Frank

Well, I’m not sure what John Piper hoped to accomplish by giving this speech, other than confirming the faith of those who already accept the complementarian perversions of what the Scriptures actually teach about the Triune God and his intended purposes for human beings, both male and female, who have been created in his image (Gen. 1:26-28). But I think he has started a firestorm of criticism that he and his complementarian associates never dreamed of stirring up, and if they ignore, do so to their own peril. There are a number of websites, such as CBE’s blog”The Scroll” and CT’s blog “Her.meneutics” that really take to task this poppycock that since “God is masculine” therefore “Christianity must be masculine” in its expression.

Rachel Stone, in the CT article, “John Piper and the Rise of Biblical Masculinity,” made this statement, which pretty much agrees with what Cheryl has expressed in this posting:

As to Piper’s specific claim that “God gave Christianity a masculine feel,” which I personally I take as a kind of whistling in the dark, I join many others in regarding this as patently untrue. Leaving aside Piper’s conviction that churches must be led by males–a concept that some Christian scholars believe to be rooted in the New Testament’s cultural context–none of the eight marks of leadership Piper referenced in his speech could be considered specifically “masculine.” Attributes like bravery in the face of criticism and boldly teaching scriptural doctrines in ways that press forward to wise application in life even when those truths are hard to hear cannot be persuasively put forth as qualities that are masculine rather than feminine.

If you would like to read this excellent article in the full, the link is as follows: http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2012/02/john_piper_and_the_rise _of_bib.html

As for Piper’s comment, “God has revealed himself to us in the Bible pervasively as King, not Queen, and as Father, not Mother,” I thought of the following response my former mentor and longtime friend, Dr. Robert K Megregor-Wright, wrote:

The first observation on the claim that God must be masculine because he is never called “Mother” is that it is an argument from silence and is therefore invalid. God is never called a Trinity in the Bible either, but all the essential structural elements of the Trinitarian model can be exegeted from specific passages, and only this model of God includes all the textual material without contradiction or residue. Likewise with the biblical egalitarian model of human nature and relations. The Bible never uses the word “egalitarian” to describe Christlike patterns of human relationships, yet this is the only exegetical construct that logically accounts for all the textual evidence. So the absence of such an expression as “God our Mother,” or anything like it, means nothing except perhaps to signal God’s contempt for the pagan goddesses (“God, Metaphor and Gender: Is the God of the Bible a Male Deity?,” DISCOVERING BIBLICAL EQUALITY, p. 296).