growing in Christ and helping to fulfil the Great Commission.
So now lots of people are thinking everything will be all right if we can just get women to believe (or at least act as though they believe) that helping (ezer) their husband means doing, in all circumstances, whatever their husband wants them to do.  What complete rot!  What better recipe could you have for producing a bunch of self-absorbed, self-delighting, authoritarian bullies hardly distinguishable from Wahabi Muslims?  That they’re also saying that people who think differently are heretics is just another sign that sections of the complementarian crowd are on the road to being just another weirdo cult.

Hi Cheryl.  Thanks for all your hard work.
I read Stimson’s linked article and then got to wondering what femininity is according to the CBMW.  So I skimmed a few articles over there, including Elisabeth Elliot’s chapter in RBMW, and the impression I get is that they’ve confused Christianity with cultural conservatism.  So it is not OK for men to have facial scrubs but it is OK for women to get their nails done. Well, I don’t like men to be effete either but this business about women and make-up reminds me of a story I read years ago.  There was a Christian women’s conference on in Europe somewhere.  The Danish women were scandalised by the American women (because they were all wearing make-up).  The American women were scandalised by the Danish women (because they were all smoking cigars). 
Elisabeth Elliot doesn’t seem to realise that feminists aren’t a homogeneous bunch.  She credits them all with believing that the only differences between men and women are “a matter of mere biology” and being interested only in “questions of authority or power or competition or money”.  Oddly, after describing the differences between male and female roles among the South American Indians among whom she worked – differences that she must, at some level, have realised are culturally conditioned because most of them are so foreign to Westerners – she then urges us not to, “swallow the feminist doctrine that femininity is a mere matter of cultural conditioning, of stereotypes perpetuated by tradition”.  Here the word “mere” is the only thing that makes her statement passably true.
So yes, I agree with you that fear is probably what is underlying a lot of CBMW rhetoric; that and nostalgia for the good old days when women knew their place, divorce was relatively uncommon and most men (and, no doubt, plenty of women) agreed that a battered wife had probably been “asking” to be beaten.
Lately I’ve been wondering about people like David Koresh, Jim Jones and Wayne Bent. Does anyone know what these fellows’ position on women (and/or male authority) is or was?  Did they preach the subordination of women?  Is that part of how they managed to get so many of their female followers to have sex with them?  I ask because my understanding is that sexual abuse seems to be much more common in  families where the father is traditionally authoritarian and Scripture is used to justify a “me first—you submit” attitude toward women