Part I: "A Traditionalist View," by Thomas Howard (followed by Part II: "An Egalitarian View," by Donald W. Dayton)
The liberation fat is on the fire, and most of us suspect that we are facing either an epochal breakthrough from ancient tyrannies or the imminent dismantling of the divine order.
That, in any case, is the choice we have, if we listen to the rhetoric used by the two sides in the discussion. On the one hand we hear that the Church has, for 2,000 years, meekly (if not brutally) accepted a thoroughly unbiblical status quo, namely, the subordination of women to men; whereas the authentically biblical message is of the liberation of all of us from all the tyrannies of class, race, and sex categories. Jesus was, if we pay attention to him, a feminist; and St. Paul, although he is the favorite of the chauvinists, can be seen on a close reading of his works to have been on the side of liberation. His strictures on women at home and in the church are local and ad hoc, not principal. Further, the biblical account of creation gives no comfort to the male supremacists, speaking as it does of humanity, the crown of creation, as appearing splendidly under this dual modality of feminine/masculine, the two modalities bearing equally the image of God.
On the other hand, we hear that “liberation” doctrines represent an entirely pernicious undermining of the whole scheme of creation, since this creation is hierarchical, with primacy having been placed on the shoulders of the man, and woman having been placed at the very center of the whole picture with her responsibility for bearing and nurturing the race; and with biblical vocabulary speaking of the Deity as “He,” with the incarnation having been in the form of a son, not a daughter, and with the leadership of the people of God having been placed on the shoulders of patriarchs, prophets, evangelists, apostles, fathers, bishops, and doctors of the Church, every one of them men.
These stark historical data (all these men, that is) have been generally interpreted by Judaism and Christianity as representing, not a cultural, much less a sexist, plot; but rather the deepest mysteries of the human phenomenon, in which the masculine variation on the divine image is asked to bear this kind of burden; while the feminine is asked to bear a burden which is in some ways closer in to the center of things, the great epiphany of this mystery being the Virgin herself, whose burden was infinitely more splendid, more glorious, and more central, than any burden borne by any mere patriarch, prophet, or apostle. Whoever they may be out there in the “front row” so to speak -- all those males, that is -- the woman is there at the center, with a kind of influence that no mere patriarch or czar or chairman can ever hope to approach.
We are all “Adam” in some sense more elemental than we are “Eve.” On this view, the burden of particular aspects of the splendor of the Divine Image, including authority and primacy, has been placed upon the shoulders of the man; whereas the answering burden has been placed upon woman -- the echo, or antiphon, to the man’s aspect, without which his authority and primacy are solitary and sterile. This pattern is not plotted out in scripture, as it is in Plato, the neo-Platonists, Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bonaventura, and the rest of them. Rather, it is implicit in the whole fabric of biblical narrative.
Not so, says the feminist: Eve, and not Mary, is truly our Mother, since she is the one who, once and for all, declared and enacted our authentic liberation from the dominance of males, be they gods, men, or serpents. The church has been guilty of a cynical hoax in pretending to elevate the Virgin to the highest place, since we all know that her exaltedness is precisely in proportion to her humility -- her “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That is not the pattern which we wish to hear celebrated as paradigmatic for women.
And furthermore, says the feminist, all your talk about the great roster of male prophets and apostles and bishops and so forth, is tendentious, since there were Sarah and Deborah and Esther and Jael and Anna and Dorcas and some women in the New Testament who appear to have labored in ministry along with the apostles. (The difficulty with this effort, of course, is that it is self-defeating, since, no matter how extravagantly generous we may try to be in granting as long a list as the feminists want to trot out, it is embarrassing in its brevity next to the list of the, alas, male prophets, apostles, etc. But that sort of tit-for-tat quibbling is, surely, niggardly and pusillanimous, and neither side shows up to very good advantage when they get down to shouting lists of male and female names at each other!)
The obvious question, of course, which lies underneath all this tallying and calculating of men versus women in the biblical narrative, is whether or not that narrative is normative. That is, we are stuck, all of us, with sheer male predominance (or what appears to be predominance: more on this presently) in scripture -- the men in the front row in Israel and the church; and all that implacable biblical insistence on speaking of the Deity as He. Hence the effort of the traditionalists on the one hand to establish the biblical picture as normative, and of the liberationists on the other to show that there are deeper principles implicit in the whole fabric of biblical vision and language, and that the supposititious male predominance is a relative, cultural thing.
The traditionalist rejoinder to this is predictable: no, no -- you have it backwards. It was not just a random happenstance that Yahweh picked a patriarchal society to exhibit His Name in. He didn’t take his cues from them: He prepared them, and ordered them, to exhibit, in the structure of their social and political and domestic and cultic life, the deepest mysteries of divinity and humanity. In their enactment and celebration of life -- public, domestic, and cultic -- there was to be displayed in the midst of an idolatrous world full of goddesses and priestesses, the authentic and graceful splendor of the mystery of humanness, namely, men bearing and exhibiting their share of the burden of the imago Dei, and women bearing and exhibiting theirs, all of it culminating in the hilarious glory of the Great Disclosure itself -- the begetting upon the flesh of the Virgin Lady the Incarnacy in the form of a Son.
Great mysteries, great splendors, great disclosures; none of it random, none of it cobbled together in merely relative, cultural terms (i.e., the god [male] impregnating the human [female] and getting a child [male] simply be cause that’s the way the cultures had organized themselves). The whole Israelitish and Christian drama was the enactment o the stage of our history -- the chaotic, cluttered stage of our history -- of The Way Things Are. There has appeared, in the midst of our confusion, and our efforts to order things, the Epiphany of the glory. The splendor and the exactitude of the City of God has shown itself for us, and it turns out to be a City where the distinctions are stark and exalted -- where the pattern is as intricate and joyous as the pattern of the subtlest symphony or dance: no blur, no clashing, no struggle for position, no interchangeability of roles; every instrument, every dancer, blissfully obedient to the score, exhibiting in his or her own special individuality this particular kind of excellence. The patriarch here, the prophetess here, the archangel here, the father and husband here, the kind here, and the great Mother of the Lord here. No blurring. No struggle. No jockeying for position. No shouting of “Unfair!”
Hey! Hold it! cry the feminists at this point (and quite rightly). You’re trying to snow us under with the rhetoric of splendor because you don’t want to face the nitty-gritty issues of our own day. But we won’t be bamboozled. You are trying to sweep, with clouds of glory, past the painstaking questions of exegesis, and of sheer justice, that engage us. What does the Bible say, especially the New Testament? And what does Christian justice and liberty mean? Don’t regale us with your splendors and your Virgins and your City of God: Let’s talk about women now, and about what the Church ought to be proclaiming and celebrating now.
These are fair rejoinders. And by this time it is clear enough that I am no impartial reporter on the question. I speak for the traditionalist view -- the view that has been at work in Judaism and Christendom for some thousands of years, and which sees the feminist dogmas to be, perhaps, the most bitterly ruinous and the most grievously mendacious set of notions to appear on the public scene in a long time. Those are strong words, and amusing to my opponents, I am aware. Oh -- the poor chauvinist, quailing, terrified, and wringing his hands at the threatening march of the women who might just turn out to be creatures as good as he, once he and his chauvinist colleagues have lost their grip on the levers of power. Poor thing!
But of course that is not quite the way the traditionalist would phrase it! It is difficult not to resort to the language of mystery and splendor and so forth, since, for the traditionalist, all of politics and society and domesticity and cult, nay, of our very awareness of ourselves, derive eventually from our prior vision of what The Whole Show appears to be.
There are, of course, two or three items that can be dismissed at once as not even controversial. First, there is no warrant in scripture for “bossism.” Women are never commanded to obey men who think that women are their drabs, to be chivvied about between the hearth and the bed, mere chattels. Further, I cannot imagine much of a quarrel, among serious minds, over the question of vocation and pay. Jobs and professions (law, politics, weight-lifting, hair dressing) ought to be open to whomever wants to, and can, do it.
The root questions, as I have intimated already, which face all of us, traditionalists or innovators, are at least three fold certainly: 1) Is there a divine order which works all through the fabric of the cosmos, from the seraphic immensities bowing before the Ancient of Days, down to diapers? Any Christian, of course, will suspect that there is such an order, the difficulty here being how we are to perceive it, and, perceiving it, to enact it. 2) Is that order hierarchic, as Judaism and Christendom (and incidentally, all of paganism: There are no democratic myths) have assumed? Or is it egalitarian, as modernity urges? A corollary to this second question would be, of course, what the burdens are which masculinity and femininity are asked to bear in that hierarchy, and what, exactly, is the nature of the glory which we assign to those burdens. (Modernity, for example, chooses to denigrate the burden of maternity: It is “second class.” To the Jew and the Christian, this is, of course, a naked betrayal of modernity’s bankruptcy, and a failure to perceive anything at all of the mysteries of humanity. To suppose that women will somehow be moving closer to the center of power, and of their true identity, by struggling for chairpersonships and some will-o-the-wisp of “independence” is, on a biblical accounting, radical worldliness.) 3) How do we sort out the “permanent things” from the things that are relative and merely cultural (and therefore changeable)? Plenty of things are relative: We may wear togas, pantsuits, or tutus as we may please; but is there a permanent principle of covering that we exiled, post-Edenic men (and Christians: Redemption does not obliterate the realities, alas) must come to terms with? Or again, we may have sex in a bower, a palace, or a ditch, as we may please; but is there permanent principle of privacy that we must affirm?
Perhaps we may enrich the sort of picture that emerges by means of a series of “ifs.” 1) If there is a pattern of things that is fixed by the divine wisdom, then that fixity will be experienced by the denizens of that order as the mode and guarantor of freedom, wholeness, and bliss. It cannot be an obstructive, debilitating thing.
2) If that pattern turned out to be, in point of fact, ordered hierarchically, then the “laws” governing all the relationships among the members in that pattern would of course differ from the laws obtaining in a differ pattern where each member had to be equal to each other member in order to find his own felicity. In the hierarchical order, rightly understood and enacted, freedom (or wholeness, or felicity) for each participant would be found in a set of relationships reaching up and down. Each one would need to learn, and obey, the canons governing his downward relationships (authority, and mercy, and responsibility at least -- a man rightly relating to his son or to his dog, say); and those governing his upward relationships (obedience, loyalty, and trust anyway -- a man rightly relating to his master or his god, say). And, the over-arching quality to all these relationships, up and down, would be called Courtesy: that keen and noble awareness of the validity and splendor of the nature, individuality, and office of every other creature, be that other creature an archangel, a chairwoman, a spouse, an elf, or a mole.
That, I think, is at least the notion at work in the hierarchical idea. Do not imagine that I am arguing that human beings ever make it work properly: I know about the horrors of feudalism, political and ecclesiastical; and political democracy may be the unhappy best we can do, with its checks and balances, in a system governed, as politics are, by cupidity.
Which brings me to my third if: 3) If the order in which we live, and in which we will ultimately find our freedom and bliss, is a hierarchical one; and if, because of our limitation and cupidity we do not feel we can make this work in our public affairs by entrusting power to any hierarchy of men (czars, kings, etc.); then perhaps there does remain, none the less, a case in point, as a sign and an image, in our otherwise democratic struggle to achieve the equality we so earnestly suppose we want, which will remind us of, and exhibit for us, what our ultimate freedom and bliss are like.
For the Christian and the Jew, this case in point, this sign and image, would be the home. Again there are no particular arguments or proof texts in the Bible defining, describing, and giving a rationale for the home as the basic unit of human life, with father, mother, and children in that descending order of authority. Rather, that picture appears to be the assumption upon which the scripture proceeds when it refers to human life. There is no space given to alternative patterns for the basic domestic unit -- the matriarchy, or the commune, or whatever. Whether we agree with it or not, we have to affirm that the assumption throughout the Old and New Testaments is this patriarchal one. From the mandate given to Adam, through the burdens placed upon the fathers under the law, to St. Paul’s injunctions to fathers in the New Testament, the assumption appears to be that it is on these shoulders that the final burden of authority for the home lies.
The question, though, which undoubtedly remains in all of our minds about this picture is, Yes, but, say what you will about how splendid it all is, it still comes down to dishwater and diapers and scrub brushes for the woman in the case.
There is a distinction that needs to be made here, however. For any individual woman, it does not come down to that, since she is free not to opt into domesticity and marriage; and, with the swift changes that are occurring as a result of the lib movements, she has a wider and wider field of vocations open to her. So if dishes are a horror to her, she need not be bound by them. This, however, leaves all the married women still at the dishpan, and here no man (no male person, I mean) has any warrant to pontificate. I myself wonder if there are not one or two very earthy, workaday notions applicable here. For one thing, the man can jolly well help. There’s one thing. But of course this does not touch the principle which the liberationists are fighting, which is the blithe male assumption that the dishpan is somehow the woman’s bailiwick. And at this point, a man can only retreat to the bigger picture and offer that, as modestly as he can. That is, if the responsibility for the domestic ambiance of the home and for child bearing and care is, in fact, laid upon the woman, as scripture, history, and myth have assumed, then dishwater is one of the things in there, alas, along with parturition and suckling and singing lullabies; just as monkey wrenches and committee meetings and bullet wounds attend various so-called “male” occupations.
What, then, is the sum of your remarks, my opponents may well ask. What is it -- back to washtubs and mops for the women (the lucky married ones), and back to wilted spinsterhood for the others?
No. The Church is the paradigm of humanity. In her large household we must all find our true selves; and we must find the healing that is denied to us, one way or another, by whatever limitations “life” has saddled us with: loneliness, deafness, mental disorder, physical disability. Our lives as brothers and sisters, and as fathers and mothers to each other in the Church, will be the Way toward our great Liberation, when our Redemption is fulfilled in the Resurrection.
So, what is so “bitterly ruinous and grievously mendacious” (to quote you) about the feminist argument? We buy what you’ve just said.
The traditionalist would see the ruinous and mendacious thing to be the reshuffling of the imagery -- the imagery of God, and of man and woman. He would see the enterprise as worldly -- as a selling out to modern, unbiblical dogmas of egalitarianism, of power struggle, of unisex (or at least interchangeability of roles), and the false modern hierarchy which sees chairpersonships and so forth as somehow more exalted than motherhood (oh: the old word is out!).
And he would say to the feminists: In so far as you want women to be free to take jobs, fine; and in so far as you want men to wake from their oafish torpor and begin to bear their real burden of self-giving, and to exalt the real splendor of womanhood, then I am with you. But in so far as you want to remodel marriage and the home on the power-struggle, committee model of modernity, or to offer childcare centers as somehow an alternative for motherhood, or to rewrite biblical language, speaking of Our Androgyne which art in heaven -- in so far as this is your agenda, then I will fight you, for it is a novel agenda, repugnant to the ancient wisdom of the Church, and ages less flaccid than our own would have named it heresy.
When this article appeared, Thomas Howard, author of Christ the Tiger and An Antique Drum, was associate professor of English at Gordon College.
Part II: "An Egalitarian View," by Donald W. Dayton
I am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to Tom Howard’s defense of “traditionalist” opposition to “Christian feminism.” He obviously understands the issues and the arguments of those who insist that Christian faith and feminism are not mortal enemies but congenial allies. By this understanding he enables the discussion to proceed beyond the quoting of isolated texts to the profounder and more difficult theological and hermeneutical positions that more often than not determine the manner in which the scriptures and Christian faith are understood.
Instead of responding in detail to each of Tom Howard’s comments, I prefer to focus on what seems to be his central claim. If I understand him correctly, his basic contention is that Christian faith and the scriptures represent ultimate reality as basically hierarchical in nature. This hierarchical structure of the universe and human life is a delicate and intricate pattern that Tom Howard compares to a symphony or a closely choreographed dance. Each part has a distinct role in the whole, and true freedom is in finding one’s predetermined place in that pattern.
From this vision (glorious and moving in many ways) any sort of “Christian feminism” appears “pernicious” and “worldly” -- an intrusion into Christian life of “modern, unbiblical dogmas of egalitarianism.” It is here that we begin to sense the problems in Howard’s position. He has allowed himself to be fooled by the contemporary scene in which feminism appears to have largely secular origins. He forgets that feminism has a much longer history and that its origins were thoroughly Christian though admittedly grounded in an alternative vision of the character of biblical and Christian faith.
Beverly Wildung Harrison suggests in a recent issue of Review and Expositor (Winter, 1975) that the “social origins” of the women’s rights movement are to be found in “American evangelicalism.” She praises Alice Rossi (in The Feminist Papers -- see below) for being “one of the first contemporary feminists to identify the connection between the Second Great Awakening ... and the women’s rights movement.” The Evangelical Revival in Britain and the Great Awakenings in America were important expressions of Christian faith that incarnated a profound egalitarianism grounded in the “leveling” fact that all persons are first of all sinners needing a personal appropriation of God’s grace. These currents helped generate a variety of egalitarian protests against an essentially hierarchical society by providing much of the impetus for the anti-slavery movement, by contributing to the rise of the trade unions, by engendering a new sense of self-worth in the working classes of England, and finally in producing the feminist movement.
I am sure that the “traditionalist” would find these populist movements just as distasteful as modern, secular egalitarianism; and would no doubt even suspect that they are merely cloaks for modern ideas essentially foreign to both scripture and the Christian faith that have preserved an anti-egalitarian hierarchical vision for some 2,000 years.
But this last assumption must also be questioned. The kind of hierarchialism advocated by Howard is not as obviously grounded in scripture as he assumes. It is essentially a medieval vision of the Christian faith. Among its modern advocates would be C.S. Lewis who admits his delight with this worldview in The Discarded Image and laments its demise in the modern world. Lewis is, in turn, reflecting the vision of a Milton or a Dante. One has only to glance at the chapter on “hierarchy” in C.S. Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost to discover the rhetoric of Howard and to begin to sense the actual sources of the vision that he advocates.
Most interpreters of Western thought ground this medieval worldview only partly in its biblical roots. At least as important is neo-Platonism. The major impact of this system of thought came in the ninth century through the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. Church historians argue that these writings were seized upon because the hierarchical patterns of thought provided the basis of order on which to construct medieval society and also to provide a rationale for the emerging papal theocracy (Cf., for example, Roland Bainton, Christendom, Vol. I, pp. 165-66).
A close reading of Howard’s essay reveals other signs of his affinities with this worldview in addition to hierarchy. Notice his fascination with the inhabitants of the celestial realms (archangels, seraphim, etc.); his preference for “medieval” and “Catholic” terminology for the church, its structures, and its role in society; his orientation toward the “Virgin Lady.” Howard would of course acknowledge all of this. He understands his perspective not only to be “traditional” but also “classicist” and grounded squarely in the neo-Platonic vision of reality.
This fact, however, puts the whole debate in a much different light. It may actually be viewed at least in part as a tension between two competing visions of the Christian faith. On the one side is a hierarchical vision of reality deriving from medieval and neo-Platonic roots. On the other is a Christian egalitarianism (with its tendency toward feminism) that came to expression in 18th and 19th century populist evangelicalism.
(No doubt it will seem strange to many to contrast traditionalism and evangelicalism. In our post-fundamentalist/modernist controversy culture these perspectives are often collapsed, but the distinction is important and illuminating. It is most clearly seen in Howard’s own adopted communion, the Anglican Church. In that contest the “evangelical” tends to be “low-church,” innovative, and likely to undermine the traditional role of the church authorities and sacraments by emphasizing the personal appropriation of grace. The traditionalist on the other hand is “high-church,” hierarchical and authoritarian, and likely to resist the “evangelical” as a cheap destroyer of the mystery and majesty of the sacramental view of grace. The same contrast may be seen also much nearer home. Baptist A.J. Gordon, founder of Gordon College, was an “evangelical” -- and also an abolitionist and a feminist. Episcopalian Howard, professor at Gordon College, is a “traditionalist” who resists on behalf of a God-given hierarchy the egalitarianism of a Christian feminism.)
The point of this rather belabored distinction is not the establishing of labels, but to argue that both positions can claim a grounding in valid Christian traditions. On the other hand, both are susceptible to the accusation of importing non-biblical and un-Christian nuances. If we may get beyond the inappropriate contrast of Christian hierarchy versus secular egalitarianism, we may consider the real questions: (1) the appropriateness and (2) the scriptural grounding of each of these positions. As is surely clear by now, I not only find all my natural sympathies with the egalitarian understanding of Christian faith, but am further convinced that all Christians should be inclined in that direction.
If I may borrow some of Howard’s rhetoric, I find his hierarchical vision to be disturbingly pernicious. When its social implications are played out, it supports a static and repressive status quo. This has become increasingly obvious to me in recent study of the 19th century struggles over the institution of American slavery. Howard’s arguments appear there in support of slavery. Pro-slavery clergymen argued that society has a God-given hierarchical structure. It was true that slaves were on the bottom, but that position could be just as fulfilling and satisfying as the more “difficult” and “heavy” responsibilities of the master. True happiness and freedom were to be found in a submission to authority that was not accidental but of the very fiber of the universe.
One finds there too the debate about the redeemed versus the fallen order.
All of this raises some interesting questions about the selective way in which Howard applies his hierarchical vision. We assume that he is not inclined in this age to marshal his worldview to a defense of slavery. He declares as well that no “serious mind” would quarrel about the questions of women’s right to enter all professions and vocations. (We assume that he includes here, as well, the ordained ministry.) But the birth of feminism was in part a response to the objections of such “serious minds” as the New England clergy who objected to the “unnatural” practice of allowing women to lecture on behalf of the anti-slavery cause. Among the major struggles of the 19th century feminist movement were winning the right of women to education, entrance into the learned professions, and the granting of the franchise to women. Such “serious minds” as theologian Charles Hodge of Princeton opposed granting women the right to vote on the basis of the biblical doctrine of “headship” -- an autonomous vote by the “subordinate” wing of the marriage was unthinkable.
Such struggles now seem quaint to us in the 20th century. But at the time they were deadly serious extrapolations from the Christian doctrines of “headship” and the “God-given orders” of society. I hope (and expect) that in another century we shall look back on this one with a new sense of both the quaintness and awesome oppressiveness of the hierarchical reading of the Christian Scriptures.
But this then is the real question -- at least for most Christians: Which of these views (the hierarchical or the egalitarian -- or perhaps a synthesis of the two) has the clearer grounding in scripture? The difficulty, it must be admitted, is that one finds some basis for both views. The problem is the hermeneutical and theological one of arranging that material into a construct that has normative value for the life of the church today. This process takes place inevitably, either consciously or unconsciously, and is the major reason that expressions of the Christian faith are culturally relative and need to be rethought in terms of the questions raised by each new age. Responsible Christian faith and thought must undertake this task anew in each generation with the most careful exegesis and theological reflection.
This process is very complex and involves asking a number of important questions: (1) What is the nature and purpose of the scriptures? Are they intended to convey worldviews and instructions for the ordering of society and family life? Or are they intended to convey the message of salvation and the call to discipleship that will take specific form in various cultures under the guidance of the scriptures, but not always in precisely the same way? (2) What was the meaning of the scripture text in its own day? Feminist exegesis of the last century and a half has demonstrated the extent to which the scriptures have been read in terms of the cultural assumptions about the subordination of women. (3) What was the function of the scripture text in its own day? If by contrast with the culture of the day, the actions of Jesus and the words of Paul were “liberating” in their own day, is it not possible that we are false to both those words and those actions by insisting on a literal application to a time and culture that has al ready experienced the leavening impact of the Christian message? (4) Which elements of the scripture then are of local application and which are substantive and principal? Is patriarchal family structure a part of the substantive message of the scriptures? Or would requiring that be to fall into the same trap as insisting on circumcision? (5) Which passages and elements of scripture are to become determinative in giving the interpretation to the rest? Can Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”) be lifted up as the hermeneutical key by which to interpret other scripture?
The resolution of such questions is beyond the limits of this response. But there has been developed over the last century and a half a substantial literature arguing the position of Christian feminism. (See below for some clues to this material.) There is a powerful exegetical and theological case to be made for the equality of women that can be quite convincing once one lays aside the hierarchical assumptions advocated by Howard -- assumptions that have nowhere near the claim to be biblical that he claims for them. I would wish to add finally only two points that have not received sufficient attention in some of the contemporary literature.
I would like to emphasize the pertinence of the slavery parallel. Historically it was the abolitionist movement that produced in its wake the feminist movement. There were several reasons for this, but one of the most important was the parallel problem in the interpretation of the scriptures. The favorite anti-slavery text of Galatians 3:28 conjoined the issues -- and the admonitions to wives are found alongside of those to slaves. Those parts of the Christian church that sided with the anti-slavery movement were more likely to support women’s rights. The further the church got away from the anti-slavery struggle the more she tended to move away from feminist positions. What is needed today is a making explicit of the biblical hermeneutic that allows Christians to assume that abolition was not only the right, but the Christian course of action. This same hermeneutical position will then be found applicable to the women’s issue.
I would like to add one final comment. Those of us who are associated with the Post American have been increasingly impressed with a much neglected but central theme of scripture that we find very difficult to square with the kind of hierarchical structure advocated by Howard. We find that the scriptures, far from defending a certain structural pattern of society, call us rather to renounce advantage, power, and authority. This concern permeates the Bible in its constant call to involvement with the poor and oppressed. It is a central theme in the meaning of the incarnation. Philippians 2, for example, tells us that “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” Taking seriously this model would erode all traditional social structures. It is striking that Paul makes this the essential point of the Christ/Church analogy in Ephesians 5 that Howard holds up to defend the traditional pat tern of family structure. That passage calls rather for “mutual submission” and affirms that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
For further reading:
Because full development of the exegetical, hermeneutical, and theological argument for Christian feminism is beyond the limits of this essay, I would like to indicate other sources of information. The most recent and readily available source is Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be (Waco: Word Books, 1974). More helpful for the hermeneutical issues involved is Krister Stendahl’s booklet, The Bible and the Role of Women (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966). For further bibliography see the August -September issue of Post American, pp. 28-29. Of more specialized character, but more pertinent to the positions I have taken above, would be the following:
(1) I have argued the Christian and evangelical rootage of feminism and briefly traced the historical development of the related hermeneutical questions in a recent paper given at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary titled “Evangelical Roots of Feminism.” An associated paper, “The Rise of Women in Evangelicalism,” is written by Lucille Sider Dayton.
(2) Alice Rossi grounds the American feminist movement in the “Second Great Awakening” in an essay in her anthology of The Feminist Papers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973 -- also available as a Bantam paperback). This volume also provides a sizable collection of the 19th century documents.
(3) A somewhat scarce but very helpful treatment of the general issue is B. T. Roberts, Ordaining Women (Rochester, New York: Earnest Christian Publishing House, 1891). In addition to arguing for the ordination of women this volume affirms egalitarian marriage and explicitly develops the hermeneutical parallels between the slavery and the feminist issues.
(4) A classic study of the biblical passages involved is Lee Anna Starr, The Bible Status of Women (1926). Rev. Starr was the pastor of the college church in Adrian, Michigan.
(5) A most helpful theological defense of Christian egalitarianism has been authored by Paul K. Jewett of Fuller Theological Seminary. This book, Man as Male and Female (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975) draws largely on the thought of Karl Barth and finds there material for overcoming the “subordinationist motif” of his thought. A preface by Virginia Mollenkott makes explicit the issue of “hierarchy” in the terms that Howard conceives of it.
When this article appeared, Donald Dayton was a Post-American contributing editor, director of Mellander Library, and assistant professor of theology at North Park Theological Seminary.
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