Piper pipes on about women. Light at the end? Emmm.....

John Piper on how Jesus treated women differently and 'they were amazed he was speaking to a woman'.

John Piper is on the ball here but I am not sure about the outworkings of sin which he describes which become very gender specified. Aren't women and men both capable of either being overly dominant or overly passive to equal extents? There is some slanting going on here. Where in the Bible does it say that God created men and women equal and in his mage but with the Piper appendix that they are to have differing, honourable, complementary roles? I understand that women have the children and men do not but there is something else going on here too which unfortunately has its outworking in preventing women from preaching and teaching the word of God to men. Of course, this is not explicit here or even hinted at but I sense it do you? Can you sense it too? The man is a humble courageous protector and he lays down his life for his wife but the woman should do the same if she is in Christ. This is revolutionary, yes, but because it was said to men by the apostle Paul. To quote E L Mascall, who is actually a traditionalist: 'behind St Paul's thought about the man and the woman... the fundamental relation is ...of mutual perfection and of derived partnership.'1

Where Paul advocates that the man is to lay down his life for his wife we are in an interesting place in the bible because of the way that it has been presented. We are looking at Ephesians 5:21-33. The NIV, like many bibles, incorrectly creates a separation between verse 21 and the rest of Paul's writing here. Verse 21 is the frame within which the rest of the advice should be understood. The husband and the wife are to be mutually submitted to each other: the wife to the husband as the Church to Christ and the husband to the wife as Christ to the Church. Christ died for the Church,so the husband's love for the wife is to be self-sacrificial. Paul overstated the husband's submission to the wife to counteract the authority men had over their wives in the first century. It doesn't mean that Paul didn't think that the wife shouldn't also lay down her life for her husband. She should, it just didn't need stating because it would already be assumed that she would.

You're so nearly there Piper.

1 MASCALL, E.L., 'Women and the Priesthood of the Church' p.119