Lately hierarchical Christians have been complaining that their people are far more egalitarian than they should, and egalitarian Christians have been complaining that their churches are far more hierarchical than their confession spells out. The question is, why?
The first thing we must note is that on the hierarchical Christians side, it is the leadership that is complaining; on the egalitarian side it is the laity that is complaining. In other words, hierarchical laity has a hard time putting their beliefs into practice, while egalitarian leadership isn't always willing to put their beliefs into practice.
This reveals two things to us:
1) People are naturally egalitarian, but power corrupts.
2) Love leads to equality, but power kills love.
Love leads to equality because those who love treat others naturally with respect and consideration. Power kills love because in our quest for power we must treat others with disrespect and without consideration, and having secured power we must hold on to it, wherefore we cannot treat others the way we want them to treat us; we cannot love them the way we love ourselves.
Hence we find that hierarchical Christians who love, naturally revert to equality, and egalitarians who seek power, naturally revert to hierarchy.
And this tells us that the question is really about our willingness to serve one another in love. Do we, or don't we?
Very good point, Susanna. Makes total sense to me. However, since complementarian husbands would deny they are seeking power, and claim their behavior is loving, they'd look at this as a "straw man" argument. So I'd like to play with it a bit, take it a step further.
ReplyDeleteJohn Piper would claim that real love is doing your role--that is real service. He makes it sound like making the final decisions (which most hierarchical husbands demand the right to do) is actually a burden, which husbands bear out of love. According to Piper, it would be extremely inconsiderate of a woman who has a black belt in karate to physically defend her husband if the couple is attacked. That would be power-seeking, self-agrandizing, disobedience to God and to her husband on her part, I guess. And for the man to
not defend his wife even though he has neither the skills nor the strength would be inconsiderate, unloving and shirking his duty. He claims that maintaining your role is serving the other and not power seeking.
So for the sake of discussion...Suppose a short, not particularly strong man, like Piper, who also considers making the final decision his burden, yet tries to be fair to his wife, ends up being attacked while out with his wife, who, lets suppose, has a black belt in karate, is he serving his wife in love if he tries to defend her against the attackers? He thinks he is, even though he may end up dead or in the hospital for a long time, and his wife may end up there, too.
Is he really loving her, or is he seeking power? Is the black-belt wife loving her husband and God with her non-action, or is she shirking her duty by refusing to use her skills/abilities for the protection of all involved?
Closer to home for many couples, is a wife being loving to her husband when she has great math skills and doing the family bookkeeping/budgeting would be easy to her, but in order to maintain roles, she watches her husband labor with the bookkeeping for hours on end so that he can maintain his role. Is she helping him feel like "a MAN" when she looks over his shoulder and sees several mistakes that could get him in trouble with the IRS, but says nothing? And if she does say something--ever so lovingly and tactfully, of course--and her husband snarls at her for undermining his sense of masculinity, is she being unloving or power-seeking?
Is it loving for a husband to deny his wife the privilege to use her skills to protect her husband and herself, whether through karate or through bookkeeping? Is it loving for him to endanger both of them either physically or financially because of his lack of skills, when his partner has the skills to handle the situation with relative ease? I am fairly certain many complementarian hierarchialists would claim it is loving for a husband to maintain roles in these circumstances and they would completely miss the fact that the husband's behavior has more to do with pride than with love. Could it be when they coach wives to make themselves seem stupid and weak so their husbands can feel smart and strong, that they are encouraging wives to build up the sin of pride in their husbands? Even in Piper's book that should be "clearly sin."
~Waneta Dawn
Hi Waneta! Great points. I wrote an article about exactly what you are talking about.
ReplyDeletehttp://recoveringfrombiblical.blogspot.com/2014/01/piper-and-immature-young-man.html