A friend on Facebook recently linked to an article by John Piper that lays out his view on women as pastors.
Now, the content shouldn’t surprise anyone, but I wanted to share an excerpt before adding some thoughts of my own, just so we’re all starting from the same place.
“The Twelve are all men. That was intentional, because they are all given incredible authority to found the church. They are like pastors, only they have more authority than pastors.
But Jesus did call women, and he called them into significant ministry. Read the beginning of Luke 8 or see the role of women at the Resurrection. Jesus broke significant taboos in the way that he elevated the role of women. It was counter-cultural to have Mary sitting at his feet learning like a rabbinic student at the feet of his teacher. And it was counter-cultural for him to have women so closely attending him, providing for his needs, and for him to be so merciful to the women of the street.
Jesus was pro-woman to the max. But he did not choose women to be apostles.” – John Piper
You know what? Piper is right. If the argument is about the Twelve, then yes, they were all men, every one of them. There seems to have been female apostles outside the Twelve (such as Junia in Romans 16:7), but his point stands.
Piper is also right that Jesus broke significant taboos and treated women in a deeply counter-cultural way. And it is there that I suggest another way of reading the text behind this essay emerges.
Is it possible that a simple acknowledgment about how Jesus (and the early Christian community) treated women is actually laying the groundwork to subvert the very position Piper is arguing for?
Jesus treated women in a way that surpassed the culture of his day and in a way that took dramatic steps past the teachings of the Old Testament. Likewise, the community rule that God gave Israel in the Old Testament treated women radically better than the culture of that day.
There is a trajectory here.
The people of God were, according to the Bible, on the cutting edge of creating a community that included and honored female voices, a community shaped by justice for all peoples. Yet at some point, we lost something. We lost that position, that trajectory, and have spent too much of our time grudgingly taking up the rear on social issues only when we have no other recourse.
Perhaps the most faithful way of living out the way of Jesus is to acknowledge that these are deeply context-bound texts and refuse to treat that contextual background as a timeless Platonic ideal? If we follow a Messiah who broke taboos and counter-culturally brought in all the wrong people, maybe we should, too?
