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- No interest in this question? Maybe it would help if I was a little more explicit. Here's a piece from a journal entry on this subject, from several years ago, referring to a Methodist belief...
- I do not use twitter...sorry folks
- I think a few quotations from the ol’ Declaration of Independence may be in order: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator...
- I just put together an evening prayer that we will do here next week (answering the independence day rhetoric of this weekend). I used several Psalters songs, with us singing the "Home,...
- I'm pretty sure that our founding documents state that that freedoms they laid out are granted from our creator... the government was there essentially to be the violent arm of God to protect...
the Jesus Manifesto
following the way of Jesus in the land of our captivity
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him. If the first woman God ever made was strong [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Daughters and Sons",
... Continue reading »
1 year ago
Let them run amok, I say. Let us all run amok. We probably need a lot more amok around here anyway.
Thanks, Kimberly.
1 year ago
I guess I write this in order for my sisters to take heart...we don't all think you belong in the kitchen.
1 year ago
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Honestly, this is an issue I have a bit of a struggle with. I think there is an inherent tension between different parts of the Bible on the issue of women in authority, though it seems to be a difference between what was written and what was actually done. There are historical and biblical examples of women in leadership, and yet the descriptors of church leaders refer explicitly to men and Paul offers up the command of silence (though this could be a later interpolation). Perhaps some of the resistance to women in authority is based on fear, but perhaps some of it is based on theology. Maybe that theology is wrong, but then that should be demonstrated and debated.
1 year ago
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1 year ago
I think there is a similarity of language by which our place as the bride of Christ (or the household of God) is a threat to the Roman paterfamilias and our place as slaves to Christ is a threat to the authority of slaveholders just as much as "Jesus is Lord" is a threat to Caesar. Some of the arguments used to defend complementarianism are eerily similar to those used to justify slavery in the antebellum South, and while of course it would be uncharitable (and inaccurate) to paint complementarians as raging patriarchalists with Confederate flags in the back windows of their pickup trucks, I think it is tenable to see in complementarianism a vestigial or residual capitulation to patriarchy, and being able to couch oppression in terms palatable enough to be able to sleep at night is a poor substitute for justice.
1 year ago
1 year ago
I'm not suggest we ignore particular verses because they sound patriarchal; I'm suggesting that we refuse to read them as a justification for patriarchalism -- at least not any more than we read the slavery passages as a justification for slavery. If someone wants to construct a complementarian view that is not haunted by the ghosts of patriarchy, they are welcome to the task. I don't want to work that hard.
I recently left a ministry in which I ran afoul of the church's restrictive view of women. We "agreed to disgree"; we also agreed that I should leave. I could have stayed, had I not taken a stand (the practice in question was allowing a woman to lead worship), but it occurred to me: if this were about race, I wouldn't hesitate. So I didn't.
My tradition is very conservative, and I regularly work alongside and eat with people who do not share my proclivities or my passions on these issues. They are decent, earnest people who love God and revere the scriptures and whom I love and respect. I think they are wrong on issues of biblical justice; they think I'm weird.
I have no desire to anathematize those who think differently. And of course I'm present my opinions -- but they are opinions about things I think are important enough to use strong rhetoric.