Beth Moore recently announced that she was leaving the Southern Baptist Convention, after years of sexism, abuse cover-ups, and cruelty from supposed brothers and sisters in Christ. A big chunk of this toxic hate came after she spoke in her church on Mother's day, giving a (by all accounts wonderful) message. She was immediately publicly shamed and humiliated by well-known Christian pastors, including Al Mohler ("There’s just something about the order of creation that means that God intends for the preaching voice to be a male voice,”) and John MacArthur ("Go home"), who, despite their apparent and repeated lack of any sort of moral fiber, continue to be held up in Evangelical circles as exemplary Christians and voices to submit to.
How do these men defend themselves? Why does the church continue to take them seriously? A big factor is the conservative Evangelical approach to scripture we discussed last time: the bible contains a handful of passages that it is possible to interpret as preventing women from preaching, and therefore many American churches have taken this to be an eternal, indisputable rule. (Passages to the contrary tend to be ignored or explained away.) In short, if this is something Christians have believed for a long time, it would be a sin to change it.
The idea that Christian ethics can't change has a certain appeal to it -- after all, God is eternal, and why should his commands be changing? And if ethics can change, why wouldn't we just change them to what we wanted and lose any sort of ability to repent of the sins we like most?
At the same time, Christian ethics over time do, undeniably, change. The worldly power centers of Christianity only recently began to condemn slavery (the slaves, whose voices Christ values more, have of course opposed it for much longer), or to support even the smallest forms of women's rights, or even to allow interracial marriage (somehow ~16% of Evangelicals are still worried about this?), and each time was accused of selling out to unbiblical forces. (This doesn't, of course, mean that slavery wasn't evil from the beginning. God presumably has always been opposed to evil, and it's hard to say anything that isn't purely conjectural as to why the bible isn't more clear about it.) On the negative side, the church's views on money seem to have regressed: absolute condemnations of usury and abuse of the poor have given way to a fully unbiblical libertarian perspective where property rights reign supreme and I owe nothing to my suffering neighbors.
If I were pursuing a PhD in biblical studies, I would be interested in providing a full account of how this happens within the bible itself. There are obvious cases: the New Testament overthrows many of the commands of the Torah in response to Jesus' death and resurrection, but there are smaller cases that happen (for example) within the Torah itself. At some point in the future I will hopefully look more systematically at this question, but for today I want to look at a specific case: the apostle Paul, based primarily on a personal experience of God, is convinced that parts of the bible (namely, the Torah codes) no longer apply. How does the church respond?
The Church's Response to Paul
A significant portion of the New Testament is devoted to an ongoing feud between the Apostle Paul and his "Judaizing" opponents.
To summarize too quickly: Paul comes to believe that Jesus' death and resurrection prove that the word of God is meant for all people, not just for the Jewish nation. In particular, he rejects Jewish cultural superiority, arguing that God loves Gentiles as Gentiles, and that they therefore do not need to keep the traditional Jewish law (particularly "identity markers" like circumcision or dietary restrictions) but can keep their cultural traditions and practices as long as they fully worship Jesus as Lord.
Paul's opponents reject this argument, with very Mohler-esque arguments: the bible says that Christians must be circumcised, can't eat pork, and need to keep strict Sabbath laws. The parts of the bible that say this are the Jewish law, given directly by God, which has been followed for thousands of years. From what we can tell, Christ himself seems to have followed Torah codes. Who is Paul to overturn the word of God for worldly reasons?
We, of course, as Christians know that the Holy Spirit was working through Paul to help the church move forward, just as we believe the Holy Spirit worked through slaves who rejected the white supremacist perversion of Christianity taught by their masters and the women who demanded the church see that they, too, were made in God's image. But for those who were not privy (as some were) to explicit guidance from God, this must have been much more difficult: Paul is making convincing-sounding and justice-upholding arguments, but his opponents have history and tradition and scripture on their side. Who should we believe?
Paul gives us some insight into the leaders' thinking:
James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised. All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along.
Galatians 2:9-10
There are two things to note here:
The leaders of the church recognize the grace given to Paul. In other words, they see God at work in Paul's life and conclude that, whether Paul is right or wrong about this issue, it seems like God values the work Paul is doing and they therefore agree to support this work. (This gels with Jesus' references to bearing fruit: God is at work when we see God's will being done, not merely by who has the best theology.)
The leaders of the church ask Paul to continue to remember the poor. (They presumably would ask him to continue to worship God as well, but nobody who met Paul could possibly doubt this was the center of his life.) In other words, the Christian church can faithfully disagree on many things, but care for the poor and the marginalized is not one of them. Churches who ignore -- or even disparage-- the plight of the suffering are putting their members in eternal danger, and we should not for a single second compromise on this.
What does this mean for us today? First, it means we should focus on the fruit churches bear (that is, the love they show and the faith they create) over and above our certainty in our own readings of scripture. If you do not believe women should be pastors, I beg you to listen to some sermons and look at the work women-led churches are doing in our communities. (I can point you to some wonderful pastors if I know and trust you, but would rather not accidentally direct potentially unwanted attention to people without their permission by listing name publicly.) You will find unambiguously important, God-driven work, and I sincerely believe that to ignore this in favor of a few questionably-interpreted bible verses places us firmly in the camp of the Judaizers. Same reasoning applies to the "LGBT Christians aren't real Christians" position --- regardless of your stance on sexual ethics, recognize the good in people's lives and stop reducing them solely to their sexuality.
Second, it means that our open-mindedness should not be absolute. When doctrine changes and God seems to be working in it, we can accept it even if we disagree with it. But we cannot, under any circumstances, accept a church that has forgotten the poor. Such a church has entirely lost sight of the gospel, and we are duty-bound to do our best to lead its members to true repentance.