An Arbitrary God?
An Arbitrary God?
By Fr. Gunnar Campbell
We who would consider ourselves orthodox and liturgical Lutherans rightly emphasize the fact that God is a god not of disorder but of peace, and that because of this God desires that all things be done decently and in order. It is who He is. And this truth governs not just the manner in which we worship but also our entire lives. The world, because it is godless, peddles in confusion and disorder, the prime example of our time being the confusion of the sexes, of who men and women are, and what they are to do.
It is a temptation for us to think that we are immune to this kind of confusion. We have stood fast against the ordination of women, while many others were swept away by the tide. We judge ourselves as having succeeded because we have not gone with the world in this matter. But while we rest on our laurels and while we consider ourselves immovable, little do we realize how much the devil has slipped in.
Give me a fifty mile radius and I can find you a voters’ meeting with hardly any men, a woman as congregational president, and a majority of women on Sunday morning. Give me a hundred mile radius and I can find you an LCMS church with women lectors, a deaconess leading chapels or giving a children’s sermon, and a pastor too afraid to talk about birth control or Titus 2:5 from the pulpit. Does this look like steadfastness? Does this look like order? Does this look like clarity?
But these are all symptoms of a confusion sown by the world in the church, a confusion that says that God is arbitrary. To illustrate this, let’s take as an example a common sedes against female ordination, 1 Timothy 2:11-12:
Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.
The typical interpretation is that St. Paul is speaking about women’s conduct in the public services of the church, and that is absolutely correct. But where things go awry is when we assume that God is arbitrary, and that this is just one of his arbitrary rules about what happens between the walls of the church building, and that it goes no further. There are those who think that to be quiet, submissive, and to not exercise authority over a man are things that God imposes upon women at the opening hymn and then relieves them of once the closing hymn has ended. Outside the service – in the home, in the government, even in the bible classes and voter’s meetings – none of these things apply, or so the common interpretation goes. Or worse yet, there are those who take a reductionist sort of interpretation and say that these verses refer only to who can or cannot take up the pastoral office.
This is all because we have been sold the lie that God is arbitrary, and this is one of his arbitrary rules for the service. We might pay lip service to things like “the order of creation”, but we do not take into account what is really meant by that. The quietness and submissiveness of women, and her prohibition against exercising authority over men, is part of God’s order to which St. Paul appeals in the following verse when he says that “Adam was created first, then Eve.” That is a pre-fall justification for the order of men and women in the church. That is saying that in the perfect world that God created, this order existed. And that in turn means that in every realm – church, home and state – this order exists. It is not confined only to the Divine Service. Instead, the order that is in the Divine Service is a reflection of the order of God Himself, of His created order. And we could go on and on, throughout the Scriptures, to all of the myriad places where the roles of men and women are discussed. We would see the same order pervade them all.
But this, I would argue, is one of the devil’s feet in the door. In practice, we often confess that God is arbitrary. He orders men and women one way in the church, another way in the home, and yet another way in the state. But God can never be arbitrary. Now this is not to say that there are no differences between the estates. But it is to say that something as fundamental as the created order of men and women pervades everything, and we would do well to keep that in mind, especially when reading those parts of Scripture that concern the role of men and women in the church. These are not disconnected commands from an arbitrary God, but they are reflections of the order which has been from the beginning.
And just as it was in the beginning, this order is good. We should not fear it, but rather lean into it. “For in this manner, in former times, the holy women who trusted in God also adorned themselves, being submissive to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, whose daughters you are if you do good and are not afraid with any terror.” (1 Peter 3:5-6) “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.” (1 Corinthians 16:13) These are not calls to be afraid of God’s order, or to resent the Lord for what He commands men and women to do, or to make some excuse as to why we can’t do it. These are calls to faithfully commend our bodies and souls to Him, and to follow Him.