As an early Christmas treat, I figured I should share the best bingo card I’ve seen in a while.
Mark Driscoll Apologism Bingo Card (on “Are Women Human?, an excellent blog worth looking around)
favorite spot on the card : “Jesus wasn’t just a gentle peacemaker”
No, really. go.
This is the second part of my essay, ” HOW PROMINENT WERE WOMEN IN BAPTIST LIFE OVER THE CENTURIES”, submitted to Dr. David Bebbington this term. This section again deals with men who were kinder in their thoughts towards women than the last section, but not fully egalitarian.
Other men fully recognized the spiritual authority of women but did not find it relevant for this world. Even though more than half of Providence Church was made up of women during its first two centuries, women are never listed as having any leadership roles.[1] For Lansing Burrows in the 19th century, he could affirm women’s spiritual equality but still remarked, “In things temporal, woman’s position in the church is one of subordination.” He had settled the question of women in authority firmly; “To honest Christian minds all that is necessary is to appeal to the testimony of the Scriptures.”[2] Some were more pragmatically against women in leadership. Mrs. Attatway was publically challenged by another woman who told her that women should not teach to the unbaptized, but only teach in closed church meetings. A tract in 1641 proclaimed, “Their only reason or cause of preaching was, that there was a deficiency of good men.” [3]
Even when women were accepted, it was not in full equality. Their prophesying and leadership was considered more miraculous because of their gender. Like the medieval mystics, they affirmed that Gods “strength appeared in weakness”, that they were the “weakest sex.” If a woman sought to fight a man outside of the church sphere, “as the rival of man, in the struggle for place, power and prominence, she as the ‘weaker vessel’ is doomed to defeat.”[4] Victorian attitudes towards gender left women to chase the ideal of “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.”[5] Speaking out led Anna Trapnel to be accused of insanity and witchcraft in the 17th century. For southern white women, their role at home defined a woman’s role, “to be mother to her own large flock; model, guide, physician, provider, teacher, priestess to the slaves or around the big city home.”[6] In 1801, Alice Izard wrote a letter mentioning her father & her response to The Rights of Woman, that, “He is as much disgusted with the book as I am and calls the author a vulgar, impudent hussy.”[7] The purity of women was important to the purity of the South, which became more important after the Civil War.[8] At the end of the 19th century, Southern Baptist women were limited to, “Go to a meeting, sing, and make pies for the preacher” in the church.[9] In 1911, Texas Baptists declared that the Women’s Missionary Union was “a menace to the integrity of the churches.” because it was “known everywhere that our people in the South, as a rule, are unalterably opposed to this thing,” of women becoming a “leader – a speaker before mixed assemblies, a platform declaimer, a pulpit proclaimer, street preacher, lyceum lecturer, stump orator.”[10] At Southern Seminary and the WMU Training School, women were not involved in preaching ministry “by reminding students that a women’s primary sphere was in the home, even if her home were located in Africa.”[11]
[1] Pamela R. Durso, “Baptist women in America, 1638-1800” (n.d.): 198.
[2] Lansing Burrows, “Woman’s Position in the Church” (Bordentown, NJ, 1872), 3–4,20, AR 25, file folder 55, Lansing Burrows Papers, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville TN.; in Deweese, Women Deacons and Deaconesses, 7–8.
[3] Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers, 16.
[4] Religious Herald, n.d., (February 20, 1868), 2; in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 79.
[5] Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 58.
[6] Fannie Exile Scudder Heck, In Royal Service: The Mission Work of Southern Baptist Women (Educational department, Foreign Mission boards, Southern Baptist Convention, 1913), 7; in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 57.
[7] Wylma Wates, “Precursor to the Victorian Age: The Concept of Marriage and Family as Revealed in the Correspondence of the Izard Family of South Carolina”, n.d., 6; in Carol Bleser, In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1900 (Oxford University Press, 1992); in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 75.
[8] Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (University of Georgia Press, 2009), 47.
[9] McBeth, A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage, 335.
[10] Baptist Women Mission Workers of Texas, Minutes, 1911; Biblical Recorder, 1892; Western Recorder, 1888; in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 93–94.
[11] T. Laine Scales, All that fits a woman: training Southern Baptist women for charity and mission, 1907-1926 (Mercer University Press, 2000), 64–65; in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 145.
This is going to be a series covering the view of how prominent women were in (English and US) baptist history 1609-1950 & the difficulties they had in comparison with men that I wrote for Dr. David Bebbington this semester. It’s a little dryer than earlier Christian Masculinities posts, but it is ridiculously historically focused and I’m quite pleased with it (even though I got a B+, ;) .)
In 1645, a Baptist woman today only known as Mrs. Attaway, the most prominent woman preacher in London at the time, stood up to address an assembly of thousands and claimed her authority to speak came from Scripture; “Now those days were come”, now “God would pour out his Spirit upon the handmaidens, and they should prophecy.”[1] She was not alone in using scripture to affirm that women could teach. Sarah Wight went on a 76 day fast in which many crowded around her to hear her prophesy and visions. She also quoted Acts 2:18 and replied to those who questioned her speaking, “This is but a taste now of what shall be.”[2] Lulie Wharton of the Women’s Missionary Union Personal Service Committee echoed this call in 1925, “in the fullness of time God is sending forth His daughters, as well as His sons, for the uplift of the world which so much needs mothering.”[3]
In 17th century England, women could still be arrested for their street preaching and church prophesying due to laws that quoted 1 Corinthians 14:34, “Let women keep silence.”[1] Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena railed against the sins of women speaking. In 1746 the Philadelphia Baptist Association proclaimed “the silence, with subjection, enjoined on all women in the church of God…excludes all women whomsoever from all degrees of teaching, ruling, governing, dictating, and leading in the church of God.”[2] Anne Wentworth was once charged with the crime of denying her submissive status as a woman because “she said she would seek strength from the Lord rather than going to men for help.”[3] J. B. Hawthorne, in an 1891 sermon titled “Paul and the Women” concludes that women were to remain silent and forbidden to teach, but were allowed to prophecy. Because “Adam was first formed”, a woman “reverses God’s order and violates the laws of her own nature and creation” when she speaks in the church.[4] Thomas Collier proclaimed that women could sometimes “may prophesie by permission” but only “in subjection to the man.”[5] Most bluntly, John R. Rice declared, “There were no woman preachers, no woman pastors nor evangelists nor Bible teachers, in the New Testament churches.”[6]
[1] Curtis W. Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-Century England (Baylor University Press, 2011), 4.
[2] Henry Jessey, The exceeding riches of grace advanced by the spirit of grace in an empty nothing creature: viz. Mrs Sarah Wight (Printed by Matthew Simmons, 1647), 90–91; in Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers, x.
[3] Julie Wharton, Our Mission Fields/Royal service. (Birmingham, Ala.,: Woman’s Missionary Union, Auxiliary to Southern Baptist Convention], n.d.), 20 (sept 1925): 27; in Carol Crawford Holcomb, “Mothering the South : influence of gender and the social gospel on the social views of the leadership of Woman’s Missionary Union, auxiliary to Southern Baptist Convention, 1888-1930” (Ph.D., Baylor University, 1999), 112.
[1] A Company of Women Preachers, 10.
[2] Philadelphia Baptist Association and Abram Dunn Gillette, Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, from A.D. 1707, to A.D. 1807: being the first one hundred years of its existence (American Baptist Publication Society, 1851), 53; in Charles W. Deweese, Women Deacons and Deaconesses: 400 Years of Baptist Service (Mercer University Press, 2005), 60.
[3] Anne Wentworth, A True Account of Anne Wentworths Being Cruelly, Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt with by Some of those People Called Anabaptists, 1676, 16–17; in Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers, 34.
[4] Leon McBeth, A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage (Nashville Tenn.: Broadman Press, 1990), 337–340.
[5] Thomas Collier, The Pulpit-Guard Routed in Its Twenty Strong-Holds (London: Giles Calvert, 1651), 79; in Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers, 14.
[6] John R. Rice, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers (Sword of the Lord Publishers, 2000), 25, 40, 43, 48, 51, 56, 58–59; in David T. Morgan, Southern Baptist Sisters: In Search of Status, 1845-2000 (Mercer University Press, 2003), 171.
Today I’m not talking about Driscoll, as I expected, but about this fun news about the notorious drug cartel La Familia Michoacana making “required reading” of John Eldredge’s Wild At Heart. (H/T Audentia) Alternet had the best title for their coverage of the piece : Christian Book Touting Manly Aggression Inspires Violent Fundamentalist Meth Trafficking Cult. Really, you can’t make this up!
John Eldredge, of course, is angry about the abuse of his book as an endorsement to perpetuate the violence La Familia has done. How could Eldredge imagine his content would be so co-opted! Content that claims (WaH 117):
” ‘The kingdom of heaven suffers violence,’ Jesus said, and violent men take it by force.” (Matt 11:12 NASB) Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Hopefully by now you see the deep and holy goodness of masculine aggression and that will help you understand what Christ is saying. “
Eldredge’s thesis, as I wrote in my first post, is that man must have “a battle to fight, a beauty to rescue and an adventure to live.” I’m missing how that thesis necessarily requires Jesus. La Familia is missing how that doesn’t endorse (really, how it requires) violence.
Eldredge wrote Wild at Heart so men would be submissive to God in their aggressive masculinity, and therefore La Familia is totally misunderstanding him. I can see how La Familia missed it. I missed it too! Eldredge’s focus on violence, weapon play, and aggression as a healthy Christian masculinity is so extreme that many believe Cartel leader “The Craziest” Nazario Gonzalez Moreno’s book Thoughtsis somehow “more in tune with the classic spirit of Christianity”.
The Alternet story gets this right as well: despite all the talk of “Writers can’t control how their words are used”, I have yet to see La Familia make required reading from the works of progressive Christian Jim Wallis. Of course, Wallis probably disagrees with Eldredge that William Wallace is more like Jesus than Mother Theresa (p.22, WAH).
The response I’ve so far heard on the right is that this is the most extreme example in the world concerning what this type of rhetoric about a “Muscular Christianity” can lead to. This is reality, and extreme examples are still real situations, not hypothetical. I didn’t have to make it up or prepare hyperbolic statements about the damage possible through this “aggressive biblical manhood” mandate. It’s something a journalist for the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote about when Wild at Heart showed up 4 times in a Mexican Intelligence Report concerning La Familia.
Driscoll, Eldredge, Piper and the gender essentialists lead to a reality that not only requires women to “always be rescued” and subservient to men, but a reality in which murder is defended as “divine justice”, and our “culture war” becomes an actual war. That’s not a world I’m prepared to accept, from the false premise of their biblically mandated masculinity to the “pro-family” cartel beheadings of fathers, brothers, and sons.
This is an introductory post to Mark Driscoll’s theology, and in the coming weeks I will be covering him more in depth both from a masculinities standpoint and a theological one. This is about the core of his masculinity: misogyny, inerrant scripture, and Calvinism. Driscoll is a “shock jock” preacher who thrives on argument and the attention that gives him. Controversial remarks concerning biological sex and gender roles reverberate loudly in today’s society, giving Driscoll the attention he craves.
Mark Driscoll is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington. While this seems an unlikely place for a conservative Calvinist to take up shop, he’s a popular guy. 7,500+ people flow into his church (at various locations) each Sunday. Over 100,000 folks download his sermons on iTunes each week. The New York Times Magazine published “Who Would Jesus Smack Down? Mark Driscoll, a pastor with a Macho Conception of Christ” last year. Driscoll got his start working with the emergent church movement, although he has since decided most preachers were too “sissified” and has distanced himself.
I do no use the word misogyny lightly. I think it’s powerful word, and I think it speaks to more than just ignorance. There are plenty of men and women, even “traditional relationship” complementarians, I do not think are misogynistic. Nevertheless, there certainly are misogynists in the world, and Mark Driscoll is among them. He holds deep contempt for women. Even those who self-avowedly hate the “overwhelming femininity” in the church think he “blurs the line between masculinity and misogyny”.
Driscoll believes scripture to be inerrant and is a conservative Calvinist, a doctrine I’ll talk about in more depth later, but this influences his view of humanity. He believes that everything changed after the fall. God hates all of humankind, the elect and the damned alike. No one is has an ounce of goodness or virtue worth saving. The inerrant part of his belief leads him to focus on God’s curses after the fall, and is the basis for his misogyny.
“If your wife is working, you are a selfish bastard. How dare you make her shoulder her half of the curse and part of yours as well!”
“Women will be saved by going back to that role that God has chosen for them. Ladies, if the hair on the back of your neck stands up it is because you are fighting your role in the scripture.”
Driscoll has taken these scriptures (and a handful of others) and created a theology that requires women to be “homeward focused” and finds no scriptural evidence for a woman working outside the home, even if “given permission by her husband”. Cole NeSmith brings up Psalm 31:24 “She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes.” but apparently, that doesn’t fit in Driscoll’s bible.
When Ted Haggard (conservative mega-pastor, Colorado Springs) was caught with a gay prostitute and meth, Mark Driscoll knew whom to blame: his wife. Zach Lind of Jimmy Eat World blogged about it the following quote before Driscoll could recall his essay from the web.
Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is… not be helping him either.
This is Driscoll in a nutshell. Men, being manly men, are important. They achieve being “real men” when they have sexy wives under their complete control. Biblical Manhood means rejecting any femininity as wrong. If you are a pastor, you should only focus on men, because, like Eldredge believed, if you win the men you automatically get their wives and families.
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