5. What If Women Ruled the World?: Celebrating Gender Differences
what if women ruled the world?
Celebrating Gender Differences
What if, instead of three wise men . . .
Three wise women would have . . . asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, and brought practical gifts.
What if women ruled the world? I once posed this hypothetical question in my course on leadership at Calvin Theological Seminary. Then I asked the students to imagine what the seminary would be like if all the school’s presidents, top administrators, and faculty had been women for some 130 years. The reverse had actually been true, except for me. The students, including the one woman in the class, seemed perplexed. Why would I even ask such a question? What was my point? Besides the fact that I love to contemplate counterfactuals, I wanted my students to think seriously about gender differences between men and women. So, what if women ruled the world? Seminaries and institutions of all kinds, including the institution of marriage, would be very different if women were in charge—or even if they enjoyed full equality.
For a time in the 1960s and beyond, some feminists and others believed that, apart from anatomy, male and female were essentially the same. I emphasize some because many early feminists looked to Germaine Greer for understanding. An Australian, she was the author of The Female Eunuch (1970), an international bestseller. Greer was a controversial figure, even among feminists of her day.
The Wikipedia entry on Germaine Greer reads as follows:
Greer is a liberation rather than equality feminist. Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and settling to live the lives of “unfree men” . . . She argues that women’s liberation means embracing sex differences in a positive fashion—a struggle for the freedom of women to “define their own values, order their own priorities, and decide their own fate.”1
Egalitarians do not deny the significance of gender differences. Indeed, such differences are not easily dismissed. Today almost everyone realizes you can’t just hand a girl a truck and a boy a doll and bend their gender proclivities.
I have one child—a son. I once tried the doll experiment, though not on him. Even if I had wanted Carlton to play with dolls, it would have been a futile effort. But my brother Jonnie, I believed, was a good candidate. He was six; I was eight. We climbed trees together, so why not play dolls? With no male ego to protect, he was in. I had a sizable collection, so I gave him Annie. We would take journeys together through the fields and woods with an old baby buggy filled with dolls. The only problem was his treatment of Annie, whom he promptly undressed and renamed Rubber-noggin. When we approached the pond, he would run ahead and hurl her into the water to see how fast she could swim. He flung her at gophers and birds and fence posts. When her head came off, it bothered him not in the least. He loved to play with Annie. So much for my experiment.
Major clinical studies, with many more subjects and far greater analysis than I gave my own experiment, have reinforced the premise that gender differences cannot be accounted for by nurture alone. One study confirmed that the differences stem from different regions of the brain. This widely publicized research released by the University of Basel in January 2015 suggests that “women generally experience higher levels of emotional stimulation than men.” More than three thousand subjects were tested by showing them negative and positive images. Women “rated these images as more emotionally stimulating than men.” This rating exercise was followed by a memory test that was also telling:
The female participants were able to recall significantly more of the images than their male counterparts. The women had a particularly enhanced ability to recall the positive images. The study’s lead author, Dr. Annette Milnik, explained, “This would suggest that gender-dependent differences in emotional processing and memory are due to different mechanisms.”2
Such studies have enormous significance for women in marriage and in the church. Indeed, I have always argued that gender difference bolsters the need for gender equality. Whether in the United States Senate, corporate industry, higher education, or religion, we need to hear the voices and consider the decision making of women. Women bring different issues and understandings to the table. The same is true in marriage. A family and a marriage are weakened when the husband dominates and his decisions are the only valid ones. On the other hand, when children see their parents operating under the banner of an equal partnership and at the same time expressing gender differences, both girls and boys move more naturally through a healthy adolescence and into adulthood.
Gender is identity. More than anything else, we are either male or female. The first words spoken at the birth of any child are “it’s a girl” or “it’s a boy.” The immediate physical difference that expands in the ensuing years, combined with hormonal, emotional, and other differences, has a profound impact on every aspect of life, including domestic violence. Any problem has the potential of being met with physical force, powered by hormones and lack of empathy. If the problem itself relates to the topic of gender, any spark is capable of detonating an explosion.
The setting was our dining room. I had flown into Grand Rapids from Chicago, having finished an intensive two days of teaching at Trinity. My ex-husband picked me up at the airport. I could tell he was in a foul mood. Before we arrived home, he raised the topic of the women elders elected the previous evening at our church’s annual congregational meeting. They would be the first-ever female elders at Fifth Reformed Church in 1985, one hundred years after it was founded. Amid my hectic schedule, I had forgotten about this critical meeting.
Although I had not voted, his anger was directed at me. After we arrived home, he demanded that I verbally stand with him against women in office. When I refused and remained silent, he began pummeling me, pushing me, knocking me to the floor, and kicking me. As I had done before, I went into self-defense mode. I curled into a fetal position, my arms, legs, and head tightly tucked. He stopped kicking. It was over. He walked away. Black-and-white Bible, black-and-blue wife.
I later learned from our pastor that during that congregational meeting, my ex-husband had gotten up, without any warning, and distributed and read a written statement on why women should be prohibited from office. If there were some in the congregation who were undecided, his conduct that night may have had an opposite effect from the one he intended.
Several months later, a male elder commented to me how the consistory had changed since women had joined the group. These two homemakers, whose children were grown, were actively involved in a variety of local ministries. Their presence often redirected discussion toward personal and family issues in the congregation and away from administrative details that were better handled by deacons or by staff. These new elders had their ears to the ground. They were aware of hurting families both inside and outside the church, some with sensitive issues that needed attention. Their input changed the whole atmosphere of these monthly meetings.
What my ex-husband saw in the election of women elders was power—women trying to take control. Headship in his eyes constituted authority that women were forbidden to exercise. His mind was closed to the benefits of creational gender difference—“male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27, emphasis added). He felt threatened by his own church, by women in general, and by a wife who celebrated these gender differences.
That a husband might feel threatened by an intelligent and articulate wife who speaks her mind could easily occur in an egalitarian marriage. But the man who insists the wife is under subjection is absolutely convinced that Scripture is on his side. And like my ex-husband, such men would typically have a significant gender advantage of physical size and strength. It’s a muscular Christianity that holds the Bible in one hand and a clenched fist in the other.
Indeed, a clenched fist alongside a black-and-white Bible was figuratively my ex-husband’s standard pose. The Bible—as he interpreted it—was the very Word of God, never to be challenged. For me, his belief in creation some six thousand years ago was not a problem as long as he did not make me subscribe to the same position. And what practical difference did it make in our everyday lives if we came to different conclusions on such matters? For him, the issue was my lack of submission to his views.
But the women’s issue itself became the catalyst for most of his frequent explosions. My changing stance began slowly several years before women were elected as elders at our church. Even though I had taken a college course in biblical hermeneutics, it never dawned on me that I was accepting a traditional interpretation on women’s roles without questioning its serious inconsistencies. But in the late 1970s, we moved to Michigan where we began teaching at the Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music. I was assigned to teach a course in women’s ministries. The previous teacher had offered insights for pastors’ wives and presented practical ideas on organizing women’s meetings and mother-daughter banquets. My own failures along those lines pushed me toward historical and biblical topics. I hunkered down and read everything I could get my hands on.
Holy smokes. That was a dangerous turn. But I was, after all, teaching at a school that emphasized the Bible, and I had the full support of the president. What I discovered when I began digging into the most frequently referenced texts was that gender roles were not nearly as cut-and-dried as I had been led to believe. From Eve and Sarah to Priscilla and Phoebe, women had played critical roles, and I needed to give them a fresh look. Such was also the case with Paul’s references to marriage and ministry. With my research under way, I was finding more and more serious scholars who were challenging long-held interpretations.
And I began to read the Bible differently myself, aided to at least a small degree by the two years of Greek I had taken in college. Greek scholars challenged me on certain critical passages such as 1 Timothy 2, which had long been the key text for restricting women’s teaching and authority in the church. The fact that Paul in the same chapter takes a stand against women wearing jewelry and braided hair was mostly ignored by those who restricted women’s roles in ministry. But that was not the issue on which I focused. I pointed my students to a much longer passage in chapter 5 of this same letter. There Paul goes on for fifteen verses, explaining exactly how older and younger widows should be regarded and supported or not supported by the community of believers.
Paul says nothing in the text that would indicate his concern for widows was merely a cultural issue that related to one particular church. Nor does he suggest that the matter related to women’s teaching and having authority (however the verses were rendered) was written in stone for all time. Yet today we ignore this longer passage in chapter 5 and focus our attention on the few verses in chapter 2. In doing so, we are deciding which words of Paul’s are important and which are not—an exercise in hermeneutics, always a human endeavor, and often seriously flawed.
One of the reasons a fresh hermeneutic is so critical is the inherent white male bias of past interpreters. That is not to say that men consciously interpret the Bible with a male bias. But historically, almost all biblical study was done by men, and their own traditional views of marriage and ministry naturally influenced how they interpreted the texts. David M. Scholer points to a typical example that relates to domestic violence. He cites an instance that clearly demonstrates the critical nature of this bias:
On August 17, 1549, a Bible, fundamentally a new edition of the 1537 Matthew’s Bible, was published in London by Jhon [sic] Daye, edited with notes by Edmund Becke. The most famous of all the notes in Becke’s Bible is the one for the phrase, “Likewise, you men, dwell with them (your wives) according to knowledge” in 1 Peter 3:7. Becke annotated: “He dwelleth wyth his wyfe according to knowledge, that taketh her as a necessary helper, and not as a bonde servante, or a bonde slave. And yf she be not obedient and healpful unto hym, endeavoureth to beate the feare of God into her heade, that thereby she maye be compelled to learne her dutie, and to do it.”3
Scholer goes on to say that “the idea that the Bible may justify and even encourage husbands to compel their wives to obey by force is, regrettably, deep within the tradition and life of the church and has shaped a painful reality for countless anonymous women throughout the last two millennia.”4
Most of the biblical passages relating to women that are pounded into dust with hermeneutical hammers are found in the three opening chapters of the Bible and in Paul’s letters near the end—pages 806–840 in my tattered desk Bible that ends on page 879. This leaves an awful lot of pages skipped over—pages that refer to marital relationships and ministry roles. Who decides what passages carry the most weight in speaking to gender issues today? Who decides which passages are to be taken literally? And who decides to ignore many of the Bible stories, relegating them to Vacation Bible School or an occasional topical sermon?
Let’s look briefly at two biblical women—one obscure, the other quite well-known. The former, Junia, who is mentioned only once in Romans 16, has rated an endless stream of hermeneutical renderings. The latter, Sapphira, whose entire biblical life is boiled down to one episode in Acts 5, draws little attention from biblical scholars, though her story in some ways more closely ties into the subject matter of this volume and whose relationship with her husband should be observed as we contemplate headship and mutuality. Yet she is typically ignored.
Sapphira is married to Ananias, who owns property and decides to sell it. From the passage, it seems clear that she not only knows about the sale but also knows her husband intends to deceive Peter and the other apostles by claiming he is donating the entire amount of the sale for relief of the poor. As a result of their complicity, they are both struck dead—Ananias first and Sapphira three hours later. So here we have a married couple who, perhaps at the husband’s suggestion, is concerned about a little nest egg for themselves. What if the heavy hand of Rome sends them all scattering? How will he support Sapphira and maybe children or grandchildren? But the expectation is that they, like others, would give everything to the apostles, who would then distribute the funds where most needed.
Ananias has the money in his pocket and is contemplating what to do. He has three choices: give it all to the apostles; give a portion, explaining that he’s going to hold on to the rest; or, to avoid criticism, tell them he’s giving it all while keeping the remainder. We are all human, and we understand his dishonesty. To us, the death penalty is overkill. But here is not the place to discuss that. Rather, the focus is on the wife and her agreement with her husband, who, in first-century Palestine, was legally the ruler of the wife. But in this case, the husband and wife are equally accountable before God. There is no “submission clause” that gets Sapphira off the hook. There was no recognized chain of command. That her husband was in authority over her wasn’t worth a hill of beans when she was standing before Peter and the other apostles—and before the court of God’s justice.
And who were these “apostles” that the text mentions? Are they the twelve apostles? That is the very issue that has launched Junia into the spotlight, particularly among recent biblical scholars. Paul would become the greatest of the apostles, and Junia, among others, is also referred to as an apostle. But who is this individual, a man or a woman?
Check her out on Amazon. Five books devoted to her pop up with a search of her name added to the word Bible. Eat your heart out, Sapphira! (No books feature her.) When you Google Junia’s name, the 747,000 results are topped by Wikipedia’s lengthy article. Quoted on both sides of the issue are dozens of biblical scholars, many well-known. As to gender, Wikipedia states, “The consensus among modern New Testament scholars is that Junia was a woman.”5 Indeed, that fight has been largely won. The big issue that remains is whether she was actually an apostle.
This entire debate centers around Romans 16:7: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.” It would seem from the plain reading of the text that Junia (and Andronicus, perhaps her husband) were apostles. But if we make her an apostle, the whole edifice of headship crumbles. So she must either be a man or be denied apostleship. Therein lies the dustup—a big debate over one otherwise very obscure woman.
His and her-meneutics. These debates are not about whether the Bible is actually the inerrant, infallible, inspired Word of God. Nor are they necessarily about exegesis, which relates more specifically to the translation of Greek or Hebrew words. Rather, these debates pivot on the interpretation of Scripture. Was Junia an apostle? Does it really make any difference? Why should we care nearly two thousand years after the fact? But it does matter to women today if here in the biblical text we find a woman apostle working alongside Paul. And it matters to those who deny the legitimacy of women in ministry. The stakes are high. And the stories of Sapphira and Junia are relevant.
In the instance of Sapphira and her husband, Ananias, the matter was church discipline—the application of which we would surely today regard as excessive. On lying to Peter—or more specifically to the Holy Spirit—they both dropped dead. “Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events” (Acts 5:11). Church discipline, by any standard is a controversial matter, though in this case the punishment was meted out by God, not man. Historically, the Inquisition stands as the most notorious club that meted out church discipline, and women were often in the crosshairs. But Protestants were also guilty. The Puritan church fathers in Salem, Massachusetts, hanged witches in the name of church discipline, as had been done in England and on the continent of Europe. And today church discipline is meted out by male elders, particularly in independent churches that require all members to sign a covenant.
In 2015, Karen Hinkley found herself on the receiving end of church discipline meted out by a council of male elders at the Village Church in Dallas. Led by Matt Chandler (often referred to as an evangelical superstar), the megachurch boasts several thousand members and many others who regularly attend. Those who join must sign a covenant that puts them under the authority of the elders, should discipline be deemed necessary.
Karen and her husband, Jordan Root, were on assignment as missionaries in Asia when Karen learned he was addicted to child porn. They both returned home, and he confessed his problem to the elders, who assumed they would be able to help repair this now-broken marriage. Karen, however, on learning that the addiction had been a major aspect of her husband’s life long before they were even married, contacted an attorney and sought an annulment. If an annulment means anything, this was an instance where it was appropriate. The couple had been married only a short time and had no children. But the church elder board thought otherwise and placed her under discipline after she had already asked that she be removed from church membership.
After the story went viral, Matt Chandler apologized, but the episode illustrates so vividly the struggles that women confront among those who exercise male headship in marriage and in the church. Had she been treated fully as her husband’s equal and had there been women on that elder board, her awful position as a wife of a child porn addict might well have been viewed in a different light.
Indeed, the accounts of Sapphira and Junia are telling. Sapphira is not excused in the real estate transaction because her husband is presumed head of the home and she is under his authority. Junia is recognized by Paul to be among the apostles, one who has authority. But when Karen faced discipline, she was presumed to be under subjection to her husband, and she faced an all-male elder board that had not a single woman in authority who might identify with her plight.
How we interpret the Bible makes a difference. The stakes are high. And the stakes were high in my marriage. In fact, my writing and teaching on these issues added to an already complicated array of marital problems.
On April 9, 1987, I wrote a journal entry about how my ex-husband had several days earlier grabbed me late in the evening and thrown me on the floor, shouting threats:
April 9, 1987
I was thoroughly terrorized—as I never have been before. I truly feared he might try to kill me . . . [The next day] I called [his] folks. I still was so filled with terror, and I guess I was grasping at straws. They actually acted sympathetic, knowing [his] long history of problems, but I should have realized they would try to be defensive. They kept questioning me about little things such as church pledging, or particular Bible verses that we might have differences on that was causing [him] to go into such rages. They didn’t want to see the whole picture, but rather to try to figure out little things that I could do to turn the situation around. [His] mother even suggested I go back to writing nursery school books.
Actually, while living in Crown Point, Indiana, I had written one such book, a coauthored volume titled How to Set Up Your Own Neighborhood Preschool. But Carlton was now twelve; years earlier, I had begun writing and publishing on subjects that were more closely related to my areas of expertise. Now I felt trapped. Here I was calling my in-laws, telling them I feared their son might kill me. His mother’s only counsel: Set your academic writing aside and go back to writing nursery school books.
How did our marriage ever get to that point? When we met in the summer of 1968 on Word of Life Island, he learned immediately that I would be entering graduate school at Baylor University in the fall, and that I was, even then, intent on pursuing a PhD. His eyes were wide open. But so were mine. I learned from him that he had been expelled from Wheaton College and Miami Christian College and that he hoped to get into Shelton College in the future to finish his bachelor’s degree. I learned that Carl McIntire, founder of Shelton, was one of my ex-husband’s fundamentalist standard bearers, along with John R. Rice, both of whom were hard-line conservatives on religious and political issues. Despite our significant differences, we were both blinded by that fall in the Garden of Eden—falling in love in a paradise of perfection.
John R. Rice (who was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University) was a radio preacher whose magazine The Sword of the Lord was for a time the loudest voice for American fundamentalism. He also wrote books, the most widely distributed being Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers. In 1978 (the year we moved from Crown Point to Grand Rapids), he was still going strong, arriving at his office in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, at 6:30 every morning.
I recently came across some reflections by Stephen Lamb, the great-grandson of Rice: “I’m tired. Tired of the perennial discussions about the things women aren’t allowed to do, or what a ‘real man’ or ‘real woman’ looks like,” he writes. “Listening to claims from John Piper’s Desiring God Pastor’s Conference that God gave Christianity ‘a masculine feel’ . . . [makes me] realize that I no longer have any energy to debate those who hold to that position.”6
In a 1979 sermon printed in his magazine, Rice railed against men for failing to assume their properly specified gender role:
God bless good women. I am not blaming them. I am blaming you sissy-men, you panty-waists who have no conviction, no backbone, no character, no principle, no standards. You don’t live for God. You don’t have the convictions necessary to live for God. You don’t stand. You don’t have manhood enough. What we need these days in the matter of religion is godly men to take the place God assigned them in the church . . . We would not elect a woman president, nor follow a woman in business, but we leave church work to the women! No wonder the Bible said, “The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).7
Sissy-men, panty-waists? Synonyms for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s girlie men? I had never before heard anyone use the term panty-waist. On hearing John R. Rice deride men, it would be easy to believe that Mark Driscoll, onetime senior minister of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, was channeling him in some of his own tirades. Under an assumed name, Driscoll wrote this:
We live in a completely pussified nation. We could get every man, real man as opposed to . . . crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship loving mama’s boy sensitive emasculated neutered exact male replica evangellyfish, and have a conference in a phone booth. It all began with Adam . . . who kept his mouth shut and watched everything fall headlong down the slippery slide of hell/feminism when he shut his mouth and listened to his wife who thought Satan was a good theologian when he should have led her and exercised his delegated authority as king of the planet.8
Were we to edit out the foul language spoken by Driscoll and gender slurs of Rice, are their concerns justified? Is masculinity today being threatened by egalitarian women? And has true femininity become as archaic as bloomers? My granddaughter Kayla, as a college freshman, has her sights on a career goal and is driven—so much so that she interviews for every freelance journalism job she can find. At the same time, she knows how to dress in feminine fashion and loves to tint her hair and pick out appropriate jewelry. She’s feminine. And it has never entered her mind that somehow female is lesser than male. If guys are threatened by her, she considers it their problem, though her easy sense of humor is often like salve to a tender male ego.
One of the problems when one is dealing with masculinity and femininity is that these are cultural constructs, not biblical issues. In fact, femininity today is often closely associated with the kind of adornment Paul speaks against. And any attitude that emphasizes the he-man as “king of the planet” or a Christianity with a “masculine feel” is simply not biblical. Men who are secure in their manhood are not threatened by strong women. Indeed, a confident and capable woman can bring out the very best in a man. I point to John. He’s never been threatened by his three strong, independent wives. He has no uneasy manhood to defend.
I celebrate gender difference, and I cannot even wrap my mind around wanting to be anything other than a woman. But the fact that women may have different ways of interpreting Scripture or different teaching styles or ministry priorities surely does not mean they are less capable than their male counterparts. It simply doesn’t follow that gender difference makes women unfit for leadership and should therefore be under subjection to men in ministry and marriage.
Pope Francis spoke words of wisdom on the topic of gender difference when he was visiting the Philippines in January 2015. In this case, he recognized the problem of placing one gender above the other. In remarks made to an audience at a Catholic university, he lamented that only a small representation of females was present. His words that followed must have smelled like sweet perfume to the women—even sweeter perfume if he had hinted at moving toward opening the priesthood to women. (Mutuality in marriage is already an accepted tenet among Catholics):
Women have much to tell us in today’s society.
At times we men are too “machista” [the
Spanish term for male chauvinists] . . .
[We] don’t allow room for women
but women are capable
of seeing things with a different angle from us,
with a different eye.
Women are able to pose questions
that we men are not able to understand.9