But That's Not Fair

In Which I read the Bible and SWG and prefer the Bible

The Woman with the Sparrows (1886) Carl Bloch

I imagine that long time readers over here will have noticed that I have adopted my Holiday Posting Schedule, which is a full two hours later, at least on Sunday, than usual. Sorry to discombobulate anyone else’s routine, but it is sort of glorious to act like a regular person on a Sunday morning.

Something else that’s pretty charming is that after I wandered around the lections yesterday, I clicked over to Facebook and found that a lovely friend had sent me yet another Bare Marriage Substack Post, authored by Sheila Wray Gregoire. It was almost as if Providence himself had arranged for the readings of Holy Scripture to be given as an answer to the novel and misguided claims that SWG makes. Her post is called “Too Many ‘Christians’ Are Gleeful about Women’s Voices Being Silenced: That attitude speaks volumes.” Let’s take a gander. She introduces her subject this way:

Imagine, if you will, that you read your Bible and truly, honestly believed that the Bible taught that white people got to lead and teach, but those of other races couldn’t. How would you feel? Or imagine you lived two hundred years ago during American chattel slavery, and you truly believed that the Bible taught that slavery was okay. How would you feel? And let’s acknowledge and remember today, Juneteenth, that so many churches did indeed argue this, to their immense shame and judgment. If you’re anything like me (and I assume that you are because you’re reading this!), you’d be devastated. It would cause a huge crisis of faith. You want to believe in Jesus, you want to follow Him, but how can you if He arbitrarily chooses some to have power over others?

I don’t know how to say this without alarming anyone, but… God does choose some people to have “power” over others. Saint Paul says as much in the New Testament. In his Epistle to the Romans he said, and I quote, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” So that, of course, is awkward if you think that God should not be in the business of putting some people in positions of power and authority and not others.

Muddling the question with the emotionally fraught history of racism and slavery in America might be rhetorically clever, in some way, but is nevertheless—and again, I don’t want to be unkind, because kindness is everything, but still—facile. The interplay between God’s arranging of our lives and our attempts to do it all by ourselves is the great Mystery of Sacred History. How is it that we seize what isn’t ours and try to lord it over others, and yet God accomplishes his own purposes anyway, often using the peculiar and wicked circumstances we devise? We don’t know how he does it, but we can see it’s effects most gloriously at the cross where men with power—the Sanhedrin, Pilate, Herod—all did what they wanted to do and yet God did what he wanted to do.

Power, as such, is not wicked. Neither is authority. Didn’t God, when the world was so new, make all the animals and then give Adam the right to name them and have “dominion” over them? That was before Adam did anything wrong. Worse still, God himself has power. Is he allowed to use it without middle-class Western influencers melting down and having crises of faith?

But that is exactly what SWG seems to be experiencing:

How, exactly, is a God that would make some people inferior to others (even if people claim “it’s equal but different roles!”) good?

Observe how muddled she is. God makes all people in his own image and likeness. For the first one, he stooped down into the dust to fashion a creature who could relate to him with words and love. He then, from that creature, made a second creature like the first. Still in his own image—and really, it’s the two relating together that so peculiarly reflect the nature of God to all creation—but different. The man and the woman are like each other and yet different, just like they are like God but not God. I know this is difficult, so try to keep up. They are equal to each other, but, guess what! they often have different roles. This is hard for us to imagine because the little demon devices in our pockets make us think that we are more like God than we are, and that we can do anything we want. Still, men can’t have babies and women, on the whole, don’t enjoy working on oil rigs in the Gulf.

Thinking about this, rather than enlivening SWG about the great mystery of God’s action in the world, actually made her “despondent:”

That’s been what has made me so despondent this week. And, if I’m honest, despondent is the right word. Since I started speaking out about the SBC decision to restrict women and stop them from preaching or pastoring, I’ve been inundated by literally thousands of comments from mostly men defending the decision and calling me rebellious for challenging it.

She provides two screenshots of quite ugly comments sent to her and then goes on:

Now, not all commenters are like this. Some men just leave long arguments for why complementarianism is the correct viewpoint. They say, essentially, “the Bible says this, and who are you to question the Bible?”

I mean, that might be an inelegant way to put it. And I think that the Lord of Heaven and Earth has invited us to come and speak with him. Come, he said somewhere or other, let us reason together. And here is Jeremiah melting down in his usual way in the Old Testament lesson appointed for today:

O Lord, you have deceived me,
and I was deceived;
you are stronger than I,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all the day;
everyone mocks me.
For whenever I speak, I cry out,
I shout, “Violence and destruction!”
For the word of the Lord has become for me
a reproach and derision all day long.
If I say, “I will not mention him,
or speak any more in his name,”
there is in my heart as it were a burning fire
shut up in my bones,
and I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.
For I hear many whispering.
Terror is on every side!
“Denounce him! Let us denounce him!”
say all my close friends,
watching for my fall.
“Perhaps he will be deceived;
then we can overcome him
and take our revenge on him.”

It’s ok to wrestle with God, to grapple with what he says in the Scriptures. But at the end of the day you’re supposed to question yourself, not what God says. I know, this will be upsetting for many to hear, but if you clash up against something in the Bible and you think, ‘How can this be? Is it that God is wrong and bad?’ you must then put that thought down and say instead, ‘I must have misunderstood. I am only a sinner. I don’t understand how exercising any power in any situation can be good—except over my large online audience where I tell people what to do almost every day of the week, that is perfectly fine and something I shouldn’t wonder about—but I will trust God in his Holy Word and ask for the help and comfort of the Holy Spirit to make it plain to me. I will read some books and perhaps ask a trusted theologian or pastor who has studied these texts and can help me sort it out so that I can live comfortably with the Almighty.’ God isn’t the Baddie, when you feel like something in Scripture is upsetting or wrong. We are the Baddies and the degree to which we submit ourselves to Holy Scripture, bending ourselves, however painfully, to its Way, we will become better and more able to worship God and serve him in the world.

I’ll just say it just one more time in case I am being too obscure. What the Bible says is Good, and the reader really oughtn’t to feel sad about what it says. When the reader does feel sad, it means that something is wrong inside of the reader and she needs to go back a few paces and try to understand and ask the Holy Spirit to rearrange her own spiritual and emotional furniture, rather than assuming that the text is wrong and needs to be apologized for.

This is sort of a basic fact of being a Christian. For SWG, however, such an idea is shocking and grievous:

There’s one thing not a single one of those thousands of commenters has said:

I wish it weren’t this way, but I think this is what Scripture says.

Not a single one has said, “Yeah, I know this sounds awful, and it really is unfair, and I don’t know why God would do this, but I do believe God did this.”

And that, my friends, is what hurts more than anything else. That’s what keeps me up at night.

Oh goodness. First of all, God never promised any of us “fairness.” That is a modern category imposed over our lives and not something that God ever said was something he cared about. Don’t I, he rhetorically asked his other great Prophet Isaiah, have the right to do with the clay what I will? The answer was supposed to be Yes, he does. But second of all, why does SWG assume that God’s choices are arbitrary and unknowable? We don’t know why God does everything he does, but he does tell us about a great deal of this thinking. He tells us he has the power to cast down the mighty from their thrones, and to raise up the lowly out of the ash heap. He tells us that he often chooses the least, rather than the greatest, to accomplish his purposes. He tells us that he has the power to judge the human heart, to discern and see what is the measure of those creatures whom he has made. He often, in words, discusses the great love with which he loves us, as well as the glory he is revealing in the world. And all of these things he says so that we will trust him in all our circumstances.

If you are oppressed by some wicked person who abuses you and makes your mortal life terrible, you should go to the Scripture where you will find solace and comfort in the fact that the God who made you both will judge and give recompense to all those who never repent nor call upon his name. There is a limit to human abuse of power. That limit is first God’s mercy at the cross and later the judgement his Coming. Neither, however, negate the blessing of those who use the power they’ve been given for good and not for evil.

SWG goes on in great lamentation about the SBC confirming, once again, that they don’t think women should be the ones to preach the sermon and then reiterates her original sorrow:

Let’s return to that question I posed. Quite simply, if I believed that God created me to have power over others, I would be absolutely crushed. Because I know that this is not just.

Why? Why be crushed? Especially as it’s simply not true that SWG has no authority or power in any sphere of her life. Her daughter, her daughter’s husband, her own husband, and her large audience all live according to the principles and priorities of the platform she has built. She has immense power. And yet, she doesn’t seem crushed by that fact. Rather, she is crushed by the idea that some Christian men might have some power in some ecclesial spaces.

I have been developing a theory about the source of this sadness. I think contemporary discussions of ecclesial and familial authority and power are governed by the tortuous rubric of corporate leadership models. In that sphere, there is always a “boss” but he is driven to get as much money as possible. He might even be evil. The realm of his power is devoid of transcendent meaning. There is no great spiritual relationship between him as the boss and all the people who travail away in the little cubicles. Most of the people in the cubicles might be his superior in virtue, intellect, and love. Or they might be the same. It doesn’t matter. Everyone just needs a paycheck.

But authority and power in the church and the home are not of that type. They are organic and spiritual. They refer to the love between Christ and the Church. They are a great mystery and therefore paradoxical. They speak to the strange equality of God’s gift of himself to each creature who comes to him for mercy. They speak also the humility of the Incarnation and the glorification of the Parousia. Anybody in a church or a home who is wandering around wondering who is “better” is entirely missing the point of the exercise. But that seems to be the windowless basement, cruelly lit office park that SWG is caught in:

We all played as kids and had an innate sense of justice. We all wanted the rules followed. We hated when someone got special treatment. We knew the ideal was to share. We learned all of this in kindergarten.

And yet we also all learned the complex social strata and hierarchies of life in Kindergarten. For little boys they are overt and obvious, for girls they are a little harder to observe, but the idea that they didn’t exist when we were five and don’t exist now is ridiculous.

So here’s my question: how can someone who truly loves Jesus, and who wants to spread that love to the world, and who wants to be Jesus’ hands and feet, not be devastated to learn that God shows favouritism and gives power to some and not to others?

Oh Heavens. Where does one begin? God both shows favoritism and doesn’t. There is Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Ishmael, the Jew and the Greek. God choose one man and one people to be his treasured possession for several millennia, and then it got even more narrow when he chose one young woman over whom he poured all his favor and goodness as she became the very Tabernacle of his presence. God chooses people all the time and yet he welcomes anyone who comes to him in faith. This, perhaps, may be why SWG is so full of grief and doesn’t seem to be able to read the Bible at all, because questions of choice and power are so central to understanding the text. If you’re reading it right, you always end up back at the foot of the cross, not melting down on the internet.

SWG concludes her piece with the prediction that “The church is going to divide along these lines.” What lines are those? “…that some in our midst are only here because they can use the Bible to feel superior to others.” You can’t, she says, “have fellowship with that. You just can’t.” She confesses herself tired, and I feel grieved for her that she would be having such a hard time.

But that, at least according to this morning’s gospel, is what Jesus promised we would endure. Speaking to his impossibly small and weak band of apostles whom he was going to send out into the world with the good news of the Great Salvation he was about to work on the Cross, he said this:

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

Then, pointing to the greatest power differential of all time, he declared to them—and us, by extension—the most obvious thing in the cosmos:

“A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household.

But that’s not fair, his dear friends began to mutter, and so he comforted them thus:

“So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.

What exultation! For the Lord of Heaven and Earth to look at me and call me a mere sparrow. I am of “more value.” How much more value, it does not profit me to wonder too much. There are better and more beautiful considerations at hand, like the fact that, if I go to Church, which I plan to do, read my Bible, and open my empty hands to him, he will feed me with Himself. In that strange, mystical way God himself stoops so low to our estate, to bring us into his Kingdom, to make us part of his own blessed Son.