A Bit of My Story

I never expected to be here . . .

Finding myself in the Reformed World.

I never could have predicted that I would write on gender from a Reformed perspective. My husband and I were in dispensational churches in the late 1980s when we stumbled upon the Reformed world through John Piper’s Desiring God. By the 2000s, I was captivated. My husband bought me a sweatshirt that said “Berkhof is my homeboy.” I was homeschooling our children using materials from Logos School (Moscow, Idaho). We were living in Central Asia but visiting PCA churches on furloughs.

In the 2010s, when we returned to the US, we joined a PCA church and started to attend Reformed Theological Seminary. The first class we took was Covenant Theology. It changed my life. In that class I was introduced to Geerhardus Vos’s Biblical Theology. Vos’s thought has been reforming me ever since.

One final conversation with a professor as I was finishing my first degree ended up setting the course of my studies over the past five years. He said that he believes that a woman can learn theology in seminary, but she can never teach theology in seminary. He said that seminaries exist primarily to prepare and train ordained officers of the church. From his perspective, a woman cannot teach men to do something that she is excluded from doing herself. For the first time I saw myself through his eyes. There is a different level of belonging for women. We may be accepted as students at seminary but not in anticipation of our being fruitful there in any formal sense. His anthropology and his ecclesiology, which included the seminary, were intrinsically related, but what intrigued me is that he couldn’t give a distinctively Reformed answer to what tied them together. In other words, he could not relate gender to the church by appeal to covenant. That conversation began the journey that brings me to today. I was fairly certain that my first class in seminary and Vos held the answers to my last perplexing conversation in seminary with my professor.

It Hasn’t Been All Cerebral

At this point, you might think that my journey has been merely academic. It hasn’t. I have felt knocked around quite a bit, and I have seen friends knocked around more. We needed to leave our PCA church under circumstances that continue to profoundly trouble me. Though Vos and Cornelius Van Til have helped me forward in my understanding of gender, Vosians and Van Tilians in the current stream of Old Princeton and Westminster appear aloof or outright skeptical about applying Vos and Van Til to “male and female he created them.” Apart from a few who have offered both scholarship and friendship, I do my research among those who have little regard for it. It has seemed at many turns that the “good ole boys club” still has the sign “No Girls Allowed,” even if the girls are now grandmothers and willing to try to smoke cigars with them. This has driven me to the Lord, to follow in the tracks of the flocks and listen for the Shepherd’s voice (SoS 1).

Every Week or Ten Days

I plan to write an article every week or ten days. I will be sharing a biblical-theology of sexuality and gender and also articles that I hope will encourage those of us who wait patiently for the dawning of a new day in the church, when the gifts of women are not only welcomed but seen as essential for the church’s joy and endurance.

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