This is Martin Bonner - Catch it While It's Hot

If you have access to the US Netflix, I recommend giving This is Martin Bonner a watch (it's only going to be up for another day or two). It's a film about a man who works for a Christian organisation that aids former prisoners in their emergence back into society. It's also one of the only films I've ever seen whose main character has a degree in theology! At just over 80 minutes it is a short watch, but I am still mulling over its contents.

And it's got Karl Barth in it.

Equal Yet Unequal

When I wrote my previous post on gender and the Bible I assumed I had settled the matter once and for all. It turns out that not everybody agrees with me. Hard as it is for me to accept that that’s true, it has also forced me to turn my gaze on my own position and work out exactly where I stand. This post will hopefully help me move toward that end. I will offer a very brief “history of exegesis” of 1 Corinthians 11 based on the commentaries that are available to me. Sound boring enough for you?

The “ancient commentary on scripture” series present a smorgasbord of early Christian interpretations of 1 Corinthians. The dominant thread running through these comments is that man and woman are equal in substance but different in terms of their relationship to one another. For some, the equality is stressed. For others, it is the difference that matters.

Chrysostom states that “Christ and God are equal in substance but different in relationship, and the same applies to man and woman” (105). Severian of Gabala insists that “the nature of man and woman is the same,” just as the nature of God and Christ is the same (105). The difference, then, is one of relations – the woman submits to the man. “For just as God has nobody over him in all creation, so man has no one over him in the natural world. But a woman does – she has man over her” (107).

Augustine is clear that both man are woman are images of God – images of the Trinity, in fact. But man is that part of humanity that has “the power of ruling” and woman is that part of humanity “that is ruled” (107). Ambrosiaster, while affirming the equality of substance between man and woman, claims that “the man has relational priority because he is the head of the woman. He is greater than she by cause and order, but not by substance” (107). The woman is “dependent,” whereas the man is “responsible” (108).

Epiphanius uses this text (along with 1 Tim. 2:12 and Gen. 3:16) as justification for denying women the office of bishop or presbyter (107-8). Theodoret of Cyrus appeals to the “order of creation” evident in this text as a way of explaining “the primacy of man.” After all, “the woman was created to serve him, not the other way round” (108).

Interestingly, out of all the texts given, only Pelagius references the new creation in Christ. He says that “The man is the head of the woman in the natural order but not in Christ, in whom there is neither male nor female” (104).

The problem with the “equality of substance” argument is that it tends to be largely meaningless. All it usually affirms is that both man and woman are homo sapiens. You could just as easily say that “Wuthering Heights” and “PS – I Love You” are equal in substance. They are both books, made out of paper with ink printed on them. But that doesn’t get us very far. It is the content that matters. And the content for humans is relational all the way down. Affirming the equal humanity of women is certainly a start. God knows that powerful humans often try to deny the humanity of those they seek to dominate and exploit. But humanity is always co-humanity, and these interpretations almost unanimously present co-humanity as men being the responsible rulers and women the dependent subjects. It is hard to argue that they have read Paul irresponsibly; his language, at the very least, makes these readings almost natural. But it is relatively easy to argue that they have not taken the “counter-testimonies” of the canon into account, as Pelagius did.

Skipping on a few centuries, Calvin, like Pelagius, notices an apparent contradiction in Paul’s thought. How does he reconcile 1 Corinthians 11:3 with Galatians 3:28? Calvin does so by appealing to the “spiritual kingdom” which is only in view in the Galatians passage. Here the equality between man and woman has nothing to do with their bodies, or with “the outward relationships of mankind.” Rather, it has to do with the mind and the inward conscience (354). 1 Corinthians 11, on the other hand, has to do with “civil order or honorary distinctions, which cannot be dispensed with in ordinary life” (354). So while “spiritually” there is no regard paid to the difference between male and female, “external arrangement and political decorum” dictate that a relational “inequality” exists, such that woman follows man.

Calvin also addresses the discord between Paul telling women to cover their heads while they prophesy (1 Cor. 11:5) and Paul telling women to be quiet in the Church (1 Tim. 2:12) by claiming that Paul was simply delaying his condemnation of female prophesying for another date, and that by condemning their uncovered heads he does not commend the prophesying (356). This, it must be said, is yet another disastrous example of the kind of exegesis that happens when scripture must be perfectly squared with itself. Calvin’s logic is flawless, but it only serves to show how limited the role of logic is when it comes to faithfully reading the text.

In relation to Paul’s phrase that man is the image and glory of God, and woman is the glory of man (1 Cor. 11:7), Calvin is pretty much in line with early Christian interprets: substantial equality but relational inequality. The man is therefore “superior” to the woman and has “pre-eminence” over her (357). The woman is the “distinguished ornament of the man” (in The Message translation of Calvin, she is “the man’s trophy wife”), the “product” whose “cause” and whose “end” is man (357-8).

This is a brief selection of the interpretations of 1 Corinthians 11 which the Church has produced and inherited down through the ages. I will tackle some of the more modern interpretations in another post, but I will make three comments based on the above snippets.

First, early Christian interpreters were well capable of criticising the literal meaning of biblical texts when they didn’t conform to reason or moral sensibilities. There is no such criticism levelled at this passage, however. The “order of creation” argument made sense in their world. The relational superiority of men made sense. Indeed, texts like 1 Corinthians 11 perpetuated that norm.

This raises a question which was also raised in the comments section of the first post on this topic: on what grounds can we criticise this norm? Is patriarchy “normalised” by the scripture’s rootedness in patriarchal societies? If Paul was patriarchal, does this make patriarchy the norm? And if he was patriarchal, on what grounds can we criticise his patriarchy? Paul, after all, told us to imitate him. Does that mean we should imitate his patriarchy?

Second, the witness of the canon is acknowledged by both Pelagius and Calvin to be in (apparent) tension. Calvin resolves this tension in the interest of preserving a univocal canon. Pelagius’s brief comment lets the tension hang in the air. Should this canonical tension be resolved? Or can one part of scripture be countered by another part of scripture without losing the authority of scripture? What would the authority of a diverse and “tense” canon look like? How would this authority be exercised?

It should be no secret by now that I think that scripture is countered by scripture in numerous places. I think a doctrine of scripture (and a hermeneutical method) have to reflect this diversity. The principle of scripture interpreting scripture is a sound one, provided it is not used to explain away the troubling nature of certain texts.

Third, Calvin’s distinction between the spiritual kingdom and the “ordinary life” which we live in the world has had a long shelf life. I have had plenty of conversations with people where we largely agree on the radical message of the gospel and yet disagree over whether this radical message can or should have any impact in the here and now. In theological jargon, there is very little realized eschatology around today. Paul, who said that “if anyone is in Christ, there is new creation: the old has gone and the new has come”, would surely be horrified at Calvin’s exegesis, and his relegation of the kingdom to the human conscience.

As I said in the original post, Paul should be read graciously and critically. Critically, because he was unable to see the full extent of the “crater” that was created by the explosion of his gospel message.  Graciously, because the gospel which he preached was the gospel of Christ, who is the good news.

Who Then Should I Kill?

I stumbled upon Richard Dawkins's website today. He wrote an article defending his recent tweets about rape and paedophilia and logic. It's his description of moral philosophy that's most intriguing, however. He begins the article with these paragraphs:

Are there kingdoms of emotion where logic is taboo, dare not show its face, zones where reason is too intimidated to speak? 

Moral philosophers make full use of the technique of thought experiment. In a hospital there are four dying men. Each could be saved by a transplant of a different organ, but no donors are available. In the hospital waiting room is a healthy man who, if we killed him, could provide the requisite organ to each dying patient, thereby saving four lives for the price of one. Is it morally right to kill the healthy man and harvest his organs? 

Everyone says no, but the moral philosopher wants to discuss the question further. Why is it wrong? Is it because of Kant’s Principle: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” How do we justify Kant’s principle? Are there ever exceptions? Could we imagine a hypothetical scenario in which . . . 

What if the dying men were Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein and Martin Luther King? Would it be then right to sacrifice a man who is homeless and friendless, dragged in from a ditch? And so on. 

Two miners are trapped underground by an explosion. They could be saved, but it would cost a million dollars. That million could be spent on saving the lives of thousands of starving people. Could it ever be morally right to abandon the miners to their fate and spend the money on saving the thousands? Most of us would say no. Would you? Or do you think it is wrong even to raise such questions? 

These dilemmas are uncomfortable. It is the business of moral philosophers to face up to the discomfort and teach their students to do the same.

It is true that moral philosophy has been (and continues to be) practised along these lines. But my word is this the most boring and pointless way to do moral philosophy, not to mention the most morbid. Moral philosophy, it seems, boils down to who we should kill!

You can either throw Andres Iniesta into a pool of piranhas or starve 2 homeless men to death. Which should you do?

Your father and mother are drowning in the ocean. You are only able to rescue one of them on your two-person dinghy. Your father is a surgeon who saves hundreds of lives a year. Your mother is a social worker who transforms the lives of families in poor communities. Your father has cancer and will die in a year. Your mother has a brain tumour, but she will live if it is operated on. The only person in the world who can operate on her is your father. Who should you save?

While fun for about three minutes, this is the worst form that moral philosophy can take. Rather than it being the business of moral philosophers to face up to these uncomfortable and useless dilemmas, it should be the business of moral philosophers to once and for all put this way of doing moral philosophy to death. Ironically, it has no utility.

A Response to Kevin's Blog Series

Over at Creideamh Kevin has just completed a perceptive blog series on The Meaning of Marriage by the Kellers, which culminated in a review of Trevor Morrow’s Equal to Rule. Rather than having to wait each day for a new episode, the whole season can now be watched in one sitting. That’s the beauty of the Netflix age.

To summarise, Kevin praised the Keller’s for being complimentarians who are as uncomplimentarian as it’s possible to be while still remaining complimentarians. But then he criticised them for the implicit (and explicit) natural theology which props up their perspective, and for the subordinationist doctrine of the Trinity which appears at important junctures. (I wonder if in fact these two problems are simply two sides of the same coin, with the Trinitarian life of the God-head receiving its intelligibility from the natural world. The complimentarian position then becomes a way of “explaining” or “understanding” the ineffable mystery of the Trinity. As Augustine once said, if you understand it then it isn’t God. Basing a social ethic off of it implies understanding it, and claiming to understand it is a sign that it isn’t God!)

Whether the Kellers are guilty of what Kevin charges them with I don’t know, because I made a vow before God never to read another book on “relationships.” But Kevin is a gracious and judicious reader of texts, so there is good reason to trust his argument.

There is one issue I have with Kevin’s series which I’ve highlighted in the comments, and which he touched on in the final instalment. It is the issue of biblical interpretation. Kevin, based on Morrow’s book, describes the following hermeneutic:

You begin in Genesis 1 and 2 with equality. In Genesis 3 there is Fall and the distortion of gender identity that produces, among all the other chaos, misogyny and the rest of the sin that we bear. But from that point onwards the culture-transcending revelation of God pierces through with judges and prophets and poets and saints that direct our attention to the restoration of creation’s goodness. This comes to fruition in Jesus, and Morrow reads the succeeding letters of the New Testament as part of the real-time working-out of what the Kingdom means for worshipping communities. Figuring out what it means for gender is why we have the passages over which people battle.

This is a hermeneutic that will go a long way toward figuring out what it means to live in the Kingdom, but I have one problem with it. The word which pierces us is not “culture-transcending” – or at least not all the time. The fall pervades even the biblical text. The word which (when read in a certain way) calls us out of patriarchy is also implicated in the very patriarchy which it calls us out of. This is why figuring what the Kingdom means for gender necessarily involves critical reading. This isn’t a simplistic criticism which lambasts Paul for how wrong he was. Nevertheless, it is possible to be critical of Paul while being faithful to the Gospel which he preached. Consider some of New Testament scholar and United Methodist minister Richard Hays’s comments on 1 Corinthians 11.

This is a difficult text that has been omitted from the revised lectionary. In it Paul speaks of man being “the image and glory of God” and woman being “the glory of man”. Hays says that “regrettably, Paul gets himself into a theological quagmire” (186). This is regrettable, argues Hays, because Paul’s interpretation of Genesis 1:27 is faulty, most likely based on a tradition which sees only the man as the original image-bearer. This interpretation leaves Paul espousing “the ontological priority of the male” (187). Hays says that “[Paul’s] arguments may appear unpersuasive and objectionable to modern readers, but there is no point in attempting to explain away what Paul actually wrote” (187).

What is also interesting about this passage from 1 Corinthians 11 is that Paul appeals to “nature” (physis) as a source for normative behaviour (1 Cor. 11:14). This appeal, Hays writes, was characteristic of Stoic and Cynic philosophers (189). Given the Corinthians’ love of Greek wisdom Paul perhaps adopts it as a rhetorical device, but he nevertheless adopts it. Barth’s “nein!” may quite rightly be aimed in Paul’s direction at this point.

Hays’s “reflections for teachers and preachers” offers some practical advice on how such a passage can help us to figure out what it means to live in the Kingdom. First, he says that we should practice “hermeneutical honesty,” never pretending to understand more than we can (190). This is a culturally-conditioned text whose details often lie beyond our grasp. Yet Hays states that all texts are culturally conditioned, and so the cultural idiosyncrasies of this particular text do not mean that it does not apply to us. Rather, it applies to us as much as any other text.

Hays says that the aim of Paul’s letters in general (and this letter in particular) “is to reshape his churches into cultural patterns that he takes to be consistent with the gospel” (190). Hays then brings the following question to 1 Corinthians 11: are Paul’s directives persuasive on their own terms? In other words, does Paul mount an argument that is consonant with his own theological vision? (190) Hays’s answer is yes and no. On the one hand, the created distinction between man and woman is consonant with Paul’s theological vision. On the other hand, the hierarchy which he justifies based on a “problematical exegesis” of Genesis leads to a weak argument (190-1). What then should we do with this passage? Hays offers three pieces of advice.

First, the created distinction between man and woman should be upheld by the church. “We are not disembodied spirits,” says Hays, and so the particularity of our bodies should be reflected in our dress and appearance (191). Second, Hays sees in this passage a Pauline argument for the functional equality of men and women. He goes so far as to say that “[a]nyone who appeals to this passage to silence women or to deny them leadership roles in the church is flagrantly misusing the text” (191). Third, Hays says that the “patriarchal implications” of verses 3 and 7-9 must be confronted. How should we confront them? Hays suggests that we consider other readings of Genesis that might challenge Paul’s and which “might lead us to conclusions about the relation between male and female that are not precisely the same as Paul’s” (192).

Another strategy suggested by Hays is to begin with the clause “God is the head of Christ” and to explore what this headship might mean within a Trinitarian understanding of God. Hays claims, rather uncontentiously, that Paul had no explicit doctrine of the Trinity (192). He also claims that Paul appears to operate with a subordinationist Christology (see 1 Cor. 15:28). According to Hays, the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity actually works against the subordinationist implications of Paul’s argument. These suggested strategies do not lead to “simplistic arguments about whether Paul was right or wrong” but rather “enable us to rethink more deeply the substantive theological issues raised by his treatment of hairstyles in the worship of the Corinthian church” (192).

I offer Hays’s interpretation of this contentious Pauline text as a way of showing how a gracious and judicious reading of the biblical text might be carried out. Bringing this back to Kevin’s series, it is interesting that the charge of “natural theology” or “subordinationism” could be levelled at Paul’s own work on gender relations. This leads me to believe that as long as Paul cannot be read critically, the complimentarianism of the Kellers will continue to flourish.