A missionary on equality of the sexes

by Harold Kurtz

[This article was originally published at Presbyweb on March 8, 2006, and is reprinted here with permission of the author. Rev. Harold Kurtz is working with the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship which he founded in his retirement. Kurtz ran for moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA, in 2003. He lives in Portland, Oregon.]

I am concerned about the status of women in the EPA for the sake of women, for the sake of men and for the sake of the EPA Church. People need to understand the Biblical rational for the equality of the sexes and for the most part, members of the PCUSA have not worked through the Biblical reasons – I believe they have normally been taught only the American cultural reasons and that is not adequate if we hold a high view of scripture.

I came back to the US after 22 years in Ethiopia to a denomination still troubled by women's ordination-troubled by a belief in the equality of the sexes that had seldom been taught from a Biblical point of view. Most people do not realize that women were equal on the mission field long before they were given the vote and equality in their home congregations and denominations. I came back to find congregations as well as individuals troubled by the women's ordination issue and found myself in demand from a number of congregations as well as individuals to help them understand the Biblical point of view. I like to remind people that it was the mission field that forced Paul to rethink his cultural understanding of the equality of the sexes. Anyone going into the EPA should ground themselves in the Biblical basis of equality whether they be men or women. In short form, here is what I teach

1. You can't make a Biblical case for equality unless you root it in the first three chapters of the Bible. You can't do it well, at least, using only New Testament scripture. And that should be logical since we are going back to God's original intent before the fall, before sin determined so much of human relationships.

2. In Gen. I, there is nothing that speaks to hierarchy – just, plop, they are both there, created in the image of God.

3. In Gen. 2, you get the reference to Eve being created as the "helpmate" or "helper" for Adam. Some say this indicates inferiority. The Hebrew does not. If you follow the Hebrew word through the Old Testament-you can do it with a concordance that follows Hebrew words-you will find it used primarily in the cases where the "helper" is the superior-God helping human beings. If you want to give a rank to this Hebrew word then you would have to translate this as saying that God created Adam who didn't have a clue so God created Eve to set him straight!

4. In Gen. 2, Adam names the animals. In Middle East culture – and Ethiopia carries a great deal of that culture going back to the time of the Queen of Sheba – the cultural symbolism of this, to name someone, is to have control over them. When Adam names the animals it means that he is to take care of them, he is the shepherd of the animal world and is to protect them. Adam has a dominion role to play. But Adam does not name Eve! God brought Eve to Adam and Adam simply says, "She is bone of my bone, etc." There is no naming here.

5. I believe the Bible is matriarchal. What follows in Gen. 2 is the statement that a man shall leave his father and his mother and go live under his wife's mother's roof – not the other way around of the patriarchal society. A woman and her children are the most [vulnerable] of the new family and yet they are the future of the race, the clan, the tribe, the people group. A pregnant woman, a woman in childbirth, a woman with young children and the young children themselves are most in danger and they are the future. The woman's womb is the future of the tribe and therefore the woman is the one most in need of protection so the man is to move in with his wife's family so she can be protected by her mother, father, brothers, relatives. I believe for good reasons the Bible is matriarchal. I have seen a great deal in the world of the plight of women and their children caused because the patriarchal society does not protect the most venerable in their midst and it is still one of the saddest social ills of this sin filled world!

6. Now you get sin coming into the world and the fruits of sin in Gen. 3. It is after the fall that domination comes in – "the man shall rule over you." But this was not the original intent of God, the way that God wanted us to live together. God intended that we should live together in the harmony of God's love and respect. That is Eden. The need for domination is sin. Here you get a very graphic description of the plight of women down through the ages – as well as men and the burdens of life we carry.

7. So, the harmony of Eden is broken, the reign of sin has come. What happens then in the Hebrew symbolism is that ADAM NAMES EVE – Gen. 3:20. The era of male domination has come with sin and it is spelled out clearly here in Hebrew symbolism circling back to Gen. 2 as if to say, "Do you get what happened here?" "Do you see that domination is the reign of sin?" This is God speaking to us and speaking clearly, it seems to me, if we take our cultural blinders away and read the Biblical text in its cultural context. As Adam and his "woman" (translated in Gen. 2:23) leave the perfect harmony of Eden, spoiled by sin and rebellion, it says, "The man called his wife's name Eve." This is in sharp contrast to Gen. 2:23. Male domination and the patriarchal society had arrived in the world.

8. We all see in the Gospels Jesus relating to women in a radical different way from the normal Jewish custom. There is much that could be said about that. But it is in Paul's writings that the place of women comes to us in concrete form and that needs to be understood. I believe it needs to be understood as Paul wrestling with a cultural issue that was very hard for him, and God, in the scriptures, reveals Paul's struggles to come to terms with the Kingdom as Jesus brought it to him and to the world. It is in that cross-cultural journey of the missionary life that Paul faces his cultural captivity, the cultural captivity of the Jewish world, and the cultural captivity of the Kingdom of God. This is one reason why the Church, for the sake of its own health, always needs to be in mission.

9. We know if we read Paul's writings carefully that Paul was struggling with this issue as well as others and admitted that he was not always sure he really had the true insight of the Spirit. He says this in one place-I Cor. 7:40 -"And I think I have the Spirit of God." Paul realized he was over his head in some of these things as he struggled to move out of the Jewish world into the Gentile world – the whole world that God loved. Paul was on a journey in many areas. Some places he was very definite but in others you can almost hear his brain trying to come to terms with this new understanding of the Kingdom – a Kingdom for the world and not just for the Jew. He picks up the issue of women in several places and deals with it in many cases from a Roman/Greek cultural point of view – not using the freedom of the Gospel to bring disrespect on to the community of believers – to be in the world and yet not of the world. It is my opinion that in this journey of the equality of the sexes he finally comes to that incredible high point, and final pronouncement, "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ." People often accuse me of not taking the Bible seriously when I explain other sayings of Paul from the standpoint of honoring culture not declaring a Kingdom imperative. When I ask them about this clear statement of Paul's, what I believe Biblically is the climax of Paul's struggle with his culture, the Kingdom and the place of women, then they suddenly have a low view of the Bible in trying to explain this away!

10. It would take a book to work through all of Paul's statements and struggles but I like to point out his statement about men and women and hair. In I Cor.-this early missionary writing of Paul's as he is struggling with the Good News of the Kingdom as Jesus proclaimed it, in contrast to his Jewish cultural upbringing – Paul is wrestling with the women's issue perhaps for the first time in his writings. Among other things he writes, "Does not nature itself teach you that for a man to wear long hair is degrading to him?" Paul forgot to read his Bible! Who are the most honored men in the Old Testament? Honored by God? The Nazirites. And what is one of their main marks in the society? Long hair! Samson is the prime Biblical example. Read about them in Num. 6. "He shall be holy: he shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow long.." "…his separation to God is upon his head." God shows us in Paul's writings that it is a journey to finally bring together custom, which is to be respected, and the eternal marks of a Kingdom life style. That is not an easy task, as I learned as a missionary, to see the Kingdom, the Church, being established in cultures utterly different from the one in which I was raised – I was journeying and learning just like Paul and just as we all must do.

11. Then in that same letter, I Cor. 15, Paul refers to Jesus as the second Adam. Jesus came to restore life to us – eternal life – "the last Adam became a life-giving spirit." But the reference to Adam, a man of dust, means more that the restoration of the eternal life humans lost in the fall. "Just as we have born the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven." I Cor. 15:49 The last Adam, Jesus, is also a life giving spirit, Paul writes in I Cor. 15:45 John writes, "In Him was life and the life was the light of humankind. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it!" The second Adam also came to restore the lost Eden, to bring the world and human beings back in harmony with the original desire of God. And part of God's desire is that we learn to live on the other side, the back side, the original side of life without domination. "And he girded himself with a towel. and washed the disciples feet… he said do you know what I have done to you?....a servant is not greater than his master." "You shall not be like the Gentiles who lord it over one another."

12. I teach this around the world when I travel. It comes up because God is calling women all over the world into leadership and the women themselves are often perplexed because they have received a message from the outside – from missionaries and other church leaders who are just passing on a culture rather than taking those cultural blinders off and reading the Bible correctly. Those outsiders, captured by their culture as Paul was until God set him free, say to them that God hasn't called them even though that call may have come in the form of a dramatic vision of Jesus! I have been able to help many women and many churches come to terms Biblically with what God is doing in the world today – calling and empowering women.

I firmly believe we haven't faced up to the fact that on this issue we are still held captive to the Roman/Greek culture that corrupted the understanding of Paul and the Church of the first four centuries. (Don't forget to check the feminine name in Ro. 16:7-Junias.) Missiologically speaking, I believe the Reformers of the reformation out of which we have come, only partially freed themselves of the cultural captivity of the Holy Roman Empire – the Roman culture. New Testament speaking, they still remained too much as members of the "circumcision party" of the Roman Catholic Church and its cultural captivity. And, parenthetically, I believe what God is doing in the present explosion of the two-thirds world church is finally setting the Gospel free from that captivity and taking us back to the New Testament, first four centuries understanding of the Gospel, the Kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it. It is strange that for the most part the evangelical churches of the western world have allowed themselves to be held captive to the culture of the Roman Catholic Church – like the Judaizers or circumcision party of the New Testament. Thank God the Pentecostal movement has played a significant role in breaking the Roman Catholic cultural stranglehold – even though some of the Pentecostal leadership has gone back on their heritage because of the cultural pressure of so much of the evangelical world.

Well, this is an old missionary's viewpoint of the Bible in the area of the equality of the sexes and it is a viewpoint that was forced upon him by the clash of cultures, just as Paul experienced it. That clash took away at least some of the cultural blinders which I used to read the Bible. For that I am eternally grateful to God!

Comments

[Dana Ames]

Harold is a dear and holy man- he has come to our church twice, and he captured this girl's heart in all the right ways. I pray for him nearly every day. He is a splendid example of all the vocations Stevens writes about.

Michael, in point 5 should it be "vulnerable" rather than "venerable"?

Dana

[neil]

A great article, thank God for people like this.

[Michael W. Kruse]

I have met Harold a few times but we have never really had the opportunity to really connect. I know him mostly by reputation and what I have read and it is all good! This article demonstrates that.

Dana I think you are right. I merely did a cut and paste from the source. I will insert a correction.

[Michael W. Kruse]

And speaking of editing, the book really is coming.

:)

[Dana Ames]

Oh boy!!
D.

[Rusty Bullerman]

Great article. He has started where you really need to start, which is where the patriarchalists start, Genesis. The only difference is that he interprets it correctly. One point on Genesis 3; at no point is the man commanded to rule over the woman. The language is descriptive, not presecriptive. The whole foundation and key to the issue is what Genesis 1 - 3 REALLY says. The "complementarian-patriarchalist" argument collapses once Genesis is properly understood.

Thanks again for this great site.

Rusty

[Michael W. Kruse]

You are welcome, Rusty. Thanks for your words of affirmation.

You are right about Gen 1-3. You can't get the hierarchical postion without reading back in to it.

[Barb]

Thanks for reprinting this - I missed it in Presbyweb. I hope you don't mind I linked you at my blog. I appreciate Mr. Kurtz's wisdom and hope/pray it is heard by many and in God's infinite wisdom, the culture which says women are an afterthought/second string embrace how liberating/freeing the gospel is for men and women.

[Michael W. Kruse]

Please link away. I have linked you as well.