In my new book, How Jesus has Liberated Women (Volume One, Before Christ, is now out), I argue that Jesus was the first and best feminist. Which implies that those who came after him have not always made par (many turned out to be wolves, as he warned). In the next volume, I will show that like pagan religion, post-Christian philosophy has an abject record of insanity on the subject of sex. And yes, that includes misogynistic philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, lesbo-normative thinkers like Judith Butler, and people who despise women and blame men, yet write brilliantly -- here's looking at you, Simone De Beauvoir.
Here is one ingredient in the secret Christian sauce, which Paul stole from Jesus and the prophets: ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Red and yellow, black and white, rich and poor, Jews, Gentiles, and pagans to the uttermost part of the Earth, and Adam AND Eve, we're all in the same pickle, called "Sin and Death." (And great novelists and psychologists have stolen from St Paul, or recognized from scratch.)
And so, as C. S. Lewis warned, Satan sends errors into the world in pairs, that we flee one only to be ensnared by its opposite and equally deadly number. This is what one finds, reading the history of "enlightened" thought about sex.
I won't replicate the story, which you can begin reading in Volume I, and by God's grace, next year in Volume II, from ancient times to this day, and how Jesus has brought liberation to billions of women and men.
But the Church, oft-entwined in the World, trips over the same opposing errors.
Christ and his followers have liberated billions of women in profound ways. But Christians, including myself, are subject to the same temptations as other sons of Adam and daughters of Eve: sex, power, pride, greed, self-delusion, self-righteousness.
So "take heed, lest we fall." We swerve to avoid the ditch on one side of the road and plunge into the crevasse on the other side.
Here is an example of the dangerously simplistic thinking that results.
The author is a preacher and teacher named Derek Penwell. He seems sincere and well-meaning, and at times can be eloquent. And the ditch he swerves to avoid is really there: I spend most of Volume One describing it. But Christian theology demands balance.
As often with short pieces on important topics, I reproduce most of the essay, respond point by point, then draw conclusions.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"Yesterday, I shared this as a Substack essay and got a strong response from women who've been hurt by the church. I'm posting the full piece here for folks who don't spend time on Substack. By reposting it on Facebook, I'm hoping this pastoral letter of apology and solidarity (1) reaches more of the women the church has too often managed instead of trusted (2), diminished instead of believed, warned about instead of listened to, especially those who'd never see it on Substack."
(1) Speaking as a pastor, Penwell should make sure his message is biblically sound and agrees with the facts. First, to whom are you apologizing? "Women who have been hurt by the Church?" How vague both terms are. Does "the Church" mean the Body of Christ? Particular congregations? Denominations? Church leaders? In the full sense, "church" refers to all followers of Christ, male and female.
Most Christians around the world are female. And each and every one of us is a sinner. Every one of us also possesses a quanta of power, as Burke put it. And we have used that power at times to hurt -- and hopefully at times to help -- both men and women.
So you're off to a bad start, Pastor Penwell. You seem to be assuming that Adam sinned while Eve demurely hid in the bushes. Anyone who has lived on Planet Church or on Planet Earth knows that's nonsense, just as it was nonsense when a few church fathers blamed Eve more than Adam. (Not St. Paul: "In ADAM all have sinned!")
I am also leery of this term "solidarity." It is often used as a "popular front" term in Marxist class warfare, nor that everyone who uses it recognizes that link.
This may seem overly subtle or paranoid, but the use of such terms is often telling.
A pastor should not be an "ally" or in "solidarity" with any race, sex, class, or nation. He is a servant of God. Like the prophets of old, he is called to speak God's truth to sinners and saints belonging to every human category. (And if we meet aliens, or angels, maybe to them as well.)
The word "solidarity" assumes a sort of social warfare in which some who do not themselves belong to the revolutionary and long-oppressed class nevertheless join with them to battle the knuckle-dragging ancient regime. (And therefore, by the way, gain power in the revolutionary system, as the intellectuals who led traditional Marxist revolutions tended to do.)
"During Advent this year, I've been writing pastoral letters to people the church has too often wounded instead of welcomed. They aren't arguments or position papers. They're attempts at honest apology, lament, and solidarity. (3)
Today's letter is for women.
My dear ones,
The church taught you that you were dangerous.
We told everyone that your body could make a man stumble, your voice could usurp authority, and your leadership could unravel the natural order. (4) Mostly, I think, because somewhere deep down, the men in charge suspected that was true."
(3) This sounds humble. But it also seems to echo a comment on this pastor's Facebook page, in which he jokes that he charges $1000 an hour for arguing with people on Facebook. This rhetorical approach seems to preclude the possibility of being disputed. "I'm not arguing, I'm just honestly apologizing and expressing solidarity."
If you say something that is out of line with truth, others should call you on it, whether you frame it as a philosophical argument or an apologetic epistle.
(4) Why does Penwell discuss sexual temptation and authority together? And what truth does he suppose men recognize "somewhere deep down?" Is Penwell admitting that female leadership "could unravel the natural order?"
It is certainly true that immodest and / or lascivious behavior tempts many men, and some women. So the Bible does enjoin women to dress modestly. Or should we come to church with lots of flesh showing? Does he wish to quarrel with such New Testament injunctions? Without, perhaps, naming them, or showing why they are wrong?
There is an equivocation at work here, which with the general lack of clarity in these lines, can set us up for error. It is not clear what he think was "true" about what "the men in charge" thought, because the referent includes multiple unrelated elements, and the pronoun "that" could refer to any of them.
But also, he blames men in the church for comments that are actually found in the New Testament. I guess they're an easier target. It doesn't sound good for a pastor to say, "St Paul was a knuckle-dragging misogynist." But that hardly seems fair to Christian leaders who are sincerely trying to follow Scripture, however flawed you may feel their interpretations to be.
St. Paul also does seem to say leadership in the Church should be male. At the same time, he often greeted and praised female leaders. How one is to sort that out, is an exegetical and psychological problem which is much debated, but not my focus in these books -- I have bigger fish to fry. (I'll explain that later.) But it would be more charitable to concede that some who hold the traditional view may do so out of honest desire to obey Scripture, not out of innate misogyny or fear or female power. Some who hold such views are, after all, themselves women.
"So, we made elaborate theological rules to contain you, dressing up our fear in Scriptural finery, and calling it 'God's will.' We built hierarchies that somehow magically ensured we'd land on top, and you always wind up in the 'helpmeet' role.
"We preached (5) about a woman's submission as if it were some kind of key to understanding God's design for creation. Unfortunately, what that really meant was nothing more theologically compelling than: 'Stay in your lane so we don't have to feel threatened.'"
Again, who is "we?"
Women have helped lead many Christian organizations that I have been associated with. Most preachers in China now seem to be female, as was the co-pastor of the church I served in the suburbs of Taipei in the 1980s. In YWAM, where I got my first extended taste of mission experience, women were often leaders and teachers. One gave a teaching in my Discipleship Training School in Hong Kong in 1984 on why that was biblical. I asked about those verses in Paul, and like Penwell, she seemed to take the question as evidence of a sinister motive on my part. In fact, I was seriously wondering how to interpret those verses.
So who related "a woman's submission" to the order of Creation? Aside from St. Paul himself, when he wasn't warmly greeting and commending, or upbraiding, female colleagues? (Not for taking on leadership roles, but for quarreling?)
Are we to assume that males and females should never take different "lanes"? And that any opposing suggestion is merely a patriarchal power trip? Again, this doesn't seem very charitable or a credible act of psychology. Consider, for example, C. S. Lewis. As I show in The Case for Aslan, and one can see in his Collected Letters, Lewis had numerous deep and respectful relationships with talented female poets, writers, and teachers. But he also argued for complementarian views, based on his understanding (or misunderstanding, if you prefer) of innate gender differences.
Say he was wrong all you like. I do not find his arguments on such topics particularly compelling myself. But he was not angling for patriarchal power, or power of any sort, except that of the sheer persuasive force of words used well -- a power he readily granted to females who matched him in debate, or whose academic or acting careers he promoted, or whose poetry he rhapsodized over while also offering helpful editorial suggestions.
Pace Foucault, it is not always about political power.
"And when you refused to shrink down to a manageable size, we called you divisive. We said you had a spirit of rebellion when what you actually had was a calling that frightened us.
"I'm so sorry.
"I'm sorry for every time you felt the call to preach and were handed a pot holder and a nursery schedule instead.
"I'm sorry for every meeting where you offered an idea that got ignored, only to hear it praised ten minutes later when a man said the same thing.
"I'm sorry for every sermon that made submission sound like a sacrament while maintaining a conspiracy of silence about the men who weaponized it behind closed doors." (6)
There's certainly a lot of that going on. Human beings weaponize everything, including love. (As Lewis brilliantly depicts in The Four Loves and The Great Divorce.)
Yes, men have sinned greatly. Yes, women have often been their victims.
And vice-versa. And there's just as much intra-sex manipulation going on.
Biblical submission is mutual. It is also a necessary part of any civilized society. The police, too, tell us to "stay in your lane." Of course, you can switch lanes. But signal first, watch for other cars, and remember where your exit is. Because in a sense, civilization is all about this dance between vehicles in different lanes. Submission alone -- to marks on the road, to signs, to police, to other drivers -- lends us freedom of the road.
Paul understood that.
As I argue, the Bible has freed women around the world to change lanes -- live longer, leave the home, not get "swapped out" for the younger model, be supported when support is most needed, study, teach, invest, transform nations.
There is nothing in the Bible that tells all women to submit to all men.
The sin Penwell describes is, by many accounts, common. But a careful preacher should recognize that we are all tempted to it, because everyone in society holds power, and most of us gain some measure of authority. Most of us can relate to the centurion's talk about both exercising authority and being under it in different capacities. Yes, Paul's talk about "submission" has been used by power-hungry people to enslave others. Nevertheless, mutual submission is a cornerstone of civilization. Even the president walks around the sign on the floor that says "Wet floor" or on the wall that says "Just painted, do not touch."
"I'm sorry for the way we talked about Mary. We made her a passive vessel, a sweet girl who said yes and then receded into the background. We stripped her of her prophecy, her protest, her full-throated declaration that God was pulling tyrants off thrones and lifting the lowly. We turned a revolutionary into a Hallmark greeting card." (7)
(7) I kind of like this part. Though "we" do it to Jesus, too. And if you read early Christian writings, you find women saying and doing astoundingly gutsy things -- the martyrs were not Hallmark cards, and many of them were women.
"I'm sorry for every woman who reported abuse and was told to pray harder, forgive faster, or think about what she might have done to provoke it.
I'm sorry for the ones who were handed back to their abusers with a blessing and a Bible verse.
I'm sorry the church became the most dangerous place instead of the safest one." (8)
(8) There are no "safe places." Jesus was not safe in the manger. Paul was not safe in the synagogue. Church is not safe, and never will be, for anyone. Jesus warned against wolves, for instance. Power corrupts, in the church as well as everywhere else.
But is the church generally more dangerous than, say, Mohammed's harem? Or the home of a Brahmin on his death bed, when you are expected to burn with him soon? Or brothels in Snake Alley where girls were lined up, a pimp on a chair by their side, to call out to crowds of men as they passed? Or the womb of an expectant mother in ancient Rome, where infanticide was normal, and girls who had been tossed out to die were often picked up and raised for work in brothels?
Churches certainly can be dangerous. A young pastor predated one of the churches we attended growing up, going after girls. Recently I learned that a favorite counsellor at the Bible Camp where I lived when my Mom was cook, went after boys. (Not in camp, fortunately.)
Childhood is often dangerous, which is why Little Red Riding Hood's Mom echoed Jesus in telling her daughter to watch out for wolves. Predatory behavior was accepted in many pre-Christian cultures, as one can see, for instance, by a close reading of Plato's Symposium, as I show in that first volume.
But Church has generally been a happy place to my Grandma, Mom, sister, and wife, whose lives were immeasurably enriched by their time in God's house -- probably one reason most who attend church worldwide are in fact female. Are we to suppose the women who make up the bulk of Christian congregations around the world are fools? Or masochists?
Yes, watch out for the wolves. Everywhere. People in every institution tend to cover up for those with power and money. Followers of a rabbi who was murdered by religious officials in the name of God should not find this too shocking -- especially since he warned it would happen again. But let us not simplify matters, by pretending that oppression is so neatly defined by gender, or by lapsing into melodrama.
"And I'm sorry for the silence. For all the pastors (myself included, God help me) who knew something was wrong and weighed the cost of saying so against the comfort of staying quiet. For all the times we chose peace over truth, and called our cowardice prudence." (8)
(8) A first-person apology is welcome after all the vague 'we's." If this piece had been written in the first-person singular, with concrete details, some of my concerns would evaporate.
"Here's what I need you to know: the dirty secret we’ve tried to keep hidden:
"The God who actually shows up in Scripture isn't the God we described to you.
"The God of the Bible isn't embarrassed by women with power. God spoke through Miriam, Deborah, Huldah. God trusted Rahab with an entire military operation.
"On Easter morning, God had the most important news in human history to deliver. The men were barricaded behind locked doors, terrified. So God entrusted the first sermon of the Christian faith to Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and the other women who showed up when the men wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t, and sent them to preach the resurrection to disciples who were too afraid to leave the house." (9)
(9) This is true, but a bit reactionary and, again, unfair. Jesus' male disciples probably were more vulnerable to arrest, as the Pharaoh in Egypt attempted to kill male babies to control the new Hebrew nation. God did not really say, "Men are such cowards! I guess I'll have to send the good news to women, instead!"
Yes, women participated in the work of the gospel, as did men. God didn't cater to the misogynistic biases of the Greco-Roman world. That doesn't mean it merely echoes the slogans of modern feminism. The Bible flatters no identity group, and has no use for social dualism of any stripe.
Penwell is making the same mistake Chairman Mao and the Red Guards made during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He reverses the biases of the past. He admits, as a pastor, to having been unfair to women in an earlier era. Now he thinks he can fix things by pushing down on the opposite side of the scale.
The Gospel calls us to go deeper, to what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called "the line between good and evil" that passes through every human heart.
And again, those other verses are in the Bible, too, which do seem at times to assume some degree of complementarianism. Biology does, too. It is simplistic and uncharitable to ascribe anything short of viewing gender roles in the Church as absolutely and always identical, as arising from mere cowardice or lust for power.
"If you've walked away from church because church was where you learned to hate your body, distrust your voice, and doubt your calling, your leaving isn't a failure of faith. It might be the most faithful thing you've ever done.
"If you can't sing the hymns anymore because the words taste like all the lies they dressed up in sacred language, God isn't angry at you.
"If you flinch when men quote Scripture because you've heard those same verses used as clubs to beat you down and silence you, we ought to be holding you up as an example of wisdom and bravery." (10)
10. This is stirring rhetoric. And it is possible to make the mistakes Penwell warns against. It is also possible that we are neither so wise nor so brave, but are giving in to a new Spirit of the Age promulgated in Hollywood.
Flattery is not the proper office of a preacher.
"You aren't broken. (11) The Jesus who shows up in the Gospels isn't standing with the dudes holding stones, but with you, with every woman who’s been convinced she’s the problem, rather than the knuckle-draggers trying to erase her. (12) That Jesus sees you and calls you by name, saying what he said to that bent-over woman in Luke 13: "You are set free."
(11) Yes, you are broken. So am I. That is the first intuition of the Christian faith. Penwell seems to have forgotten it, and is engaged in patronizing flattery.
(12) Again Penwell simply reverses former stereotypes, and praises the group that had (supposedly) been universally damned, while damning the group that had (supposedly) been universally praised.
In a sense, there is biblical precedent for this:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
But Jesus did not ascribe that virtue en masse to any group of people, because he knew what was in man (and woman). Penwell is eloquent, but his simplicity is as heretical as the error he confesses to having fallen into in the past.
Women are never broken? Never "the problem?" After Jesus saved another woman from being stoned, he then told her, "Go and sin no more." Was he out of line?
We need wholistic biblical truth, not careless blame and praise of undifferentiated masses of human beings.
"I don't know how to end this except with the truth.
You deserved a church that celebrated your voice instead of shushing it.
You deserved a theology that honored your body rather than treating it as a threat.
You deserved leaders who protected you, not the men who harmed you.
You deserved better. So. much. better.
You still do . . . And may you know, in whatever part of you still has room to hear it, that your voice matters, your body is holy, and your calling is real.
Be gentle and brave." (13)
(13) I hope most Christian women find this as patronizing and simple-minded, if perhaps well-meaning, as it appears to me.
Of course our bodies should be honored, both as creations of God, and also as the potential Temple of the Holy Spirit. But dust they are, and to dust they shall return. Not all uses of them are equally noble or holy. Does it really honor women to speak to them as if they were holy by definition, unlike those "knuckle-dragging" male louts?
Of course God can speak through women, men, donkeys, or rocks that cry out.
But there is a time to be silent, too, and yes, to stay in lanes and submit to one another. Jordan Peterson argues that women more often need to learn to become more assertive. But great novelists, male and female, recognized that many women have always had "voice" down pat, being richly skilled at keeping spouses, children, and everyone else under their thumbs. (Including some of the female characters in the Chinese classic I am presently reading, Dream of Red Mansions, despite the misogynistic customs I describe in Qing-era Chinese culture.)
And what do we "deserve?" All we have, comes by Grace, a doctrine that Penwell seems to have forgotten. Life itself is a "gift of God, lest any man (or woman) should boast."
Pastors should not teach us to boast, or to assume collective innocence or permanent victimhood, though we act as both victims and perpetrators at times.
Speaking of victimhood, where in this confession does Penwell refer to the millions of young women who are taught to despise their femininity? To cut off body organs? To mate without commitment? To casually end pregnancies? To help develop weapons and technologies that threaten the future of the human race? To blame the patriarchy for oppressing them, even as girls graduate from college in far greater numbers than boys, live longer, commit suicide less often, and are less addicted to drugs?
So What About Female Preachers? And Speaking Truth to Power?
Samuel Johnson famously said, in response to reports of the Quakers, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
While I love good rhetoric, of which insults are a sub-genre now sadly in crisis, my experience has been quite different. I have heard many female preachers do it very well, indeed. The lady pastor at our church is becoming my favorite. The best sermon I heard in China over the past two years, came from a woman in the ancient Shang-era capital of Anyang, where Jonathan Goforth used to preach to the men, while his wife preached to the women.
But no, I don't think churches with an old-fashioned preference for male sermonizers are the focus of evil in the modern world.
Indeed, having observed some of the horrors which women have experienced in pagan societies, and shown how the Gospel rescued them from those dungeons, where many were sentenced to death, I do tend to regard the question of gender roles behind the pulpit as a "first world problem."
Why are there no women linebackers in the NFL? The league has been 100% male from the beginning. Why has no woman been elected president of the United States yet? I can think of many I would vote for in a heartbeat, and with the 52% of voters who are female, our united ballots should be enough to put them in office.
And why are there so few male graduates in, say, psychology?
Women usually do have, and should have, leadership roles in the Church. It is not my office to determine how particular denominations or churches should sift through the relevant passages of Scripture, and the very real psychological as well as physiological differences between the sexes, which seem to be in part reflected in such statistics, to decide what should be normative. It may sometimes be my job to point out abuse, which does occur in the Church, and bad will, which we are all sometimes guilty of.
But notice that lines of power have now shifted. The evils of the past are not precisely the evils of the present. A revolution has brought new people to power, and they abuse that power as well. Merely attacking the evils of the past, without noticing how power is abused in the present (out of cowardice!), is the sin of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.
Call Christian men, and women, out when they oppress. Cover-ups are evil: we see tens of thousands raped, and lives destroyed, boys and girls doomed to go through life lonely, children raised without "Mom" or "Dad," students taught to hate, yet hesitate to speak up. Speak out when you witness evil, including racism, including misogyny, including abuse of power. We do so often lack guts! But let's avoid heavy-handed and over-generalized condemnations and overly sentimental praise. The two often go together, for that is the way of the heresy which I call "social dualism," of which Marxism and some forms of "anti-racism" and feminism are examples.
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