Sheila
Do only women get to serve like Jesus? Are only women supposed to emulate some of the Jesus passages in Scripture? We’re going to be talking about that today on the Bare Marriage podcast. Hello, I am Sheila Wray Gregoire from BareMarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence based biblical advice for your marriage. And I am joined today by my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach. And yeah, we’re going to go over a really cool article that was sent to us and listen to some clips and just talk about some of the arguments that a lot of us hear about gender roles in the evangelical church and how we can better understand them. So it’s going to be a fun one.

Before we get started, a shout out to our Spanish translation work that is now live. We’ve got podcasts that are translated into Spanish. We looked specifically at the ones on how to make sex work well, because we’ve got The Good Girls Guide to Great Sex in Spanish, and we’ve got the Orgasm Course in Spanish. So we’re trying to get like, not all of our resources. It’s too much, but the one specifically about, hey, how sex works, because I’ve had so much feedback. We did a kind of a poll of some of our Spanish speaking fans last year and asked what, what is the biggest need? And they said, just basic sex ed. So that’s what we’re doing first. And then if this goes well, we’re hoping next year to do the Great Sex Rescue.

Thank you to everyone who has been donating through our Patreon at Patreon.com/BareMarriage. And to those who gave money through the Good Fruit Faith initiative of the Bosco Foundation, that is tax deductible within the United States. Whatever the proper term is, you get, you get, you get deductions on your taxes and we’ll put those in the podcast notes, those links.

And yeah, without further ado, you want to jump in. Okay. So one of the things I want you all to understand is that I don’t spend my life online trying to find terrible takes or good takes. I just don’t have time. And so the majority of stuff that I get is because other people send them to me. And this week, I got it, or not this week as I’m recording this several weeks ago. Yes, I got this really great article by a woman named Renee. And it’s in the Priscilla Papers, which is a publication of the Christian for Biblical Equality. And it was in the summer edition, and it’s called consider others as more important than yourselves is Philippians 2 – 3 to 11 for everyone or just for women? By Carly Pruetch. And I’m sorry, I don’t know how to pronounce her last name. Really, really interesting article. And I want to look at it. And she’s specifically highlighting some of the arguments that Kathy Keller makes in the book that she wrote with her husband, the late Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, because Kathy was the one who wrote the chapter specifically on gender roles and marriage. And so in this article in the Priscilla Papers, this woman’s walking through how a lot of compliments are using Philippians 2 as teaching on how women should act. And they’re ignoring that this is advice for Christians for all Christians, yes, regardless of gender. Yeah. And the reason that I wanted to go through this was because I think a lot of the arguments that are being made are stuff that we just hear. They’re like in the water. And I thought if we could, if we could look, look at them little by little, maybe we’ll help you be able to just understand when you’re hearing stuff that sounds not quite right, but you don’t know what the issue is. So here we go. I want to start by reading from the article. Okay. I actually do you have it up. Do you want to read because you don’t need reading glasses and I’ve already put this in 20 points.

Rebecca
So here’s what Carly wrote.
The Philippian Christians would have faced the same temptations to assert their own prominence over one another that the culture around them widely celebrated. However, Paul audaciously called the believers to live in opposition to that norm. In one of the most famous passages in scripture, Philippians 2 – 3 to 11, Paul asks the Philippine Christians to do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. From verse three. He then exhorts them to have the same attitude as Christ Jesus, who profoundly upended all the norms of social status and hierarchy. Though fully God, he became fully human. Not only did he become one of us, but he also became the least of us, becoming what Paul called a slave. Jesus willingly identified with a group whose symbolic identity itself was shameful. Tragically, this radical, called mutual humility for all Christians has been co-opted by complementarians to do the very thing Paul wrote boldly against – secure status and power for some over others. We shall see how the call to consider others as higher than yourself and to adopt the same attitude as Jesus was a call to all Christians to subvert the power plays and status structures in their cultural context. Then we can examine how this passage has been used in complementarian spaces to unequally call women to adopt the selfless attitude of Jesus, while at the same time allowing men to adopt the attitude of Rome and grasp for the very power that Paul wanted them to give up.

Sheila
Yeah, I almost feel like we don’t need to say anything else, but we’re going to. No, seriously. Good article we are going to put a link to in the podcast notes. We’re not going to read the whole thing. That was two paragraphs. We’ll read it a few more later on. But seriously, a good article. And before we start, I want to read Philippians 2 – 3 to 4. Yeah. Because they’re often separated from 5 to 11, you know. So 5 to 11 is the famous passage, let the same mind be and you that was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, made himself nothing, and took on the form of him.

Rebecca
In the NKJV? And I memorized NIV.

Sheila
But you know. But we all know what. Hopefully we know what the passage is. You know that he took on human likeness

Rebecca
God did not consider his equality with God something to be grasped, but humbled himself, made himself

Sheila
Took on the form of human likeness.

Rebecca
Yeah, but it’s not what it is.

Sheila
Okay, well, whatever. You know. Okay. You know, let’s get the actual Bible out. What a thought!
Here you go. I want to focus on verses three and four first.

Rebecca
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross.

Sheila
Therefore God has highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow in heaven and earth, and honor to the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the father.

Rebecca
You used a couple of IV words in there from when you helped me memorize it.

Sheila
Okay, but I actually want to focus on verses 3 and 4 first.

Rebecca
Verse 3 and 4 is this: Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.

Sheila
Okay. And then there’s that break.

Rebecca
That break. And then it goes into the one that we were trying to figure out.

Sheila
Yeah. And what’s important to realize, of course, is that in Greek there aren’t breaks. And so those are those things. Yeah. Those are things that are often put in, you know, by translators, by editors to say, hey this is moving on to different topics to make it easier to read because like, if it was all one. Yeah. If it was all one big thing, we would find it hard. It’s like how there’s headings in magazine articles. Okay. But Paul didn’t necessarily mean for a break to happen there. Like he was thinking that that was all one thought. Now, in the article, she points out an argument that Nijay Gupta and Michael Bird make. Nijay Gupta, of course, has been on this podcast before with his book, Tell Her Story. He’s written a number of books about women in the New Testament and that phrase, consider others better than yourselves or more important than yourselves. They say it’s actually better translated higher in status, because that whole passage, if you look at it, is really about status. Because the Romans had a real issue with status, like your clothing, where you sat. They love status, like where you sat at a banquet, who got to speak first. These were all really, really important things. And so as the new church was forming, Paul had to deal with this cultural expectation of status and trying to undermine it. And so he’s saying, look, consider others, you know, of higher status than you. So give things up for them.

Rebecca
Be deferential, be overly kind and hospitable. And don’t consider yourself entitled to anything from them. Like, don’t put yourself in a position where you can benefit from someone else’s deference.

Sheila
You know what, Becca? The internet can sometimes be a really, really terrible place.

Rebecca
Absolutely.

Sheila
But I have a happy place.

Rebecca
We do.

Sheila
That is our patreon group on Facebook. It’s the place where I go when I need some encouragement. Where I just need to bounce something off of people to see if I’m crazy or not. And also where I get the best ideas for our podcasts and our blog posts.

Rebecca
Absolutely. And we also have a lot of fun there too. We’ve created a fantastic community where we, you know, share funny memes that we’ve seen throughout the week, and we talk about the terrible takes that we saw on Instagram. And you can go somewhere and know that you don’t have to defend your belief that women should have rights. So if you are looking for a way to support this podcast, if you love what we do and you want to give us a tangible step up, you can join our Patreon for as little as $5 a month and get access to our Facebook group, where you’ll get to join in the fun and know that you’re supporting a fantastic cause.

Sheila
To join our Patreon! It’s just Patreon.com/baremarriage, or take a look at the link in the podcast notes.
Yeah. So I want you to put a pin in that, because we’re going to come back to that at the very end, because I want to talk about how this relates to my upcoming book, Fawn. But yeah, this whole idea, this whole context of this is to undermine the power differentials and power dynamics that are happening in the church. Okay. And then and then Paul says, and so let the same mind be in you that is also in Christ Jesus. So, Carly Pruetch, the author of this article, then asks this question: what if only one side seeks to consider the other as higher than themselves? Would that truly embody Jesus’ example of submission in Philippians 2 – 5 to 11?
What happens when you have two parties and one decides it is the other party’s permanent role to take on Christ self-emptying for the good of the other person. Despite Paul’s call to all Jesus followers to have the same mindset as Jesus, how did submission become central to the identity of women as children of God? And to answer that, she uses Kathy Keller’s chapter in The Meaning of Marriage as an example.

Rebecca
And it’s a great example because the meaning of marriage is widely considered a very mainstream soft comp book. You know, we talk a lot about more fringe examples often. But even among what our mainstream evangelical books mean in marriage is one of the more, I would say it’s more one of the more nuanced and normal ones, like Love and Respect is bonkers.

Sheila
Absolutely bonkers.

Rebecca
Yeah. There was actually no excuse for believing that. That and people who are listening to like, amen, man, I don’t know why I did. But the Meaning of Marriage is one that slips by because it sounds so much more reasonable. And so it’s good that we’re talking about that one because I think that’s when people actually get tripped up because they can see theLove and Respect, they can see the Everyman’s Battle, but then they hear our pastor, speaking the Meaning of Marriage and it sounds good. And so then they stay stuck in this cycle of ending up in these toxic places. Yeah. That’s why I want to talk about it

Sheila
Exactly. Because you know Tim and Kathy Keller are, they’re thought of as, as they’re the nice ones. And I’m not trying to dispute that. Actually I saw an interesting video when I was searching for clips for this where Kathy said, Tim, people talk about how winsome and nice Tim was, but he was actually very like when he believed something he was very firm. And so anyway. But, you know, we do think of Tim Keller as the nice one. And, and I think he, he was he definitely tried to listen to people,

Rebecca
That there’s, there’s like I will say that I, this is one of those things where you have to, like, have the understanding of both and where you have a whole group of people who don’t see problems as human rights violations.

Sheila
Yes.

Rebecca
And for them, Tim Keller seems really nice. And for people who see these things as human rights violations, it’s hard to understand seeing Tim and Kathy Keller as nice. I will be honest
And so we’re not downplaying this when I’m saying we’re talking to the people who are still in it. These are the people who are the kind of people that they’re in your neighborhood. You’re probably not going to realize that they have these views, right? Like they’re probably like they’re nice community members. They seem to be attractive to people. They had these churches that people kept coming to because it was very seeker friendly, quite unquote, like that kind of stuff. And so, like, this is where we need to be able to grapple with both and here we’re talking about the fact that these people were not out here saying women shouldn’t vote, and they weren’t out here being like, well, I forgot my wife’s birthday and she was disrespectful.

Sheila
And they weren’t out there saying you should submit to being smacked around for a season. You should submit to abuse as John Piper said. Although as we’re going to talk about, they shared a stage with him and promoted him.

Rebecca
They’re just these squishy midground people which are really hard to pin down if you’re in evangelicalism, figure out why is this rubbing me the wrong way? Yeah. We’re not saying we agree with their takes. I just wanted to make that clear. Tim Keller had really, really strong takes on human rights issues that I feel very strongly about. Yes. That I want to be very clear that I’m.

Sheila
Yes, I, I completely agree with that. Okay. So I completely agree. So let’s, let’s listen to some clips from Kathy Keller because I thought, well, I can read from The Meaning of Marriage, but it might be better to hear from her. And she actually gave talks at some Gospel Coalition conferences of ten years or so, 12 years ago, where she was explaining what she wrote in The Meaning of Marriage. So we have several clips. The first one that I want to play is her talking about her own journey, in faith and how she came to believe in complementarism. And I think this is really important to set the stage.

Kathy
I grew up in a family that was not particularly religious, although we did attend and belonged to a local United Presbyterian Church. It was what is now the PCA USA. It was then the U.P., USA, and when I became a Christian in my teenage years, I felt God’s claim on my life very, very strongly and knew that I was meant for full time Christian ministry. And right about that time, the United Presbyterian Church started debating the issue of ordaining women. And I thought, cool, I’ll be ordained. That’s, you know, and I happily went under care of my session to prepare for ordination, started looking at seminaries. Doug Dunderdale was assigned to me for Pittsburgh Presbytery to be my advisor as I prepared to go under care for ordination at Pittsburgh Presbytery, which at that time was a very deeply divided presbytery, debating the pros and cons. The Wynn Kenyon case. For any of you who are old enough to remember that huge debate about ordination of women. It wasn’t until college that I ran into people who actually believed that the Scripture was trustworthy and God’s Word, and could be relied on and should be believed and accepted. And I started reading my Bible for the first time in college, and it seemed indisputably clear to me that God had assigned different job descriptions to men and women. Not better or worse, just different. And that ordination to the ministry and some other things were not given to women.

Rebecca
So she started reading her Bible for the first time in university, and then it was abundantly clear to her who had never really read her Bible before.

Sheila
Yeah, well, okay, I know where you’re going with this. There’s so many things I want. Can we want to take a different tack on this than I think the one you’re going to take? I know what you’re going to say. Okay. I want to start with, I believe that her experience was real because in a lot of what we would call the more liberal denominations, especially in the 70s and 80s, which is what she would have been talking about. Reading your Bible wasn’t a big thing. And to be honest, in a lot of these denominations, in some of them, there still isn’t this expectation that people are going to be doing devotions the way we have in the evangelical church.

Rebecca
One of the reasons why the evangelical patriarchal right wing mindset took such hold, was because more liberal and progressive churches did genuinely fail. And I’m happy to fully take the stance. Yeah, I failed.

Sheila
They did. And I want to say this loudly, yes.

Rebecca
This is an issue where they did not take up the mantle of spiritual discipline. Among the congregation. And so then people who were truly wanting to be that sold out for Christ or like wanted to dig deeper, many of them found that they did not find people who could do that with them in progressive or mainline spaces, and they ended up in right wing spaces.

Sheila
And that’s exactly what happened. And the fault of that, like you said, lies on these liberal denominations. I mean, in Canada, we think of the United Church for that, the Anglican Church, to a large extent, you know, that in some cases, some of the Presbyterian churches, that they just didn’t stress the spiritual disciplines. And so there was this vacuum and the evangelical church filled it.

Rebecca
And when we pretend that that’s not the case then we give people who are questioning their evangelical church a lot of fodder to not try out these churches, because a lot of these, these churches that are more mainstream are actually shifting these days. And becoming more because they’re realizing, wait a second, we have to actually make strong theological cases for things because we don’t have a culture of Christianity anymore. Yeah. You actually do have to convince people to come to church. Yes. Versus in the heyday of the mainline denominations, you didn’t have to convince people to go to church. They just went to church because that’s what we did.Right? Right. So things are actually changing. So when we say like try out like, have you tried one of the more mainline like areas and you’re probably picturing what Kathy’s talking about here. That’s not the case anymore.

Sheila
No. I remember when I went when you were a baby, we were living in Toronto and we went to an Anglican church in downtown Toronto, a little Trinity Anglican, and the vast majority of people there were not Anglican like they had come from. Yeah, it was a catchment church for all the evangelicals. It was like one of the first churches. We just didn’t realize we were in an evangelical church at the time. Yeah, it was totally ironic, but it had it, it had the expectation that you were going to read Scripture. It had, you know, sermons where you got deep into Scripture. It very much had that flavor of we take Scripture seriously. And that was in the 90s in the early in the, in the mid 90s. And so, you know, there are many Anglicans that do take Scripture seriously. But I believe Kathy, when she said that the first time she found people who actually took the Bible seriously was when she got to college and she basically met the fundamentals. And so that is on the mainline church. And I think what’s going to happen, at least, you know, I do believe that the church is going to split between those who follow Christ in order to get power and those who follow Christ out of love. And right now, we have both people in the same churches and even in the same marriages. And eventually that is going to split. And when it splits, the churches are going to be formed, not based on infant baptism or the gifts of the spirit or all the things that have traditionally divided us, I do believe they’re going to be split in terms of love versus power.

Rebecca
My church is already, like I’m part of a denomination where you’re able to join regardless of your tertiary and secondary doctrine. The uniting factor is the outreach and the love and the service. And anyway, that’s a whole other thing that I’d love to talk about.

Sheila
Yeah. And so I think as, as that happens, we’re going to see a lot of people who grew up in the evangelical church who were disabled in the evangelical church, joining a lot of people who maybe were discipled in the mainline church. And hopefully there’ll be a little bit of cross-pollination. So the evangelicals will bring the Bible knowledge and the disciplines.
And, you know, the fact that we have memorized Scripture and, you know, the others will bring more of the service attitude and the philosophy and the deep reverence and mysticism. I think there is something like the mainline churches that have such a deeper reference for Scripture in a lot of ways. Like, you know, I hear more Scripture in my Anglican church than I ever did at any evangelical church. And, just the idea of the Eucharist and how precious that is. So I hope there’ll be some cross-pollination. But anyway, my point is just listen to how Kathy is setting this up, as it was just so abundantly clear that women couldn’t be ordained. And she goes on to tell the story of how she insisted that she didn’t want to be an ordination track anymore. But she never gives room for the fact that there might be different biblical interpretations.

Rebecca
And to be very clear. During that decade, there were fantastic articles and books on how women could be ordained from a rigorous scriptural study.

Sheila
Do you remember? Did you see the reels that were going viral from NT right about a month ago or in the summer anyway?

Rebecca
The one we dealt with a long time ago. They have been going viral a month a year for 5 years.

Sheila
Yeah. But T Wright who was the Bishop of Durham in England. And has an amazing podcast with Michael Bird who we just talked about in this article with Ni Jacob. He was one of the ones in that Philippians 3 thing. But he was asked, he was on tour in the US recently and he was asked about women’s ordination, and he kind of laughed and said, I always get asked this. And it kind of flabbergasted me because we dealt with this 40 years ago, you know, and he’s really frustrated. But then he gives a very succinct, very good answer. And it was really good. I’ll see if I can find it and link to it in the podcast notes.

Rebecca
Yeah. If we can find it we’ll put it in the podcast notes.

Sheila
That was clip one. Let’s move to clip two now.

Kathy
A husband and wife living out their roles of headship and submission can display the fullness of the glory of Christ and the gospel in a powerful way. In Philippians 2, we’re told about Jesus in his submission to the father, dying for our salvation and rising to greater glory. In Ephesians 5, we’re told about Jesus in his headship of the church, exercising his authority by being a servant in order to provide his bride with whatever is necessary for her growth and perfection. For the sake of this discussion, I’m going to assume that we all here agree that the Bible is the only rule of faith and practice. God’s voice to us in areas in which he wants us to be happy and therefore obedient.

Sheila
Yeah. And then she goes on to say a few other things that we’re going to assume. But,

Rebec
I love how in both clips, this is what evangelicals do. Seriously. Here. Yeah. And they say like, well, then I found people who actually took the Bible seriously and they found. This is such a bad faith and a sloppy logical argument. That is a fallacy where you are presenting yourself as the only true option, or where you’re maligning at all other view points or interpretations.
You’re priming your audience.

Sheila
Yeah. What you’re doing is you’re equating your interpretation of Scripture with Scripture itself. And so you’re saying if you disagree with me, then you don’t take the Bible seriously, and which is not a good faith argument. And I believe Kathy Kelly takes the Bible seriously, I absolutely do. I also believe she’s wrong about this interpretation, but I believe she takes the Bible seriously. And I think in this day and age, to argue that if you take the Bible seriously, you will obviously believe in complementarism is simply. And I don’t know what the right word is, but there are so many books and it’s called. The majority of people who sit down to study this stuff become egalitarian when they honestly study it like, and just to assume that if you take the Bible seriously and agree with me, it is a take.

Rebecca
But here’s where you’re seeing exactly what that article was talking about. Where she says, we are to submit to our husbands as in Philippians 2. But Philippians 2 is not only for women.

Sheila
Exactly.

Rebecca
And it doesn’t make sense. Like what? What was it? Carly who? She was saying that Paul was specifically trying to get out of Roman status and power situations. And here they are using these segments of Scripture that are about removing power and using them to give power.

Sheila
Yes, I know, it’s insane. And he goes on in the Meaning of Marriage to argue that, you know, men take on this load of becoming like Christ and laying down their lives for their wives. And so. Yes. And so their way of emptying themselves to become like Christ. And Philippians 2 is to take on authority.

Rebecca
What they all say is that men also take on. They also lay down their lives because they will protect their lives, and they are the ones who would die for their wives if someone broke into the house or they do all sorts of these theoretical things. But in James. It also says that if you see someone on the side of the road, you say, I’ll pray for you. I care about you, but you do nothing. You are spitting on them like. It’s worse than doing something theoretical. Does it actually matter?Find me a place in the Bible where the theoretical matters. Like, I’d love it if someone could find me a part in scripture where it says the Christian life is about what you think you theoretically might do, if the opportunity sometimes does present itself in a statistically unlikely situation. Versus it’s like, no, it’s about how you are actually doing for the people in front of you who you have the ability to help. I would love for you to find me a part of the Bible that says that we are saved by what we think the best version of ourselves might do.

Sheila
Yeah. Okay, so now I want to do something different that we haven’t done before and I hope this works. But I want to play a longer clip by Kathy where she’s talking about how this submission headship thing is. It’s about two minutes and 20s. So it’s not overly long. You can handle it, people. But what often happens is that people will say all kinds of things, and at each point it’s like, okay, wait a second. That’s kind of weird. But because they’re just talking, you don’t have time to fully analyze it. And so I want us to get the experience of listening to two minutes and 20s, and then we’re going to listen to it again, but we’re going to stop it and comment on it bit by bit. Okay. Okay. So here we go.

Kathy
What about the submission of a wife? Well, I’m tempted simply to say that if you have a husband who understands his headship, then there can be no anxiety about submitting to a man who’s willing to die for you in order to serve you. But let’s not leave it there. If we look at Jesus in Philippians 2, this is what we read. Your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ, who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. And in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the father. Jesus’ submission leads directly to God being glorified. Keep that equation in your mind. The son’s equality as God was without question, but he took on the role of his servant. This is crucial to understanding gender roles or to any discussion of gender roles. Their roles. Roles okay. Roles. Has anyone been in the military? One of the first things they teach you is you salute the uniform, not the man or the woman in it. Okay. The role of this father and the son are not the same. The being of the father and the son are ontological equal. There’s your $20 word for the day. Ontological means in their essence. In their essence the father and the son are equally God. But the submission of Jesus to the father in taking the role of a servant in order to be our Savior was the role he assumed willingly. It meant that he assumed a role that was economically subordinate and economically here doesn’t mean anything to do with stocks and interest rates. It means in order to accomplish a task. His submission was not compelled or required of him. Would you please notice that it was a gift for the purpose of securing our salvation? And women who choose to be submissive to the gender roles God has assigned are offering that submission to God first, not to their husbands, for the purpose of creating a marriage that nourishes, enriches, and reveals.

Sheila
All right. Let’s just start with that first bit. Do you want to just play it again?

Kathy
What about the submission of a wife? Well, I’m tempted simply to say that if you have a husband who understands his headship, then there can be no anxiety about submitting to a man who’s willing to die for you in order to serve you.

Sheila
Okay. Stop it. Okay. I love how they give this, well, obviously, if a man is willing to die for you, then. And if he’s if he’s giving himself as Christ gave him, then submission is easy. Yes, but what if he isn’t like that?

Rebecca
But not only that, I don’t even care. Even if he is like that. It’s a theoretical thing that might happen someday. Is he willing to do the dishes? Is he willing to listen, is he willing to be nice? Is he willing to have your opinion matter? So let. Whether or not he’d die for you. I actually could not care less.

Sheila
No, but. But even if we get out of the realm of dying for you and we have a whole podcast on on that, which was kind of funny because I talk about it so much, like people will say, oh, but if he’s truly loving as Christ did, if he’s truly, you know, loving you as his own body, then of course you’re going to want to submit to him. Like, I hear this constantly, like so. So the submission is easy when a man is doing his part. Okay, that’s not what the data says. Yes. Okay. Because the data says that it doesn’t matter whether he’s a good guy or not. When women lose their autonomy, the marriage gets worse. So. So it’s like not having autonomy is a bad thing. Not feeling like your opinions matter as much in marriage as your husbands is a bad thing. Even if he’s a great guy who would never dream of overruling you.

Rebecca
Not only that, because it points to a larger issue. We are all in self selected groups that tell us something about who we are as people. Right. That is just a fact of the matter. We all, we all of us like to think, know I’m fully independent and I am just totally biased free. And no, you actually do create your reality based on your beliefs and your value system. Who are the kinds of people who need their spouses to submit to them? Is it even possible to love someone as Christ does and need them to submit to you?

Sheila
That’s what your dad always says, right? Love your neighbor as yourself. And he’s like, okay, but I would never want someone to be an authority over me. So how can I love you as myself and want to be an authority over you? That doesn’t make any sense.

Rebecca
What Kathy is saying here? But if you have a man who is loving you as Christ would then it’s easy to submit to them is an oxymoron. Yeah, because if you are going to truly love someone, you do not want to strip them of their power and autonomy. God does not strip us of our power and autonomy. Yeah. God wants us to serve him. Yeah. But he’s God, first of all, that actually is a trump card. Yeah. Like, you actually do get to be God if you’re God. But also, he did not model to us a love that was about forcing people to give up autonomy and dignity in the same way for simply someone else to have power. Yeah, we give up from ourselves in order to help others, not in order to prop up others. That is a very different thing. What Kathy said here is a mutually exclusive category and she doesn’t even realize it.

Sheila
Yeah. Now there’s another big, big problem with what Kathy says, because she seems to be assuming that men are this great. But let’s take a look at who is on stage, because these talks were given together for the gospel conferences. They were given through the Gospel Coalition. Do you know who the Gospel Coalition propped up was and the together for the gospel conferences. CJ Mahaney who ran the sovereign Grace ministries. Who was responsible for covering up multiple cases of child sexual abuse.

Rebecca
Truly abhorrent behavior and truly awful.

Sheila
Who else was propped up and invited to these conferences in the early days, Mark Driscoll. Okay. Nobody can claim that Mark Driscoll is a good example of someone who loves sacrificially and gives himself up for others. John Piper, who claimed that women should endure abuse for a season.

Rebecca
If it could lead their husband, their abusive husband to Christ, then it’s not worth it. What would happen if your unbelieving husband beats you, you’re the only Christian in his life and you divorce him? Well, then he might be sent to hell forever and that would be on your shoulders. Like that’s the essence of what he told abused women. That’s horrific.

Sheila
Right? So I mean, this is a big problem. Well, first of all, if you’ve got a great man, you’re obviously going to want to submit to him. And the assumption is that when we follow these gender roles, everything is very beautiful. But she doesn’t really do anything with it. But what if he’s not? What if this isn’t a beautiful picture?

Rebecca
What if he is one of the men you are sharing the stage with?

Sheila
Yeah, exactly. And so yeah. Big problem. Okay, let’s listen to the next bit.

Kathy
If we look at Jesus in Philippians 2, this is what we read.

Sheila
And you can stop it there. We’re not going to listen to this whole thing again. But note, note how so much of her writing and her philosophy around marriage is based in Philippians 2. Okay, we hear this, and she’s applying this to women, not to men. Which is simply not anything that the text is insinuating, but it goes along with their idea, which is that which they talk about in The Meaning of marriage, about how marriage is this picture the gospel. And it’s this picture of Jesus and God, and it points us to it. And so, just as you have someone in authority who lays down that authority and loves you, so you have someone who lays down their autonomy and submits. And so this marriage picture is this beautiful picture. And again, it’s this assumption that it is this beautiful picture. But it is not a beautiful picture in any way, in any practical form that you can measure. Because overwhelmingly in our studies, in Sally Gallagher studies, in John Gottman studies we find that when people act out headship, marriages suffer. And so there is nothing beautiful about this. And if something gets worse when you actually put a doctrine into practice, you cannot claim that that doctrine is giving us a picture of God.

Rebecca
What ends up happening? I know people can’t really be confused by that. Say yes, but we also know this. That is fine. That, like people who hold to more conservative theologies, tend to do really well. It’s because there’s something called signifiers. So when there’s a doctrine that there’s a lot of doctrines that if you believe them, you’re more likely to have a good marriage, have a good sex life, not get divorced, have a great job, have great like have a higher SES status, all the positive things in psychology, okay. The problem is people only ever measure whether or not you say you believe that. They don’t measure whether or not you act out. Yes. Well, we measure whether or not you act it out. And when Gottman measures, if you accept Sally Gallagher measures, if you act it. Whenever we actually look at the practicalities, it falls apart. So why is it that when people believe things but don’t act as out, it’s good because it’s a signifier of a different demographic? Yeah. So what ends up happening is if you the kinds of people who are going to these intense churches that require you to be at the church building three times a week for, church and then small group and then your kids club that you’re volunteering with or is and then they’re the kind of people who are also reading books about theology. What’s that kind of person like?

Sheila
And they have an amazing support system

Rebecca
You’re getting ahead.

Sheila
Okay. Sorry.

Rebecca
I am looking at what you’re going to see on the survey. Right there they believe things like the woman should submit to man because they have more proximity to religious spaces. Religious spaces tend to say that. So they are the kinds of people who are going to church multiple times a week who are reading these books, which means they’re going to be more highly conscientious in general, which is already related to all those positive things. Yeah, just a high conscientious score. Doesn’t matter if you are a wicked pagan, you’re going to have a higher. If you have a higher conscientiousness, you’re going to have better marriageable satisfaction. Satisfaction like that is what these things tend to show. Okay. But it also means, just like you said, you’re more likely to have good social support because you’re volunteering at church multiple times a week. You have friends. The same reason why getting involved in community events like theater that I’m in, or like a whole bunch of other stuff, is also positively associated with all of these things. Because we are not meant to live in isolation. It means you have community. It is not about the theology, it’s about what it tells you about the person that they are in the position to hear that theology. It means they likely don’t have to work shift work. I mean, they likely have a higher paying job that has normal 9 to 5 hours because they’re able to be at the church on Sunday morning and multiple evenings a week means they’re not probably not trying to make ends meet by doing double duty. So already you don’t have financial instability at as high of a rate if you are at these kinds of churches. Like there’s all these different things. If that belief signifies that have nothing to do with that belief, and then what they do in evangelical spaces is they take that data about belief, they ignore the data about practice, and they don’t realize they’re doing is congratulations we have more middle class, conscientious people who live in nice neighborhoods, and our marriages are better. And I’m like, yeah, but you look at that cross-section of data from literally any demographic of belief. And you’re going to get the same rates. For the most part it’s, it’s and when you act out harmful theology it harms. We have to stop contributing to the positive things that we need to stop saying that religion is the positive thing. What we’re actually measuring is money and personality.

Sheila
Except that religion is also found when you have meaning and purpose to your life, that’s also more correlated with other things too.

Rebecca
Just that belief I’m looking at when you actually break down the statistics, just that belief, it’s easily explained often by demographics, the things that are benefits that are beneficial in religiosity, that are beneficial on their own are things like meaning, purpose, believing God loves you, altruism, a challenge, and external, external. What’s the word? Pressure is the wrong word, but a support to act in altruistic and generous ways. Like all these kinds of things, we’re actually. No, you have a group of people around you who are looking out and seeing, hey, if you have like seven sports cars, people are going to be like, maybe we give some of that money away. Those are the kinds of things that actually do benefit you. And you have accountability and you have support, and you have this group of people who have a similar goal. It’s not believing that women should be under men.

Sheila
Yes, absolutely.

Rebecca
That specific belief can be explained by demographic. That’s what I’m saying.

Sheila
Absolutely. Okay. Let’s go ahead. We’re going to skip ahead. We’re going to from where she quotes Scripture, not the Scripture isn’t important. We’ve just quoted that many times in this podcast already and go to what she says afterwards.

Kathy
Your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ, who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. And in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the father. Jesus’ submission leads directly to God being glorified. Keep that equation in your mind. The son’s equality as God was without question, but he took on the role of his servant. This is crucial to understanding gender roles or to any discussion of gender roles. Their roles. Roles okay. Roles.

Rebecca
I just want to say something. She sounds so tired. This sounds like someone who has been told multiple times that what she is doing and telling women that they are worth less than men, and she’s not listening to them, she’s just plowing over them. I’m just going to say that’s why we keep going.

Kathy
Has anyone been in the military? One of the first things they teach you is you salute the uniform, not the man or the woman in it. Okay.

Sheila
Okay, so she’s already saying she’s already kind of going against what she said at the beginning, because at the beginning she says, look, if a man is doing all this great stuff, it’s easy to submit to him. And now she says, you.

Rebecca
Salute the uniform, not the man.

Sheila
Yeah. Band of brothers. Amazing scene, but like so she’s already going back on what she started this whole session section with.

Rebecca
She’s already contradicting herself so early. She sounds reasonable because she says, well, because he’s a good man. You can submit. And now that she’s convinced you that she’s reasonable, she’s saying it doesn’t matter who the man is, he’s the man.

Sheila
Yeah, okay. Keep going.

Sheila
The being of the father and the son are ontological equal. There’s your $20 word for the day. Ontological means in their essence. In their essence. The father and the son are equally God. But the submission of Jesus to the father in taking the role of a servant in order to be our Savior was the role he assumed willingly

Sheila
Okay, so what she’s saying is that they are equal in being, but they’re different in role. And we have dealt with this so many times. I have my biggest Instagram reel that’s gone the biggest so far though your recent you’re Mr. Jumbo may have gone higher. Yes. We will try to put links to the podcast notes.

Sheila
Please follow me on Instagram if you’re not already following me. And remember, whenever you see my stuff on Instagram or Facebook, please hit like because it helps the algorithm show it to more people. But I did a quick two minute thing on this idea that you can be equal in being, but different in role, where one of the roles is subordinate. If the reason that you have a different role is because of your being which is unchangeable, then you’re being itself cannot be equal. Because if the reason that you are subordinate is because you are a woman, then and not for any other reason, then you cannot say that being a woman is equal to being a man.

Rebecca
Cause we are not talking about roles that are that, that don’t have a power differential, you know, you had a this is a stupid example, but that might make sense to people, right? The difference between fishing like fish swimming and monkeys climbing. Okay. So say that you have something like a or mountain goats can’t swim, but they can climb mountains and fish can swim but they can’t climb mountains. The mountain goats don’t get to decide the fate of the fish, right? Like you’re not going to make a fish climb a mountain. We’re not going to make a goat swim. Yeah, like that’s that’s the thing. They have different roles but similar values, right?

Sheila
Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca
The difference is this is not what we’re talking about because there’s not something that men cannot do that is a role that women are able to do except for biological functions. Right. And we don’t say that like, like men can stand up and pee a lot more easily than women can. That is , sure, that’s a difference. But it doesn’t have a meaning and like a purpose and a power behind it. But saying that because women are women they cannot lead is saying that there is a deficiency there. Because it’s not like there’s something that men cannot do that has an authoritative, that has a responsibility placed in it that women can do.

Sheila
And that’s and that’s the whole thing is because they’re saying that it’s about roles. But if it were about roles, there would be things that women can do that men can’t and things that men can do that women can’t. That is not based on biology, but there aren’t. There are only things that men can do that women can’t. And so it’s not about different roles. It’s only about restricting women. And when people say, oh, but like the pilot and copilot have equal value but different roles. Yes, but a copilot can one day be a pilot.

Rebecca
Yeah and also the copilot and pilot take turns. That’s actually what happens.

Sheila
Right. Or if they’ll do the military one, they’ll do the major and the private have equal value as human beings, but they have different roles and different authority. Yes, but that major was once private.

Rebecca
And if the private doesn’t become a major is because they weren’t qualified for the position.
Or they decided not to or decided to get out of the military or whatever. Right?

Sheila
Whereas a woman is always excluded simply because of her very ontological nature as the word, the $20 word that Kathy used. So by virtue of her ontology, she cannot have any authority over a man, and therefore, no, she is not equal. And the fact that they keep making these arguments that are so obviously logically incorrect it is wild to me. Okay. Oh, I wanted to say one other thing. Yeah. Let me read a note that a patron left. So we put the paper up in our patreon group, and I said to people. Hey, do you have any thoughts on this paper? Because we’re going to be doing a podcast on it. And one of our patrons left this comment, and I want to read it and then talk about something that she’s referring to. She says Kathy Keller’s chapter in The Meaning of Marriage was so sad to me. The blatant misunderstanding of Scripture and illogical statements to show how unself aware she is regarding the biased assumptions she is bringing to the text, and calling women subordinates, which the article quotes is disgusting and not faithful to the text. One issue that keeps coming up when I talk to soft complimentarians is that they genuinely have convinced themselves that the leader’s husband is truly being Christlike, as described in Philippians, as long as he uses his authority to serve and help his wife flourish. But they don’t realize that by claiming unilateral authority, the husband is depriving the wife of access to the same authority and autonomy, which would ultimately allow her to flourish. Cutting someone off from the privileges you enjoy is not Christian or Christlike in any way, shape or form, and I just want someone to make it make sense. No, not a little bit more, soft complementarians should not get off the hook for garbage doctrine. They need to answer these kinds of questions. I’m also dumbfounded by the illogical claim that when wives model Christ’s voluntary submission, they take a submissive role to their husbands. Meanwhile, when husbands model Christ’s submission, they end up with special authority. How convenient for men. Their version of Jesus has special perks. Complimentarians, of course, would say it’s not special perks or privileges, an extra burden of responsibility. But that’s not the whole story. Having greater self-determination and autonomy helps people flourish and grow into mature adults and believers, and women should not be deprived of that.

Rebecca
And saying that the way that the husband gives up his power is by serving except then he is not giving up his power.

Sheila
But why do you need power to serve?

Rebecca
And also Jesus didn’t say, well, I am going to still keep all my power and I’m not going to fully humble myself, but I’m going to be nice to you. He actually became fully human. Yes, he was also fully God, but he actually did become fully human and he fully humbled himself. He didn’t say, well, I’m going to keep on to this, but in a way that is nice. He got rid of his authority. Yeah. He fully submitted himself to God’s authority. Men are not doing that when they hold on to their power. And so they can’t say that they’re emulating Christ because they’re by definition, not if they keep their worldly power. He got rid of all worldly power.

Sheila
Absolutely. Two quick things on her comment. The first is this idea that men bear a burden of responsibility. And John Piper has said this, that when they have the final say, that’s a real burden. If that were true, if it were, if it were harder to bear the burden of responsibility than to be the one who doesn’t have to make the decision, then we would see that men do worse in marriage than women in situations where men bear the final decision. But we don’t see that at all. We see the exact opposite. There is not a burden of responsibility. There’s a burden of being under someone who takes your autonomy. The second thing that I just want to comment on is what you said about your subordinate, because in In the Meaning of Marriage it’s very interesting because she spends like three pages going into the meaning of iser.

Sheila
And in the Old Testament, when Eve is created, she’s called a user connector, a helper suitable for him, a helper in opposition. So she’s different from him, but she meets him in every way. And Kathy Keller actually agrees with all of that. She talks about how the word is used so many times of God in the Bible, and it’s a sign of his strength. It’s used in military terms where, you know, God comes to rescue. Right. But then on the very next page, she calls women wiser subordinates.

Rebecca
Even though there is no qualifier.

Sheila
Yeah, she has just spent several pages showing how it doesn’t mean subordinate. And then she just throws that in there. It’s like that is not a faithful interpretation of the text that is reading in her own bias. Anyway, it’s just an interesting thing in In the Meaning of Marriage. Okay, let’s listen to the last bit of it.

Kathy
It meant that he assumed a role that was economically subordinate and economically here doesn’t mean anything to do with stocks and interest rates. It means in order to accomplish a task. His submission was not compelled or required of him. Would you please notice that it was a gift for the purpose of securing our salvation? And women who choose to be submissive to the gender roles God has assigned are offering that submission to God first, not to their husbands, for the purpose of creating a marriage that nourishes, enriches, and reveals.

Sheila
Okay. Here’s what really bothers me about this. And actually this is the thing that makes me upset on behalf of Jesus, because we just finished reading a passage where it says, in the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow. Okay? Jesus is God. Jesus is the center of our faith. He is the one that we are to follow. And then she goes on to say that actually when we submit to our husbands, we are ultimately first submitting to Jesus. So what she’s saying is that by following your husband, by letting him make the decisions, by doing what your husband says you are, you are actually following Jesus. That is putting the husband in Jesus’ role. There is no way around that. That is that is, you’re telling the wife to do what the husband says and that by doing what the husband says, she is following Jesus.

Rebecca
So what you have ended up doing, is you have made the husband an intercessor or a mediator which I will say it as someone who was raised going to a youth group in a very right wing conservative Baptist church, this makes me laugh so hard because I was told so many times that Catholics aren’t Christians because they put mediators between the believer and Jesus. Yeah, that’s what I was told. Now, that is a gross misrepresentation of Catholic theology. But when they talk about intercessors and Mary and all these things, the things that I was told in the Baptist church was that the Catholics don’t actually serve God. They put things in between people and God. They have to confess to a priest instead of just praying to themselves and all these things. And you can feel like there’s a reason I’m not Catholic. I’m not theologically Catholic. But the way that they talked about it was a gross misrepresentation of Catholic theology. But their reasoning for why we can’t be Catholic actually applies to their theology on marriage. What they’re doing is they’re putting a mediator between women and God through their husband. Yeah. They’re saying you serve God through serving a man versus you. Pray to God by praying through Mary. You pray. You confess to God by confessing to a priest which does actually have biblical. I will say the confession stuff has a lot of biblical weight to it. But like there’s a lot of stuff here where it’s the exact same logic and was I was railed against for years at the Baptist church in town about how Catholics aren’t real Christians. Yeah, because they pray to God through other people or they serve God through doing this. And I’m like, Kathy Keller just said the exact same thing you serve Jesus by submitting to your husband’s authority. How is that any different? That is, you are putting a mediator in between. Now, you can say that a way that we serve God is by serving others. Absolutely. But you’re serving God like you’re not submitting to your husband, even if he tells you to do something that’s not in line with what God wants or, yeah, just giving up authority for no reason, or probably because the difference is she’s not helping her husband. She’s propping up her husband. And like we said earlier, you’re not ever in Scripture supposed to, like, give up powers to someone else, can make more profits or have more power or like, that’s not how this works.

Sheila
Okay, so can I read? Can I give Carly the last word on this? Okay, so we’re gonna. I just want to read to you how Carly ended her article. We end where we began with Cicero’s quotation. By nature, we yearn and hunger for honor. Today’s yearning for honor may not look like it did in ancient Rome, but when an entire theological system is created to give men places of honor or leadership and keep women subordinate, the men who have glimpsed honor are still grasping for its radiance today. Unfortunately for them, the women they oppress are formed more into the likeness of Christ than the oppressors themselves, since they, the men, claim the name of Christ, but follow the rule of Rome.

Rebecca
The way is narrow.

Sheila
Amen. I want it to end. I told you to put a pin in Philippians 2 – 3 to 4. And because I want to end on, on something and kind of do full circle here, because the point here that she makes at the very end, again, is that this is about honor. Right? And Philippians 3 to 4 was to treat others where, you know, as who have higher as if they have higher status, like we’re supposed to be giving honor to others and not grasping it for ourselves. And what this theology does is it gives men honor and it takes it from women. And one thing that we wrote about in Fawn, it’s kind of the Bible passage that encapsulates our whole book. Okay, so Fawn is our upcoming book, How a Trauma Response Became Biblical Womanhood and How Women Can Reclaim Their Agency. It’s coming out in March. You can preorder it now, and when you preorder it, it helps us a ton because then bookstores are more likely to order some in. Amazon isn’t going to run out of copies on launch day, and then people will stop ordering it like it really does help us. So we’re going to have a launch team going. We’re going to have preorder bonuses in January, but if you preorder it now, you can send in your receipt now and, and you’ll be notified when all of that happens. Or you can just keep your receipt and send it in in January. But we’ll tell you how to do that. And the links are in the podcast notes. But one of the things we talked about is Isaiah 40. And there’s this beautiful passage that talks about what the coming of the Lord will look like. And basically it’s that the mountains will be brought low and the valleys will be brought up, and the crooked paths will be made straight. So when Jesus comes, the mountains are brought low and the valleys are brought up. Okay. Think about that image. Right? The things that are high are going to be brought low, and the things that are low are going to be brought up. Mary talks about it in her song. Like the Magnificat has brought down rulers from their thrones. And he has lifted up the humble. Right. Like, like this is what this is what the coming of the Lord looks like, is that we get rid of these power differentials. And in the Bible. Here’s the thing. There are verses that tell people to be lower, like Ephesians 2, okay, that tell people to lower themselves down. There are also verses that tell people to lift themselves up, to speak up for injustice, you know, to speak up when you see things wrong, that you are valuable. So there are both verses in the Bible that bring things low and verses in the Bible that lift things up. And what we should be doing is we should be giving the verses that lower things down, primarily to those who are already privileged. And we should be giving the verses that lift people up to those who are already low down, so that we can accomplish this. Mountains being brought, low, valleys being brought up the gospel. But instead what we do is we give the verses to go low to those who are already low, and we give the verses to go high to those who are already high..

Rebecca
It might say you were a mountain and now you should be a very tall hill. We do. We do serve more. We do more than him, sir. But you’re still a hill. Yeah, well, she’s still a valley. Yeah. Like this is the thing. It’s like you don’t get brownie points for keeping some worldly power.

Sheila
Like the gods. God’s desire is that these things that have stratified us, that have pushed some people into oppression, that these things are ended so that we can flourish together in unity. And instead, what gender roles theology does is it cements those power differences, and it uses very pretty biblical language to do it. But it is not a good interpretation of the Bible theologically. It doesn’t fit with much of Scripture, with the original languages, with the original context, and it also doesn’t fit when we look at practical outcomes, when people act it out. And so, yeah, I just thought this was such a great article from the Priscilla Papers. And I want to encourage people to check it out. The Christians for Biblical Equality is a great organization. They have chapters throughout the United States. We’re hoping to bring some to Canada. They have someone from Atlantic Canada I know. And the Priscilla Papers is a great publication, so check it out. There’s some great work being done on this side, and let’s make those crooked paths straight. So thank you for joining us on the Bare Marriage.

Sheila
Check out all the links in the podcast notes and we will see you again next time on Bare Marriage. Okay. Bye bye.