The Tax Attorney Hermeneutic

The PCA’s battle over women in church office exposes a deeper question: how should scripture shape gender roles in a changing culture?

I’ve highlighted the work of an online influencer named Redeemed Zoomer, who argues that Christians should not abandon the mainline denominations. He himself is in the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) and is a PCUSA seminarian.

He’s frequently criticized by conservatives who argue that mainline churches have abandoned traditional Christianity. One of their big arguments is that the PCUSA has women in church office (elder/pastor and deacon). In fact, not only are women allowed in church office in the PCUSA, churches are required to have women in such offices.

This seems like a straightforward debate: should there be female church officers or not. But the reality is more complex, as a recent debate in the evangelical Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) shows.

The PCA requires that only men serve in church office. However, there’s been a debate on exactly what women can and can’t do in the church.

The culturally progressive faction within the PCA has tended to take a minimalistic view of what women are not allowed to do, perhaps best summed up by the Tim and Kathy Keller dictum that, “A woman can do anything an unordained man can do.” The basic approach is that anything that is not explicitly prohibited in the Bible is permitted. Kathy Keller writes in their joint book The Meaning of Marriage:

Should wives never work outside the home? Should wives never create culture or be scientists? Should men never wash clothes or clean the home? Should women take primary responsibility for daily child care while men oversee finances? Traditionally minded people are tempted to nod yes to these questions until it is pointed out that nowhere does the Bible say such things. The Scripture does not give us a list of things men and women must and must not do. It gives no such specific directions at all.

With regards to the church specifically, she wrote in her monograph Jesus, Justice, and Gender Roles:

I do know that in New York City (or any educated and highly secular environment), any practice that we cannot defend biblically is not an option. So the corollary of not ordaining women is to make sure that every role legitimately open to unordained men and women is filled with women as well as men.

Redeemer took this in an interesting direction. Presbyterian churches are governed by a board of elders called a “session.” In the Redeemer’s PCA, elders are church officers, and so only men can serve on a session. However, Redeemer reportedly includes - or has included - women as unordained, non-voting members of their session, who were allowed to participate in session discussions. That is, they were not just silent observers. They had voice if not vote. This was reported at least eight years ago by Tim Bayly and I’ve never seen anyone dispute that it happened.

Given that the influential Kellers adopted this practice, I always assumed that it must be widespread among other PCA churches. I’ve mentioned before that my wife’s former Kelleresque PCA church attempted to recruit her to chair their pastoral search committee, for example. Not only is she a very competent person, but also their view was since having a woman in this role was not explicitly forbidden, not only was it allowed, but they should make a point of trying to find a woman to fill it.

But it wasn’t until recently that I saw a major controversy over this. A week or so ago Michael Foster, a former PCA pastor, began a series of tweets showing PCA churches that had instituted some form of women’s board or other structure which gave the appearance that women were functionally serving as church officers. (The practices of these churches vary widely, with not all of them following Redeemer’s specific practices).

As it turns out, Foster had done a complete review of every PCA church to identify those he viewed as having functional female officers, and he put his research up on a web site called, perhaps melodramatically, Save the PCA.

This is one of a string of recent scandals and controversies in the PCA. I actually devoted an hour long Members only podcast to the state of the PCA that covered them.

The State of the PCA

(Should you be tempted to subscribe at the Member level, I won’t discourage you, but I do want to note that my annual discount period for the Member program is coming up in November).

There are two things I’d like to discuss relative to this.

The first is the approach to interpreting the Bible. The Keller approach to gender is an example of what I call the “tax attorney hermeneutic” of scripture. It looks at the Bible, the denominational confessions and rule book, the way a tax attorney looks at the IRS code. That is, what’s the absolute least amount I have to do in terms of having differential practices around gender roles in order to stay compliant?

I use the tax attorney analogy because this approach not only permits anything that is not explicitly prohibited, it also looks for creative ways to work around actual restrictions. Having unordained, non-voting, unofficial female members of a session is sort of like setting up a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands as a tax shelter.

I read the arguments in favor of this general approach, and they make a certain kind of sense when you hear them. But what sets off my detector is that this approach is not generally applied. It’s used in cases like this where the goal is to minimize differences from the surrounding secular culture, but not to other areas, where sometimes the opposite approach is used.

For example, consider race. Famously, the Bible does not have an explicit prohibition on slavery, and in fact appears on the surface to implicitly approve of it through its regulation of the practice in the New as well as Old Testament. I disagree, but many Southerners appealed to the Bible to justify slavery. (In fact, there are a lot of things the Bible doesn’t explicitly prohibit in the proof text sense being applied on gender roles, like polygamy, or even pre-marital sex. Yet Christians have always viewed them as sinful).

But, of course, not only does the progressive PCA faction reject slavery (one would hope! - but believe it or not some people still don’t do this), it also takes a very expansive reading of scripture when it comes to matters of racial justice. Keller himself used the Old Testament example of Daniel praying over the sins of his own people to create an expansive theology of corporate, intergenerational sin for white Americans when it comes to race. I have my differences with Keller on race, but he was at his best when explaining how Biblical terms and concepts were actually sophisticated and expansive, as with idolatry.

As I always say, I’m not a theologian. So I’m not going to get into some theological argument on these points. But I can read English very well. And I can see when people use a minimalist approach over here but a maximalist one over there. Maybe that’s even justified, but even if so, I’ve never heard anyone articulate their different interpretational approaches and why they picked one over another in different circumstances.

What I can say is that this tax attorney approach to gender, and only very specific matters like gender, is one reason I’m skeptical of the evangelical complementarian gender theology system as taught by today’s evangelicals.