When Honoring our Fathers Means Demeaning our Sisters

Looking for the Dawn of Reformed Anthropology

Two of the theologians who have helped me most to see gender for what it is, Geerhardus Vos and Cornelius Van Til, never wrote on gender. A third, Meredith Kline, saw a glory attached to gender, but the glory of man pertained to God as his origin and the glory of woman pertained to man as her origin. Kline saw a disproportionate glory which would be difficult to fathom. The woman’s glory was related to “her image status as derivative and subject to authority.”¹ If you place the male and female side by side in Scripture, Kline understood the male to radiate the glory of the Creator and the female to radiate the glory of the creature. In other words, when it comes to glory, he considered the man-woman distinction to be an analogue of the Creator-creature distinction. For Kline, this meant that all trinitarian and covenantal images primarily gather to the man alone. Think about that. The divine images of Father, Son, and Spirit find their immediate representation in the man alone, not the woman. All the covenantal images of head, prophet, priest, and king devolve principally on the man. The glory of the covenantal offices, the glory of the means and end of the covenant, are reflected in Adam alone, not Eve. Set over and against the man, the woman partakes of the glory of God’s covenant vicariously, secondarily, through the man and by virtue of her union with the man. In other words, her glory is mediated by the man. In some Presbyterian and Reformed circles, even if these things are not understood well or taught explicitly, they are caught.

The Reformed understanding of women is based not only on what she is not — in other words she does not represent God directly — but on the shameful things she is. As representing the creature, her status changed in Genesis 3. Beginning with the church fathers, she began to be understood in the light of fallen mankind in their rebellion against God. Even as redeemed, she was seen as allied with Satan, a usurper. In the 1970s, a student at Westminster Theological Seminary, Susan Foh, rooted this in Genesis 3:16. Her view has been widely-accepted, though now there are signs of correction. Foh considered all women to be ethically cursed as a result of the Fall. At the core of their being, women’s desires were thought to have been corrupted by God because of Eve’s sin, leaving them inclined to overcome lawful male rulership. In Genesis 3, Foh saw a new weakness from God, a consequence of her disobedience. She is power hungry. In the end, Foh was thought to provide fresh exegetical proof of Aristotle’s understanding of the woman as inferior.

Aristotle understood women and slaves to be physically, emotionally, and intellectually weak, and thus inclined to be stubborn, gullible, deceitful, and irrational. In his work On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle wrote, “For the first principle of the movement . . . whereby that which comes into being is male, is better and more divine than the material whereby it is female.” This is something that Aristotle and Meredith Kline in line with the Reformed tradition share in common. They compare men to women only to find men more divine. As many in conservative Reformed Presbyterian churches understand it today, both woman's secondary status in Genesis 2 and her moral weakness in Genesis 3 make her role clear. Women are to be under authority and serve the man because he alone principally represents God.

This understanding of the woman comes with a price tag, and not only for the woman. When we returned from Central Asia in 2013 and became members of a Presbyterian church, I did not see these things right away. Understanding came slowly, beginning with a vague sense that as a laywoman I was seen as different than a layman. This happened in small ways. A group had formed to study Calvin’s Institutes. Though I was a serious student of Reformed Theology, it was understood that only men could join this group. Also, there seemed to be something off when I wanted to talk about theology, as if I was trying to do something I could never do or to be someone who I could never be.

I began to understand more when the first pastor told me that he understood Genesis 3:16 to say that all women are uniquely cursed with a desire to cast off male authority. I could only deduce that somehow my thirst for theology was seen in that light. It was threatening, as if deeper knowledge must be guarded from those who could potentially misuse it. I began to suspect that it was considered precarious to theologically educate a woman who could, perhaps even would, turn her knowledge to dubious ends. By the end of our time in that denomination, it was clear to me that my voice was not welcome, whether respectful, brief, informal feedback to our pastor on his sermons, input in Sunday School class, or conversations in the foyer with my brothers and sisters in Christ about my research in seminary. With this mindset, there can be no complementarity, no intentional growing and learning from one another, no “one mind, one heart, contending as one for the faith of the gospel,” no intentional one-anothering, no true knowing of one another, no deliberate practice of mutuality, whether edification or consolation. You cannot freely receive from someone you cannot freely trust. If women are viewed categorically with suspicion, then there will be no freedom in giving and receiving from half our neighbors — no purposeful knowing and being known, no eternal sowing or reaping in each other’s lives.

In the end, I was told that I did not fit, that I was in the wrong church, the wrong denomination, part of the wrong tradition. I agreed. What was required of me was simple. I was to recede into the background and let my husband be my face and voice in the church. If I could only do that. Because of how I understood myself and the church from Scripture, I could not. I saw myself as a living stone, a full member of the body, visible, at work, with gifts given according to the will of the Spirit. Over time, as I continue to think about these things from a greater distance, it has become clear to me that Reformed anthropology has hobbled the church. As presently understood, it lends itself to the effacing and silencing of half of those who bear God’s image in worship, and not only half.

I write because I believe that the Presbyterian and Reformed church needs to come to a true understanding of her people as male and female. It will take humility and a serious, intentional, sustained effort to purge theological anthropology of a natural law understanding of ourselves. Once that happens, the church will be ready for the equally difficult task of reforming ecclesiology. We cannot set our minds to ecclesiology with Aristotle still knocking around in our heads. Our understanding of ourselves is foundational to an understanding of how we are to worship the God who made us for this very purpose. Anthropology and ecclesiology go together because Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 go together.

As it stands now, Presbyterian and Reformed ecclesiology is not satisfied with silencing only half of the church during worship. Consider this quote from the OPC’s 1991 Report of the Committee on the Involvement of Unordained Persons in the Regular Worship Services of the Church Minority Report #2.

A women's individual voice is not to be raised audibly except when it is a part of the whole body speaking in harmony. But, it needs to be stressed that this is normally the case for every other participant — non-qualified men, children, inactive qualified men—excepting those qualified men who are officiating the worship. Almost all within a given body of corporate worship exercise the role of submissiveness and so silence in the sense explained.²

Though this is a quote from a secondary document that was not ultimately accepted, the author’s understanding of worship is in line with Calvin’s ecclesiology. On the one end, a woman’s individual voice is not to be audible in worship, and on the other end is the minister of the gospel set apart from the rest of the congregation, whose voice is an audible and visible sacrament, his preaching mystically conveying the real presence of Christ.

Mark Beach, ordained in the URCNA and a professor at MARS, sets forth Calvin’s understanding of preaching in his article, “The Real Presence of Christ in the Preaching of the Gospel.”³ With Calvin, Beach affirms that “the internal working of grace follows and is effected by the external working of grace.” That external work is the preaching of the ordained minister. With the Spirit, the duly-ordained man is the primary means of grace from God to his people. God speaks and mediates himself through these selected prophetic mouthpieces. Quoting Calvin, Beach writes, “For he wants to give no one the Spirit or faith outside of the outward Word and sign instituted by him, as he says in Luke 16:29: ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.’” With Calvin, Beach equates the sign and Word with the “preaching of the gospel . . . the key element in the divine work of redemption . . .” (emphasis mine). Preaching by the faithful and devoted ordained preacher is seen to be nothing less than divine activity, not human.⁴ Can we stop and consider the chasm created in this paradigm? On one side, we have the raised voice of a minister thought to be nothing short of a divine sign, a sacrament. On the other side, we have a sea of people who are not to be visible or audible as individuals. Put another way, we have one man whose voice is thought to be united to Christ’s as he preaches, and we have a sea of men and women whose individual voices are not to be heard. In Calvin’s system, worship thus sets before us visibly the Creator-creature divide — the duly-ordained elder whose voice is spiritually united to Christ’s as he mediates supernatural grace . . . and the congregation whose individual voices are silent in receiving that grace. It is important to consider how Calvin and Beach have come here.

Beach’s article begins with Luther’s understanding of the “keys of the kingdom” as the “power or office of preaching” through which forgiveness is imparted. In Rome, the keys are thought to reside with the Pope. In Geneva, the keys are thought to reside with the “power or office of preaching.” On these keys, “our repentance and work, our disposition and all we are, should be built . . . depend(ing) on them (the power and office of preaching) with as daring confidence as on God’s Word itself.” According to Calvin, we must never doubt what the keys say, at the risk of losing both body and soul. In other words, not only do we enter by the keys, but the keys assure our safe passage. To doubt the keys is to be in danger of being lost eternally. Did you catch that? Our eternal salvation depends from beginning to end not only on what Christ merited by his active obedience and passive obedience on the cross, but on this being “imparted and distributed” through Christ’s presence in the outward preaching of the official minister. Beach writes, “Ordination certifies one’s call to the ministry — that is, the ministry of the Word. For Luther, only in this official capacity could one preach God’s Word with divine authority and sanction . . . (Like) the angel who announced the resurrection, preachers must be sent from heaven.”⁵ I am not sure how we can call this understanding of the “keys” reformed. We simply have taken the keys from one man and turned around to give them to “the power and office of preaching.”

According to Beach, Calvin similarly ascribed preaching a mystical and sacramental meaning, Christ uniting himself to the preacher's words so that the prophet-preacher becomes the “vehicle of God’s saving presence.”⁶ For Calvin the preacher was the “mouth of God,” and “God does not wish to be heard but by the voice of his ministers.”⁷ Christ has set pastors “in His place to speak as if out of his mouth.”⁸ Referencing Calvin’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 3:5, Beach writes, “Christ is pleased to honor pastors by making them dispensers of ‘the incomparable treasure of faith.’”⁹ Calvin calls the minister’s proclamation a “sure and infallible sign” that God is “near at hand to us, . . . that he seeks our salvation, that he calls us to himself as though he spoke with an open mouth, and that we see him personally before us . . . God (offering) himself to us in the person of his only Son” in that “he sends us pastors and teachers.”¹⁰ In Calvin’s mind, mere men are to consider themselves, and to be considered by their people, the public face and voice of Christ.

At this point, I cannot help but wonder whether the unreformed anthropology of Calvin’s Reformed church has set their ecclesiology askew. What began as the magnification of man over woman has become the magnification of a set of men over all men and women. Misguided, sinful patterns of thinking about ourselves are hard to contain, which is why misogyny labeled as the “fight against feminism” often morphs to include ethnic racism. Even if Genevan anthropology is not at the heart of Genevan ecclesiology, it seems clear that Calvin’s ecclesiology provides little help in righting the Aristotelian bent of Reformed anthropology. Consider the case below.

PCA pastor Zachary Garris wrote the book Masculine Christianity, a theological case for female subordination in all spheres of society. He has added a more recent work, Honor Thy Fathers, further rooting his masculine religion in the Reformed fathers.¹¹ He calls women to the “participation of silence” as they represent the voice that is not God’s.¹² The first chapter of Honor Thy Fathers sets the direction of his book using overtly misogynistic quotes from the Reformed tradition. (I wonder if Garris thinks to take warning from Jesus’s command, “Call no man father” or Peter’s caution against the “vain manner of life handed down from your fathers.”) Garris claims the anthropology of the 16th and 17th century Reformers as true and faithful.¹³ For example, here is Garris’s quote of Oecolampadius (d. 1531): “‘We know how through weakness Eve, feebler and less intelligent, sinned, which is why the serpent attacked her.’ Thus, woman ‘is by nature the weaker vessel.’”¹⁴ Can we see and call this quote for what it is, sin? Instead Garris incorporates Oecolampadius into his case. Garris insults the intelligence of all women before moving on to assign woman an idolatrous end or purpose, which is to magnify the glory of maleness. Garris quotes Calvin,

“God has conferred upon the man, so as to have superiority over the woman. In this superior order of dignity the glory of God is seen, as it shines forth in every kind of superiority . . . . . (The) man is the beginning of the woman and the end for which she was made . . . (All) women are born, that they may acknowledge themselves inferior in consequence of the superiority of the male sex.’”¹⁵

Garris goes on citing the “theological giants” including John Knox, Christopher Goodman, and William Gouge, asserting that women are inferior by nature and thus subordinated by Scripture. Garris says that the Reformed fathers deemed female rule in all spheres not only as prohibited by Scripture but as absurd and repugnant.¹⁶ Because of their subordination by nature and Scripture, Garris wants women to be silent in worship. They should not pray publicly, read Scripture, teach Sunday School, or even ask questions. In worship, males must be seen to be God’s image, representing God and speaking on his behalf. The woman must be seen not as the image of God, but the image of man generally, and of her husband more specifically. She is associated with weakness and thus she cannot speak on behalf of God but rather must be publicly silent. I suggest again that our paradigms for anthropology are Aristotelian, truncated conceptions that lead to self-preoccupation. They cause some of us to think of ourselves more highly than we ought and some of us to feel shame at the mere mention of ourselves. We have come to see ourselves as mere caricatures of what God is truly telling us in our differences as male and female. Our barren anthropology leads to poor interpretations of key biblical texts which further hinder our efforts to find the encouragement that God has built into our differences as male and female. From our truncated understanding of ourselves can come puzzling patterns of worship seen by the world through open church doors, as well as havoc wreaked behind the closed doors of our homes.

We have considered gender too lightly. Some would say it does not deserve thought. They would say it is clear by nature. They would ask, “Do we even need special revelation considering how clear general revelation makes it?” Add to this how they suppose we “feel” our differences and “see” our differences in the things that are created. We feel the repugnancy of a woman presuming to teach a man. Calvin, Knox, and Gouge feel the monstrosity of a woman leading, as if the universe is being undone. Add to this that the Father and Son are easily deduced as masculine images. All fathers and all sons are male. Though spirit is a feminine noun in Hebrew and neuter in Greek, the “Spirit of Truth” in John 16:13 takes a masculine pronoun. We can stop there, right? I suggest we are far from finished. The next question is “How do we use this to explain one mankind, male and female, made in the image and likeness of the self-contained triune God, who is one essence, three persons, equal in power and glory?” And how do we understand woman in the image and likeness of God with respect to her covenantal identity in Genesis 2 as she proceeds from Adam, representing to him a bridal city?

I have come to the conclusion that the woman’s personal representation is tethered to the Spirit, more especially as the Spirit reveals himself above as the heaven temple. My understanding of the Spirit as the heavenly Glory-tent comes from Meredith Kline in his book God, Heaven, and Har Magedon. He ties the heavenly realm to the Spirit. Though Zion is a female image in OT and NT prophetic Scripture, woman representing the Spirit realm is antithetical to the anthropology of Kline. All images must principally devolve on the man alone. The male priest’s investiture represents the Spirit clothing himself with the heavenly tent. The male prophet models “Adam’s creation as image-reflector of the glory of the Creator-Spirit.”¹⁷ The male as king reflects “man as a royal son with the judicial function appertaining to the kingly office.”¹⁸ For Kline, the bridal image reflects her derivation with a glory mediated by her husband, “recreated as Christ’s Glory-image . . . one body with the Lord, her Head, in the Spirit.”¹⁹ For Kline, woman cannot directly represent or reflect the Spirit’s glory because she is derived from man. Her identity is tethered to and dependent on the man who precedes her. That dependence on him for her glory only goes one way. A man perhaps can exist without his glory-covering, but a glory-covering has no meaning or purpose apart from the man. Do we think like this? A good clue as to whether we have incorporated this into our anthropology is how we view single women in our midst.

With this, I return to what I really wanted to write about, the pre-exilic portraits of Zion. In these we most clearly see Zion as the city of God. But more than the city of God, the city is called God as it is hypostatically united to the immutable, invisible, eternal Spirit. As I have mentioned before, based on the work of Meredith Kline and Lane Tipton, the Spirit “endoxate” suggests that the Spirit cloaked himself with the heavenly tent. He took the form of a tabernacle, a tent stretched out, constituting the dwelling of God and angels. That realm is nothing less than the Sabbath goal of mankind.

In his self-revelation in the heavens, the Spirit’s work on earth is better understood. In the heavens, he wrapped the throne in a robe of light, uniting himself to a shelter, a tabernacle. You might say that the Spirit hovered over the heavenly throne creating a canopy, an eternal dwelling for God’s throne and his angels. In God, Heaven, and Har Magedon, Kline makes this case.²⁰ This is why we see the Spirit proceeding from heaven and hovering over the tohu v’bohu, the darkness and void of Genesis 1:2. The Spirit is replicating the glory of heaven on earth as the Creator-Spirit brings life and light to the “lower register.”.

What does any of this have to do with us? When God created the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1, he explicitly made mankind to mirror himself. Mankind, male and female, are not made in the image of the natural world, but in the image of the supernatural God who made the natural world. In other words, we do not look to nature, the lower creation made on days five and six to understand ourselves as male and female, but to supernature— to the triune God, to the seventh day, to the supernatural realm of Sabbath rest. Adam and Eve are not to look back in time or around themselves to the water and sea creatures, to livestock, crawling creatures, and wild animals. Eve is not to look to Adam to understand herself as the image of God. They are to look onward in time and upward in space to understand who they are. They are to understand themselves based on the triune Creator who said, "Let us make mankind in our image, after our likeness.” They are to look to the Throne and the Sabbath city, the goal of their obedience (Heb 4:6).

I have argued that beyond our unity as one mankind and our diversity as male and female from whom will come the tribes and tongues and nations, we reflect God’s manifestation of himself in the heavens in our personal differences. The throne is associated with the Father and Son. The city is associated with the Spirit. The tent encompasses the throne, as a body encloses a head, without blurring those distinctions. There is no competition for power or for glory within the Godhead or amidst the revelation of themselves, whether the throne and city or male and female. When God created mankind as a revelation of himself, there are no degrees of power or glory. The male and female of Genesis 1:27 are both called to the same work of dominion in 1:28; they both radiate the one glory of the triune God who spoke them into existence as his image and likeness. In other words, they are like God in the sense that the power and glory of mankind, male and female, as well as the tribes and tongues and nations destined to take that glory to the earth’s ends, are located in the finite, created human essence which is what makes male and female human. There are no degrees of image bearing, and there are no degrees of power and glory among us. This is foundational to the love and esteem to which God calls us. It is why love of God and love of our neighbor go together. The love that God commands, which is the fulfillment of the law, finds its deepest root in the internal life of God, not the temporal bonds of kinship (Rom 13:8).

At the heart of the covenant is the promise of Sabbath rest in the presence of God. Some traditions emphasize this as the beatific vision — to know God by sight in his heavenly temple, where we will experience the fullest expression of God’s love in the things he has prepared for us. The beatific vision is receiving him as our inheritance. And it is not only with God, but in God, in his Spirit-tent. In the words of Isaiah,

“Shout for joy, O barren woman, who bears no children; break forth in song and cry aloud, you who have never travailed; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband,” says the LORD. “Enlarge the site of your tent, stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, do not hold back. Lengthen your ropes and drive your stakes in deep. For you will spread out to the right and left” (Is 54:1-3a).

This “tent” called Zion, and more specifically, Daughter Zion, is the very great reward promised to Adam if he would only obey, which he did not. Zion was offered to Adam as the substance of his blessedness, reinforced by Zion’s image and likeness, life-giving Eve. And this “tent” is promised to you and me if we believe in the Second Adam who did obey. This is what we get — God himself, irrevocable union with the One seated on the throne and in the One who constitutes the city. In that city it will be said most truly, “In him we live and move and have our being.” The self-contained Spirit will enclose us, and the air of the Glory-cloud will fill the immortal lungs of his beloved. The Spirit will surround us and fill us. This is our destiny as those brought near. This is the image of Daughter Zion in the Scripture, one who is consistently feminized, juxtaposed with Israel, masculinized as son. The Song of Songs is devoted to these images of the son and the Spirit-city. In the Song, we are given temporal things to point us to the eternal things that we are receiving with the Son in the City.

Kline and Lane Tipton understand the Spirit-city as deified in the Old Testament Scriptures. Consider this quote by Tipton, building on a quote by Kline: “ . . . this epiphany of the Spirit is ‘a permanent embodiment of a person of the Godhead in a created entity.’” Tipton continues, “The Person of the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and from the Son, permanently indwells the heaven-temple. As he indwells, he fills that realm with the glory that sanctifies that place as the holy temple of worship that instantly evokes worship from the angels whom God created to fill it.”²¹ Christl Maier in her research of Daughter Zion comes very close to saying this same thing when she writes concerning Psalm 48, “God and his holy mountain are similarly praised and the mountain is even identified with the city of God. The spatial description is so forceful that even God is depicted spatially.”²²

Far from the prevailing understanding of Reformed anthropology, I suggest that the pre-exilic prophets point us to the woman’s unique representation of the Spirit whose glory is underived and unmediated. The woman’s glory is not appended to or mediated by the man’s glory. She stands with the eternal Spirit and his revelation of himself in the supernatural realm as the heaven temple. As the pre-exilic prophets speak of Daughter Zion as the Glory Realm, I hope that the eyes of our hearts can be open to an understanding of ourselves that does not lead us to compare ourselves with ourselves with a goal of exalting ourselves or silencing our neighbor, but rather an understanding that fuels our understanding of our triune Lord God and builds our anticipation for his eternal plans for us. Next Substack, I hope to look carefully at Psalm 48 and 46, as well as Isaiah 6:1-8 and Micah 3:9-12, passages which Christl Maier calls the “Preexilic Zion Tradition.” Thanks for reading.

1. Meredith Kline, Images of the Spirit, 34.

2. https://opc.org/GA/unordained.html#Minority2

3. Mark Beach, “The Real Presence of Christ in Preaching,” MJT 10 (1999) 77-134. URCNA is the United Reformed Church of North America. MARS is Mid-America Reformed Seminary.

4. Ibid, 84.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., 93.

7. Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament (1982), 83.

8. John Calvin, Commentary on Acts 13:47.

9. Beach, 100.

10. John Calvin, Sermon 25 on Eph. 4:11-12.

11. The PCA is the Presbyterian Church in America.

12. Zachary Garris, Honor Thy Fathers: Recovering the Anti-feminist Theology of the Reformers (2024).

13. Ibid., 10.

14. Ibid., 17.

15. Ibid., 21.

16. Ibid., 75-77;

17. Meredith Kline, Images of the Spirit, 57.

18. Ibid., 28.

19. Ibid., 96.

20. Meredith Kline, God, Heaven, and Har Magedon, chapter 2.

21. Kline draws a parallel between the “indoxation” of the Spirit, the Spirit’s taking to himself the form of the heavenly throne room, and the incarnation of the Son who took to himself created flesh. Tipton goes further and ties the ascension of the incarnate Lord to the “encoronation” of the Son. Jesus is filled with the Spirit’s glory as becomes a Spirit-temple for his people. As I see it, this is another way in which the Son and Daughter Zion are revealed in heavenly glory. Jesus becomes Daughter Zion not only on the cross as he bears the sin, shame, guilt, and death of his people, but at his ascension as he is filled with the Spirit’s glory at the Father’s right hand (Lam 2). Christ’s enthroned flesh becomes the Spirit temple, Daughter Zion. an eternal habitation for his people in union and communion with himself. In other words, Kline ties the “indoxation” of the Spirit in Genesis 1:1 to the incarnation of Christ in the gospels. Tipton further ties the “encoronation” of the Son after his work on the cross to the “endoxation” of Christ’s flesh by the Holy Spirit as he is enthroned in Sabbath rest after his resurrection. It is this Spirit whom Christ gives his people at Pentecost, that they might become endoxate Daughter Zion, a temple-dwelling, anticipating a future unveiling in glory.

22. Christl Maier, Daughter Zion, Mother Zion: Gender, Space, and the Sacred in Ancient Israel, 33.