Throughout my Christian walk, I’ve always had an uncomfortable relationship with my “tribes.” Initially, I thought it was a character flaw in me. I was too contrarian, I was asking too many questions, or I wasn’t paying enough attention. No doubt some of those things played into it but as time went on I started realizing how many people in my life expected a purity that I could never live up to. I was always, to use a Harry Potter term, a mud blood - someone tainted by the unpure.
I constantly live in a state of in-between. As a Pentecostal in a baptist high school, I had teachers who believed I was demon-possessed. While later in my Pentecostal college I had classmates tell me I was not Pentecostal because my dad was disabled and because one time in a chapel I refused to follow a speaker’s “Holy Spirit instructions” to stand on a chair and tap my stomach (all of this literally happened) to free my spirit to worship.
This plays out in other ways. As an Egalitarian, I inevitably have Complementarians accuse me of adopting secular social systems over Scripture. While Egalitarians will continue to be suspicious of me because of my proximity to Complementarians. I’m not an ally, regardless of over 5 years now of teaching female ministers how to do gospel work. Since I don’t perfectly align, I am not an ally.
And a few years ago I found out that many women I thought were friends had been talking behind my back to blacklist me because they perceived I was not pure enough. I was devastated because each one of them I gave platforms to and publicly supported but it did not matter. I didn’t embrace every nuance and group think so I was cast out. These things have real-world implications.
Burk vs. Du Meza
Over the last week, my circles have been abuzz about Denny Burke and Kristin Kobes Du Meza publicly debating her book Jesus and John Wayne. I’d highly recommend reading Kristin’s thoughts here and Denny’s response here. For the TL;DR crowd here’s Denny’s assessment which I thought was fair:
If you boil it all down, she asked me a question, and I asked her one. She asked me whether I thought her book Jesus and John Wayne contains false teaching (to which I answered “yes”), and I asked her if she believes that homosexuality is sinful (to which she answered that she doesn’t know yet).
What caught my attention about this thread is not the theological confrontation per see, but Kristen’s reasoning. At first, I thought Denny was attacking someone who was in the process of trying to approach the issue of sexual ethics objectively, fairly, and as a scholar. You can tell from Du Meza’s response that she thought so as well:
Since that time, I’ve encountered compelling theological & historical arguments that challenge or complicate traditional approaches to this issue. I’ve read several but have several more to read, and am doing so in conversation w/ “traditional” perspectives.
As a teacher, I ALWAYS encourage this type of approach. No issue, thought, or theology should ever be un-investigatable. But it’s the next parts of Du Meza’s approach that caught me off guard and made me understand exactly why Burk was hitting this issue hard:
I’m doing this all in community, w/ scholars, pastors, theologians, & LGBTQ+ Christians (sic.), as part of my local church, as part of an officially sanctioned denominational process, and in an official capacity as a representative of my university…But I’m going to do so in conversation & communion with my LGBTQ sisters & brothers in Christ.
Inside Du Meza’s response is apparent smuggled presuppositions that betray her claim to coming from a traditional ground. Mainly, she takes communion with LGBTQ+ sisters & brothers in Christ. As Burk points out:
She is already willing to have communion with and to recognize LGBTQ persons as her brothers and sisters in Christ. In other words, she is already saying that it is right to welcome to the Lord’s table those who embrace and affirm a homosexual identity. She may be under the impression that this is a “middle” or “undecided” position, but it certainly is not. Once you’ve affirmed unrepentant homosexuals as your brothers and sisters in Christ, you have already endorsed an affirming position no matter what your ethical calculation might otherwise be.
Now, I personally know men and women who would identify as LGBTQ+ but remain celibate or do not act on that identity because the teaching of Scripture regarding sex outside of marriage is clear (and universal regardless of one’s identity) and their identity in Christ supersedes whatever identity they themselves identify with. I would gladly take communion with and have taken communion with these brothers and sisters. If that is what Du Meza is referring to here then I heartily agree. However, that does not seem to be the case based on other posts she’s made and it’s there that Burk’s rebuttal becomes extremely poignant.
The UnMaking of Biblical Egalitarianism
You may be asking what any of that has to do with Egalitarianism? Du Mez explains:
Contemporary white evangelicalism in America, then, is not the inevitable outworking of “biblical literalism,” nor is it the only possible interpretation of the historic Christian faith… It is, rather, a historical and cultural movement, forged over time by individuals and organizations with varied motivations—the desire to discern God’s will, to bring order to uncertain times, and, for many, to extend their own power. (Jesus and John Wayne, p. 14)
As an Egalitarian, I’ve noticed many examples of authors like Du Mez sneaking in what Burk called a “universal acid” into their theological treatises of Egalitarianism. What is that acid? “That under every truth claim is someone’s will to power.” Du Mez does this throughout her book but she is not alone, almost every other modern Egalitarian book I’ve read over the last year has included this underlying sociological framework and category. And this framework undergirds how they process issues of race, culture, exegesis, and gender, and more often than not when it is pointed out it’s immediately denied. But as shown earlier, Du Mez seems to be working from a premise that one can take communion with someone practicing open sexual immorality while denying she’s reached that conclusion. Which is it?
Complementarians will argue that embracing Egalitarianism was the first part of the slippery slope that leads to an embrace of apostasy. And while Burk and others will thankfully say the whole Complementarian/Egalitarian debate is a secondary gospel issue, I do agree with their concern about my “camps” continuing alignment and adoption of secular categories that in my experience has almost always led to deconstruction and then apostasy.
Josh Howerton outlined this beautifully over on Twitter:
“STEP 1: they subtly get u to embrace secular categories – patriarchy, affirming/non-affirming, "hate", secular definitions of racism, justice, and oppression, misogyny, etc. This happens via social media immersion, massive social pressure, higher ed, entertainment industry,etc. You HAVE TO understand the way these words are being used, because something VERY subtle is happening to you that you don't realize is happening.
Imagine each word is a circle that many things go inside. For instance, the Patriarchy circle would have many things in it that are SIN and that Christians reject. Abuse, the toxic belief that men are superior to women, the idea that all women should submit to all men, etc. But the way the word patriarchy is used, there are also many Biblical, good things that get smuggled inside that circle too and lumped in under the negative label "patriarchy" –– the call upon men to lovingly lead their families, male eldership, etc.
So, when you start using the secular category of "patriarchy" to evaluate, you're automatically starting from a place that HAS TO result in pointing to Biblical concepts and feeling them wrong/evil. The same is true for all those other words above.
STEP 2: u start evaluating Biblical Xianity by those secular categories & (shockingly!) a faith built upon the violently non-secular Scriptures doesn't align w the morals of those secular categories
STEP 3: as a result, you feel there are some things you need to deconstruct, and you begin a search for a form of Christianity that meets the standards of the secularly-defined categories, rejecting everything that doesn't.
STEP 4: you discard many aspects of historic, orthodox Xian ethics while trying to keep the foundation, but with tremendous inner tension, bc the first principles you embraced in STEP 1 are at war with the foundation you're trying to hold.
So, you begin to see Xianity as an instrument of misogyny, "hate", etc because of the way the conversation was subtly framed for you in Step 1. If you accept the world's categories, you'll ALWAYS come to the world's conclusions.
There is eventually little / no difference between you and a secular humanist. An example of this would be the most common forms of Progressive Christianity, which John Mark Comer has pointed out, "is a stopover on the way to post-Christianity."
STEP 5: having rejected the fruits, you eventually reject the root too and deconvert.”
I do not believe Egalitarianism leads to apostasy or deconstruction. I believe the argument for Egalitarianism remains one of the most consistent traditional, historical, and Christian approaches to understanding gender. However, modern Egalitarian thoughts and arguments, especially those I’ve seen over the last week, are embracing categories and frameworks that charitably might do well in identifying problems (something I’d argue Du Mez does do very well) but offers solutions that do not align with the plain reading of Scripture and actively undermine it. And if Egalitarianism is going down that road, I cannot follow.
Stuck in the in-between.