Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield

Author:Rosaria Butterfield [Butterfield, Rosaria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

1 Kevin DeYoung, “Patterns That Preach,” in Men and Women in the Church: A Short, Biblical, Practical Introduction (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 36–42.

9

The Power of a Woman’s Voice

I hate the double-minded,

but I love your law.

You are my hiding place and my shield;

I hope in your word.

Psalm 119:113

I recall a time when my youngest children were babies—Mary was a newborn, and Knox was almost three. Mary was softly cooing in my arms, and Knox gently put his head next to her heart.

“Mama! Hear that? Baby Mary wants to play cars and trucks with me!” Knox exclaimed. Now, there is no way that a newborn baby can play cars and trucks. And there is also no way that Knox could read Mary’s intentions. But none of this quenched his enthusiasm. Knox was confident that Mary’s deepest desire at forty-eight hours old was to play cars and trucks with him.

When siblings do that, we call it cute.

When readers of the Bible do it, we call it sin: “You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you,” declares Moses, the lawgiver (Deut. 4:2).

It was funny when my almost three-year-old son started to “talk” for my newborn daughter, but this is not a method of Bible interpretation that holds water.

Today there is an entire worldview that stands in opposition to faithfully reading the Bible you hold in your hands. A faithful Christian is called to read the Bible and to submit to what is there in the Bible, not to seek a universal woman’s voice—a “gynocentric interruption”1—or to read what you imagine should be written on the page. Biblical feminists reject the plain reading of the text. They also reject the pattern of the creation ordinance as something we must follow today in careful obedience to God’s word.

Author Carolyn Custis James writes that the problem Christian women must overcome as they read the Bible is patriarchy. She writes:

The story of Ruth takes place within a full-fledged patriarchal culture. Patriarchy is a social system that privileges men over women, where the actions of men command the focus, and women (with few exceptions) recede into the background. Under patriarchy, a woman derives her value from men—her father, husband, and especially her sons.2

To James, patriarchy is “the cultural backdrop against which the gospel message of Jesus stands out in the sharpest relief.”3 She continues, “The Book of Ruth is . . . a critique of patriarchy.”4 Jesus is featured here as the savior of both our individual sins and the sin of patriarchy. However, because women do not derive their value from men but from God alone, this is a false understanding of biblical patriarchy.

Things have an uncanny way of becoming what they were designed to be. If you are reading this and need to regroup on the interpretative approach you are using during your Bible study time, then course correct. But, also, please hear this as well: the belief that biblical headship or biblical patriarchy is sin is simply not biblically true.

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