1990 November/December issue Part 3

Men, Women and Biblical Equality. Part 3

   Men have disobeyed by misusing their authority, and women have disobeyed by refusing it. We are not therefore at liberty to drain the word headship of its oblivious hierarchical meaning. Let’s be careful not to overlook the all-important word as: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church” (Eph 5:22, 23). In what sense is Christ the head of the church? It’s a physical metaphor Paul is using. Is it not the head of the human body the part from which all other parts take orders? Yes, iv’e read pages and pages of arguments about that Greek word Kephale. Some would insist that it means only source, and carries no thought of authority. But I insist that metaphors are metaphors and they mean more, not less, than the mere words could mean in another context. One wonders if these humourless, nearsighted, nit-picking, theological pendants have ever read a book in their lives!
(At least one of them has, I know- my friend Roger Nicole is not humourless, and he does read books- he has about 35,ooo or so in his basement- but oh Roger, what will you do with the mystery we are talking about here? Please tell us about that mystery!)
  
No wonder churchgoers are bored and men don’t know how to court women anymore and marriages are dissolving. God’s arrangement of things (so much more fascinating than “equality”) has been discarded. A concern for fairness doesn’t fit in at all with the concept of sacrifice. It is in suffering and sacrifice, willed and accepted because of deep and disciplined love, that the still, small Voice is heard: Lose your life for Me and find it! It is in losing ourselves that the ego is transcended and real happiness discovered. One can’t help trying to picture what this “biblical equality” looks like at the breakfast table, in the bedroom, or when it’s pouring rain and two separate but equal spouses have to decide whose turn it is to race through the parking lot and bring the car to the door of the restaurant. It has never occurred to Lars to allow a discussion about this. He is protector (and, of course, my helper here), which means he’s the one who gets wet! He has the greater responsibility before God. The buck stops with him.
  
   As Mrs. Bush said in her commencement address last spring to the women of Wellesley, feminists must not indulge in self, but must “believe in something larger than yourself.” In a rebuke to the ill-humoured feminist leadership (“anyone seen Molly Yard smile lately?” asks columnist Cal Thomas), she told them that, first and foremost, “life really must have joy.”
  
   Something larger than yourself. That’s what we need, isn’t it? A much greater vision of things than politics can ever provide, busy (as it must of necessity be) about terribly banal things like rights and equality. God forbid that we Christians should introduce politics into marriage or the church. A glad surrender to the divine order is like a dance- one leads, one follows, each by his or her obedience freeing the other to do what God assigns. There is harmony then, true liberation, and peace. I know it. I’ve tried it both ways (my way more often than I like to remember), and only God’s way works. [My books on masculinity, The Mark of a Man, and femininity, Let Me Be a Woman, attempt to spell these things out in great detail.]

Men, Women and Biblical Equality. Part 1
Men, Women and Biblical Equality. Part 2