Heather Koerner volunteers herself for an intensive fisking:
"Boats or Votes?" asked one prominent newspaper at the time, seeming to indicate that women needed to choose between equality (the right to vote) and protection (the boats).
That dichotomy--either choose protection or choose equality--is a difficult one. On one hand, I want it to be known and acknowledged that I am not inferior, that I am absolutely of equal worth as a man. On the other, I know deep down that I am more vulnerable to harm in this life, and I long for safety and security.
Thankfully, it's a choice that Christianity does not demand I make. Certainly, the world will tell me that accepting protection from godly men is the same as affirming my inferiority to them. But the Word tells me different. It acknowledges both truths--my worth and my vulnerability--without making me choose between them.
First of all, the Bible does not use the concept of equality in the sense that Heather is using it. The Bible is quite clear that authority and value are not in any way tied to one another, as God gave incredible authority to people who were quite clearly inferior in His estimation to even the bottom of the barrel in the invisible, eternal, catholic body of believers. Heather's fundamental problem is that she cannot accept that authority is not, biblically speaking, tied to equality. In fact, the Bible is rife with examples of God giving authority to people without regard for any matter even tangentially related to equality. Thus, there is no contradiction between a biblical view that respects the equal worth of a woman and an equally biblical view that says that women should not hold positions of political or ecclesiastical authority.
God tells me that I am an equal heir to His kingdom. But He also commands that my Christian brothers, my husband in particular, act to me as Christ acted toward the church. That he be willing to give himself up for me.
This is only partly true. Paul's words regarding the role that men are to play toward women they are not married to comes from 1 Timothy 5:2, not Ephesians 5, as Heather suggests:
1Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, 2older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.
In the sense that there is a familial obligation to protect relatives, Heather has a point, after a fashion. However, the majority of the modern set of expectations toward women flies in the face of the behavior that was expected of a sister toward a brother during the time in which Paul wrote these words. They were, after all, written in an age when it was generally expected that a sister would not only respect her brothers, but also in an age when brothers also tended to carry a greater authority in the family than their sisters, so some context is necessary.
Going back to Ephesians 5, the same verse that places the burden of protection and sacrifice on Heather's husband for her, a wife is also expected to submit to her husband. Submission and obedience are not the same thing; the former is voluntary, not based on a command-control relationship between the two. In this sense, it is an even greater burden as Heather must voluntarily accept her husband's authority.
Ephesians 5 is dangerous for the Christian feminist who wants to argue equality in general, while keeping the chivalric obligations because if the husband's role is expanded into a broad socio-political one, then so is the wife's role. Invariably, this expansion of a chapter which focuses on the power dynamics of a married couple into a broad statement about male-female interaction in general naturally demands the complete disenfranchisement of women and their purge from the halls of power in general within the state and church. Arguments may be made against this, naturally, but not ones that are rational and scripture-based.
As I write in today's Boundless article, "Nurturing Protection," "the world's masculinity either demands to be served or refuses to be bothered." But biblical masculinity acknowledges both my worth and its mandate to serve sacrificially by laying down his life for mine.
Biblical feminity acknowledges a man's worth and its mandate to serve sacrificially by submitting to male authority so as to not undermine the very source of the masculine obligation to care for and sacrifice for the women in a man's life. This means that biblical feminity naturally gives up claims of authority granted to it by the culture in exchange for what is offered by the biblical relationship described in Ephesians 5.
To me, those Titanic men were unquestionable heroes. They didn't demean a woman's worth by protecting her; they esteemed it.
This is amusing in light of the fact that this tragedy transpired in the twilight years of the chivalric era. Undoubtedly, both the men and women on that doomed vessel would have been horrified if they could see the behavior of and dynamics between both genders today. Both the crude and weakened masculinity of the men, and the selfish, almost categorically unlady-like behavior of the women. Were the Titanic to happen today, it wouldn't be a struggle to imagine many a boorish woman shoving men out of the way (one could even see some of them trying to throw kids overboard), nor would it be a struggle to imagine a number of men doing the same. The moral of this story is that one cannot play the back-and-forth transposition of values and actions between two distinct eras and hope to come to conclusion that can pass muster before a crowd with a three digit IQ.
