A House Divided Against Itself, Part II

Sorry for the delay, but I've finally found the time to transcribe Part II of "A House Divided Against Itself," a 3-part series focusing on gender and our roles as a Christian.

(Please be sure, if you haven't already, to read Part I first. The third post will deal with injustices committed against men.)

The injustices that have been committed in the name of the church against women are already quite well known and documented; however, I still believe they must be reiterated because while some denominations are long past the problem, there are still many countries and many places here in this one where that is not yet the case. Though I have been on the receiving end of some unfortunate comments on occasion, I am very thankful to have grown up in a home and church where all that I'm about to discuss was a total non-issue. I had every chance in the world, and I am grateful.

In the past, and in some places still, women have been treated like children--something that should be seen and not heard, incapable of an independent relationship with God and thus less capable of moral discernment and thus inept at life compared to men, and needing to be ruled over. However, it is important to note that for each sin Eve committed, Adam committed the exact same one in parallel...so there is really no grounds to lift one above the other. What order you sin in is irrelevant--the magnitude of the sin does not change in the eyes of God, against whom all sins are high treason.

It may be that the serpent's choice of the gender less capable of physical self-defense was no accident. That said, had the reverse occurred and men had sinned first, I have no doubt Eve would have "fallen to the occasion" quite adeptly and come up with some reason why men should not be allowed to make decisions, either, and some way to enforce it. And indeed, feminists have done exactly that, in a way.

But for now, let us remember that both fell in tandem--both were cursed. How people have reacted to the curses upon each, however, is telling and one of the best outcomes the devil could have hoped for. Adam, of course, was warned that he would toil and receive little reward for his sweat and blood. Eve would suffer pain in childbirth, blame, and subjugation. And the line we hear from people--even from Paul, according to the culture of his time--is that for a woman, before and even after Jesus' salvific act on the Cross, this is how it ought to be, and a woman ought not resist her inferior lot in life.

Yet every invention--every technological advance we make--every labor-saving device we create is one less drop of sweat shed from Adam's brow, one more step towards a physically easy life.

So tell me, why is it good and right for Adam to work against his curse, and Eve not to?

Tell me, furthermore, how it is that men and women are not equally saved. Obviously Jesus came to us as a man. No other option would do, to accomplish what He set out to do in that physical and social environment, of course, given that He was to be fully human as well as fully God. But to suggest that He freed one gender more than the other, because He came as a man, is to limit His deity and His love. Nor would I suggest that Jesus would be in any way less capable of relating to women, or that they would need any other intermediary but Him. God created both, after all, and He contained all of that within Him!

Unfortunately, we are still left with a situation where in certain quarters women are the inferiors in their societies. The world extends to men in these places a power that is theirs for the taking. No one will object--indeed, they will celebrate it. But just because our earthly expectations of power are one thing does not mean that true power is what we would believe it to be. We were so sure of what a Messiah was before He came: a war leader. We did not see that before true power there must come surrender of worldly power. That crown was offered to Jesus in the desert and the city both, and however much it might have been hailed by the people in their misunderstanding, He refused it in favor of a crown of thorns and the Cross.

We too must surrender the power of domination--be we male or female--whenever it is offered to us. If we rise that others may bow at our feet and hail us as their better, then we must surrender and ourselves be the ones to give up our egos. Our highest position, as humans, is servant. It's the same in marriage, the church, and the workplace. If you feel entitled to have another human being at your beck and call, looking up at you instead of at the level, then you are in the wrong. If you would confine and constrain your fellows and restrict them from following their calling, then you are an obstruction that needs to step out of the way--or assist your brother and sister instead of being a stumbling block in his or her path.

And that is the point so many miss in Paul's letters. Women at the birth of the church were uneducated, and deliberately so. A woman was not to learn the Law or study in the synagogue. Jesus did not accept that: women learned from Him as well as men. We should acknowledge greater learning and listen. To just blurt when we don't have a clue...that is disgraceful, and Paul was right to say so. But people miss the next step women were to take. Ask questions in an appropriate venue, of one you love and trust! Learn! Then you will have the standing to say something that will not unwittingly lead others astray. And men were called upon to answer these questions if asked, not to hide the answers to perpetuate ignorance that could then be used to justify claims of moral inferiority and lesser judgment ability.

A Christian has no call to belittle or diminish women, to put them in a lesser place than men. But this post cannot come alone. One tyrant must not be replaced with another--and make no mistake, that's exactly what feminism (as opposed to egalitarianism, which seeks the uplift of all, and which I believe to be the Christian's call) advocates. Revenge and bitterness, and deafness to injustices committed against men, is unacceptable. Neither patriarchy nor matriarchy is justified: the gifts God has placed in each other must be expressed, even if perhaps a man or woman has received a gift seen less frequently for their gender.

In Part III, many of these same principles will return, and I will address how they apply to a Christian response to injustices against men.

To take the name of the Lord in vain...

"You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name." --Exodus 20:7

What do you think of when you hear this commandment? Do you think of its colloquial statement (drawn from the King James Version), "Don't take the Lord's name in vain"?

What are you used to thinking of, when you think about what this commandment means? Do you think of the swearing of oaths using God's name? Do you think of avoiding God's name in speech altogether or only under specific circumstances? Do you think of certain curse words that place God's name in a vulgar context?

Caution in our speech in this manner can be a good thing if it also schools us towards caution in our thoughts and our hearts. That said, there is, of course, the temptation--as there is with all commandments and precepts--to take the law only in this sense: that if we don't use God's name in oaths, or we don't mention Him in expressions such as "Oh my God," or whatever may be appropriate to our culture or denomination, then we're doing all we need to do.

I would like to suggest that there's far more to it than literally suggesting when we may or may not use the word "God." What about when we try to claim God as our justification for our own selfish and hateful acts? What happens when we use God, for instance, as an excuse to belittle people, to cheat them, or even to commit acts of violence? I'm not looking at just the "obvious" abuses that we see in the history books--I'm talking about even the simple things, treating those with different beliefs inside and outside of our faith, with the sort of coolness we would not think of doling out to those who are more like ourselves. If we do these sorts of things and then claim God wants us to do that, what we are doing is ascribing to Him a false motive...our own sinful motive, that is.

In essence, what we have committed is defamation of character against our Lord, by the "witness" of our words and actions.

Caution with our choice of words is a good thing--but if we become legalistically fixated on only the use of this phrase or that, we, like the Pharisees before us, may risk missing the real elephant in the room, and the spirit within us that this commandment was intended to root out.