Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

• Genesis 3:16-19

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

• Ephesians 5:21-33

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

• Galatians 3:28

“Fiorenza uses the method of historical criticism, but starting from the experience of women’s oppression and with the aim of transforming the situation. Her aim is to write a contextual Liberation Theology, with the goal of liberating women, not to develop a supposedly neutral academic theology. She acknowledges that for the feminist theologian the Bible is itself part of the problem in that it is patriarchal and androcentric and has erased women from the history of salvation. Nonetheless, it also contains within it materials that can be used for the liberation of women, especially by reaching behind the later patriarchal formulations to recover the lingering evidence of an earlier egalitarian age. Fiorenza makes use of the biblical material, but for her it is evidently feminism that is the criterion for the truth of biblical teaching, not vice versa.
“ ‘A Feminist hermeneutical understanding that is oriented not simply toward an actualizing continuation of biblical Tradition or of a particular biblical tradition but toward a critical evaluation of it must uncover and reject those elements within all biblical traditions and texts that perpetuate, in the name of God, violence, alienation, and patriarchal subordination, and eradicate women from historical-theological consciousness. At the same time, such a Feminist critical hermeneutics must recover all those elements within biblical texts and traditions that articulate the liberating experiences and visions of the people of God.’ (In Memory of Her Chapter 1)”

• Tony Lane, A Concise History of Christian Thought

Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1938-present) is a German feminist theologian, born in Romania.  In spite of the quote above, the second paragraph coming from her book, In Memory of Her, there are criticisms on her works where she refutes the feminist attitude that Paul’s letters can be ignored due to his misogynistic attitude.  She found Paul to be equality minded, quoting Galatians 3:28, that we are all one in Christ.

But the second paragraph seems to say that if Scripture goes against feminist ideology, then the Bible must be ignored on that point.  If that is a true statement of her feminist theology, then I do not care whether she has a point or not.  We cannot pick and choose what Scripture we want to believe.  If we do, we are nothing more than an idolator, creating a god, but calling him Jesus, but one that listens to us alone.

The concept of a woman being subjected to the male is anathema in modern conversation, but the curse of woman is clear in Genesis 3 that woman not should but will be subject to her husband.  Arguing that the woman freely accepts the man’s curse by going into the workplace and working equal to a man is admirable.  They could stay home and do housework – wow, do I sound misogynistic at this point.  But my point is accepting the male curse while working in the workforce does not negate the female curse.

And God’s system works in a perfect world, and some of us made it work in this broken one, but I still think I got the better end of the deal. Where humans screw things up is that we have a sin nature and our love for each other falls short of what God wants that love to be.

But I have heard many arguments about the word “obey” in marriage vows.  My wife said “obey” and she meant it, but even though she did not think this “Christian thing,” as she called it, was real until near our 25^th wedding anniversary, we read the entire chapter of Ephesians 5, not rejecting any words.  We are to subject ourselves to each other.  It is a partnership similar to our relationship (minus the romance element) that we will have with Jesus in Heaven.  We subject to each other.  The wife obeys the husband and then Paul goes into great detail about how the husband loves his wife.

I wrote recently about if I ever made a big decision in our household without a lot of discussion with my wife, I paid dearly for it.  And if that decision did not become “golden”, that is no problems with it down the road, I paid doubly dearly.  And that mistake may not have been made twice on a major decision.  My wife was more than my equal.  She did things that I could not do.  She did most of the things that I could do better, but I had a much higher income potential due to a master’s degree in an engineering field.

And that one point of revising the Bible to suit your purposes is my only concern here.  What I read about her arguments that Paul treated male and female equally are admirable comments, especially when she breaks with the rank and file of the feminist movement to make such comments.

Women deserve equal pay for equal work.

When I was working on a construction project at a military kaserne near Karlsruhe, Germany, there was a loaded trailer that had been parked in a troubling spot.  We had to use other means to get materials to the construction project with that trailer in the way.  A couple of days of inefficient work on our part and a female truck driver backed up to the trailer.  She expertly backed the truck up to the tongue of the trailer, but she was off by roughly the width of the tongue.  By this point, everyone on my construction crew had stopped work.  They muttered how she had stripes, and the military paid you by time in service and rank.  But could she do the work, equal to a man?  With a fully loaded trailer, she walked around her truck, lifted the tongue, with twenty or thirty guys watching (since the weightlifting room was opposite the construction site), and she used her hips to inch the trailer into position.  At that point, my twenty guys started clapping, since our work had been hindered by the trailer being in the way.  She turned red, got in the truck, and I yelled at my guys to get back to work before she cranked the engine and drove away.  I wonder how many men in that situation would have asked for help since there were a lot of them watching, thus not doing anything at the moment.

We are all humans.  We are all subjected to the issues of living in a fallen world.  There should be equality in the workplace, but our sin nature must be overcome.  And that same issue occurs in the home.  I was blessed with a slow transition.  My wife was ill for many years before she died.  I slowly took over one thing and then another.  I hate housework, but now that I am alone, I must do it all.

My wife did a lot of things that she did not like doing, and I never heard her once complain.  Why?  Because we were a team.  We were two people who had become one flesh.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.