John Chrysostom on 1 Cor. 11:3

One of the things that struck me in reading the Ware and Starke book was how much this sort of defence of complementarianism depends on 1 Cor. 11:3 – ‘But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God’ (NIV). Simply put, even if we could demonstrate an eternal functional subordination in the triune life, we would have no warrant to draw an analogy to gender relations apart from this single verse. But the verse cannot bear that weight: however we read it, ‘head’ is being used in (at least) two senses. Particularly if we are talking about things like authority, the Father-Son relation is just not the same as the Christ-human relation. That surely does not even need arguing… …but in case it does, here’s the argument, from St John Chrysostom’s Homily 26 on 1 Corinthians. Lucy Peppiatt put me on to the text in her (excellent) Women and Worship at Corinth (of which much more in a day or two…); I don’t know a modern English edition, so I have done a (fairly quick and dirty) translation of my own (from Migne, but I think his text is OK): ’The head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God.’ Here the heretics attack us, contriving from these words to diminish the Son. But they trip over themselves! If the head of woman is man, and the head is of the same substance (‘homoousios’) as the body, and the head of Christ is God, then the Son is of the same substance (‘homoousios’) as the Father! They say that they are not trying to show here that the Son is of a different substance to the Father, but that he is subject to authority (‘archetas’ – does this argument sound familiar at all?) How should we respond? First, when we speak of the incarnate Son’s being subjected, we do not mean that the divine Son is subject – that’s just how we talk of the economy of salvation. But anyway, how are you going to prove the point from the passage? If they say the Father has authority over Christ as a husband does over his wife, then they have to say that as Christ rules over men, so the Father rules over the Son – the passage says ‘the head of every man is Christ’! Who would dream of saying such a thing? If the Father is as much greater than the Son as the Son is greater than us, this really diminishes the Son! So, we shouldn’t use the same arguments about our human existence and God’s divine existence, even if we use similar language. We have to recognise God’s transcendence – God is so great! If they don’t admit this, they end up with all sorts of absurdities – God is the head of Christ, and Christ is the head of man, and man of the woman; if we take ‘head’ in the same sense every time, then the Son will be as distant from the Father as we are from the Son – and the woman will be as far from us as we are from the divine Word, and what the Son is to the Father, we are to the Son, and the woman is to the man. Who could accept all that? If you understand the word ‘head’ differently speaking of men and women from the way you understand it speaking of Christ, then you have to understand it differently speaking of the Father and the Son too! (If you’ve not come across him, John was a great preacher in Antioch towards the end of the fourth century, and became archbishop of Constantinople; he is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar as one of the three great teachers of the church, along with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus; to pre-empt the criticism that usually comes at this point, it is fairly certain that he does not say this stuff because he has been infected with feminism, or lost sight of the gospel through reading Germaine...

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Gay relationships in the Bible?

I have been reading the new edition of Jeffrey John’s book, now titled Permanent, Faithful, Stable, Christian Same-sex Marriage,in preparation for writing a couple of pieces on human sexuality. In the course of his discussion, Canon John makes brief reference to the miracle of the healing of the Centurion’s servant in Lk. 7:1-10 // Mt. 8:5-13, and draws on Theissen and others to suggest that ‘[a]ny Jew … would almost certainly have assumed they were gay lovers.’ (p. 14) On this basis, and because ‘the possibility that the relationship was homosexual would not have escaped Jesus, Matthew or Luke’ (15), Canon John argues that ‘it is a real question whether we are intended to see Jesus deliberately including a gay couple here as yet another category of the despised and rejected…’ (15) I had heard this line before, of course, although the argument that it fitted a pattern in the healing miracles of extending grace to the excluded was new to me. It occurred to me, though, that it was not a text commonly considered in the literature on theological accounts of human sexuality, and a quick search confirmed that: Stan Grenz noted that the argument had been made in Welcoming but not Affirming; beyond that, as far as I could determine, silence. The text is not even treated in Robert Gagnon’s compendious The Bible and Homosexual Practice (except for a note about God-fearers amongst the Gentiles, with the intervention of the elders in Luke’s version being held up as evidence.) This story seems to play extensively – along with the relationship of David and Jonathan (which gets a bit more discussion – see both Grenz and Gagnon, or Eugene Rogers, Sexuality & the Christian Body, e.g.) – in ‘semi-popular’ defences of the acceptance of faithful same-sex marriage in the church, at least in my hearing; given that, the silence of serious sources – from any side of the debate – is unfortunate. It does seem clear, however, that neither account will stand up as a Biblical defence of faithful same-sex marriage. This is not because of the silence as to the precise relationship – Grenz’s point about the centurion, and Gagnon’s point about David and Jonathan – but because, even if we were to accept that the relationships were actively sexual, neither gets us anywhere near a picture of ‘faithful same-sex marriage’. Holding up David as an exemplar of any account of sexual ethics seems to me to be rather ambitious, given the details of his career; it is surely really very obvious that he was not someone who experienced exclusively same-sex erotic attraction and who was seeking a faithful and exclusive sexual relationship with another man… As for the centurion, it is very plausible that a Roman centurion would engage in sexual intercourse with his slaves, both male and female; it was a standard way for a slave owner to assert control over his possessions. (There is an extensive literature on this.) Raping a slave to assert ownership and control is some distance from any  ideals of Christian marriage I know of, however. Even if we hypothesise some sort of unusually affectionate relationship (Luke has the slave as ‘precious’ – entimos – to his master), we have to insist that a properly loving relationship can never occur in the context of ownership – we open the door to all sorts of horrific ethical possibilities otherwise. This is not the end of the argument of course – hardly even the beginning (Oliver O’Donovan entitled his book on the debates within the Anglican Communion A Conversation Waiting to Begin…). An intelligent discussion proceeds by testing and weeding out bad arguments, however, and these arguments are just...

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Junia (3): a different witness from history

From (an English translation of) a commentary on Romans: Though Paul is not wont to make much of kindred, and of other things belonging to the flesh, yet as the relationship which Junia and Andronicus bore to him, might avail somewhat to make them more fully known, he neglected not this commendation. There is more weight in the second eulogy, when he calls them his fellow-prisoners; for among the honors belonging to the warfare of Christ, bonds are not to be counted the least. In the third place, he calls them Apostles: he uses not this word in its proper and common meaning, but extends it wider, even to all those who not only teach in one Church, but also spend their labor in promulgating the gospel everywhere. He then, in a general way, calls those in this place Apostles, who planted Churches by carrying here and there the doctrine of salvation; for elsewhere he confines this title to that first order which Christ at the beginning established, when he appointed the twelve disciples. It would have been otherwise strange, that this dignity should be only ascribed to them, and to a few others. But as they had embraced the gospel by faith before Paul, he hesitates not to set them on this account before himself. The author knows that Junia is a woman; indeed he never even considers the alternative; he knows that she is an apostle, and doesn’t consider any other possible translation to be worth mentioning. He lists the works she did as teaching in her own church; a broader evangelistic ministry; and church-planting. He paints Junia as a significant and active leader in the early church. Who is this raving feminist, this traitor to traditional Christianity? He wrote his Romans commentary, his first attempt at Biblical exposition in 1539, in Strasbourg; later he moved to Geneva, where he preached and and published some more Biblical commentary; rightly or wrongly, however, he is more famous for a work entitled Institutes of the Christian Religion… …take a bow, John...

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What N.T. Wright should have said last night (imho…)

Jon (Hi Jon; don’t you get more than enough of my ramblings in class?!) left a comment on the previous post, saying he wanted to ask Tom Wright a question: ‘Can a scientist believe in the resurrection?’ I wasn’t at the lecture, so can’t assess the implied criticism that it didn’t adequately address the title, but the comment got me thinking in the watches of the night. It is/was an odd question to address in a lecture, in that it admits of a trivial empirical answer:- even on the strictest possible definition of ‘scientist’ (say, doctorate; published research; currently employed in the field), there are several dozen scientists in my acquaintance who do believe in the resurrection, and actuality entails possibility (if they do, they clearly can…). So, why might this have been an interesting question for Tom to ask, or to be asked (if the title was given to him)? I think I can see an answer; before outlining it, I ought to confess that, not only was I not at the lecture, but (embarrassing confession time) I haven’t yet read the third of Tom’s series on Christian Origins, The Resurrection of the Son of God, so I really am flying in the dark here! Wright’s project is, even in his own estimation, a renewal of the quest of the historical Jesus. That is, it is an attempt to discern what can be known of Jesus by the methods of historical scholarship alone. Hence the various debates with the Jesus Seminar: they are about the same task with the same tools, if disagreeing how to use them. Hence also the enormous apologetic value of the project, if it works: the aim is to develop a body of knowledge about the person of Jesus Christ that is certain, and not dependent on a faith-perspective or prejudice or anything else. Hence, finally, the various debates about the appropriateness of the project: can we really abstract questions of fact from questions of perspective so easily? The question of the resurrection is somewhere near the heart of these. Wright has tried to argue that the existence and nature of the early Christian movement is sufficiently remarkable that it demands explanation, and that it can only be explained historically by an astonishing event happening very soon after the crucifixion of Christ. He has, in the past, cautiously suggested that the account of the resurrection of Jesus, would, if true, be an adequate explanation for this fact. He has further suggested that no other proposed explanation is remotely adequate. This, however, presents us with a big question: can the event of bodily resurrection be part of a historical reconstruction? There is a response to Wright’s programme that sees it as magnificent, but fatally flawed at precisely this point. Historical scholarship operates with a ‘methodological naturalism,’ that is, it refuses to accept, a priori, any explanation that does not accord with a purely naturalistic account of what may happen in the world. On such an account, Tom Wright’s work then becomes at best a massively elaborate reductio ad absurdum: purely naturalistic history cannot explain the existence of the Christian churches, one of the major facts of world history, without denying its own premises by accepting the possibility of bodily resurrection. It may be that Tom can demonstrate the premises of this argument, but even if he can, all he has proved is the inadequacy of naturalistic historical scholarship, not the truth of the resurrection—that’s the way the logic of a reductio works. This response, however, probably credits the generality of historical work with more philosophical self-awareness than it in fact possesses. I suspect that most historians, if pressed, would not reach for words like ‘naturalistic’, but for words like ‘plausible’: they seek to give an account of events, and the connections between them, which is ‘plausible’ to the intellectual culture in which they write. Thus, eighteenth-century historians might have appealed to ‘extraordinary operations of Providence’ (at least until Gibbon), and nineteenth-century historians might have assumed the inevitable evolution of all human cultures until they mirrored the civilization of (Protestant) Europe, but such ideas are no longer culturally acceptable. If this is right, then to shift the cultural plausibility status of the resurrection from ‘impossible’ to ‘extraordinarily unlikely’ would be a major gain for Tom Wright’s argument. And a discussion of the science of resurrection is probably the best way to attempt to do...

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