Apparently I blog the most when I'm riled up by something I read during a lunch break. This may or may not be helpful - it's admittedly more difficult not to swear.
But sometimes my heart breaks, and I end up posting here.
Via a link from
Emerging Women (@emergingwomen) on Twitter, I ended up reading a
post by Kevin DeYoung about the deep connections between "complementarianism" (the view that men and women have
very distinct - and separated - roles in life and in the church) and "
the New Calvinism". The post notes that while the "young, restless, and Reformed" folks are allowed to hold a variety of views on baptism, the Lord's Supper, and even eschatology, the
New Calvinists are pretty much monolithically - and aggressively - complementarian.
Now, I'm egalitarian (holding the view that both men and women can be called and equipped to whatever God wants, and that He never created or intended for a gender-based hierarchy) - but I'm not posting this because I'm sad that I'm excluded from the New Calvinist camp. If the New Calvinists want to make TULIP end with a C for complementarianism, I won't stop them.
DeYoung suggests that New Calvinism and complementarianism go hand-in-hand because complementarianism "signifies" the convictions of biblical inerrancy, penal substitution, and eternal punishment. Maybe so - I wouldn't claim any of those phrases for my own theology. (A description of a theology of biblical centrality, incarnational atonement, and a denial of
inherent immortality is for another time...) But while those phrases and complementarianism do in fact often go hand-in-hand, the question
why still remains.
Here's my suggestion: the New Calvinist doctrines of the-inerrant-interpretation-of-the-Bible-in-Calvinist-terms, limited-atonement-through-penal-substitution, and God-created-most-people-to-burn-in-Hell-because-God-cares-more-about-the-glory-He-obtains-through-His-sovereign-cosmic-barbecuing-skills-than-He-does-about-people - well, those doctrines are inherently tied to the New Calvinist over-arching story of determinism.
Everything (cancer, the Holocaust, your bad hair day, your good hair day, the fact that some people are predestined for hellfire) - everything is determined by the New Calvinist God.
So
of course our roles as men and women are also determined by God.
Of course God created us to fit perfectly into pre-determined categories. These pre-determined (determined, apparently, in the Industrial Revolution when it was first common for ordinary men and women to work separately) categories are so rigid that even God's Spirit can't break them and call a woman to ministry.
(I know some New Calvinists wince when they're accused of this "hyper Calvinism": We're not saying that God is the source of human evil, they say. But they
are saying that God is the source of the
literally irresistible evil urge that lies behind evil acts. In their minds, this means that the person doing the evil act is guilty (and worthy of the hellfire for which they're predestined) and God is innocent of all wrongdoing. Does anyone else have a problem with this logic? Because God "only" gave the person an evil desire they were
literally-in-all-senses-of-the-word-literally unable to resist, God's free from blame? Anyway.)
When did Christianity become fatalism?
Given that this rant is so, well, rant-like, I feel like I need to add some context to everything I say here. Here it is:
I grew up Presbyterian,
both PCUSA
and PCA.
I'm probably related to a lot of the New Calvinist crowd: My great-grandfather on my dad's side was from Holland (the
country); my mom traces her genealogy back to the Puritans on the Mayflower; I have a deep appreciation for Western Michigan; in third grade, I asked my friends to pronounce my first name "Yulie" because that was more Dutch.
And maybe this is why I think about all this so much, instead of just going my merry little Wesleyan way and ignoring DeYoung and Driscoll and the rest: because I
know that Reformed theology doesn't need to look like
this. It's entirely possible that Reformed theology could move in
this trajectory. I know this from
experience. (Though that's a particularly Wesleyan source of knowledge, I suppose.)
I know that it is possible to grow up "reformed/reforming" and learn about the power of the Spirit, about the exciting mystery of the universe and of the weird physics behind it, and about how loving Christ is far more important than belonging to a particular strand of theology. It's possible because it happened.
I know that it is possible to grow up in a church where policy said that women were not ordained but where I was taught the beauty of wrestling with God, the reality that no two men or two women are alike because we're all equally individual
humans, and the importance of my (female) intellect. (Which is maybe why I have less of a problem with the Catholic/Orthodox churches who have a funny view of the priesthood but who, as DeYoung notes, don't have a complementarian theology which encourages the subordination of women in all of life.)
I'm not going to confuse everyone by using the label "Reformed" for myself - I'm head-over-heels for John Wesley and I hold to the same view of God-in-history as A.J. Heschel and Jurgen Moltmann, and it just seems oxymoronic to suggest that I might be a "Reformed" open theist. So I'm not Reformed, given that I disagree with most of Reformed theology's "distinctives". But I don't think that the theological descendants of John Calvin need to cling to five-point-Calvinism (or biblical inerrancy, or penal substitution, or eternal punishment, or complementarianism) any more than I need to cling to those things as a biological descendant of
John Alden.
N.T. Wright spends a bit of time in his new book,
Justification, emphasizing that we don't need to be so terrified of the word "
synergy". (All the Eastern Orthodox nod their heads knowingly.) What if the theological decedents of the reformation actually took seriously the priesthood of all believers and the necessity of continually reexamining the Bible to check and see if prior interpretations were incorrect? What if that's what it meant to be Reformed? (It's possible - I've seen it.) I guess what saddens me about the New Calvinism is that I grew up in a Reformed setting very much on the "always reforming" trajectory. And the New Calvinism is squashing that.
The way that the New Calvinism imposes its determinism onto the roles of men and women is just one example of the larger disturbing trend.
(Some additional things to read, just because these folks have talked about the egalitarianism thing better than I can in my slightly-extended-by-now lunch break:
Christians for Biblical Equality and
Scott McKnight's The Blue Parakeet.)
(And, in case you think that viewing women as men's equals in all of life isn't important except on a "theological" level, just know that this is
actually about the
future of humanity.)
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