Saturday, June 27, 1998

Some evangelical scholars say Baptists jump to conclusions about what the Apostle Paul said

By Jeffrey Weiss / The Dallas Morning News

Dr. Richard Land brushed aside arguments against the just-approved Southern Baptist Convention definition of the marriage relationship. Take up your objections with the Apostle Paul, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission told a national radio audience last week.

For those who believe the Bible is inerrant -- every bit the perfect word of God -- he and other Southern Baptist leaders say that a careful reader must inevitably reach these conclusions: that "a husband has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect and to lead his family." And that "a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ."

Many Christians who do not take the Bible as literally have objected to those statements, which were were approved as amendments to the Baptist Faith and Message during this month's Southern Baptist Convention.

"It was a little arrogant to state that, if you didn't agree with the SBC statement on the submission of women, that you didn't agree with the word of God -- suggesting their interpretation was the only possible one for people who reverence the Scripture," said Dr. Russell Dilday, president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

But others who say they take the Bible every bit as literally as Land say a hierarchy of husband over wife is anything but an inevitable conclusion.

For some who disagree, the argument is over the definition of words first written hundreds and in some cases thousands of years ago.

Consider Genesis 2:18, one of the verses cited by the Southern Baptists to bolster their position. In many translations, the verse has God deciding to create a "helper" for Adam.

But the Hebrew tells a more complex tale, said Rabbi Howard Wolk, of the Orthodox congregation Shaare Tefilla in Dallas. The Torah combines two words: azer, which means "helper," and k'negdo, which means "opposite," Rabbi Wolk said.

Traditional Jewish interpretation defines the combination word as a helper who stands opposite but on the same level, he said, with a sense of equivalence that is often lost in translation.

Some New Testament scholars offer similar challenges to the Southern Baptist interpretation. Christians for Biblical Equality is a decade-old organization of evangelical Christians who say they take the words of the Bible just as literally as Dr. Land but reach very different conclusions about the God-granted roles of husband and wife.

"The Bible is without error. And therefore we have to deal seriously with the women's issues," said Dr. Catherine Kroeger, founder of Christians for Biblical Equality and professor at the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.

She and her supporters challenge modern understanding of some of the original Greek. And they suggest that other Biblical verses should be more heavily weighted when considering marriage issues.

One of the key passages quoted by Southern Baptist leaders in support of their position is Ephesians 5:21-24. The New International Version reads: "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church ..."

And while that may look unambiguous, the challenge is in the word translated "submit," Kroeger said.

"There are a lot of ways this can be understood," she said. "The word is translated differently in different parts of the New Testament."

The Greek word -- hupotasso -- "can also mean to associate with, to attach to, to ally with or relate with in a meaningful way," Kroeger said.

And none of those meanings, which are reasonable interpretations in the context of Scripture, implies a hierarchy, Kroeger said.

Douglas Groothuis, an assistant professor at Denver Seminary, a Conservative Baptist seminary in Colorado, suggests that other parts of the Bible show that men and women are supposed to be regarded as equally capable of leadership.

Galatians 3:28 says that "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

"The hierarchicalists say all that means is that men and women can be equally saved. My response is that's not saying anything new," Groothuis said. "There's got to be something more to it than that. God is breaking forth a new order where women are coming into their own."

But the authors of the Southern Baptist statement challenge every assertion of the biblical egalitarianists.

Dr. Dorothy Patterson, a co-author of the Southern Baptist statement and the wife of the new SBC president, questions the credentials of her challengers as a biblical inerrantists. And she says that they torture the text with unusual definitions.

"It's one of the things that makes us most angry as theologians," Patterson said. "They just say, 'This is the primary meaning' when it doesn't even make sense."

The words have clear meanings, she said. The roots of hupotasso -- "to place under" -- aren't ambiguous.

"I don't think God would give us something that depended on us all knowing Greek," Patterson said.

---

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.