Dear John 1
Dear John,
It is over. This relationship has taken too high a toll. I have ignored too many aspects of scripture, too many stories from the life of Jesus and too many gifts in my sisters in Christ – just to be in relationship with you. Worst of all, my relationship with you is actively damaging my representation of Christ to the women in my life because I end up treating them as a slightly lesser creation of God, as though their gifts don’t quite measure up to mine.
How did I allow myself to buy into the thinking that my gifting was greater than that of my wife or my sister or my daughter? At the very outset of creation God himself said “I will make him [man] a helper suitable for him.”(1)The word that the author of Genesis records God using is ēzer. John, you always made it sound like that word, helper, meant that the woman was Adam’spersonal assistant. As though she was just helping the boss do his job.
But, John, with the exception of the two times that ēzer refers to a woman in Genesis (2) there are three times that it is used to describe nations that Israel calls upon for military support (3) and sixteen times that it describes God as Israel’s helper! (4) Once I realized how often this term was used to describe God it made me realize that I couldn’t automatically think that a woman was somehow subservient in her role to a man simply because she was called his helper. God is called the same thing and we never think of God as subservient to Israel!
What may be more enlightening to me was that a poetic and rhythmic aspect of the creation stories in Genesis record God creating and observing that His creation is “good.” Moments before the creation of the woman, theēzer,God reveals to us that the condition of man is “not good.” (5) A condition that was rectified by the creation of woman. Woman wasn’t an afterthought, wasn’t an assistant, wasn’t a second-class citizen with a gift set that was subservient to man. She was a solution to the condition of man, meant to partner with man, to provide aid to man as was modeled by God on behalf of Israel.
John, this sounds a lot less like complementarianism and a lot more like I should be sitting under and learning from the many ēzer’s that God has placed in my life. I’m learning that “partner” is a false flag if equity is absent in the relationship. I have a lot of unlearning to do, and I have a lot of apologizing to do. Repentance calls for me to move in a new direction rather than continue in the current one so I’m moving on to egalitarianism and I can’t do any of that if I’m in a relationship with you.
Without regret,
Former Complementarian Christian
1.Genesis 2:18
2.Genesis 2:18, 20
3.Isaiah 30:5, Ezekiel 12:14, Daniel 11:34
4.Exodus 18:4, Deuteronomy 33:7,26,29; Psalms 20:2, 33:20, 70:5, 89:19, 115:9, 10, 11; 121:1-2; 124:8; 146:5; Hosea 13:9
5.Genesis 2:1