I’ve been listening to a group of seminars on the Redeemer site where Tim and Kathy Keller address their view of male headship in the home and church. I wrote one post (Pt 1) about it mostly dealing with Kathy Keller’s “Texts of Terror“. The series continues with more clarification by Kathy Keller with some Q/A, then a presentation by Tim and then Q/A for both of them. 

In this post I’ll do a bit more interacting than simply reporting I think. Again, I found the presentations very interesting worthwhile listening to. I have deep appreciation (from afar) for the Kellers (church plants are commonly the fruit of a family’s labor and Redeemer seems to be no exception to this) and what God has done through them at Redeemer and given both my proximity to them ecclesiastically and historically (given my roots in Paterson NJ) the Redeemer story continues to fascinate me.

Kathy Keller and Cultural Irony

In the second posting (Objections…) Kathy Keller takes apart the objections to the positions she laid out in the first. Her defense of the prohibition of women from ordained ministry in the church is fairly typical of most of the arguments you can find in much complementarian literature. While she holds doggedly to the prohibition she also advocates for strong female participation in ministry in everything but ordained ministry. This comes through in the beginning of Tim’s talk  with his NOM rule. Women may do everything  None Ordained Males (NOM) can do. This includes their “deaconesses” that they get in trouble with in some of their more conservative circles.

All of us come to the Bible with our temperaments and these temperaments impact how we approach and handle things. Kathy Keller in her handling of these arguments feels to me to have a temperament that is pretty hard nosed and black and white when approaching these issues. The complexity and the nuance is quickly boiled down into her judgments on these matters and you can hear her settledness in her voice.

There’s a real irony in this when it comes to gender disputes today because here you have a sharp, articulate woman who sounds like she’s “speaking like a man” in our lexicon of gender caricatures arguing for a prohibition for women from a specific ecclesiastical leadership role. This is culturally a fascinating and powerful thing. Stock rebuttals that might assume she is being oppressed into these positions by men don’t stick because as she said in the first lecture she came to this position as a convert and an adult and what appears to be her temperament and posture don’t reflect having been raised in a household where she would have been groomed to be deferential or compliant to male domination. Just listening to these brief lectures makes me imagine that she must infuriate both women who are strongly offended by her stance as well as unnerving many men who might find her demeanor unseemly for how they imagine a Christian woman should be. She seems to very much incarnate the position she espouses.

English Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed

Another reaction I have when I listen to Kathy Keller walk her way through her arguments is I feel the difference between English Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed nuance. Cultures have nuances that get expressed even when they’re subtle. I’m not saying that Hollanders can’t be doctrinaire, petty and hard nosed (as the old saying goes “wooden shoes, wooden head, wouldn’t listen”) but this kind of tight, rather legalistic, black and white argumentation I think is culturally copasetic with Presbyterians than the Dutch Reformed variety.

My father once pointed out to me how long and exhaustive the longer Westminster Confession can be as compared to something like the Heidelberg Catechism. My father also told me a story of a PCA missionary who through his private devotional prayer life found himself speaking in tongues. He confessed this to his Presbytery and found himself on the outs. In the CRC he found a space where he could quietly continue this practice while also have a place that was conservative theologically for him. There sometimes seems to be a certain flex in the Dutch variant of this tradition that isn’t always in the English variety.

Part of why I don’t find her tight system so convincing is that a tight system demands that it be that tight all the way around. A huge problem for the prohibitory stance is the consignment of this stance to home and church and a CS Lewis reference from the 40s really isn’t enough, especially given the repeated demand to go back to scripture for this thing. If you buy into this standard the whole argument has to be as water tight as you require of others.

Ambiguity and Seeking Cultural Expression

There are a number of issues over which the church has maintained deep disagreements because of seemingly contradictory Biblical material (Arminian vs. Calvinist, infant baptism, eschatology, etc.) and while we all find Biblical support for our positions and express them within our ecclesiastical structures we learn to live with a bit of humility regarding them. Noteworthy in her presentation was her embrace of Wayne Gruden’s work in terms of the negative but then different from him substantially in terms of what women are not only permitted to do but should be exhorted to do (this come through again in Tim’s piece.)

Part of the tremendously difficult task of church leadership in every cultural context is to figure out how to appropriate the special revelation and apply it to their situation. I have problems both with those who demand this that this specific prohibition (ordained women) is universal and eternal and with those who consider the historic or cultural reality of the prohibition to be necessarily discriminatory and evil. I would suggest that the diversity of Biblical material might suggest that this particular application is something the church needs to work out for its own contexts. That isn’t to ignore normative and good gender differences, it just recognizes that not only do you have gender difference to consider but also theological constructions of ordination and leadership to contend with.

I agree with her resisting an implicit myth of progress rationale as she finds in Webb’s work but there are more than two options in these matters. In my ministry experience I’ve seen women exerting leadership in multiple cultural contexts with widely different structural expressions. I have some sympathy for her argument that a discipline of submission is healthy but I question whether this forced, universally asserted prohibition really is faithful either to the Scriptures, the history of the Christian church, or is the best application of a deeper complementarian (the imago dei requires both genders expressed within institutions) position. See some of Scot McKnight’s recent comments on this.

It looks like I’m going to need a part 3 for this because I really want to talk a bit about Tim Keller’s presentation and why I think they have been able to make this thing work for them.