Women Preachers and Willow Creek

Tomorrow my friend Scott Polender gets to preach at Bethany Chapel in Wheaton on a text that includes these verses: “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

That is an explosive passage, and I have been praying for Scott as he prepares his sermon. I don’t know what he is going to say. I do know that he will take these verses seriously – he won’t joke about them or skip over them or apologize for them – and he will thoughtfully integrate them with the rest of the verses in the context and with the Bible’s message as a whole. For that I thank God.

I believe it is possible for sober-minded Christians to arrive at different conclusions about these words from St. Paul. To paint with broad strokes, some will say, “These words are consistent with other Bible passages that promote male leadership in the home and in the church, and they are grounded in creation order. Therefore, women shouldn’t preach or hold the office of elder.” Others will say, “St. Paul also says to greet one another with a holy kiss [Four times! Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26]. And Jesus commanded his disciples to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14). We recognize these commandments to be culture-bound practices that do not apply to us directly today, and the same should go for what Paul says about women teaching and leading.”

I think that there are fair arguments on both sides. Here I will go no further than that. By “fair arguments” I do not mean “equally valid,” or, “there’s just no way to decide between them,” or, “they’re both wrong and I alone understand the true synthesis.” I only mean that a cordial, reasoned, and even passionate discussion can take place between Christians who differ on this matter without either side denouncing the other or evicting their opponent from the room. I have no more to say about the specifics of that debate.

But I do have something to say concerning responses to this issue that I find foolish, cowardly, uncharitable, or downright dangerous.

Foolish: “St. Paul was a misogynist, right?”

The charge of misogyny against Paul can really only be brought by someone who has not read enough of him to have earned the right to give an opinion worth hearing in public discussion. Two questions should be asked of anyone who would accuse Paul of misogyny: (1) Have you read all 13 of his extant letters? (2) Were you awake when you read them? A little digging into the Pauline corpus will reveal texts so stunningly respectful of women that one could scarcely believe a first century Jewish Pharisee wrote them apart from divine inspiration: “In Christ there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28); “the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Corinthians 7:4). Most impressively, Paul insists that a husband must love his wife enough to submit to death by torture for her sake (Ephesians 5:25). Let me be clear. Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Hybels are all misogynists. St. Paul wasn’t.

Cowardly: Just ignore the problematic Scriptures.

I think this is the majority position in evangelical churches today. There are countless churches where you could attend every Sunday for a decade or more and never once hear a sermon that included an exposition of the passage in 1 Timothy 2 that I will hear tomorrow. The preachers at these churches don’t want to offend people, and so they avoid hard texts. The most common way of skirting difficult passages is to preach sermon series with names like “Elevate” or “Guardrails” and then cherry-pick Scriptures that are amenable to whatever point the preacher wants to make. Now I will say something blunt and adversarial. Pastors who shun hard verses should resign from the ministry and pursue other callings. Don’t go to their churches. You don’t want a sniveling coward as your shepherd. Go to a church where the preacher goes verse by verse through books of the Bible, thoughtfully acknowledges Scriptural authority, and sometimes says things you don’t like.

Uncharitable: Impugn the motives of those who disagree with you.

This temptation is so natural and so universal that it must be consciously resisted. (Hang it all, some might say I fell into it myself in the paragraph above when I accused preachers of cowardice for never expounding 1 Timothy 2. “Hey, lighten up - maybe some of those preachers just haven’t gotten around to it yet. And maybe they will before they die of old age." Hm. Possibly.)

It is a special duty to do one’s best to refrain from assigning foul motives in an issue so fraught with passion and likely to trigger outrage. Ask yourself, “Did I come by at least some of my opinions honestly? Maybe my opponent did too.”

Downright Dangerous: Grant indulgences to powerful people who agree with you.

The number of women who have accused former Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels of sexually inappropriate conduct has climbed to ten. He has denied all allegations. So at this point it is a he said/she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said. He’s guilty.

In reading the testimonies of the women staff members that Bill hit on, I noticed that a particularly painful element of the harassment was the fact that he had been so "pro-women." They acknowledged that he provided them with valuable mentorship, that he had opened doors of ministry that had been closed to them in more conservative churches, that he busted the glass ceilings and empowered them in ways that previous generations of women had never known. He was an evangelical feminist trailblazer! How could he, of all people, first exploit, and then discard and slander, the very women who had been his valued partners in ministry?

Among the thousands of lessons to be learned in combing through the wreckage of Willow Creek Church is this: please be on your guard against people who agree with you and are in a position of power to give you what you want. By satisfying your thirst, they can tempt you to hold back from calling them out quickly for their crimes. It’s a common pattern. Harvey Weinstein gives a budding starlet what she craves – a movie role - and in the aftermath his own lawyer lamely points out, “Weinstein didn’t invent the casting couch.” Donald Trump gives some evangelicals what they want – say, conservative judges and tax reform – and some of them go and make donkeys of themselves by never noticing that the man is a son of hell.

Some people who disagree with you have good hearts, and some people who agree with you - and can even do you a lot of favors - have bad ones.

"Can You Prove That God Is Compassionate?"

Yesterday a friend asked me an intriguing question. He wrote, “If an unbeliever asked you to prove from your own life that God is compassionate and gracious, what would you say?” He clarified that he was not talking about spiritual salvation. That is precisely what an unbeliever would doubt or disbelieve. The kind of evidence my friend was looking for would come not from the pages of Scripture but from personal experience. Is it possible, looking no further than the scope of one’s life, to find reasons for believing in the compassionate nature of God?

I think that a certain kind of answer might be quickly exposed as problematic. For example, suppose I say, “Here’s how I know God is gracious. Nine years ago, in my loneliness and wearied despair, God brought to me a woman whose sweetness of disposition no fantasy could contrive, and she agreed to marry me, and I became the most happily married man I have ever known.” But another could answer, “Very well for you. In my case, my wife treated me with ever-increasing rude contempt until she abandoned me to pursue lovers. Where was your compassionate God then?” Or suppose I say, “About 15 years ago, I thought I would lose my son, because his depressions were so severe that they led to suicide attempts and repeated hospital stays. But God mercifully adjusted the chemicals in his brain, and now he is a married, productive father of two who has not slit his wrists in more than a decade.” Another answers, “Yes. Well. My son cussed me out and took his life.”

It is hard to imagine any blessing, any joyous reception of God’s grace, to which some understandably embittered soul might not respond, “But I experienced the opposite! If your good fortune demonstrates God’s kindness, doesn’t my bad fortune demonstrate his cruelty? Your circumstantial evidence gets you nowhere, because I can always summon counterexamples. Is it not better to say that God is capricious, distributing good luck and bad in approximately equal loads, and the only reason you think he is good is because you conveniently ignore his nastiness? Or maybe God is beyond good and evil, and our notions of ‘compassion’ and ‘cruelty’ are really just human constructs that we project onto a God who transcends morality. Or maybe there is no God, and our delights and our tragedies are random events that we try to infuse with meaning by attributing them to the kindness of a good God or the discipline of an angry one. But all three hypotheses – a capricious God, a morally transcendent God, or no God at all – fit the facts better than your “God-is-kind-because-one-time-he-did-this-terrific-thing-for-me.”

To be clear, I do believe in God, and I even believe that things like my happy marriage and my son’s psychological restoration are signs of his grace. But these are not events upon which I would base any argument if trying to reason with a skeptic. If I were a skeptic myself, I think that such reasonings would fall flat because of the counterstrikes I have mentioned above.

But there is still an argument from experience which my internal skeptic has never been able to answer. And it concerns the fact that there indeed exists such a thing as compassion. Compassion is real, undeniable; we have all felt it and witnessed it, and even, at some point, delighted in it with joy inexpressible. If you are of a certain turn of mind, that joy is never more than five minutes from you. You can experience it now by going to YouTube and watching the viral video of 50 moms lip-synching and signing “A Thousand Years” with their Down Syndrome children. When I saw that video the other day I wept, like everybody else, and I told my wife about it, and she said she had seen it already, but she watched it again, and wept again. Maybe some of the moms in that video shed tears of grief when they learned that their babies would have certain limitations. But they had their babies anyway, and loved them, and they go on loving them – and now their manifestations of sweet compassion provoke in us not tears of sorrow but tears of delight.

Contemplate that delight. Give it a good, honest philosophical rumination from as objective a standpoint as your subjective mind can attain. Where does your appreciation for compassionate grace come from? What set of circumstances characterize the universe (or multiverse) as you understand it such that there wells up within you a joy beyond words when you see compassion incarnated in a mom doting on her struggling child?

It seems to me that all the non-God hypotheses fail to account for this phenomenon. They require too much faith, and insist that we accept not merely paradoxical mystery but flat-out contradiction and nonsense.

Suppose God is there but doesn’t care. He does not delight in compassion, nor is he the author of it. All he did was make us and our habitat (who knows why?) and set us adrift in the cosmos to go do our thing. How in the world then, as offspring of this non-moral God, did we manage to invent goodness? How did the stream rise higher than its source? I cannot for the life of me believe that we ourselves crafted mercy from scratch - perhaps in the hope that we could some day present it to God and tell him how much it would please us if he got on board with it. But God would only do that if he thought mercy were a good thing, and how could he think anything was “good” if he himself were beyond good and evil? To think something good you must first have some kind of goodness yourself! I do not see how something like compassion could ever “arise” from a non-compassionate originating force. But I can perceive how it might descend to lower plains from an Original that is goodness itself.

The same sort of thinking applies to the hopeless task of accounting for compassion in a universe that has no Maker whatsoever. In a Godless universe, all acts of compassion (along with all concepts, thoughts and events of any kind) are reducible to matter and energy, which in turn are reducible to – what, exactly? A fluctuating quantum field that randomly generates bubble universes? Something like that, I suppose. Author and poet Joy Davidman outlined the creed she once held as an atheist in these terms: "Life is only an electrochemical reaction. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy is only."

It is indeed possible to see the compassion of Down Syndrome moms and our responsive tears as electrochemical responses grounded in nothing but a series of cause-and-effect events that go all the way back to the Big Bang, and that, given the way atoms necessarily respond to forces acting upon them, could never have been otherwise. Of course, exactly the same would be true of the actions of a murderer-rapist and of the revulsion and rage that characterize our response to him. Compassion and mercy and cruelty and malice all stand on precisely equal grounds in a cosmos without God, and there is simply no reason to say that one set of actions is “better” than any other.

It cannot be said too often that Friedrich Nietzsche understood this point with bracing clarity. As Tim Keller likes to point out, Nietzsche has never been answered. (Here I candidly admit that I am in part relying on Keller’s authority. He has read a lot more philosophy than I.)

So I make my appeal to what I think is the right instinct in all of us, an instinct that keeps bubbling up and that can only be resisted by a deliberate act of the will and convenient forgetfulness. Compassion is a real thing, and it is good, and there is a reason why it delights us that is not ultimately the same as the reason for the existence of things like malice and oppression. The simple truth is that compassion is an attribute of our Maker, and we delight in it because he does.

Once you have come to accept (whether by faith, revelation, or deduction) that God exists and that he is compassionate, then I think you are able to relish the significance of a story like that of Lisa and the rainbows.

On Mother’s Day 2001, Lisa’s husband suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack right in front of her. Russell Krausfeldt was just 40 years old, a good man much beloved by all who knew him. Their children were 14, 11 and 5. For many months afterward, Lisa would not wear makeup, because it ran when she cried, and she never knew when she would burst out in tears.

As you can imagine, Mother’s Days in succeeding years were very difficult for her. But a consoling sign came to her on Mother’s Day 2002. She saw a rainbow in the sky that day, and it pleased her, and she received it as a gentle indicator of God’s ongoing love in the midst of her trial. But God wasn’t done. The next year, again on Mother’s Day, she saw another rainbow. Then the year after that, the same maternal holiday arrived with a third consecutive rainbow – each one refracting to a widow’s eyes the light of God’s grace.

Lisa told me that by the fourth year she was a bit stronger and did not “need” the rainbow as she did on previous Mother’s Days. (Of course she looked for one anyway, but contented herself when they ceased appearing). Move ahead to 2009, when I met and courted her so quickly that poor Lisa got stuck with the task of informing friends and family that in a few weeks she would be marrying a guy none of them had heard of. Naturally they had questions and doubts. When she called Russell’s mother with the news of her sudden engagement, she found that she needed to defend the wisdom of her decision. “Are you really sure you want to marry this man?” In the course of this difficult conversation, Lisa happened to turn around and look out the window. There was a rainbow.

I know what that meant. God, in an act of gracious compassion, gave to one of his daughters the sight of four rainbows: three to comfort her in the loss of a good husband, and then an extra to encourage her in the acceptance of a serviceable one.