Sometimes, a few lines of poetry can demolish the strongest -- and strangest -- arguments looming around it. This, written by Black poet Countee Cullen in the 1920s, demolishes quite elegantly the strongholds of Kinism, anti-egalitarianism, and racism in all its forms. (I would LOVE for someone to tell me, by the way, why, from a Biblical point of view, egalitarianism is wrong. Seriously. Steve Schlissel, are you out there?).
"She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores
As poor Black cherubs rise at 7
To do celestial chores."
And that, brothers and sisters, is to the Church's shame.
The Author
Keely Emerine Mix, siyocreo@live.com
About Me
- Keely Emerine-Mix
- I'm a wife, mom, reader, writer, and disciple of Jesus Christ, living among the hills of North Idaho and contending for truth, working for justice, and proclaiming a Gospel of revolutionary proportion.
5 comments:
Even though this poesy was recycled from your post of August 11, and even though I am not interested in defending either Kinism or racism per se, the question of why egalitarianism is wrong is worth addressing.
First, equality before the law is a Biblical concept. Nobody disputes that. For example, no homosexuals should be denied the same right to get married that heterosexuals have. And, in fact, the laws in all 50 states currently allow homosexuals to get married -- as long as they marry a person of the opposite sex.
If egalitarianism is taken to mean sameness of function, however, that is impossible. A man cannot bear children, and he does not have a right to.
Conversely, a woman does not have the essential quality of maleness required to stand in the pulpit as a Christian preacher. It has nothing to do with inferiority or superiority, wisdom or gullibility, or excellence or vileness character. Those are all relevant to the question of who is qualified to teach in an official capacity, but the woman is, biblically speaking, disqualified from performing that particular function simply because she is female. It is not meant to imply any condemnation of, or looking down on, women -- not in the least.
Over at Mablog, Chris Witmer -- a true gentleman I have had the distinct pleasure of knowing my entire life -- recently said, "Christians can't mess with anthropology without simultaneously messing with Christology. Ordination of women has serious Christological implications. Jesus is male. This maleness is a problem for feminists. Extrapolating from the radical egalitarianism that Christian feminists read into Gal. 3:28, in Theology and Feminism, Daphne Hampson rejects the particularity of the incarnation: "I am not myself a Christian because . . . I do not believe, whatever I may mean by God, that it could be said of God that God was differently related to one age or people than God is related to all ages or people." Indeed, why stop there? Why not be rid of transcendence entirely? How about a nice Gnostic shemale Buddhist Jesus, in whom all distinctions disappear? By the same logic that puts women into the pulpit, eventually distinctions among persons and their social relationships must also be seen to be illusory, or joined into one undifferentiated amalgamated mass. Take this logic far enough and both man and God simply disappear. Not all feminists go down that road, but more than a few are at various points along the road, a road to oblivion."
The right sort of egalitarianism means that I'm allowed to apply for a spot on a NBA team, just the same as Magic Johnson. The wrong sort of egalitarianism insists that the NBA needs to lower its standards to allow me to play in order to fulfill a quota that gives them some social engineer's idea of "racial balance."
Much more could be said. Why does God give different talents to different people? What's egalitarian about that? God chooses some people and not others, and he doesn't choose the people he chooses because they are better people. What's egalitarian about that?
By the way, I am now reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and enjoying it immensely and finding it immensely profitable reading. You can probably get this at your local public library, or if you buy it in paperback it is pretty cheap. I don't agree with everything he says -- for example, his near-total neglect of Zionism in the book is a glaring defect, and is surely deliberate, but not surprising -- but there is simply too much here of immense value not to recommend this book highly. One of the big points that stands out in this book is how egalitarianism has been championed by every actual or would-be despot since the French Revolution -- from Napoleon to Otto von Bismarck to Woodrow Wilson to Father Coughlin, Mussolini, Stalin, FDR and Hitler and beyond. And if you think there is any incongruity in mentioning all those names in one mouthful, you definitely need to read the book.
For me, the bottom line is that only a return to the biblical faith can overcome all the crap that we have been dragging around with us since the Englightenment -- and that will include the rejection of egalitarianism as an "ism."
Jesus' maleness is no problem for evangelical feminists, nor is it the, or even a, crucial designation for the Incarnate One. "There is one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ, himself human."
No one has ever been saved by Christ's maleness. No greater number of people would be saved if he were female. It's Jesus' full humanity and full divinity that made his full atonement on the cross efficacious for the salvation of humankind. He was a man while nailed to the cross, but his being male neither further condemned him nor provided him mercy. He claimed to be the Son of God, not the male offspring of a male Father-God. Your theology of the Incarnation is deficient if you don't see that.
Again, we are saved by Christ whose human flesh was torn and whose human blood shed on our behalf. His humanness, in concert with his divinity, saves us -- not the fact of his being Incarnationally a male human being.
I'll address your arguments about egalitarianism in a few days. You are confusing egalitarianism in regards to the gender debate with a more "macro" definition of egalitarianism -- which you still seem unable to grasp, regardless.
Suffice to say that your reasoning is faulty. The argument you offer -- that as men cannot bear children, and don't have that right, so women don't have "the essential quality of maleness required to stand in the pulpit" and thus don't have that right -- is un-Biblical, illogical, and, to be frank, astonishingly thick.
Egalitarianism is not "equality before the law." It's not men trying to get pregnant, or women trying to develop a penis, or deciding that everyone should be treated, societally and legally, exactly the same -- your six-year-old, for example, being able to get his drivers' license, and your 30-year-old brother getting to play Little League. You surely understand that. Please?
Finally, I sense a problem with your thought processes when you identify Chris Witmer -- who, for all I know, is you -- as a "true gentleman." Believe me, seven years of reading his comments to local blogs and listserves has me convinced that while he is many things, a "true gentleman" he is most assuredly not.
Keely
Okay, since the words "egalitarian" and "egalitarianism" have a broad range of uses -- in part, I was trying to convey a sense of that breadth, which is why you thought I was all over the place -- your elucidation of a definition will be helpful.
We Japanese have a saying about Chris -- to know him is to rub him. Keely, you just have to get to know him better, and learn to rub him the right way.
I can't imagine a circumstance under which I'd enjoy the company of Mr. Witmer, or you.
I'm sorry. That seemed redundant.
Keely
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