Women, equality rights, and life-giving

I like to do my postings in multiples of five; i.e., every five weeks or even five months. My goodness, one does get distracted. I know that I promised to say something about Ann Coulter, but that dubious character's many charms (logical and balanced reasoning, unfortunately, not being among them) were no match for selling our condo, purchasing and extensively renovating our new townhome, and entertaining company nonstop all summer.

But here I am, back at the old stand after once again taking a hiatus of considerable length. I really must get back to a schedule of frequent postings. Otherwise, I'm risking the loss of my reader.

I have much on my mind, but I'll start with this. I have been thinking for some time about the view of most modern secular feminists that women's rights are somehow subordinate to men's rights if women do not have full and convenient access to abortion services (often disguised with such ironic phrases as "maternal health"). I have emailed large numbers of Christian women in leadership capacities in the church and educational institutions about this matter, and have heard back from nary a one. Either I am too off-putting to correspond with, or else they consider the subject either too obvious or too baffling to address.

What is a poor oblivious male to do?

Well here's one sorry effort on my behalf. I preached at our church recently and shameless inserted into the sermon a reference to childbearing, which had little to do with the topic at hand. I went even further and suggested that the ability to give birth to children gave women more rights than men could ever have. I followed up with a question and answer session about the sermon, and no one in that sanctuary full of females brought it up.

So I'll try it here. I'm going to reproduce the first half of the sermon with the reference to having children, and ask you to comment.

Don't let me down.

Okay, here goes.

The Gospel as Simply as I Can Preach It (first half only)

I was a guest last month at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. In the men's washroom, of all places, I found a familiar booklet printed by Chick Publications. I say familiar because these dubious little booklets have circulated for decades, although it had been many years since I had last seen one.



This particular issue is entitled “This Was Your Life.” Someone had hand-written 'Free' on it,

although given that it was situated on the toilet tank, I was pretty sure it wasn't for sale. It depicts a middle-aged man, successful and wealthy, a pipe-smoker with drink in hand, stricken by a heart attack and now dead and buried. His spirit is bidden to rise from the grave by the angel of death who shows him what a sinful life of self-indulgence, carnality, and indifference to spiritual realities he had led. He is then handed over to a demon to enjoy the Devil's gentle ministrations for eternity.

Having now hopefully scared the you-know-what out of the reader, the tract goes on to offer a similar man the chance to make a better choice. This gentleman confesses his sins, receives Christ as Saviour, asks God to reveal his will, prays before meals, reads bible stories to his children, visits the sick, puts money in the offering, shares from the Bible with others, and becomes a champion employee. He too has a heart attack and dies, but is received directly into heaven.

The booklet ends with a prayer for you to recite to become a Christian yourself, and encourages you to, among other things, read the Bible in the KJV every day.

And that, in three short paragraphs, is the Gospel according to St. Chick.

It was Einstein who said that "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." I have entitled this meditation The Gospel as Simply as I Can Preach It.” As that will take me the twenty or so minutes that remain, I will never be asked to become a writer for Chick Publications, a lost opportunity that I will endure stoically.

Now to be completely candid, I was raised in a church whose depiction of God's good news was little different from what I quoted above from Chick. Perhaps your experience was the same. And I did, in God's grace, decide that I wanted to be a follower of Christ and a child of God at a relatively young age, although a broader understanding of what all of that actually meant did not follow for many years. I do not mean to disparage, in any way, the small slice of the Gospel that the booklet represents.

But it is narrow and disproportionate. Its depiction of the Christian life, the Christian mind, the nature and will of God, life's purpose and priorities, and the joy and challenge, and sometimes heartache—even heartbreak—of Christian experience is badly deficient. It's a gospel of bones with little meat. And a good number of the bones are missing as well. Not to mention much of the brain and heart.

Well, where do we start? As the Apostle Paul and the other early disciples set Asia and Europe ablaze with the good news, they had only the Old Testament as their Scripture. So for me, it's back to the beginning, the Garden of Eden.

I understand this story, and many of the others in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, as theological parable or metaphor, not history. Whether you agree or disagree with me on historical matters, the theology is the same. So let's skip the arguing over minor details and get to what God wanted us to learn from the story.

Humankind is depicted in an idyllic state where she and he (Eve and Adam) are to steward the perfect creation handed to them by God. Work was to be as normal for our ancestors as it was for God. God is depicted throughout the Scriptures as a working Deity, and humankind was to be no different.

'Idyllic' didn't mean that there was little or nothing to do. It meant that humanity could realize all that we were created to be in an environment of full equality, peace, justice, love, joy, mutuality, respect and self-respect, challenge and creativity in full partnership with the Triune God, Him and Herself. This, I believe, is what heaven will be like.

It was only after the fall from grace, when Adam and Eve gave up their idyllic experience through trying to improve upon God's will, that economic scarcity entered the scene, and that work became a monotonous drudgery, with notions of equality and respect for others set aside in favour of exploitation, prejudice, greed and self-indulgence, murder, and so on.

While male and female were equal in Eden, and both were charged with stewarding the earth through pleasant and creative work, the woman was given an additional privilege that made her, in one glorious sense, even more like her Creator than man could ever be. She was made Life-giver!! Only the woman would participate in adding to God's perfect but incomplete Creation through the miracle of new birth. There is no better picture of this than the story of Mary, mother of Jesus, when apprised of her coming pregnancy by the angel Gabriel. You can read each thrilling word at your leisure in the Gospel according to Luke chapter one.

Do not underestimate the importance of this in God's eyes. St. Paul, the champion of female worth and equality in the New Testament, alludes to this special status for women in his rather obscure reference in 1 Timothy 2:15: “But women will be saved through childbearing.” I don't believe that this means that bearing children guarantees a spot in heaven. It is also obvious that it doesn't assure women that having babies will be a breeze or that every woman will make it through the event unscathed. So what does it mean?

In other of his writings, St. Paul tells us to “work out our salvation.” He means that salvation is both an experience of choosing to become a child of God, and then living for God by doing the kinds of things that God has empowered us to do in full partnership with himself and his people. Paul often describes women as having full equality with men in the reception of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and in the exercise of those gifts in even the most senior leadership positions. But as an additional act of the greatest honour, woman continues to partner with God as Life-giver.

Marvelous!

This indescribable privilege was also marred as human imperfection and disobedience to God replaced the perfect state. God noted, with incredible regret I have no doubt, that the inevitable consequence of Eve’s choice would lead to this:

"I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master." There goes perfect equality with her husband as a spouse, and joyous partnership with God as a mother, in one fell swoop.

We have since seen a history of men suppressing and exploiting women while hogging all the top positions, whether in the family, the church, or in society generally. Most modern feminists have bought this nonsense that the man's life is somehow the superior one, and that life-giving is an unfortunate side effect of being female that must be controlled by having full access to abortion, in order to have full and equal rights with men. My goodness, in God’s perfect world they have more rights.