A Response to the Danvers Statement: Difference between revisions

10. Historical study is increasingly demonstrating that there have always been at least some evangelicals at the vanguard of movements for the emancipation of women from the arbitrary restrictions of a male-dominated traditionalism. Janette Hassey's "No Time For Silence" is a recent example (1986) To paraphrase a famous Puritan pastor as he sent some of his flock off to the New World, "The Lord hath yet more light to break forth from the history of women's ministry!" And much of this history does not particularly flatter traditionalism. Have we forgotten how bitterly the reactionary conservative clergy inveighed against even so elementary a development as allowing female citizens the right to vote? Would a modern signatory to the Danvers Statement like to argue that the women's vote is the cause of today's social corruption? Since the "spirit of the age" is still male-supremacist, and the suppression of women (in cheerful fulfillment of the prediction in Genesis 3:16) is the natural stance of all heathen cultures, I fail entirely to see how our practicing the implications of Galatians 3:28 could be rationally thought of as conformity to the spirit of the age.

One can only hope as the subject continues to unfold in the public forum of evangelical scholarship, that the promise of Isaiah 55:10 and 11, that God sovereignly supervises the effectiveness of His Word as He wills, will be increasingly made real in the life of Christ's Church. Reformation-minded saints must continue to pray that the light of God's Word will eventually reform the traditionalist vision into a closer conformity to the whole of Scripture. In this way "the noble Biblical vision of sexual complementarity" may be seen to be fully compatible with that life in Christ in which "there is neither male nor female" but only redeemed children of God growing more and more into the grace of mutual submission, and exercising freely the gifts with which God has wisely graced them.