Month: March 2019

From “Man and Woman in Christ” by Stephen B. Clark, (97, 98).

Reading “Man and Woman in Christ” has been an illuminating experience. He has a wonderful way of explaining Biblical teaching.

“The New Testament pattern of men’s and women’s roles is not primarily a matter of activities but of relationships.  Women in the early Christian family would be more likely to cook the food while the men would be more likely to grow it, but their roles in this and other matters are not defined as much by the activities which end up being the province of one or the other as by the way they relate to one another. The husband does the farm work because he is the provider for his wife and children.  The wife does the cooking because she serves the immediate needs of the family.  For the most part, men and women perform certain activities because these activities express a fundamentally different social role, not because certain activities are intrinsically the man’s or the woman’s. For example, the wife in a hunting society might do the farming as a household task, and yet she and her husband might still fulfill the same fundamental roles in the family as would their counterparts in an agricultural society.”

“The roles of man and woman are interdependent.  The man’s role depends on the woman’s role being performed and vice versa.  For instance, the husband’s role is not designed so that he can live with no help from a woman.  If his wife dies or is absent and there is no daughter or sister to take her place, he must perform many of his wife’s functions.  The same applies to the woman if her husband is absent or dies.  An analogy between head and heart can be helpful here.  The head (or brain) is the center or director of the nervous system.  The heart is the center or director of the circulatory system.  Both are essential to the health of the body as  a whole.  They perform corresponding or complementary functions.  The heart is subordinate to the head in its functioning, but it is not therefore less essential to the body (the head included).  Likewise, the wife in the household is the “heart,” the “inside center” of the family. She directs a set of family activities essential to the functioning of the family.  The husband is the “head.” He both directs a set of family functions and is over the wife’s activities, but he cannot “keep the body alive” without her.”

“The roles of husband and wife comprise a partnership, but a partnership of a particular kind.  They are complementary partners, not comrades who work together on identical tasks. Each has a separate sphere of responsibility that complements the other’s. This point is especially relevant for contemporary Christian efforts to strengthen the family by strengthening the partnership between husband and wife, but in a way that obliterates the complementarity of husband and wife.  These attempts often focus on “companionship.”  They aim to get the husband and wife to do as much as possible together.  Their goal is not to strengthen each partner in his own role and to strengthen the union of the two.  To be sure, modern husbands and wives often fail to spend the time together that they should in order to have a real union.  Some of these contemporary Christian attempts are designed to correct this situation so they can actually be in unity.  However, many of these efforts to strengthen family life destroy the strength of family roles and thus advocate an approach to family life that differs greatly from New Testament teaching. The New Testament approach attempts to create “one person,” a husband and wife united, but with a division of labor that allows each to extend the ability of the other to function.  The husband and wife become engaged in a relationship of reciprocal service and interdependence without competition.  They are, in short, complementary in role.”

From “Man and Woman in Christ” by Stephen B. Clark.  Page 172.

I found Clark’s comments on the head-coverings from 1 Corinthians 11 illuminating.  He isn’t arguing for head-coverings.  Rather, his comments are helpful in discerning what cultural expressions are good to hold onto and which are not. His comments also underline the importance of cultural expression.

“The use of head covering in worship services was a cultural expression, an expression that has meaning to people within the context of their culture.  In this case, the meaning of head coverings lies in its ability to express a particular social structure in the roles of men and women.  The first five chapters of this book examined how the early Christian community and Israelite society structured these roles.  But societies express their social structure in customs which are not intrinsically necessary to the social structure.  A woman could wear a sari as a symbol of her position as well as a head covering. On the other hand, every society recognizes that some clear expression fos social structure are important.  Most peoples place such a high value on such social symbols (dress, “manners,” rituals of respect, etc.) that they do not distinguish between the cultural expression and the underlying social structure. For example, among many peoples, children would never address their parents or any older person by the parents’ first names.  Such informality would be viewed as highly disrespectful and possibly as serious an offense as overt disobedience.

Western society is increasingly losing an appreciative sensitivity to cultural expressions such as these.  To be sure, not all cultural expressions are automatically good.  In fact, the New Testament views some as expressions of sin.  For instance, the New Testament looks unfavorably on such expressions when they express distinctions among Christians based on social class or wealth (see Jas 2:1-7).  On the other hand, the early Christians encouraged such expressions when they expressed differences of age and sex.  Younger people honored older people and the community paid honor to men because they were men and women because they were women.  Something is undoubtedly lost when people lose the capacity to value and understand such cultural expressions.  When Pual linked head coverings to the basic order of the Christian community, he was manifesting a concern that many human societies will instinctively share, but one which modern Western society does not find readily comprehensible.”