A Maid to Order Bible
Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic
Christian Understanding of Gender
by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
Baker Academic, 2005
(138 pages, $14.99, paperback)
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
To remain “biblical,” the Evangelical progressive, these days infallibly marked by his profession of being both orthodox and egalitarian, has never been able to deny outright the parts of the Bible he finds damning to his cause. In the early days of Evangelical feminism, attempts at persuasion tended to concentrate on reinterpretation of the patriarchalist seats of doctrine, especially in the writings of the unfortunate St. Paul, who was viewed as having a particularly difficult time saying what he meant.
With time and critical scrutiny, however, it appeared this project would collapse of its own weight for several reasons, first because the scholarly reinterpretations of sub-egalitarian passages, once the shell shuffling in the journals was done and the pea finally reappeared, still looked strained and unnatural, not to mention at odds with the way these passages had been understood from the Church’s beginnings.
An Egalitarian Canon
Then it became more plain that it wasn’t just Paul who was the problem, but the broad patriarchalist stream upon which he sailed, a stream that perfused the Scriptures from beginning to end and in which all parts were connected. It became more difficult to make the necessary adjustments to biblical anthropology without noticing that one was perforce also making changes to traditional ethics and Trinitarian doctrine.
Worst of all, it became apparent as the work progressed that there was a controlling agenda behind it that came not only from outside the Bible, but outside any historically plausible definition of Christianity.
Faced with this situation, the problem for egalitarian theologians has become associated less with particular passages of Scripture as with the Scriptures considered as a whole. Several years ago in the pages of this journal we dealt with one of them, who averred that the Bible contains patriarchalism in much the same way as it contains reference to the devil and his works. What’s patriarchal isn’t Scripture—it’s just in the Bible. What’s egalitarian, he assured us, is what’s truly Scripture. Obviously this canon-within-the-canon approach has its drawbacks, the first of which is that by that rule the Bible can be made to teach anything whatever, but some variation on the theme seems to be what’s being worked on today on the upper floors of the Evangelical theology laboratories.
A case in point is the new book by John G. Stackhouse, holder of the Sangwoo Youtong Chee chair of theology at Regent College in Vancouver, recently opened by J. I. Packer’s retirement. Stackhouse’s thesis improves on the plausibility of the scheme mentioned above, for he not only asserts that patriarchalism (which he regards as evil, and the root of many evils) is found in the Bible, but that it is authoritatively taught by valid representatives of “Godself.”
Stackhouse’s eschaton, however, is “finally feminist,” for patriarchy is an interim measure that God has, in “holy pragmatism,” ordained for humankind in its sinful and ignorant nonage, and from which he intends it to become extricated as it ventures further into the life, knowledge, and love of the genderless God—presented in male terms in Scripture because of the cultural captivity of the world and the Church to patriarchalism.
Real Orthodoxy
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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