Old style evangelical gender politics
This post, by Mark Sayers, is well worth a read (ht Mike Bird on FB). It reflects briefly on the transformation of masculinity that occurred as part of the broader evangelical attempts at social transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. Writing about the same phenomenon, John Wolffe comments: Evangelical concepts of manliness were a challenge to contemporary secular male values, whether among [sic] those of the British gentry, landowners in the American South, or convicts forcibly resettled in Australia. Emphasis on ‘honour’, machismo and lineage was confronted by a stress on ‘calling’, moral virtue and the family as a spiritual community of mutual affection rather than merely an expression of patriarchal sovereignty.’ (The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers, and Finney (IVP, 2006), p. 141) As far as I am aware (and I’m not a historian), this strand of the widespread social transformation wrought by nineteenth-century evangelicalism is relatively under-studied. There is a fair bit of work out there on the evangelical reconstruction of femininity to embrace more public and political roles, but very little on changes in masculinity – Rotundo on American Manhood and Tosh, A Man’s Place both deal with the question in some measure, but I struggle to think of much else. Nonetheless, the evidence for both the conscious attempt to recast masculinity, and its (somewhat patchy) success is not hard to find. Evangelicalism taught men to be gentler, less aggressive, and more considerate; whilst not often refusing the prevailing cultural assumption of male dominance in the family, the Evangelicals repeatedly and explicitly re-cast it in less patriarchal ways. As I noted, the reshaping of femininity has been more studied. This is not just about radicals like Josephine Butler, although there is no doubt that her explicitly feminist agenda was inspired by her evangelical commitment; rather, it was general, and based on two central evangelical tenets. On the one hand, evangelical women experienced a fundamental spiritual equality with men, which inevitably strained the boundaries of a patriarchal society; on the other, evangelical social concern led them to devote their leisure time to campaigning, and so to public action and political involvement; a woman who, after her conversion, ceased to attend the theatre and instead became active in campaigning for social improvement necessarily began to redefine her position in the culture. Hannah More was quoted (in an anthology entitled The Young Bride at Home, which was as much of a radical feminist tract as its title suggests) as saying: ‘[Women are] equally with men redeemed by the blood of Christ. In this their true dignity consists; here their best pretensions rest, here their highest claims are allowed.’ This experience of a fundamental equality had significant and demonstrable effects on expectations and constructions of femininity in the evangelical world; the wives of evangelical clergy, for instance, were expected to take an active role in ‘the Lord’s work’ alongside their husband. In 1832, Hints to a Clergyman’s Wife was published, giving extensive advice on how to be a co-worker with one’s husband; the author encourages even nursing mothers to find ways to be publicly active in Christian work. Methodist and holiness movements provided a particular intensification of this theme, as a woman who could lay claim to the experience of entire sanctification was in a demonstrable position of spiritual superiority to men who could not, a situation creating a significant pressure to reverse cultural-normative gender roles. Phoebe Palmer’s astonishing evangelistic ministry is the most obvious example of this, but there are many others (Hannah Whitall Smith’s entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals notes that, at the Brighton Convention for the Promotion of Christian Holiness in 1875, ‘[t]he most popular sessions … were those in which Hannah preached her practical secrets of the happy Christian life to audiences of 5000 or more, mostly clergymen who were theologically opposed to the preaching ministry of women’). (In all of this there is a third basic evangelical conviction at work, what we might call missiological pragmatism. John Wesley relied on it in recognising Mary Fletcher’s preaching ministry. Fundamentally, for real evangelicals, if people are getting saved, we’ll make the theology fit somehow!) Hannah More is also a fine example of my second theme. She sold millions of tracts in her lifetime (two million by 1796, and plenty more afterwards), writing powerfully and popularly about pressing political and social issues, not least slavery. She was not above satire and parody (‘Ye that boast “Ye rule the waves,” / Bid no slave ship soil the sea, / Ye that “never will be slaves” / Bid poor Afric’s land be free.’). In her only novel, Coelebs in Search of...
Read MoreBooks on gender and ministry from an evangelical perspective
I’ve been asked by several people in recent months to recommend books on this subject. I can’t claim to have read everything on the topic, and I probably have a bias to British authors, but here are a few suggestions – not necessarily all the best books, but a selection that, taken together, will open up most of the standard arguments well. I’d welcome other suggestions in the comments. Lis Goddard & Clare Hendry, The Gender Agenda (IVP, 2010): Lis and Clare are both Anglican ministers, but take different sides on this debate; the book is a series of emails they exchanged exploring many of the standard issues and arguments. It is accessible to the general reader, without being simplistic, and offers sympathetic presentations of two different positions. This would be the first book I’d give to most people – fair, generous, and informative. Gundry & Beck (eds), Two Views on Women in Leadership (Counterpoints) (Zondervan, 2001, rev. 2005) (chapters by Linda Belleville, Craig Blomberg, Craig Keener, and Tom Schreiner, with responses by each). A bit more technical; again, a sympathetic and non-controversial presentation of different viewpoints; the format means the arguments are more connected than Goddard & Hendry.) Pierce & Groothuis (eds), Discovering Biblical Equality: Complimentarity without Hierarchy (IVP/Apollos, 2004, rev. 2o05). A heavy and technical presentation of various aspects of a case for women in preaching and leadership positions, including serious treatments of all the crucial passages by respected evangelical Biblical scholars (Fee, Marshall, …) Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (IVP/Apollos, 2004). A large and comprehensive presentation of every aspect of the case for ‘complementarianism’. (This isn’t a great book, really, but I know of nothing that does the same work better – does anyone else?) Millard Erickson, Who’s Tampering with the Trinity? (Kregel, 2009) Explains and explores a curious contemporary argument that gender subordinationism somehow reflects the Trinity; I confess that the argument seems to me to rely on a simple, albeit rather common, misunderstanding of ecumenical doctrine, but some people seem to find it convincing, and Erickson does a good job of explaining what’s going on. Scott McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking how you read the Bible (Zondervan, 2008) and William Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (IVP, 2001) both address the question of hermeneutics – how we should find meaning in the Biblical texts – and how that applies to gender relations and roles. On specific texts, the best places to go are the commentaries. Any good evangelical commentary will summarise various points in the debate, before offering a reason for the author’s preference for one side or another. At a basic level, try the relevant volumes in Tom Wright’s NT for Everyone, or the Bible Speaks Today; for more in-depth discussion, try, for example, Fee on both 1 Cor. and 1 Tim., or Thistleton on 1...
Read MoreCould the evangelical gender debate be depolarised?
A conversation that some of us have been involved in privately has spilled over into the blogosphere and twitterverse in the last few days. It concerns attempts to get past the hard lines on gender roles in (family and) church that are being drawn within British evangelicalism. (There is of course a similar discussion in America; it seems to me that the lines are rather differently drawn there, however.) Krish Kandiah has published a couple of blog posts here and here; Jenny Baker has made some comments in response here; Vicky Beeching has commented here and here; Hannah Mudge, who I don’t know, links to a number of other posts here. I won’t attempt to link out the twitter debate… I have also seen comments to the effect that it is astonishing that anyone thinks this is still worth arguing over; I simply note that, in every tradition of Christianity (I know of) that can even plausibly claim to be growing, this is presently a live issue in some sense: not just evangelicalism; but old Pentecostalism; the broadly Pentecostal churches of the global South; British Baptist life; the Chinese house churches; confessional Catholicism (& confessional catholic churches out of communion with Rome); the Black majority churches in Britain; the ‘new-church’ charismatic networks in Britain and Europe; … If the job of a theologian in any way includes being responsible to the life of the churches, this issue should be near the top of our theological agenda. I would love to have a doctoral student or two working seriously on it. The evangelical debate is routinely presented as being polarised between ‘complementarians’ (who believe that men and women are created equal in value but different and complementary in role, and so see certain roles available to men that are not available to women – none the other way around, curiously) and ‘egalitarians’ (who see no necessary distinctions between the roles men and women may play in any area of life). It is routinely noted that these terms are ugly, unwieldy, and unhelpful (in that ‘complementarians’ protest their belief in gender equality, and (some) ‘egalitarians’ believe that men and women are created to be different, but that this does not impose any bars on the exercise of ministries in the church); I want here to challenge it as an inadequate typology of positions, which overlays a false polarity on a much more nuanced debate. To the extent that some of the immediate debate (posts above from Krish, Jenny, and Vicky Beeching) is about the possibility of finding a practical ‘middle ground’ between the two poles, if I am correct, there might be a chance of moving the argument forward. The debate turns on appropriate gender roles in family and congregation (the American tradition of letting it spill out into society more generally does not seem to have many serious proponents on this side of the Atlantic). However, already there is the possibility of complication: in a recent post on the New Frontiers theology blog, Andrew Wilson pointed out some of this complexity; in particular, he suggests (on the basis of quoting commentaries on Eph. 5) that several leading ‘egalitarian’ writers in fact hold a ‘complementarian’ view of marriage. If he is right (and even if he is wrong, he raises the potential of the position…), then we already need to distinguish ‘church-egalitarian’ from ‘family-egalitarian,’ and similarly with ‘complementarian’; there are four positions, not just two, and those who agree about church life might disagree about family life, and vice-versa. To complicate further, it is not news that the ‘church-complementarian’ position in fact covers several different claims. The most obvious, perhaps, is the distinction between ‘teaching’ and ‘exercising authority’; whilst some would argue that the two are indifferently prohibited to women by Scripture, others – particularly, in my experience, conservative evangelical Anglicans, find the exercising of authority to be the crucial point, and would allow a woman to exercise a teaching ministry, even an ordained teaching ministry, so long as she was not the minister of the congregation. (Clare Hendry, who with Lis Goddard wrote the excellent Gender Agenda (IVP, 2011), which is the best non-technical introduction to this debate that I know, is an Anglican deacon who preaches regularly in her congregation and lectures in a theological college, roles she finds compatible with her commitment to Biblical complementarianism.) In British Baptist life we have fairly often moved in the other direction over the past century, allowing female leaders in the congregation whilst restricting the pulpit to men. Again, the Anglican move is often to insist only that the senior leader is male; New Frontiers argue that...
Read MoreContemplative prayer and contemporary worship
A recent conversation with our pastor, Andrew Rollinson, about those spiritual practices which I find useful/generative/satisfying/whatever the right word is, brought to mind a blog post from Vicky Beeching which noted that she, as a leading worship leader in the contemporary evangelical style, finds broadly contemplative practices of spirituality most nourishing for her personal spirituality. I had indicated to Andrew that charismatic worship and contemplative prayer were the two places where I most regularly experience connection to God and personal transformation by God. This in turn brought to mind an argument I gestured at in a footnote of a paper on contemporary worship (a paper that is currently under review by a journal), and had intended to develop more fully. Let me assume (without a lengthy footnote exploring the present academic discussion…) that the study of (Christian) ‘spirituality’ is fundamentally a discussion and interrogation of the ways in which (Christian) people find personally-meaningful connection with the awesome reality that is the triune God. On this basis, spirituality cannot be reduced to technique – there are, simply, no practices we can engage in which will guarantee God’s response – but it can be analysed in terms of discipline – there are many practices we engage in which seem, for at least some practitioners, to tend to promote (an awareness of) divine response. (Parentheses to duck the question of whether practices in fact lead to divine response, or whether God always responds, but our practices aid our awareness of that.) On this basis, it seems to me that the basic orientation of charismatic spirituality, expressed in traditions of contemporary worship, is remarkably similar to the basic orientation of contemplative spirituality. I am aware of (some of) the many schools of traditional contemplative spirituality, and thus of the danger of generalising; for the sake of a blog post, however, I generalise. Many historical Christian traditions of spirituality school their disciples in practices of lengthy attentiveness, with words, images, or objects providing a helpful focus for this attentiveness. Somehow (and it is variously theorised) such lengthy attentiveness results in an awareness of God’s presence, and an experience of divine activity towards one’s own soul, that is held to be either the goal of the practice of prayer, or at least a substantial good to be achieved by the practice of prayer. The endless repetition of the ‘Jesus Prayer’ commended in the anonymous Russian Way of the Pilgrim; the practice of lectio Divina; meditation on object or phrase, be it candle, host, rock, or fragment of liturgy; even exercises directing mental focus to particular parts of the body – all seem to suggest that sustained attention or focus somehow allows openness to God’s life and activity. (I am aware of criticisms of this analysis in, e.g., Turner’s Darkness of God; to the extent that they highlight that the modern obsession with felt experience can eclipse the reality of divine action, I wholeheartedly agree with them; but I do not think that this changes my argument here very much.) The fundamental mode of charismatic spirituality, the extended time of worship, functions in exactly the same way, it seems to me. Through the repetition of songs and the extended time of singing, the worshipper is enabled to leave behind whatever baggage she brought with her into the meeting and to become focused in serious and transformative ways on God’s presence and action. Again, sustained attention or focus somehow allows openness to God’s life and activity. The two traditions are surprisingly congruent; it should be no surprise that some of us – like me – find nourishment in...
Read MoreTrue Christian manliness? CVM & The Code
Back in the day, I led my share of Boys’ Brigade parade services. Now, I’ve nothing at all against the BB (I’ve known, indeed chaplained, companies that worked astonishingly well as Christian youth organisations), but that bit in the service where we went through the organisation’s old object, ending with ‘and all that tends towards true Christian manliness’ was, I confess, always a struggle. With some rehearsal, and a resolute refusal to look at certain friends in the congregation, I got through each time without collapsing in helpless laughter; without even smirking, indeed. The aim of that ‘object’ was truly noble, but the wording was, shall we say, not phrased in the vernacular of this generation (or the last one, or the one before that…). There have been times recently when I’ve longed for ‘true Christian manliness’ to re-appear. I try to avoid contemporary Evangelical discussions of Biblical manhood – not for fear of laughter, but of despair. I will acknowledge that I have heard one sensible discussion of ‘Biblical headship’ in my life, but of the several dozen I’ve come across, that is not a good average. I’ve read Driscoll, Grudem, Piper, Mohler, and the rest on the subject because I’ve had to; I find them unhelpful and unedifying; there have been moments when my gut reaction to a particularly poorly expressed thought has been a sudden irrational desire to embrace my feminine side with an energy that would make Frank N Furter or the travellers aboard Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, look positively macho (darling!). (And to put this into context you need to know that I generally refuse to buy shaving foam with moisturiser in it because to do so would be uncomfortably metrosexual…) I say all this because I want here to praise a book on Christian masculinity, and it is appropriate context to indicate that this does not come naturally to me. Carl Beech, Andy Drake, and Ian Manifold are all leaders within Christian Vision for Men (CVM), and a year or so ago they published a little book called The Code: It’s time for a new kind of man. Codelife is a programme CVM are running, inviting blokes to sign up to a series of ethical commitments, The Code (you can see the list here); The book is a series of brief chapters illustrating each commitment in The Code. What’s so good about it? First, it does not fall into the trap of defining masculinity against femininity. For Carl (who – full disclosure – is a friend), Andy, and Ian, being a man is not primarily about not being a woman. So it is not about headship, or leadership, or protection, or strength (or indeed inability to multitask, or a pathological hatred of Strictly Come Dancing – that last is just part of being properly human, surely?). Or, rather, there is discussion of leadership (Codelife IX: ‘I will lead as He would lead…) and protection (Codelife X: ‘I will use my strength to protect the weak and stand against the abuse of power.’), but this is not cast in binary gender terms, but as a positive account of a well-lived life. It is certainly not gender-indifferent, but nor is it controlled by a simple opposition. As Gen. 1:27 points out, we are human before we are male and female; to narrate being human solely in terms of that binary opposition is a serious mistake. Second, however, it is serious about (contemporary, British) masculinity. This is subtle, but obvious. Carl, Andy & Ian recognise that living as a man in C21st Britain is different from living as a woman, and The Code, and their explications of it, are alike constantly alive to that. They – perhaps wisely – make no commitments about which (if any) of the differences are down to a fundamental gender divide, and which (if any) are down to contemporary cultural mores, but they are alive to the lived reality of being male in Britain today. (How far might this extend, culturally? I don’t know; I’d be interested to know, for instance, the extent to which British Asian or Black British men might feel the need to shape and nuance what is said here to make it real for them.) For me, however, this book speaks to the world I live in, to the expectations and complications and (significant) privileges of being a man in British society today. Third, their vision of ‘true Christian manliness’ is holistic. It is about creation care, as well as about unashamed personal evangelism; being a man, for these three brothers, means taking with utmost seriousness the injustices of the global...
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