Why I am not a Mormon: Introduction

It may seem strange to some people that I would bother explaining why I am not a Mormon. Most of us are familiar with the Mormon “elders” – generally a pair of teen-age looking boys with fresh, earnest faces and good intentions. Most of us don't really feel a need to explain to them exactly why we think they're mistaken – and it seems nearly heartless to explain it all to sweet, earnest youths who are so sure they're doing the right thing. And there's a risk in explaining it to them: I've met people on-line who are ex Mormons. After coming to the conclusion that Mormonism was all a big lie, some are so bitter and disillusioned that now they have given up faith in God and anything “religious” altogether. That may seem like an overreaction, but overreactions are part of human nature.

I have no interest in bashing Mormons. The Mormons I've known personally have mostly been hard-working and kind, good neighbors and good parents. And anyone with even the faintest interest in genealogy can appreciate the contribution the Mormon church has made in that area. Mormons generally lead clean and healthy lifestyles precisely because they're Mormons. I'm not sure whether they have a longer life-span than average, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did. You have to acknowledge that level of uprightness – and the fact that their church takes their moral authority seriously enough that they can help their people, when these day so many churches completely abdicate their moral responsibility to their members for fear of offending them.

So if Mormonism is a good influence morally and can be credited with creating a whole population noted for its healthy lifestyle, why write a piece disagreeing with it? Religion is a complicated thing. A religion can have a good ethical teaching and a good moral influence, and that does not necessarily mean it is on solid ground in what it teaches about history or the nature of God. Yoga has some good effects, but that does not by itself make the Hindu faith to be true. The Muslims have strong teachings on sexual morality that lead to praiseworthy, low rates of HIV infection in many Muslim lands, but again that does not by itself make their faith true. These good effects are evidence that certain teachings and practices have real-life benefits, but those particular teachings and practices are not the key beliefs of each group. So the real-life benefits that arise from good morals and good practices do not mean that their other beliefs are true.

The key claim of the Mormon church is, at the most basic, that the Book of Mormon is on the same level as the Bible. Because so much has already been written on the topic, I'd like to take a different approach. I will look at just one of the existing controversies about the Book of Mormon, not so much in order to answer the question behind the controversy, but to compare the kinds of tools we could use to resolve the controversy. As we will see at the end, it will lead us to a different kind of question. But here I will begin with one of the typical questions that arises about the Book of Mormon. It's a small question in itself, but it illustrates vital differences between the Book of Mormon and the Bible.

Why I am not a Mormon: An impasse?

Here's the question: The Book of Mormon mentions “coins”. Critics have claimed that, because the New World cultures did not have any coins before the Europeans arrived, that the reference to “coins” in the Book of Mormon is evidence that the Book of Mormon was made up by someone without good historical knowledge of the ancient New World, rather than actually being a product of the ancient New World. Mormons have responded by saying that the “coins” are referenced only in titles or headings added later after the original translation, and that the “pieces” of precious metals referenced in the original translated text of the Book of Mormon are measured out by weight and are not truly coins. In this way, the complete absence of archaeological evidence for coins would no longer be a conspicuous embarrassment to the Mormon community's claim that the Book of Mormon is the product of the ancient New World rather than the product of Joseph Smith's imagination.

That looks like an impasse, doesn't it? Two sides have made claims and counter claims, and there is no way to research it further. Each side has made its claim; each side has its own beliefs. How can we know any more than that? Each will believe what they will – won't they?

This is where the more interesting questions come into play. (To be continued.)

In which I admit to myself that busy season is upon me at work ...

Hi there

I've actually gone an entire week without posting, and looking at my hours at work this past week I have to admit: busy season is here. I've mentioned before that I have some new pieces I've been waiting to post until busy season; they'll be up next. I will still be interacting with any comments, since this is the first time I've put these particular thoughts out in public.

Thanks for your patience during the annual busy season at work.

So "TEOTWAWKI" wasn't a character from the movie Avatar?

I recently met the acronym TEOTWAWKI: The End Of The World As We Know It. Kind of sad that it has its own acronym, isn't it?

But I came across it on some websites that were part of my research as I've taken up hobbyist-level gardening, and have been reading up on sustainability, re-using seeds (no hybrids!) and so forth. It's also the beginnings of hurricane season and I live in hurricane country, so I've been making sure my disaster preparedness plans are all set for the upcoming year. But these days, if you google "disaster preparedness plans", you generally find people worrying about something more interesting than hurricane season.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not bothered by people who try to live sustainable lives in their own back yards, or take their gardening to the next level as part of a survival plan, or do urban homesteading, or any of that. It has a kind of geeky appeal that I thoroughly understand. I mean, there were Victory Gardens in WWII, right? What bothers me is that some people are seriously discussing, as part of their TEOTWAWKI plans, having enough ammo to blast away the mobs that would steal all of their food. Sure, food is a survival matter; sure, stealing is wrong; sure, self-defense is justifiable. It's just that, if we're seriously planning for things we can buy to make us less likely to starve to death if a hungry mob comes along, how about enough seeds for them too, and some spare flour to keep them going until then? Just saying.

The main fault I see in the TEOTWAWKI discussions I've seen on-line is this: not taking seriously the need to *rebuild*, not just merely survive. And that takes being able to see people as a community -- even if they're too panicked to act like one at the moment.

Just food for thought, if we see the mythical TEOTWAWKI in our day.

The Jabez maneuver: Jehovah's Witnesses and "stauros"

I am friendly with the Jehovah's Witnesses in my neighborhood. They do their best to serve God; anybody who does that has earned some respect from me. I believe they are deceived; and I believe they were deceived (and continue to deceive others, unknowingly) by the use of "the Jabez maneuver" -- a pet name I've had for the tactic of using obscure trivia to mask shallow knowledge and instead claim expertise.

Stauros

Did you know that "stauros" -- the Greek word used in the New Testament for "cross" -- originally meant something like "stake"? The Jehovah's Witnesses are banking on you not knowing that. They believe that the whole church went far astray very early in its history, and is deceiving people about all kinds of things and hiding information and so forth. It's fairly boilerplate conspiracy-theory stuff. One thing they advance as proof is that "stauros" meant "stake" -- that Jesus was crucified/impaled on a vertical stake without a crossbar. Their artwork of the crucifixion has Jesus on a vertical stake, his hands pinned above his head rather than out to the sides. The traditional style of cross is considered something like a pagan import; "stauros" proves that the Jehovah's Witnesses are the true remnant of original Christianity, while our cross-shaped crosses prove we're the apostates, you see.

Besides the shape of the cross being irrelevant for our knowledge of Christ, it also ignores all kinds of information about the history of crucifixion as capital punishment, placing most of the weight of the argument on a single Greek word for a Roman form of punishment. Still, they claim that "stauros" is the key piece of knowledge. Many Christians have advanced arguments from the gospels, from ancient Roman sources, and from early Christian writings showing that the cross of Jesus was actually a cross (not that it much matters, other than keeping the Jehovah's Witnesses from sheep-stealing by advancing faulty arguments). I'd like to add one more piece of information: how the words for "cross" and "crucify" (you know, the "stauros" type words) were written in the oldest copies of the Gospels that we have.

The staurogram

One of the oldest manuscripts we have of the Gospels is a papyrus known as P75. Scholars date it somewhere around 175-225 A.D. -- fairly early in Christian history. In that papyrus, the scribe used special forms for the words "cross" and "crucify" (stauros and its cousin the verb stauroo - pardon the transliteration there, I'm not really going to switch over to another font just to get an omega). The Greek letter tau (second letter of stauros) looks roughly like our upper-case T; the Greek letter rho (fifth letter of stauros) looks roughly like our upper-case P. In several cases where the words "cross" or "crucify" appear in this ancient manuscript, the scribe has gone out of his way to drop out the "au" so that he can write the T and P shapes on top of each other, making something that physically resembles a person on a cross.

This is an enlargement of an actual photo of part of Luke 24:7 in the ancient papyrus P75. Luke 24:7 reads, "The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day be raised again." The italicized part ("and be crucified", or "kai staurothenai") is the part shown in the image above. The original image can be found here, where if you patiently count down to the 25th line of text on that page and look towards the end of the line, you will see the original written by the hand of a scribe somewhere around the year 200 A.D. The word has a horizontal line written above it indicating the special form of the word. Notice how two letters have been dropped in order that the scribe can make the T and P shapes overlap to resemble a human figure on a cross.

There are several places in this ancient manuscript where either the noun for cross (stauros) or its matching verb for crucify are written with that special form. Other ancient manuscripts have been found from roughly the same time with the same special form of stauros: a form where the writing has been deliberately arranged to physically resemble a man on a cross. Given that there are other manuscripts from around the same time, it is really unlikely that these are the first people ever to write "stauros" that way; it was more likely becoming an accepted practice in Christian circles. But this would make it an accepted practice in Christian circles by around 200 A.D. to write "stauros" in a way that it was clear that, in this case, "stauros" itself did not mean a stake.

"My Father is greater than I" - the road less traveled

"My Father is greater than I." - Jesus. (John 14:28)

The problem

We Christians are generally taught that Jesus is equal to the Father. This verse calls that into question (or some would say, appears to call that into question). There is a ready answer, both traditional and common -- the road more traveled, if you will: That Jesus spoke this according to his human nature alone. Of course humanity is less than deity; problem solved.

This whole piece will assume the reader is familiar with basic Christian theology and, considering where it will be read, that the reader is probably fairly orthodox according to historical Christian views.

The problem with the answer

The answer -- that Jesus spoke according to only his human nature -- has seemed problematic to me. For one, we had to flirt with the outskirts of Nestorian theology to say that; it essentially separates the divine and human in Christ by saying that the divine did not participate at all in that answer. If Christ's humanity and divinity are separate in such a way that he said things according to just the human nature alone, then how do we recognize things where the divine was participating? What else did he teach only according to his human nature? Did he die only according to his human nature? Was he baptized only according to his human nature? Did he weep at Lazarus' tomb only according to his human nature? Did the very nature of God participate with manhood fully, or not?

The answer that Jesus spoke according to only his human nature may also be problematic in light of what Jesus said, "I do nothing of myself; but as my Father has taught me, I speak of these things" (John 8:28). Sure, there are different ways we could understand this depending on how we view Jesus. But it does lend more weight to the idea that, if we take the gospels as reasonably reliable witnesses, we have reason to wonder whether "only according to the human nature" is really consistent with what Jesus' contemporaries wrote about him and what they meant to tell us about him.

Many people are decidedly uncomfortable with Jesus saying "My Father is greater than I" because it shines a spotlight on a problem-area for understanding the Trinity. I have heard theologians wrestle with questions like "Why is the Father the first person of the Trinity, if all are equal?" Or, "Why was the second person of the Trinity the one who was incarnate? Could it have been another?" I suppose, from that point of view, you could just as easily ask how the third person was assigned the job of being the one who came at Pentecost. If our starting point is "There are three equal persons who are one God", then those questions are very difficult to answer at all, much less to answer convincingly. They are not so difficult to answer if our starting point is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- the way the people encounter God, rather than the theories attempting to explain it.

The road less traveled and the nature of the Father

And so I am, for this piece, taking the road less traveled. I'm not talking about the easy solution that many non-Trinitarians have taken, where they likewise assume that Jesus was talking according to his human nature -- and this because they assume the human nature is the only nature he had. It is often assumed that if only we dismiss the Gospel of John, the problem goes away and we get a human Jesus.* Some have pointed out that it's only in the Gospel of John that Jesus claims to be equal with God, only in the Gospel of John that Jesus says that whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father, only there that he is called uniquely begotten of God. But it is also only in the Gospel of John that Jesus makes problematic statements such as "the Father is greater than I", or the Father being "the only true God" (John 17:3). So rather than toss out John, I think we might want to consider the possibility that our interpretation isn't a great fit to what John has said.

Here I start by taking a broad application of Jesus' saying, "I do nothing of myself; but as my Father has taught me, I speak of these things." What if we apply that also to "The Father is greater than I"? Taking a close look at the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we can notice one thing: only the Father is without origin. The Son is "begotten" of the Father; the Spirit "proceeds". The Father is the origin of the Son and the Spirit. The difference between the Son and the Spirit on the one hand, and creation on the other hand, is that the Son and the Spirit are not creations. They are of the very essence of God. But that very essence has its origins in the Father. The Father is unique within the Trinity in being the only "person" -- if we care to use that language -- absolutely without origin, absolutely self-existing. That is why, when we use Trinitarian language to describe God, that the Father must be the first person of the Trinity.

Some could say -- and fairly enough -- that the persons of the Trinity are numbered as "first, second, and third" after how they are listed in the ancient baptismal formula: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." True enough; but unless that baptismal formula is arbitrary then the order there may give us knowledge to help us in our understanding of God. And when we study further, we find that not only is the Father listed first in the baptismal order, but that he is also the origin of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The baptismal formula fits well with what we know of the Father from other teachings of Jesus.

The road less traveled and the nature of the Son

Once, when reading Jurgen Moltmann's writings, I came across a passage where I badly wanted to check the translation and see if he really could have said such a thing; he said, in essence, that the second person of the Trinity became the Word of God. I suspect the translation was accurate about the general intent, because several of the things he had said sounded as though his starting point was the idea of three persons in one Godhead, rather than the witness of those who had seen remarkable events involving the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He sounded as though he was denying that the Son is intrinsically the Word of God. And whenever we talk primarily about "persons of the Trinity", we risk losing sight of that. But what if it is better to start with what Jesus' contemporaries said about him, rather than what later theologians and philosophers made of it? Here we do not find "the second person became the Word", but "The Word became flesh."

When the Gospel of John tries to describe to us who Jesus is, it starts with the creation of the world, how God spoke the Word and shaped the world. From there, having introduced the Word as the active power of God behind the very existence of this world, the author moves on to say that this Word became flesh; that is the Gospel of John's introduction of Jesus. I don't really think the view that "Jesus only had a human nature" is truly on the table from the Gospel of John's standpoint. The Word of God -- being the living word of the living God -- fittingly came to us as a person rather than a book. But the Word of God is sent from God, derived from God, spoken by God -- shows God, reflects God, reveals God. We can truly and fully affirm that whoever sees Jesus sees the Father. And yet the Father is greater, not by having things that were withheld (as if all the fullness of God did not reside in his Word), nor by staying transcendent while Jesus walks the earth. The Father is greater as the one who sends, the one who is the origin. Jesus did nothing apart from his Father's will; it was not the other way around. The Word of God reflects the Father whose Word he is; the Son of God is in every way a true image. We can affirm that he is the way, the truth, and the life, that no one comes to the Father except through him; and yet, we still see that he is here as the way to the Father who sent him.

The road less traveled and the nature of Holy Spirit?

No, the text I'm discussing -- "The Father is greater than I" -- is not the right place to discuss the Holy Spirit. So here I will limit myself to just a few comments. The Holy Spirit, likewise, is the Spirit of God. Just as Jesus is the Word of God, is fully of God, is uncreated, likewise the Holy Spirit is fully of God and is uncreated. And yet both have their origins in God the Father. (Many would here add, "and the Son"; this writing is not the time or place for that argument.)

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

Christians have called on the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit from ancient times. The baptismal formula has always been one of the important texts informing our understanding of God. I think it is no accident that the place we look to understand God is the place where we first meet him as Christians: at the baptismal font. The texts about baptism speak of our rescue, our being remade in the image of God, our cleansing and rebirth, the renewal of creation, and the forgiveness of sins. At each step of the baptismal formula, God moves closer to us: from "our Father in heaven" to the Son who is God With Us to the Spirit who is God within us, making us God's own temples. We are caught up into the life of God himself, transformed by the renewing of our minds. That is the promise of the power of God at work in this world.

Two roads diverged

"My Father is greater than I." If Jesus spoke this according to the fullness of who he is as Christ, if he spoke as the Word of God, then he has taught us something about God. He has forced us to look more closely not at the abstract "three persons of the Trinity", but at what it means for God to act in this world as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and how the Word of God and the Spirit of God are related to what it means to be God, and to be the people of God. When we understand God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we understand a God who acts in this world for us and for our salvation. So this saying does challenge our understanding of the Trinity, after its own way.

When we speak of the three persons of the Trinity, do we have as clear a picture of God as when we speak of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?

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* If we dismiss the Gospel of John and just limit ourselves to the other writings about Jesus, we still don't get a merely human Jesus. But that's beyond the scope of discussing "My Father is greater than I" and what to make of it for talking about the Trinity.

Controversies: the role of women

The role of women is a controversy that often follows the liberal/conservative divide within Christianity. Within Christianity, it is a given that both men and women are created in God's image and receive gifts of the Holy Spirit. The divisive question relates to whether women should hold positions of authority.

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Complementarians

Complementarians believe that men and women have different natural gifts, different roles to which they are called, and different roles which it is fitting for them to hold. Specifically, complementarians believe that women cannot be church leaders above a certain level of responsibility or authority.

Internal diversity: Some complementarians admit women to lower church offices in such roles as serving communion, ushering, acolyting, reading from the Scripture during services, or serving as deaconesses. Others would see these as trespassing across the bounds of leadership offices reserved for men.

Strong points: Many complementarians hold to this view out of a commitment to living God-pleasing lives and out of loyalty to Scripture, where the common understanding of Paul reserves leadership and authority roles to men. People are also drawn to this view by the sense that sexual differences are part of nature and that therefore distinctions between men and women are natural and right. There is a belief that the natural inherent sex differences may affect leadership ability in such a way that there is an inherent rightness to reserving certain positions for men. Some also see the male leadership as representing God, who asks us to refer to him as Father which is an explicitly male term, or as representing Christ who is male in his humanity. Further, for many people -- both men and women -- it is comfortable to live out traditional roles; this is seen as a legitimate point in favor of the "nature" argument by some complementarians.

External criticisms: Whether or not any given complementarian intends to keep women down, the practical outworking of the complementarian view is to deliberately and systematically exclude women from leadership roles. To give different rights to some but not others is seen simply as injustice. To classify people into two classes, one above the other, is by definition to treat the second group as second-class. Additional concerns range from oppression and marginalization of women to a loss of the use of God-given gifts.

Response to criticism: None of the concerns of the egalitarians changes the fact that the common understanding of Scripture reserves leadership and authority roles to men. In Scripture, Paul argues both from the order of creation (that men were made before women) and from the fall (that Eve was deceived but Adam was not deceived) that men should lead (1 Timothy 2:13-14). In Genesis, we see an explicit statement attributed directly to God that the husband would rule over the wife (Genesis 3:16). In the matter of justice, women and men are equal in their humanity but not in their roles. Upholding different sexual roles is seen as healthy and right, while confusing sexual roles is seen as unhealthy. The complementarians are concerned how often the same groups that advocate erasing the lines of sexual roles also advocate the normalization of homosexuality; to a complementarian, this is no mere coincidence but necessarily follows from the removal of effective distinctions between men and women.

The slippery slope: The complementarian view does not apologize for dividing humanity into two classes and assigning one a higher level of authority than the other. Because of this, there have been times and places in Christian complementarian cultures where women could not own property, where many places of higher education were closed to women and many jobs were closed to women. Is there a clear answer as to how it is possible to have two classes of humanity, one above the other, without the lower being oppressed? If not, how is that different from saying the complementarian view has injustice built into it?

Uncharitable moments towards the other side: Complementarians often assume that, because they hold their views out of respect for Scripture, that egalitarians have no respect for Scripture. The rhetoric can be heated and decidedly unkind. It is not unknown for the complementarians to question the morality of the egalitarians or disparage the authenticity of their faith. Complementarians may suggest that egalitarians promote homosexuality.

Charitable moments: Some complementarians may recognize that the egalitarians' driving desire is to apply "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" in the matter of the battle of the sexes. They may also recognize that egalitarians are skeptical about men arguing in their own self-interest, and that this skepticism has some historical basis.

Fair questions from egalitarians to complementarians:
About practice: A woman cannot lead in a complementarian church, but she can lead in business. A woman cannot vote in some complementarian church meetings, but she can vote in secular elections. When women see the secular world treating their views with more respect than the Christian church, what does that do to their view of the church?

About understanding Scripture: The clear statement that the husband would rule over the wife is from God's judgment after the fall. In the age of Christ, with his redemption, is it appropriate to argue for a permanent church institution based on perpetuating punishment for a past sin? All the clear complementarian statements in the New Testament come from Paul, who brought those views into Christianity with him from the extra-Biblical traditions of Judaism. When we evaluate Paul's writings, what should we make of what Jesus said about the extra-Biblical traditions of Judaism being mere traditions taught by men? We see the early church making decisions based on meeting in council and discussion with the consent of all the church. Did Paul have the authority to make a decision by himself that is binding on all Christians of all time?

Egalitarians

Egalitarians believe that men and women are fully equal in their humanity and therefore in their roles, and that both are able to serve in church leadership in a God-pleasing way.

Internal diversity:
Some egalitarians believe that the sexual differences between men and women make a material difference, and want to make sure the different views are heard. Others maintain that sexual differences are wholly immaterial to an individual's abilities or performance as a leader.

Among egalitarians, there is general agreement that women should have access to the same roles and jobs as men, but there are some differences in the respect and authority accorded to the Bible. This leads to some differences in how the egalitarian view is framed. For those who have a generally high view of the Bible's historicity and moral authority, different textual arguments have been advanced about whether Paul is being understood as he intended, and whether certain passages in Paul's writings may be later interpolations that were not part of the original text. Others see Paul's argument from Eve's fall as conveniently selective, as there are endless examples of men in the Bible who were morally imperfect, but that has never been taken to mean that men should not lead. Others view the Bible as teaching a moral ideal that we are still realizing over the course of history, that we are on a trajectory towards living out the reality that there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Others note that Paul's arguments rest largely on the Genesis creation account, which they take as non-historical; they see no reason to exclude women from leadership over the account of Eve given their understanding of it as symbolic.

Strong points: There is not even the appearance of injustice, of discrimination against women. The men's arguments cannot be seen as self-serving. Many people welcome the fuller participation of women and value the contributions made by women to the leadership of the churches in which it has been tried.

External criticisms: One common position in egalitarian circles is that the statements of the Bible on men's and women's roles are no longer binding. This is a direct rejection of the idea of a timeless, eternal word of God that guides us steadily throughout all the ages of the world. Other arguments on reaching egalitarian views from the Bible -- that the relevant text says the opposite of how it has usually been understood, and that it is an interpolation -- contradict each other; if both arguments are accepted we would believe that the right understanding of a certain passage is really egalitarian but that it was added at a later date so it is not binding. The two arguments cancel each other, and cannot be advanced in such a way as to take both of them seriously. This makes them appear to be ideologically-driven arguments that put the goal of reaching a pre-determined conclusion (the egalitarian one) above the goal of understanding the original text.

Response to criticism: Egalitarians note that even the most conservative Christian groups will view some teachings of the Bible as being culturally-specific and outdated, whether the law of Moses to drain meat of all blood, or the New Testament note to "greet each other with a holy kiss". The Bible's laws governing slavery are now largely seen as ways to prevent abuses of slavery, but that Christ's call to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" has been applied so that in most places slavery is illegal. The type of slavery where someone could be involuntarily enslaved for life through no fault of their own is now widely considered barbarous and unChristian. Applying Christ's teachings has been a way to take the world to new levels of justice and equality that Paul hardly imagined. In this way, the proclamation of the good news of Christ, God With Us, has been a humanizing voice for all the oppressed as it spreads through the world. Applying the same teachings to the role of women is proclaiming the forgiveness of Eve's sin too, not just Adam's; it is proclaiming the full redemption and full value of all humanity.

The slippery slope: The complementarians have warned that altering traditional views of manhood and womanhood will lead to the normalization of homosexuality (which is another controversy in itself). In practice, this has often been the case: that groups who normalize female leadership also tend to normalize homosexual practice. Some within the egalitarian camp would not see this is as a problem but rather a further proof of the social justice of the egalitarian camp; others within the egalitarian camp still advocate for traditional expressions of physical sexuality within heterosexual marriage.

Uncharitable moments towards the other side: Egalitarians often mockingly stereotype the complementarians' views of masculinity with caricatures of chest-thumping, beer-swilling men. Too often the egalitarians' arguments address the caricature (i.e. strawman fallacy) rather than what the complementarians themselves believe. While this does reinforce the egalitarians' own views, it also tacitly assumes that complementarians' actual views shouldn't be taken seriously. The egalitarians' attitude towards complementarians is often condescending, tainted by smugness.

The battle of the sexes can lead to heated rhetoric. At the extremes, egalitarians have charged complementarians with turning a blind eye towards violence against women such as wife-beating or rape. This effectively paints a picture of male complementarians as Jack-the-Ripper types, if not the actual perpetrators then at least the apologists and enablers of barbaric and brutal crimes against women.

Charitable moments: Some egalitarians may note that the complementarians' driving motivation is to respect God by respecting Scripture, to keep with their sense of what is right, natural, and God-given. Egalitarians may also note that the complementarian reading of Scripture has been historically well-accepted and is not a controversial reading of the texts at this time.

Fair questions from complementarians to egalitarians: On the matter of interpreting the Bible, the egalitarians' call is to understand Paul in context -- which nobody disputes in principle. In practice, the egalitarian context for Paul, as applied, is often taken to mean that he is no longer applicable in our context. At what point does "understanding Paul in context" become equivalent to "placing him within a context which does not affect us here and now"? Once the Bible is moved to the category of "historically interesting but outdated" rather than "timeless guidance", why follow the teachings of the Bible today?

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Related controversies: The moral authority of the Bible. Interpreting the Bible.

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Links:

Martin LaBar has rounded up links of writings from egalitarian groups. He points out that these groups retain heterosexuality as normative:

• A Wesleyan/Holiness perspective in Christianity Today
• A position paper from the Evangelical Covenant Cburch
• A commentary from the dean of a Wesleyan seminary
• Martin's own writings on the closely related topic of women and family leadership

Thanks for the additional resources on that perspective.

The Jabez maneuver

(If I blogged nothing but the controversies series we'll all get tired of it. I'll be pacing the series so that it's not the only thing on the blog.)

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Remember The Prayer of Jabez? That book was all the rage awhile back. At the time of its wild popularity my main thought was, "You've got to be kidding." Don't mistake my point; I'm glad if many people enjoyed the book and were more steadfast in prayer -- and in looking to God for blessing -- than before. I don't think any ill of the readers or the author.

The root of my amazement traces back to something that even the review at Amazon notes:

Even well-versed Biblical scholars might be perplexed if asked about Jabez, a little-known man listed in 1 Chronicles, chapter 4 ...

I think many people have an insecurity, a nagging doubt that they are missing something important. When someone comes up with something we have never heard of before, we can come to doubt whether our understanding is adequate. It happens sometimes that someone uses this insecurity against us, that someone deliberately tries to leverage control by flaunting obscure trivia to claim expertise. Because of my initial reaction to the book of Jabez, I have been mentally referring to this move for some time as "the Jabez maneuver." (This is not to assume such poor intentions for the book's author! The point of comparison is the wide recognition given to such a minor figure in the Bible.)

I see "the Jabez maneuver" in fads all the time, whether musical fads, diet fads, scholarly fads, or spiritual fads. The basic setup is simple: find something obscure that has some merit, and fly its flag high as the one thing needful to make everything better. Never heard of it? That's just proof: This is what you've been missing all along.

So it is no surprise that people try to win arguments by exploiting that same type of insecurity. It is a standard (if dishonest) move in arguments to latch onto an obscure point -- preferably obscure enough that this person is the only one familiar with it -- in order to look smarter. If the arguer proves they know something the other side doesn't know, who looks smarter? If the arguer knows even something really trivial -- for example, poor Jabez, rest his soul -- why, they must know even more than the really well-versed Biblical scholars who never heard of him before the book hit the presses. Right?

Unfortunately, this move is often used by people who only know a few obscure facts to gain the upper hand in arguments, and otherwise may not have grasped the basics of the area in which they claim expertise. The risk is that, armed with just a few trivial pieces of knowledge, they may convince the unsuspecting that they are experts when in reality they have almost no knowledge of the field.