Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light
If you are familiar with the church, and especially if you are also a woman, then you’re probably aware that churches take radically different positions on the ways that women can serve in them. Many churches exclude women from leadership roles, or teaching roles, and many denominations refuse to ordain women. We hold a different view. We believe God calls and equips both women and men to serve His church at all levels, for His glory. So over the next three weeks we want to offer three perspectives on why we think that this is a faithful position for Christians and churches to take. And as you might expect, our perspectives are biblically and theologically derived.
Going Back to the Beginning
The most beautiful truth of Christianity is that God is Love. This truth not only resonates deeply with our intuitive ideas of what God should be like, it also provides the coherent thread that runs through the whole story of the Bible. In other words, we naturally expect God to be loving, and the Bible reveals just what true love looks like, specifically in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. I root my affirmation of both women and men as leaders and pastors in the church in the beautiful truth that God is Love. Let me explain.
To affirm that God is Love implies a few things. Most fundamentally it implies that God is a relational being. We call this the Trinity: the mystery of the three-in-one, differentiated unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is relational in His very nature. And that relationship is Love. Love is likewise the motivation for God to create anything other than Himself. God created a cosmos where relationships of love could happen. Then God filled that cosmos with all kinds of life that bring Him glory. But it wasn’t until he made humanity that His goal was achieved. In Genesis 1:27 we learn that God made humankind in His image. And a fundamentally unique and important part of being made in that image has to do with our ability to be in relationship together.
An analysis of the pronouns used in Genesis 1:27 helps bear this out. No translation does justice to them. So I offer you my own. With notes!
So God created the human creature in His own image,
in the image of God He created it (note: singular pronoun)
male and female He created them (note: plural pronoun).
The human creature is made in the image of God, and that creature which bears the image of God is created as male and female.
We see the same basic thing happening in Genesis 2, if we can stop reading it as a story about a man named Adam. The name Adam comes from the Hebrew word that means “man” in the generic sense of “human”. In the first four chapters of Genesis there is not one instance where the Hebrew ‘adam can be read as a proper name. In Chapter 2 this is especially true since it always has the word “the” attached to the front. Genesis 2 is a story about the creation of a human creature. This human was created in God’s relational image, but is found to be alone. This is not good. It is not good for the human to be alone. So God brought all the other animals before the human, but none is a proper answer to the human’s loneliness. So what does God do? He puts the human into a deep sleep and splits it in two. Traditionally this is when God creates a woman out of Adam’s rib, but the Hebrew word frequently translated as “rib” is not an anatomical term. (See the footnote in the NIV.) It is an architectural one. It shows up regularly in descriptions of the tabernacle or temple and refers to “one side” of the structure (Exodus 26:26 is a good example). God splits the generic human creature into two parts, and now we have a male and a female. Genesis 2:24 celebrates their union as it is the reconstituting of the full image of God. (It should be noted that Jesus uses Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 as his go-to texts when questioned about divorce and marriage. See Mark 10:1-12)
The point is this: It takes both men and women, in right relationship, to fully bear the image of God in this world. No one person, no single gender, can bear the fullness of God’s image. One of the implications of this view is that both masculinity and femininity have their source in the person of God. We often use masculine pronouns for God because the Bible does. But God is not more masculine than feminine. And masculinity is not intrinsically more God-like than femininity. Nor vice-versa. God is the source of the truly masculine and the truly feminine.
Now obviously there is more to the story. This equality between the genders is distinctly absent from our history and our current world. The reason for that comes in Genesis 3 and the story of The Fall (bum, bum bum). This post is long enough already, so I’ll be brief. The immediate effects of The Fall are described in relational terms. The man and woman feel shame about their nakedness (a marring of the human-self relationship). They hide from God (a marring of the human-God relationship). They blame one another (a marring of the human-human relationship). They are cast out of Eden (a marring of the human-earth relationship). Sin has distorted relationships on all these levels. But shouldn’t the church strive to live more fully in the ways God intended us to, rather than the ways sin compels us to?
In summary, for us to live fully into the beautiful truth that God is Love, we must seek to reveal that God and that Love as fully as we can. This requires both men and women selflessly living out their unique calls in ways that mirror the differentiated unity of the Trinity.