Tell Her Story

I've just finished reading Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church by Nijay K. Gupta.  I really liked some aspects of it, and found some others seriously lacking.  The following is not a full review by any means (though by your leave I'll label it as a review), but just a series of thoughts and reflections.  I would welcome push-back if you've read it and liked it more (or less) than I did!

Things that I liked:

The survey of women in the Greco-Roman world (chapter 3) is great at showing that there was significant variety to the experiences of women in the first century.  It is certainly not true that first century women were universally restricted to the house, or that they never had roles outside the domestic sphere.  If in your imagination the background to the New Testament is a world of very rigid gender roles, I think it's helpful to see that things were more varied than that.

One line of argumentation that I've never heard deployed in person, but have witnessed on the internet and therefore gather is current in American Evangelicalism, is the idea that "women can't perform such and such a role in ministry because they are too..." (10) - fill in the blank as you please.  This sort of argument, based on the (demonstrably false) idea that there are immutable traits which mark out all women (and all men) is never advanced in Scripture, and this book takes it apart rather well.

Highlighting the role of women in the narrative of salvation history - whether that's a character like Deborah in the Old Testament (ch 1), the women who encountered and often accompanied the Lord Jesus (ch 4), or the women named by Paul as co-workers (chs 5-9) has the potential to enrich our understanding of God's work.  There will also certainly be points at which meditating on these women and their stories will point to changes that need to be made in the thinking and practice of the church today.

Things that I found frustrating:

The chapter on Genesis 1-3 is seriously underdeveloped, given the importance of the contents for this whole discussion - and placing it after the portrait and discussion of Deborah seems a little tendentious to me.

Much of the proposed reconstruction of women's lives and ministries in this book is very speculative, and involves more reading between the lines than I think responsible exegesis can support.  I lost track of the number of times we were told that we couldn't be certain of something, but then that same something was used to develop the argument as if it were certain (or the other way around; we are told that "it is more certain" that Euodia and/or Syntyche held the title of episkopos or diakonos (104), but then later we find it is only "quite possible" - and even then no particular evidence is offered in support (106).  Was Phoebe tasked with reading the letter to the Romans publicly?  We don't know (124), but we're asked to imagine it anyway.  The three chapters on Phoebe, Prisca and Junia seem to me to be trying to do far too much with the scraps of relevant text that we have, and consequently I can't see them convincing anyone who didn't already want to be convinced.

There seems to be some indecision or confusion at one key point in the book's argument, relating to offices in the early church.  Gupta endorses Wayne Meeks' conclusion that "Acts and the Pauline letters make no mention of formal offices in the early Pauline congregations." (81)  The rest of this chapter, however, discusses the nature of the diakonos, episkopos, and presbyteros in some detail.  These are described as 'roles' rather than 'offices', but I'm not sure I see the difference.  This becomes of great importance when a central plank of the complementarian position is that women did not serve as overseers or elders in the early congregations.  (As an aside, I appreciated Gupta's clear evidence that women did serve as deacons - although this was somewhat undermined by the vagueness about whether this was a formal office or not - and also his insistence that 'deacon' was a leadership position, with significant authority and responsibility).  I think Meeks' conclusion is completely unsustainable, and overall the presentation here seems to fall into a slightly 19th century way of contrasting an informal, charismatic early church with 'early catholicism' emerging (to the church's detriment?) a little later.  Given Titus 1 and other passages, I think it is clear that the appointment of elders was a central part of the Pauline mission, and that these elders were genuine office holders.

There also seems to be confusion about the extent to which the apostles were able to break from their own sociological background.  So we are told that "I don't think it is the case that the apostles blindly followed 'culture' when it comes to sexual anthropology" (49), but the chapter on the household codes assumes that the authors of these texts couldn't have imagined a more egalitarian setup, and so were limited by their cultural horizons (195).  I'm not sure the latter perspective fits comfortably with the inspiration of Scripture.  It's a shame, because there's a lot in the reading of the household codes here which seems evidently correct to me.  There's a similar confusion going on about householders hosting church - they must have been elders, because sociologically it would have been impossible for them to play host and not be church leaders.  But sociologically, the criteria for eldership would have been largely different from those laid down by Paul, who is obviously not thinking in sociological but theological terms here.

Other thoughts and reflections:

The particular arguments and scenarios that this book is written against are not ones that occur directly in the context I know best, and I believe it is very important that complementarians distance themselves from the extreme forms of patriarchy that are, apparently, being endorsed in parts of the church.  (One is sometimes tempted to think cutting off all cross-Atlantic communication might be a blessing, to be honest).  I will say that careless language, and perhaps behind it careless thought, can sometimes give the impression that we hold positions we do not in fact hold, or at least are not consistent with our deepest convictions.

If the key question is 'ought women ordinarily to serve as elders in churches?', I don't think this book successfully proves the affirmative, and I don't think it is correct to insist that the burden of proof lies with the other side (91 and other places).  The reason, it seems to me, that Gupta thinks the burden of proof lies with the complementarian camp is that he doesn't offer any sort of theological anthropology in this book.  The Scriptures do tell us some things doctrinally about the nature of humanity, and specifically the nature of humanity as gendered, which are absent from this discussion, and which to my mind swing the burden of proof back the other way.

If it is correct that elders ought ordinarily to be men - and I haven't given any argument for that here, I know, but I think it's true - then one thing that is clear from this book is that ministry, including Word ministry, authority, and responsibility must not be limited to the elders.  The diaconate should be open to women, and should not be restricted to administrative tasks.  There should be leadership and ministry opportunities for women at every level in the church, notwithstanding the restriction of the eldership.  There is a dangerous tendency in some churches I know towards an increased focus on the elders as ministers - such that they do all the teaching, almost all the leading, etc. - which when combined with a male-only eldership ends up denying complementarianism and falls over into outright patriarchalism.  I think we also need to think hard about how the elders hear female voices, and what it looks like for there to be Mothers as well as Fathers in the church.

For those about to lead worship

Jesus Christ is our worship, the essence of it and the whole of it, and we may worship God in Spirit and in Truth only as we are made partakers of his worship.

Thus T.F. Torrance, in Theology in Reconstruction, 249.

Torrance's point has at least a two-fold application.  Firstly, we cannot make an acceptable offering to God by ourselves.  All our worship is soiled by our sinfulness, and inadequate as a response to God's greatness and his grace.  We cannot possibly come of ourselves to appear before God and honour him.  Remember Nadab and Abihu?  Outside of Christ, our very worship of God deserves and attracts his wrath.  So if you're about to lead worship, please remember that you cannot do it - that you depend on Christ to pour out the Spirit so that what you do might be real, genuine, acceptable.  Worship is not within your powers, and leading others in worship is something that should make you tremble.

But second, an acceptable offering to God has been made, in our human nature, by our Brother the Lord Jesus Christ.  Because he appears in heaven before God, as our great High Priest, there is human worship which is sinless and holy, and which genuinely honours the Father.  And because that worship exists, we can come to worship - not as if we were offering something alongside Christ's offering, but as we are joined to him by the Spirit in faith our own inadequate worship is clothed in his great act of worship, and made to participate in it.  There is nothing for us to add, because he has done it all; but we may participate, because he has gone ahead of us.  So if you're about to lead worship, remember that what that means is directing people to Christ, who is the real worship leader, and resting in him and his perfect worship yourself as you lead others in doing so.

The joyful voice of the creature

In Church Dogmatics III/1, Barth discusses 'creation as justification'. Creation is good, really good, because it is good in God's sight. But why is that so? Barth is clear that we do not find the goodness, the rightness - the justification - of creation in our experience of the world, not even our good experience:

Created order has what we may call its brighter side. But its justification by its Creator and His self-disclosure is not bound up with this brighter side. It is not connected with the fact that the sun shines, that there are blossoms and fruits, pleasing shapes, colours and sounds, realities and groups of realities which preserve and foster life, purposeful relationships and order, intelligible and serviceable elements and powers, which enlighten the created mind of man, speak to his heart, and in some way correspond with his will for life and foster it.

This brighter side of creation is not enough to justify the creature, to render it really good. After all, we acknowledge in referring to a brighter side that there is a darker side, which might push us to exactly the opposite conclusion. But this not mean that the beauty and order of creation is meaningless. It simply means that its meaning can only be really understood, and placed on a secure foundation in our knowledge, in the light of God's revelation, the covenant brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ:

An affirmative judgement on creation has its foundation and rightful place. The recognition of its direct and immanent goodness is demanded from the man whom the Creator in His revelation has confronted with Himself. 

Note that it is really the immanent goodness of creation which is to be recognised here. The beauty and order that we see in creation really do speak of its goodness in God's sight. Creation speaks goodness in itself, and thus witnesses to God's goodness all the time; this voice, however, is only heard and heard rightly when God is known in Christ, and the covenant is known as the meaning of creation. 

The joyful voice of the creature rings out where the self-revelation of God has been apprehended.

Quotes from CD III/1, 370-1.

The knowledge of the Holy Trinity

The lectionary prescribed Luke 10:21-24 as part of the reading yesterday, and I'm struck by how beautifully trinitarian this passage is.  It begins with the Lord Jesus rejoicing in the Holy Spirit and praising the Father - so there already you have the three divine Persons.  Why is the Lord rejoicing?  At first glance it appears to be because God has concealed the truth from the wise and intelligent and revealed it to those who are, metaphorically, infants - the low status folk, the ones with nothing special to offer.  And that is surely part of it: God's plan is playing out, as the disciples see the Kingdom drawing near in Christ and their eyes begin to be opened to his identity and what that means, whilst other seemingly more likely candidates see nothing.  So Jesus praises his Father.

But as the passage goes on a deeper foundation is revealed.  How is it that God is made known through Jesus?  It is because all things have been entrusted to him by the Father, and "no knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son desires to reveal him."  The foundation of the revelation of God accomplished in Jesus is the relationship between the Father and the Son from eternity.  Because the Father knows the Son, and the Son knows the Father, the Son is really able to make the Father known, and it is the Father's good pleasure that he do so.

To put it another way, nobody truly knows God except God - how can a creature really know the Creator?  But God really does know God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit know one another, and know in one another the fullness of Deity which they equally and together possess and are.  God knows God.  But in the incarnation, that divine knowledge of God - the only knowledge of God which can be true - has been repeated as human knowledge.  The Son knows the Father now as a human being knows, but as the same Person and in the same relationship of total knowledge that he always had.  And when anyone else comes to know the Father through Jesus, or to see who Jesus is in relation to the Father, it is the opening up of that relationship of knowledge through the Holy Spirit so that more human beings can now truly say they know God - not in themselves, but by virtue of and in dependence on the human knowledge of the Father incarnate in the Son.

Jesus tells his disciples - just one verse before this passage - not to rejoice in the success of their mission but in the deeper truth that they belong to the kingdom.  I think here, perhaps, we see the Lord rejoicing not just in the fact that God is being made known, but in the deeper truth of his relationship with the Father - and therefore truly rejoicing in the Holy Spirit, the Person who represents most deeply the communion of Father and Son within the Godhead.  And how we should rejoice when we realise just what relationship of knowledge and love it is that we are drawn into when we glimpse something of the glory of God in the fact of Jesus Christ.

Celebrating hungrily

The celebration of Pentecost is a bit different from all the other gospel feasts that make up the church year. Like all those feasts - Christmas, Easter, Ascension - Pentecost looks back to something that happened, a foundational event in the ministry of Christ for his church. In this case, we recall the way in which the ascended Lord Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on his followers in Jerusalem, thus constituting them his new earthly body, his witnesses. We remember, and we celebrate with gratitude because without that event the good news of Jesus would never have reached us, the community of the church would never have come to be.

But the difference lies in this: Pentecost is celebrated with an edge of hunger and desire to it. That first giving of the Spirit is an unrepeatable, unique event, in one sense, but in another sense as we read the narrative and remember the event we are caused to long that it might happen again. Of course it can never happen again for the first time, in the foundational way in which it happened there and then; but because the outpouring of the Spirit is an ongoing ministry of Christ, there is a definite sense in which it could happen today, here and now. In some way it definitely is happening - otherwise the church would long since have died out of the world - but don't we want to see it happen in power, as it did? Wouldn't we love to see the Spirit at work bringing thousands at once to new life through the gospel? Don't we want the dramatic transformation which came over the Lord's fearful disciples? 

So we celebrate the then-and-there with a distinct eye on the here-and-now, and pray: come, Creator Spirit.

Holy Saturday, forwards and backwards

We can reflect on Holy Saturday, the day the Lord Jesus spent in the tomb, in two different directions.  Both are instructive, and each brings out a different emphasis.

Firstly, we can think our way into the story, and work forwards in time through the events.  Friday has happened.  The Lord is crucified.  Everything about Friday screamed finality.  Jesus breathed his last, gave up his Spirit.  "It is finished" - think about how you might have interpreted that on the Friday, before you knew what was going to follow.  The spear, the blood, the water.  And then the dead body laid out in the tomb, the heavy stone rolled across the doorway.  The last light disappears.  That's the end.

Reading the final verses of Lamentations at Evening Prayer yesterday, I was struck by the fact that it might really have been the end:

Lord, bring us back to yourself, so we may return;
renew our days as in former times,
unless you have completely rejected us
and are intensely angry with us.

It might be all over.  The mercy of God is new every morning - but...  Karl Barth asks at one point whether the mercy of God might not have taken the form of making a final end to us.  Would it not have been mercy for Christ to bear away our sin - remove the threat of eternal judgement - and yet just draw a line under the whole existence of humanity?  Like the mercy of expelling Adam from the garden, so that he would not eat from the tree of life and become an eternal sinner...

Thinking forwards from Friday into Saturday, we hold our breath.  Is it all over?

But second, we think backwards, from our position after Resurrection Day.  We know that Saturday is not the end.  Thinking forwards has taught us not to take the resurrection for granted, but thinking backwards we nevertheless know that it is coming.  Tomorrow will be Easter Sunday.  The Lord Jesus is alive, and reigns with the Father and the Spirit in the unity of the One God.  Though he was dead, he lives.

And yet he really was dead.  That needs to be remembered.  The one who lives for us really died for us.  That is gloriously good news!  He died bearing my sin; he died to put my old self to death.  And he really did.  There is no doubt about it.  His body lay still in the tomb.  My sin - my liability to judgement, my corruption, my uncleanness - is dead with him.  I can live now free of that, by the Spirit of the living Lord Jesus.  The stone that rolled across the door of the tomb is the final goodbye to my old sinful self.

Thinking back from Sunday to Saturday, we say: yes, it is all over.  And now everything is new.

Anti-intellectualism

Every now and again, the critique is raised of evangelicalism that it is anti-intellectual.  I think that critique is in some ways fair, and in others not so much.  Here is a little exploration of anti-intellectualism with some thoughts on how we can renew a Christian intellectual culture in our churches.

Firstly, I want to point out that there is a good, justified, and theologically well-founded anti-intellectualism which rests on two distinct grounds.  The first is that God's wisdom is not the wisdom of the world.  "Since, in God's wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached."  The message of the cross contradicts the wisdom of this age; the deep-thinkers of the world stumble over the apparent foolishness on display in the crucified God.  When the Apostle tells us that Christ Jesus "became wisdom from God for us", he is not only establishing where wisdom is, but also telling us where it is not.  Christ became wisdom for us by going to the cross, by demolishing everything that the human intellect would naturally think about God.  This demolition job goes to the foundations of natural thinking about God.  It is not that we mostly had God right, but were surprised by this one thing that he has done.  Christ who becomes wisdom for us in the incarnation and supremely at the cross is in himself and from eternity the Wisdom of God.  The apparent foolishness of the cross goes to the heart of who God is, and the fact that the cross appears foolish to us when in fact it is wisdom which reflects the eternal Life and Being of God is a sound rebuke to human intellect.

The second ground for anti-intellectualism is grace.  I think this is where a lot of evangelical anti-intellectualism comes from.  God doesn't expect us to climb up to him, either morally or intellectually; he comes down to us.  The message of the cross is devastatingly simple.  An infant can begin to understand it.  There are no theology exams for salvation; simply, child-like trust is all that is required.  Wherever an intellectual barrier is erected which seems to threaten the simplicity of the gospel, a certain amount of anti-intellectualism is justified and indeed required.

However, anti-intellectualism is not itself a good thing.  From the fact that God has created us with brains and the ability to engage in more or less complex reasoning, we really ought to assume that he wants us to use them - and why, if we are called to use them in life generally, would we not be expected to use them in understanding God and his works?  In fact already in the Scriptures and then in the Tradition of the church we see plenty of rigorous intellectual work, grappling with the reality of God's revelation, seeking to describe it and trace out its implications.  What puts people off that sort of work in the church?

To an extent in evangelicalism I think it is, as already mentioned, the desire to keep the simple gospel simple.  Fair enough, as far as it goes.  But we do our own faith, and our appeal to outsiders, no favours if we decline to engage in thought about what we believe.  The danger looms of a purely subjective faith - I believe it because I believe it - with so little intellectual content, so little concern to explain what we believe and why, and so little effort to connect this faith to a general view of the world, that it becomes unassailable but also inexplicable.  The gospel is simple, but it is also huge in its claims and its implications, and really the church does need to take up the task of exploring and explaining these.

There is also, if I read things correctly, an unhelpful biblicism at work.  Of course evangelicals are Bible people; that's the whole big idea.  But when the Bible is used as if answers can just be read off the surface of the text, and as if any attempt to reflect more deeply on how those answers join up, whether certain parts of the text might be key for interpreting and applying other parts, whether the text might imply a metaphysical hinterland (and perhaps foreground) - well, then I think we're in trouble.  Holy Scripture doesn't work that way.  If we insist on just sticking to the words and formulations of the Bible, we may well end up in heresy - many heretics have been very keen on the text of Scripture! - but at the least we will miss the depths of what is being portrayed in Scripture.

If we want to avoid anti-intellectualism in our churches and foster a thoughtful theological culture, I think we need to consider a few points.  Firstly, those of us who like theology and read big books for fun need to rein it in.  It is very easy for theology enthusiasts to give the impression that they have graduated from the simple gospel to something more profound.  In reality, there is nothing more profound.  Those who have done the most intellectual work need to be able to speak the language of simple faith in church, even as they hope to guide people deeper into that simple gospel.  Even as we go deeper, it should be very evident that we are going deeper into the same message, and certainly not moving on from it.  And this should be clear not only in what gets said, but where the focus and the enthusiasm are.  I get nervous when people seem more excited about metaphysics than they are about Christ crucified.

Second, the links between the Bible and theology need to be clearly spelt out, and it needs to be absolutely clear that the Bible is in the driving seat.  I have no time for that approach that says you need the Nicene Creed or whatever in order to properly understand the Bible.  Rather, I want to show that the Bible itself teaches Nicene Trinitarianism, because that is how God has revealed himself.  There is a temptation for theologians to scorn those who just want to stick to the Bible; instead, why not help people to see that sticking with the Bible is exactly what we want to do, and that the way to do it is to think through the nature and identity of the God revealed in the Bible?

Finally, we need to be clear that the intellectual work of the church is not intended to make the message of the cross appear wise to the world.  Clever folk who are converted to Christ will need to keep on putting to death their natural wisdom in order to start thinking on the basis of God's wisdom - in order to have the mind of Christ, to think on the basis of Christ in the wisdom which the Spirit displays.  Thinking that starts from Jesus and returns to Jesus, making much of him - that is what we need.