This ladies ignorance of and total inability to adequately critique what she believes she is.
This ladies ridiculous name.
Hard to Believe? Biblical Authority and Evangelical Feminism
R. Albert Mohler Jr.President
Anne Eggebroten visited Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and what she found there shocked her. As a matter of fact, she was so shocked that she wrote about that experience in the July 2010 edition of Sojourners magazine. Readers of her article are likely to experience a shock of their own-they will be shocked that Eggebroten could actually have been surprised by what she found there.
In "The Persistence of Patriarchy," Eggebroten writes about "the wide reach" of complementarian views of manhood and womanhood among conservative Christians. Her article is subtitled, "Hard to believe, but some churches are still teaching about male headship." Hard to believe?
Can anyone really be surprised that this is so? In some sense, it might be surprising to the generally liberal readership of Sojourners, but it can hardly be surprising to anyone with the slightest attachment to evangelical Christianity. Nevertheless, Anne Eggebroten's article represents what I call a "National Geographic moment"-an example of someone discovering the obvious and thinking it exotic and strange. It is like a reporter returning from travel to a far country to explain the strange tribe of people she found there-evangelical Christians believing what the Christian church has for 2,000 years believed the Bible to teach and require. So ... what is so exotic?
She begins her article at Grace Community Church in California, where, in her words, "God is male, all the pastors, deacons, and elders are male, and women are taught to live in submission to men." That is a snappy introduction, to be sure, but it requires some unpacking. When Eggebroten says that, at this well-known evangelical church "God is male," she is echoing the arguments of the late radical feminist Mary Daly, who famously asserted that "if God is male, then male is God." At Grace Community Church, as in the Bible, references to God are masculine, but God is not claimed to be male. Interestingly, she also missed the fact that Grace considers the role of the deacon in terms of service, rather than authority, so women in fact do serve as deacons with responsibility for particular ministries.
Nevertheless, Eggebroten is certainly onto something here, especially when Grace Community Church is contrasted with the Episcopal congregation visited by her husband on that same Sunday. In that church, a woman is preaching the sermon. We can't miss the point when Eggebroten writes, "These two different worlds exist side by side: congregations where men and women are equal partners in service of Jesus Christ, and others where gender hierarchy is taught as God's will and the only truly biblical option. On Sunday morning we all drive past one flavor of gender teaching to worship in another."
Well, on this Sunday Anne Eggebroten did not drive past Grace Community Church. Instead, she heard a sermon by Dr. John MacArthur, who for more than 40 years has served as pastor of the church. Beyond that, MacArthur has become one of the most respected and influential preachers of our times, with perhaps the most widely-disseminated ministry of exposition in the history of the Christian church.
Eggebroten enjoyed the sermon, remarking that MacArthur's message was "excellent." She added, "I guess that's how mega churches get started." Well, one can hope.
The central part of her report from the trenches at Grace Community Church comes from an experience at a visitors' reception after the sermon. Eggebroten asks a woman there (a physical therapist with a degree from the school where Eggebroten teaches), "Is women's submission to their husbands stressed in this church?" The answer, of course, was yes.
It appears that Eggebroten could hardly have been surprised, for she wrote,
-At least things aren't as extreme as they sound on the church Web site. There, I had listened to Anna Sanders lecture women on how to live in submission to their husbands. "We need to beat down our desire to be right and have our own way," she had said, citing John Piper,Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and Martha Peace-all authors published in the last decade. "It's his way, his rights, his expectations, and his plans.... Be a helper."-
So, there was little ground for surprise when Eggebroten asked the question at the visitors' reception. But there was more to come. She writes, "I'm stunned to find that the 300-student Master's Seminary on the church campus enrolls only men."
Well, let's see. The Master's Seminary, according to it's own mission statement, "exists to advance the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ by equipping men to be pastors and/or trainers of pastors." The logic is simple and straight-forward. The church believes that the Bible restricts the office of pastor to men. The Master's Seminary trains only pastors and trainers of pastors; thus, it limits admissions to men. What could possibly be stunning about that?
As Eggebroten acknowledges, seminaries that train for roles beyond the pastorate may enroll women for those programs without compromising this conviction. But Master's does not offer those programs, so what is possibly shocking?
In the course of her article, Eggebroten continues her reports of conversations with members of the complementarian tribe before getting to the more deeply theological portion of her essay. In this passage she gets to the core issue:
-Here's the question: Is God permanently committed to the kinds of social hierarchy that existed in the first and second millennium B.C.E. and continued until recently, when education and voting were opened to women? Or does the vision of Paul in Galatians 3:28-"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus"-take precedence?-
At this point the agenda becomes clear. Eggebroten argues that the church has simply perpetuated the patriarchal traditions of the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures that formed the social context for the early Christian church. Against these she contrasts the Apostle Paul's beautiful declaration in Gal 3:28-"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."
But this is the kind of sloppy and agenda driven exegesis that reveals the desperation of those who would reject the New Testament's limitation of the office of pastor to men. In Gal 3:28 Paul is clearly speaking of salvation-not of service in the church. Paul is declaring to believers the great good news that "in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith" (verse 26). He concludes by affirming, "And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise" (verse 29).
To read Gal 3:28 the way Eggebroten reads the verse, you would have to believe that the Apostle Paul was in direct contradiction with himself, when he restricts the teaching office to men in letters such as 2 Timothy and Titus.
Or ... you can try to deny that Paul actually wrote those latter letters. Eggebroten accuses conservative evangelicals of ignoring "evidence that the ‘pastoral epistles' (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) were written in honor of Paul long after he died and reflect a second-century debate over women's roles in the church-whether to conform to social customs for the sake of winning converts, or to advocate radical social equality (and even celibacy) in the last days before the Second Coming."
What this reveals, of course, is the argument of many evangelical feminists that we can discard the teachings of the Pastoral Epistles. We can keep the Apostle Paul we like (taking Gal 3:28 out of context, for example) and disregard the Paul we do not like.
Nor are the Pastoral Epistles the only biblical texts subverted by this line of argument. With reference to 1 Cor 14:35 ("Let a woman learn in silence with full submission"), Eggebroten suggests, among other options, that "verses 34-35 began as someone's marginal comment, later copied right into the text."
With this approach to the Bible, you can simply discard any text you dislike. Just dismiss it as a marginal comment, or deny that Paul even authored the text. This is where the denial of biblical inerrancy inevitably leads-the text of the Bible is deconstructed right before our eyes.
"So what is the will of God for women today: silence or preaching, subjection or mutual submission?" Eggebroten asks. She adds, "Many Christians in all denominations, including evangelicals aren't even asking this question any more-yet the neo-patriarchal movement remains widespread."
The answer to that question, as Eggebroten's essay helps to clarify, depends on your view of Scripture. In order to reach her conclusions, you must accept her evasions of the biblical text. If you are willing to do that on this question, you will be willing to do so on other issues as well. The central issue is, and will ever remain, the authority of Scripture.
Anne Eggebroten has written a fascinating report that, like so many others of its kind, reveals more about the reporter than the reported. Eggebroten teaches religion at California State University, Northridge, and she is a founding member of the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus. In her other writings she has, for example, profiled "the reality of abortion as a morally responsible choice being made by countless Christian women of all denominations."
In what sense can any of this be bent to fit within evangelical identity? This essay reveals again how these arguments-and the magazine that publishes them-are so very distant from the beliefs of most evangelicals. If there is anything genuinely shocking about this article, it is the fact that the writer would attempt to lay claim on evangelicalism.
In yet another twisted use of Scripture, Eggebroten concludes by citing Gal 5:1, "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." As Paul asserts, in Christ we are free from the slavery of attempting to prove our righteousness by the Law. Paul is not liberating the church from the Bible.
In the end, that is the real issue. There are Christians who would demand to be liberated from the Bible. Now that is what really should be shocking.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville, Kentucky
Anne Eggebroten visited Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and what she found there shocked her. As a matter of fact, she was so shocked that she wrote about that experience in the July 2010 edition of Sojourners magazine. Readers of her article are likely to experience a shock of their own-they will be shocked that Eggebroten could actually have been surprised by what she found there.
In "The Persistence of Patriarchy," Eggebroten writes about "the wide reach" of complementarian views of manhood and womanhood among conservative Christians. Her article is subtitled, "Hard to believe, but some churches are still teaching about male headship." Hard to believe?
Can anyone really be surprised that this is so? In some sense, it might be surprising to the generally liberal readership of Sojourners, but it can hardly be surprising to anyone with the slightest attachment to evangelical Christianity. Nevertheless, Anne Eggebroten's article represents what I call a "National Geographic moment"-an example of someone discovering the obvious and thinking it exotic and strange. It is like a reporter returning from travel to a far country to explain the strange tribe of people she found there-evangelical Christians believing what the Christian church has for 2,000 years believed the Bible to teach and require. So ... what is so exotic?
She begins her article at Grace Community Church in California, where, in her words, "God is male, all the pastors, deacons, and elders are male, and women are taught to live in submission to men." That is a snappy introduction, to be sure, but it requires some unpacking. When Eggebroten says that, at this well-known evangelical church "God is male," she is echoing the arguments of the late radical feminist Mary Daly, who famously asserted that "if God is male, then male is God." At Grace Community Church, as in the Bible, references to God are masculine, but God is not claimed to be male. Interestingly, she also missed the fact that Grace considers the role of the deacon in terms of service, rather than authority, so women in fact do serve as deacons with responsibility for particular ministries.
Nevertheless, Eggebroten is certainly onto something here, especially when Grace Community Church is contrasted with the Episcopal congregation visited by her husband on that same Sunday. In that church, a woman is preaching the sermon. We can't miss the point when Eggebroten writes, "These two different worlds exist side by side: congregations where men and women are equal partners in service of Jesus Christ, and others where gender hierarchy is taught as God's will and the only truly biblical option. On Sunday morning we all drive past one flavor of gender teaching to worship in another."
Well, on this Sunday Anne Eggebroten did not drive past Grace Community Church. Instead, she heard a sermon by Dr. John MacArthur, who for more than 40 years has served as pastor of the church. Beyond that, MacArthur has become one of the most respected and influential preachers of our times, with perhaps the most widely-disseminated ministry of exposition in the history of the Christian church.
Eggebroten enjoyed the sermon, remarking that MacArthur's message was "excellent." She added, "I guess that's how mega churches get started." Well, one can hope.
The central part of her report from the trenches at Grace Community Church comes from an experience at a visitors' reception after the sermon. Eggebroten asks a woman there (a physical therapist with a degree from the school where Eggebroten teaches), "Is women's submission to their husbands stressed in this church?" The answer, of course, was yes.
It appears that Eggebroten could hardly have been surprised, for she wrote,
-At least things aren't as extreme as they sound on the church Web site. There, I had listened to Anna Sanders lecture women on how to live in submission to their husbands. "We need to beat down our desire to be right and have our own way," she had said, citing John Piper,Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and Martha Peace-all authors published in the last decade. "It's his way, his rights, his expectations, and his plans.... Be a helper."-
So, there was little ground for surprise when Eggebroten asked the question at the visitors' reception. But there was more to come. She writes, "I'm stunned to find that the 300-student Master's Seminary on the church campus enrolls only men."
Well, let's see. The Master's Seminary, according to it's own mission statement, "exists to advance the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ by equipping men to be pastors and/or trainers of pastors." The logic is simple and straight-forward. The church believes that the Bible restricts the office of pastor to men. The Master's Seminary trains only pastors and trainers of pastors; thus, it limits admissions to men. What could possibly be stunning about that?
As Eggebroten acknowledges, seminaries that train for roles beyond the pastorate may enroll women for those programs without compromising this conviction. But Master's does not offer those programs, so what is possibly shocking?
In the course of her article, Eggebroten continues her reports of conversations with members of the complementarian tribe before getting to the more deeply theological portion of her essay. In this passage she gets to the core issue:
-Here's the question: Is God permanently committed to the kinds of social hierarchy that existed in the first and second millennium B.C.E. and continued until recently, when education and voting were opened to women? Or does the vision of Paul in Galatians 3:28-"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus"-take precedence?-
At this point the agenda becomes clear. Eggebroten argues that the church has simply perpetuated the patriarchal traditions of the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures that formed the social context for the early Christian church. Against these she contrasts the Apostle Paul's beautiful declaration in Gal 3:28-"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."
But this is the kind of sloppy and agenda driven exegesis that reveals the desperation of those who would reject the New Testament's limitation of the office of pastor to men. In Gal 3:28 Paul is clearly speaking of salvation-not of service in the church. Paul is declaring to believers the great good news that "in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith" (verse 26). He concludes by affirming, "And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise" (verse 29).
To read Gal 3:28 the way Eggebroten reads the verse, you would have to believe that the Apostle Paul was in direct contradiction with himself, when he restricts the teaching office to men in letters such as 2 Timothy and Titus.
Or ... you can try to deny that Paul actually wrote those latter letters. Eggebroten accuses conservative evangelicals of ignoring "evidence that the ‘pastoral epistles' (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) were written in honor of Paul long after he died and reflect a second-century debate over women's roles in the church-whether to conform to social customs for the sake of winning converts, or to advocate radical social equality (and even celibacy) in the last days before the Second Coming."
What this reveals, of course, is the argument of many evangelical feminists that we can discard the teachings of the Pastoral Epistles. We can keep the Apostle Paul we like (taking Gal 3:28 out of context, for example) and disregard the Paul we do not like.
Nor are the Pastoral Epistles the only biblical texts subverted by this line of argument. With reference to 1 Cor 14:35 ("Let a woman learn in silence with full submission"), Eggebroten suggests, among other options, that "verses 34-35 began as someone's marginal comment, later copied right into the text."
With this approach to the Bible, you can simply discard any text you dislike. Just dismiss it as a marginal comment, or deny that Paul even authored the text. This is where the denial of biblical inerrancy inevitably leads-the text of the Bible is deconstructed right before our eyes.
"So what is the will of God for women today: silence or preaching, subjection or mutual submission?" Eggebroten asks. She adds, "Many Christians in all denominations, including evangelicals aren't even asking this question any more-yet the neo-patriarchal movement remains widespread."
The answer to that question, as Eggebroten's essay helps to clarify, depends on your view of Scripture. In order to reach her conclusions, you must accept her evasions of the biblical text. If you are willing to do that on this question, you will be willing to do so on other issues as well. The central issue is, and will ever remain, the authority of Scripture.
Anne Eggebroten has written a fascinating report that, like so many others of its kind, reveals more about the reporter than the reported. Eggebroten teaches religion at California State University, Northridge, and she is a founding member of the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus. In her other writings she has, for example, profiled "the reality of abortion as a morally responsible choice being made by countless Christian women of all denominations."
In what sense can any of this be bent to fit within evangelical identity? This essay reveals again how these arguments-and the magazine that publishes them-are so very distant from the beliefs of most evangelicals. If there is anything genuinely shocking about this article, it is the fact that the writer would attempt to lay claim on evangelicalism.
In yet another twisted use of Scripture, Eggebroten concludes by citing Gal 5:1, "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." As Paul asserts, in Christ we are free from the slavery of attempting to prove our righteousness by the Law. Paul is not liberating the church from the Bible.
In the end, that is the real issue. There are Christians who would demand to be liberated from the Bible. Now that is what really should be shocking.
re: "This ladies ridiculous name."
ReplyDeleteAd hominem attacks hurt your case, not support it. She had no input on what her surname is, and it has absolutely no bearing on what her point is.
Also, I find Mohler's article very hypocritical. He accuses her of hyperbole of tone, and poor hermeneutics, and then engages in the same to make his own point.
I agree with the previous post
ReplyDeleteDear Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI agree that Eggebroten’s name has nothing to do with her point, but please note that I never pretended it did. When I said I love her ridiculous name I was stating an opinion. In no way did I mean that as an attack, it was merely an observation (and coincidentally one of the three things I loved about the article).
I'm allowed to love things. I can love the New England Patriots, you can love Barack Obama, it's not right or wrong, It's just an opinion.
Are you willing to let me have an opinion?
To your second point, whether Mohler uses the same techniques he is critical of in Eggebroten is open to debate (I'd certainly love to see why you think he uses poor hermeneutics) but is really beside the point. If you'd like to offer support for this woman's "findings" that's fine, but don't just throw mud around at other people. You may be right you may be wrong, but it doesn’t really matter since the point of this article is to discuss Eggebroten’s article, not me, and not Mohler.
If you'd like to debate what Eggebroten said let’s do that. If you'd like to bring legitimate points about the article or the articles critique that's great too, but don't say that I don't play fair because I have an opinion, and then give an unsupported attack about how Mohler gives an unsupported attack; without ever interacting with the point of the article in the first place, that's just silly.
Basically you said that Mohler and I are mean. Maybe we are, but are we right?
That's the most important question.
Phrased as you put it, after calling her ignorant and crazy [I now see that you have removed the crazy part, but google cache still has it], you can hardly be surprised that I took it as "ridiculous (stupid)" rather than "ridiculous (awesome)". To me, it just seems like a regular german name, and your reaction to it seems a little borderline racist. Maybe that was not your intent, but I thought it would be helpful to you for me to point out that that's the way it came across.
ReplyDeleteRegarding whether you're allowed to have an opinion or not, of course you are, but as Christians, we are called to not just say whatever we think, but stick to speech that is edifying (Ephesians 4:29). For example, I may see someone who strikes me as particularly ugly, but telling them (or saying it behind their back) would be very ungracious.
Regarding the article itself, I was mostly responding to your response to it. There are several critiques of the article out there on the web that are much better than I could possibly do. (I did a quick google search but couldn't find the specific ones I remember reading almost a year ago when the article first came out).
The main source of hypocrisy to me is in Mohler's tone in the article whereby he is shocked and surprised that Eggebroten is shocked and surprised at Comp teaching. They both engage in hyperbole and in not quite presenting what the other side believes in it's entirety.
I'm not going to defend Eggebroten's position, because I don't agree with it either. On closer reading of the article, I can't really find any specific instances where I could justify calling Mohler's interpretations as poor hermeneutics, so I admit that I was probably overly hasty in saying so. It's hard to critique here, mainly because he merely alludes to his own position, assuming that the audience is already familiar with it. I am familiar with Complementarian theology, and I am of the opinion that it has a poor or inconsistent hermeneutic. I can provide references if you're interested, but that's a much larger discussion.
I will say, though, that there are other options for finding harmony in the scriptures which don't include either restricting Galatians 3:28 to solely salvation (as Mohler does) or to say that the Pauline verses are wrong (as Mohler states Eggebroten does).
-Moara (aka Annon #1)
I found the link I was thinking of.
ReplyDeletehttp://powerscourt.blogspot.com/2010/07/does-bible-put-women-down-response-to.html
-Moara
Moara,
ReplyDeleteAwesome stuff. Thanks for responding and posting that article. I REALLY appreciate your calling me out on what you consider inconsistencies in what I'm posting, but most importantly, dialoging on the articles that I bring up. I believe it's extremely valuable to have others give honest criticism on things, because it others to process and develop their systems of thought. So thank you for being willing to do that, and thank you for doing some homework to help enlighten me as to other views on the article in question.
I feel that the issue of male headship in the family is a core component of Biblical doctrine, and I enjoyed reading Mohler's critique of Eggebroten, but I was quite glib in my post, and I appreciate your saying so. Thanks for your willingness to engage in this discussion, and I hope that you will return to the site again with your thoughts on my musings.
Moara,
ReplyDeleteI just posted another article on Gender in the Church, I would love your thoughts on that post/article as well.