This is why wives so easily chafe under authority, even when husbands exercise it in a legitimate way -- as a result of the Fall, submission has become distasteful, not just in marriage, but in all authority structures (just ask your children!). This is why Scripture repeatedly reminds and exhorts those under authority (citizens, members of churches, wives, and children) to overcome their tendency to rebel against it.
Genesis 3:16 also teaches that the Fall has tarnished the husband's use of authority and the blessing he was meant to derive from it. Instead of the loving leadership contemplated in the creation design (see Gen. 2:18- 25), the husband would be inclined to shirk his responsibilities and abuse his authority.I want to just say bullshit and write this off as another “me Tarzan, You Jane” sermon by a Neanderthal preacher.
But this type of thinking is all to common in Evangelical circles. In the Baptist circles I grew up in this was the predominant view. My wife was taught, as a pastor’s wife, her primary duty in life was to make sure everyone thought well of her husband. She even had a class in how to properly give a tea party. (no I am not kidding)
John R Rice was the predominant family guru and he advocated that women were best served by being at home, married, and pregnant.
My wife and I started married life with the John R Rice philosophy of family. I worked. She stayed at home and had babies. She did work for a time in the Church daycare or Christian School but those types of jobs didn’t count. (and she was paid like they didn’t count. The Church paid men more than women)
I was the head honcho, chief of the tribe, CEO of our family. I ruled the kingdom with a rod of iron. I made all the decisions.
And we had a lousy marriage.
It is a wonder we survived the first five years of marriage. I was (and can still be at times) pretty temperamental during the early years of our marriage. As the boss of the home I would draw a line and say ”this is it”. Inevitably ,my wife would cross that line and then the war would begin.
What was the root problem? Her unwillingness to “submit”?
Or perhaps I was the root problem. I was taught to be the “head of the home” and I was going to be the head no matter what. When my wife refused to comply with my lordship I would react angrily. Fortunately, I never physically beat my wife, but I sure made her pay in other ways.
Such is the fruit of the teaching that Bruce Ware espouses. I am sure I will be rejected as nothing more than an extreme case, but many years of pastoral ministry brought me into contact with hundreds of guys just like me. Poorly taught complementarians (though few would have known that label)who hurt their families and often destroyed their marriages.
Fortunately for my wife and I (and my children) I saw the error of my way. Time and study has brought me to the egalitarian position, and I have watched the liberating effects of it in the life of my wife, and my own life.
We are co-heirs of the mystery of life. We walk together, side by side. Truly equal in the eyes of God and I hope in the eyes of each other.
We still battle the after effects of the earlier years of our marriage. My wife still falls into a default mode that allows me to be the “decision maker.” Sometimes, I have to force her (by not making the decision) to make decisions for herself. Our marriage is still a work in progress. We will celebrate 30 years of marriage in a few weeks.
In his sermon mentioned above, Bruce Ware passes the buck.
Well Bruce, this Bruce thinks:
Several years ago our family attended a very conservative Reformed Church. Great pastor. The services were some of the best we ever attended. Several hundred people attended the Church.
We were accepted rather readily into the Church. We thought, “maybe this is the place where our journey ends. Maybe this will be our Church home.”
Things went along fairly well until one Sunday, in an after Church discussion, my wife mentioned to a group of Church women that she “worked outside the home.” Immediate silence!
From that moment forward we were treated like we had the plague. My wife was the only woman in the Church that worked outside the home. By her doing so she was sinning against God’s order for the family .Never mind her husband was sick and disabled. Sadly, we left this Church several months later.
In the mid 1990’s I pastored a Sovereign Grace Church that believed that women were to keep silence in the Church. Church business meetings were hilarious. If a woman wanted to ask a question she had to ask her husband who would then ask the question for her. At no time was the woman allowed to speak. Single women had to ask an older man to ask the question for her.
One family in the Church took this to the extreme (as if that wasn’t extreme enough) . The wife was converted during our time there.She desired to be baptized. One of our traditions was to have the baptism candidate give a testimony prior to baptism. Her husband refused to allow her to speak in Church so she couldn’t be baptized. This went on for weeks and then one day the wife came into my office crying and wanted to speak with me. She told me she really wanted to be baptized but didn’t know what to do. I told her this “your husband is standing between you and God, You need to disobey him and obediently follow the Lord in baptism.”
Needless to say I started World War lll. The wife was baptized and the husband got over it.
Such is the fruit of complentarianism when it is taken to the extreme. While I do not consider complentarianism sinful I have seen it used as a tool of abuse far too often.Many men would still subscribe to these words of Laforgue; many think that there will always be ‘strife and dispute’, as Montaigne put it, and that fraternity will never be possible. The fact is that today neither men nor women are satisfied with each other. But the question is to know whether there is an original curse that condemns them to rend each other or whether the conflicts in which they are opposed merely mark a transitional moment in human history.
-------Then again, it is institutions that create uniformity. Young and pretty, the slaves of the harem are always the same in the sultan’s embrace; Christianity gave eroticism its savour of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul; if society restores her sovereign individuality to woman, it will not thereby destroy the power of love’s embrace to move the heart.
It is nonsense to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters; the contradictions that put the flesh in opposition to the spirit, the instant to time, the swoon of immanence to the challenge of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of forgetting, will never be resolved; in sexuality will always be materialised the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence.
To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.
The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning.
On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. ‘The direct, natural, necessary relation of human creatures is the relation of man to woman,’ Marx has said. ‘The nature of this relation determines to what point man himself is to be considered as a generic being, as mankind; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. By it is shown, therefore, to what point the natural behaviour of man has become human or to what point the human being has become his natural being, to what point his human nature has become his nature.’
The case could not be better stated. It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.
This garden is full of the memories of my childhood. The Solomon seal, lily of the valley, and bleeding heart were favourites of my tiny self. They seemed to me in my childhood to be Biblical plants. The rest are poppies, ajuga, and oxalis. Other plants in the picture but not in bloom are foxgloves, oregon grape, hellebore, lamium, and heuchera. I cant believe that I forgot to mention the forget-me-nots!
One interesting example of the latter form of publication is the story of Rashi and his daughters. While many know of Rashi's liberal attitude towards his daughters' donning of tefillin, few may have heard that towards the end of his life, as Rashi grew ill, his daughters actually wrote many of his halachic responsa for him. As a battle wages on today over the issue of whether or not women can give halachic psak, this historical precedent is certainly worth considering.
Meanwhile, other learned Jewish women of the time were unabashedly writing works under their own names. Dulcie, the respected wife of Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, was known as a religious poetess. In addition, she would give public lectures on Shabbat, and in this way supported her family. She died in 1215, murdered by two Christian Knights of the Cross.
Then, too, there were women copyists like Paola, the granddaughter of Rabbi Nathan ben Yehiel (1035-1110), who transcribed Biblical commentaries that may still be read today in Breslau archives. While transcription is hardly a form of original expression, it does attest to a level of scholarship achieved by women of this time, as well as the apparent social acceptance of women writing.
Further evidence of this can be found in letters composed by women of this period which survived in the Cairo Genizah. Many of these letters are written in elegant Hebrew and reference various Biblical stories even as they speak of everyday affairs. For example, one letter written by Lady Maliha to her family in Egypt, opens with the following wish:
"May peace from Heaven...be bestowed upon you...and a long life like his who became father of the people, or his who was bound as a victim on a high mountain, or of Jacob, the plain man, or of him who sprinkled blood on the altar seven times."
Maliha's words attest to her knowledge of the stories of the patriarchs and Aaron the high priest. Thus many women at this stage were well-educated and had begun to write on a variety of topics, though none had yet published a halachic work under her own name.
During the Middle Ages, many more women began to write everything from memoirs to epics to halachic teshuvot.. The causes of this increase in authorship are numerous. The first major reason we have more literature from women of this period is simply historical: the more recent the era, the more documents will remain in our possession. Second, technological advances meant that writing implements and surfaces were more accessible.
Third and most importantly, by the fourteenth century, women's education had begun to improve dramatically. In the secular world, particularly Renaissance Italy, all kinds of educational opportunities were opening for interested ladies. The trend spread to the Jewish world, and in 1475, a group of Italian Jewish women began to operate a Talmud Torah for girls in Rome.
Literacy was increasing as well, and while many women still could not understand Hebrew, various Yiddish novels and mussar books were published for their benefit. This development allowed for the cultivation of a larger literary appreciation among women who might otherwise not have opened a book at all.
In the synagogue, where women had trouble reading and comprehending the Hebrew prayers, a tradition began of appointing a zogerke, a woman who would help lead the others through the service. Additionally, in the seventeenth century, Jewish men and women began to compose tkhines, or Yiddish prayers, written for women who felt too isolated by the Hebrew prayers they could not understand. The increasing communal commitment to women's education, literacy, and inclusion in ritual allowed for a dramatic increase in female authorship.
This is the first edition of this work, which was dedicated to Pope Leo X, whose courteous reply was printed in later editions of the book; nevertheless the publication was a great impetus to the Reformation and Luther's German New Testament was done from the second edition; Erasmus' own new Latin translation, printed parallel to the Greek Text, is different from the Vulgate, which papal authority subsequently declared should be used exclusively.
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(Note: while many of her materials are online, I recommend buying the multi-volume edition of her works -- this page sells her sets in both Hebrew and English.) Read the rest here.
