The Sinking Sand of Patriarchy

Getting to the Root of Abuse: Distortions of God and Mankind

A few weeks ago I ventured onto a Reformed website, a discussion board, hosted by theologians, pastors, and thinkers. I entered a thread on the topic of abuse in Reformed and Presbyterian churches. To their credit, they did endure me, if only for a few days. What was I doing there, a place which I rightly suspected would be somewhat unsympathetic to my views of our differences as male and female? As abuse is being uncovered in Reformed circles, I grieve with hope because I believe that a day will come when our understanding of ourselves as male and female will heighten our worship, multiply our love and respect for one another, and increase our anticipation for what lies ahead for us with the Son in the Spirit-city.

So I ask again. Has our tradition come to an understanding of ourselves as male and female that accords with the doctrines we embrace? Do we have a distinctively Reformed anthropology? What can we add to this conversation as we build on the contributions of those who have come before us in our stream of the church? I speak about the great strides in our understanding of creation and redemption through the lens of covenant — the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, the two-Adam headships of those covenants, and the end or goal of Sabbath rest. Or has the work of reforming anthropology barely begun in the Reformed world? As I have mentioned before, I believe that the Reformed have a foundation on which to build a distinctively trinitarian and covenantal anthropology, one that goes beyond a superficial understanding of our differences as male and female, beyond natural theology, beyond common sense gender “roles,” beyond seeing our differences in terms of power differentials. Perhaps the Reformed understanding of trinity and covenant will take us to the heart of what we point to as from God and to God. Maybe God has brought our generation to this cultural moment of gender confusion as abuse is being revealed in the church to lead us to consider again what God is telling us when he says: “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Gen 1:26). Perhaps this is driving us to the joy of meditating on the glory of God revealed in making us one mankind, male and female (Genesis 1:27) in an ordered circulation (Genesis 2:22).

Perhaps the suffering that is being exposed in Reformed circles and elsewhere can be traced to how we have been trained to see one another. To be honest, I consider the abuse among us as on a continuum with what we observed for over two decades in Central Asia. In those years, marriage among our neighbors rarely evidenced mutual love and respect. It simply was not a part of their culture. Almost all our neighbors’ wives were at some time harmed by their husbands. Some disappeared for weeks while their bruises faded, bones healed, and they recovered strength to be able to function normally again. Needless to say, violence destroyed trust and prevented true intimacy in their marriages. In the places where we lived, marital infidelity for men was the norm, not the exception. Almost all the women feared, expected, or excused their husbands' unfaithfulness. If you asked men about their treatment of their wives, the very question would surprise them. It was part of the culture in which they were raised. If asked in just the right way, they might confess a “natural theology” of women — from women’s physical weakness a host of other weaknesses can be deduced. The woman’s status and work simply reflect what they are by nature. Though few would recognize this as the thought of Aristotle, the evidence that they were his disciples would be there all the same. Aristotelian anthropology aligns with fallen man.

Has their religion helped or hindered their fallen impulse toward abuse? Does their religion call them to love and respect their neighbor? Does their religion break down barriers so that love can flourish? Our former neighbors are part of a religious system whose only opposition is the Creator-creature distinction. There is one God, and all else bows to his power. Their marriages, intentionally or intuitively, could be said to reflect this great divide: one God on top, a monadic deity, a Creator who demands unquestioning allegiance, who readily does violence to the will of his creatures . . . and all else, subjugated in life or through death. Their religion means “submission.” It indicates their own subjugation, which then becomes the battle cry of conquest, the subjugation of their unbelieving neighbor. In stark opposition, we as Christians bear the name of the Son of God, the second person the Trinity, who being in the form of God, humbled himself and took the form of a servant and was made like us. Love compelled him to become a man in order to live the life we could not live and to die the death we could not die, to bring us to God. And in that condescension, he left a pattern for us to follow.

A recent podcast discussed Doug Wilson’s patriarchal trinity, from which Wilson derives his patriarchal religion. For Wilson, the Father projects onto human maleness a reflection of his own ultimate masculinity. Wilson sees the Father as ultimate masculinity because the first person of the Trinity is never said to submit to either Son or Spirit. That reflection of God or “masculinity” simply is authority and rule, which Wilson defines as “the right to make decisions that affect others.” Wilson calls Christian men to this type of rule, which should begin in the home and then expand to encompass the church and society.¹ Is this how the Bible speaks? Or did Jesus say that whoever would be first among you must be your slave, literally someone without rights (Matt. 20:27)? And how is “rule” in the church truly described, other than as an empowering, a strengthening, not a subjugating, of the body of Christ — that is, his people, his bride? The emphasis is not on the elders’ rights, but on the body as the dwelling place of the Spirit as she increasingly mirrors the city above through what is described as the slave labor of those who would be first. The elder who is worthy of double honor does not focus on his masculinity, authority, power, or rights, but on preaching and teaching which magnifies our triune God in the hearts of those whom he serves. His Godward labor builds up, not subjugates. He lends his strength to the strengthening of a dwelling, feminized in Scripture, in which God lives in his Spirit (Eph. 2:22).

When we turn to the true Scriptural teaching concerning marriage, the husband-wife relationship is never talked about in terms of masculine authority, rule, or rights. In place of those words, the Bible speaks of love as a laying down not only of rights, but of life itself (Eph 5:25). Where does Christ speak about his masculinity, rights, or rule as he sets his face like a flint toward Jerusalem where he will die a criminal and slave’s death (Luke 9:51; Isa 50:7). The Ephesians 5 model of marriage says nothing about masculine rights or rulership modeled after the supreme, divine patriarch, the Father. It rather speaks of willing, self-denying love, the love of Christ who became a servant in order to free those held captive to fear and death. Concerning wives, Ephesians 5 says nothing about Douglas Wilson’s “femininity” as the lack of rights, authority, or rule, but rather of the wife’s Godward, uncoerced, self-denying submission to her husband as she mirrors the mystery of what lies ahead for all of us as the bridal people of God called heavenward.

Can the Reformed church think for a moment about the abuse of power that we are seeing in the homes and churches around us and whether those abuses reflect how we speak about God? For example, how do we imagine “irresistible” grace? Does “irresistible” wrongly give and impression of God as pinning us down or holding and twisting our wrists as he moves us in the direction he chooses? As far as I recall, there is only one wrestling match in the Bible, and the Lord did not will to win. Jacob wrestled all night and overcame the Lord. In overcoming the Lord, Jacob’s heart was won to the Lord who promised to be with him to fulfill all that he had promised him. Another way to ask this: Is our understanding of God’s power at work towards us in balance with what the Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter 3 asserts: “nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures.” In other words, God does not violate our wills, but rather renews and transforms them so that we willingly receive him, so that both his will (primary) and our will (secondary) are expressed. This is not how Wilson sees masculinity and power. Wilson’s definition of masculinity appears to demand that men are that half of us who make decisions that affect others. Masculinity comes with “rights.” In marriage, half of us conquer, and the other half of us are conquered. Half of us subjugate and the other half of us are made subject, whether it aligns with our wills or not.

By his own admission, Wilson traces his current understanding of authority and power at work on earth to his conversion to reconstructionism and postmillennialism in the 80s. This thought caused something to snap like a “dry twig” in his mind: “All enemies, with the exception of the last enemy, death, were going to be subdued while Christ was still in Heaven. When He returned, He was going to destroy that one remaining enemy.” Wilson understood that Christ subdues all his enemies now indirectly, through the exercise of masculine strength on earth. Three years later, Wilson became Reformed, something he recalled as unpleasant and painful. I cannot help but wonder if his discomfort was tied to how he saw God’s power exercised in his salvation. This is how Wilson sees irresistible grace:

“Some might say it makes conversion sound like a mugging, with the hapless proselyte having been bonked on the head in order that he might be dragged off to eternal life, whether he wants to be or not. But the problem with this image is the intent of a mugging – to rob and maim. Why would we ever think of salvation in such terms? We need to think about this more carefully. There are other irresistible things in the world, and yet we never call them that. We just take the irresistibility for granted. . . . Irresistible grace? Why not? God is irresistibly God. He is the irresistible Creator. His creation of light, and space and time were all irresistible. He spoke and everything just showed up, ready or not. Just as the Bible tells us the new birth is like the first birth in this respect, Scriptures also tell us that the new creation is like the first creation in this same way.”

Do you see it? Wilson appears to say that God does indeed “bonk” and “drag off” his people, his bride, but God’s intentions are good. Perhaps it is just this (mis)understanding of his lack of agency in his own salvation that made Wilson’s own conversion to Calvinism so difficult, but now Wilson finds it useful. “Mugging” is in bounds, as long as one’s intentions are good. Again, the truly Reformed position is not that the human will is violated, but that the human will is wooed and made willing to come to Christ and be saved. Violence is not done to the creature’s will. He is not “dragged off.” For sure, his salvation finds its origin in the eternal decree of God, but the human will is engaged. The human being is granted agency as secondary cause in his salvation.

At the height of Wilson's influence in our lives, about 15 years ago, I wrote a screenplay. It was an allegory. As I look back, it demonstrated how I saw my own salvation at that time. It was about a father, a king, a patriarch, who as a last resort gave his rebellious and egotistical daughter in marriage to a travelling minstrel in hopes that he might make something of her. It is an old theme. Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” comes to mind. The minstrel turned out to be a powerful and noble king from a neighboring kingdom who took the form of a common serf until her “taming” was complete. He was then revealed in his glory. As I look back, I am amazed that I saw my salvation in terms of violence — overpowered, subdued, taken away, agency stripped away. Writing the screenplay was my attempt to reconcile myself to my reduced agency in our home and the local church as we were attempting to live out Wilson’s model. This personal “declension” felt “holy,” but I see my model was wholly wrong. God ordained my agency in salvation as a secondary cause, something seen in marriage as Paul appeals to the wife to offer God-ward submission, not the husband to rule her. God ordained my agency in marriage. The pattern of marriage is not based on the Father as patriarch of the trinity, nor on the Creator-creature distinction, nor on the supposed “mugging” of salvation, but rather on our triune God, on the Throne of the Father and Son and the Spirit-city, God’s manifestation of himself in the heavenly realm, and on the means and end of our covenantal union and communion with God on the Mountain of the Lord. In the words of Lane Tipton,

“The trinitarian processions and the trinitarian missions serve a covenantal end —consummated communion with the triune God in the heaven dwelling . . . Trinitarian theology structures Reformed theology from its beginning to its end and decisively shapes every doctrinal locus it touches. The trinitarian system orbits around and explicates the organic relation between the trinitarian processions and the covenantal missions of the Son and the Spirit, creating image-bearers in natural religious fellowship under covenant, that comes to consummate communion with the triune God in the Heaven-temple, in an earth and a people conformed to heaven’s glory.”²

As the Reformed church sees and responds to abuse, I feel like my small part is to offer for consideration a paradigm for gender relations that is trinitarian and covenantal. Maybe I am wrong, but is it not worth considering? I was told emphatically by the men that monitor the Reformed sounding board on which I posted that although I had some understanding of Reformed theology, I had no ability to use the Reformed sources I claimed. They told me that my proposal was an attack on divine incomprehensibility and that “no respectable Reformed theologian” would agree with what I was saying. I was told in no uncertain terms that we cannot draw a line between the Trinity and ourselves as (1) an equally ultimate unity as one mankind and diversity of persons, equal in power and glory; (2) in personal procession and embrace; (3) representing the covenantal means, the man’s perfect and personal obedience, and the covenantal end of his people as set apart for himself.

Does anyone else think it is strange that from 1977, the year George Knight wrote his book on the “role relations” of man and woman based on the trinity, until the great trinity debate of 2016, the most popular voices on gender considered the trinity a viable paradigm for gender, and yet now somehow we are reluctant to draw any parallels between an orthodox and historical understanding of the trinity and ourselves? We simply think that what seemed reasonable and right to so many of us for 39 years was just wholly misguided. I propose that we did make a stride ahead in those years by establishing that there indeed was a connection between our triune God and ourselves. We just wrongly understood the God worshiped as “holy, holy, holy.”

What I would have said next on the sounding board if they had not permanently muted me is that the historical sources I claim as support never thought the reformation was finished in their day with their contributions. Yes, Calvin understood the ecclesia reformata to be semper reformanda, always reforming. As long as the Lord tarries, we understand our need as his church to grow in our knowledge and understanding of God, who, as Calvin said, has tethered himself to us by “many bonds.” As I move into a discussion of Daughter Zion in Lamentations next Substack, it is my prayer that God would use even me as we heal and chart a solid path ahead.

1. For Wilson’s understanding of the Father’s masculinity impressed on human maleness, see For a Glory and a Covering: A Biblical Theology of Marriage, 40-41.

2. “Reformed Trinitarianism and Federalism,” beginning at minute mark 13:57, https://reformedforum.org/lessons/reformed-trinitarianism-and-federalism-17min/