{"id":645,"date":"2008-09-16T10:04:18","date_gmt":"2008-09-16T17:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=645"},"modified":"2008-09-16T10:04:18","modified_gmt":"2008-09-16T17:04:18","slug":"david-gushee-on-palins-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2008\/09\/16\/david-gushee-on-palins-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"David Gushee on Palin's Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Gushee<\/a>, one of my favorite evangelical thinkers, writes a provocative piece in USA Today<\/a> on the challenge he thinks Sarah Palin’s nomination to Vice President poses for conservative evangelicals (HT:\u00a0 Euangelion<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I’m not sure Gushee completely hits the mark concerning church leadership.\u00a0 As others note<\/a>, 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, one of the key reasons complementarians hold that 1 Timothy 2:11-12<\/a>\u00a0is normative for the entire Church age, rather than a limited cultural prohibition (such as, say,\u00a0the 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.\u00a0 This suggests, according to complementarians, that there is something inherent in the nature of “male” and “female” that\u00a0establishes different\u00a0(but complementary, not “superior” and “inferior”) social roles.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n