Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 16:4 (Fall 2002)
Article: Hermeneutics In Pink And Blue An Open Letter To A Pastor Asks: Are Two Versions Of Biblical Truth Required In The Church?
Author: Christiane Carlson-Thies

PP 16:4 (Fall 2002) p. 3

Hermeneutics In Pink And Blue
An Open Letter To A Pastor Asks: Are Two Versions Of Biblical Truth Required In The Church?

Christiane Carlson-Thies

Christiane Carlson-Thies has been a CBE member since its founding in 1987. She lives with her husband and son in Annapolis, MD, where she is self-employed as a telecommunications consultant.

Dear Pastor Smith: The debate within the body of Christ on the topic of women’s identity and role has often been cast as a battle between traditionalists ardently defending biblical truth and their critics who would, either by design or by ignorance, loosen the church from its biblical moorings in order to promote a foreign agenda. In truth, for many of us, our unease with the traditional position has nothing to do with being swayed by modern liberation movements; rather, our unease is a response to the weaknesses within the traditional position itself.

In the spirit of 2 Timothy 2:15, I hope the critical comments I offer can become part of a conversation to examine whether, on this topic, our church has correctly handled the Word of Truth.

Female Subordinationism

There are many excellent books that wrestle in detail with the specific texts that have formed the case against women’s full participation in authoritative offices in the church. I won’t repeat or even summarize their good work. Instead, I hope to raise the broad question of whether Scripture attaches such an absolute value to gender that femaleness, by itself, must become an automatic disqualifier from authoritative offices— either all offices or only some.

By “female subordinationism” I mean that teaching which holds that women’s authority to teach and lead is necessarily limited by one thing only: women’s God-ordained subordination to the authority of men.

For some believers, female subordinationism is grounded in a theology that regards all women in all times and in all places as having little or no intrinsic God-given authority. As an example of this position, in John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood,1 women are cautioned that even when giving directions to a male stranger lost in their neighborhood, their demeanor must not compromise the stranger’s masculinity (Recovering, p. 50). Thus, for some, even the hint of a woman having authority over a man in any context is an offense to be fastidiously avoided. They believe that the exercise of creation-wide authority is a constitutive element of manhood alone.

For other believers, the traditional “limiting texts”