Part 5: Moving Forward: Reaffirming a Commitment to The Adequacy of the Scriptures
Finally, to advance the conversation about complementarity, there are two more things related to the scriptures: first, we must reaffirm our commitment to the adequacy of the scriptures for the life of the Church; Second, we must ensure that the scriptures are read correctly, distinguishing between the moral principles of Scripture and the space it leaves for wisdom.
- I believe that the Bible establishes two functions: elders/pastors and superintendents/deaconos.
- I also believe that the role of the elderly is limited to qualified men.
- While men and women can serve as deacons (or.
- If you prefer.
- Deacons.
- For women).
- ).
So what about the chairman of a mission committee?A management team, a young pastor who’s not old, the director of the women’s department?Do these posts come out of the waste of the elders or the deaconos bucket?
The problem, of course, is that many churches do not have a clear understanding of what an old man or deacon is. Moreover, the Bible says nothing of these other positions. They enter and leave the ranks of the elders or deaconos with little clarity as to what is what.
Moreover, as I have pointed out elsewhere, we use the corporate word, and vaguely, “leadership” describes everything, allowing churches to walk the margins of the Bible.
For my part, I am willing to recognize that deaconos have some kind of “leadership” in their particular areas. A sound deacon, for example, will provide advice and instructions to your staff in managing the church sound system. He or she can get a quote and make decisions about how to use it. In other words, I think we can distinguish between the diaconal sound system. direction and the kind of supervision of the elders over the entire congregation that Paul and the others say belong to the elders.
However, if churches use non-biblical language as an executive leadership team, or the “President of the Mission Committee” should be more careful in explaining to their congregations whether these positions represent alumni leadership or diaconal leadership. They have to work hard to maintain all leadership positions in one of these two lanes.
Here is the deepest point: are there any different ecclesiological convictions that are glimpsed behind all these conversations about complementarity?How do Sam Emadi and Alex Duke’s articles specify it?And different beliefs about the adequacy of the scriptures. It’s easy to have good ideas in mind and start insisting on them, as if they were biblical. “We need to hire women to solve the problem of violence. “”Men must distribute the communion trays. Many of these ideas can be good or even wise in a particular ministerial context. However, making something that is not in the Bible obligatory gives you more weight than you can carry. The Holy Ghost is not sitting in heaven thinking, “I wish I could have inspired the Apostles to say that?!”good ideas in task, these ideas start doing things we never wanted them to do.
This is what the adequacy of the scriptures means for the conversation about complementarity: the safest course of action for men and women is to adjust more and more to the Word of God; man’s wisdom does not guarantee our safety; God’s wisdom does. . So, if something goes wrong in our homes or churches; If women are humiliated or neglected, or if men abdicate from responsibilities or are excessively harsh, the problem is not rooted in the scriptures. The problem is disobedience or ignorance of the scriptures. The solution is to open our Bibles and examine them again, study more. , think more, reapply and obey.
The scriptures are enough for everything that afflicts us. Different voices can bring different perceptions to our understanding of the scriptures, but if something is not in the Bible, it is not an “obligation. “Only inspired things become “duties. “
What we have to do is continue reading our Bibles and adapt our thoughts and practices to the Word of God.
Elsewhere, I argued that we must recognize that differences between men and women in the most diverse contexts of life are rooted not in biblical precepts, but in models of “design”. Dieux. This is crucial, I mean, because the conception of creation takes us back to the biblical category of wisdom. Wisdom in the Bible is something that overlaps the law, but a little different from the law.
Wisdom issues a “duty,” as in “men should?”Or “women should” but him? Duty?Is wisdom a little different from duty? The law. Duty? Wisdom resembles some of the Proverbs (?Does a wise son listen to his father’s instructions?). The “duty of the law seems to be something of the Exodus” (“Shouldn’t you steal?”). wisdom comes with a “normality. ” His opposite is madness (the father can be a fool, a thief or a father who gives conflicting advice). The duty of the law comes with an “always. ” His opposite is sin. Yes, sin and madness often overlap, but not always.
The fact that gender differences are governed by the? Wisdom means that there is some flexibility in the expression of gender when we move from one cultural place to another. A woman’s kilt in a country can look a lot like a man’s kilt in Scotland. What does this flexibility of cultural expressions mean? As contemporary Christians often assume, we can therefore ignore various cultural signs of masculinity and femininity as ‘simply cultural’ and morally insignificant to us.
Paul, for example, recommends long hair for a woman (1C 11. 15), a recommendation that depended on certain knowledge about her culture. However, we hope we will not approach Paul or accuse him of trafficking in cultural stereotypes. I could even agree to a certain extent. However, he would continue to say, “Long hair for a woman is essential to expressing femininity where I live, and the Word of God commands women to be like women and men to be men. Similarly, you should pay attention to the signs of where you live.
In other words, if we want to be? Within, but not in the world, we must pay attention to healthy expressions of masculinity and femininity in our different cultures, as well as pay attention to linguistic differences and other “indications”.
In short: masculinity and femininity belong to divine conception, allowing some flexibility and needing wisdom in the way we live our masculinity and our femininity; however, this is no excuse for ignoring the various cultural expressions of each place, but paying special attention to them and striving to participate in healthier versions of them for the biblical purpose: to maintain equality and difference.
As a final word, I would like to acknowledge how grateful I am for the ministry of CBMW (Council on Biblical Manhood and Femininity). They don’t get 1000 points. But they show a bravery that many of us, including me, are missing. They sought to teach what the Bible says on a subject that will bring few friends and many enemies in our time. I don’t understand why a complementary person, whether broad or narrow, is not grateful, even when they disagree. We must honor our brothers and sisters in Christ and applaud their efforts to learn from the Bible. Not only that, we must imitate them, working on this issue.
After all, the road ahead may be worse, today it is harder to be complementary than it was five years ago and I suppose it will be even more difficult in five years, our culture is increasingly lacking in conceptual categorization. a public school in the late 1980s and a non-Christian university in the early 1990s. Looking back, my non-Christian companions always believed that men and women were different. People could make jokes (some appropriate, some not) that depended on a fundamental sense of our differences, but these intuitions quickly disappear. The ideologies that prevail in our time make us deliberately refuse to see the differences between men and women and, at the same time, prevent us from seeing them.
Perhaps the inevitability of nature is reafided in this generation, yet sin is irrational and I will not be surprised if the certainty of the androgyny of our culture is aggravated, if so, this idea, these odious Christians?, would continue to insist on all. cases about the distinction of roles, sincerely surprising, frightening and irritating non-Christians kind, respectable and caring. Even the narrowest supplements will end up anathemaized.
What does the complementary task mean more than ever?We must continue to reform according to the Word of God, above all, again, we must conform to the Bible. We must work to understand authority and difference, as well as equality taught in the Bible. A good understanding and practice of each will be the best defense against abuse and abdication. In this way, “Keeping your [our] exemplary procedure among the Gentiles, that in what they speak against you as wrongdoers, looking at you in your good deeds, can they glorify God on the day of the visitation?”(1 P. 2. 12).