the Pharisees vs. the Gospel

In the not-quite-nine years of this blog’s existence, I have published 249 posts and currently have a backlog of 99 drafts. So if you’re reading this, this post managed to become the 250th post instead of the 100th unfinished draft. Random fact of the day.

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One of my very first weeks at the Anglican church, a line from Father Joe’s sermon stuck with me: “In my previous tradition, the Baptist church, what we seemed to care about most was how to be really good at arguing.”

I’ve never been Baptist, but I’ve been in a fair number of churches where the primary value was definitely arguing. The “best” Christians were always in a defensive stance, holding onto the Bible as both sword and shield, as if our purpose was to guard God Himself from the people and ideas “out there.” I learned all the tactics and talking points, and I learned the Bible really well so I could make even better moves than most. When I was in it, it was fun, like playing a sport with my “team,” and all the camaraderie and belonging that entails—even though in reality, we were little more than gossips and keyboard warriors, too cowardly to have meaningful discussions with real people about real things that didn’t fit neatly into our categories.

If I had stopped there with my study of the Bible instead of digging deeper, if my life had stagnated instead of winding through periods of intense pain and change, if God had not proved far more faithful to me than I was to Him, I’d probably still be having fun playing for that team in our imaginary game—while blind to the real war trying to rip God’s Creation apart.

This is the war Jesus came to fight, not as a great arguer or even a great warrior, but as a human baby, a growing boy, a man of sorrows and a suffering servant. He expanded the boundaries of God’s holy kingdom by feasting with the poorest sinners. He rebuked those who weaponized the Scriptures by being the Word of God in the flesh. He seized authority over all Creation by bowing His neck to His accusers, He ascended to the throne of heaven by being crowned with thorns and raised up on an execution tree, and He shattered the power of death by committing His spirit into the hands of God.

And He left us with one job: to take the good news of His kingdom to every corner of the earth, welcoming people from every tribe and tongue and nation to the glorious banquet halls of His communion table, where there is no space for the greed and self-importance of the flesh. This vocation is the continuation of Christ’s mission to sew the world back together, to undo the power structures and value judgments and myriad abuses of a post-Edenic humanity through the abundant hospitality of the Holy Spirit. To usher in the New Creation.

The real war is not the old game of “my church vs. the outside world.” It’s not Christians-who-are-right-about-everything vs. Christians-who-are-wrong. It’s not cultural ideas vs. God, who needs His army of Bible-wielders to shield Him; it’s not conservatives vs. progressives; it’s not men vs. women or white vs. black or rich vs. poor.

In this country, like ancient Israel before us, it’s a lot more like the Pharisees vs. the Gospel of Jesus Christ (see Luke chapter 15).

We can all stand on the defensive around an invisible idol, protecting our small god and his many demands and limitations from anyone’s questioning, or we can lay down our weapons and come together to the table of the bounty of the King of Kings. He is delighted for anyone to repent and return to His open arms—the question is, will we, too, be delighted when even sinners are welcomed to eat at this table? Or, like the embittered older son who did everything “right,” will we resent our Father’s goodness toward the prodigals, and reveal ourselves to be a long way off from the true heart of God?

Jesus said of the Pharisees in His day,

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”

Matthew 23:2-4

This was the reality of being on that argumentative “team.” I could tell you all the right things to do and think and believe, and back them up with Bible verses—but never lift a finger to love you through your real-life pain, proving my knowledge to be meaningless.

I’ve grown weary of spending my life on the defensive for a God who does not need my defending. Let me spend it instead throwing open the doors of His love, mercy, and grace for every hungry soul I can find, whether they fall in line with my particular statement of beliefs or not.

living in the expectation of dying

What About Bob is traditional family viewing for my in-laws, and over years of joining in against my will, I’ve slowly warmed up to the very-much-not-my-style comedy. Besides the delights of late-1980s fashion and its farcical plot, the movie somehow manages to make you (or me, anyway) think a lot about human nature and the human experience. The scene above is one that sticks with me: it’s supposed to be funny, watching these two neurotics room together and overthink the nature of life and reality of death, but of course—Siggy is right.

“There’s no way out of it. You’re going to die. I’m going to die. It’s going to happen.”

Or, as my Grandma B. used to say, “Honey, I don’t have to do anything except die and pay my taxes, and I’m in no hurry to do either one.”

Except some of us (ahem, me) have spent our lives convinced that there was a pretty good chance that it wouldn’t happen—not to us. We’d pay our taxes, but we weren’t planning on dying.

We were the Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye generation: We spent Sundays listening with interest (or terror) to a literal, dispensationalist interpretation of Scripture with an eschatology built around the core belief that we are looking for an end of the world that begins with the sudden whisking away of the entire Christian population from the earth (an event called the Rapture). The key signs to watch out for, despite the fact that this is supposed to happen “like a thief in the night,” are the decline of society into ever-greater evil and corruption, plus increasing violence against Christians all over the globe. The present-day headlines, whatever they happened to be, would serve as proof for this theory. I can’t remember how many times in the aftermath of 9/11 I heard, then just eight or nine years old, that we might at any time have to line up for a firing squad of terrorists and be called on to renounce our faith. I often imagined this scene, wondering if Jesus would intervene at the last moment by Rapturing us to heaven. (There is an entire website dedicated to watching for the Rapture, including a “Rapture Index” that measures current events in terms of how close we are getting to the event we seek. It’s currently within a few points of its all-time high.)

If you’ve ever walked into your home expecting to see your parents or your spouse there, only to find the place deserted, and thought “Did I get left behind?” you know exactly what I’m talking about.

As I’ve read through the Bible again and again over the last 10 years, I’ve come to wonder how an event with so little Biblical evidence has been allowed to take up so much space in many churches. I’m far from convinced it’s not there at all—if Jesus does suddenly sweep us all away from a dying earth while it experiences its last great troubles, I for one will be thrilled to see Him—but I do wonder if the obsession with it has blunted some of the Church’s work.

I’m 31 years old and I’m only now reaching Siggy’s uncomfortable conclusion: I am going to die. There is no get-out-of-death-free card. In the words of St. Paul, “To live is Christ and to die is gain”; this isn’t a reason to panic. But it is a reason to think about how I am living, how I am aging, how I am resting in Christ’s victory as I come to grips with my mortality and the high likelihood that this earth and the human race will continue well after I am gone.

Suppose we’ve had our eyes set on entirely the wrong prize all our lives? Looking endlessly for a worsening world, of course we found it; what we missed from that narrow viewpoint were all the ways life for human beings has massively improved over these last centuries, and maybe even some of the ways we could have joined in the spread of blessing. Injustice, greed, and cruelty are still everywhere, but so are efforts to make the world a better place and treat humans with greater dignity. Given the choice to be born at any time in history, realistically we’d all choose some point in the last 50 years—girlish romantics who fancy themselves Elizabeth Bennett notwithstanding (though I think they’d change their minds once they had to make, mend, wash, dry, starch, and iron all those pretty dresses by hand). Child mortality alone is a stunning example: For most of history, around 50% of all children globally didn’t live to age 15; by the year 1950 that number had fallen to 25%. As of 2020, it was just 4%, and it’s lower by another tenfold in wealthier countries.

But if our escape from death depends on this earth becoming more hellish, what motivation do we realistically have to bear good fruit, to bless our communities, and to spread the kingdom of heaven?

What better incentive to sit on our hands and watch the world burn than the expectation that as long as the fire gets bigger, we won’t be among those burning up?

I know I, for one, have noticed a shocking Max Detweiler-esque attitude within myself at times: “What’s going to happen’s going to happen. Just make sure it doesn’t happen to you!” But for hundreds upon hundreds of years, the Christian faith was second to none in building institutions and societies around the outlandish idea that humans are uniquely valuable. Yes, we’ve done an abjectly terrible job of this at times, but the fact remains that everything in the Western world and beyond has been touched by the influence of Christianity—the influence of Christians who believed a vital part of their calling was to broaden the boundary lines of God’s space on earth.

And so it should be! The Church is the plan. We are the Act Two of Israel’s mandate to bless the nations, commissioned by the Son of God Himself to take the Good News of the Kingdom to the ends of the earth. If we don’t prepare the way for the return of the Lord, who will? We eagerly wait, not to be snatched to safety while the bad guys get their due, but to welcome our Conqueror back to His Kingdom when His work is done.

And that could be tomorrow or in 10,000 years—so we must live in the expectation of dying, expending our lives for the testimony of God’s goodness and setting the big and small things right so that the next generation, and the next, and the next can continue the work toward readiness.

We plant gardens. We bake bread. We serve our neighbor. We share our resources. We learn, we work, we retire; we grow up, we raise children and grandchildren, we grow old. We love, we doubt, we fear, we trust. And then, like countless generations before us, we cross to the other side of that thin veil, into the open arms of a great cloud of witnesses.

And here, the work goes on until the King rides home.

it is not good for man to be alone

If you have been reading along these past couple of months, you know I have been wrestling with a doctrine that has thus far governed most of my life in some way: the doctrine of complementarianism (defined here, if you need a refresher). This struggle is coming to a head now as my church considers a new pastoral candidate who is, to put it plainly, a very hardcore complementarian. Here’s his complete “statement of belief” as it regards the roles of men and women:

I believe God has created men and women as equal in the image of God, thus they are equal of value and worth to God. Men and women also have equal access to the spiritual blessings found in Christ and are of equal value to the church. God, in creation, has designed men and women to fill and serve in distinct roles in the home and the church. Women are designed and ordained by God to follow and submit to the leadership of qualified men in the church, and her husband in the home as a willing helper. Men are designed and ordained by God to take on a leadership role in their family, being called as the head of their household to provide, protect, and lead their family. God has also called certain, qualified men to lead churches in the office of pastor/elder. God has reserved the office and function of pastors/elders to only men. The fall of humanity in sin introduced distortion to these God-given roles, as women became inclined to usurp male authority, and men abused their authority in leadership. Yet, through the redemption found in Christ, men should lead churches and their families with selfless, Christlike care and women should joyfully submit to the God-given authority in their home and the church, as both men and women seek to live under the supreme authority of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Ten years ago, this statement would not have raised a single red flag for me. I’d have agreed with every word of it and celebrated that our church was gaining someone who was clearly taking God’s commands seriously. I was ready and willing to be that “joyfully submissive” woman because that’s what I believed would make God happy—never stopping to question the logic, to test the facts, or to examine the fruit.

But when you have actually been forced to eat some of the fruit of hardcore complementarianism like this, as I since have, you do not soon forget the way your stomach roiled from its rot.

The taste of that rot is what initially sent me into the last half-decade of study—but it is no longer the only red flag I see. Yes, complementarianism’s produce has proved putrid in my life and in the lives of millions of other women (and men) left in its wake, but beyond that alone, I’ve found that this doctrine also crumbles when measured against the big picture of God’s Word or the good news of the Gospel.

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Our pastoral candidate’s above statement includes the following sentence: “God, in creation, has designed men and women to fill and serve in distinct roles in the home and the church.” But this statement cannot be corroborated by the creation accounts of Genesis 1 & 2, and in fact, Genesis indicates the exact opposite. Men and women are very clearly designed in creation as equals and co-rulers over Creation, and given the exact same vision to carry out:

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:26-28

To get anything other than total equality of value, role, and design out of this passage, you must 1) read Genesis through the lens of Paul (which is a faulty hermeneutic—Paul was informed by Genesis, but Genesis was not informed by Paul) or 2) assume that Paul’s theology fundamentally contradicts the theology laid out in Genesis (which would throw into question the cohesion and inerrancy of the Bible). The only difference between the two created beings that Genesis offers is that one is male and one is female. All other perceived distinctions are inferences we make on the text through the lens of how we have interpreted later parts of the Bible or through the lens of our particular circumstances and culture.

As far as Genesis is concerned, all humans are designed to hold an identical role and fulfill an identical purpose: to image God, rule Creation, and multiply on the earth.

Could you say that they do so in different ways, because one is a male and one is a female? Of course—that’s why there are two of them, so that each can capture uniquely the male and female characteristics of God as they rule over and carry out His vision for Creation—together a complete picture. But these unique attributes do not inevitably lead to a difference or distinction in “roles” at home or in the church. The role is the same for them both: to image God.

It’s long been a flaw in our understanding of the sexes, I believe, to think of them as opposites. We are not opposites, we are counterparts. We aren’t made to oppose each other, but to correspond to one another. Therefore, it’s not necessary to put one in the place of perpetual leader and the other in the place of designated follower; the real vision is that of Ephesians 5:21: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Notice what God said when He decided to create the woman:

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.”

Genesis 2:18 CSB

Much has been made of that word, “helper.” Whole books have been written using it to prove that women are “designed” (as the above complementarian statement claims) to follow and submit to male leadership. But we know Hebrew interpretation and translation better than this! A faithful understanding of the Hebrew word ezer recognizes that this term is used elsewhere in the Bible in two ways:

1. To describe military powers who sweep in as allies to help God’s people

2. To describe God Himself who intervenes to rescue His people in their time of need

Far from putting women into a position of divinely designed subjugation, this description elevates women to the role of godlike deliverer—one who is uniquely empowered to stand as an ally with those in need. And this isn’t about making dinner for your hardworking husband. When God says “It is not good for man to be alone,” He isn’t saying “Men are helpless and need wives”—He actually doesn’t even use the term for a man, but the term for mankind. It is not good for mankind to try to operate without the corresponding alliance of womankind, or for womankind to operate without the corresponding alliance of mankind.

Paul agrees:

However, in the Lord, neither is woman independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as the woman originates from the man, so also the man has his birth through the woman; and all things originate from God.

1 Corinthians 11:11-12

We need each other. Only together can we represent God appropriately. And yet the leadership structure of whole churches and denominations is built on a requirement of men operating without the corresponding alliance of women.

No wonder the fruit of this doctrine is not good.

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Another portion from this complementarian statement of belief that catches my attention is as follows: “The fall of humanity in sin introduced distortion to these God-given roles, as women became inclined to usurp male authority, and men abused their authority in leadership.” While I believe the intent with this statement is to introduce a better way through Christ, I can’t help but ask: Why are we, His Church, basing our doctrine on a reaction to the Fall rather than on the proactive building of the Kingdom?

The verse he’s referring to is Genesis 3:16:

To the woman He said,

“I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you shall deliver children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”

In the deeply complementarian circles I come from, this verse was treated as a condemnation of women and a mandate for men. Something like, “Man, keep your woman in her place, or she will destroy you.” If you didn’t grow up in this kind of church culture (or if you did, but you’re not female), try to imagine for a moment what it would be like to have this verse spoken as truth against you. It breaks my heart to think of all the women who still, subconsciously, believe themselves to be innately dangerous and in need of pressing down to preserve the pride and position of men.

In my view, this verse is actually one of the most clarifying anti-complementarian passages in all of Scripture. It captures the new reality for women after sin distorts the scene, in which the ones who were supposed to co-rule Creation as equal counterparts with men become that which is ruled over instead. It’s not that men began to abuse their God-given authority, as the above statement claims; it’s that men began to claim rule and authority over women that God did not give them, and Woman would be left with an unmet longing for the proper position of dignity and equality she once held at Man’s side—a longing she would learn to weaponize against him.

But instead of setting their eyes on the Edenic vision and striving to replicate it, the complementarian church seems bent on reacting to the reality of the Fall—therefore, inadvertently, upholding it.

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The question I’d most like hardcore complementarians to answer is, what is the Good News for women?

When Jesus came, He opened His ministry with a quote from Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the favorable year of the LORD.”

And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began saying to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Luke 4:18-21

The “favorable year of the Lord,” or the “Year of Jubilee” as it was known in the Torah, is detailed in Leviticus 25. It came about after seven sets of seven years—every fiftieth year—and was marked by a complete rest for the land and its people, as well as a release of all debts and slaves. After 49 years of labor and toil, buying and selling, enslavement and indebtedness, God ordained a time for everything to be reset and made right once more.

You are to consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim freedom in the land for all its inhabitants. It will be your Jubilee, when each of you is to return to his property and each of you to his clan.

Leviticus 25:10

Jesus said that He came to bring the Jubilee. He came to proclaim freedom. He came to bring rest. He came to usher in the Kingdom.

And not just for heads of household, or for rulers, or for Pharisees, or for men. It was for everyone: Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. Even those least valued or respected in society were invited to claim an equal share in this Good News. At long last, the Anointed One had come to reverse the effects of the Fall for good, to defeat the power of sin and death, and to make it possible for all humankind to share again in the vision of the Kingdom!

So why, oh why, are we trying so hard to keep this Christ-won reality from being true in our churches?

Why do we refuse to live fully by the truth that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)?

Why would the freedom proclaimed by Jesus in Luke 4 extend to everyone except women? Why would women be the only ones required to stay in the same position the Fall had left them in? Why wouldn’t the Good News be good for everyone?

I believe it is. And I believe that trying to make complementarianism work within the framework of the true Gospel demands that we bend ourselves into theological pretzels that God does not endorse. I’m not throwing out Paul; I’m asking that we place Paul into the larger context of the Scriptures he knew, loved, and believed. I think he would be horrified by where so many churches have landed on this issue, and by how little headway has been made in the last 2,000 years.

It’s time to proclaim freedom in the land for all its inhabitants, women included. Ultimately, whether in families or in churches or in public spaces, the fact remains: it is not good for man to be alone.