A tree, a support, and a wall

A metaphor, to explain what I mean

Imagine that you have a backyard garden, and in this garden is a tree. It is an extravagant tree. Let’s call it a black walnut. Over time, this tree begins to lean a bit. Because it is so extravagant and lovely, you decide to build a support for it. The support is haphazard and unattractive, and so around the support you build a wall. In your backyard garden you now have an extravagant, leaning tree, a haphazard support, and a wall.

The support is useful- it prevents the tree from leaning too far and breaking- and the wall hides the support a bit, and makes it more attractive. There is nothing wrong with either the support, nor the wall. But note that neither of them were original to the garden, nor are they necessary to it. The garden might, and indeed did, exist for many years without these supports. It might have gone on just fine without them. The tree might have leaned a bit more, but it might not have fallen. Because the tree was precious, you desired to support it. But it may in fact be one of those created realities that is extravagant, precious, and precarious. Such things do exist. But what we have now is a garden we have cluttered with supporting structures that are useful but perhaps extraneous. Useful, perhaps, but not well-designed. They are not beautiful, nor do they contribute anything to the garden’s design. They are clearly tacked on.

By my reading, the haphazard “supports” in this metaphor are some of the development around male-only offices of the church and ordination that have arisen to reinforce the extravagant, leaning tree.

We do indeed have a developed theology of ordination, and of “offices” of the church, depending on which tradition you come from. But I am not at all convinced that either a fully developed theology of ordination or of “offices” exists in the New Testament. Both “offices” and the developed theologies of ordination we have are interpretive judgements that have developed, which many find useful, but which I am suggesting may have developed to serve one primary purpose- to reinforce what seemed to be an extravagant, leaning tree.

The church, and especially the relationship of men and women within it, is this leaning tree, and the diversity of its members it what makes it both extravagant and precarious. The New Testament (and the Old testament, for that matter), contain stories of women’s involvment in this organism.

The wall that both hides and reinforces the haphazard supports of our male-only offices and ordination practices is our theories of gender. They lean heavily on hierarchy to speak of male and female design. They also draw broad theological conclusions from “nature” which, though apparent in some populations, may be less apparent in others. They seek to organize and systematize “traits” and “roles” though they exist, are much more haphazard than such systems suggest.

Where I differ from others on this topic is that I do think there are male and female design- something that both men and women “are”- and I think this design is inclusive of both strengths and weaknesses, of both aptitudes and potentials for sin. I think there is something complementary about the two, together- minimally, that this union alone can generate life. It does not seem insignificant that both the union of male and female, and the union of Christ and the church, are the life-generating organisms that Christians point to to speak of God in the world. God brings life through the union of men and women, and through the life of the Church in the world God also brings life. Both matter in irreducible ways. Both are beautiful.

But they are also precarious! They seem, sometimes, to be in danger of falling. But perhaps they lean because they are laden with fruit. Perhaps they are precarious but not doomed to fail. Perhaps we missed the opportunity to grow in discernment and the life that this way yields, this life of honoring the extravagant, leaning tree, and instead settled for an ugly, poorly designed set of supports.

Perhaps we don’t need that wall. Maybe the scaffolding itself was hastily built. The reinforcement of “complementarianism” or “egalitarianism” has now for decades provided the design and the content of the conversation about men and women. It has reinforced the view of male-only offices- indeed, I’ve suggested that such a view is impossible without such structures. But in providing structures for male only offices, these walls have ontologized male only leadership in ways that, by my reading, are in fact not easily read off the Bible. They rely too heavily on several texts which, though indeed part of God’s inerrant word, are themselves occasional, cryptic, and inconsistent. We’ve come to lean too heavily on the wall to interpret the relationship between men and women, and the role of the two in the church. God made trees to nourish us, to bring great beauty to the world and to provide shade for others to rest, their canopy a shelter from the sun and the rain. God made men and women to be the same, I think- to bear life, to provide shade, to lean a bit, to take the risk of falling, but to remain a witness to a life that might not have been.

I think we ought to try, for a bit, to speak of this relationship without that hasty wall.