-by Roland Wrinkle

God’s failed lab experiment: Combining testosterone with hubris. Movie moguls, TV stars, comedians, federal judges, senators, congressmen, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, civil rights icons, and, yes, pastors. All powerful and influential men accused of career-destroying sexual abuse inflicted on female employees whose careers they held in their mighty hands. I’m shocked! Not that it happens and is so pervasive, but that we finally got together as a civilization and suddenly declared this blight on our humanness to be really bad and announced that the powerful would be held responsible and brought down. The meek has inherited the boardroom. My head is still spinning.

Living in this country, I am not unfamiliar with the issue. Thirty-five years ago I represented the first female paramedic hired by a major metropolitan fire department when her male co-workers drummed her out by sexually harassing her until she quit. That caused things to change. I then pioneered the law of sexual harassment in the workplace, handling many cases and even establishing new law in a rather celebrated case, Bihun v. AT&T Information Systems, Inc. (1993) 13 Cal.App.4th 976. You can google it and read it and when you do, you’ll learn of an all-too-familiar story of the boss vulgarly pursuing a young, female subordinate and, upon ultimate rejection, ruining her career. I’ll never forget how Oksana Bihun described the non-debilitating but ever-present amount of sadness that always lingered. The abuse of power cases I handled ranged from the disgusting to the sickening and included sexual assaults and rape. The big companies never did anything to the abuser. They uniformly reasoned, “that is just Charlie being Charlie” and Charlie made too much money for the company and secretaries are expendable. That is, until we made it more expensive for them to keep supporting Charlie.

Now that the culture has decided it’s time to make a radical shift and send notice to all men of power and position that they can no longer get away with it, I ask myself, “Where was the conservative evangelical church on all this?” I found the answer: Hiding under the pulpit. How could the church not have been the leading voice in exposing and condemning such obvious evil? Because we all too frequently twist and bend our sacred scriptures to make them do our bidding. Here, in my judgment, the shame of the church stems from acceptance of a supposed biblical doctrine and sanction for seeing women as less than equal to men. Because we live in a male-dominated culture, we read cultural biases into scripture and we then, unsurprisingly, see a biblical warrant for the subordination and subjugation of women which isn’t there. We confuse, and therefore mistake, cultural norms for biblical truths. Once the concept of inferiority is accepted as “gospel,” then mistreatment and abuse are right around the corner.

Jesus, flying unflinchingly in the face of the prevailing culture of the Eastern Mediterranean of 2000 years ago, exalted women in a radical and surprising way. He both declared and modeled that women were no longer to be considered property to be used and abused and included women in the inner circles of his new movement. Jesus’ disciples included women (Luke 8:1-3), a practice almost unheard of among the rabbis of His day. Not only that, He encouraged their discipleship by portraying it as something more needful than domestic service (Luke 10:38-42).

In fact, Christ’s first recorded, explicit disclosure of His own identity as the true Messiah was made to a Samaritan woman (John 4:25-26). He always treated women with the utmost dignity -even women who might otherwise be regarded as outcasts (Matthew 9:20-22; Luke 7:37-50; John 4:7-27). He blessed their children (Luke 18:15-16), raised their dead (Luke 7:12-15), forgave their sin (Luke 7:44-48), and restored their virtue and honor (John 8:4- 11). Thus He exalted the position of womanhood itself. At the foot of the cross were “many women … who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of the sons of Zebedee (Matt 27:55–56). The only male disciple who had the cajones to show up was young John. The others were cowering in the shadows. It was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, who brought spices, that they might come and anoint him. And it was this distaff trio who first found the tomb empty (Mark 16). Women became prominent in the ministry of the early church (Acts 12:12-15; 1 Corinthians 11:11-15). On the day of Pentecost, when the New Testament church was born, women were there with the chief disciples, praying (Acts 1:12-14). Some were renowned for their good deeds (Acts 9:36); others for their hospitality (Acts 12:12; 16:14-15); still others for their understanding of sound doctrine and their spiritual giftedness (Acts 18:26; 21:8-9). John’s second epistle was addressed to a prominent woman in one of the churches under his oversight. Even the apostle Paul, sometimes falsely caricatured by critics of Scripture as a male chauvinist, regularly ministered alongside women (Philippians 4:3). He recognized and applauded their faithfulness and their giftedness (Romans 16:1-6; 2 Timothy 1:5). He just didn’t want to so upset existing cultural norms so as to cause chaos and disruption that would drown out the already astonishing and disorienting message of the Gospel.

But our culture, as the culture of Jesus’ day, subordinates women to an inferior position in relation to men. And, as with many issues in the past, we use the Bible to justify our prejudices. And, as with many issues in the past, subordination leads to abuse. But the culture has changed on this one. We are now free to go back to our bibles and see that it was there all along.