Lady Preachers and Breastfeeding Men
Finding the ‘why’
Women behind the pulpit are one of the surest signposts of a sick church. To reach this point of antinomianism a church must have such a high proportion of Lewis’s ‘Men without chests’ that it is difficult to see how the rot can be reversed. I wanted to start by saying ‘there is broad agreement among conservative evangelicals that women must not preach’, but I realised that this was ridiculous. The Venn diagrams overlap so closely that one could rather say that to be a conservative evangelical is to be an evangelical who does not believe women should preach.
Thankfully within conservative evangelicalism there is also unanimity on the question of ‘why’. Stop an average Baptist on the street, and ask them this question, and they will reply ‘because God says so’, an answer sweet as cold water to a parched soul. However, ask them another ‘why’, ‘why does God say so?’ and the responses will start to vary. Some will say ‘I don’t know, but He does’, and God bless these faithful ones. Some others will say ‘He just does’, and these good men and women will get their reward in heaven. However, perhaps you might ask an ignorant and uncouth sort, the kind who is covered in tats and can’t shake the language of his former life, and he might say ‘I dunno, I guess they’re f#%&ing useless at it’, and he is the best of all.
Good answers, real answers and correct answers
All three of these answers are admirable, but only one is correct. The first answer, ‘I don’t know, but He does’ is not a real answer. However, saying that this is not a real answer is not to say that it is a bad answer. The implied trust in the authority of God to decide things which are above our understanding is to be commended. For someone who honestly doesn’t know why God says what He says, this is the best answer to give.
The second answer is a real answer, but it is a wrong answer. To say that God ‘just does’ something is to say that there isn’t a reason why He does it, or in other words, it is arbitrary. We should have a lot of patience for this wrong answer though, as it comes from a good place. The answerer is correct that God has the authority to make arbitrary laws, but is wrong in believing that this is one of them.
The third answer is best because it is both real and correct. The reason why God says that women should not preach is because he has not made them to be preachers, and when they try to do it anyway they subvert not only His wishes, but also the natural order that He made.
The natural order
When I say that there is a ‘natural order’ many people will hear ‘arbitrary hierarchy’, and therein lies the heart of the problem. I said in my last post that our life and death struggle with the culture is largely on the nature of reality. Our culture is hell bent on perverting every interrelation in the natural world, as the dark force behind this cultural jihad knows that in so doing he will make us both miserable and impotent. Look around and you will see confusion everywhere. You will see women rolling dogs around in prams, cute blonds in military recruitment posters and children locked in supervised pens until mum and dad need them as an accessory at the weekend function.
As we Western Christians watch this world gone mad we are largely silent, as we have already swallowed the substance of the opposing argument. With our heads we accept their premise that everything is arbitrary, that there is no one way that things will work best. We believe that children must obey their parents because God says so, not because they are stupid and will ruin themselves if left to their own devices. We believe that husbands should love their wives because God says so, not because husbands are blessed by loved wives. We believe that wives must not have authority over husbands because God says so, not because women crumble under a load they were never meant to bear. We are like the defenders of some ancient land, who have ceded every piece of cultural ground to the pagans except for the central citadel of the central city, the last bastion, ‘the Lord said so, so here I die!’
I have a deep appreciation for this spirit, but it is misguided, and also fails in the end. As we so often see, when the time comes to make this final stand, you look around and find that your kin are no longer by your side. These adherents to the ‘there’s no reason why, but God says so anyway’ lose their people for two reasons. Firstly, it is human nature to find the minimum application to arbitrary commands, and this leads to a thin and insipid culture defined by the negative. Everything is framed in terms of how close to the line you can go before it is crossed. ‘What is the maximum amount of skin I can show?’, ‘what is the most I can do on the Sabbath?’, ‘Can we let a woman chair the elder’s meeting without actually taking the title of elder?’ Ironically a culture built around minimal applications feels not just thin but also repressive, as we are always tapping the walls of our prison cells, looking for a way out.
The second reason this viewpoint loses the kin is that it puts a gulf of distance between us and God. Instead of a God who loves us and can help us flourish in this life, we see a God who doesn’t really care. He’s set some house rules we don’t understand, and then sips his coffee and reads the paper, occasionally calling out ‘don’t bother me, just follow the rules’, when we ask why we are allowed to watch all the broadcast tv we want, but no Netflix.
The confusion of the sanctified
In defense of these Christians, they are often far too sanctified to let this view really play out. They know deep down that God is a God of love, that He cares for His children and that His ways are not only right but also good. However, for some reason on the issue of women and authority this understanding falls away. We allow or even encourage our women to view the restrictions on them as arbitrary. Our pastors say from the front that, ‘half of you women could preach through this text better than I can, but God says you must not’. But let us be frank; women are short, cute and weak. They have soft, high and musical voices. They are hormonal, emotional, relational, lovers of peace, haters of brashness. In short they are perfectly created for exactly what God made them to do, which is clearly not thundering His words down from the pulpit.
Heaven or Hell
Someone could counter that they have met women who are 6 2’, have square jaws and lungs like blacksmith’s bellows. They may also counter that some of the best preaching is not thundering, but gentle, caring, emotional. What then?
Firstly, we would need to ignore that preaching is inseparable from pastoring, which brings with it a much broader set of prerequisites and narrows the talent pool down even further. But putting this aside, the way of thinking shown by this question is symptomatic of a much deeper issue, so deep that it is hard to contradict it in words rather than feelings. Let the questioner stop for a moment. What does he feel about this butch woman who could match Whitfield for volume? How would he feel about the gentle preacher if he knew that he had no other volume, even when addressing the great sins? Personally I feel like retching. And there is reason behind this feeling. Even where we can create mechanically coherent exceptions to natural categories, we find that God has built into us a dogged loyalty to these natural categories. We know that a child must obey their parents, even if the child is wiser than the parents. We know that woman shooting at each other from muddy trenches is an abomination, even if they are very good shots.
In a previous post I stated that ‘watching a woman preach is like watching a man breastfeed’. This comparison drew some criticism for, as the critics point out, women are physically capable of preaching while men are not physically capable of breastfeeding. As our tattooed friend pointed out at the start, physically capable is a low bar, and I am yet to meet a women who I think would make a decent preacher (let alone a good pastor). However, all of this aside, God has put into us a longing for His patterns, a deep desire to live in harmony with His creation as He created it. Even where it makes mechanical sense, we know that to violate these patterns brings us to the edge of the Void, where all is chaos. And this is why the analogy of breastfeeding men is an apt comparison for lady preachers. Men shouldn’t breastfeed, but not simply because they can’t. There are rare men with genetic issues who do have lactating ducts, and these men should be locked away if they every put a baby near their chests. It’s an abomination, a revolution against the Lord Almighty, to violate His categories in this way. We have too much of our maker in us to not see the way the world ought to be, and to embrace anything else is to prefer Hell to Heaven.
