The reemergence of debate over the role of women in the Church is based on a confusion, I believe. The confusion is the result of asking, and attempting to answer, the wrong question — namely, what value does biblical Christianity assign to women? The answer to that question is not gender-specific, and it is a disappointment to anyone hoping to find the center of what Christianity values in themselves. You can read it in Luke 17, starting at v.7:
“Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’”
» The problem is there is no way to take this text seriously while harboring the thought “ I’m not being properly valued!” All of us, men and women alike, are loved but we are not worthy. Our being the object of God’s love is not based on our inherent value. This, precisely, is the power of the Gospel. We have nothing coming to us; yet we have been given everything. So the phrases, “ the unsearchable riches of Christ” and “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor mind conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”
» You might say, “ well, fair enough, but we still need to discern what roles women should play in the Church.” I don’t think this is really a problem. Once you remove all the emotional baggage from the exegesis of the text, the Bible tends to read pretty clearly. Passages like Paul’s now infamous, “ I do not permit a women to teach” don’t present an obstacle to anyone who is in hot pursuit of the role of unworthy servant. The only obstacle is to those clinging to their own inherent worth, begrudging any slight, flinching at any apparent devaluation.
» Of course, easy for me to say. I’m a man and a leader in the Church. Every Sunday you all have to listen to me, as I stand in a little box, elevated above the common lot of humankind, making lordly pronouncements.
» But isn’t all that an illusion? Jesus said, “the greatest among you shall be your servant. He who exalts himself will be humbled…” (Mt 23:11ff). If it’s true that I am able to take power and control to myself, then in fact I have no real power and I am accomplishing nothing of any lasting value. It is only when I cease to look like the world’s idea of a powerful leader (“…the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them…” ) that any work of the kingdom is accomplished. If any women envies me my “ stature,” she envies a misguided, perhaps even an evil, fool. I have no business longing for the appearance of power, or socially-borrowed “power,” but only real power in the Holy Spirit, and that can be gained only by descending with Christ to that place of making myself nothing, taking the form of a servant, even dying on a cross. Power, as we commonly conceive it, is all smoke and mirrors.
» This is what we should be fighting over: not how much worth will be assigned to us, but how we might have true glory in laying our lives down for Christ and his Gospel. This is where unworthy servants find peace, and a lifetime of genuinely satisfying labor.