Jesus and Gender

or "Being a Pretty Princess"

It is a documented fact that evangelical Christianity struggles to attract blokes, and does much better with women. Various theories have been advanced as to why this might be. Probably the most popular one is that we're just not doing church right - our songs are overly sentimental, our preaching isn't action-packed enough, our vision of Jesus isn't macho enough. Church doesn't feel very blokey.

Some of those things might be valid concerns, to a certain extent. But I've been wondering whether the Christian message is stucturally anti-male, and I suspect it is - and I suspect that isn't a problem.

Psalm 45 is my jumping-off point here. The Psalm celebrates a royal wedding. It celebrates the greatness of the King, and the beauty of the Princess he is about to marry. If read Christologically (and it must be, both as a general hermeneutical principle and because of the juxtaposition of verses 6 and 7), this is a celebration of Christ's love for the church. And it's magnificent - he the Royal Lover, she the Beautiful Princess wooed away from her people.

A combination of this Psalm and John Owen's insistence that marriage is the primary image for understanding our relationship with Christ leads me into Ephesians 5:22-33. In this passage, two things become clear. One is that the roles of husband and wife in marriage are not symmetrical or reversible; the other is that in the relationship of Christ and the church, he is husband and we are bride.

So the gospel assigns the church a feminine part. It would be interesting to explore exactly what that means, but for now suffice to say this is going to be a problem for people who want a more macho, man-friendly church.

Is this a problem for the gospel? I guess not. Maybe Christianity is more attractive to women - well, so be it. You don't have to follow the modern feminist critique all the way (and I wouldn't recommend following it very far), but it is clear that women have been kept at the margins in most societies most of the time. And doesn't the gospel speak mainly to the sidelines? For me as a man, the question is: can you accept that you are beautiful to your divine Lover and Husband, and not need to be the man in this relationship? Because ultimately, The Man is the man.

Interesting to compare the reactions of the church and the Bible. The church says "we need to man up, we need to appeal to men"; the Scripture says "if it helps, He does think you're a very pretty Princess".

No more apostles, thanks

The Bish has been writing about apostles, and why he (with newfrontiers as a whole) thinks they are around, and needed, today. I feel the need to offer a contrary opinion, although hopefully not just for the sake of being contrary. I have a lot of respect for newfrontiers as a movement, but this is one of those things that I think they just have completely wrong, for a couple of reasons. Go read Dave's post first - otherwise this won't make much sense.

The reasons I object to this talk of modern-day apostles would include:

1. It's an ahistorical argument. It can be demonstrated that the word 'apostle' is used in the NT to describe several different sorts of people - but two millennia have passed since then. We can't just ignore the fact that the word 'apostle' has had, since the 2nd century at least, a technical meaning in the church. It refers to the twelve, plus Paul. newfrontiers seem to want to skip over all this history as if it never happened, as if we could ignore the history of the church and live in the book of Acts. We can't, and we're not meant to.

2. It's an anti-ecumenical argument. It has a tendency to place evangelicals who do not recognise any 'apostolic influence' outside the church. The church is, after all, apostolic! And if we define apostolic the way newfrontiers would like us to, all independents and presbyterians are outside the church.

3. It's an argument that undermines the uniqueness of the eye-witness generation. This is not Dave's argument about the sufficiency of Scripture, although it is similar. The church is apostolic because it listens to the apostolic witness - whether actually written by the apostles or not. This witness - the witness of those who saw his glory - stands as the foundation of the church. The foundation is in one sense part of the house, but in another sense is a separate thing, the necessary precondition of the house. So the apostles were in one sense the beginning of the church, and therefore a part of it, but in another sense they stood apart from it. That is important - it means the church is always faced by a standard that is in some sense external to it, namely the record of the apostolic witness in Scripture. A continuing apostolate is theologically disastrous, because it must tend to undermine the distinction between the apostles, who always speak to the church in Scripture, and the church, which always hears the apostles in Scripture.

4. It's an argument that dethrones Christ in his church. This is a more controversial point, because it cuts against bishops, presbyteries and the like as well as contemporary apostles. Christ rules his church by his word; God's people are entrusted to that word, not to successor-apostles. I am of the opinion that this means congregationalism - I have quoted Barth to this effect elsewhere.

5. I can't help thinking it must be a personally unhelpful label for people to bear. But I can't say much about that, with my limited experience of those involved.

6. It is hardly reformed thinking! That's not very important, except that when you stretch definitions this far I wonder whether they mean anything at all anymore...

Here endeth the controversy. Perhaps.

Knowledge and People (postscript)

To clarify all that has gone before...

I do not think that anything that I have written achieves anything more than putting a necessary question mark against the ratio-empiricist view of the world. It proves nothing, disproves nothing. I'm happy with that as a result. Ultimately, it is only the ratio-empiricist view of the world that demands proof in this way.

If I were to begin writing this again, I could begin from a totally different point. Rather than a philosophical starting point, we could have a Biblical one. Consider the throwaway comment of the Apostle Paul in Galatians 4:9...

But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God...

The description that Paul gives of becoming a Christian has two sides to it - coming to know God, and coming to be known by God. They are the two sides of a personal relationship. The 'knowing' here is not an epistemic term, but a relational one. This is therefore a question of revelation - as any personal relationship is. I cannot force you to relate to me, nor can I decide by myself the depth of our relationship: that is decided by the extent to which we reveal ourselves to one another. Similarly here.

But this relationship, for all its genuine two-sidedness, is not symmetrical. The "or rather" is significant. It doesn't undo the first clause, but it does relativise it. Your coming to know God happens in the context of God's coming to know you. His action is decisive in a way that yours is not. He reveals himself - opens himself to personal relationship - in your direction, and you respond. Numerous other Biblical passages, in Old and New Testaments, paint the same picture.

If reality is ultimately personal, this is how it must be. Ultimate reality is personal, therefore ultimate knowledge is relational. This will never sit well with the ratio-empiricist. He demands the right to be a spectator, an analyst. From the point of view of the analyst, all of this relational behaviour can be explained away - and I should say, very successfully and tidily explained away. No person is found here. No relationship is founded here.

Why am I Christian then?

Because I am confronted by an undeniable Thou - the God who reveals himself.

I am confronted by Jesus Christ.

Knowledge and People (3)

Apologies for the delay...

Why does all this matter?

I guess there are two effects that I see. One is relational, the other epistemological, but they're very closely intertwined.

Relationally, it becomes very hard to take other human beings seriously. Reductionism becomes the best approach. We think we can analyse the behaviour of another in much the same way that we would analyse the behaviour of an animal. You hear people say things like "love is just a combination of hormones" - meaning, I think, initially, other people's experience of love. Conversation becomes farcical on this view. The fact that we do actually have conversations, and do actually fall in love, betrays that the ratio-empiricist view does not capture all our experiencs: there is a Thou out there behind the face of this human being. Thank God for inconsistency in this regard!

There is an alarming possibility here. Most recently I have heard several people deconstruct their own experience of love in the way demanded by ratio-empiricism. What is happening? I suspect that we are seeing the loss of the primacy of the subject. People are applying their reductionist understanding of the Other to themselves. I cannot believe that this really reflects their experience of being themselves; it is a stifling interpretive grid. Unable to view others as truly human, they come to view themselves as less than human as well. We truly do need other people to know ourselves at all.

Epistemologically, acquiring knowledge becomes all take and no give, or perhaps no receive. In a world where I am the only subject, all learning is by analysis and systematisation of what I experience around me. This seems to lead into the loss of a concept of testimony. Although philosophers acknowledge that testimony is one of the most basic and common speech acts, and although in actual fact we would all have to admit that the overwhelming majority of what we know has been learned through testimony, ratio-empiricism tends to distrust it. In the absence of a genuine other, what can testimony be?

This then has an effect on the way we approach texts, for example (there is at least one person reading this who knows that I am now trespassing on his area of expertise. I'll try not to leave dirty footprints). Is it not inevitable that a text becomes an object to be manipulated in any direction we see fit on this worldview? After all, we cannot be assured of the existence or significance of the author (and this is as true for a living - even a present - author as it is for a dead or absent one), so why should we not take a text in whatever way we choose? I wonder whether ratio-empiricism makes knowing inherently violent...

To this whole worldview, Christianity asks three questions:

1. Given the fact that your worldview cannot account for central human experiences, why should we follow it?

2. Given that all your arguments against Christianity are based on this worldview, why should we take them seriously?

3. Have you considered that ultimate reality might be personal?

Knowledge and People (2)

So, what exactly is my problem with ratio-empiricism?

It's all to do with the way this epistemological viewpoint understands the relationships between me and the world. Ratio-empiricism inherits from its parent views the basic orientation of a thinking/experiencing subject confronted by a world of passive objects. I am the subject; everything else is an object. Now, in one sense this is a simple truism. As Kant so helpfully pointed out, it must be possible for me to attach the label "I think" to every one of my thoughts and perceptions - that is to say, I am the subject of all my thoughts and perceptions. If it were not so, they would not be my thoughts or experiences.

(As an aside - and feel free to skip this paragraph - this is actually not nearly so simple as it sounds. Kant himself ends up reducing the "I" which is subject to nothing more than a logical tag - quite literally, an ownership label which holds thoughts/perceptions together in one consciousness. The problem emerges most clearly when you consider introspection: me thinking about myself. It must be possible for me to say "I think" about these thoughts, or they are not mine. But the "I" in "I think" is the subject of the thought, whereas the thought itself is of me as an object. How "I" become an object to myself is quite difficult. Kant avoids the problem by maintaining that "I as subject" and "me as object" are completely different, the former being noumenal. Well, that's transcendental idealism for you.)

This orientation - a thinking/experiencing subject confronted by a world of objects - will get you a long way in the natural sciences. Any critique of this viewpoint cannot be absolute, but must be simply a qualification - if you like, a "yes, but..." Still, it is possible for a "but..." to raise such a fundamental question that one is forced to revisit the "yes" and reconsider it. This is, I think, one of those cases.

Because there is simply no room in this world of subject/objects for people. There is, presumably (although this concept is not without problems), one person - me - but there are no others. A person, I take it, is someone who can themselves be a subject in the same way that I can be a subject. Obviously, not a subject of my thoughts/perceptions, but a subject of their own thoughts/perceptions - another centre of consciousness.

Qualifications: obviously, there will be a sense in which another person is an object to me. And strictly speaking, ratio-empiricism does not of necessity deny that the object in front of me could be another centre of consciousness.

But ratio-empiricism does make this concept highly problematic (in both the common and Kantian sense). If knowledge really works the way the ratio-empiricist claims, or rather assumes, it does, then I am bound to treat the other person as a passive object. I am bound to approach them, epistemologically, as if they were not a person in the way that I am. The gap between my consciousness and theirs cannot be bridged in any way on this worldview. The idea of other conscious beings becomes something that is strictly beyond my ability to know: it can be thought, but not tested, and therefore lies outside knowledge.

There is no room for people in Kant's world.

If this isn't making sense, I promise it will start to come together tomorrow when I run through some of the implications as I see them...

Knowledge and People (1)

I haven't started writing yet, and I can tell this post is going to contain massive generalisations and over-simplifications, and yet still manage to be really pretentious. I'm sorry, I really am. Try to bear with it, I think it might be important.

Epistemology. Broadly, the discipline which discusses knowledge and seeks to express just how it is that we come to have it. I think we live in an age that is obsessed with epistemology. And I think that this raises quite a few problems.

Let me explain to you how I see the history of this issue. When I was studying philosophy at A level, we used to talk a lot about rationalists and empiricists. Your average rationalist privileges thought over experience, whilst your common or garden empiricist thinks that experience is what is most important. This is, of course, an over-simplification, but it helps us to see two big epistemological traditions in western philosophy. At the head of each stands a greek.

Plato is, if you like, King of the Rationalists. He thinks that what you see around you is all just shadow. What can be thought is much more important than what can be sensed. Plato loves maths, and also a good bit of mysticism, because these things are in the mind. He thinks general and universal things are much more exciting than particular or limited things. He loves to make systems of thought that are internally coherent, and barely cares whether these systems match the shadowy empirical world around him.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is Captain Empiricist. He loves to look around him at the world. He considers the main source of truth to be the senses, and thoughts are to be directed by experience rather than vice versa. He takes a keen interest in particular things - he enjoys cataloguing animals, for example - and is much less interested in mysticism. He likes logic - a lot- but mainly because it helps with the exploration and understanding of the world around him.

The philosophical descendants of Plato and Aristotle bickered for centuries.

The genius of the Enlightenment is the construction of a worldview which binds rationalism and empiricism tightly together. Science - as opposed to the random observation of facts in nature - is a perfect blend of rationalism and empiricism. A system is thought which explains prior (perhaps haphazard) observations, and then observations are made (systematically) to test the system. Plato and Aristotle are friends. Good friends. Their love-child (eww) is Kant, because Kant extends (or attempts to extend) the scientific method to metaphysics, and with it ethics and religion. He is quite explicit about this endeavour, and he really thinks that he has done it in his critical philosophy. No need to go into detail on that here.

So from Kant onward, ratio-empricism rules the roost in epistemological discussion.

Tomorrow: why ratio-empiricism is very, very bad...

Insecurity

The Christian gospel demands total insecurity from us, and offers us total security. This works itself out in different areas of life - yesterday I was thinking and chatting through three of them with Dan Halpin:

1. Righteousness

The most familiar, perhaps. The gospel offers total righteousness, i.e. the status of complete innocence and indeed moral perfection, through faith in Jesus Christ. But that faith demands that we abandon any and every other claim to righteousness that we might make. It is Christ or nothing. Hence "I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh". Hence, "I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own..."

It comes down to: be insecure in yourself, that you might be secure in him.

2. Planning for the future

The text is James 4:13-16, which speaks for itself really:

"Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil."

Only note the depth of insecurity - it is not "if the Lord wills, we will carry out our plans", but "if the Lord wills, we will live..." But within that insecurity, there is great security. The Lord's will is certain, and if we know him at all then we know that his will is good.

3. Preaching

Just a thought: when I have done everything necessary from a human standpoint to prepare to address people on God's behalf(!), it is still utterly impossible that I should do what I plan to do. I cannot speak God's word. As I mount the pulpit, I am utterly insecure. But God has promised to speak, and so in realising my inability and insecurity I am both able and secure.

(As an aside, you should read Glen's article on preaching at Theology Network - I read it, and behold it was very good).

All in all, I am radically undercut by the gospel. If I am to be justified in any of my endeavours, it must be in God through Christ.