Trinitarian Debates at Trinity

CT and Andy Naselli report on debates about the Trinity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Central to the debate has been the subject of whether the Son eternally submits to the Father. Together Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware argued that relations of authority and submission do indeed exist among the persons of the Godhead, while Tom McCall and Keith Yandell argued against this proposal.

Ironically, myself and my systematics colleague Dr. Robert Shillaker have an article coming out on this very topic in Trinity Journal published by TEDS! A few thoughts:

I argue that the dynamics of the Father-Son relationship in the Fourth Gospel and key Pauline texts (e.g. Phil. 2.5-11, 1 Cor. 11.1-3, 15.28) all imply the functional subordination of the Son to the Father. If we hold to Rahner's axiom that the economic Trinity corresponds to the immanent Trinity, then these relations are rooted in the eternality of God and the Son is eternally sent by the Father. The incarnation of the Son (as opposed to the Father or the Spirit) was singularly appropriate to the Son in view of his eternal relationship the Father. The Son is of the same substance of the Father and Spirit, but has a different function within the Godhead.

Nonetheless, I would make several important qualification. (1) I do not like the term "subordination" because, whether you like it or not, you're beginning to edge yourself towards the categories of Arrianism. Instead, following Pannenberg, I prefer to speak of the Son's obedient self-distinction from the Father which is eternal. (2) I am concerned that a debate about intra-Trinitarian relations is being rigorously and inappropriately applied to gender roles within the church. Grudem and Ware are both avid complementarians and their interest in the debate is the application of the same principle (equal in being but subordinated in rank) to male/female relationships. My response is: (a) Yes, it is fine to have equality in being and subordination in rank, but there is nothing about the Trinity that tells you that rank is determined by gender; (b) the Trinity has three persons so it's application to marriage or ministry strikes me as exceedingly limited (unless you're marriage consists of some bizaar love triangle); (c) 1 Cor. 11.3 does relate divine headship to male/female relations, however, Paul does not say that man is the head of woman because the Father is the head of Christ, instead, he provides three analogies of headship to make the point that women and men must respect their respective heads! (d) The issue of gender roles in the home and women-in-ministy should be settled on more firmer exegetical ground than be based on the selective and slippery application of Trinitarian relations within the God-head. In fact, I think I could easily develop a Trinitarian argument based on subordination for the role of women in pastoral ministry if I had too! (e) As a result I would kindly ask all theologians, be they egalitarian or complementarian, to cease and desist from using the Trinity in any gender debates because the arguments are informed by other theological questions, by competing cultural ideas of gender and personhood, and denominational battles over the qualifications for pastoral ministry.

Palin causes a Gender Bender

Over at USA Today, David Gushe writes about the implicit tension in conservative evangelical endorsement of Palin. Many of these conservative evangelicals hold a complementarian position on prohibiting women from pastoral ministry, the deaconate, and from preaching and teaching in the preence of men, and yet these same evangelicals also resonate with Palin who largely represents their religious values on family and faith. How can they endorse a female President he asks? Now this raises issue about church-state relationships and do different rules hold out for different domains of authority, i.e. the secular state and the Christian Church. I do not presuppose the perspective of Gushe, but I do have to ask how do you endorse Palin if: (1) You believe that a women's primary responsibility is in the home and women should not work outside the home (as Dorothy Patterson stated in an interview here). (2) If you believe that it is wicked for a woman to be the leader of a nation? (Paige Patterson is reported to have said this during his examination as a witness in the Sheri Klouda case. A transcript is available here, see the last question where he answered, "The Bible does say in the Book of Isaiah, that it is something of an indication of a wicked society when women rule over them" - if this is incorrect someone please tell me and I'll remove the apparent quote). Can Mr. and Mrs. Patterson vote for Sarah Palin as a consistent expression of their views on the place of women (of course it could be worse, she could be a Calvinist)?

For a response to Gushe see Denny Burke's short post, David Kotter offers comments on this subject at CBWM, and let me say that my wife is essentially a stay at home mother who works in a craftshop on Saturdays!

Ontology and Gender

While grading some Pastoral Studies papers I came across an interesting quote that, according to Feminist studies, "males are prone to regard themselves as generic humans rather than gendered persons conditioned by historical and cultural processes". I thought this most interesting especially since I had a thought provoking converstation with my good friend, Mimi Hadad of CBE, about gender and identity. Her point was that underlying the whole debate over the role of women in the church and home within evangelicalism are some tacit assumptions about ontology. For me there is no question as to whether or not culture conditions and shapes our perception of gender identity and gender roles (in multiple ways whether feminist or patriarchal), it simply does. That is why I find myself frustrated by some conservative Christians that I have met who make odd claims that women should not wear jeans or trousers and the like because it is too masculine and is thus unbiblical (too masculine for whom is always my response). But at the same time I cannot go along with the idea that gender is merely a social construct. There are too many physiological, neurological, and psychological differences between men and women to reduce gender to environmental factors. I've learnt this from nearly 10 years of marriage and having two daughters! Nonetheless, I think that our conception of ontology is crucially important for how we understand gender identity, gender roles, and how to treat other human beings. If we add to this a Christian worldview of Creation and New Creation, things become all the more complex as to how to relate to gender and ontology together. This I believe is why every seminary needs to have a course that explores "Sexuality, Gender, and Theology" since this is the burning issue of our age in terms of pastoral practice, expectations in Christian marriage, and theological debates in mainline churches.

Paul and Gender

I'm currently writing a chapter for my new Paul book and the chapter is called: Bourgeois Babes, Bossy Wives, and Bobby Haircuts. It is honestly one of the hardest things I've ever written on (Jesus and the Law is # 2) and I am continuing to plow throw it with great caution and care. But I very much liked this quote from Judith Gundry-Volf:

"In sum, Paul seems to affirm both equality of status and roles of women and men in Christ and women’s subordinate or secondary place. He appears to think that sometimes the difference between male and female is to be expressed in patriarchal conventions and that sometimes these conventions should be transcended or laid aside."

Judith Gundry-Volf, ‘Paul on Women and Gender: A Comparison of Early Jewish Views,’ in The Road from Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on his Life, Thought, and Ministry, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 186.

Paul and Women - Articles to Read

There's a lot of stuff out there on Paul and women, but works that I have found helpful of late that are both exegetically sound, theologically sensitive, and also irenic in spirit, are:

Blomberg, Craig L. ‘Neither Hierarchicalist nor Egalitarian: Gender Roles in Paul,’ in Paul and His Theology, ed. Stanley E. Porter (Pauline Studies 3; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 283-326.

Sarah Sumner, Men and Women in the Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004). See the interview with Sumner here .

Philip Towner on 1 Tim 2:11-15

I'm currently reading through Philip Towner, The Letters of Timothy and Titus (NICNT; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006) and here is a summary of what Towner has to say on 1 Tim 2:11-15.

Towner does not advocate the restriction of women from ministerial offices nor does he regard the text as a post-Pauline creation by a follower of Paul who did not share his teacher’s egalitarian view of women. He situates himself between “feminist” and “hierarchicalist” interpretations. His approach has the following characteristics and conclusions, first, Towner is highly dependent on Bruce Winter’s study about the “new Roman women” who asserted their independence with great flare even to the point of making their sexual status ambiguous by their dress and apparel. Given that Christian worship in the atrium of a Graeco-Roman house in Ephesus was a “public” space, Paul does not want the well-to-do Christian women to bring Christians into disrepute by exhibiting this new liberated femininity in public worship. Second, Towner also maintains that the heresy circulating in Ephesus does influence Paul’s restriction here, but he carefully notes the study of S.M. Baugh that has debunked the often repeated scenario that the women were influenced by the hyper-feminist Artemis cult in Ephesus, and Towner adds that there is no definite evidence that the women were even teaching the heresy. Nonetheless, Towner thinks that Paul’s need to provide instructions about marriage (2 Tim 4:3), his statement about the value of childbearing (2 Tim 2:15), the misreading of OT stories (2 Tim 1:4; 2:13-15; 4:1-5), coupled with the attraction of some wealthy women and young widows to the “new women” paradigm does connect the women to the Ephesian heresy. Thus: “Paul prohibits a group of wealthy women from teaching men. The factors leading to his prohibition are: (1) public presentation – outer adornment and apparel and arrogant demeanour give their teaching a shameful and disrespectful coloration; (2) association with false teaching – they may actually have been conveying or supporting heretical teaching” (200). Third, Towner is convinced that elsewhere women did play a public role in Paul’s churches and he detects an equality principle within the Pauline gospel (e.g. Gal 3:28). Fourth, regarding the two complementary infinitives of v. 12 (“to teach” and “to exercise/assume authority over”) he concurs with Andreas Köstenberger’s syntactical and grammatical analysis of the passage but disagrees with him that “to teach” has a positive force since the wider context suggests that the content of the women’s teaching contains heresy or the teaching itself is motivated to assert their dominance over men – in both cases “to teach” has negative connotations. Fifth, concerning the “saved through child-birth” remark in v. 15, Towner thinks that Paul “urges these Christian wives to re-engage fully in the respectable role of the mother, in rejection of heretical and secular trends, through which she may ‘work out her salvation’” (235).