Patriarchy and the Lost City
Recovering a Vision of the Son and the Spirit
Through my study of biblical theology, I have come to see that introducing patriarchy into the local church and marriage confuses categories that we find repeatedly established in Scripture. In fact, Jesus specifically warns us against this confusion in Matthew 23:9, “But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ because you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. Do not call anyone on earth your father, because you have one Father, who is in heaven. You are not to be called instructors either, because you have one Instructor, the Messiah.” Our Lord sets apart his Father, the First Person of the Trinity, as our one and only Father, and he sets apart himself, the Second Person of the Trinity, who became incarnate for us and for our salvation, as our one and only Rabbi. We are not to call or consider religious leaders “fathers.” In the local church, there will inevitably be diversity, ethnic diversity, male and female, the old and the young, but there is only one family relation we claim and experience — siblings. We have brothers and sisters, not fathers, though the older are to use the wisdom gleaned from their long lives to serve, and the younger are to be gentle and show respect to the aged. In fact, God calls his church to give special honor to what is considered weak and ignoble in this age (1 Cor 12:22-24). God calls us to promote the dignity of all of our siblings, as we learn from one another as those under one loving Father and under the instruction of our divine brother, Jesus. This is not to say that there is no recognized work of protecting, serving, teaching, and leading for some, but rather that we recognize those set apart as our siblings. Elders and deacons are our brothers and sisters. They should not consider themselves our fathers, nor should we.
Likewise, in Christian marriage, we are not called to mirror patriarchal bonds, but the distinct relation of husband and wife. As I have been arguing for many months, we do not represent the bond of Father and Son, but the bond of Son and Spirit. There is a union and communion of the Second and Third person which was first manifest in the heavenly realm as the Son clothed himself in the glory of the Spirit.1 This is the prototype of marriage. In other words, “patriarchal marriage” is an oxymoron, distorting what God is truly telling us by making us husband and wife in Genesis 2.
“Patriarchal brotherhood” in the church and “patriarchal marriage” are both contradictions of terms. In fact, introducing patriarchy in either context lends itself to idolatry by obscuring our vision of our one and only Father. Patriarchy distorts our understanding of God. It also distorts our neighbor, with whom we are called to live as coheirs, mirroring the unity and diversity within God himself, three persons equal in power and glory. We stand under one God, our Father, and beside one another as male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, in these two institutions which explicitly magnify God — the church and marriage. In the church, the fatherhood of God is singular. We live under one Father as brothers and sisters, called to outdo one another in honoring and loving each other, even as overseers are called to a “noble task” (Rom 12:10). Likewise in marriage, there is no father-figure, but rather two persons symmetrically bound to one another as bone of bone and flesh of flesh.
The Father-Son relationship is reserved for God the Father in relation to the incarnate Son and all of Christ’s people united to him. Together with the Son, “brethren” share one Father through his resurrection from the dead. Consider Jesus’ words to Mary Magdalene in John 20:17: “Do not cling to me since I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Can we think for a moment about whether asserting “patriarchal” relations, against Jesus’ command, might be responsible in part for the havoc wreaked by abuse in churches and marriages? Christ explicitly warns us about calling our leaders “Rabbi” and any man “Father,” even as he calls all of us to enter boldly into the inclusive communion of brothers and sisters in the church . . . and some of us into the exclusive bond of husband and wife in temporal marriage. Is patriarchy natural to God’s order, part of the “fabric of the cosmos”?2 I suggest that it is unnatural to God’s order in the church and marriage. Where it is found, it aligns with the distortion of sin and our fall from innocence. It causes us to be preoccupied with things below and hinders us from recognizing the glory that awaits us with the Son in the City. As his church, we are united to Christ as brothers and sisters receiving the Father’s kingdom. We are also Christ’s glory-bride. We live as siblings in the Son and as a bride in the Spirit. This is our inheritance as children of the only Father we acknowledge in the church and in marriage, the one who is in heaven.
We find what God is truly telling us about ourselves as male and female, brothers and sisters in the church, husband and wife in marriage, in every book of the Bible. We represent things that came before us and that will endure long after this world is rolled up like a scroll and its elements dissolved. In the Eschatology of the Psalter, Geerhardus Vos writes,
(Christianity’s) eschatology is its greatest religious glory, for in this the Church expresses her faith in a future when all the accidents and externals of religion shall drop away, a great purging of the world-stage, which shall leave only the perfect and ripe fruitage of all of God’s intercourse with man from the beginning. The Gospel of the life to come is the Gospel of a Church sure of herself and her own endless destiny.3
I suggest that the Gospel of eschatology, “the life of the world to come,” is what gender proclaims. Our differences display sonship and cityhood. It leads our thoughts to the Son and his Spirit-city. Contemplating ourselves as male and female, as brother and sister, as husband and wife, leads our thoughts heavenward. It fixes our hope on our future, the King and his royal bridal city.
It should come as no surprise that trinitarian heterodoxy goes hand in hand with distorted conceptions of diversity among us and a preoccupation with power on this earth. Twisted understandings of God align with warped views of ourselves, whether our distinctions as male and female or our existence as one body and bride of Christ. There is a link between introducing a power hierarchy into the trinity and making the church and marriage about who is in control.
In 2008, Douglas Wilson published Heaven Misplaced, calling us to suspend thoughts of systematic theology so that we might consider a “lyrical theology.”4 He wants us to see the “loveliness” of the story he imagines, which is a virtually heavenless story. It is a vision of the transformation of earth before the return of Christ in the glory of his heavenly city. Wilson longs for a golden age on earth, a time when it will be hard to imagine that this world can get any better.5 Then, and only then, he imagines Christ will return from heaven to crown the work of mankind by destroying the only remaining enemy, death. What has Wilson done? He has misplaced God’s dwelling, the Spirit-city. He has relegated Zion to virtual insignificance. He has transferred the glory of Christ’s eternal bridal realm to a temporal, fallen realm. I find no coincidence that Wilson’s misplacement of heaven goes hand in hand with the misplacement of the bridal city’s anthropological symbol, the woman. By God’s design, our understanding of heaven and our understanding of ourselves as male and female are bound together.
Wilson’s view is the polar opposite of Vos. For Vos, the gospel of eschatology is the gospel of heaven, and heaven is the holy dwelling of God. It is the gospel of God’s throne and of his throne room, which Meredith Kline calls a theophany of the Holy Spirit.6 In Vos and Kline’s thought, heaven as the throne of God stands over and against the earth as God’s footstool, even as the two are destined to converge in the great finale of history. The gospel according to Vos and Kline is the gospel of a heavenly Son, who was made flesh for us and for our salvation, and of a heavenly City. which is destined to descend, consummating what God has prepared for them that love him.
The Sabbath throne and the Sabbath City are the one hope of God’s people in the Old and New Testament. Earthly kings are a false hope. God is the one and only refuge of God’s people. Psalm 2 asks, “Why do the earth’s nations, peoples, kings, and rulers plot in vain?” Judgement is in the hands of God, who is a refuge for his people. He is the one enthroned in heaven (Father) and the one installed on Zion (Son), who indwell God’s holy mountain (Spirit). Unlike the original holiness of Adam and Eve, God's mountain is not a conferred holiness. Zion simply is holy, as are all theophanies, whether in heaven or on earth — including the heavenly throne of the Father and the Son and the heavenly Spirit-train of Isaiah 6:1. The Angel of the Lord, the enfleshed Son, the Pillar of Fire, Cloud, and Dove are all holy theophanies. As the psalmist says, “Exalt the Lord our God; bow in worship to his holy mountain, for the Lord our God is holy” (Ps 99:9). Are God’s people called to bow to the Son or to the Spirit? In other words, “Is the Son or is the Spirit the Lord who is holy?” I suggest that it is the Son and the Spirit manifest as one dwelling and one refuge of the people of God. It is the one royal citadel. When John in Revelation beholds the Son, he sees him amidst the City. When John “in the Spirit” sees the City, his attention is ultimately drawn to the One seated on the throne, the One who lives forever and ever (Rev 4).
In the beginning, the one throne of heaven was the manifestation of the embrace of the Father and Son. And the one temple throne room of heaven was the manifestation of the embrace of the Father and Son in and with the Spirit. They are three persons existing as one God, equal in power and glory. After sin entered and the promised Seed crushed the serpent, the incarnate Son was exalted to the Father’s right hand. The Son of David was clothed as a man with the personal glory of Zion and sealed to his heavenly city. In his union with the Spirit, the throne of the Son and his city have become one anchor for the people of God. Our desire is fixed on the Son and his Holy Mountain (Ps 3:4). Any attempt to pit Jesus and his Spirit-city against one another, making one more worthy of our desire than the other, makes little sense in the Scriptures. In his installment on Zion, Christ has been united to the Spirit of Sabbath glory. The triune God of Sabbath rest is the one chief end of mankind. The Son and the Spirit’s mutual, personal indwelling belongs to us forever as our inheritance from the Father. We are destined to live with the Son in the Spirit-city forever.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the Zion psalms. Zion is the city of a king. Both are front and center in the minds of the psalmists. Last Substack, I wrote about the first of two Korahite collections, Psalms 42-49, songs which open the second book of Israel’s psalter. The Korahites long for the end for which they were made, the triune God, the Throne and the Tabernacle. They reach for the royal Son and the royal City of Ophir gold, united in the wedding of the ages. The prophets also saw the glory of the Son and City. Daniel speaks of the Lord seated, his clothing white like snow and the hair of his head like whitest wool. “His throne was flaming fire; its wheels were blazing fire. A river of fire was flowing, coming out from his presence” (Dan 7:9). The throne of the Son, and the fire which moves it and proceeds from it, fill Daniel’s thoughts. The fire that Daniel sees evokes Exodus 19:18: “All of Mount Sinai was covered with smoke because the LORD had descended on it in the form of fire. The smoke billowed into the sky like smoke from a brick kiln, and the whole mountain shook violently.” The Lord, the Holy Spirit, was there, manifest as fire. A few verses later, we find, “ . . . one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of heaven.” These clouds are not part of our world, now visible to our eyes, but clouds which are inexpressible, full of glory, the clouds of heaven. Clouds, like fire, are theophanies, more particularly of the Holy Spirit. When you come to the new covenant, where you find the Son of Man, you find a “pneumophany,” the Spirit manifest as his holy dwelling.
The Son now enthroned amidst that fiery Glory is forever united to the life-giving Spirit in heaven. We confess, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and Son,” and yet we also acknowledge that Christ when he enters that life-giving realm, ablaze with glory, becomes “life-giving Spirit” (1 Cor 15:45). In other words, the Son ascended and enthroned, robed in the glory of the Spirit, encircled in Spirit’s light, enveloped in the radiance of Zion, has become one life-giving Spirit-dwelling for God’s people for all time.7 What God has joined together, let no man attempt to separate.
What the Old Testament foreshadows, the New Testament establishes. In Acts, you find the Son indwelling the Spirit-city. When the Son appears, you see his Glory-citadel. For example, when Stephen gazes into heaven, he sees “the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” “Heavenly-glory,” “Jesus,” at the right hand of “God” — Stephen sees nothing less than a theophany of our triune Lord. At his conversion, Paul also sees the Son revealed as “a light from heaven flashed around him” (Acts 9:3). Later, Paul “in Christ” is caught up “to the third heaven . . . to paradise” and hears the inexpressible (2 Cor 12:2-4). When John sees Revelation’s Christophanies, the Lord is always in his throne room or descending with his glory and city. When Christ comes again, he will be “with his angels in the glory of his Father.” Similar expressions are repeated throughout the New Testament: “in the clouds with great power and glory,” “in the glory of his Father with the holy angels,” “on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory;” “seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven;” “in his glory, and all the angels with him, on heaven’s clouds with heaven and her hosts.”
You cannot proclaim Christ as King and denigrate or marginalize the Sabbath City. They have become one bone and one flesh. Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, writes that the relationship between the husband and wife is “the fundamental human relationship upon which all of human history is based. It bears a theology within itself, and indeed it is possible and intelligible only theologically. . . to leave the woman out of the whole of theology would be to deny creation and election (salvation history) and thereby to nullify revelation”8 (23). It would deny eschatology. I suggest that the reason why divine revelation is based on this distinction is because our differences first of all reveal God himself and his revelation of himself in the heavens. Male and female, man and woman, husband and wife manifest something of the beatific vision, God on his holy hill. The foundation of our differences reaches back into the triune nature of God. What God is revealing by making us male and female is himself. If we were made like him and our chief end as mankind, male and female, is to know him, why would we not understand ourselves and our neighbor as revealing something of him? Why would we think that our unity and diversity are arbitrary, just the way things are, only for the purpose of “mutual help,” “legitimate issue,” and “preventing of uncleanness” as the Westminster Confession states.9 Almost four hundred years have passed, and we have not made progress. Worse than that, through the biblical theology of Vos, Van Til, Kline, and others, we have come to the principle of representation and yet decided that representation does not apply to male and female. Or worse yet, we have decided that when male and female are juxtaposed, half of us represent who God is and half of us represent what God is not.
If our differences as male and female are bound up with the Creator-creature distinction, the immortal and the mortal, the wise and the foolish, when Eve took the fruit and ate, she would have confirmed in time and space what God was communicating through his decree to make them male and female. Instead we see them symmetrically opposed. They were created together; they were tempted together; both ate; both of their hearts were darkened; they both hid; they both rejected the God of heaven for a fleeting glory; God approached both; God spoke to both; God provided a way home for both. From Genesis 1:26-28 forward, we find Adam and Eve symmetrically presented, one mankind, male and female. God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness.” The man and the woman are made in their unity and diversity in the likeness of God, the triune God, persons equal in power and glory. Of all creation, the man and the woman most perfectly declare him not only as made in “knowledge, righteousness, and holiness,” for union and communion with God, but as one and many, in procession and embrace. Adam and Eve together and separately represent the divine Creator in their existence as one mankind, male and female (Gen 1), man and woman (Gen 2), Adam and Eve, and Seed and woman (Gen 3:15-16). By nature before Genesis 3:7, and by grace after Genesis 3:7, right through to the end of Revelation, the man and woman continue to declare things that were, things that are, and things to come. Man and woman together were created by God and for God. Together they fell, and yet by grace, together they will rise as sons in the Son and a city-bride in the Spirit.
Thank you for reading. I welcome any comments. Next Substack, I hope to write about the Son and City in the Zion Psalms of the Second Collection of the Sons of Korah.
Meredith Kline, God, Heaven, and Har Magedon, 10-17.
Doug Wilson, https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/patriarchy-vision-forum-and-all-the-rest-of-it.html. This term is used by Wilson repeatedly and picked up by others. In It’s Good to be a Man, Michael Foster & Bnonn Tennant write, “Patriarchy is inevitable. God has built it into the fabric of the cosmos. You could as soon smash it as you could smash gravity” (Kindle Loc 75 of 227). It is the same concept which Kevin DeYoung asserts when he writes that patriarchy comprehends “the way the world is and the way God made men and women.” See “Death to the Patriarchy?,” https://clearlyreformed.org/death-to-the-patriarchy/).
Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology, “The Eschatology of the Psalter,” 365.
Wilson, Heaven Misplaced: Christ's Kingdom on Earth, 10.
Ibid. 15.
Kline, 11.
Ibid., 113-114. See also, Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., “The Life-Giving Spirit,” https://journal.rts.edu/article/the-life-giving-spirit/.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Daughter Zion, 23.
Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), XXIV.1, https://www.blueletterbible.org/study/ccc/westminster/Of_Marriage_And_Divorce.cfm.
The more you write and develop this study, Anna, the more and more it makes sense, and the more I’m baffled by how the Spirit/city/woman typology has been missed for so long and by so many. Your first paragraph also reminds me of Dwelling in the Household of God by Mary Coloe. I can’t remember if you’ve read that (or her other book on temple typology in John), but this paragraph especially resonates with what you wrote:
“The household model [of the church] as imaged in the language of the Fourth Gospel essentially deconstructs the patriarchal household model of antiquity, since it takes as its point of reference the divine communion [between Father and Son]. The Fourth Gospel, while using “father-son” terminology, reconstitutes the relationship as a dynamism of mutual self-giving love…We do not have within this household a hierarchy of leadership other than the leadership of faith and love.”
In addition to the explicit sibling language in 20:17, Coloe points out the implication of 19:26-27 re the joining of Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple. If the mother of Jesus becomes the mother of the BD, then logically the BD is now the brother of Jesus. The new family of God is a family of siblings who share a Father (God the Father, through union with the Son) and a Mother (the church/household through the indwelling Spirit).
Anna, your deep, Biblical thinking is so refreshing! Like Aaron says, the more I interact with what you're writing and have begun thinking about other aspects of theology in light of it, the more I am shocked (and grieved) that we've missed this for so long. It is so clear - and harmonizes so many fragmented shards of our theology that, to this point, have served only to injure rather than edify the church.
Your pointing out that our understanding of gender directly correlates to our understanding of our eschatology is profound - and truly, our vision of heaven is just as fragmented and murky as our vision of women is! It suddenly occurred to me that as we begin seeing women (and men!) more clearly, we may perhaps also begin to see heaven more clearly as well.
I have wrestled with these theological shards for my entire life, and have never been able to even consider talking with church leaders about them until recently. I couldn't exactly just go and say, "You're wrong!" with no coherent alternative to present and say "Is not this a better way to understand it?"
I currently am reading How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy by Terran Williams. His work, together with yours here, is giving me hope that I can begin to articulate a rigorous defense of this better way to understand and apply the theological lessons our gender is designed by God to teach us. Though to be honest, the thought of engaging my pastor and session on this is terrifying (my pastor is quite literally the smartest, most biblically astute person I know). For my children, and others though, I don't think I can in good conscience continue to kick the can further down the road for them to deal with. Reading, thinking, praying, and planning to do something - I'm just not quite sure what.
Until I figure out what that something is, I will continue to look forward to each of your posts. Thank you!