Editor’s Reflections -- By: William David Spencer

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 27:4 (Autumn 2013)
Article: Editor’s Reflections
Author: William David Spencer


Editor’s Reflections

William David Spencer

When editors Ronald Pierce and Rebecca Groothuis’s Discovering Biblical Equality came out in 2005, many were surprised to read its subtitle: “Complementarity without Hierarchy.” “Wasn’t that term ‘complement’ already taken? Didn’t it already mean ‘hierarchical’ by its inherent nature? Was this a case of co-opting a word and attempting to redefine it away from its original meaning?” were the questions to ask. Those who took the time to check it out in Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary may have been surprised to read: “1. something that completes or makes perfect . . . 2. The quantity or amount that completes anything . . . 3. Either of two parts or things needed to complete the whole; counterpart.”1

That we are counterparts, completing one another (1 Cor 11:11-12), should not have been such a great surprise. Genesis 1:27 tells us male and female humans are created in the image of God, and we see God employing the concept of counterpart in Colossians 1:15. There, we are told that Jesus Christ is the visible counterpart of the invisible God, the eikōn, “that which has the same form as someth[ing] else,” a “living image2 that completes God’s self-disclosing revelation by making the Great Unseen seen (John 14:8-11). No wonder the pious wanted to kill Jesus in John 5:18. We are told he was calling God “his own father,” “making himself equal (isos) with God.”3 What his opponents realized is that, in his claiming descent from none other than God, Jesus was actually declaring himself to be God, as his “Father” was God. Christians, of course, understand that he was doing far more than merely making a claim to deity. He was stating a revelation: revealing himself as equal with the Father.

How equal is equal? The word is actually an absolute term. Absolute terms do not have degrees of absolutism. One is either equal or one is not. It is like the term “eternal.” Someone or something is either “eternal,” or not “eternal.” If it lasts a phenomenally long time, but eventually ceases to be, like the Greek gods that could eventually die (a claim the Cretans even made for Zeus, whom they believed was buried on Mount Ida, though other Greeks maintained Zeus was indeed immortal, thus branding “all Cretans”...

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