Paula

Hi Truthseeker,

Just to clarify for anyone who might be confused, when we say this is a secondary issue, we in no way mean it’s not important. We’re just saying it’s not something that should make some believers condemn others. But it’s most definitely important because that happens; it’s important because male supremacism has made it so. When half the Body of Christ is bound and gagged, we have to take a strong stand against the system of theology that promotes it.

That said, your pastor is equivocating on “submission”; he’s comparing apples and oranges. Both men and women submit to leaders, but even then it should be for as long as the “students” are in training. It should never be a permanent situation. If the “students” never graduate then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the “school”!

So there is nothing men submit to that women don’t. But there is something women submit to that men don’t. Your pastor thinks that the issue is just submission, but it isn’t; it’s unilateral submission, it’s a double standard. And this special class of submission for women has grave consequences, both in the church and in the home.

When a woman submits in the church, she is told not to use her spiritual gifts to half the believers, if such gifts include pastor, prophet, or any other “presentable part”, which male supremacists have wrongly classified as “authoritative”. She is told she is in sin if she dares to exercise such gifts to adult males. Quite illogically, she is entrusted with the wisdom and guidance to bring boys to maturity, but once they get there they are her spiritual superiors!

When a woman submits in the home, she is basically treated as a child who never grows up. She can be trusted to teach the children how to dress themselves but not decide what she herself can wear. She can present the gospel to them but not to adults. She can teach the boys to be independent someday but never for herself or her daughters. Her children can pray directly to God and learn to follow his voice, but she can only hear from God through her husband. And she is inherently disqualified from protesting these maddening and logic-defying regulations.

The woman alone is held guilty for Eve’s sin, while the men claim Adam’s alleged leadership role even though Adam was quite unfit as a leader. Apparently the curtain in the Temple was only torn in two for men; apparently only men can “come boldly to the throne of grace”; apparently only men, by virtue of their reproductive organs alone, are trustworthy with the Gospel and the spiritual responsibility for their grown-up wives.

Don’t know if my rant helps, but there it is.