I don’t want to exaggerate Calvin’s contribution to the women’s liberation movement, but he did in effect seek to liberate the Mother of God from what he believed to be idolatrous worship of Mary. Read his commentary on John 2:1-11.
He still held a high view of Mary’s piety and godliness, but rejected key Marian doctrines of the Church.
One of the things that started to bother me about Evangelicalism and even more so about Calvinism is that there was no coherent theology and philosophy of femininity and motherhood. Only a kind of legalistic framework. Mary is pretty much erased from people’s memory. Yeah, that might be exaggerated, but I’m not sure. I think that the incoherence in gender theology and philosophy that I was seeing might have something to do with this Protestant confusion about who Mary, the Mother of God is.
[Some questions that I couldn’t answer adequately when I was an Evangelical:
Who is Mary?
What IS a woman?
What IS a mother?
There is a lot of talk about what women should be doing, but why?]
Is it a stretch to say that feminism can trace it’s founding to Calvin? Probably a stretch, but I wonder...
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Complementarity, patriarchy, mutuality. Those three battle it out in Evangelicalism. Where is the coherence, the balance? There is no referee, only strong opinions.
What’s missing? For me it was the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and matriarchy.
Patriarchy has male headship.
Complementarity has male leadership and female submission, even mutual submission.
Mutuality has complementarity in a way, but there was something I could never quite figure out. There was a lot of talk about androgyny...and I was doxed, ...and my personal life invaded. That was years ago...
Then I read the Eastern Orthodox Church Father, St. John Chrysostom. He had all of it, except the androgyny part that many of today’s egalitarians love to talk about to somehow support their gender idealogy.
Chrysostom didn’t shy away from the great themes of Patriarchy. Matriarchy. Complementarity. and Mutuality.
Read the little book On Marriage and Family Life - which is a collection of his homilies on the subject. Marriage isn’t either this or that. It is both and. Equilibrium. Both complementarity and mutuality. Both Patriarchy and Matriarchy. Male and female relationships reflect those natural ways of interacting.
That’s one aspect of Orthodox Christianity that I like. They don’t run from paradox. They seek equilibrium. Both complementarity and mutuality can be true. Patriarchy includs matriarchy. They are not mutually exclusive. The roles are not reversed or blended or denied. Honor your father and your mother. Your father is not your mother and your mother is not your father. The father is head of the family. The mother is in the yoke with him, beside him, working together towards a common goal. Mutual respect. Not the same or interchangeable. Equal doesn’t mean same. Hierarchy in God’s economy doesn’t mean oppression.
Egalitarians emphasize mutuality almost exclusively as far as I can tell. I’m sure I’m wrong, but I spent a LOT of time trying to figure out where they were coming from. I tried to understand, and I have the wounds to prove it.
Egalitarianism can’t mean that there is no hierarchy at all even though they claim to not be hierarchical. It didn’t make sense to me. I was told that I was following Satan. That has something to do with male dominance being a result of the Fall and part of Satan’s plan for the human race. Absolute equality is what God intended. Anyone promoting traditional male-female roles is evidently following Satan.
Yet the egalitarians want to be leaders, so it’s not really about equality. I wasn’t woke. I have no desire to be. None whatsoever. My brain has recovered from trying to understand egalitarianism. Nothing works the way they say it does - not even their own relationships.
In any musical group, for example, there has to be a hierarchy. That goes for a symphony orchestra, a choir, or even a rock band. Otherwise there is cacophony as each musician tries to exert his or her dominance over the group. If the leader gets too heavy handed, then the group breaks up. If the leader doesn’t actually lead, then chaos is the result. Sure. It’s not gender based, but it’s not marriage or the Church either.
Anyway...etc...
No hard feelings.
Felix culpa...
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