Anti-Heroes: The Day I Lost Faith In My Theological Heroes
**WARNING: Sexual Content**
*This is a bit of a long one, but I think it needs to be. There are several moving parts and I want to make sure I make them all clear*
I love theology and biblical studies, and I love reading the works of great thinkers. And as an INTP according to the Myers-Briggs system of personality profiling, my personality is highly driven towards seeking truth and accuracy. Unlike many others, I’m not very swayed by emotional arguments (not to put down emotions) – I want to see your working out. How did you come to your conclusion? What data are you using and how valid is that data?
One of the great things for someone like me in reading books on theology and biblical studies is that often scholars go to great pains to show their working out. They don’t just make assertions without evidence, they take the time to explain and often use copious footnotes so you can check their sources for yourself.
This week, however, there was a major incident (which I’ll get to in a moment) that prompted a flood of responses online, including several official analyses by some high profile biblical scholars/professors that I really respect(ed). Some of the commentaries given by these scholars were bad, really bad, and I’ll explain why in this post. I’ll actually show my working out too so you can judge for yourself.
It wasn’t just that the accuracy and truthfulness in their commentaries was way off, which would be really frustrating for someone like me but not enough to prompt a public post like this. It was that their comments and articles smeared and shamed another Christian with false accusations and stirred up unnecessary outrage. I’m calling them out because their “scholarship” has contributed to some serious harm in the wider church and will likely contribute to ongoing harm.
By the way, I’m not just being an anonymous keyboard warrior here, taking my beefs to the general online community without taking it to these scholars first. I’ve tried for several days to discuss my concerns directly with these scholars, to no avail. Beth Felker Jones, who authored the article I will be specifically critiquing in this post, did not respond to my email, and refused to answer my questions to her on Twitter, choosing to block me instead. Her colleagues from Northern Seminary, Nijay Gupta and Geoff Holsclaw did engage with me briefly, but just dodged and did not even engage with my questions of concern. Another colleague of Jones’, Scot McKnight, has just ignored me altogether (although to be fair, I’m not sure if he even reads comments on his Twitter posts).
Gupta, Holsclaw and McKnight all publicly promoted the article by Beth Felker Jones and some gave similar comments themselves. McKnight has posted similar thoughts and talked about it on his podcast. I know this because I follow them all online. I’ve bought scholarly material from all of them. They all (usually) do really, really great work. They have been some of my biggest scholarly heroes.
Which is why I find this all the more devastating.
The Incident
The incident that caused such a stir several days ago was a blog post put up by The Gospel Coalition (TGC), one of the biggest platforms online for Christian articles. The post itself was an excerpt from a soon-to-be-released book called Beautiful Union by an American pastor named Josh Butler. The post was a controversial one, talking about how sex between husband and wife can be used as a picture or metaphor for Christ’s union with the church. Butler used Ephesians 5:31-32 as the basis for his idea:
’For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
Butler suggests that the language of a man being united to his wife, or cleaving to her as it says in the translation he uses, is language that points to sexual union, and therefore Paul is suggesting in Ephesians that the sexual union between husband and wife is a metaphor for Christ and the church. Judging by the introduction and first chapter of his book, Butler’s aim is to promote a restored vision of sexuality, and to look through the sexual relationship of husband and wife to what it could point to about the union of Christ and his church, thus the title of his book – Beautiful Union.
The excerpt that was initially posted received quick backlash and was promptly pulled down. But it wasn’t just pulled down, it was replaced with a link to the entire introduction and first chapter of the book, Beautiful Union, from which the post was an excerpt. TGC suggested that the wider context of the whole chapter might allay people’s concerns. It didn’t. In fact, many people suggested that the wider context only made it worse.
I didn’t get to the original post in time, but I did get to the intro and first chapter. They have also subsequently been taken down, but I saved it all as a PDF document. So I can’t link to Butler’s work for your reference, either post or full first chapter, but I can share the PDF of intro and first chapter with anyone who asks. I don’t know which part was in the excerpt, but I know that I have whatever was in the excerpt plus all the surrounding content of the full chapter, so I know that at least I haven’t missed any information. I will use direct quotes and screenshots in this post to accurately reflect the source material.
The Criticism
Butler’s post received strong backlash and criticism for 2 main reasons, one of which is quite valid and the other, I believe, not. The first reason is questions about the validity of interpreting the verses in Ephesians 5 as referring to sex and not simply being about the general union of a marriage relationship. Tied to that, many people had qualms about using sexualised language in talking about Jesus.
The best critique from this angle is by Dani Treweek, an Australian theologian and author who specialises in theology around singleness and sexuality. I recommend reading her post here.
The second reason for backlash and criticism is that the theology in Butler’s work is allegedly harmful misogyny and dangerous to women. It is from this angle that many have taken aim at Butler and his work, by people convinced they are on a righteous crusade against the evils of misogyny, the patriarchy, and abuse against women.
This angle, I believe, is not valid.
Not that I think crusading against misogyny and abuse against women is bad. To the contrary, I’m all for it… with a clear caveat: that it’s directed at the right enemies. Just like I’m hardcore opposed to rape, but I’m also hardcore opposed to false accusations of rape.
Beth Felker Jones, a scholar and professor at Northen Seminary in the US, published a critique of Butler’s work on her blog, which has been widely shared by her colleagues as listed above. It is her critique that I will be focussing on in this post as it was widely considered one of the best takedowns of Butler’s theology and represents similar arguments I’ve seen elsewhere. And since it was shared and supported by several of my “heroes”, it represents their take on this issue too. You can read her article for yourself here.
I’m not going to give a comprehensive critique of Jones’ article because that would take going through it almost line by line (yes it’s that bad). I’ll give some highlights though and they are more than enough.
Now, she does critique Butler for both of the reasons mentioned above, but I’m going to focus on where she takes the misogyny/harmful to women angle. Although, I have to say her argument against the first reason is not at all well-reasoned like the critique from Dani Treweek. Jones ends up going on a rant that in places just becomes absurd.
She says at one point:
“Vaginas aren’t special sacred rooms, awaiting the presence of God; they’re simply parts of bodies, already indwelt by the very Spirit of God. Penises aren’t the divine presence; they’re simply parts of bodies, in need of and dependent on the presence of God.”
Yeah, no joke Beth. It would be absurd for Butler to suggest something like this… which is why he didn’t.
But it’s the harmful misogyny angle that takes up the most space for Beth Felker Jones, and it is that angle to which we shall turn.
Complementarian VS Egalitarian
First we need to look at the big picture issue, which is about our methods for interpretation. As a scholar and seminary professor, Jones (and friends) talk a lot about the importance of careful exegesis. Exegesis is the process of carefully reading a text to draw out it’s intended meaning. The opposite of exegesis is eisegesis, which is a reading into, and artificial importing onto, the text of your own ideas and interpretations that are not supported by the text itself.
In biblical studies, eisegesis is a very big no no.
In her critique of Butler, Beth Felker Jones employs eisegesis as her interpretive method pretty much from start to finish. I can’t stress enough just how bad this is for a scholar, especially when someone else’s reputation is on the line.
The overarching idea that Jones imports into Butler’s work is one of misogyny and gender hierarchy. The way she does it is summed up pretty well by this tweet from Dani Treweek in a discussion we had on Twitter:
So some clarification of terms for context: “complementarianism” is roughly the idea that, although men and women have equal value and status as image bearers of God, the differences between the sexes mean that some roles are for men only, such as being a pastor/elder in a church, and having more authority than the wife as head of the home. A gender hierarchy, in other words. Egalitarianism, by contrast, insists that men and women have fundamental differences, but there is no restriction on roles for women in the church and no difference in authority in the home. In other words, no gender hierarchy.
There is quite a spectrum along complementarian/egalitarian lines, and like with anything else there are extremes. There are large pockets in complementarianism where the gender hierarchy fosters abuse, and there are way too many women who have suffered abuse supported by a complementarian framework. But complementarianism does not automatically equal abuse or misogyny, and one of the really frustrating things about the debate – particularly amongst Americans who tend to be hardcore tribal about everything – is the extreme tendency by egalitarians to frame all complementarianism as inherently misogynistic.
TGC are notoriously complementarian. Josh Butler, who wrote the offending post, is a complementarian. Beth Felker Jones and her colleagues are staunchly egalitarian and seem to be in the camp that considers complementarianism across the board to be inherently misogynistic. Without wanting to go into nuance (maybe another time) I would be considered egalitarian. Nine times out of ten I would agree with those from Northern Seminary over TGC.
I’m not a big fan of TGC in general to be honest.
Now, with all this discussion about complementarianism and egalitarianism you might be expecting me to mount a defence of Josh Butler’s complementarianism as expressed in his article, arguing that it’s not as misogynistic as Jones and her friends are making it out to be. My job here is actually much easier than that. My argument is that Butler’s book Beautiful Union, going by the intro and first chapter, is not about complementarianism at all.
Yes, you read that right. I don’t need to defend his brand of complementarianism. I’m arguing that it shouldn’t even really be part of the discussion!
Think about it for a second. Aside from the extremes (which do exist, I’m not denying that) the average Christian couple who hold to a complementarian view don’t factor the idea of the husbands’ authority into literally everything. Like, the husband doesn’t get to always choose what the couple will watch on TV just because he’s the “head of the home”. He doesn’t have full authority to determine what the couple eats for every meal, or demand his wife submit to his own personal preferences in choice of a bottle of wine after dinner. He doesn’t get automatic first dibs on the shower in the morning just because he “has authority”.
How would the concept of “a husbands’ authority” even be relevant in the bedroom?
Again, aside from extreme cases which certainly do exist, there’s no reason for a hierarchy in a couple’s sex life. It doesn’t even make sense to have one. The only way that male authority would be relevant to a couple’s sex life is if the husband was to treat the wife as his own personal sex servant, making his needs the most important. And I’m pretty confident that the majority of complementarians would absolutely balk at that idea.
The Error
This is the fatal error that Jones and so many others have uncritically made.
Here is the eisegetical framework that colours Jones’ entire critique:
Josh Butler is complementarian as are TGC –-> Butler is writing about something (sex) that highlights differences between men and women –> His ideas must therefore be complementarian and gender hierarchical –> Gender hierarchy is misogynistic and harmful to women –> Therefore, Josh Butler’s book is misogynistic and harmful to women.
When you look at the progression of “logic” that I’ve just outlined, you can see that this conclusion can be reached without even looking at the content. And that’s exactly what has happened. That was the framework Jones and friends had already decided upon before reading a single word of Butler’s work.
You might think I’m just speculating here, as is Dani. But I actually have confirmation straight from the mouth (or keyboard) of Geoff Holsclaw, Jones’ colleague from Northern Seminary. I wrote to him about my concerns, outlining clearly a number of glaring discrepancies between what Jones claims about Butler’s views, and what he himself actually says (which I’ll go through later in this post).
I essentially asked, “How have you even made this about complementarianism and gender hierarchy when both of those things are absent from Butlers’ actual work, and a view of hierarchy is even explicitly contradicted by it?” He didn’t respond to any of my clear examples, his only response was this:
You read it folks. What is their framework for interpreting Butler’s work?
“It is sponsored by TGC which hold to a complementarian framework which supports a gender hierarchy.”
As we shall see, there is no explicit idea of gender hierarchy anywhere in Butler’s work. His only comment on hierarchy is that there is none:
Giver And Receiver
If you’ve read this far, thank you and well done! Now we can get to the meat, the clear examples of scholarly malfeasance exhibited by Jones and celebrated by many others.
As I mentioned earlier, the big theme in Butler’s book is basically how (he suggests that) sex between husband and wife is a picture for Christ’s relationship with the church. He riffs heavily off the physiological differences in gender roles that husbands and wives bring to the sex act. He points out that the husband enters into the wife and is received by her. Also, from a procreative perspective, the husband deposits a “gift” (semen) which includes his very DNA which is received by the wife as his contribution to procreation.
He then applies these distinctions metaphorically to Christ and the church – that Jesus goes into the church and is welcomed, that he gives a gift that contributes to life, which is received and embraced by the church.
I’m not going to really look at how he applies the metaphor to Christ and the church – and how appropriate or not that is – but more so his language around the roles of husbands and wives in their coming together sexually.
The language Butler uses to describe the difference between the roles of husband and wife are as “giver” and “receiver”. More so, he turns that language into “generosity” and “hospitality”. The husband is “generous” in giving of his very essence, his own DNA. The wife is “hospitable” in actively welcoming her husband inside her and receiving his gift.
It’s worth noting that Butler makes a distinction between what he’s saying happens on a physiological level – the way men and women’s bodies physically fit together – and what happens in the wider context of lovemaking. He says things like, “the bridal role in bodily union is passive (at a deep conjugal level) while also actively participatory (at a broader surrounding level)”. There’s a distinction between what happens at a “deep conjugal level” (i.e. the way the genitals fit together) and the “broader surrounding level” (the whole act of lovemaking).
He also says clearly:
Don’t read too much into the giver/receiver language, in other words, it’s only a very limited analogy. Yet Jones and associates have deliberately ignored this distinction, and have read way too much into the language.
Arguably, from a physiological and biological perspective, the language of giver and receiver makes sense. But the language of giver/receiver has somehow been taken up by Jones’ and many others to be language of gender hierarchy. She says:
“The giver/receiver paradigm carries dangerous baggage. Giver/receiver can easily be rephrased as “active/passive” or “Lord/subject.” This can be weaponized; we’re sinners, after all. The built-in asymmetry of power lends itself to abuse, too often telling women to submit in inhuman situations.”
This small paragraph is just a bunch of assumptions built on top of assumptions. Why does language of giver/receiver have a “built-in asymmetry of power” (meaning, one side of the equation has more power than the other)? How can giver/receiver easily be rephrased as “Lord/subject”?
Jones doesn’t say.
I don’t think she really thought about it to be honest. If she did, she’d realise that there are numerous circumstances where a “receiver” can have more power than a “giver”. Like a lesser king paying tribute to an emperor. Or, as a modern parallel, citizens giving taxes received by the government. A local mob boss who receives payment for his gift of “protection”. These are just some random examples off the top of my head, I’m sure you could think of many more.
Or if we use Butler’s language of hospitality, it is even more obvious that there isn’t a “built-in asymmetry of power.” Think about this scenario: Elon Musk invites you over for dinner, extending you his hospitality, and you bring a bottle of nice wine as a gift. Who has the most power in that scenario? Or conversely, you welcome in a homeless person, extending them the hospitality of your home, a bed, some food. Who has more power in that scenario?
The truth is simple – giver/receiver simply doesn’t have an inherent “built-in asymmetry of power.” Beth Felker Jones just made that up. My guess is that she had to find gender hierarchy somewhere, since she’d already decided that it must be present, and the giver/receiver paradigm felt like the place it must be hiding.
Later in her essay she seems to contradict her own assertion that a giver/receiver relationship has a power dynamic which favours the giver:
“While the article interprets penises as “givers,” female bodies are frequently interpreted that way too. The thesis of Kate Manne’s book, Down Girl, is that misogyny is a social system in which women are expected to give to men and are punished if they do not.”
Wait a minute!
So… if men are givers, that’s misogyny. But also, if women are givers, that’s misogyny too??
The answer is, yes.
At first I thought she was contradicting herself, but she isn’t. I thought she was originally saying that givers have inherently more power than receivers in a giver/receiver dynamic, but she wasn’t. It’s actually men that have inherently more power. Which role, giver or receiver has more power? Whichever one is the man.
You see folks, it’s not the giver/receiver dynamic that has a “built-in asymmetry of power”, it’s actually just the male/female dynamic. Whichever way you want to frame it, whatever term or role is ascribed to the male is the one that has inherent power. And really, for people like Beth Felker Jones, I think pretty much everything is basically just misogyny. So when Butler framed men as givers and women as receivers, she knew that must be misogyny.
Active And Passive
Butler also at one point uses the language of active and passive roles in sex. Jones picks up on this and says:
“Theologies which place the man in the active role and the woman in the passive role deny the full humanity of both male and female and biblical teaching on mutuality. They are easy to use to legitimate abuse..”
Historically, active and passive when referring to sex are words that basically mean the one who is.. *ahem*.. the “penetrator” (active) and the “penetrated” (passive). Butler says as much: “The groom enters into the bride with his presence, while the bride receives the presence of the groom within herself.”
On reflection, it may not have been a good idea to use active/passive language, because others have used it in a way that carries a lot of baggage. Like Freud’s use of the language for example, that has been “much criticised by feminists.”
But the key theme I’m talking about here is exegesis vs eisegesis. The important thing when reading Butler’s text is to ask, what does Joshua Butler mean when using these terms?
It’s pretty obvious if you ask me. He literally says:
“Don’t read too much into this language…” But it’s too late. Beth Felker Jones is full steam ahead in her freight train of reading way too much into Butler’s words, and there’s no stopping her now.
Mutuality
Her claim, as quoted above, that Butler’s theology denies mutuality is quite simply, false. When you understand what Butler is trying to say with his giver/receiver and active/passive language, and where he places it within the wider context of lovemaking, there’s no reason to think he’s trying to spout ideas that deny mutuality. But this is where Jones’ analysis crosses the line from a poor reading into an actively bad one. Because Butler not only doesn’t deny mutuality, he frequently and explicitly affirms it!
What should be said about a professional scholar who makes claims about a text, that are clearly and explicitly contradicted by the text itself? Dishonest, to say the least. We’ve now moved beyond simple eisegesis. Jones is not just inserting her own ideas into the text, she’s deliberately and deceptively throwing away ideas that are in the text.
I did have one brief interaction with Jones on Twitter, and it was about this point. I asked how she could claim that Butler’s theology denies mutuality when he, in fact, explicitly affirms mutuality multiple times. Her response:
“I read quick references to mutuality in a framework of giver/receiver.”
That’s it.
We already know that Jones has completely misread ideas into the giver/receiver paradigm, but her response raises another disturbing question: what on earth is a “quick” reference, and why is it something that can be discarded? I haven’t heard of this obscure “quick” rule before that says you can ignore and dismiss a statement in a text if it is “quick”. What qualifies as “quick”? It’s clearly not the number of words used, because a couple of the above quotes are full paragraphs. I’d really like to know!
Honestly folks, at this point it’s clear that Beth Felker Jones is literally just making stuff up, left, right and centre. Her article can’t seriously be referred to as “scholarship” anymore, it’s just a grotesque parody. Once it becomes clear what she’s doing – 1) deliberately ignoring what Butler actually says, in favour of 2) distorting, twisting, exaggerating and essentially just making stuff up from her own imagination – you can see it all through her entire article.
As I said, I could almost go through the entire thing line by line to show how bad it is.
But this post is already too long. If you can bear with me just a little longer, let me quickly address a couple of other things (that really do deserve more time).
Pornified
Jones accuses Butler’s work of being “pornified”, which she links directly to misogyny. Now obviously it’s a book about sex, so you’d kinda expect a bunch of sex talk. But Jones thinks Butler crosses the line into “pornification”. What is the basis of her claim? She says that “pornography is full of recognized tropes, misogynist tropes. One of those tropes is an obsession with ejaculation.”
Butler is obsessed with ejaculation, according to Jones. On what objective basis does she make this claim? The same basis she uses for a lot of claims in this article: because she said so.
Seriously, that’s pretty much it.
In a book about sex, you’d expect some references to ejaculation, surely. How many references would cross the line from reasonable to pornified? Three, apparently. I read through carefully and found exactly three references to ejaculation out of 29 pages in a book about sex. Here they are:
Now ok, maybe it’s not the number of references but the tone of the references that would cause Jones to make the charge of “pornification”. It seems that way based on the interaction she describes with her son and husband. She calls it a “euphoric ode to the glories of ejaculation.” I read it as a celebration of the goodness of a husband contributing part of himself towards procreation. Sex within marriage, and procreation, is beautiful, why shouldn’t it be celebrated?
And yeah, I’m not sure about too much temple language at play here either. But that’s a different subject. The question is: is it pornified?
I would argue my reading is in line with Butler’s tone throughout his whole chapter, whereas Jones has to distort it wildly out of shape to get to her interpretation. But distort she does. Not for the first, or last, time.
Porn is about arousal and a lewd pursuit of illicit pleasure. Butler’s descriptions are not intended to prompt arousal. They’re not lewd descriptions at all, he uses euphemism instead of graphic description. And whilst pleasure is implicitly there in the background (we all know that men experience orgasm when ejaculating), the focus is clearly not on pleasure but on the husband’s “gift” of giving part of himself.
Jones’ charge of pornification comes simply from her own highly subjective reading of Butler’s whole work. She knew it would be misogynistic before evening reading it. Here was just another place to point all the misogyny out.
In an article that’s full of a lot of really disappointing stuff, this is perhaps the worst. Jones doesn’t just charge Butler with poor theology, she paints him as being gross. His whole view of sex, she reckons, is obviously twisted by being deeply infected with pornography and misogyny. What slander! Oh man, Jones should have taken a lot more care with her treatment of another person’s work and reputation. Her article is reckless and damaging.
Male-Centred
Ok last one (I promise). Jones claims that Butler’s work is “a rhapsody over a very male-centered experience of sexual intercourse,” and that, “it is ‘good news’ for men at the expense of women”. His ideas are all about male satisfaction, she reckons, and women are just expected to be pretty much sex slaves. I’ve seen A LOT of these kind of comments online in the last few days.
In one of her footnotes, Jones includes this deceptively cropped screenshot:
It’s cropped to make it appear like the appeal to servanthood in the bedroom is directed at wives. It’s actually from the preceding section and is directed at husbands:
Do you know how many times Butler appeals for wives to serve their husbands in the bedroom?
None.
Do you know how many times Butler appeals to wives to make sure sex is pleasurable for their husbands, that their husbands should be fully sexually satisfied?
None.
To husbands on the other hand…
But we shouldn’t be surprised at this point that Beth Felker Jones can read all those things and still call it “male-centred at the expense of women”. If it wasn’t for the few quotes she pulls out just to distort beyond recognition, I wouldn’t believe that she’s actually read the material at all.
Now I should be a little bit charitable to Jones and her colleagues at Northern Seminary. They’re all very pastoral, and have had to love too many people through the fallout of bad teaching that is harmful to women. There’s a heck of a lot of abuse out there in the evangelical church. They think they’re being heroes.
But in this particular case it’s obvious that they’ve chosen an ideological agenda over sound scholarship and truthfulness. And that’s the scary thing that we’re seeing way too much of these days: anything is justified in the name of activism. Really bad scholarship and a flagrant disregard for truthfulness are ok because the end justifies the means. The great enemy, Complementarianism, needs to burn to the ground, and Jones and friends will seemingly use any tactics necessary to fulfil their “righteous” agenda.
Scary stuff.
This is much more dangerous to the church than any single piece of bad theology. If our scholars – the ones we trust to carefully examine, weigh, interpret and teach for us – are prepared to so flagrantly throw away truthfulness and sound academic practice in favour of idealogical agenda, what’s to stop them doing it again? And again?
And again?
They think they’re the heroes here. They’ve now become anti-heroes. I hope my former heroes at Northern Seminary will have the courage and humility to look in the mirror on this one and sing along with Taylor Swift:
“It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.”