David Gushee, one of my favorite evangelical thinkers, writes a provocative piece in USA Today on the challenge he thinks Sarah Palin’s nomination to Vice President poses for conservative evangelicals (HT: Euangelion).
I’m not sure Gushee completely hits the mark concerning church leadership. As others note, gender roles and authority in the sphere of church polity is not necessarily the same question as gender roles and authority in the sphere of civil government. However, Gushee is right, I think, that the arguments many “complementarians” make are rooted in what they understand as the order of creation, which extends to the church, the family, and presumably, to the other significant sphere of influence in society, the civil government.
In fact, one of the key reasons complementarians hold that 1 Timothy 2:11-12 is normative for the entire Church age, rather than a limited cultural prohibition (such as, say, the repeated New Testament injunction that women should cover their heads during worship, which almost all evangelicals ignore) is that verses 13-15 refer directly to the order of creation of man and woman and to the woman’s role in the Fall. This suggests, according to complementarians, that there is something inherent in the nature of “male” and “female” that establishes different (but complementary, not “superior” and “inferior”) social roles.
I won’t try to untangle all the impossibly difficult exegetical and hermeneutical issues the “complementarian vs. egalitarian” debate raises, but Gushee’s questions seem fair, particularly these:
- If you agree that God can call a woman to serve as president, does this have any implications for your views on women’s leadership in church life? Would you be willing to vote for a qualified woman to serve as pastor of your church? If not, why not?
- Do you believe that Palin is under the authority of her husband as head of the family? If so, would this authority spill over into her role as vice president?
The second question I quote above seems particularly dicey for complimentarians. You might sidestep the first question by noting the distinctive spheres of governance represented by Church and State, but there’s no getting around the sphere of governance represented by the family.