On men, women, the Church and leadership

As an LITD reader, by definition, you're well-informed, so there's a good chance you're already familiar with the dustup between John MacArthur and Beth Moore. Still, given that you're also a busy person, I offer this synopsis from Joe Dallas at The Stream:

I doubt you need the backstory, but in case you missed it, last week renowned pastor and author John MacArthur was asked during a panel discussion to give a one-word reaction to the equally well-known name “Beth Moore.” His two-word response? “Go home.”

At the core of the situation is that fact that Moore is an egalitarian and MacArthur is a complimentarian. My research into this dichotomy  is not presently extensive, but I suspect that these terms and the distinction between them has arisen as one element of the great sociocultural upheaval of the last several decades. If there's documentation that it goes back further, send it along.

The minister at the Methodist church I attend - a woman - was pretty incensed over MacArthur's dismissal of Moore's ministry. She riffed off of it for her sermon yesterday, and made a compelling case for her position. She's obviously a woman of God and asserts that she was called to be a a pastor. She is steeped in Weslyan doctrine and clearly embraces it. And she made the same point Dallas makes - after admitting that it took the better part of last week to see clear to do so:

I refuse to call him, as many are now doing, a buffoon, chauvinist, or prideful jerk. On the contrary, the man has faithfully preached, taught, and written about the Word for decades with a consistency and discipline I admire hugely.

That admiration is one sided — I am, after all, both a Charismatic and a Counselor, two C’s that don’t sit well with him — so I approve of him far more than he’d ever approve of me. Still, he doesn’t deserve to be denigrated or have his motives and character called into question, as many are now doing. On this point let’s take a lesson from Beth herself who plainly said, “I esteem you as my sibling in Christ.” That he is.

Which is, I guess, why I’m so disappointed in his remark, and even more so, in the enthusiastic approval he got from those present when he made it. Some say it sprang from sexism; some say it was ego.

I say we’ve got a sweeping problem of worldliness infecting way too many of us.

This is the age of the mob scene, the tantrum, and the sad, juvenile tendency to run and observe whenever someone yells “Fight! Fight!” We gather around controversy for entertainment, and we follow people who huff and puff and berate others, stupidly telling ourselves their public aggression is strong leadership; deep conviction. Dear Lord, what a sad trend has settled onto America!

But we, the church, can do better. We can do it by denying ourselves permission to use social media as a platform to belch when a reasoned statement is called for.

Both my pastor and Dallas bring far more open-heartedness to the matter than I'm able to muster at present. My current take is that MacArthur is a bonehead. He thinks Catholicism is Satanic, he'll brook no challenge to his young-earth creationist, cessationist and millennialist positions, and will not even consider the possible veracity of free grace theology. He's been in trouble with various institutions a few times throughout his career for his boneheadedness.

Now, with all that said, for the past several months I have been looking into the positions of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the organization behind The Nashville Statement, which strikes me as a sound declaration of the way God has designed humankind.

Longtime LITD readers will not be surprised that I've been drawn to this, given my repeated stressing that until 20 years ago at the very outset, no culture anywhere in the world at any time throughout history has had a definition of marriage that included two people of the same sex being so joined, as well as my repeated stressing that people who "feel" like they are the opposite gender are suffering from a delusion. No matter how much someone has gobbled hormone blockers or had his or her crotch carved up, the DNA in any cell of his or her body will tell us his or her gender. Bruce Jenner remains Bruce Jenner.

But if you get into the CBMW literature, you see that it's a pretty forthrightly complimentarian outfit.

It seems to me there are degrees to this, with the aforementioned MacArthur's absolutism being way out at the end of the spectrum. Council spokesmen John Piper and Wayne Grudem don't seem to come at it with MacArthur's rigidity.

Forty, even maybe as recently as ten, years ago, I had a much different view of all this. For one thing, I wasn't a Christian yet. I had been through my ideological conversion, and was the conservative that I still am, so I wasn't a feminist, but I just saw any doctrine that talked about men as the only suitable leaders in a church or family as inherently unfair. In fact, this issue was one of my last sticking points.

But as I deepened by faith journey and came to understand that Scripture has an authority from which there is no escape, I had to grapple with the fact that God is a He, that his only begotten child was a son, and that such shapers of Judea-Christian history as Moses, David. the prophets and the apostles were males. There are some passages about this in 1 Timothy, Ephesians and Titus that we must grapple with. To expand beyond our religion to a look at the sweep of worldwide history, we can see that human societies have almost exclusively been organized patriarchally. 

I'm no longer a novice Christian, but I still have much to learn. At this point, my gut has me seeing things Morris's way. She takes, and always has taken, doctrine seriously. She calls God "Father." But, like my own pastor, she has contributed too much to a richer understanding of God's word for me to believe that she should not be so contributing.

Bottom line: the central truths of our faith are not imperiled by our willingness to say that ongoing conversation and debate about some of these more intricate points is merited.

We, after all, are the creatures. He is the Creator. There are always going to be limits to our understanding. Part of being a faithful child of the Most High God is being okay with some mystery, no matter how much we grasp.