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Biblical Equality and the Societally Destructive Lie of Egalitarianism
Right now I’ve got two major series still alive that I will continue, one on the one Bible doctrine (parts one, two, three, four, five) and the other on the crucial explanation of belief in evangelism (parts one, two, three, four, five). Feel free to click on the links and read these two series. I’m not done with them. They’ll continue, but today I’ll talk about something else. Enjoy.
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Terminology
When someone says equality and egalitarianism today, one most likely thinks of sex or gender, the relationship between men and women. This corresponds to the primary usage of the terminology. Egalitarianism became the contrasting word or philosophy to complementarianism. This traces back to the late 1970s and the new women’s studies departments in secular universities, as a part of “social science,” which also redefines science.
Complementarianism as a terminology did not emerge from Christians, as church leaders began borrowing the term to describe God’s design for men and women. It first arises in women’s studies to explain the dynamics of authority in a family, where complementarianism was also called conventionalism. Naturalist feminists would characterize complementarianism as the inferior complementing the superior.
Christians did not use “complementarian” until the 1990s, when theologians began borrowing the term from feminist literature. The theological writers used complementarian to project a Christian view of equality of roles between men and women. They thought even egalitarians would appreciate men and women complementing one another. At that point no one would claim that men and women did not complement one another. The original idea of complementarianism was communicating equality to women, that they are free and equal to men as wives and mothers.
Emergence of Complementarianism
I never grew up hearing the word “complementarian.” Such a term did not exist in churches. The first I heard it was when the 1991 Grudem and Piper edited book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, came out. I bought it, read it, and used material from it. Then I did not take the time to consider the history of this issue, which is important. Complementarianism made sense and I took it as a historical biblical position. It isn’t. In fact, it is, as the sub-heading indicates, “A Response to Evangelical Feminism.” Complementarianism is not historical biblical faith.
The original point of Christian complementarianism was not hierarchy in the family, but equality. The appropriation of complementarian terminology from feminist women’s studies intended to give women more freedom than they already possessed in families and churches. It emphasized equality. Naturalists could agree that nature gave the sexes more variety than inequality, that both sexes are equally sensible but in complementary ways.
Complementarianism and Egalitarianism
Professing Christian writer Rebecca Groothius backs what I’m writing, albeit for different reasons, with this paragraph in her 1997 book, Women Caught in the Conflict:
The confusion that can result when tradition collides with social change is exemplified by the effort to retain the tradition of male authority (hierarchy) by couching it in terms compatible with contemporary psychological and theological ideas about the equality of men and women (complementarity).
Theologians and preachers repackaged biblical marriage roles in secular feminist and psychological terminology. It sounded good, complementarianism, but it was actually deposing biblical patriarchy and sending a unique male role into oblivion. Things have digressed much further than these earlier iterations of complementarianism.
Displacing God
Egalitarianism is a much larger subject than marriage roles and hierarchy within family. It relates to complete elimination of a biblical or truly Christian view of authority. At a root level, it displaces God Himself in society.
As a part of his plan to overturn God’s will and way, Satan intervenes and corrupts through the family, but as a means overall he attacks God like we see in the Garden of Eden and the fall of mankind. He targets God using God’s highest creation. The world God created functions according to God designed hierarchy with God at the top of a gigantic flow chart. God made the institutions and intends for His creation to operate according to them.
Unity or Oneness
Scripture doesn’t use the terminology equality so in a sense equality itself is a misnomer. I started the title with Biblical equality. Scripture communicates “oneness” or two or more “are one” (John 10:30, 17:22; 1 John 5:7). The same idea comes with the expressions, “are one body” or “are one bread” (Rom 12:5, 1 Cor 10:17, 12:12). The English word “unity” is found three times in the King James Version, twice in the New Testament, both in Ephesians 4. It translates the word, henotes, which means, “a state of oneness or of being in harmony and accord.”
Perhaps you use or have used the words, “one in essence,” to communicate equality. I say, “Man and woman are equal in essence,” and I take that from Galatians 5:28:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
This is the only time this “one in Christ” idea is expressed, except for John 17:21, where Jesus prays, “that they also may be one in us.” The position in Christ makes people “one,” which is unified. God created both male and female in His own image (Genesis 1:26-27).
Hierarchy
The oneness is real, but it does not diminish the distinctions of rule, authority, and someone being “over you” (Hebrews 13:7, 17, 24). Many references communicate this idea of another person “over you.” The Bible expresses it in a number of different ways. It declares obedience and treatment of the employer, the parent, the husband, the government, and the pastor. In Genesis 3:16 God says, “he shall rule over thee.” When Jacob blessed Jacob, who impersonated his son Esau, he said in Genesis 27:29:
Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.
This was his mindset. Jesus says in John 15:20:
The servant is not greater than his lord.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:3, “the head of the woman is the man.” In John 10:29, Jesus says, “My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all.”
Categories of Hierarchy
Oneness does not clash with the truth of authority, headship, obedience, submission, and subordination. Actually, when someone understands his God ordained position, either made in the image of God or one in and with Christ, he can and will submit. The security of the position gives confidence and strength to submit or obey authority or the head. This is the will of God.
Scripture provides two important categories of hierarchy. One, God places men in positions of authority that He lays out in scripture. He rules according to these positions. Rebelling against them rebels against God. Two, God stays above everything through His truth, goodness, and beauty. This is how we “obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). If it violates His truth, His goodness, or His beauty, we obey that rather than the person in the position. This isn’t personal opinion, but the authority of the Word of God.
More to Come
Debunking of Nine Marks Dual Church View: Both Universal and Local Churches, Part Three
Nowhere does scripture make a connection between an earthly church and then a final heavenly church. Neoplatonic Christianity or professing Christianity invented this idea, one borrowed by Jonathan Leeman in his article, The Church: Universal and Local, for the 9 Marks parachurch organization. A believer in a salvific way has a citizenship in heaven and has a seat in heaven in the sense that God reserved it for him, which is like someone seated in Congress without physically being there. Because He saved me and keeps saving me, Jesus anchors me in the heavenly holy of holies. The seating of me and the anchoring of me there does not mean I am there in the present. It is a blessed guarantee of my salvation.
Universal church ecclesiology uses neoplatonic language. It says the true church is all believers, the apparent “universal church,” which manifests itself in a visible church, the local one. It finds reality in the ideal or the mystical. Leeman says the universal church becomes local by gathering. A church is a gathering. A gathering doesn’t become a gathering by gathering. The not-gathered thing is not a gathering. This is also how all of the New Testament reads. It’s not called a gathering or an assembly when it doesn’t assemble. It isn’t an assembly then. The only reason why Leeman talks about the church as universal comes from neoplatonism.
Jonathan Leeman writes a unique ecclesiology. The dual church view isn’t unique, but his attempt to keep an attachment to the literal meaning of ekklesia, “assembly.” 9 Marks and he see the damage of the typical universal church teaching, that becomes easily untethered from the biblical practice of the church, which is only local. The typical universal church teaching creates free agents without accountability, living how they want yet continuing to call themselves Christians.
The attempt to keep congruity between assembly and universal church keeps Leeman in the mainstream of evangelicalism, which loves its universal church. It keeps alive a multitude of boards, conventions, associations, colleges, universities, and other parachurch organizations. Someone can live and work in that parachurch world as if it is Christian ministry without anything like it in the Bible. It is unhelpful, but mainly untrue. Whatever kingdom-like quality Leeman wants to attribute to the church, the mixture of the universal undermines the authority that the kingdom of Jesus Christ possesses.
As one might expect, Leeman’s system of interpretation effects his outcome. He fails to mention, however, his system — amillennialism. That system must see a universal church, which is a synonym with the kingdom. It erases a line between soteriology and ecclesiology. It results in reading his conclusions into scripture.
A Kingdom Argument
Leeman uses a doctrine of the kingdom to argue for a universal church. Some truth exists within the framework of his argument. As a representative of His church, Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom in Matthew 16:18-19. That does not mean the church is the kingdom, which emerges from amillennialism, an eschatology of Roman Catholicism and Capital Hill Baptist Church, Mark Dever, and 9 Marks. The church and the kingdom interrelate like the church and the family of God do.
Leeman says the church provides the way to say who citizens of the kingdom are. He compares church membership to the means of possessing the passport into the kingdom. To know who they are, Leeman postulates baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the means. He says these are covenant signs of the new covenant, so they express the entrance requirements into the kingdom. Nothing in the Bible says this. It is nifty inventiveness to attempt to prove a point, while having nothing to do so. It’s another way of my saying that it’s a stretch by Leeman.
The article further argues the kingdom/church concept with the language of “binding” and “loosing” in Matthew 16:19 and 18:18. Churches are doing kingdom work. They are not the kingdom. They represent the kingdom on earth. God gives the church — churches — heavenly authority to judge who is in and who is out. I’m sure that Leeman knows that doesn’t mean that the church kicks people out of heaven or out of the kingdom.
Jesus characterizes the extent of the judgment of the church in Matthew 18:17, “Let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.” The church regards a person as heathen. He may not be heathen. The man under church discipline in 1 Corinthians 5 proved himself to be a kingdom citizen, even though the church loosed him. The Lord Jesus Christ gives to the church, which is visible and local, the earthly judgment of heavenly or kingdom citizenship.
It’s true that someone, who isn’t baptized, doesn’t take of the Lord’s Table, won’t join a church, doesn’t submit to church leadership, and won’t gather with a church, the church should judge as not saved. Christ gave that judgment to the church. This doesn’t mean the church is the kingdom. It’s been given the authority of the kingdom. The King of the kingdom is Christ and the Head of the church is Christ.
The Bible offers a distinct soteriology and a distinct ecclesiology. They are distinct doctrines. However, they also relate to one another. Church membership requires salvation. However, it also requires baptism. Baptism isn’t salvation. It isn’t a “putting away of the filth of the flesh” (1 Pet 3:21). According to the New Testament, a church can have unbelievers in it, a mixed multitude, and will very often have unsaved church members, who should examine themselves whether they be in the faith (2 Cor 13:5). Most reading here know that church membership is not the same as salvation.
Terminology like church, temple, and body relate to the church. Words like kingdom, family, and saint relate to salvation. You can be in the kingdom, family, and a saint without baptism. To be in the church, temple, and body, you must be baptized. Scripture shows some relationship between terms of the church and of salvation. However, Leeman takes this further than what scripture teaches in order to vindicate his false universal church teaching.
Historical Argument
Leeman attempts to justify the universal church with a historical argument, using the patristics and the Protestant Reformers. He portrays a pendulum swing between an emphasis on the local church then the universal church and then back to the local church, meanwhile both churches existing with his dual church view. He writes the following:
Yet among Baptist groups the risk now would be to shift the weight of the body entirely onto the other foot, where Christians would give all their attention to the local church and little to the universal. Certain strains of Baptist churches, such as the Landmarkists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would in fact argue that only the local church exists. They would also refuse to share the Lord’s Supper with anyone who was not a member of their own church. Gratefully, such strains were rare.
He charges Baptists with overemphasis on the local church, especially those he calls and others label, “Landmarkists.” He attacks closed communion, unwillingness to share the Lord’s Supper with someone not a member of his church. I would contend that the Landmarkists brought ecclesiology back to scripture and communion back to its “communion of the Lord’s body,” which is local only. Christ gave communion to His church, which is local only.
The Landmarkers rose out of the Southern Baptist Convention, when Protestants shared their pulpits and partook in their communion. Baptists distinguish themselves as separatists. They separate from false doctrine such as infant sprinkling. Further, Southern Baptists allowed modernism or liberalism into the churches and rejected church perpetuity in their seminaries, leading to ecumenism. Landmarkers brought the Convention back to scripture and historic Baptist doctrines.
Leeman uses a kind of smear tactic, because his knowing what readers may have heard about Landmarkism. It’s like calling someone “flat earth” or “election denier.” It’s a rhetorical tactic. It doesn’t make a true historical or biblical point. He assumes people will think Landmarkism is bad, so they’ll associate local only ecclesiology then as bad too.
I agree that men through history believed in a local church, a universal church, in only a local church, and in both a local and a universal church. You can find all of those ecclesiological positions through history. However, we know a church is local. Where is the universal church in scripture and did it develop through history? Did it arise from neoplatonism?
Forced Universal with It “Showing Up”
Leeman says the universal church shows up in churches, which are local. He says that happens when churches cooperate with another in common service or labor for the Lord. Yes, churches all have the same Head if they are true churches. That doesn’t make a universal church. It is a generic church. It is an institutional understanding of church. Each true church has Christ as its head. This is not the discovery of or a doctrine of a universal church.
Churches either fellowship based upon the same doctrine and practice or they separate from one another. When they fellowship, that isn’t a universal church concept. That is just fellowship between two churches, like existed between the Jerusalem church and the Antioch church.
The universal concept of church seems to require churches cooperating. It leads to diminishment and corruption of true doctrine. If there is to be “no schism in the body” (1 Cor 12:25), and the body is universal, then no church should separate from one another. However, “the body” in 1 Corinthians 12 is defined as local in v. 27, when Paul says, “Ye are the body of Christ,” speaking of the church at Corinth. If it was universal, Paul would have written, “We are the body of Christ.” He doesn’t. Schisms exist between bodies. They are not to exist in the body.
The unity that Jesus prayed for in John 17 (v. 22) is found in separate churches that fellowship one with another based upon the truth (John 17:17). Unity is required in individual churches (Eph 4), not between separate churches. Separate churches attempt to have unity like Jerusalem and Antioch tried in Acts 15. True unity requires separation.
Evangelicals like Leeman do not teach biblical separation. They don’t write on it. They talk about church discipline, but they don’t teach on separation from other churches. Their false universal church teaching fuels this, which will mean apostasy for their churches and their movement. Every New Testament epistle teaches the doctrine of separation, which depends on a right view of the nature of the church.
Are Worldly Pleasures A Necessary Sacrifice For or Unto Salvation?
The Lord Jesus Christ told stories, called “parables.” In one of a later of those in Matthew 22, Jesus uses the story of a certain king and the marriage of his son. The “certain king” is God the Father and “his son” is God the Son, Jesus. The point of the story revolves around those who get into the wedding ceremony as a guest. Getting into the wedding ceremony is getting into the kingdom of heaven, which is the same thing as getting into heaven. Why don’t people get into heaven (compared to getting into a wedding as a guest)?
I think anyone reading here understands the concept of not getting into something you want. Something was sold out or a no vacancy. Nothing could be worse than not getting into heaven. It would be great to find out why you won’t get in. Not everyone will get into heaven. Jesus teaches this exclusivity. The Bible explains who gets into heaven and who doesn’t. In the parable of Matthew 22:1-14, Jesus tells a story that explains why people won’t get in.
Maybe you missed an event for some reason. Maybe for some reason you didn’t get a hotel you wanted on a particular night. Perhaps you tried out for a team and didn’t make it for some reason. You interviewed for a job, even your dream job, and you didn’t get it for some reason.
Jesus gives a few reasons for someone not getting into heaven. Jesus knows more than anyone about why people won’t get into heaven. Of all the reasons, His last reason is more important than any of the others. However, in the passage with the parable at least three verses explain one of the reasons people don’t get into heaven. That reason is worldly pleasures.
Someone who wants the kingdom of heaven, who wants Jesus Christ, can’t also want worldly pleasures. Verses 3-5 read:
3 And sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come. 4 Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are bidden, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are] killed, and all things are ready: come unto the marriage. 5 But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise.
A parallel passage to Matthew 22:1-14 is Luke 14:1-24. Concerning the reason of worldly pleasures, Jesus says there in verses 17-20:
17 And sent his servant at supper time to say to them that were bidden, Come; for all things are now ready. 18 And they all with one consent began to make excuse. The first said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it: I pray thee have me excused. 19 And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them: I pray thee have me excused. 20 And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.
Jesus presents salvation as a choice for which someone cannot have it both ways. Jesus earlier in Matthew (6:24) said, “No man can serve two masters.” In the next chapter He says you either take the narrow road or the broad road. When someone chooses the narrow road, having counted the cost, he is not choosing the broad or wide road that leads to destruction. Some of those on the wide or easy road choose worldly pleasures over Jesus Christ. This is akin to choosing self over Jesus.
Worldly things that keep someone from the kingdom of heaven are their own ways, their farm, and their merchandise (Matthew 22:1-14). It’s also represented as a piece of property, five yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:1-24). These are all things, worldly things, pleasures or lusts, that someone puts ahead of the Lord and His kingdom. The passage is saying you’ve got to make a choice and choosing the narrow, instead of selfish pursuits, worldly ones, is part of that choice. You can’t serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:24).
An eternally fatal flaw of new evangelicalism is that you can take both the world and Jesus Christ. One does not need to give up one for the other. No. The Apostle John echoes what Jesus taught in this parable and others, when he wrote (1 John 2:15): “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” In His high priestly prayer in John 17, Jesus says believers will not be “of the world.” That’s what Matthew 22 is saying in addition to many other passages. Worldly pleasures can and will keep you out of heaven.
In the Long Prayer of Jesus to His Father in John 17, Has “Of The World” Become Meaningless?
The model prayer of Matthew 6 and Luke 11, Jesus didn’t pray. He was teaching His disciples how to pray. Certain few times the New Testament records that He spoke to His Father, He didn’t ask for anything. He prays for one thing in John 12:28, “Father, glorify thy name.”
On the cross in Luke 23:34, Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them.” He prayed three times in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26, two of which He requested essentially the same thing, and the third time it says he prayed the same thing as the first two. In verse 39, He prayed, “Not as I wilt, but as thou wilt,” regarding His suffering and death, and then in verse 42, “Thy will be done,” which was about the same thing.We know Jesus prayed other times, but those passages don’t tell us what He prayed. John 17 most represents what Jesus prays, because it contains more that He prayed than all the other places combined. I will focus on one point of His requests in the chapter, which were not many, but of all of those prayers, He uses the words, “of the world,” seven times.
14 I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 15 I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
17 Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. 18 As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. 19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. 20 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.
15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.
For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.
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