Hoodwinked
No, not the cute movie. I’m talking about The Council of the Hood— you know, man-hood and woman-hood. Not the Biblical terms “male” and “female” but those contrived and loaded terms invented for the purpose of keeping Christian women out of full participation in the boys’ clubs called “church” and “home”.
But instead of yet another dissection of this “body of death”, let’s concentrate on the positive. We need to shake the dust of hierarchy from our feet as we leave the Pharisaical, power-loving crowd to themselves. They will keep us bogged down trying to unravel their twisted logic if we let them, keeping us from moving forward with the message of hope and freedom in Christ.
This message is not just for women either. In the previous post about codependency, we saw that men are damaged as well by the teachings of hierarchy. They are told exactly what they want to hear, what appeals to the flesh: the men that they are in charge, and the women that they will not have to make any decisions in this life.
A couple years ago I responded to the infamous True Woman Manifesto with a manifesto of my own. I think if we as egalitarians focus around positive statements like that, as well as renouncing the horrible teachings coming from many claiming Christ today, we might begin to see actual progress instead of just spinning our wheels in the mud of hierarchy debates.
In other words, enough already. Let’s move on and begin the building up and healing of the community of believers. Let us model the Body of Christ as shown in scripture instead of wrangling over who gets to have power. Let us develop and publish our own “systematic theology”, our own faithful translations, our own training courses and accreditation for achievement (I don’t use the term ’seminaries’ because they imply a legitimate priestly class). Let us “build up the wall” even though we are short-handed and surrounded by enemies.