Power Games

I came across a quote by that deserves some attention:

"For once we have toppled God and nature as authoritative sources of the difference between the sexes, we are indeed left with gender understood as a conventional or 'relational' organization of the darkling plain of fluctuating relations among individuals, each of whom is jockying for maximum power."

Sadly, this is much of what is going on in our world between men and women. In one of Dallas Willards books he talks about how our throwing out of all authority and absolutes, even rites, rituals and customs, leaves us paralyzed in a vacuous freedom. It is as if becoming aware of violence and oppression perpetrated by our boney fists, we decided to remove the bones altogether. Once that happened we quickly sluffed off the filthy skin and now we are exposed and without shape in a world that seems more frightening (not less).

I don't know the best way to understand gender roles, but I think she makes an important point that if we throw out God and nature, we aren't left with much. If all roles, rites, inclinations, etc. are simply social constructs (arbitrary and disposable) how do we not end up in a power game. There is not time to go into it fully, but I like how Paul dealt with this massive problem.

The world of the first century was most certainly a time of male domination and female oppression. Women were not considered equal, as a gender or as individual wives or daughters. Fathers kept wives to bear sons and sought mistresses and concubines for pleasure. They had the power to literally, drop their daughters in the trash (one of the early Christian ministries was to save these forsaken orphan girls). Men, as husband, as father, as master, had all the power in that society. So Paul (see Ephesians 5) goes after them. He tells men three time to love their wives, in a culture were they didn't love their wives. Twice it is love your own wife, in a culture where faithlessness was the norm. He goes right at the powerful and tells them to love like Christ. He goes right at the powerful and explodes the power game by saying that you must follow Christ to the cross. Your love must be sacrificial. You must lay your life down.

I think if Paul were writing this letter today he would have to tell both men and women in the words of Christ from John's gospel; "you must love one another, as I have loved you." He would tell both genders to forget the power game and follow Jesus to the cross. He would tell both genders to lay their lives down. As Paul says, we preach Christ and him crucified.