Climategate: Follow the Money

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

The Climate Emails

The Economics of Climate Change
Rigging a Climate 'Consensus'
Global Warming With the Lid Off
Climate Science and Candor

Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

he Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama A foreign policy of penance has won America no friends.

By FOUAD AJAMI

'He talks too much," a Saudi academic in Jeddah, who had once been smitten with Barack Obama, recently observed to me of America's 44th president. He has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory.

He is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again.

It was the norm for American liberalism during the Bush years to brandish the Pew Global Attitudes survey that told of America's decline in the eyes of foreign nations. Foreigners were saying what the liberals wanted said.

Now those surveys of 2009 bring findings from the world of Islam that confirm that the animus toward America has not been radically changed by the ascendancy of Mr. Obama. In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

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Martin Kozlowski

Mr. Obama's election has not drained the swamps of anti-Americanism. That anti-Americanism is endemic to this region, an alibi and a scapegoat for nations, and their rulers, unwilling to break out of the grip of political autocracy and economic failure. It predated the presidency of George W. Bush and rages on during the Obama presidency.

We had once taken to the foreign world that quintessential American difference—the belief in liberty, a needed innocence to play off against the settled and complacent ways of older nations. The Obama approach is different.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

Mr. Obama could not make up his mind: He was at one with "the people" and with the rulers who held them in subjugation. The people of Iran who took to the streets this past summer were betrayed by this hapless diplomacy—Mr. Obama was out to "engage" the terrible rulers that millions of Iranians were determined to be rid of.

On Nov. 4, on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, the embattled reformers, again in the streets, posed an embarrassing dilemma for American diplomacy: "Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them," they chanted. By not responding to these cries and continuing to "engage" Tehran's murderous regime, his choice was made clear. It wasn't one of American diplomacy's finest moments.

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Associated Press

Mr. Obama has himself to blame for the disarray of his foreign policy. American arms had won a decent outcome in Iraq, but Mr. Obama would not claim it—it was his predecessor's war. Vigilance had kept the American homeland safe from terrorist attacks for seven long years under his predecessors, but he could never grant Bush policies the honor and credit they deserved. He had declared Afghanistan a war of necessity, but he seems to have his eye on the road out even as he is set to announce a troop increase in an address to be delivered tomorrow.

He was quick to assert, in the course of his exuberant campaign for president last year, that his diplomacy in South Asia would start with the standoff in Kashmir. In truth India had no interest in an international adjudication of Kashmir. What was settled during the partition in 1947 was there to stay. In recent days, Mr. Obama walked away from earlier ambitions. "Obviously, there are historic conflicts between India and Pakistan," he said. "It's not the place of the United States to try to, from the outside, resolve those conflicts."

Nor was he swayed by the fate of so many "peace plans" that have been floated over so many decades to resolve the fight between Arab and Jew over the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Where George W. Bush offered the Palestinians the gift of clarity—statehood but only after the renunciation of terror and the break with maximalism—Mr. Obama signaled a return to the dead ways of the past: a peace process where America itself is broker and arbiter.

The Obama diplomacy had made a settlement freeze its starting point, when this was precisely the wrong place to begin. Israel has given up settlements before at the altar of peace—recall the historical accommodation with Egypt a quarter century ago. The right course would have set the question of settlements aside as it took up the broader challenge of radicalism in the region—the menace and swagger of Iran, the arsenal of Hamas and Hezbollah, the refusal of the Arab order of power to embrace in broad daylight the cause of peace with Israel.

The laws of gravity, the weight of history and of precedent, have caught up with the Obama presidency. We are beyond stirring speeches. The novelty of the Obama approach, and the Obama persona, has worn off. There is a whole American diplomatic tradition to draw upon—engagements made, wisdom acquired in the course of decades, and, yes, accounts to be settled with rogues and tyrannies. They might yet help this administration find its way out of a labyrinth of its own making.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

Tim Keller Wants to Save Your Yuppie Soul

The evangelical Christian preacher says the secular holy trinity of money, ambition, and achievement is the root of all evil. So why are so many New Yorkers flocking to him?

• By Joseph Hooper
• Published Nov 29, 2009

Keller leading a Redeemer service. (Photo: Anthony Suau)

It’s a Sunday evening at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and the pews are full. Redeemer is a conservative Evangelical Christian congregation, but the parishioners don’t fit the easy Bible Belt stereotypes. They are a cross-section of yuppie Manhattanites—doctors, bankers, lawyers, artists, actors, and designers, some of them older, most of them in their twenties or thirties. The peppy Christian-pop anthems, performed by Broadway-caliber singers and working jazz professionals, seem to go by in double time, the faster the better to get to the main event, the weekly sermon, delivered by pastor Tim Keller.

Keller is a 59-year-old bald, large-framed man, dressed today in a blue blazer and gray slacks. For those expecting hellfire and brimstone, the first surprise is the voice. Keller doesn’t speak in theatrical, over-the-top tones but in a soft, conversational manner, as if he’s sharing a confidence with a friend. For today’s sermon on a passage from the Old Testament Book of Habakkuk, in which a minor Jewish prophet rails about the misery brought on by the Babylonians in the seventh century B.C., Keller jumps to the recession and what he sees as shameful finger-pointing by both liberals and conservatives. “The Bible doesn’t let you do that,” Keller intones from the pulpit. “The Bible is nowhere near as simplistic, dare I say it, as either the New York Times’ or The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. You can write that down. Put it on your blog, I don’t care.”

Now Keller takes Habakkuk’s rap against the Babylonians—their “need to clothe themselves with glory”—and aims it straight back at his ambitious, striving Upper West Side congregation. He notes that tennis legend Chris Evert once admitted in an interview that she was driven to win because “winning made her feel pretty” and that Madonna confessed she felt special only when she was breaking through to new levels of fame. Whether we’re athletes, artists, businesspeople, or preachers, Keller says, we all suffer from the same malady—trying to fill our empty spaces with achievement when only accepting God’s grace can do the job. “We want to feel beautiful, we want to feel loved. We want to feel significant and that’s why we’re working so hard and that’s the source of the evil.” In another sermon, on another Sunday, he asks the congregation point-blank: “Why are you in New York? Deep down, you think something is wrong with you.”

Although relatively few secular New Yorkers know about it—Keller prefers to keep Redeemer mostly under the media radar, in part for fear of generating hostile publicity—an Evangelical Christian megachurch is growing in the heart of Manhattan. In the late eighties, Keller came here on what at the time seemed close to a theological suicide mission—to create a strictly conservative Christian church in the heart of Sodom. Today, Redeemer Presbyterian holds five Sunday services at three packed rented venues (in the morning, there are services at the Ethical Culture Society auditorium at 64th Street and Central Park West and at Hunter College’s capacious, 2,000-seat auditorium on 69th Street, between Park and Lexington; in the evening, there’s another service at Hunter and two at the First Baptist Church at 79th Street and Broadway). On any given Sunday, some 5,000 Manhattanites and fellow travelers hear Keller preach in person, and roughly 25,000 download his sermons every week from the church’s sophisticated website, redeemer.com. Late last year, Redeemer closed the deal on a permanent home at 150 West 83rd Street. What is now a defunct four-story parking garage is, in two years, set to become a $50 million modern worship center. The project is believed to be the first significant new church to be built in Manhattan since St. Peter’s went up, more than 30 years ago, next to what used to be known as the Citigroup Center.

Keller has also been building his brand in print. Last year, after his book The Reason for God hit No. 7 on the New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list, his publisher, Dutton, conceived the idea for a new Redeemer imprint. Keller’s latest book, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters, out in October, speaks directly to the concerns of New York and New Yorkers. The book, like the sermons it’s derived from, delivers a sharp spiritual rebuke of the very things—ambition and achievement—that brought many, if not most, of us here. Keller’s message, in other words, is a slap in the face to our civic religion of success. And scores of us seem to be flocking to him.

On a sunny morning not long ago, Keller greets me at his upper-floor apartment on Roosevelt Island and ushers me into his study. Lined with overflowing bookcases, the office could belong to a professor or a shrink. On this day, Keller’s wife, Kathy, is recovering from surgery at New York–Cornell Hospital. Keller points at the large window just beyond his desk that opens onto the East River and, across it, the Upper East Side: “I know what window is hers. We can look window to window.”

Parishioners outside a Redeemer service, Sunday November 8. (Photo: Mordechai Rubenstein for New York Magazine)

Keller and Kathy were bookish middle-class kids from Pennsylvania, he from Allentown, she from suburban Pittsburgh. It was at Bucknell University in the early seventies that Keller effected a self-transformation from “garden-variety nerd, filled with self-doubt and angst” to born-again Christian. (He’s still unashamedly nerdy. On discovering we both have late-September birthdays, he says, “You know, Frodo and Bilbo are the 22nd of September … very illustrious.”) Keller says he fell under the spell of religious writers, C. S. Lewis being the best known, whose faith in Jesus and the Bible was untainted by the anti-intellectualism of American fundamentalism. Tim and Kathy both attended the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts and were married just before graduation. The couple spent nine years in the small town of Hopewell, Virginia, before moving back to suburban Philadelphia in 1984, where Tim took a teaching post at Westminster Theological Seminary and expanded his pastoral range to include urban ministries downtown.

In the late eighties, Keller’s denomination, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, asked him to oversee the building—or “planting,” in the Evangelical argot—of a church in Manhattan. The idea was that winning believers in New York would have an influence out of proportion to the group’s numbers. When Keller’s first two picks for the pastor’s job declined the offer, Keller, despite misgivings of his own, decided to move Kathy and their three young sons and take the position himself. “I just felt it would be cowardly of me not to,” he says. “But we had a kind of ‘sick in the pit of our stomach’ feeling every day.” I later asked Kathy, Tim’s soul mate and more blunt-spoken alter ego, whether the church ladies of the Atlanta-based PCA worried about the couple, as if they and their three young sons were being sent on a mission to a remote African village. “Oh, that would have been easier,” she said. “Big bad Whore of Babylon is where we were going.”

The church’s first New York service, in April 1989, drew 75 people to a rented Seventh-day Adventist facility on the Upper East Side. By that fall, Keller was leading two weekly Sunday services for up to 250 people. Redeemer had the luxury of a starter group of parishioners brought to the church by an offshoot of the Evangelical missionary organization Campus Crusade for Christ, mostly young professionals hungry for what Keller calls a “crunchy, believe-in-miracles” kind of Christianity. With its message that you can be a thinking person and a believer simultaneously, Redeemer became, in a phrase one hears with almost eerie frequency from parishioners, the ideal place for a believer to bring a nonbelieving friend. At the time, with Evangelical Christianity mired in the sex and money scandals of the Jimmy Swaggart–Jim Bakker era, “no one had ever met someone who had more than a third-grade education that believed the things that were being preached at Redeemer,” Kathy says. It didn’t hurt that Redeemer came to town just as the early-nineties recession began, when Keller’s blind-ambition-is-the-root-of-all-evil message was especially resonant.

“Why are you in New York? Deep down, you think something is wrong with you.”

Throughout the nineties, the church grew mostly by word-of-mouth. That was by design. The Kellers can be suspicious of the media, especially Kathy, who still hasn’t gotten over a 1998 Times article that emphasized Redeemer’s conservative take on homosexuality and premarital sex (more on those issues below). The story, Kathy says, “could have been entitled ‘Manhattanites More Stupid Than We Thought—Attend Christian Church.’ ”

September 11, 2001, brought a significant jump in Redeemer’s attendance. “We didn’t have two morning services then,” Keller recalls. “You could see the people couldn’t get in, and it was just jammed, so I went back to the organist and came back and said, ‘Everybody who can’t get in the doors right now, if you come back in two hours, I’ll do another service.’ And six or seven hundred people came back.” And last year’s historic economic collapse gave parishioners another reason to seek solace in the church. One congregant testified earlier this year that God “finally saw fit to relieve me from my job in banking” and how “in this season of drought … God will provide.”

Keller is on a promotional tour for Counterfeit Gods. Over the phone, in a car on the way to the St. Louis airport, he’s unpacking the Redeemer theology for me. His belief system is not the fundamentalist strain running through many of the Bible Belt megachurches—the “saved” us versus the “heathen” them. Nor is it the new-school “be a winner, praise the Lord,” Christian self-esteem-building ideology of Joel Osteen. Keller advocates something of a third option. He wants to call people’s attention to the emptiness of a way of living that overvalues worldly achievement and to help them see the spiritual benefits of accepting Jesus Christ, and all he stands for, as their savior. But Keller wants to do that in a way that’s not intellectually insulting or morally hectoring. What he refers to as “idols,” he says, are the things we’re so wrapped up in, it’s as if we worship them as gods, in place of the one true God. Traditional vices like sex and drink can be idols, he says, but more insidious can be traditional virtues like hard work and family—“good” things that we can mistake for “ultimate” ones. “The way you can tell your love for something has turned idolatrous is that you basically destroy the thing you love,” he says. “Overwork often leads to destruction—people who overreach and cheat or have health breakdowns. If you put too much on your children, your kids can be crushed by your expectations for their happiness and success.”

New York itself isn’t the problem, Keller says. “I basically revel in New York,” he says. He and Kathy maintain an out-of-towner’s love of museums, concerts, and restaurants, and like to explore neighborhoods they don’t know with their son Jonathan, an urban planner. The problem, Keller says, is a culture that values success above everything else. “There is an enormously sick pressure to perform and do well and make money. Companies essentially force people to make work more important than anything else.” Orthodox religious faith, he says, “is a hedge against the idolatry of success and what people are doing—almost selling their souls. I don’t have a Bible verse that says you’ve got to live the rest of your life in New York. But I say slow down and try to actually enjoy the city. People use the city to get ahead. And I’m saying no, have your life here.” Keller is conscious of the fact that while he is reproving us for our workaholism, he himself is putting in hours that could stand comparison to those of the most driven hedge-funder. “The people who know me best don’t think I’m a hypocrite,” he says. “They see me as one of them. A fellow struggler.” He says his faith was only strengthened by the tough-minded rationalism he faced when he came to his adopted hometown. “I talked to a lot of sharp New Yorkers who had a lot of tough questions,” he says. “I very often said, ‘Gee, I don’t know why,’ and I had to think and read until I could get back to them.”

The signature Keller sermon is a mix of biblical scholarship, pop culture, and whatever might have caught his eye in The New York Review of Books or on Salon.com that week. The intellectual component is the key to winning over New Yorkers, he says. “When you communicate in a way that touches a person’s heart culturally, you get growth,” he says. “I come here, and people say, ‘Oh, look, Tim quotes The New Yorker and Nietzsche and talks about the existentialists. He’s an intellectual.’ Another way to put it is: ‘He’s showing me what Christianity would look like if I believed. Because I think like him, and even though I’m not sure I agree, it resonates.’ ” Using the author of The Antichrist to get across a Christian message is a neat trick, and I confess to Keller that an old cynical expression popped into my head: “Running with the hares, hunting with the hounds.” He doesn’t smile. “It’s not too deliberate, otherwise it does become an act—‘That’ll get the New Yorkers,’ ” he says. “You have to live here so you’re a lot like New Yorkers, you live the same life, and you have the same concerns.”

“You can’t teach what we teach—that you must be born again through belief in Jesus Christ—without saying most of the world is wrong.”

Keller’s effect on parishioners struggling to make sense of 80-hour workweeks or rejected theater auditions can be intoxicating. “I needed something to ground me and didn’t know what it was,” says 27-year-old Shani Barrett, who moved here from Southern California to make it in theater, so far with limited success. “He was, like, dead-on-balls accurate,” is how she describes the experience of hearing Keller speak for the first time. “I just felt he was talking to me and my situation.” These days, she says, “I pray after yoga class, I pray before auditions, and before I go onstage. I put it in God’s hands. What he wants to happen will happen.” Mark Tait, a 25-year-old private-equity analyst, says Keller’s teachings help him keep his demanding work life in balance. “I really don’t understand how people aren’t throwing themselves off the Brooklyn Bridge if they don’t have more to live for than earning six figures and going out every night and buying nice clothes.” Jonathan Tse, a 28-year-old investment analyst originally from Hong Kong, describes Redeemer’s emphasis on divine grace as a kind of liberation from the pressure that Manhattan, and the Asian community in particular (the Redeemer congregation has a disproportionately large Asian component), puts on its young people to perform. “Redeemer and the gospels themselves basically say, ‘You don’t earn your way into eternal life by working or by being good.’ ”

Keller doesn’t like to call himself an Evangelist because of the right-wing political overtones the term carries, but he certainly aims to convert others to his faith. He and his church also stress the importance of developing a personal relationship with God and Jesus Christ and generally take a conservative approach to interpreting the Bible. Keller does not believe the world was created in six days, but unlike his more mainstream Protestant counterparts, he does believe that the Genesis account of Adam and Eve is, in some real, nonmetaphorical sense, true. Imagine, he asks his congregation, “the grief God feels looking at us when we commit spiritual adultery? We’re the spouse from hell. God is in the longest bad marriage in history.” And for all their modern urban sparkle, his sermons unfailingly resolve into the same Evangelical endgame: Jesus died for our sins. Wake up New Yorkers and accept divine salvation.

Keller insists his church allows for political diversity. “There’s this foolish idea that if you believe in God and Jesus is the Son of God, you’re going to be against gun control,” he says. “Actually, I think you simply can’t get orthodox Christianity into one political mold.”

But when it comes to sexual morality and gender issues, Keller takes a strict, traditional Christian line. That is to say, he believes things that enlightened urban Americans generally do not: that women should not be ordained as ministers (Kathy Keller opted out of becoming a pastor when she decided that female ministers were unbiblical); that abortion is unequivocally wrong; that sex out of wedlock and homosexuality are sins. Keller treads this ground cautiously. He knows these positions make Redeemer a potential target. They have significance in his ministry, he insists, not as cultural litmus tests but as expressions of God’s will as revealed in the Bible. Redeemer represents a middle ground, he says, between the moralism of conventional right-wing Christianity and what he regards as the do-what-feels-right narcissism of secular culture. “Because these are ‘wedge issues,’ ” Keller says, “people will say, ‘You’ve got to be completely with me on this issue or you don’t love me.’ Well, we’re trying to say, ‘We can love you. We really can.’ ”

But especially for the parishioner who doesn’t come from a conservative Christian background, regarding homosexuality and premarital sex as sins, even so-called forgivable ones, is a challenge. “These areas are where a lot of people just stop,” concedes Demian Repucci, a 38-year-old design and branding consultant who leads one of the church’s many small fellowship groups. “They’re the wall. Which I think is an issue for the church at large, not just Redeemer.”

Longtime parishioner James Hornbeak, a 55-year-old screenwriter who for years worked in retail fashion, has chosen to surrender to what he regards as God’s will: “If you can trust God enough to say, ‘I will give you all this peripheral stuff, my feelings about abortion, women, feminism, and homosexuality, all of those little side buttons, if you can trust Him, I’d say you’re in for a real treat.”

Others struggle. Shani Barrett, who has brought a gay theater friend to church, simply rejects the conservative theological line on homosexuality: “Maybe I have the mentality ‘take some, leave some if I don’t like it,’ which is maybe not the best way to look at it.” For Beth Cannon, 32, a graduate student in film at Columbia who is active in her fellowship group, it’s Redeemer’s stance on not ordaining women that is the biggest impediment to her pursuing full church membership. “It’s one of those things like, which conviction do I hold dearer?” she says. “But I haven’t met many people at Redeemer unwilling to discuss it.”

At Redeemer, I tell Keller, you may teach that you should treat your gay, pro-choice, or, for that matter, atheist neighbor with respect, even love, but as a matter of belief, you know that he or she has the misfortune of being wrong. “Well, you know what,” he says, “you can’t teach what we teach—that you must be born again through belief in Jesus Christ—without saying most of the world is wrong.”

One morning in October, Keller addressed the congregation at Ethical Culture on the state of the church’s soul and its finances. Redeemer was at the end of a $20 million fund-raising drive intended to finance the new church building and eventually two more churches in town. The plan is wildly ambitious, but Keller was selling it with true believer’s zeal. “I’ve never been more excited except maybe when I started here,” he told the crowd. “In the last five years, we’ve prayed well but not desperately. Recently, my prayer life has gone through the roof.”

The three Redeemer churches, each with its own pastor, would serve as “regeneration centers,” Keller said, which would “plant” still more churches throughout Manhattan. Since coming to New York, Redeemer has helped start some 65 churches of various Protestant denominations, many of them of the small “storefront” variety, serving minority neighborhoods in and outside Manhattan. But the new ten-year “vision” is an order of magnitude grander, what Keller described as “almost a wall of services” at Redeemer or Redeemer-related churches serving the would-be spiritual seeker from 110th Street in Manhattan all the way downtown. “We want to be a movement,” he said at one point in the service. And he ended it, as he always does, with a prayer.

Counterfeit Gods

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Counterfeit Gods 3

Counterfeit treadmill: How we turn good things into false gods

Two books about idolatry—one old, one new—are well worth reading. Herbert Schlossberg's Idols for Destruction (1983) is a scholarly look at the idols many of us worship: money, power, nature, humanitarianism. . . . Tim Keller's Counterfeit Gods (2009) is a pastoral look at the idols many of us worship a quarter-century later: money, power, sex, moral excellence. . . .

Schlossberg concluded that only Christianity could overcome the envious spirit that waters the poisonous plants of secular politics and socialism. Keller concludes that the human heart is an idol factory that takes not only bad stuff but "good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things."

Idols for Destruction, although some of its specific examples are dated, is like a course in macroeconomics that illuminates our society's performance, structure, and behavior. Counterfeit Gods, with examples from the Bible that remain perpetually new, is like a course in microeconomics that shows us how we make decisions to allocate our limited time on this earth—and often make mistakes.

Keller himself tells his own story of how he fell victim to idolatry by taking something good and making it ultimate, as he tried to become the perfect pastor, bearing all burdens and turning down help: "It wasn't until I began to search my heart with the Biblical category of idolatry that I made the horrendous discovery that all my supposed sacrifices were just a series of selfish actions. I was using people in order to forge my own self-appreciation. I was looking to my sacrificial ministry to give me the sense of 'righteousness before God' that should only come from Jesus Christ."

Keller writes, "We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes." That got me thinking about my two decades of involvement with WORLD and my continued delight in every issue that comes out. In this way only, I identify with William Randolph Hearst, who a century ago would put his newspaper on the floor and with his toes turn pages, doing what one sub-editor called "a tap dance around and between them" as he relished what he saw.

I especially enjoy meeting our terrific subscribers. So many say such kind things, all of which I like to think are true. My self-image is that of humble cracker-barrel philosopher to the nation, genially dispensing Bible-based wisdom. I've been writing in WORLD about my pilgrim's progress from atheism to Christian thinking, one episode at a time, always encouraged to continue by emails and comments, always thinking that the story is about God's mercy and not me.

Then something happened to a quotation thrown into the last issue's episode as an amusing example of a Manhattan-centric attitude: A New York foundation president had told me, "If you go to Texas, no one will hear of you again." To my surprise and chagrin, that quotation appeared in big type taking up a third of a page—and since I haven't vanished, it looked like bragging. I saw the big type after WORLD had already gone to press, and I was nauseated at the thought of having 120,000 copies opened over the coming week with that on a page. What would WORLD subscribers think? It would ruin my image.

Keller realized that he was being self-righteous rather than Christ-dependent. Counterfeit Gods helped me to realize that I was doing the same. Did that big-type shock expose my desire to win praise for humility? Had I turned WORLD and my reputation into idols?

A good book helps us to ask ourselves hard questions. This has been a hard page to write, but if it helps you to ask yourself a hard question—What good things in my life are becoming idols?—it's been worthwhile.

The Exercise Option: Who Knew?

The first study using exercise as an effective tool to combat ADHD was done more than 30 years ago. Why are we just discovering it now? Because the information never got out. That raises questions about the role of patient advocacy groups—especially when those groups are partly funded by drug companies.

The nation's leading ADHD advocacy organization, CHADD (Children and Adults with ADHD), supports more than 200 local chapters across the country, works with local school systems and acts as a national clearinghouse for information about ADHD. Because Ritalin is such a useful drug in managing the disorder, it's no surprise that CHADD would tout its benefits. But the relationship between the advocacy organization and the company that manufactures the drug has made some observers uncomfortable. In the late 1990s, CHADD lobbied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to reclassify Ritalin as a Schedule III drug, which would make it easier to obtain and refill prescriptions. (The FDA declined to change Ritalin's status.)

At the time, Ritalin's manufacturer, Ciba-Geigy, which is now part of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, supported CHADD's efforts with cash. According to a 1995 report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Ciba- Geigy contributed $748,000 to CHADD from 1991 to 1994, a relationship that was not well known to most within the ADHD community. The DEA noted that in 1993 and 1994, when Ciba-Geigy warned of an impending Ritalin shortage, CHADD went on a media blitz, raising fears of empty prescription bottles in interviews and in letters to Congress. "The relationship between Ciba-Geigy and CHADD," wrote DEA officials, "raises serious concerns about CHADD's motive in proselytizing the use of Ritalin..."

The DEA was also alarmed about the treatment of Ritalin in CHADD literature, where it was "routinely portrayed as a benign, mild stimulant that is not associated with abuse or serious side effects. In reality, however, there is an abundance of scientific literature which indicates that [Ritalin] shares the same abuse potential as other Schedule II stimulants."

Since those concerns were raised, CHADD officials say they've created a firewall between its financial donors and its informational and advocacy work. "It's not unlike a newspaper, which takes advertisements but reports the news in an objective way," says CHADD spokesman Bryan Goodman. The group's income sources are now posted on CHADD's website (chadd.org). Contributions from pharmaceutical companies continue to be a big part of the organization's budget. Over the past five years, the major ADHD drug manufacturers—Novartis (which makes Ritalin), Shire (Adderall), McNeil (Concerta) and UCB (Metadate)—have contributed a total of more than $1 million each year, accounting for more than one-quarter of CHADD's annual budget.

But CHADD doesn't entirely exclude alternative treatments. The group's bimonthly magazine, Additude, ran one of the few articles about Michael Wendt's exercise research in 2002, and last year published material on Spark author John Ratey in "Beyond Meds," a special report on complementary approaches to ADD treatment. "You can't just say, 'Medicate the child and everything will be okay,'" Goodman says. "If you decide medication is right for you, it has to be part of a whole host of treatment options."

Women and Ministry, by Tim & Kathy Keller

Introduction

The Debate in the Church

Redeemer is committed to a high view of Scripture. We believe that, unless the Bible is God's word to us, we live without any real moral authority. "Right" and "wrong" would then become matters of personal taste or popular opinion. We would not really be able to talk of justice or truth at all, for there is no way to know objective truth.

Today, many people charge that the church and traditional Christianity are oppressive to women, denying them the right to the full use of their gifts in ministry. Many claim additionally that the Bible in general (and Paul in particular) is specifically guilty of this unjust treatment of women. These are extremely serious issues, especially for Redeemer Presbyterian. We are committed to the authority of the Bible and also to the liberation of all Christians to use their gifts in ministry.

The following paper represents many years of reflection, discussion, experimentation and practice. It is not an exegetical paper, studying passages in detail. It will, we hope, serve as a foundational paper for future patterns of women's ministry in the life of our congregation.

The Problem of 'Objectivity"

I (Tim) recognize that it may seem easy for me to talk in an objective, studied way about what this or that verse means about this subject. I have had women say to me in the midst of such a discussion, "For you this is a discussion, but for me this is my life you're messing with!" I realize my disadvantage. But please realize that neither men nor women can come to Scripture "objectively". Both men and women will find it difficult to hear God's voice clearly and to submit to God's authority. But only when we do can we even begin to submit to one another.

The Problem of Divisions

The divisions among evangelical Christians over this issue are very tragic. For many centuries, the church did not let the Scripture lead it away from the general oppression of women conducted by society. The church should have seen that the Bible does not teach the inferiority of women. Now, we fear, the fruit of the church's sin are coming home to it.

We live in an era of tension. In many churches, a particular view of women-in-ministry has become a basis for fellowship. Sometimes the message is: "though we believe in the Scripture, in Jesus as the Son of God, the need for repentance and faith in order to be born again, the importance of spreading the kingdom through the ministry of the Holy Spirit—if you don't share my view of women-in-ministry, there's the door!" Some 15 years ago, we would have entered the Presbyterian Church USA to minister, but we were told that our view of women-in-ministry precluded us from serving there. Though we would have worked beside people with different views, those on the other side of the fence would not work with us.

We do not want that to be the case at Redeemer. If you hold a view that differs from church policy or of the personal approach of the pastor, you should not feel bound to leave. We know what it was like to be "disfellowshipped" over this issue once! We will not do it to anyone else.

The Trinitarian Pattern

"Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of woman man, and the head of Christ is God.” -1 Corinthians 11:3
Here Paul says that the man is the "head" of the woman. But what does that mean?

1. Biblical headship involves servanthood.

Let's look at the two analogies. First, Christ's headship of man is clearly one of authority (there is submission), and yet his authority is expressed through sacrificial service. He discovers our needs and meets them. "Christ did not please himself", therefore we must "please our neighbor for his good, to build him up" (Romans 15:2-3). A "head’s" job is to use authority to please, to meet needs, to serve.

2. Biblical headship involves voluntary, respectful submission between equals.

The second analogy is critical: "the head of Christ is God". Whereas Christ is of a higher order of being than human beings, the Father and the Son are equal in power, greatness and dignity. The Son is not inferior to the Father all. This second analogy proves that "headship" does not imply superiority. Philippians 2:6 tells us that the Son was equal to the Father, but voluntarily took on a subordinate role, obeying the Father. He did this to accomplish our salvation.

What do we conclude about "headship" from the Christ-to-mankind and God-to-Christ analogies?

3."Headship" is something given by one person to another. The giver is equal to the receiver: the receiver has a real and final authority, but uses it only to serve and please and build up the giver.

The traditionalist misunderstanding

What does it mean, then, when Paul says (when discussing the role of women in the church) "the head of the woman is man?” There is a traditional view that comes to Scripture with a prejudice. It believes that women are inferior in many ways, unfit for leadership. This leads to all sorts of conclusions: "it means women should stay home, should not have careers, should not take jobs of leadership, and so on." This view looks to the first analogy of headship (Christ and man) but not the second one (the Father and the Son), where there is no inferiority at all. Men and women are both given the mandate to rule the earth (Genesis 1:28), and they are joint-heirs in God's grace (I Peter 3:7; Galalatians.3:28). Even here in I Corinthians 11 Paul makes it clear that there is equality of being. In v.8, he points out that Eve came from Adam, so "woman was created for man, not man for woman". Yet in v. 11-12, he points out that each human male is born of a woman, so "man is not independent of woman". Man should not lord it over women with his authority, since "everything comes from God". All authority is derivative from God and partial. We exercise authority only as an act of submission to God.

The feminist misunderstanding

But others come to Paul's statement on headship and try to ignore it. Some say, "Paul only means that Eve came out of Adam". Many interpreters point out that the Greek meaning of "head" {kephale) means "source", not "authority". Virtually all evangelical feminist interpreters make this point. The problem is that, while Christ did create humankind, God did not create Christ. He was not the "source". A survey of 2,336 example of the use of kephale in Greek literature reveals only two times that it is used as "source" and not "authority". Actually, Paul probably means kephale in both senses. In I Corinthians 11:8 he says, "For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man." There the two are combined. Paul grounds male headship in creation, while in I Corinthians 11:3 he grounds it in the Trinity.

Evangelical feminist interpreters also point out that Paul told slaves to submit to their masters and also told wives to submit to their husbands. Isn’t it (the reasoning goes) natural to assume that, just as slavery has gone by the boards with time, that female submission should as well? The difficulty is Paul's basis. Does Paul ever say: "slaves, obey your masters because of the way you were created?" Does Paul ever ground the basis for slave-master submission in the nature of creation or in the nature of the Trinity? Many feminists say that Paul was simply accommodating himself to the times. But the relationship of man to woman in Paul is not based on customs of the times but the relationships within the Trinity itself.

The evangelical feminists do not come to the Scripture "neutrally" (who does?). They come with this conviction:

"Many Christians thus speak of a wife's being equal to her husband in personhood, but subordinate in function. However, this is just playing word games and is a contradiction in terms. Equality and subordination are contradictions.'-L Scanzoni and N. Hardesty. All We're Meant to Be (Word, 1974), p. 110

This crucial statement is completely at odds with the God-Christ analogy. Christ was equal with the Father, yet took a submissive, subordinate role. It ignores the I Corinthians 11:3 definition of headship, just as does the traditionalist.

The biblical pattern of headship is neither the traditional nor the feminist. The feminist rejects the idea that subordination can ever co-exist with equality (though this is the basis of the trinity's relationship). The traditionalist believes that subordination assumes inequality. So both of these groups agree! They reject the biblical concept of headship as inconsistent.

Now let's see how the Trinitarian pattern of rule-and-submission-among-equals works itself out in marriage, in society in general, and in the church.

The Pattern In Marriage

1. A head may never use authority to please self.

In marriage, wives are told to give headship to their husbands (Ephesians 5:21 ff.) This does not mean that the man simply can make all the decisions nor does it mean that he gets his way whenever there is a difference of opinion. Why? A "head" may never overrule his spouse simply to get his way or please himself (Romans.15:2-3). A head sacrifices his wants and needs to please and build up his partner (Ephesians 5:2ff.).

2.Headship is “tie-breaking” authority.

Well, since this is also true of the wife (Ephesians 5:21 -"submit to one another," then what is the difference? A head only exercises authority to over-rule when he believes his spouse is doing something destructive to her or the family. In a marriage, where there are only two "votes", now will the stalemate be broken in cases where there is not just a difference in taste or preference, but in cases where both parties believe the other is seriously mistaken? There can be no unity unless one person has the right to cast the deciding "vote". That person knows that, along with this "right' comes the greatest accountability and responsibility.

The Bible directs that a wife, when she marries, give that "right/responsibility" freely to her husband. The husband realizes that ordinarily, his authority does not take the form of "over-ruling''—in fact, the servant-model directs the "head" to usually put aside his own tastes and preferences in deference to pleasing his spouse. But when there is a "hung jury", and it is critical for one person to take both leadership and responsibility, the “head's” service takes the form of initiation. He leads by over-ruling.

3. Why do men and women have these callings?

It is fairly obvious that the need for "tie-breaking authority" is necessary in a marriage partnership. But why does God direct in his Word that it go to the man? Many people struggle the most with this very point. If they cannot see a practical reason for a command of God, they hesitate to commit to it.

We must reject the traditional rationale.

The traditionalist says: "Women must submit because women aren’t fit for making decisions, for leadership." But many couples will admit that the wife is more decisive and has better judgement than the husband. Besides, the Bible no where gives that as a reason.

Our likeness to the Trinity.

The "reason" given by the Bible is simply that man-and-woman were made in the image of the Triune God. Women are called to follow Christ, who voluntarily subordinated himself in response to the Father's call. To put this in perspective, let’s ask this question: "Why was Christ the one who gave up authority to become subordinate? Why did Christ answer the call from the Father to give away authority?" We don’t know, but if anything, it is a mark of his greatness, not his weakness! A case could be made, then, that women have this calling because they are greater than men!

4. The Biblical pattern calls both parties to submit.

Many godly couples have come to realize, then, that the Biblical pattern is equally difficult for both parties. The woman and the man both must submit first of all to their roles, their call from God.

Society traditionally gave to men the authority to over-rule their spouses for their own pleasure. But the Bible's "headship" authority is quite different, we have seen. As a result, many Christian men would gladly give up "tie-breaking", servant authority to their wives. They don’t like the heavy responsibility for service and self-denial that "headship" brings.

On the other hand, many women would gladly take the authority themselves, because they see how men abuse it, just as God predicted (Gen. 3:16). But both must struggle to submit to God's call.

5. Tapping into the mystery.

When a Christian couple does so submit, however, they do so because God's Word directs them to. And after years of practice, they begin to see that this pattern somehow gets them in touch with something deep within them. Neither is demanding submission from one another, but after first submitting to God they are enabled to submit to one another's needs. It makes them both strong and tender, bringing them to serve one another yet in different ways.

Woman was created as a "helper” (Genesis 2). This word indicates no weakness at all, but complementary strength. In the Bible, God is our Help. A helper is someone who can help because he or she is stronger than the one being helped. For example, I can help my son with his homework because I know more than he. On the other hand, if I do his homework for him, I have stopped using my strength as a helper. In the same way, women have inherent strengths, insight and endurance and adaptability that men do not generally have. Women "help" their husbands through a willing submission through strength.

Mysterious it is! Real "masculinity" is full of tenderness and real "femininity" is full of strength. But they are still different from one another in many indefinable ways. Submission to God's pattern for marriage gradually gets you back in touch with these deep truths and you begin to discover your true self.

The Pattern In Society

The next logical question is: "is every man the head over every woman?" Paul's statement might lend itself to that conclusion, but the Bible's testimony is otherwise.

1. Women achieve leadership in society.

Even in ancient Israel, at a time where women in society were the property of their husbands or fathers, women were endued with unusual power in civil affairs. For example, women could not inherit property in those days. Yet, God specifically dictated that daughters could inherit the property of their father (Numbers 27:8). Also, Deborah eventually became the political leader, the "president" of Israel (Judges 4). There is no indication that she was acting illegally or extraordinarily.

There is therefore no indication that women in general society need to defer to men. Women can be executives, presidents of banks, or the president of a country. Does this seem inconsistent? Why would the Bible insist on a Trinitarian pattern in marriage, but ignore it in society?

Again, we must speculate a bit, because the Bible does not answer all of these "why" questions. One good possibility, however, may lay in the Biblical basis for democracy.

2. Democracy is for society while rule-submission is for our spiritual lives.

Christians are for democracy because we believe in sin. Many folk believe in it for the opposite reason. Rousseau believed in democracy because he thought that people were so wise and good that no one is fit to be a slave. Of course, Christians wish for no one to be a slave, but we believe democracy is good because no one is fit to be a master!

Because of sin, people misuse absolute authority. Thus it is clear that monarchy, wise and good kings, would be a form of government that very much fits the Trinitarian pattern. God is a King, not a President, and our spiritual lives are based on monarchy. So why don’t we have Kings? The answer is that we have to abolish monarchy due to sin. We have to treat all people as equal.

C.S. Lewis explains the Christian view of equality:

This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or joy) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. L think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don’t think the old authority of kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience of subjects, laymen, wives, and children was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall. and protection against cruelty.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or safety-gadget but as an absolute ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind that hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracies, just as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of monarchies. It will kill us if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive of a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or bow, is a prosaic barbarian. There are men whose taproot to Eden has been cut: whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where we are forbidden to honor a king, we honor millionaires, athletes, film-stars, even famous prostitutes and gangsters. For our spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

We must wear clothes since the Fall. Yes, but inside, under what Milton called these troublesome disguises", we want the naked body, on proper occasions, to appear. It is still so in the marriage-chamber. In the same way, under the necessary outer 'covering" of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual differences should be alive. It is there when, as Christians, as laymen, we can obey the priest all the more because the priest has no authority over us on the political level. It is there in our relation to parents and teachers—all the more because it is now a willed and wholly spiritual reverence.

It should also be there in marriage. Husbands have so horribly abused their power over women that to women, of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an absolute ideal. Naomi Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on the defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. This is the tragi-comedy of the modem woman; taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success.

This whole question is of immense practical importance. Every intrusion of the spirit that says, ‘I’m as good as you’ into our family and spiritual life is to be resisted as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Let us wear equality, but let us undress at night.”

In summary, the pattern of rule-and-submission is greatly muted in society because of sin. People abuse authority, so politically, all authority must be elected authority—and all individuals must have access to places of authority.

The Pattern In The Church

When we come to Scriptural teaching on women-in-the-church, we discover again a different pattern. Unlike in marriage, all women do not submit to all men. But unlike society, there is a Trinitarian pattern. It is not muted.

On the one hand, women are clearly partners with men in ministry. The Christian church is far ahead of Judaism and pagan religions in this.

Women were full members of the covenant community (Acts 1:14). They were deaconesses (I Timothy 3:11; Romans 16:2); this meant they were ministry leaders, initiating and supervising ministries. It is wrong, therefore, to say that women cannot be area directors in para-church ministries, or to say that women cannot lead evangelistic, discipling, educational, or teaching ministries. Tabitha (Acts 9:30) was a leader of mercy ministry to the poor, while Euodia and Syntyche (Philippians 4:2,3) were Paul's evangelistic associates. Priscilla discipled and instructed Apollos (Acts 18:26) and led a house church (Romans 16:4,5). As in the Old Testament (Exodus 15), women were prophets and did prophesy. They spoke and prayed in public worship (I Corinthians 11:5).

It appears from this that there are no ministry gifts nor ministries that are forbidden to women. And yet, Paul draws some limits.

The office of elder is forbidden to women.

Elders are to be men (1 Timothy 3:1-3). In 1 Timothy 2:11, Paul forbids women to "teach or have authority" over men. In 1 Corinthians 14:35-36, women are not to take part in determining whether a teacher is teaching sound doctrine. (Note: Paul's command for women to "keep silent in church" cannot mean that they may never speak publicly. That would contradict I Corinthians 11 where women are told to pray and prophesy. It means they are to keep silent when the prophets are judged.)

Elders are leaders who admit or dismiss people from the church, and they do "quality control" of members' doctrine. These are the only things that elders exclusively can do. Others can teach, disciple, serve, witness.

There are a number of qualifications for this office—God must call and give elder gifts. When the congregation elects elders, it is not to elect people it likes, but people God has gifted along the lines of 1 Timothy 3:1ff. Most men and all women do not qualify and will never be elders. It is not something they can attain through hard work. It is a calling from God the King.

Why does God call certain ones? Because they are inherently more worthy? That has never been the case. It is the same question: why did the Father rule while the Son submitted? The answer is that both were great and wise persons who did not resent the submission-and-rule pattern but rejoiced in it.

Does exclusion from the eldership mean that women are inherently unfit for leadership? The only thing we can conclude is that women do not fit this particular kind of leadership. Consider the types of leaders in Israel. There were prophets, kings, priests, and elders. Though kings had physical, political power over the priests and elders and prophets, they could not take over their duties. Saul, for example, was forbidden from doing priestly work, offering sacrifices.

Women were prophets and also were heads of state (a queen-Attialiah, and a judge-Deborah). On the other hand women could not be priests or elders. Not only were women precluded from the priesthood, but all men not of the tribe of Levi. Was God being arbitrary? No, he was acting like a King. He called some people into some kinds of leadership and precluded other people from other kinds. Sometimes the preclusion was done on the basis of gender, other times on the basis of nationality. All people gladly submitted to his Lordship if they understood his rights over them.

Women and non-elder males can use any and all spiritual gifts in ministry.

Though the job of elder is a high calling, every believer is a "prophet, priest, and king". All non-elders in the church must and can use their gifts in the church, whatever they are.
In a nutshell, our position is this: whatever a non-ruling elder male can do in the church, a woman can do. We do not believe that I Timothy 2:11 or I Corinthians 14:35-36 precludes women teaching the Bible to men or speaking publicly. To "teach with authority" (I Timothy 2:11) refers to disciplinary authority over the doctrine of someone. For example, when an elder says to a member: "You are telling everyone that they must be circumcised in order to be saved—that is a destructive, non-Biblical teaching which is hurting people spiritually. You must desist from it or you will have to leave the church." That is "teaching authority"—it belongs only to the elders.

Thus, women at Redeemer will be free to use all the gifts, privately and publicly. There are no restrictions on ministry at all. There is a restriction on the office of elder. Why? Because the Bible precludes it, and therein it points us back to the Trinitarian pattern which is strong in marriage and muted in society, but which is practiced in the church.

Aren't Paul’s prohibitions to women in authority specific instructions just for those local church situations?

Evangelical feminists have for years recognized the difficulty of denying Paul's prelusions to women and yet maintaining a high view of Biblical authority. There are two ways they have argued:

1. First, they say we must distinguish between absolute norms and circumstantial advice, instruction given only to some churches at some time. Paul's advice about women and authority has only to do with particular churches at that time.

The serious problem with this view is that everything Paul wrote he wrote to specific situations. All his writings were letters, not theological essays. When we hear Paul say, "In Christ there is no Jew and Greek, no male and female,” he has written it to Galatians who are embroiled in a particular problem. When he says, "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man" in I Timothy, he is speaking to a man (Timothy) whose job it was to plant churches and set up an organizational structure. 1 Timothy is all about how to appoint elders and deacons, how churches are to function. If anything, I Timothy 2:12 could be said to be a general principle in a book of general principles about how churches are to be operated!

But our point here is that even 1 Timothy is a particular letter to a particular situation. Everything Paul teaches is to a specific situation. To distinguish between "timeless" and "temporary" is to set up a "canon within a canon", and one based on your own opinion. In fact, if the ordination of women is a "justice issue", then surely to preclude women from speaking or having authority in even one church would be horribly wrong. This leads us to the second approach.

2. The second way for evangelical feminists to respond to Paul is to frankly admit he was in error.

This is the position of virtually all folks who favor women's ordination to all offices.
Feminist interpreters continually point out that there are ambiguities and difficulties in the passages on women. What does it mean that "because of the angels, the woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head” (I Corinthians 11:11)? Or "women will be saved through childbearing" (I Timothy 2:15)? By bringing up these difficulties, it is often implied that "these are difficult passages and who knows what they really mean?" But actually, Paul's basic points are extremely clear. Hardly anyone doubts that Paul meant to exclude women from ruling office. So, the real question is: how do we regard his view?

The basic answer of evangelical feminists is: he was wrong. Usually, this kind of blunt statement is avoided in print, but it is everywhere assumed. One of the first evangelicals who wrote in favor of women's ordination was the most frank:

Because these two perspectives—the Jewish and the Christian-are incompatible, there is no satisfying way to harmonize the Pauline argument for female subordination [which Jewett considers "Jewish"] with the larger Christian vision of which the great apostle himself was the primary architect. (P.Jewett, Man as Male and Female, p.113)

In other words, Paul's teaching on women cannot be avoided. It is there. But it is wrong, contradicting the rest of the Bible. We are, then, really back to the same thing-a "canon within a canon", set up arbitrarily, determining which parts of Scripture are "higher, and purer" and which parts are backward, retrogressive. If Scripture alone is our final authority, where we get a standard for judging Scripture?

Virginia Mollenkott, an evangelical feminist, gives great insight into how it was necessary to change a view of Scripture to accommodate women's ordination. In an interview with The Other Side magazine (TOS) she tells how she was speaking at a conference with Paul Jewett and others on women in the church.

Mollenkott: Anyway, the night before Jewett spoke, some of us had a long and painful private meeting. We were discussing whether he dared say his thing on the Pauline self- contradictions. We decided he didn’t dare to because it would jeopardize the job of the person who had set up the conference. So Jewett retreated into what is the safe thing to do: that is, talk about Jesus' behavior...
TOS: If we interpret the Old Testament by the New, we have some sort of criterion for the Old Testament. But how do we tell in Paul? If his teaching about women is merely cultural, then maybe what he says about justification is, too....
Mollenkott: It seems to me that at this point we have to rely on good, careful scholarly exegesis. We have to place passages in context... We have to pay attention to word choice, literary form...
TOS: But...your approach will help us find out what a passage means, but so far you haven’t said much that I can see which helps me pick out what passages are true. In literature it is one process to determine what something means and quite another to determine if it’s true...Now how can I tell which are records of errors and which are normative?
Mollenkott: When we find a passage, a spirit which runs all the way through the Bible-at that point I know which one is for all time and which one for the hardness of our hearts. Another guideline is the analogy of what Jesus said and did. If something doesn’t fit the life and teaching of Jesus, again I know which is for all time...
TOS: I am gradually moving toward your position...But if l wind up where you are, l am seriously considering resigning from The Other Side. Our stance has been to call America and the church back to the Bible. It seems to me that calling people to that is one very important thing which accepting your position makes hand to do. Maybe I should just clear out and go work for some less evangelical magazine...
Mollenkott: I don’t think you should do that....I think before long many, many evangelicals will come along toward a more scholarly approach to Scripture...Let the rest have their iron maiden of a definition of inspiration which they use to oppress other people. Let them declare themselves as fundamentalists. Let's the rest of us get on with the job”. The Other Side. May/June 1976

This interview does show that it requires a shift in one's view of Scripture to work around Paul's limitations on women's authority in the church. Moltenkott says that we can choose the normative from relative passages on two criterion:

1) If a teaching is repeated more often in the Bible, an apparently contradictory one can be rejected if it appears less often, or

2) if a teaching contradicts the life and teaching of Jesus, it can be rejected.

These criterion do not work, if you hope to find Biblical support for the ordination of women! Consider the first criterion. In the Old Testament, God is the "husband" of Israel, who is the "wife". In the New Testament, Christ is the "husband" of the church as we are the "bride" of Christ. When God wishes to express his loving authority over us he depicts us as feminine and himself as masculine. This is a repeated, broad-based Biblical theme, throughout. All believers are "feminine" toward God, for we give ourselves in surrender to him. See Romans 7:1-6. By putting ourselves in his arms, he bears his fruit into the world through our bodies.

And consider the second criterion: Jesus' life and ministry. Not one of his apostles was female. Feminists are quick to point out that he was adapting to his culture. But now they are doing the same thing to Jesus that they did with Paul. What really is the standard, now, by which we judge Jesus? If women's ordination is a real justice issue, can we excuse our Lord on the basis of cultural pressure? Was he the type of person to succumb to popular opinion?

We feel that there is a deep inconsistency in the phrase "evangelical feminism". The feminists who are consistent recognize the Bible as a sexist book throughout. They reject it. The feminists who try to hold to complete Biblical authority have, really, an impossible balancing act to conduct.

The Pattern At Redeemer Presbyterian Church

On the basis of the above position paper, how will women function in ministry at Redeemer Presbyterian church?

Leadership structure at Redeemer Presbyterian.

We hope to have two boards of officers: elders and deacons/deaconesses.

The Deaconesses themselves.

The Deaconesses will be women elected by the congregation who will do discipling, counseling, and shepherding in the church, particularly among the women. Spiritual maturity is the qualification. They will probably also exercise a teaching ministry in the church, depending on their gifts.

The Deaconesses and the Deacons.

Together with the deacons, they will equip and guide people into ministry in the church. At Redeemer we want to help laypeople begin and conduct ministries. Deacons and Deaconesses will do this together.

The Deaconesses and the Elders.

The church will continue to have broad-based planning and strategizing. Deaconesses will serve on planning/oversight committees (e.g. evangelism, education, worship) with other officers and non-officers. Deaconesses could chair such a committee if the group so elects. Also, the Elders, Deacons, and Deaconesses will meet regularly for strategy and oversight of the church. In matters of discipline and doctrine, the elders have the final say-they have "tie-breaking authority"! Also, the elders represent the church at denominational meetings. But deaconesses will sit in positions of influence and will have regular part (along with many women on program committees) into the strategizing and decision-making process of the church.

The real challenge will not be to create a structure, but to create a climate in which men and women truly work together as equal ministry partners in the church, still recognizing the principle of male headship in the eldership. Will we really let women lead ministries? Will we really release women's gifts to witness, nurture, and serve in the church? Will we incorporate the wisdom of all the mature Christians into the planning of the church? Or will we have a paternalistic attitude which in thousands of subtle ways puts women down and does not listen to their advice or concerns? That remains to be seen! But that is our goal—to create a community that even non-believing feminists recognize as not oppressive, yet one that honors the Biblical distinction between the genders.

Conclusion

We know from experience that our position on women-in-ministry dissatisfies many people. Many friends from the traditional evangelical church find it far too "liberal" and "permissive", while many other friends on the other side still feel it is oppressive. Our position is not totally unique. See J. Hurley's book, Man and Women in Biblical Perspective or Susan Foh's book, Women and the Word of God. They come close to where we are.

The fact remains that nearly everyone we meet is more "conservative" or else more "liberal” than we are. Thus we appeal to our friends to work with us on this. We do not to make this issue a cause of division, as we said above. We see no reason why friends with the same view of the Bible cannot work together, all the while influencing each other and refining one another's viewpoint in order to become truly Biblical. Please be partners with us.