So I’ve been thinking and teaching and writing about the Biblical role of women a lot lately. Sunday school the past few weeks was on Colossians 3 and then Sarah Pelin get’s nominated and all that. It is refreshing to get a good giggle in the midst of all this. The Sacred Sandwich provided it. Read it and grin.

John McCain has selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. In case you missed it, she’s a she. Bible believing Christians are faced with a question that seems archaic to others: Is it right for a women to lead a nation? Of course that has happened but the question is the appropriateness of it. Can we American, Bible believing Christians vote for a ticket that has a woman in the second highest office? One Reformed Baptist pastor has weighed in on the negative. I disagree [with some of his exegesis]. Here’s my review:

1. “The Bible views it as a judgment and calamity upon a nation for it to be ruled by women.” I do not agree with this. Chanski cites Isa 3:12 but uses just half the verse. The passage is written in the form of Hebrew poetry and a major component of Hebrew poetry is parallelism. The parallel in the Isaiah passage is children oppressing them and women ruling over them. These are saying the same thing in different ways. What I think Isaiah is saying is that the weak are going to be able to dominate the nation. Children and women are not strong compared to men.

The judgment is not that women might lead; there is no Biblical condemnation of the role of queen. Rather the judgment is that the nation will become so weak they will be that easy to conquer and dominate.

Chanski mentions an “inherent constitutional weakness in womanhood” citing 1Pt 3 and 1Ti 2. I don’t believe that either passage is intending to teach that women are weaker (beyond the physical) than men.

The major point of 1Ti 2 is not that women are weak but that men must fulfill their duty to lead. That is why Paul points out that Adam was created first in verse 13. Adam had the law of the garden and was to faithfully transmit it to Eve. When Eve was deceived and in danger of violating it, he should have stepped in and lead. He didn’t. If Paul is intending to teach the inherent weakness of women, the fact that he mentions the order of creation makes no sense to me. The context from 1Ti 2:8 through the end of the chapter 3 is men doing what is right, not that women are weak. That seems to make the most sense of what Paul is saying there.

The 1Pt 3 reference is to women as the “weaker vessel”. Typically, the Bible uses vessel as a metaphor for the body (see 1Sa 21:5 for example). Women are (typically) bodily weaker than men (though some of the stuff I saw in the Olympics made me wonder) and so Peter is saying to live with them in an understanding manner, don’t dominate them or expect them to do the same things you do.

3. Chanski brings up Deborah, a judge of Israel as “an indictment against shameful male dereliction” but that isn’t how Deborah is introduced. She is introduced in verse 4 of chapter 4 as a prophetess and a judge. There is no indictment in her judging the nation. There is no mention or hint of male dereliction of duty at that point in the story. The only “male dereliction” in that episode comes in verse 8 with Barak’s (oh, the irony of that name!) refusal to lead the army in battle.

The cycle of the judges goes from okay to horrible, ending with Samson who couldn’t be worse. It sets us up for David who will be a man after God’s heart. Deborah comes in near the beginning of the Judges cycle so she isn’t that bad. God raised up all of the judges, even the bad ones. Deborah is nowhere put forth at an indictment against the male leaders of Israel, God could have raised up a stinker like Sampson at that point.

5. Here/ Chanski is back on track. This is an important question; can Palin fulfill her duties to her family and be Vice President at the same time? She has five children including one with Down’s Syndrome. Women have a Biblical duty to be “workers in the home” (Titus 2:5) and with a handicapped child in the home the work is greater. But before we count her out on this we need to consider a few things. First, this is a decision that her husband must make, not other Christians. Her husband is responsible for her and we have to honor his decision unless it is clearly sinful. Second, Trig is only six months old the burden of caring for him will most likely not be more of a burden than any other six month old at this point. It is when Trig is older that the burden will grow. Third, being a worker in the home is not exclusive of doing other things. The idea woman of Proverbs 31 worked outside the home selling her wares in the market (Prov 31:18, 24).

In the end, we need to evaluate Palin based not on the appropriateness of a woman in the White House, but on her qualifications and ability to lead. Women may not lead in the home or the church but the nation is an entirely different matter. We need to be as Biblically faithful as we can in this and remember that God raises up and takes down the leaders of nations. Even in democracies.

Added 9/2/08: Thanks to Bob Gonzales for pointing out my misrepresentation of Pastor Chanski’s post. See the comments for his correction. I have modified this post to hopefully better reflect the original author’s intent.

Added  9/8/08: Another blogger takes on the same questions and appeals to Proverbs 31 as well. A well written post, I recommend reading it.

Added 9/12/08: Doug Wilson adds a little bit more of a bump to my point about Deborah.

I love the Mythbuster guys. They’re nuts in a smart way. I have no idea what their point is in the demonstration but it is petty awesome. What you’ll see in the second half of the clip is essentially what an ink jet printer does. Only theirs is huge. And it uses paint balls.

This is really a follow up to Whither Fundamentalism.

More from Wood’s book on O’Connor. The history of the thing is what gets me. Sometimes we can look back at the 1950s with nostalgia, nearly all of America went to church. Surely those were better times. Family values reigned on TV: Ricky and Lucy, though married, slept in separate beds. One wonders where Little Ricky came from. But what was really going on?

The other weekend, I heard Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday play some tapes of his father. His dad was a DJ and Scott often came to the studio with him. Someone sent Scott some tapes of his father’s broadcasts and Scott shared them with us. While Scott spoke of his father’s struggles, one thing I heard really began to form my way of thinking about the 1950s. Communism was the big bad guy we faced. They were Communist and we were Capitalist. And Capitalism was good. They were Atheist and we were Religious. So Scott Simon’s dad at one point reminded people to go to the church or synagogue of their choice this weekend because “America has always been a religious nation.” Wow, think of that. People went to church or synagogue because it was the American, unCommunist thing to do. I mean, that makes a lot of sense in light of the relative victory of liberalism over fundamentalism in the 1930s. Churches would preach good, harmless messages about doing good to your neighbor. No one was offended with the gospel but were encourage do be good citizens. At the same time you were fighting Communism.

Now consider this quote from Wood:

O’Connor’s critical independence–her unwillingness to equate Christianity with any scheme or program–led her to reject another consensus that she regarded as far more noxious than bourgeois prosperity and anti-Communist hysteria: the newly emerging American civil religion. Its intentions were no doubt good. As sociologist Will Herberg argued in his influential 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, various representatives from the nation’s historic faiths joined in an effort to combat ethnic and racial discrimination. United in their opposition to bigotry in all forms, they agreed to ignore their fundamental theological differences for the sake of a common need. The cause of social justice came to be defined, however, as a larger good than the historic traditions themselves. Thus was the old civil religion of Washington and Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers reshaped into a new Americanism that could suffice quite well without any confessional particularities at all…

Not only did the civil religion of the 1950s melt particularized historic faiths into a thin religious gruel; it also made even the most secular Americans into allegedly religious people. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once declared, “Our government makes no sense…unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith–and I don’t care what it is.” (Wood, 17, 19)

Isn’t that what O’Connor is reacting against? The liberal, tolerant church of the 1950s was American religion. It wasn’t Christianity, it wasn’t Judaism, it was something in between. And all the while, Fundamentalism was marginalized and thought of as backward.

So today there are scholars scratching their heads wondering what happened to the Mainline liberal churches. They are shedding members at an enormous rate. What happened is that the Communism that stood so tall in the 1950s began to lose its threat by the 1960s and when we won the space race in the 1970s they didn’t seem so dangerous after all. I mean there was still the threat of nuclear attack, but as a society, we’d demonstrated our superiority. We just needed to win the cold war and all was right. So a civil religion wasn’t so important any more. It would be more acceptable to be an atheist or agnostic and you probably wouldn’t be called a Communist any more.

First, I have to define what I mean by ‘fundamentalism’. The word today has taken on a huge and grotesque meaning. What it meant originally was Protestants who held to the inerrancy of the Bible and the reality of miracles. The term came about when a group of these Christians authored a four volume set titled The Fundamentals which were published from 1910 to 1915. These books were written as an answer to the rising theological liberalism that was spreading across the (primarily Northern) American Protestant church.

Last night, I was tired and bored so I pulled a book off my shelf that I bought but never cracked. It is Ralph C. Wood’s dissertation Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Flannery was a Roman Catholic author in the South in the 1950s. And, in case you didn’t catch it, she was a woman. That gave her a pretty distinct outsider’s view of just about everything around her. Anyway, I’m digressing. At the beginning of the book, Wood talks about how this Roman Catholic would often side with the Fundamentalists around her rather than the Liberals. He goes on to lance the misunderstanding of what fundamentalism is:

 George Marsden has shown that American fundamentalism is, in fact, an urban rather than a rural phenomenon, that its conflict with modernism arose in the North rather than the South, and that it was birthed by legitimate concerns over scientific and historical challenges to the main claims of Christian faith. This is not to deny that most revivalistic Methodists and Baptists and Pentecostals living in the South during the publishing years of O’Connor’s life (1948-1964) were also fundamentalists. They, too, held that the Bible is God’s verbally inspired, inerrant, infallible book–not only in matters of faith and morals but of history and science as well. Yet their biblical literalism was taken for granted rather than pitted against an alleged enemy. Marsden wittily notes, therefore, that to speak of most Southern Christians as fundamentalists was to indulge in redundancy. There was no need to give them the name, since the South remained largely immune to the angry battles that racked the Northern churches.

Once the warfare ended with an overwhelming modernist triumph, fundamentalism came to be regarded as the worst of abominations. In high academic and ecclesial places, whether [Roman] Catholic or Protestant, its adherents have been dismissed as rigid and narrow, as mean-spirited and closed-minded folks who bludgeon their enemies with their Bible. Most scholars and critics see themselves, by contrast, as enlightened and compassionate, as inclusive and diversity-desiring people. We thus give thanks that we are not like the fundamentalists, the one group whom everyone can despise without guilt. Many liberal Protestants, by contrast, regard the Bible as a classic work of religious literature, one sacred text among other kindred books, the Western equivalent of the Muslim’s Koran or the Hindu’s Gita. (Wood,14-15)

The drum  most often beaten to show the “ugly face” of fundamentalism is the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. For the fundamentalists it was a public defeat. For the liberals, it was thought to show how backward fundamentalism really was. That has been the paradigm that has hung around fundamentalism’s neck ever since.

Further down the road, American fundamentalism began to change. There grew within the movement an increasing emphasis on separation from the world and on personal holiness. “I don’t drink, smoke or play cards and I don’t go with girls who do” became a popular motto. The list of taboos included hair length for both men and women, prohibition of cards and dice, rejection of dancing and rock and roll, and on. But beyond that, it also entailed for many a required break with those who did such things. But in the 1950s, Carl F. H. Henry and Billy Graham and Kenneth Kantzer and some others formed Christianity Today and began a movement that, at the time, was called “new evangelicalism” but today we just call it evangelicalism. If you read Henry’s book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, you can watch the transition. The book is a series of essays he wrote for Christianity Today. Early in the book, ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘evangelical’ are used interchangeably even in the same paragraph. By the end of the book ‘fundamentalism’ is gone. The evangelicals kept the fundamentalist doctrine but embraced cultural engagement. Digressing again.

Today our media has distored the term ‘fundamentalis’ to mean ‘fanatic’ typically of a religious sort. In the 1930s the term ‘Islamic Fundamentalist’ wouldn’t have made sense. And the shaded glasses of the Scopes Monkey Trial didn’t fit fundamentalism early on. Fundamentalism started amongst the educated and included two men who believed in evolution but rejected the scientific naturalism that excluded God from the process. The caricature of fundamentalism that is common today

Teaching is taken here to mean profitable instruction, which tends to edification… This is the true use of Christ’s word. As, however, doctrine is sometimes in itself cold, and, as one says, when it is simply shown what is right, virtue is praised and left to starve, he adds at the same time admonition, which is, as it were, a confirmation of doctrine and incitement to it. – John Calvin, Commentary on the Epistle to the Colossians, Chapter 3 verse 16.

I love the way Calvin warns us in this.  Isn’t that what too often happens? We encounter excellent teaching, we delight in the delivery and we acknowledge the virtue of its truth, and then we walk away and fail to obey it. Virtue is praised and ignored. At least it is of some (tragic) comfort to know that this was happening in Calvin’s day as in Geneva as well as today in the West. We’re no better than they were but we not much worse either.

As I teach through chapter 3 of Colossians I am repeatedly confronted by my lack of action. I believe and “Amen!” chapters one and two but when I get to chapter three I find myself wanting. Do I really believe chapters one and two?

bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. – Colossians 2:13 (ESV)

Reviewing my exegetical notes on this verse, here’s what I found I’d written:

Theologically, it is significant that we are called to forgive even as the Lord has forgiven us. If ‘the Lord’ here refers to Jesus, as I believe it does, then the image of the cross looms large in any dispute between believers. Jesus would push Himself up on nail pierced feet in order to utter the phrase “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” He didn’t have to in order for them to be forgiven, He did it so they could hear Him. How much discomfort will we endure to forgive someone else? Too often too little.

Recently I taught on Colossians 2:16-17 and we talked about the relationship between the Christian and the law. What I wanted to do was to point out that the issue of the Sabbath is important and is handled in different ways by Bible believing Christians. For me that opened the question of how we understand the relationship between the Christian and the Law.  I decided to do some broad overviews. Here’s what I presented.

The law is for Israel not the Church. Israel and the Church are two different entities in God’s program. Israel is under the Law, the Church is under the grace. If something from the Old Testament is not repeated in the New Testament, it is not part of the New Covenant. When Israel rejected Jesus, God turned to the Gentiles to make the Jews jealous. God is not done with Israel; the Church age is a pause or parenthesis in God’s work with Israel after which he will once again deal with Israel. When revival comes to the Jewish people, they will return to the Law but in many ways it will be ceremonial. When Dispensationalism reads Colossians 2:16-17, they see a vindication of their system. The Sabbath is part of the Law and should not be observed by Gentiles.

New Covenant Theology (NCT) isn’t a new version of Covenant Theology, it is a theology that focuses most strongly on the New Covenant. Stresses the supremacy of the New Covenant. The Law was fulfilled in Jesus and we are now under the Law of Christ. Jesus articulated the supersession of the Old Covenant law in the Sermon on the Mount. The Ten Commandments passed away with the Old Covenant. Like Dispensationalism, if a command is not repeated it is not binding so NCT sees Colossians 2:16-17 as an affirmation that the Sabbath is not part of the New Covenant.

Covenant Theology (CT) recognizes that God relates to mankind in covenants. In the garden, Adam and Eve were in covenant with God and they broke it. After the fall, God instituted a new covenant, the Covenant of Grace whereby he promised a savior to humanity. All of the covenants after that were administrations of that Covenant of Grace therefore there is unity between the covenants. What is not repealed or fulfilled in the Law is still binding. The Ten Commandments are part of God’s moral law, the law written on people’s hearts and is therefore applicable always. When CT reason Colossians 2:16-17, they see the Sabbath here not as the weekly Sabbath instituted at creation but in conjunction with the feasts and New Moons. In the ceremonial part of the law, there were additional Sabbaths that went with specific days. Those were a shadow of Christ.

What I said in the end was that whatever comes to us by way of rule or law comes to us through Jesus. So we don’t simply pick up the Sabbath rules from the law of Moses and directly apply them in the New Covenant. There is a Sabbath for God’s people but that doesn’t mean it looks just like it did in all the other covenants.

Just some random links and comments. No particular order.

Dinosaur Eel Better Than Modern Variety. So this eel is referred to as a “dinosaur eel” because, they say, it’s family tree goes back 96 million years. Its scales are uberengineered. Though thin, they are made up of four layers and when impacted, they don’t crack lengthwise, they crack in circles so it is almost impossible to puncture. The scale is lighter than modern versions, thinner and more durable. So why don’t other eels have that kind of scale? There doesn’t appear to be any drawbacks to it. Why did this eel keep its super scales? Just doesn’t sound to me like they just evolved.

An Appropriate Level of Superivsion. The more I hear about the Chick-fil-A owner the more I respect him. Some pre-teens(!) broke into his house, fired off fire extinguishers, threw eggs and had a food fight on the tennis court. Damages come to about $30,00. But Mr. Cathy didn’t press charges. He didn’t want the girls to spend time in juvenile detention. He didn’t want them to have a criminal history. Instead, he cut a deal with their parents. No video games and they have to read books. What a great idea! The courts aren’t the answer for everything, parental supervision should be considered. Love it.

Run. I haven’t done it yet, but I am going to register have registered for my first 5k. It is in September at a forest preserve near my house. The beginners program I’m using is called “The Couch-to-5k Running Plan” so that should work, right? Right?

Check out the video below. It is from Good Magazine and sums up the issue with gas prices and rising food costs very well. I think the issue is very timely during this election cycle. Corn is a poor choice for making ethanol, the cell walls are thick and harder to break down and it takes a long time to grow. We should be investigating faster growing, thinner cell walled crops like grasses. But neither candidate is going to touch that third rail since the farm lobby is strong. Anyway, take a look at the video and think about the solutions the candidates are putting forward.