Hard to Believe? Biblical Authority and Evangelical Feminism

Anne Eggebroten visited Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and what she found there shocked her. As a matter of fact, she was so shocked that she wrote about that experience in the July 2010 edition of Sojourners magazine. Readers of her article are likely to experience a shock of their own — they will be shocked that Eggebroten could actually have been surprised by what she found there.

In “The Persistence of Patriarchy,” Eggebroten writes about “the wide reach” of complementarian views of manhood and womanhood among conservative Christians. Her article is subtitled: “Hard to believe, but some churches are still teaching about male headship.” Hard to believe?

Can anyone really be surprised that this is so?  In some sense, it might be surprising to the generally liberal readership of Sojourners, but it can hardly be surprising to anyone with the slightest attachment to evangelical Christianity. Nevertheless, Anne Eggebroten’s article represents what I call a “National Geographic moment” — an example of someone discovering the obvious and thinking it exotic and strange. It is like a reporter returning from travel to far country to explain the strange tribe of people she found there — evangelical Christians believing what the Christian church has for 2,000 years believed the Bible to teach and require. So . . . what is so exotic?

She begins her article at Grace Community Church in California, where, in her words, “God is male, all the pastors, deacons, and elders are male, and women are taught to live in submission to men.” That is a snappy introduction, to be sure, but it requires some unpacking. When Eggebroten says that, at this well-known evangelical church “God is male,” she is echoing the arguments of the late radical feminist Mary Daly, who famously asserted that “if God is male, then male is God.” At Grace Community Church, as in the Bible, references to God are masculine, but God is not claimed to be male. Interestingly, she also missed the fact that Grace considers the role of the deacon in terms of service, rather than authority, so women in fact do serve as deacons with responsibility for particular ministries.

Nevertheless, Eggebroten is certainly onto something here, especially when Grace Community Church is contrasted with the Episcopal congregation visited by her husband on that same Sunday. In that church, a woman is preaching the sermon. We can’t miss the point when Eggebroten writes:

These two different worlds exist side by side: congregations where men and women are equal partners in service of Jesus Christ, and others where gender hierarchy is taught as God’s will and the only truly biblical option. On Sunday morning we all drive past one flavor of gender teaching to worship in another.

Well, on this Sunday Anne Eggebroten did not drive past Grace Community Church. Instead, she heard a sermon by Dr. John MacArthur, who for more than 40 years has served as pastor of the church. Beyond that, MacArthur has become one of the most respected and influential preachers of our times, with perhaps the most widely-disseminated ministry of exposition in the history of the Christian church.

Eggebroten enjoyed the sermon, remarking that MacArthur’s message was “excellent.” She added, “I guess that’s how megachurches get started.” Well, one can hope.

The central part of her report from the trenches at Grace Community Church comes from an experience at a visitors’ reception after the sermon. Eggebroten asks a woman there (a physical therapist with a degree from the school where Eggebroten teaches), “Is women’s submission to their husbands stressed in this church?” The answer, of course, was yes.

I appears that Eggebroten could hardly have been surprised, for she wrote:

At least things aren’t as extreme as they sound on the church Web site. There, I had listened to Anna Sanders lecture women on how to live in submission to their husbands. “We need to beat down our desire to be right and have our own way,” she had said, citing John Piper, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and Martha Peace—all authors published in the last decade. “It’s his way, his rights, his expectations, and his plans. … Be a helper.”

So, there was little ground for surprise when Eggebroten asked the question at the visitors’ reception. But there was more to come. She writes, “I’m stunned to find that the 300-student Master’s Seminary on the church campus enrolls only men.”

Well, let’s see. The Master’s Seminary, according to it’s own mission statement, “exists to advance the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ by equipping men to be pastors and/or trainers of pastors.” The logic is simple and straight-forward. The church believes that the Bible restricts the office of pastor to men. The Master’s Seminary trains only pastors and trainers of pastors, thus it limits admissions to men. What could possibly be stunning about that?

As Eggebroten acknowledges, seminaries that train for roles beyond the pastorate may enroll women for those programs without compromising this conviction. But Master’s does not offer those programs, so what is possibly shocking?

In the course of her article, Eggebroten continues her reports of conversations with members of the complementarian tribe before getting to the more deeply theological portion of her essay. In this passage she gets to the core issue:

Here’s the question: Is God permanently committed to the kinds of social hierarchy that existed in the first and second millennium B.C.E. and continued until recently, when education and voting were opened to women? Or does the vision of Paul in Galatians 3:28—“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”—take precedence?

At this point the agenda becomes clear. Eggebroten argues that the church has simply perpetuated the patriarchal traditions of the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures that formed the social context for the early Christian church. Against these she contrasts the Apostle Paul’s beautiful declaration in Galations 3:28 — “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

But this is the kind of sloppy and agenda-driven exegesis that reveals the desperation of those who would reject the New Testament’s limitation of the office of pastor to men. In Galatians 3:28 Paul is clearly speaking of salvation — not of service in the church. Paul is declaring to believers the great good news that “in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” [verse 26]. He concludes by affirming, “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” [verse 29].

To read Galatians 3:28 the way Eggebroten reads the verse, you would have to believe that the Apostle Paul was in direct contradiction with himself, when he restricts the teaching office to men in letters such as 2 Timothy and Titus.

Or . . . you can try to deny that Paul actually wrote those latter letters. Eggebroten accuses conservative evangelicals of ignoring “evidence that the ‘pastoral epistles’ (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) were written in honor of Paul long after he died and reflect a second-century debate over women’s roles in the church–whether to conform to social customs for the sake of winning converts, or to advocate radical social equality (and even celibacy) in the last days before the Second Coming.”

What this reveals, of course, is the argument of many evangelical feminists that we can discard the teachings of the Pastoral Epistles. We can keep the Apostle Paul we like (taking Galatians 3:28 out of context, for example) and disregard the Paul we do not like.

Nor are the Pastoral Epistles the only biblical texts subverted by this line of argument. With reference to 1 Corinthians 14:35 (”Let a woman learn in silence with full submission”), Eggebroten suggests, among other options, that “verses 34-35 began as someone’s marginal comment, later copied right into the text.”

With this approach to the Bible, you can simply discard any text you dislike. Just dismiss it as a marginal comment, or deny that Paul even authored the text. This is where the denial of biblical inerrancy inevitably leads — the text of the Bible is deconstructed right before our eyes.

“So what is the will of God for women today: silence or preaching, subjection or mutual submission?,” Eggebroten asks. She adds, “Many Christians in all denominations, including evangelicals aren’t even asking this question any more—yet the neo-patriarchal movement remains widespread.”

The answer to that question, as Eggebroten’s essay helps to clarify, depends on your view of Scripture. In order to reach her conclusions, you must accept her evasions of the biblical text. If you are willing to do that on this question, you will be willing to do so on other issues as well. The central issue is, and will ever remain, the authority of Scripture.

Anne Eggebroten has written a fascinating report that, like so many others of its kind, reveals more about the reporter than the reported. Eggebroten teaches religion at California State University, Northridge and she is a founding member of the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus. In her other writings she has, for example, profiled “the reality of abortion as a morally responsible choice being made by countless Christian women of all denominations.”

In what sense can any of this be bent to fit within evangelical identity? This essay reveals again how these arguments — and the magazine that publishes them — are so very distant from the beliefs of most evangelicals. If there is anything genuinely shocking about this article, it is the fact that the writer would attempt to lay claim on evangelicalism.

In yet another twisted use of Scripture, Eggebroten concludes by citing Galatians 5:1, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” As Paul asserts, in Christ we are free from the slavery of attempting to prove our righteousness by the Law. Paul is not liberating the Church from the Bible.

In the end, that is the real issue. There are Christians who would demand to be liberated from the Bible? Now that is what really should be shocking.

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I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

Anne Eggebroten, “The Persistence of Patriarchy,” Sojourners, July 2010.

Why Biblical Christians Should Reject the “Christian” Left

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Guest: Dr. David Noebel, president, Summit Ministries

If a man is known by the friends he keeps, then President Obama’s choice of “Christian” leftist Jim Wallis as his spiritual adviser is very telling.  It actually makes perfect sense as both men are committed socialists.  Wallis is the president of Sojourners, a “Christian” organization dedicated to advancing socialism in the U.S. and abroad under the ruse of “justice and peace.”

In Hour 2 of The Christian Worldview on Saturday, Dr. David Noebel, president of Summit Ministries, will help us understand Jim Wallis and “Christian Leftism”, how much it has infected mainstream Evangelicalism, and why biblical Christians need to reject it.  Dr. Noebel will also speak about the coming new global economic order being advocated by world leaders at this past week’s G20 meetings.

Related Article:
Shared Misery: The Socialization of America

Jim Wallis: Obama’s “Red” Spiritual Adviser

El Salvador has officially joined the Red regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. South America is turning Red, dark Red, and little is being said to alert North Americans of the encroaching Red plague. Perhaps that’s because North America is moving in the same direction. The president of the United States has surrounded himself with socialists, and some of those closest to him have had a part in turning South America Red.

According to the Associated Press (March 17, 2009), Mauricio Funes, the presidential candidate of the Farbundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) is the new head of the nation of El Salvador. Behind Funes “is a party of former Marxist guerrillas that fought to overthrow U.S.-backed governments in the 1980s and whose rise to power has raised fears of a communist regime in the war-scarred Central American country.”

The AP admits “ex-guerrillas will almost certainly form part of the Funes government, including Vice President-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a rebel commander-turned-congressman.”

And then there’s the “drug” connection! Investor’s Business Daily reports that “last May, the FMLN confessed to ‘a relationship’ with Colombia’s drug-trafficking FARC Marxist terrorists after documents found on the computer of dead FARC chieftain Raul Reyes, killed in a 2008 raid, proved it” (March 16, 2009).

Funes, of course, says he’ll “govern moderately, more like Brazil ‘socialist’ President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva than Venezuela’s radical [communist] Hugo Chavez.” Of course, this is what the Nicaraguan communist Daniel Ortega said, too, before he displayed his communist “proletariat morality” by hugging the communist dictators Castro and Chavez. Ortega and all his South American pals are hard-core Marxist-Leninists.

While all of this, of course, is relevant to an ardent free-market capitalist, what really frightens me is that Obama’s latest announced “spiritual adviser” has had connections with all these Marxist regimes. And who is the president’s latest adviser? The Rev. Jim Wallis.

Frontpage Magazine (March 17, 2009) reports, “The most notable of [Obama's] spiritual advisers today is his friend of many years, Rev. Jim Wallis.” Rev. Wallis admits that he and Obama have “been talking faith and politics for a long time.” He was picked by Obama to draft the faith-based policies of his campaign at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last year. Why should this alarm us?

First, Jim Wallis has had relationships with the communist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).

Second, his “Witness for Peace” was an attempt to defend the Nicaraguan Sandinistas! Wallis, together with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s former pastor of 20 years) “rallied support for the communist Nicaraguan regime and protested actions by the United States which supported the anti-communist Contra rebels” (Family World News, February 2009, p. 7).

Third, Wallis and his Sojourners community of fellow-travelers believe Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua and the other revolutionary forces “restructuring socialist societies” are the communist paradises the United States needs to emulate in order to establish “social justice.” Writing in the November 1983 issue of Sojourners, Jacob Laksin notes, “Jim Wallis and Jim Rice drafted what would become the charter of leftist activists committed to the proliferation of communist revolutions in Central America” (Laksin, “Sojourners: History, Activities and Agendas” in Discoverthenetworks.org., 2005).

The ugly truth is Wallis wishes to see the destruction of the United States as a nation and in its place “a radical nonconformist community” patterned after the progressive, socialist commune he established in Washington, D.C., in 1971 (Laksin, Ibid.).

“The Sojourners community,” says Laksin, “actively embraced ‘liberation theology,’ rallying to the cause of communist regimes that had seized power with the promise of bringing about a revolutionary restructuring of society.” Clark Pinnock, a disaffected former member of Sojourners, said that the community’s members were “100 percent in favor of the Nicaraguan [communist] revolution” (Laksin, Ibid.).

All this revolutionary activity in spite of the fact that today’s Cuba, for example, has to import 84 percent of its food supply due to the socialistic mess of the agricultural system (150,000 oxen till the ground because tractors represent capitalism). However, in a move that looks more like capitalism than Marxism’s state farms, “Raul Castro is moving to boost food production by putting more land under the control of private farmers” (The Weekly Standard, March 23, 2009).

It appears that Raul Castro is learning what America’s early pilgrims learned back in the 1620s! William Bradford noted in his “History of Plymouth Plantation” that once he canceled the pilgrims’ socialistic experiment and provided each settler with a piece of property to till, starvation was averted. We can hope and pray that Raul Castro continues to implement more capitalistic policies and will learn firsthand the economic system that has brought more people out of poverty than any other in the history of the world. (See Rodney Stark, “The Victory of Reason.”)

Of course, Wallis should have learned the lessons of Plymouth Plantation early in his education, but may not have because our Secular Humanistic K-12 curricula delete most of the history of the pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact in an attempt to avoid acknowledging its “advancement of Christianity.” (Sadly, one first-grade textbook that does include the pilgrims has them “praying to the Indians.”)

For years, Wallis has been in the forefront of the “evangelical” left and has been fêted at numerous evangelical colleges and seminaries. That seems to be the “in” thing right now. His publication Sojourners is piled high on these campuses for the reading pleasure of the naïve and foolish.

Unbeknown to these colleges and seminaries is Wallis’ Red background. He was the president of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) while at Michigan State University. The SDS was the youth arm of the League for Industrial Democracy – the American counterpart to the British Fabian Society founded to promote socialism throughout the West. One of the League’s mentors for years was Norman Thomas, who argued that “the American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened” (Google, Norman Thomas quotes). Another prominent League mentor was John Dewey, a signatory of the atheistic, socialistic 1933 “Humanist Manifesto.” The SDS actually merits a chapter in Richard J. Ellis’s work “The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America,” published by the University of Kansas Press.

In October of 1969, SDS original organizer Tom Hayden directed his followers to “set off on a rampage, smashing windows of parked cars, hurling rocks and bricks through apartment windows, and fighting with police.” Hayden blamed the police for his violence even though later his followers “comforted themselves, because theirs was a violence to end all violence, a liberating and righteous violence that would rid the world of a system that deformed and destroyed people. Such glorious ends justified, even ennobled, violent means” (Ellis, p. 137).

Ellis insists that the language of revolution and violent confrontation was evident throughout the ranks of the SDS. Jim Wallis was part and parcel of this pro-communist group of radicals and revolutionaries.

Wallis’ Sojourners enterprise has been a radical, socialistic undertaking from the start. Frontpage Magazine (March 17, 2009) says, “As one of its first acts, Sojourners formed a commune in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Southern Columbia Heights, where members shared their finances and participated in various activist campaigns that centered on attacking the U.S. foreign policy, denouncing American ‘imperialism,’ and extolling Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World.”

Sojourners contributing editors included the radical Daniel “Pentagon Papers” Berrigan, Walter Brueggemann, James Hal Cone (author of the racist “Black Theology and Black Power” in which the white race is depicted as devils), Rosemary Radford Ruether (professor of Feminist Theology, Catholics for Choice, God is the feminine Gaia), Ron Sider, Cornel West and Garry Wills. Today, Sojourners’ Board of Directors includes Wallis, Ron Sider, Brian McLaren and Bart Campolo.

Over the years, Wallis has been pro-Vietcong and actually gloried in America’s defeat in Vietnam. He said, “I don’t know how else to express the quiet emotion that rushed through me when the news reports showed that the United States had finally been defeated in Vietnam” (Ronald H. Nash, “Why The Left Is Not Right,” p. 58).

However, like Jane Fonda, Wallis said next to nothing about the communist genocide that followed the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. In fact, in a typical communist response, he criticized those fleeing Vietnam by boat as somehow attempting “to support their consumer habits in other lands” (Nash, p. 59).

Wallis has been closely associated with Richard Barnet (former contributing editor of Sojourners) and the Institute for Policy Studies, a radical left-wing think tank supporting socialist revolutionaries around the world; Wallis had his book “The Soul of Politics” published by Orbis Books in 1994, a radical left-wing Roman Catholic publishing arm of the radical left-wing Maryknollers; Sojourner magazine has been a strong supporter of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and, indeed, has supported every left-wing, liberation theology cause around the world.

And yes, Wallis portrays the evangelical right that happens to be pro-American and anti-communist “as members of the forces of darkness” (Nash, p. 66, 71). For Wallis, a good Christian is someone who is pro-communist and socialist, while a bad Christian is someone who is anti-communist and pro-capitalist. The cry of the Sojourners crowd is “social justice” for the poor and downtrodden – social justice being code for socialism/communism.

I could not disagree more strongly. I contend that the Marxist-Leninist worldview is 100 percent contrary to biblical Christianity, and I document this extensively in my book “Understanding the Times.” Further, communism is directly responsible for the murder of tens of millions of human beings, a slaughter documented by Stephane Courtois, et. al. in their 1999 book, “The Black Book on Communism” (Harvard University Press).

I will attempt to be as kind and gentle as humanly possible and break the news to the Rev. Wallis and his “spiritual” advisee Barack Obama – socialism has never lifted the poor out of poverty. It has equally distributed poverty, but it has never been able to create the wealth that is partially responsible for lifting the poor out of poverty.

I say “partially responsible” because one’s worldview is even more important than wealth in reducing poverty. But socialism is a flawed idea, and it poisons the worldview of the people it influences. Our brothers on the evangelical left, who are concerned with the poor, need to read Theodore Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.” Although not a Christian, Dalrymple understands perfectly the importance of a proper worldview and its role in combating poverty, drugs, crime and broken families.

Can we admit a hard truth? Christian capitalist Truett Cathy’s Chic-fil-A has done more to fight poverty and help the poor than all the pronouncements of Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Daniel Berrigan, Brian McLaren, Tony and Bart Campolo, and their entire crew of left-wing sociological and economic friends combined.

Thomas Sowell explains, “It would be devastating to the egos of the intelligentsia to realize, much less admit, that businesses have done more to reduce poverty than all the intellectuals put together. Ultimately, it is only wealth that can reduce poverty, and most of the intelligentsia have no interest whatever in finding out what actions and policies increase the national wealth” (Capitalism Magazine, May 9, 2005).

In fact, the intellectuals are the very ones who complain about those who do increase wealth. Again, Thomas Sowell speaks to this issue: “Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century – medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer revolution. The people who created these things – the doers – are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers.”

Socialism is built on a slogan: “What can government do for me today?” instead of “What can I do to better prepare myself to take care of myself in order to be a better Christian and servant of my Lord?” Preparation involves individual responsibility, traditional family values, education, love of God and neighbor, and compassion for the up-and-outers as well as the down-and-outers.

Socialists stand against nearly every Christian, conservative principle imaginable. Compare the socialist agenda with Yale professor David Gelernter’s summary of the conservative position – “the freedom of every American to make his own way, free speech on the radio and everywhere else, free elections for workers and other people … freedom to acknowledge and celebrate the nation’s rootedness in Christianity, Judaism and the Bible … love of liberty and love of God” (National Review, March 23, 2009, p. 32).

In 2006, Barack Obama was the keynote speaker at Jim Wallis’ Call to Renewal conference, “Building a Covenant for a New America.” Following his address, in an interview by the United Church News, he cited “the teachings of the UCC (United Church of Christ) as foundation stones for his political work.” He said, “Just as my pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright from Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, welcomed me as a young man years ago, UCC churches across the country open their doors to millions of Americans each Sunday . … I believe that democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal values. Social justice and national security are both universal values, values that may originate for some in their religious beliefs, but are shared by us all.”

What Americans can look forward to now that Rev. Wallis has the ear of the president is what Sojourners magazine has been pedaling since 1971 – “advocating America’s transformation into a socialist nation” (Accuracy in Media Research Report, May 1983, Section 19).

Could it be that America, who turned her back on God by deciding that prayer and the Bible can no longer grace her public schools, but homosexuality (indeed the whole GLBTQ rainbow), abortion counseling and condoms in school colors are welcomed, is experiencing the very judgment of God? There are consequences for “forgetting God,” as Solzhenitsyn noted about his mother country, Russia. These same consequences are piling up on the metro-sexual West in general and on the United States in particular.