Feminist scholar visits Grace Community Church ... is shocked by male leadership

Well, it is quite clear that Anne Eggebroten pays very little attention to the facts or has little interest in either communicating the truth in part or in whole regarding this matter.

Today I’m attending a megachurch—Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California—where God is male, all the pastors, deacons, and elders are male, and women are taught to live in submission to men. My husband, visiting Phoenix for a week, texts me that a woman is preaching in the Episcopal church he found near his motel.

No, GCC does not teach God is male and no there is no general teaching that women are to live in submission to men. But does that matter to Anne Eggebroten? It appears not.

It does teach that God is clearly communicated as “masculine” and it also teaches our Lord Jesus, the Savior, was a male on earth and there is no indication in Scripture that this particular feather of the hypostatic union has ceased in his glorified state.. If this is that to which she refers she needs to be clear but again she makes to citation for clarification. Maybe the the scent of theological scandal wouldn’t arise if she made such proper identifications.

Not to mention that it is not women being taught to live in submission to men but wives who are, in the context of the marriage, taught that the bible teaches that wives are to submit to the proper exercise of a husband’s domestic authority. But again, all the qualifying just puts a damper on such generalizations. Hmmm…is that the intelligence of “feminism” we should admire?

I ask her, “Is women’s submission to their husbands stressed in this church?”

“Yes, it is,” she says. “A ship can have only one captain. But it’s not enslavement.” She tells me she’s fortunate that her husband is “not the domineering type. We take a difficult issue to God in prayer. I rarely have to let him decide.”

I’m thinking about women who are advised not to leave abusive marriages, but I don’t bring this up. At least things aren’t as extreme as they sound on the church Web site.

A pity the issue she was “thinking about” wasn’t brought up, but of course if it was it would spoil Eggebroten’s disingenuous opportunity to imply the answer would be hostile with respect to any leaving of any marriage. Savages! Ah feminism.

“It’s sad, really, that the only place in my entire life that I have experienced gender discrimination is the church,” VanScoy emailed me. “Certainly God never intended to gift a woman to do something she was not intended to do.”

Much of the debate hinges on Genesis 3:16, God’s words to Eve: “And he shall rule over you.” Hebrew scholar Phyllis Trible translates the line as “he will rule”—not a command or an entitlement, but God’s view ahead into a future where men will dominate women. As The New Oxford Annotated Bible’s notes put it, “The man’s rule over the woman here is a tragic reflection of the disintegration of original connectedness between them.”

A nod to Anne here where she outdoes herself in absenting herself from the facts for her lament. No, much of the debate does not hinge on this. Part of it, some of it but not much or most. The issue of gender roles both with in the church and domestically as well as in all other divine institutions is given far more treatment in Scripture than this one passage. Not to mention her complete avoidance of any theological considerations that would counter her chosen scholar’s view (based on what hermeneutic I don’t know) which reflects her desired interpretation.

The rest of the article is rather embarrassingly shallow.

The fact that she is shocked by the stand taken by GCC indicates that she must be living in a bubble, the bubble of liberalism. There are literally thousands of churches that take the Scriptural stand on male leadership. As a professor at a state school, she is certainly surrounded by heaping doses of liberalism in the workplace, but apparently can’t take the time to stay current on what’s going on in various segments of the larger Christianity community.

Once she decides what she wants to believe, she finds (and twists) the proof texts she wants and finds excuses to disregard the passages she doesn’t want to hear.

I’m shocked that she is shocked.