Considering Recovering From Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, the Finale

Some of you thought this would never end. But all things, good and bad, come to an end this side of the eschaton. Then everything, good and bad, will be eternal.

This will cover the last chapter and some final thoughts concerning Aimee Byrd’s recent and controversial book Recovering From Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. We are going to peel back the yellow wall paper one last time. The final chapter is called When Paul Passes Phoebe the Baton.

As you can likely tell from that title, Byrd returns to Phoebe and Paul’s commendation of her to the church in Rome. She draws on James Montgomery Boice to say that she likely had traveling companions since it was generally unsafe for women to travel alone in the ancient world. Paul is wanting to identify the courier of the epistle: Phoebe.

Interestingly she also notes that Paul may have taken quite some time to write the letter, perhaps having rough drafts, editing, dictation and so forth. She depends on E. Randolph Richards book Paul and First-Century Letter Writing. I was surprised that someone wrote a book on such a niche subject, but I shouldn’t be I suppose. This seems to overly stress the human authorship and minimize (at best) the divine authorship. I don’t generally conceive of the Holy Spirit needing Paul to edit and utilize rough drafts. But this is a rabbit trail since the Spirit is not super-intending this blog post.

Sacred Siblingship

Byrd gets this phraseology from Mixed Ministry: Working Together as Brothers and Sisters in an Oversexed Society. Her arguments are based on Reidar Aasgaard’s “My Beloved Brothers and Sisters!” Christian Siblingship in Paul (again thinking people write about the oddest things). It was a powerful social institution. Siblings of the opposite sex could talk to one another in public, and show some affection prohibited to lovers. Paul uses this to reveal the type of bond Christians should have, a very counter-cultural bond. She explores some of the reasons for this bond in families. Sibling obligations were distinctive and yet fluid. “Factors such as age, gender, skill, and birth order all contributed to authority and responsibility both in the household and public spheres.” She notes that sisters often mediated between fathers and sons. The longest relationship you’d have in life was the sibling relationship.

Some of those calls were painful

Family was important to Jesus, but not more important than the Father and those spiritually united to him. Jesus did provide for his mother at his death. As we think of Phoebe, Paul is saying “she’s one of us!” not just someone paid to carry a letter for me. Byrd again returns to her theory that Phoebe was astute and full of theological vigor, capable of answering any questions like the old Ligonier phone room.

She makes much of the fact that a woman could carry the letter to Rome, and the theory she was there to answer questions too (meaning instructing them in what Paul means). In like fashion, Byrd introduces us to Basil and Gregory of Nyssa’s older sister Macrina. Belonging to a convent she was apparently theologically astute and Gregory indicates that she was influential in his life and theology.

“We see from Gregory’s writings that ‘women’s theologizing is fundamental to the development of Christian thought and should not be relegated to the fringe or regarded as a concession prize at best.”

Sisters can communicate God’s Word. This sister by blood and spirit taught her younger brothers, not only as children but as adults. They didn’t silence her as a mere woman. They valued her as a person and her input or ideas.

Then Byrd engages in “historical imagination” with Richard Bauckham regarding Junia also mentioned in Romans 16. I call it speculative, and the difference may or may not be more than semantic. There are translation/interpretative differences: she is either well known as an apostle (lower case, not the office) or well known by the Apostles. Chrysostom seems to indicate in his homily on this text that she was “worthy of the appellation of apostle!” She would be part of a church planting team sent out (hence apostles). PC(USA) author Kenneth Bailey seems to view her as an Apostle, at least of sorts, arguing she was witness to Jesus’ ministry (he seems to be reading our technical use back into the text). Bauckman gets more speculative in arguing that Junia is the Greek name for the Jewess Joanna who was married to Herod’s steward. As part of Herod’s court, she and her husband likely had connections in Rome, and perhaps were missionaries to Rome later.

I don’t want to get too detailed in this. The gist is that women were engaged in the church planting project. What role they played is uncertain. What is certain to me is that Byrd is confusing “apostles” with “Apostles”. She thinks that this speculation poses a problem for complementarian churches. I don’t think it does for me as a complementarian-in-search-of-a-new-name. As laypeople, some were sent to plant churches in accordance with the gospel of the Apostles (given to them by Jesus, obviously). The word in Greek is not used exclusively for the office. We must look at how it is used to see its meaning in a particular case. So, this doesn’t mean that women had authority and office. We do see that they provided resources and engaged in evangelism as well as discipleship. At times we clearly see women like Prisca alongside her husband working to disciple men. We do see women commissioned and sent onto the mission field, and this is a good thing.

Peel and Reveal

She’s calling us to evaluate our views and the practices of our congregations. She uses clutter blindness as an illustration. We become blind to the clutter around us (like in my office) after time passes. I discussed this with someone today: broken or misplaced items become normalized after about 30 days. So fix or put those things away in timely fashion.

We really can’t see the yellow wallpaper because we are so used to it. Evaluate the practices to be sure you aren’t just falling into a cultural trap (either egalitarian or patriarchical). This isn’t limited to issues of gender. There are many things that are cultural that can be mistaken for biblical mandate. We can be blind to the racial insensitivity or worse in our churches because it has been there for so long. She quotes Upton Sinclair as saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”.

Byrd notes there about 60 “one another” passages in the Scripture which include aspects of discipleship. These passages are second plural, and are not gendered. The people who fulfill them are gendered. And so we minister as a man or woman to a brother or sister, father or mother, or son or daughter.

“Siblingship is the very framework that will help us to uphold distinction without reduction. We have unique responsibilities and contributions to our sexes because women will never be brothers and men will never be sisters.”

She reminds us of the difference between tradition and traditionalism. She’s not wanting to get rid of tradition but traditionalism (I’m taking her at her word).

Summary Thoughts:

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  Haley Carruthers crossing the finish line in London (Business Insider)

  While she affirms male headship in the church (only male elders) she more assumes it than proves it. She refers to Genesis 2 in a footnote. There is no mention of Titus 1 or 1 Timothy 2-3.

• At times she heavily depends on one source for pages at a time. Many of those oft repeated sources are egalitarian scholars. It can sound like idiosyncratic viewpoints that she has picked up rather commonly held and understood.
• She brings up lots of material and concerns from other books of hers. The main new contribution is issues concerning the CBMW in terms of how they reduce masculinity and femininity to authority based on ESS. This is based on a Biblicist approach to understanding Scripture.
• She also attacks their problematic process of trying to discern what women can and cannot do in a local church. I wish she was more clear about some of the practices that she thinks are cultural additions (traditionalism) but she seems to want us to think it through.
• In terms of Jonathan Haidt’s social intuition theory, she doesn’t seem to address the elephant as much as the rider.
• At times she is selective. For instance, she reminds us that Miriam led others in song after the parting of the Red Sea in judgment-salvation. Byrd does not mention that she led the women, and in the chorus that Moses had already been singing. As a result it sounds like overstating the case through the selectivity. I said this in less than a paragraph, so it doesn’t take long. She also left out that Miriam was struck with leprosy when she and Aaron complained about Moses marrying the Cushite woman.

This is a good book that brings up a variety of good points. At times it seems like she’s trying to do too much and so the reasoning isn’t as clear as I’d like.

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Considering Recovering From Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, Part 4

Our consideration of Aimee Byrd’s most recent book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, continues with the 3rd chapter, Girls Interrupted. In many ways this is a continuation of the previous chapter in addressing the feminine voice in Scripture. She sticks with the Old Testament, and the same time period as Ruth. Her focus here is Judges, though she begins with Exodus and the midwives.

Before we get there I want to reiterate what she does as she introduces the chapter (and at the end).

“My hope is that you will begin identifying how this coactivity of the male and female voice functions more and more in your regular reading of Scripture and consider its implications in church life.”

The female voice, while not the dominant voice in Scripture, is a helpmate of the male voice. They, she argues, complement each other so we get a fuller Scripture. God, in His providence, provides for this in the dual authorship of Scripture. It is not an addition from disgruntled feminists. Byrd does not seem to argue like a feminist in this regard. She’s not saying this voice is more important. She’s not denigrating the male voice as less important to women. She’s not trying to get women (or anyone) to focus on the feminine voice at the expense of the rest of the Bible; indeed the majority of the Bible. She does want us to recognize it in regular Scripture reading. In other words, as you are reading, notice the perspective (which actually is part of good hermeneutics). Where some people will struggle even more, though, is the implication for life in the church. We will get to this in the Peal and Reveal section.

While Richard Bauckman is an egalitarian, I think his point should be obvious and non-controversial. Women, as part of the people of God, are mentioned in the Bible. Women, as we are about to see, likely participated in passing down the oral tradition of the Scriptures. A woman affirmed the authenticity and authority of the scrolls found in a dusty temple to the king who wanted to know if he should recognize them as Scripture. Other texts focus on women as main characters. This is true, right?

The Midwives’ Voice

In bringing up Exodus Byrd brings up the midwives, in particular their conversation with the Egyptian leaders. We can either believe God gave this information to Moses via direct revelation or through oral tradition as the midwives reported the exchange to the elders of Israel and anyone willing to listen. How we answer this question may say more about us than it does about Scripture. We affirm oral tradition in the Gospels. Luke, for instance, researched it. He did not witness the events himself nor received a Matrix-like download but talked to men and women about the events in question. John may have too. Some of the discussion between Jesus and the Samaritan woman was likely related to him by Jesus. But there are also part that Jesus was not first party to and that may have been reported to John by her at a later date. But we clearly have her communicating to others in her village about Jesus. We see the same thing with the women’s testimony about showing up at the tomb and discovering Jesus gone. Affirming does not make someone a feminist or egalitarian.

She also brings us James Montgomery Boice via his book The Life of Moses. He spent time addressing this. In the section she quotes there is this sentence: ” … God does not record the pharaoh’s names, but he remembers these two women, Shiphrah and Puah, because they did the right thing.” She is assuming that they were tradents of the faith, passing “down the heritage and tradition of God’s people by sharing how God worked through them.” This appears to be a valid assumption.

Women in Judges

Then she shifts to Judges where she’ll spend most of this chapter. Judges focuses on how the people of Israel began to live like the Canaanites and not like the people of God they were called to be. One aspect of this that runs through Judges is “by the way the women are viewed and treated.” This is not the only way. It is a symptom of their apostasy. The apostasy was the main deal, but this was a horrifying manifestation of that apostasy. Judges is a downward spiral, and the two last stories focus on the mistreatment of women. These last two are from the perspective of the men involved. But there are some in the feminine voice.

“The main point in Judges is not the treatment of women. … But as we have the big picture, we can observe that one of the glaring evidences of the Israelites’ increasing depravity is displayed in their degradation of women.”

We find Caleb using his daughter’s hand in marriage to motivate soldiers. This is an unusual way to arrange her marriage but “Caleb is setting his daughter up to marry the best of the best.” We also hear some of Achsah’s voice. She’s not simply a trophy wife but asks for an addition to the dowry of land and asks for springs. She is her father’s daughter, bold and full of faith.

The main feminine voice is Deborah’s. She was a prophetess who also functioned as a judge. People came to her for judgements. Unlike most judges, she was not a soldier or a general. She speaks the word of the Lord to Barak to lead the men in battle. We must consider the realities of the conflict before we are too tough on Barak. The Canaanite General Sisera has 900 chariots, essential the equivalent of a tank. Not only did Barak have none, but it was not an organized militia with weapons. It was really a bunch of farmers. He wants the prophetess to join him because she represented the Word of God to the ragtag army he was called to lead.

We see her voice primarily in her song which tells the story of the battle. God sent a storm (this was supposed to be Baal’s territory) to neutralize the chariots. Barak doesn’t kill Sisera, but Jael (a “housewife”) kills him with a tent peg (an allusion to Gen. 3:15). Deborah is the “mother of Israel in her song. She counseled them, preserved their heritage and provides strategy. This is a woman working in the public sphere. She is contrasted with Sisera’s mother who waits at home for her son to return home with a slew of new female slaves to exploit. From her wicked perspective, sexual domination of women prisoners is a great thing.

Byrd notes that Jesus uses similar language as he laments over Israel. He wants to cover them with his wings like a hen her chicks. Then she returns to Deborah (all this in the same paragraph). She is contrasted with the Canaanite goddesses, and the worst abuses of patriarchy that play out in Judges. Her song passes on Israelite tradition.

Byrd shifts to Jephthah and his daughter. I’m not sure whom or what he expected to come out of his home first but he promised he would sacrifice it. Here is a judge of Israel vowing to consecrate him or her to the Lord. There is some question about what that means and how it took place, but his daughter who was his only child, was the first to come out. Not a servant (I guess that was his hope), but daddy’s girl runs out to greet him. Whether she was consecrated and remained virgin or was sacrificed, this is not an easy to read text. She did become part of Israel’s tradition, as the young women of Israel would commemorate her for 4 days a year. This stands in contrast to the laments of Canaanite goddesses. They lamented dead sons, lovers and brothers; not daughters or sisters. His daughter was valued by Israel.

“Do you see the coactivity of male and female voices in God’s Word at work here?”

She then returns to Rehab and Matthew’s genealogies. The women there don’t sound like representative of the CBMW definition of mature femininity (repeated below). This encourages a passivity, a responsiveness instead of initiative on the the part of women. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba all took initiative in dealing with their circumstances; an initiative born of faith. While Bathsheba was exploited by David (due to his position as king, her inability to reject him leads many to call this a form of rape), Solomon would not be king if she hadn’t approached an elderly, ineffective and largely clueless David. As Gentiles they point to the inclusion of the Gentiles into Israel through evangelism and conversion.

“At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships.” from Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood

Byrd then brings us to the Canaanite woman and compares her to Rahab, a Canaanite. Jesus obviously recognizes his own heritage and the Gentile women including Rahab in that line. She exhibits faith similar to Rahab. Jesus isn’t dismissing her but testing her. How far would her faith push her? Apparently some of the crumbs of Israel’s children have fallen to her already, she knows some of their history and likely some of the law and prophets since she addresses him as Son of David. Her faith reflects this.

“Their faith was not in their bravery, their discernment, their initiative, or their own resolve. Their faith was in the Lord. They had faith in his calling, his initiative, and his resolve. They responded to the call.”

She also ties together Hannah and Mary in similar fashion. Since I see this is getting long I will leave it at that.

Peel and Reveal

“It’s time for the church to examine whether we too are sending the same message as the radical feminists who are opposed to God’s Word by treating it as an androcentric text that lacks female contribution.”

Radical feminists, in rejecting the Scriptures, claim it is male centered and does not and cannot speak to them. We should not say it is male centered and only speaks to women indirectly. We don’t want to arrive at the same view of the Scripture though for opposite reasons. We do see women treasuring the Scriptures, contributing to the Scriptures and passing on the faith to others. Too often our stereotypes of women, or erroneous teaching about femininity, lead us to minimize their place in the community of faith. Women are necessary allies in God’s mission. This is the key: God’s mission. Both men and women are engaged in that by faith. Spouses share a mission and are to work together.

Think of Elisabeth Elliot for a moment. She was not a feminist by any stretch of the imagination. She wrote a book called Let Me Be a Woman, as opposed to rejecting any gender differences. She wrote an incredibly brief forward (one paragraph) to Piper’s What’s the Difference?. She had an important place in 20th century evangelicalism, not simply as the widow of Jim Elliot but as an author and speaker and seminary professor. She was a strong woman. Elisabeth’s materials were sold through Ligonier ministries for a while. At one point I was the point person for dealing with Lars, her husband at the time. She wasn’t supporting his role in the mission, but he supported her role in God’s mission. That included speaking at conferences filled with men and women, including Ligonier National conferences.

Does our understanding of complementarism allow this to happen, or hinder it? Does it make her an exception or do we affirm, train and encourage woman in our congregations to teach people? Are they coactive with us as servants of God or are laymen AAA and women AA (to borrow a baseball analogy)? Do their voices complement those of godly men for the combined good of the church?

“Women are using their voices and asking men to listen. How is the church going to respond? We certainly don’t want to mimic the culture and adapt the philosophy of the sexual revolution. But in our efforts to combat the reductive worldview of our secular culture, we need to make sure we aren’t over-correcting by slapping yellow wallpaper over it.”

It’s too bad she doesn’t develop this enough. She keeps hinting at it. This really seems to be the main issue of the book for me. Have we over-reacted to feminism with a subtle  (or not so subtle) form of chauvinism by clinging to an old traditional culture instead of evaluating both by Scripture so we are counter-cultural, neither feminist nor chauvinist but actually biblical? To borrow from Keller, the Bible is critical of every culture. She will continue to mention this like a tease to keep reading. Her focus is more on asking that question than providing the answer, however.

I’m not sure how this chapter moves the argument along. It provides more information, yes. It gives us some things to think about from Judges. But I’m thinking about the overall argument of the book. Soon we’ll be addressing the CBMW and its views more directly, and whether or not all the boundaries we say exist are biblical ones. At times you feel like she should be writing a couple of different books, not one. She seems to have too many agendas at times (as I think about the whole book). Perhaps that is why I feel like I’m struggling to review this chapter.

“Now that we are armed with a better idea of how the male and female voices operate synergetically in Scripture, let’s explore Christ’s presence in the Word of God and therefore its relationship to the church.”

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Considering the Last and Future World

Thankfully Out of Print

James Montgomery Boice has written a number of solid and edifying books.  I think it is safe to say that The Last and Future World is not one of them.  This 1974 book was his entry into the eschatalogical frenzy of the early 1970’s by those who tried to “read the times” and had suspect exegetical methods.  At some point James Montgomery Boice was an historical premillennialist.  I read the book hoping to better understand this (currently) obscure position.  The book reads rather like a Hal Lindsey book, or Billy Graham’s Approaching Hoof Beats.  That could be because he often quotes from and refers to Hal Lindsey.  Frankly I was shocked.  This book advocated the dispensational premillennial position, not the historic premillennial position.  Yes, there is a difference.

The Last and Future World is mis-titled.  It is about the end of this world, and never mentions the future (re)new(ed) heavens and earth that will come about at the cosmic renewal at Jesus’ return.    It puts for the view of a 2 stage return of Jesus- first for the church at the Rapture, and then to set up an earthly millennial kingdom which will see yet another rebellious and great battle.  Boice, and dispensationalists, because of their literalistic & chronological understanding of Revelation don’t see the book as recapitulating the same events from a different angle.  So, you have 3 great battles instead of 3 accounts of 1 great battle.  You end up with 7 judgments (with Christians experiencing at least 2 times before the judgment seat) instead of 1 time in which all people are standing before Christ.  His hermeneutic is flawed, and he rarely if ever examines different view points.  He assumes many things like an earthly millennium (there are brief, inaccurate descriptions of other views of the millennium), a future plan for Israel (distinct from the Gentiles) which is based on one word in Romans which could refer the manner or time of fulfillment.  He says that Paul stressed this, but only wrote of it in Romans 11:26-33.  That’s not a whole lot of emphasis.

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