Consistent Application of Gender Rules
Dr. Sheri Klouda, assistant professor of Old Testament languages, has been informed dismissed from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Technically, she was denied the opportunity for tenure review, despite the fact that she was hired to a tenure-track position. She was also relieved of her teaching load and told that her contract would not be renewed. President Paige Patterson grounds this decision in the fact that Dr. Klouda is a woman, and according to his interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12, it is never proper under any circumstances for a woman to teach or have authority over a man.
It should be noted that Dr. Klouda’s conservative bona fides are impeccable. She affirms the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message, which asserts that the role of senior pastor is for men only. She has no designs on the pastorate; she only wants to teach Hebrew, using the education she received at SWBTS, where she earned her Ph.D.
Needless to say, egalitarians are disheartened, angered, frustrated, and/or dumbstruck by Dr. Patterson’s decision. What might not be so obvious is that so are some complementarians.
Bill McKinnon (guest blogging at Internet Monk) believes 1 Timothy 2:12 should be limited in its application to relationships in the local church. By contrast, Dr. Patterson believes the verse in question applies across the board, whenever two Christians are involved and one is male and the other is female (or else why dismiss a qualified professor, who is not a pastor and apparently has no desire to become one, from teaching in an academic institution?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùnot a church?).
McKinnon has ten questions for complementarians who agree with Patterson’s. Here are my favorites:
3. If you are pulled over by a female police officer whom you know to be a Christian, how do you make her understand that she has no authority over you (assuming you are male)?
5. Are high school teaching jobs off limits for Christian women, since at the higher grades they might be teaching Christian males old enough (by our culture) to be considered men?
9. At what age does a Christian son go from being under his mother?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s authority to being an authority over her (and his sisters, whether younger or older)? One assumes that this is the same age where the mother must stop teaching her son.
10. Does the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìall women under the authority of all men?¢‚Ǩ¬ù concept remind you of another well known monotheistic religion that is in the news a lot lately?
Well said, Dr. McKinnon.
Wade Burleson and Marty Duren have also blogged quite a bit about this issue. I don’t know if either of them would describe themselves as egalitarians; I do know that they make a lot of sense on this issue.
Dr. Klouda has since accepted a position at Taylor University in Indiana. I wish her the best.
[Cross-posted at The CBE Scroll]
Update: As might have been expected, the Biblical Recorder is reporting that the accrediting agencies are getting involved.
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Darrell Pursiful
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Wow. I’d thought McKnight’s recent post was hyperbole. Clearly I was wrong.
As an egalitarian the only thing I found wrong with his post was that he DID agree that the role of pastor is off limits for women–which is both exegetically and theologically shaky, to say the least.
Michael: I agree with you about the men-only pastorate. But since Dr. Klouda herself apparently accepts that position, as do so many of her blogging supporters, it just makes this whole fiasco that much more bizarre.
Some days I wake up a rather liberal complementarian, others, after coffee and a morning stretch, I’m egalitarian. As a friend says, we’re complegalitarian (which is a nice way of putting, I’d like to not have to decide, thank you very much).
That aside, I’m appalled at this, well, er, development (regression?). And the worst of it, chalk another one up to Christians acting unethically.
I don’t know of any complementarians who take the view that it’s wrong for a woman to have authority over a man in any context. The standard view is that it is exactly two contexts — the marriage relation and the authoritative teaching of the local church. Some do extend this to other roles in society, as Piper and Grudem do in their introduction to Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, but what they do not do is say that men under women’s authority in the workplace, in the military, and so on should refuse to obey their orders or refuse to submit to authority. They specifically deny that view and say that at most what men in such positions should do is (and it’s really vague what this means) to submit in a way that somehow reflects God’s creation order. I don’t know what that means, but they specifically say men should submit to women in such secular contexts. Thinking it’s wrong for someone else to have put a woman in that position is consistent with thinking men under such a woman should still submit.
In the light of that, 3 and 5 are outright straw men if used against any mainstream complementarian position (including the Piper and Grudem one, which is what was used to justify this case). Even 9 and 10 misunderstand the Piper/Grudem position, since they don’t think all men are over all women, although that one I can see allows a little more confusion. They do think every husband is over his wife, and they do think the elders (all male) are over every member of the congregation. They don’t think any male is over any other woman, but they do think it’s bad in some sense (and thus worth avoiding) for women to be over men. But that’s not the same as thinking every man is over every woman, since it’s consistent with everyone else on the same level with respect to each other, aside from husbands to wives and elders to members of the congregation.
Hi Jeremy, I’m glad you think #3 and #5 are straw men. It would certainly be ridiculous to assert such nonsense. It seems, however, that Dr. Patterson and you disagree over the scope of womens’ subordination. You limit it to the marriage relationship and the local church setting (as do McKinnon, Burleson, et al.); Patterson extends it to academic settings as well. Perhaps by raising these straw men, Dr. McKinnon is trying to nudge Dr. Patterson back toward the complementarian mainstream?
Of course I disagree with the Patterson view, but that’s not what I was saying. I was giving a reason why 3 and 5 are straw man arguments even against the Patterson view. His view is that it’s wrong for those in authority to put women over men. He doesn’t say, as far as I know, that those put under the authority of women should buck that authority. Those are very different claims, and the command to submit to authority in scripture doesn’t depend on that person’s being a legitimate authority. Romans 13 would be almost never applicable if that were true, because hardly any civil authority didn’t have its roots in someone usurping power at some point.