Do have a great term.
Dana

Whilst I will not be posting anything for the rest of this month, I will be able to continue commenting on some existing posts. I don’t believe that it would be right to drop out in the middle of a discussion. However, I would prefer not to get caught up in any really lengthy discussions as I have a lot of work on and it would rather defeat the purpose of my blogging fast!

I must confess to being just a little frustrated by some of the things that you say in your response. I think that you misunderstand where I am coming from in a number of respects.

I have never denied the cultural construction and negotiation of gender roles. There is no culturally unmediated form of femininity or masculinity. I do not even believe that we would be able to arrive at some ‘pure’ masculinity or femininity if we were to strip away all of our cultural conventions and social constructions. There is no culturally unmediated substratum of gender. I have argued in the past that ‘nature’ itself is a social construction (albeit not a mere construction).

As you point out all of this is glaringly obvious. However, I don’t believe that the recognition of this entails the conclusions that you and Volf seem to draw. Part of the problem with your position, from my perspective, is the degree to which it seems to rely upon a rather suspect nature/culture opposition at certain points. Nature is never ‘acultural’: Adam was placed in a garden.

When I speak of certain differences between men and women being ‘natural’, it should be remembered that I do not ascribe to a substantialist ontology (although sometimes I might give that impression). I also see telos as part of the concept of ‘nature’. When Volf treats the differences between male and female as primarily cultural ways of negotiating biological differences, I think that he falls short of a fully biblical understanding of nature and creation and is applying another rather modern assumption (the nature/culture dichtomy) to the biblical data.

God’s creation is ordered to an eschatological end from the start and the different creatures within creation all have their own telos. There is no more basic non-teleological reality. The biological differences between men and women cannot be reduced to some underlying ‘substance’ that culture has to negotiate, but have to be regarded as value-laden facts belonging to a teleologically ordered reality that culture has to operate in terms of. The problem, it seems to me, is that many accounts of social constructivism haven’t actually moved beyond a nature/culture dichotomy; they have just privileged one side of the equation. With a Christian doctrine of creation such a movement becomes possible in a way that it doesn’t seem to be for non-Christian understandings of nature.

I believe the fact that sex is only appropriate within the context of a relationship between a husband and wife is a fact of nature. Of course, many will object to this, putting forward a range of arguments to claim that sexuality and marriage are social constructions. They certainly are, but this does not make them any less facts of nature, when we recognize the fact that nature was not created acultural and that God’s creation of the cultural reality of marriage was part of His creation of the natural reality.

In the context of worship, there are overlapping masculine and feminine roles to be played. In relationship to God the Church is feminine and the priest represents the Bridegroom in the dialogue of the service. However, there are also relationships within the congregation itself and differences between men and women are important here as well, something that we see in such places as 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 11. As the context of worship is the starting point and telos of the whole of the week, one would be surprised if the roles modelled in worship were not intended to have much bearing on regular life. Worship is certainly a time of heightened differentiation, but this differentiation isn’t altogether absent outside of that context.

It is also important to recognize that the masculine/feminine symbolism of worship goes all the way back to creation. The argument for an exclusively male priesthood from the masculinity of Christ is not actually an argument that we find in Scripture (although it is founded on good Scriptural principles). What we do find in Scripture are arguments appealing to the order of creation.

This is why the homo adorans argument is so important. Man’s most fundamental identity is found in worship, in his relationship to God. The woman was created to play a particular role in worship, to assist the man, who was to lead in their common task of worshipping God. This is one reason why Volf’s position is deficient. Sexual differentiation is not primarily a matter of sexed bodies, but a matter of the telos for which man and woman were created (which is reflected in sexed bodies).

God created man to relate to Him and to relate to the creation as His imagebearers. Men and women both image God, but they image God differently. The man is the image of God in a sense that differs from the woman and the woman is the image of God in a sense that differs from the man. Such a difference in the way in which men and women image God is suggested in verses such as 1 Corinthians 11:7. Man is the ‘image and glory of God [that is God the Father]’. As the glory of the man, the woman images the Triune God differently. I would suggest that the woman particularly images the Spirit as the One who glorifies and perfects.

When relating directly to God gender differentiation is at its height. When relating to each other gender differentiation is present to some extent, more so in some situations, less so in others. When relating to the creation gender differentiation is seldom an issue.

You bring forward a number of biblical examples to challenge my claim that masculinity and femininity are hard-wired into the biblical narrative. I actually think that they go some way to proving my point. Most of the examples that you bring forward actually prove my point beautifully. Paul’s response is important here: there performed their duty in ways that differed from their male counterparts. Deborah does not seem to have taken part in the actual killing of the battle itself, but presses Barak to do his duty.

But we can go further than this: most of the examples that you list are actually playing the key feminine role within a typological script that is repeated many times in the biblical narrative. Eve was deceived by the serpent. From that point onwards in Scripture, faithful women are repeatedly presented as the deceivers of tyrants. Sarai deceives Pharaoh and Abimelech. Rebekah deceives Abimelech. Rachel deceives Laban. The Hebrew midwives deceive Pharaoh. Rahab deceives the men of Jericho. Jael deceives Sisera. Michal deceives her father Saul. Esther deceives Haman. Others could be mentioned.

The woman defends men through her wisdom and cunning that exceeds that of the serpent. She does not defend in the same way as men are called to defend, though. The woman is not set apart to guard the boundaries in the same way as Adam and other men were. Woman are not called to go into battle, for example. Her role within the Holy War differs.

I take issue with the claim that the Scripture ‘does not explicitly present or address the differences between men and women in creation other than on a physical level.’ Where on earth does the Scripture explicitly present or address the differences between men and women in creation on a physical level? The differences between man and woman have to do with the differing roles that they were given in Genesis, roles for which they were physically equipped. The text just does not seem to support your theory at this point. Many within our culture may regard the differences between men and women in such a way, but this is not what the Scriptures give us.

I stand by my original claim that differences between masculinity and femininity are hardwired into the biblical text. Take, for example, the sign of circumcision. In the choice of that particular sign God gives sexed bodies covenantal significance. Many other things could be listed. Whilst it is certainly true that in most human activities, sexual differentiation fades into the background, it is not true to say that for Scripture sex is primarily a mere fact of physicality. I also believe that the maleness and femaleness of human imaging of God goes beyond sexual reproduction. As a single man, I can image God in my masculinity, just as a single woman can image God in her femininity.

I have read the section of Wright that you mention. What he says is quite correct, but the symbolism of sex goes far, far deeper in Scripture. The more that one studies the Scripture, the more it is there. Furthermore, this symbolism does not merely float above us, like oil on water, but calls us to live in terms of the symbolism that it presents in our own lives. For example, married women are called to be like the Church (Ephesians 5:24), like Eve (1 Timothy 2:15) and like Sarah (1 Peter 3:6).

On the issue of priesthood, a few comments. God’s purpose was that of forming a priestly nation. Israel was a priestly nation, even though it was hierarchical in strcuture. Relative to Gentiles every Israelite was a priest. There are good biblical theological arguments for the claim that every Israelite was in some sense a priest. For my thoughts on new covenant priesthood see here.

The connection between priesthood and war is not the primary argument that I would use to support male priesthood. However, I remain convinced that the scriptural evidence for the connection is robust. The Levites were warriors and sacrifices for the nation. They were warriors as the armed guard of places of holiness (cf. 2 Chronicles 23:2-7; Nehemiah 13:22). They played the role of the cherubim who guarded the garden of Eden. If you went to the wrong place a Levite would thrust you through with a sword. In Israel’s war camp, they were God’s crack troops, guarding the place of His presence with His people.

When Israel went to war, the men of Israel had to sanctify themselves and had a sort of elevated level of (priestly) holiness for a time as God was in their camp. The regular warrior became a ‘priest’ for a time. The Levitical priesthood, however, was sort of permanent divine army. Their role corresponded to the angelic host who serve God, but are also counted as His army.

The priests were also sacrifices. The firstborn sons of Israel had already been dedicated to God as a sort of sacrifice, but the Levites substituted for them (Numbers 3:45). They were dedicated to God for the sake of the whole of Israel as a sacrifice. The same logic can be seen in war, where the sons of the nation are set apart and sacrificed for the nation as a whole.

Other reasons why the priests of Israel were exclusively male can be given, but I don’t want to make a long response even longer.

René Girard has some extremely helpful things to say on occasions. However, on a number of occasions his theory risks silencing the text. This is one such occasion. Whilst there is probably a measure of truth to Girard’s position, the setting apart of the Levitical priesthood seems to be more complex than his theory might suggest. At best Girard is only part of the explanation.

Returning to the issue of priests as warriors, this is a theme that continues in the NT. Jesus is the great Warrior, who goes out to do battle with the forces of evil. He takes the Nazirite vow (vowing not to drink wine until His battle was done), which was a vow of holy warfare. We do not engage in holy warfare with physical weapons as they did in the OT, but it is warfare nonetheless. Furthermore, the task of warfare is one that men have been equipped to lead in a particular way and this is not limited to physical warfare.

The idea that Jesus had to be male to correspond to the male sacrificial animals seems to raise a few questions. Why were the sacrificial animals in question male in the first place? Not all sacrifices were male.

As I have pointed out above, in most areas of life, differences of sex need not be more than a background issue. Male and female are more like ‘neighbouring’ sexes than ‘opposite’ sexes. We have far more in common in shared personhood than we have things which distinguish us from each other. As for Podles, I have problems with a number of things that he says myself. I think that his case is quite weak at a number of points. However, where I agree I am quite happy to quote him.

I stand by my description of our society as ‘egalitarian’. Whilst there are certainly elements of our society that are deeply sexist and should be condemned, such things are frowned upon by most leading figures within our society. I also quite willingly admit that there is a lot of sexism in the media. I call our society ‘egalitarian’ in much the same way as I would call it ‘postmodern’. Most people don’t have a clue what ‘postmodern’ means and many are decidedly modern in their attitudes. However, that is the general way that the wind is blowing.

As regards ‘hierarchy’, I don’t understand hierarchy in the same way as most do. There is certainly not a hierarchy of power. However, there is a relational hierarchy without the slightest suggestion of inferiority or what has been called subordinationism. I have no interest in defending such unscriptural positions as patriarchalism for one moment. This expresses my position well.

Blessings,

But (except for deborah) they ‘protect’ in decidedly non masculine ways.

The midwives and Rahab lie, they don’t foment a revolution and swing swords.

Jael lies, uses a domestic object as a weapon, and GIVES MILK as part of her lie.

Deborah is close to ‘masculine’, but she’s obvioulsy presented as exceptional in her milirary leadership: she wants Barak to do his “manly duty”, but since he refuses, Jael gets to kill the leader, and she does it in a non-masculine way.

Even the aboriginal Dyirbal have masculine and feminine, though they might cut the pie a little bit different (pace Lakoff).

First of all, I appreciate your reading Volf. Too bad you don’t see the cultural construction and negotiation of gender roles. To me it is so glaringly obvious and makes the utmost sense. But ok.

I like your thoughts about the act of worship. I do believe that we are first and foremost homo adorans. Your totus Christus ideas go along with this. If one’s liturgical act is that of Eastern Orthodoxy, for example, where the priest symbolically enacts Jesus coming from the holy place to deliver himself into the church with his life and presence in the Eucharist, then it makes sense for the priest to be a male. Of course, all the rest of the males present at the liturgical event would then symbolically be part of the “feminine” church. But outside of the actual liturgical event, these difference would not hold. I think my Orthodox friend who is a seminary instructor would agree with me about that.

As to “masculinity” and “femininity” being “hardwired into the biblical narrative”- well, Al, I think this is your interpretation of the narrative based on what you believe about reality. Not everyone sees the biblical narrative like this; I certainly don’t. There are many instances in the biblical narrative, for example, of women protecting men: the Hebrew midwives, Deborah, Rahab, Abigail, etc. etc. Scripture does not explicitly present or address the differences between men and women in creation other than on a physical level. The point of the Genesis story of the creation of humanity is not that God is gendered, or that there is absolutized masculinity and/or femininity within God, but that humanity is the pinnacle of God’s creative activity. God Created: God Created male and female; God Created humanity in his image. There is only one Role of Humanity as image-bearers: to image God in his life-giving love/love-giving life with respect to other humans and with respect to the rest of creation. Sometimes this occurs through the power of sexual reproduction, and other times in ways that don’t involve sexual reproduction/genital expression.

Have you read Wright’s “The Word, the Church and the Groaning of the Spirit” in his little book, “The Crown and the Fire”? It is simply fabulous; the whole book is great, but this chapter (and the one following, on the Eucharist) is outstanding. It’s an exposition of Romans 8:17-27, and he says that “the theme of this passage is the extraordinary vocation of the people of God, within the overarching plan of God for the healing and rebirth of the entire cosmos.” It “points us to the genuinely Christian view of the world, and of God, and of the Church’s task in between God and the world.” The outline consists of the context of the three instances of the use of the word “groaning” in this passage, which is “rather like a threefold Russian doll; each time we open up a set of ideas, there’s another one, similar but compressed, inside. Within each section the connecting words (all the ‘fors’ and ‘becauses’) are vital.”

1) The world waits to be fully redeemed.“…The cosmos itself will one day thrill to respond to the wise rule/glory of God’s redeemed- and now redeeming- humanity. That is the vision. Instead of worship of creation by humans, as in Romans 1, we now have creation rescued by humans… Within that vision…Paul uses the great image from Genesis 3. No longer Eve, but now the whole creation, playing as it were female to God’s male, is groaning together and in travail together…The present state of the world is just this: that it is groaning in the pangs of giving birth to the new world that God desires and intends. And the result is a view of the world which leaves no room for either exploitation or idolatry.”

2) The world waits for the church to be fully redeemed. “If the world is playing out the Eve-theme, groaning in travail as it waits for the new world to be born from its womb, so the Church is also groaning as she waits for her own full adoption….The female image of the Church, groaning in travail, is placed as it were within the female image of the world….Paul is deliberately interpreting the two in relation to each other. The present task of the Church is not only to share the sufferings of Christ but in doing so to share and bear the sufferings of the world….The church is not to be insulated from the pain of the world, but is to become for the world what Jesus was for the world, the place where its pain and grief may be focused and concentrated, and so be healed…Does this mean that some of our wounds are Christ’s wounds, and that some of our wounds bring healing? I think Paul’s answer is Yes.”

3) God is at work in the world through the church to bring about the full redemption. “‘In the same way too’, Paul says in verse 26: what is true of the world and the Church is actually true also of the Spirit. Within the groaning of creation, and within the groaning of the Church, God - this strange God - is groaning also….God is sharing, by his Spirit, in the groaning of creation and the groaning of the Church. But this image remains inescapably the Eve-image, the female one giving birth…Prayer, at the deepest level, is here understood as God calling to God from within the created and groaning world, …from within the redeemed and groaning church, God the Spirit dwelling in the hearts of her people as they dwell in the midst of the broken world, and calling to God the Father, the transcendent one, and being certainly heard….The Church, then, is caught up in this divine dialogue,…comes to share the pattern of the life and death and resurrection of the Son. Verse 17 stands as the rubric over the entire passage: when the world and the Church look out on the darkness and ask why they have been abandoned, at that very moment they share the agony of the Son; so that the complaint of God’s absence becomes, paradoxically, the evidence of God’s presence….We in the West have assumed for too long that the word ‘God’ is univocal, and that we all know what it means. This passage holds out the startling picture of God as the creator and as the one at work to bring healing and hope within the world, and, in the midst of that, as the one who suffers and dies under the weight of the world’s sin, and rises again as the beginning of the new creation.”

Glory! I’ll go there joyfully with Wright. And farther than that, in terms of symbolic “maleness” and “femaleness”, I think scripture does not go.

Which leads me to thoughts on Priesthood. First of all, God’s ultimate intention was to make a kingdom of priests (Ex 19:5-6, Is 61:6, 1Pet 2:9-10), in that all the redeemed would offer God right worship. Hebrews 5:13 through 10:25 seems to say that Jesus’ final sacrifice fulfilled the purpose for the Levitical priesthood and that the LP was over with; the only “priest” in that sense that remains is Jesus, the High Priest after the pattern of Melchizedech. I find no intimation in scripture that God wanted to set up a hierarchical ecclesiastical system such as is found in the High Church traditions. I think the Christologic symbology was meant to be focused on the Eucharist, not on who is presiding over its celebration.

In light of this, I find the notion of the priest as warrior to be off base. First of all, God’s instruction to the priests to kill idolaters was a demonstration that idolatry always leads to death, whether that death is caused “directly” by God or not. Sometimes God sent a plague, which was a chance to repent and through which some people repented and lived. This had nothing to do with the “masculinity” of the priests. Secondly, as above, the Levitical priesthood was only meant to be temporary. Some people, most notably Rene Girard, think that God set up the LP in order to get people to stop sacrificing one another as scapegoats and focus the violence onto animals, temporarily, until the final Sacrifice where God took all the violence into Himself on the cross and defeated it. Which is thirdly, the example of Jesus the Ultimate Priest, not striking back when he was reviled, and empowering us by his Spirit to do the same. Part of the core of Jesus’ message, according to Wright, was the constant admonition to the Jews drop the agenda of violence, which they thought was what was going to effect their deliverance. The weapons of our warfare do not have their source in the flesh (death and corruption and all that leads thereto- NTW). Dallas Willard’s exposition of the Sermon on the Mount in “Divine Conspiracy” makes it clear that force and manipulation have no place in kingdom-of-God relations, either toward others in the church or toward the world.

I do believe Jesus had to be a male in order to correspond to the male sacrificial animals, in order to demonstrate that his Way was not simply another fertility religion, and in order to effect his work in the time and place (history) in which he was incarnated. No problem with that. I do not deny the historicity of anything about Jesus and his redeeming work. Women were drawn into that redemption from the beginning with Jesus receiving his human body from Mary (Athanasius, De Incarnatione, II/10).

Of course we humans don’t practice anything as androgynes. We have sexed bodies, and that is not unimportant to our identities. But it’s not the core of our identities; otherwise, those who don’t have all their “parts” due to birth defect, trauma or disease would be less than human. I don’t think you would go there, Al. I’ve read some of Podles; I’d like to agree with some of what he says, but I think he too can’t see very far past his own cultural conditioning, esp. as part of the Roman Catholic culture and how that plays into his view. I don’t agree with Reuther, Fiddes or Irigaray and I’m not a pan/en/theist.

I do wish you would consider how exactly the culture of the West views women. It is in fact not egalitarian “on the street”, or even respectful. If it were, there would not need to be laws against rape, laws to curb sexual harassment, or laws to ensure the same rate of pay for the same work done by men and women- which is still not at parity in the US. (My best friend has a saying: Law is for the lawless.) In the States, the leading cause of women admitted to hospital because of “accident” is domestic violence, and nearly all murders of women are committed by their spouses/boyfriends. Look at advertising, at music videos, at mass marketed film and TV, and really see how women are portrayed, especially “smart” or “powerful” women. Please ponder that for a while. A good long while.

Finally, as to the “asymmetry of male and female roles” reflecting trinitarian relations, if by this you mean the kenosis and/or subordination of the Son to the Father, those were also meant to be temporary, not eternal; my understanding was that was pretty well settled during the patristic period. I refer you also to Wright on Daniel’s vision of God sharing his own glory with the Son of Man. Also, Kevin Giles, Oz Anglican, has written about this: see book review here:
http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/2006/08/jesus_and_the_f.html
In addition, if you have time, you might peruse Michael’s posts on the book “Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy”, found here:
http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/2006/10/discovering_bib_1.html
He’s been blogging this chapter by chapter and has a helpful index at the above address, so one doesn’t have to spend a lot of time looking for the individual posts.

I don’t want to have a fight about this; if you don’t agree, we can agree to disagree. I ask that you think about these ideas. I hope you continue to treat the females in you life with the same regard you would want for yourself, consistent with being a follower of Jesus. I hope your blog fast is peaceful and your studies are fruitful. Looking forward to the Wright podcast. God bless you.

Dana