Why Four Posts on This?

I really didn’t expect to do four posts on this little series but I have found it fascinating. Why do I find it fascinating when I’m not really debating the question for myself?

Redeemer wants to chart a “third way” in the midst of an incredibly powerful binary conflict. This is no small undertaking. As you maybe have seen or will see I’ve got my doubts as to whether their system is truly a third way. (It tries to be a both-and which is also a move that Tim Keller makes in other areas or it may be hopping over the line time and again as some will charge them with.)

What are they facing? 

On one side they have their evangelical and conservative Reformed brothers and sisters for whom compromise on this issue is an abandonment of their submission to Scriptural authority.

On the other side is a strong cultural narrative that sees exclusion of women from offices of power and authority in line with a history of such exclusions resulting in injustice and suffering of women. It isn’t hard to imagine that for most majority culture women who encounter Redeemer’s policies will simply find it offensive and provide a strong incentive to in no way consider involvement with Redeemer nor hold with respect the rest of the church’s teachings.

How will Redeemer and the Kellers meet this challenge? Will it work? An honest listening to these recordings I think will lead most to believe “sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.”

The Keller’s Marital Relationship

As is common in evangelical congregations the Keller’s relationship is not only on display but also held up as a sort of a template for the rest of the community to follow. Again, Kathy Keller’s temperament seems right for NYC if they are going to model what they believe to their context.

I don’t know either of them personally at all, but even cursory contact reveals that these two are very much a ministry team. When I visited Redeemer and the Kellers in 2006 I remember being surprised that Kathy managed Tim’s email for our group’s visit. They have written books together. This is not the only series of talks that you can find on the Redeemer website that they’ve done together. They planted the church together and there is regular evidence of her input in much of what Tim does.

In the recording they are quite transparent in terms of some situations where they had to make difficult decisions together and how they applied their principle to that process. This clearly works for them. Again, as is not uncommon in church plants, the church they planted reflects the founding pastor and his wife. The live mutuality and complementarity.

Magisterial Leadership and Servant Leadership

Many have noted the tension between what might be called magisterial leadership in the church and servant leadership. I think it’s helpful to employ these terms in this discussion because it kind of highlights a lot of what the Kellers are arguing for here. They would assert that women are prohibited from asserting authoritative leadership through specific offices but that in Christ the greater leadership mode, servant leadership or Christ-like leadership is available to all. Kathy asks a number of times why we blindly accept the world’s priority of these two types of leadership by seeing magisterial leadership above servant leadership when Jesus’ teaching on the subject is clear. Women are free to exert the greatest level of leadership, why fight over what is second anyway?

I do like the argument if we see it in the light of some of Greg Boyd’s language of “power over” vs. “power under”. I’m not sure the two modes are always that discrete nor do I imagine, again, that many coming from the dominant cultural context will feel much grip from the argument. 

Zero Tolerance on Male Authoritarianism

In the next moment of the recording Tim goes on a rant against men enjoying their power and authority. Again, anyone listening to Keller’s sermons will be familiar with this. If men must have authority because they Bible says they must exercise it then they should embrace it as a servant.

“Men Need this Principle So They Don’t Check Out”

In many conversations about women in church office I’ve heard that if men aren’t forced to take the lead they check out and even abandon the church. This idea gets some play in these recording as well.

When we hit this we are now getting into that dicey area of speculatively describing gender differentiation and finding justification for this principle that they find in Scripture. In our current cultural context it seems safe to speculate on negative male qualities and positive female qualities and less safe to go the other way.

I want to make a couple of observations about this turn in the conversation.

In much of Kathy Keller’s talks we have heard how we should avoid speculation and cherry picking but this whole vein is all speculation, generalization, stereotyping and cherry picking, none of it coming from the Bible at all. That doesn’t mean we can’t have the conversation, it should just qualify it.

The whole point of the prohibition in the complementarian argument is that it is universal, trans-cultural and eternal or at least normative in a good creation. When we start working the stereotype that men are immature boys who just want to play video games, constantly abdicating from responsibility and sneaking out of church if we don’t give them an office, and that women are shrews, looking to domineer and control, what normative frame of reference are we referring to? Wouldn’t both be fallen and corrupt and why would this pristine principle be mandated before men were lice and women shrews? Or are men by nature and testosterone (which I assume Adam had before the fall) domineering, violent and aggressive and women dodgers of responsibility, the mirror negative stereotype? Complementarians go here to bolster the argument but I don’t think it really works.

Again, I think nearly everyone instinctively assumes there are structural differences between male and female and there is plenty of science to support it, yet getting into the details of exactly how this plays out is enormously difficult and speculative in the abstract.

How Redeemer Applies it? 

I went into this in a number of previous posts. In the end, however, if you listen to this final recording you get the sense that the application of this principle, apart from prohibition of women in office, doesn’t seem much different from the kind of negotiation that egalitarian couples and congregations employ. Listening to the various voices on the panel suggests that everyone is working this thing out in various ways and Redeemer and the Kellers affirm the diversity as long as the exclusion from office is maintained. There are various statements that embrace tolerance for the other side and not making this an essential issue.

By this point I’ve probably beaten this dead horse into a pulp for a number of you. The recordings might be interesting for you if you’re trying to make up your own mind on the question of gender roles in church or if you’re interested in the Kellers or Redeemer Pres.