Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 16:3 (Summer 2002)
Article: Biblical Community "Versus" Gender-Based Hierarchy: Understanding God’s Definition Of The Church As The Community Of Oneness.
Author: Gilbert Bilezikian

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PP 16:3 (Summer 2002) p. 3

Biblical Community Versus Gender-Based Hierarchy: Understanding God’s Definition Of The Church As The Community Of Oneness.

Gilbert Bilezikian

Gilbert Bilezikian is professor emeritus of Biblical Studies at Wheaton College (IL) and cofounder of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. Among the books of which he is the author are Beyond Sex Roles and Community 101. See also his “subordination challenge” on page 20 of this issue.

The most compelling proof for the existence of God should be the fact that the Christian faith has been able to survive twenty centuries of abuse inflicted upon it by the church. On all counts, the church should have shriveled and died several times during its tortuous history. Despite clear directives for beliefs and practices, assigned to it by its divine founder despite easy access to God’s inscripturated revelation, despite the ever-available guidance of the Holy Spirit, the church seems to be hell-bent on losing its way and becoming sidetracked down paths of self-destruction.

For about a millennium of its history, the church lost the memory of the locus of divine revelation. While the text of the Bible was slowly fading from crumbling parchments hidden in the musty recesses of moss-grown monasteries, clerics scurried about from pillar to post trying to extract divine wisdom from the writings of antique philosophers and from the bewildering confusion of one another’s teachings. It was only a few centuries ago that some noble adventurers of the Spirit stumbled upon Holy Writ and delivered from oblivion the very Scripture that had given the church her life.

In about the same length of time, the church misplaced, like a lost treasure, its most sacred entrustment: the way of salvation. It forgot the magnificence of divine grace and, shamefully, attempted to replace God’s gift with the miserable strivings of humans. To the miraculous achievement of the Cross, it substituted systems of salvation by works that never worked. Less than five centuries ago some sons of the church, driven to despair by the need of their own souls, dared to peer into the newly recovered Word of God to find again, for themselves and for generations to come, the free access to divine grace provided by the Cross in all its power and splendor.

At the dawn of this third millennium of its existence, there is evidence that the church is coming to the realization that, through the vicissitudes of its turbulent history, it has also lost its biblical identity as community. Across denominations, clergy are compelled to take notice of the dissatisfaction of their constituencies with the rigid and sterile institutional structures that have stifled and replaced authentic communal life. Christians read t...

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