“Scripture never presents patriarchy as the created or redeemed norm. It is a feature of the fallen world Christ overturns, not a structure he institutes.”
Rev. Aaron Mize
Ordained Servant Article
OPC Denomination
1.) Not as the created norm? Is this why we are told that Eve was to be a “Helpmeet” to Adam? Is this why Adam was the one who gave Eve her name? (Naming was a sign of authority.) Is this why, after the fall, Eve is told that “Adam shall rule over you”? Is this why Sarah called Abraham “Lord?”
2.) Not as the redeemed norm? Is this why Paul tells Titus that women in the Church are to be submissive to their own husbands? Is this why Paul teaches that women are to be “silent in the church?”
3.) Note that what Mize is teaching here is that a woman who is fulfilling the Biblical and traditional role as wife, mother, and homekeeper, who is submitting to her husband as he love his wife is in sin because, as Mize writes, this kind of patriarchy and hierarchy is a feature of the fallen world Christ overturns. If a woman is living in a world Christ has overturned, as seen in her role as wife, mother, and homekeeper, what can she be living in except sin?
4.) Patriarchy … is not a structure that Christ institutes? Is this why Christ chose 12 male disciples? Is this why the Church chose 7 male deacons? Is this why all those who wrote every book of the Bible were men? Is this why all family heads in the OT were male? Is this why the Aaronic Priesthood was all male?
It beggars the imagination that any clergy in any putative Reformed church could write the sentence, “Patriarchy is a feature of the fallen world Christ overturns, not a structure he institutes.”
Yep. I’ve been told by someone who knows him that his wife wears the pants in their marriage. So, to see him go full egalitarian isn’t suprising. This is the stuff that made me tell that session that I was leaving as I wasn’t going to have Aaron as my pastor.
Perhaps they’ve set aside Eve as the mother of all living, and gone back to the rabbinic tradition of there having been a “Lilith” – who Adam rejected because she would not submit to his headship.
Well, that certainly would make sense of it all, Ron.
I do not take pleasure in telling you this, but even Augustine believed in this implicitly anarchistic idea that the world before the Fall, the world as God had originally intended it to be, was egalitarian and that earthly hierarchies are thus, ultimately, mere effects of sin.
And that notion had its political uses. Some of the proudest Roman popes of the Middle Ages explicitly brought it up in their fierce struggle against the imperial power – seeking to morally discredit the secular rivals of their own clerical power:
http://www.romanitas.ru/eng/THE%20FALL%20OF%20ORTHODOX%20ENGLAND%205X8.htm#_ftnref193
Indeed, “who would not know that kings and dukes took their origin from those who, ignorant of God, through pride, rapine, perfidy, murders and, finally, almost any kind of crime, at the instigation of the devil, the prince of this world, sought with blind desire and unbearable presumption to dominate their equals, namely other men?”[194]
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Indeed, as de Rosa writes of a later Pope who faithfully followed Hildebrand’s teaching, “this was Manicheeism applied to relations between church and state. The church, spiritual, was good; the state, material, was essentially the work of the devil. This naked political absolutism undermined the authority of kings. Taken seriously, his theories would lead to anarchy”.[195]
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What was new, shocking and completely unpatristic in Gregory’s words was his disrespect for the kingship, his refusal to allow it any dignity or holiness – still more, his proto-communist implication that rulers had no right to rule. The corollary of this, of course, was that the only rightful ruler was the Pope.”
I have no problem learning that Augustine was wrong about something. Francis of Assisi also had egalitarian convictions.
This tendency has been a stain on the Church from the beginning.
Btw, I noticed I gave you a dead link there. Here is working link to that work about medieval papacy that I cited:
https://www.annunciationscranton.org/files/PDF/104_THE_FALL_OF_ORTHODOX_ENGLAND.pdf