Men and Women Working Together

Fourth Quarter 1998

Letters to the Editor (regarding: The Image of God: Male & Female: A Conversation about Women and Men Working Together, Third Quarter 1998) 

Dear Editors:

Thanks very much for the "conversation" you held in the recent issue of the Public Justice Report. As I have come to expect from everything produced at the Center for Public Justice, it was wonderfully balanced and sane.

Still, I hope you'll take the next step and tackle some of the more difficult and not so obvious issues surrounding the gender question. For example, take the issue of both parents raising the children. Mardi Keyes is wonderfully articulate about the need for fathers to be more nurturing, and spend more time with the children. But how we work this out in practice can be daunting. For instance, you say it seems unjust if both spouses cannot pursue God's call in both public and private life. Some scenarios make "justice" difficult. There are families around here who strongly believe in the home-schooling solution to education. What this often means in practice is that one parent (usually, but not always, the mother) ends up at home, with no real possibility of a public life at all. In fact, her or his social life can be severely challenged as well.

Another example is the issue of gender difference. What are the biblically legitimate differences of the sexes? You do mention that we sometimes communicate differently. But there is lots more. Granted Peter's pronouncement on the weaker sex is now rightly understood as a social commentary not a prescription. But is all the talk of male lordship first-century abuse? Are there no significant differences in being and function that can help us strive for more complementarity within the bounds of justice? Is motherhood quite the same as fatherhood? Is office never related to being? Paul's language in Ephesians has surely been distorted, and we now know he is talking about mutual authority, not one way dominion. Yet his metaphors and illustrations are not always reversible. A husband's headship is not the same thing as a wife's authority, though of course equality can never be compromised. But what exactly is he saying?

Prof. William Edgar
Westminster Theological Seminary
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I was so glad to see the beginning of the Center's gender conversation in the last Public Justice Report. I think this discussion is important and Michelle's presentation of "Biblical Feminism" is exactly the kind of work that my students need to be presented with—a Christian professional woman engaged in thinking through the "gender debate" in a thoughtful way. Because you invited comments, though, I'd like to add the following.

I'm almost 40. Women of my generation went to college believing that gender issues were things of the past. We were mentored by men; we went to law school and professional schools in droves; we worked hard and were promoted often. Those of us that were introduced to and committed to perspectives like the Center's at a relatively young age assumed that gender didn't really figure into the kind of thinking we were doing. Then we got married, had kids and came head to head with a new set of problems . . . not the "housework" issues—we were smart enough to marry men that assume running a house is the job of both partners. Rather, we are engaged in a societal conflict about what it means to be male or female: did God create us different, or did God create us the same?

The current debate isn't between men and women but between the group of men and women that are "essentialists" [who think there are essential differences between men and women] and the group of men and women that believe we are created to do the same work in the same way. This debate has tremendous implications for many of the public policy areas that the Center deals with —welfare reform and the education of children.

Prof. Julia K. Stronks
Whitworth College
Spokane, Washington

Your article "Male and Female" was upsetting to me. To begin with, public life and private life are never defined, especially relative to ecclesiastical office. Furthermore, although references to the Bible were made, clearly the positions stated were not adequately developed from the Bible nor did you ever state that the Bible provided the foundational answers to your male-female issues.

Your article rides on a type of presumption that you are right without sufficient evidence presented to convince us of its rightness. Some of the clearer and stronger passages are I Cor. 11:2-26; 14:34-35; Eph. 5:22-23; Col. 3:18-19; I Tim. 2:11-15; and I Pet. 3:1-7. When you can clearly exegete all these to be egalitarian, then frankly your doing so will be very helpful. You will have defeated a lion, not just a rabbit.

Personally, I think that your ideas on male and female in government and the work place are good and helpful, but how you come to these ideas for certain public spheres and then come up with different applications for church office or marriage isn't spelled out. Are there exceptions to your "egalitarian" generality?

Dale Claerbaut
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania