Frank

The Unadjusted Gospel, or the Paganized Gospel?
Once again, our hierarchicalist friends show their true colors by not only defaming and misrepresenting those who disagree with them, but also by engaging in a distorted and misleading revisionism of both of the history of biblical intrepreation, of Christian theology, and of the Gospel of Christ itself. Cheryl Schatz and other egalitarian scholars have given full and satisfactory answer to the various, absurd assertions being made by the leaders of this T4G2010 Conference, so I don’t intend to outdo their excellent and well-written articles and essays on these matters. But I cannot help but point out that the so-called “Unadjusted Gospel,” as regards its teaching on the relations both between men and women and between the Persons of the Trinity, is actually a “Paganized Gospel,” resting on the concept of the Chain of Being that was at the heart of the pagan Greek solution to the question, “Is reality utimately a unity or a diversity?”

Now this pagan Greek answer involves a hierarchy of being, contrary to the Creator-creature distinction of the Bible, where the most Superior and Perfect Being is at the top. And every being derived from this Being, as we travel down the chain, becomes progressively imperfect and inferior, until we reach the level of non-being. Unfortunately, as every student of philosophy and theology knows, it was through former Neo-Platonists, such as Origen, who in their understanding of both God and the created order, mixed this pagan concept with the Christian Faith. Dr. Alan Myatt, a long time friend, in a recent ETS paper criticizing the hierarchicalists position on the relationships existing between both the members of humanity and the Trinity, made this perceptive and revealing criticism:

The similarity of the notion of a chain of command of authority in the Trinity and in male-female relations to the non-Christian theory of the Great Chain of Being is no coincidence. Such notions originally were derived from the infusion of the Chain of Being philosophy into
Christian thought, which formed the presuppositional lens through which ancient, medieval and early modern Christians read their Bibles. The ontology of hierarchy is derived from this presupposition, a metaphysic at odds with the Christian doctrine of creation and the notion of the self-contained Triune God as presented in Scripture. It places the value and limits the function
of things according to their position in the hierarchy of Being. Current attempts to define the Trinity as an eternal hierarchy of authority and submission may be understood, then, as examples
of reading the Great Chain of Being back into the biblical text. The motive for this seems to be the preservation of an understanding of male-female role relations in the home and church that is also structured around the Chain of Being concept. It should be noted that this hierarchical understanding of these relations, indeed of the universe itself, is virtually ubiquitous in non-Christian, pagan thought throughout the world, both ancient and modern. Ancient mystery religions of the near east, as well as Hindu pantheism among others, show this tendency to structure the universe in a hierarchy of Being, with rigid social structures. In its more pure forms, unimpeded by any biblical influence, the tendency is for some type of cosmic evolution through which humans eventually become divine. One common factor is a hierarchy of divinities and a hierarchy of male over female. Patriarchy has been so universal in human society that it could be said to be the default mode of human existence (Cf. On the Compatibility of Ontological Equality, Hierarchy, and Functional Distinctions, p. 10).

Furthermore, our understanding of the unity and coequality of men and women in Christ, contrary to what is often charged against, is rooted both in Scripture and in the true renewal and transformation of the Church’s intellectual, moral, and socio-political life by the Holy Spirit himself. Again, as Dr. Myatt points out:

While complementarians persist in accusing egalitarians of yielding to the pressure of non-Christian culture in their handling of Scripture, it appears that just the opposite is true. If hierarchicalism is the fruit of a non-Christian world view, as I have contended, this has important implications. Traditional hierarchical biblical interpretation has been filtered through the lens of a cultural vision of human relations compromised by the absorption of a pagan world view grounded in the Great Chain of Being. This effectively blinded it to the egalitarian implications of the biblical text. Contrary to being a capitulation to culture, the egalitarian impulse is a historical development running against the tide of
these assumptions, that surfaced in Britain and America as the implications of Reformation theology began to saturate
the culture in the wake of the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries.38 It came into full bloom among evangelicals in the abolition and suffrage movements of the 19th century. Under pressure from egalitarian readings of Scripture, the hierarchical vision has been in a steady retreat ever since. The Bible’s teachings of the ontological equality of all persons has done away with the rule of kings in favor or democracy, the enslavement of Africans in favor of equal civil rights for all races, and the political and social subordination of women in favor of suffrage and the rights to education and a career (Ibid, p.11).

And so instead of teaching the Liberating Gospel of Christ, which Paul sets forth before us in Gal 3-5, where the people of God serve on the basis of their maturity, Spirit-giftedness and calling–these self-appointed “super champions of the faith” are teaching a different and harmful message, which focuses on the pagan chain of being, understood in terms of gender and gender-specific rules. For these particular teachers and those inclined to follow them, Paul’s rebuke is most appropriate: “I promised you as a pure bride to one husband-Christ. But I fear that somehow your pure and undivided devotion to Christ will be corrupted, just as Eve was deceived by the cunning ways of the Serpent. You happily put up with whatever anyone tells you, even if they preach a different Jesus than the one we preached, or a different kiind of Spirit than the one you received, or a different kind of gospel than the one you believed” (2 Cor. 11:2-4, NLT).