What does it mean to live the Christian life as a man or as a woman? Does whether we are men or women make any difference to living as a Christian and seeking to be a godly person in response to the gospel of Jesus Christ? Does godliness look any different for men as it does for women, or, for that matter, for young people as opposed to old people?
These kinds of questions can often cause controversy. But they’re also hard to avoid if we reflect honestly on our experiences as men and women, as well as reflect open-heartedly upon the Scriptures. In this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast, Tony Payne talks with Moore College lecturer Paul Grimmond about these complex and very important questions.
Links referred to:
- Upcoming ethics workshop: “Neurodivergence and the Christian life” (Wed 7 May 7:30pm)
- 2025 Priscilla & Aquila Centre annual conference plenary addresses: “Is godliness complementarian?”
- Peter Orr on “Slaves submit to your masters”: Understanding and applying the slavery passages in the Bible
- Thabiti Anyabwile on “A Black and Tan Round-Up”
- Moore College Open Events
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 44:21 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:00]
Tony Payne: What does it mean to live the Christian life as a man or as a woman? Does whether we are men or women make any difference to living as a Christian and seeking to be a godly person in response to the gospel of Jesus Christ? Does godliness look any different for men as it does for women, or, for that matter, for young people as opposed to old people?
[00:00:24]
These kinds of questions can sometimes cause controversy. (Well, let’s be honest: they can often cause controversy!) But they’re also hard to avoid if we reflect honestly on our experience as men and women, and if we reflect open-heartedly upon the Scriptures. I’m Tony Payne, and on today’s episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast, we’re talking with Moore College lecturer Paul Grimmond about these complex and very important questions.
[00:01:04]
[Music]
[00:01:05]
Well, hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. I’m Tony Payne. It’s really great to have you with us here today. And we bring biblical ethics to everyday issues. That’s what the Centre for Christian Living does here at Moore College. And today I’m talking with Paul Grimmond about an everyday issue that we all think about and talk about a lot, which is what does it mean to be a man and a woman? What does it mean to live in a household? Is the nature of the Christian life differentiated and different, depending on whether we’re men and women, or young and old, or different kinds of people?
[00:01:37]
Tony Payne: Paul, first of all, just tell us a little bit about what you do here at Moore College—what your role is.
[00:01:41]
Paul Grimmond: Yeah, sure. So, look, I work in the Ministry Department here at Moore College. My job is I’m trying to teach young ministers of the gospel how to integrate the Bible and theology into their practice of actually loving people with the truth of the gospel.
Complementarianism
[00:01:54]
Tony Payne: Fantastic. And, Moore College, as I’m discovering (I’m sort of a newbie here: I’ve been on the team for about two months), there’s lots of different things we do here at Moore College.
[00:02:03]
Paul Grimmond: There are lots of moving parts.
[00:02:04]
Tony Payne: Lots of moving parts, and one of them is one of the other Centres of the College—the Priscilla & Aquila Centre, which kind of thinks about women’s ministry and promotes Complementarian kind of partnership in ministry between men and women. And at the conference, the annual Priscilla & Aquila conference in February, you gave an address, which I found very stimulating. It’s just kind of the precipitating cause of me getting you to come and have a conversation. And the title of your keynote address was, “Is godliness Complementarian?”
[00:02:32]
Now, of those three words, “is” and “godliness” are sort of understandable. “Complementarian”: just for those who maybe might not be familiar with that word, maybe you’ve heard it and wonder what that means. What does it mean in that title—“Complementarian”?
[00:02:44]
Paul Grimmond: Yeah, so for me, it’s just reflective of the fact that I think the Bible talks about men and women being completely equal before God, made in God’s image, but also differentiated. So we are created differently, and in certain places and relationships and times, we’re given different roles or responsibilities to work out how we live faithfully under Jesus according to how God’s made us.
[00:03:10]
Tony Payne: And I guess complementarian—“complement” in the way that it’s spelled with an “E”—
[00:03:13]
Paul Grimmond: Yes, it’s not about saying you’re a nice guy.
[00:03:15]
Tony Payne: No, that’s a shame. But it’s going together to make up the whole—complementary of one another.
[00:03:19]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely—that we both need each other, we complement life in a household, in our churches, and our differences are good for each other.
The Book of Titus and godliness
[00:03:27]
Tony Payne: And your focus—you spoke from Titus, which is a wonderful book in the New Testament, which is a lot about godliness in Titus, right?
[00:03:34]
Paul Grimmond: It’s a lot.
[00:03:34]
Tony Payne: It’s kind of almost the main theme of the book. In fact, last millennium, when I helped to author a Bible study on the Book of Titus, it was called The Path to Godliness, because godliness is all over Titus. But in many parts of Titus, it’s got nothing to do with whether we’re men or women or anything, does it?
[00:03:51]
Paul Grimmond: No, you’re absolutely right. So if you look at the structure of Titus, Paul goes, “Look, I’ve been set apart by God. I’m an apostle, and my apostleship is for the knowledge of God’s elect, which accords with godliness.” And the whole first chapter is about appointing true and faithful leaders of the church, because there are false teachers. And so godliness is just a character of life, or ungodliness causes you to distort the truth.
[00:04:14]
Tony Payne: And the elders and leaders have to be godly people. Godliness needs to mark their character, otherwise they—
[00:04:20]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely: a fundamental characteristic. If you are working out who to appoint as a leader, godliness is non-negotiable.
[00:04:28]
And then in chapter 2, you get some of the differentiated stuff, but then you come back in chapter 3 and he basically addresses all people and says, “Look, you’ve been washed by the Spirit, and you were people who were sinful, and you’ve been saved by nothing that you, yourself did. And therefore don’t grumble. Treat all people with absolute respect and kindness and grace. So—
[00:04:47]
Tony Payne: Devote yourself to good works.
[00:04:48]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:04:50]
Tony Payne: So the life that fits with—accords with— the gospel, and it flows out of the gospel and is response to the gospel—is, in many ways, the same life —a single life. In the sense, it’s one kind of life that we all seek to live.
[00:05:01]
Paul Grimmond: It is, absolutely. And if you think about the general witness of the New Testament, right—
[00:05:05]
Tony Payne: That it would be much the same, right?
[00:05:06]
Paul Grimmond: You are being renewed in the image of your creator, as Colossians puts it.
[00:05:11]
Tony Payne: Yeah. Right.
[00:05:12]
Paul Grimmond: So who are we all becoming like? We’re all becoming like Jesus. And there’s lots that just applies whether you’re old, young, male, female, whatever station in life you are in. There are lots of things the Bible says that are just about us following Christ, honouring God—
[00:05:26]
Tony Payne: As people. As human beings.
[00:05:27]
Paul Grimmond: Yeah.
Differentiation
[00:05:27]
Tony Payne: As renewed human beings. Yeah. But here in Titus 2, and it’s not the only place, of course, you also have godliness being described in a sort of differentiated, variegated kind of way. Chapter 2 starts by saying, “Now teach what is in accord with healthy or sound doctrine.”
[00:05:43]
Paul Grimmond: Yep.
[00:05:43]
Tony Payne: And you almost expect him at that point to start teaching some theological truths or something. But he then goes on to list a whole kind of different characteristics of life that Titus is to urge different groups within the congregation—within the community—to leave out and adopt. There’s older men, older women, younger women, younger men, slaves. And amidst that differentiation, some of that when we read it, it’s just all pretty straightforward. In fact, there’s some common words that pop up in some of the different categories. It’s—
[00:06:11]
Paul Grimmond: Like self-control occurs many times through the passage.
[00:06:13]
Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:06:13]
Paul Grimmond: So each category of people is supposed to be self-controlled.
[00:06:16]
Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:06:16]
Paul Grimmond: And learning self-control.
[00:06:17]
Tony Payne: That’s something we all definitely need. And some of the differentiation—the fact, for example, that for the younger men, I think isn’t self-control the only thing they’re told to do?
[00:06:26]
Paul Grimmond: It’s the only thing that he says to them.
[00:06:28]
Tony Payne: Wonder about why that could possibly be.
[00:06:30]
Paul Grimmond: Well, I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it?
[00:06:32]
Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:06:32]
Paul Grimmond: It is just perhaps, possibly, until we’ve got that sorted out, it’s not worth talking. We don’t need to talk about any of the rest.
[00:06:39]
Tony Payne: So perhaps younger men can only cope with one instruction at a time, and the first one they need to hear is self-control. Who knows, who knows. Possibly.
Uncomfortable commands
[00:06:46]
Tony Payne: But the one that kind of sticks out like a sore thumb for us, or, “Ooh,” we kind of—almost jars us when we read it as 21st-century people—are the instructions for the older women to teach the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be submissive to their husbands and children, to be busy at home, to work in the home, and to be godly young women. It’s those verses that kind of jump out at us, and it’s interesting that they do. Why do you think those instructions jump out at us? Why do we find them almost like a sore thumb in the passage that sticks out?
[00:07:17]
Paul Grimmond: I mean, I think it’s particularly intriguing, given the shape of the whole letter and given the shape of what unfolds in Titus 2, right?
[00:07:24]
So he starts by saying, “Teach them what’s in accord with sound doctrine.” And then in verses 11 to 14 of that chapter, he explains that all these instructions that he’s just given are related to the fact that the grace of God has appeared in Jesus, and it trains us to say “No” to ungodliness and “Yes” to upright and holy lives, precisely because Jesus’ death and resurrection was designed to basically redeem us from lawlessness and to purify us to be a people who are zealous for good works.
[00:07:51]
The theological foundation for all the instructions that I’ve just given is that this is exactly what God was trying to do through the death and resurrection of Jesus to reshape you as people.
[00:08:00]
Tony Payne: So this is big stuff.
[00:08:01]
Paul Grimmond: So in terms of the context of Titus—
[00:08:04]
Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:08:04]
Paul Grimmond: —you read all of those instructions, and there’s nothing in particular that causes you to differentiate one set from another. In terms of the logic of Titus, these things are all deeply connected with what Paul sees as being the right way of loving God and honouring Christ, right? And yet, some of those things feel very uncomfortable for us.
[00:08:25]
And I think that we need to keep remembering that is true of biblical injunctions across Scripture at different times and in different places with different people.
[00:08:34]
Tony Payne: Yes. Right.
[00:08:35]
Paul Grimmond: So my illustration of this, I remember preaching a number of years ago on 1 Timothy 2 and the instruction about women remaining silent in church and not teaching men. And I was really wrestling with that and I was talking to a brother who was pastoring a church from another kind of ethnic background. And I talked to him a bit about my struggles and he said to me, “Oh, we did that passage recently. That verse didn’t rate a single mention and nobody asked a question about it. Their questions were all about being not attired with gold or pearls or silver jewellery, but actually with good deeds appropriate for women who profess the knowledge of God.” And it just struck me, “Ah. Scripture’s always controversial. But what makes it controversial is where it pokes against you and your place and time.” Some bits of the Bible we just skip over because we go, “Well, that’s a nice idea, and we all agree with that and that’s lovely.” And here’s another idea that’s contested at my point in history, in my place, in my specific context.
[00:09:35]
Tony Payne: And in a sense, the joke we just made earlier when we joked about young men is kind of a case in point. There’d be very few people who get deeply offended or be bothered or even take much time to stop and think that young men as a group of people, urging them to be self-controlled would seem to be self-evidently a good thing to do.
[00:09:50]
Paul Grimmond: Yeah.
[00:09:51]
Tony Payne: It’s an issue that you young men struggle with and always have.
[00:09:53]
Paul Grimmond: Yeah.
[00:09:54]
Tony Payne: It’d be one of those verses we go straight past. But this one we don’t. So what is it about our culture, do you think, and where we are now, that means this one pulls us up in our tracks and makes us notice and feels out of place to us—challenges us?
[00:10:08]
Paul Grimmond: I mean, that’s such a complex question.
[00:10:10]
Tony Payne: That’s a huge question, I know.
[00:10:10]
Paul Grimmond: It’s a massive question.
[00:10:11]
Tony Payne: Well, we’ve got half an hour.
[00:10:13]
Paul Grimmond: I think that there are things that—things at different levels. I do think that we are at a moment when, very helpfully, we live in a culture where people have become more aware of significance around things like abuse and domestic violence. And we have become aware that some of these verses like this are used by evil people to create control, to bring coercion, to reinforce their own sense of power, to get other people to do what they want them to do—
[00:10:42]
Tony Payne: Almost as a power move to justify what is otherwise just evil, controlling behaviour.
[00:10:46]
Paul Grimmond: Oh, rank ungodliness and deeply evil behaviour. But sin is so sinful, it can call black “white” and white “black”, right? Like we know that from Scripture and from our experience of life in the world. So I think that’s one of the reasons that we are really sensitive and, at one level, rightly sensitive to these.
[00:11:02]
Tony Payne: Yeah. I think that’s fair enough.
[00:11:04]
Paul Grimmond: Yeah. I think there’s another level though, at which I wonder whether what we value as a culture has shifted quite significantly. So one of the things that really struck me in the research was how much, for example, the household and the home was just honoured at an incredible level in ancient Roman and Greek society, as well as in biblical writing, right? The home is a precious place, and what happens there in terms of the raising of children, and the creation of character, and formation of people, and whatever, that is almost as prized a thing as you can think of doing in the world.
[00:11:42]
Whereas I think on this side of the Industrial Revolution, which has separated the public and the private—and I don’t think it’s just the Industrial Revolution; I think that philosophically as well, we’ve been through this kind of space where that move towards rank individualism, and everything is what the world means for you, and a thoroughgoing nominalism. There’s nothing given in the created order. There’s nothing objective that I can say about it. It’s just whatever I choose it to be and to mean is the thing that I have and take it to mean. But when you connect that with ideas of oppression and distrust of authority, because we are profoundly distrustful of authority, because those distinctions have been used at times by authority to create oppression or to reinforce the power of those who are in power.
[00:12:29]
So we have this dialogue that’s going on at so many different levels that just affects all of us. Our innate response to anybody who tells me there’s a particular thing that you should do because you belong to this class of person, that is anathema, really, in our place and at our moment in history.
[00:12:48]
Tony Payne: And it hurts us or strikes us particularly strongly, because, culturally, in the complex of all those factors you mentioned, and it is complex and it’s easy to do sweeping gen—I’m very good at those sweeping generalisations and I’ll resist the temptation—but amidst the complex mix of factors that have made us who we are and how we think about these things now, two of the things you mentioned there are very significant, I think.
[00:13:11]
One, that the household, which, in the Bible, is kind of like the centre of the action, if I can put it that way. It was a larger extended unit. It was the place of protection—the place of where I belonged very strongly, the place of my identity, in that sense. It was the economic unit: you lived and worked in your household. You didn’t leave the household to go out to work and do your significant work in the world. The household was where everything happened.
[00:13:37]
And in a sense, this goes all the way back to the Old Testament and debate of the house of the father. That was the basic unit of Israelite society—
[00:13:45]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely.
[00:13:45]
Tony Payne: —and in many respects—in many respects, in the ancient world. And so when we hear that older women are to teach and train the younger women to be busy at home, we hear, “Oh, to be withdrawn from the world—withdrawn from anything significant—and to be trapped at home, wearing a frock and baking for their husbands, and doing nothing significant at all, doing drudgery, menial, meaningless work while the men go out and do all that’s meaningful out there in the world”, that whole set of categories is quite foreign to this passage and to the way, generally, I think the Bible thinks about the household.
[00:14:22]
Paul Grimmond: It’s completely foreign, isn’t it? Like, totally foreign. And I think that there are a number of factors that are deeply at work there. The fact that we have been able to separate the household as a menial task and to talk about what’s prominent and significant in the world, represents, I think, at one level, a commoditisation of people and things and stuff, right?
[00:14:44]
So even if you think at an educational level, right? My daughter did very well in the HSC. She decided that she would really love to teach primary school children and to be an educator.
[00:14:57]
Tony Payne: Oh, what a waste of her high mark. Is that what she got?
[00:14:59]
Paul Grimmond: Well, can I— the number of people who said to her, like, actually said to her face-to-face, “Couldn’t you do better?” That represents—
[00:15:07]
Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:15:08]
Paul Grimmond: So I get a bit grumpy about this. I was flabbergasted. But what does that represent value-wise? Like, if we are not investing in these little people as they grow, what possible resource in the world do we have that is more precious than these little people?
[00:15:24]
Tony Payne: Look, lots Paul. You could be a business consultant that teaches people how to desire a new kind of toothpaste and buy more of that toothpaste and—hang on a second. That’s completely trivial and meaningless. Let me think of another one. But that’s what you end up swapping.
[00:15:38]
Paul Grimmond: It’s so fascinating.
[00:15:39]
Tony Payne: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:40]
Paul Grimmond: So power is about economics. It’s about having the ability to influence decision-making, even if it becomes about banal and silly and ridiculous things—your ability to make money for other people, your ability to shape the way that people think about something or whatever else. Whereas, the actual work of being in relationship with little hearts and minds, and training them to actually know themselves and to live well in the world, and to act with character and to know God, those things are actually radically diminished within our worldview.
[00:16:15]
Tony Payne: Very much. And it’s not even just the raising of children, which is, you’d think, well, is there a greater calling than shaping the life of another human being profoundly and deeply? Caring, nurturing teaching and raising them to be a fully formed independent person who contributes. Is there anything more brilliant to do with your life than to do that? And say, no, what a marvellous thing to do. This is why motherhood is just the highest calling, right? And why parenthood is the highest calling.
[00:16:41]
But it’s also that the household, I think, as the Bible thinks about it, it’s not just that, “Oh, you raise your kids and they’re wonderful people.” It’s that your household is the centre of your activity as godly humans, and from your household, brimming over and reverberating out from your household, is the service and work you do in the world for other people. So the household is not just the, “I need to build my household so that my kids are fantastic.” It’s the venue and sphere from which, and out of which, we serve our neighbours. We serve our communities. Do you know what I’m saying?
[00:17:15]
Paul Grimmond: And I think as you read, Proverbs 31, right? That picture of the woman in Proverbs 31. Who is she known for? She conducts business. She’s looking after the poor and the downtrodden. She’s selling cloth, she’s buying land. She’s in charge of—like, it’s not like she was some kind of weak-willed, stuck at home, unable to do anything woman. She was a woman who was actually creating a household, which was acting as a blessing to her entire community, because here was a place where all of the truth and righteousness and goodness of God had been played out and enacted in a way that this house didn’t exist for its own being, but actually existed for the sake of others.
[00:17:57]
And you even think—I mean, I hear the previous generation to me talk about the shift in architecture from the small house with the big verandah that looked out onto the street and the children played in the street, to the massive house with the walls around all of it, and we all sitting inside and try very hard not to be interrupted by anybody else out there.
[00:18:16]
Tony Payne: Yeah, very true. Yeah.
[00:18:17]
Paul Grimmond: That’s a massive shift in our experience of what we think household is about. But household is a place of hospitality and welcoming in and blessing outward. But all of that has shifted because of, I think, a foreign worldview that has pervaded us and that we’ve bought hook, line, and sinker without seeing the goodness and blessings of what God’s talking about in terms of household in Scripture.
[00:18:39]
Tony Payne: And it’s difficult to tease out all the different filaments of that worldview. You’ve mentioned some: the Industrial Revolution; the technological revolution; the way work has changed; the way we think about ourselves and what makes us significant has changed; the nature of economics; us as sort of economic man and that’s what’s really important about us; the different way we think about family; the sort of smaller size of family that’s happened as a result of a whole series of factors—social and economic—such that the family now is a small unit, rather than a larger one. And so it’s hard to kind of tease all these things apart.
[00:19:10]
But there’s no question it puts us in a certain frame of mind, such that when we see Paul saying that the godly woman—older woman—teaches and trains the godly younger woman to be the beating heart and manager and worker within this household, whereas in their context, that’s a self-evident good. Of course, that’s what a young woman should dream of doing, and what better thing it would be to life than to be the beating heart of her household. For us, that’s not just a second-class option, but kind of like a 10th-class option.
[00:19:39]
Paul Grimmond: Yeah, absolutely.
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[00:20:07]
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[00:21:06]
Tony Payne: And now let’s get back to our program.
The biblical worldview of men and women
[00:21:08]
We started by asking “Why does it stick out to us?” and I think we’ve explored some of those things. I guess the other angle or other side of this—so the way we think about household and the whole social structure causes it to leap out at us, but also the way we think about men and women, and the degree to which men and women are similar, the same or different/differentiated. I think that has also shifted from the time in which this text was written and the prevailing biblical worldview, which in your talk you pointed out, is not just here in Titus; it’s actually something that pops up in many places in the Bible.
[00:21:42]
Before we think about our problems, how would you describe that biblical worldview that kind of describes what’s different about men and women/what’s the same about men and women as men and women?
[00:21:52]
Paul Grimmond: The explicit statements in places like Genesis—that God made them male and female. So that biblical understanding that how we have been created biologically affects who we are and how we function as people in the world. I think that’s really significant.
[00:22:10]
And then that idea gets played out in so many different places in the New Testament, right? So perhaps one of the reasons that he encourages older women to instruct younger women, rather than saying, “Oh, you older men: you should instruct the younger women”, is that there is a reality about being human and having lived and experienced life in that space that means that you have wisdom to share. Because of all that you’ve been through and how you have worked at putting the word of God into practice in your context, that gives you real wisdom to actually pass on to the next generation.
[00:22:42]
And the bloke has a different set of wisdom, because of who he is and where he’s been functioning and how he’s been working. But to realise that the Bible is unashamed to speak in generalisations.
[00:22:54]
It was a fascinating experience for me, actually: a number of, well, I reckon it would be close to a decade ago now, I spent quite a bit of time with a brother from Eastern Europe/Russia. He was Russian, but had done ministry in Eastern Europe, and he was saying, “Look, the weird thing about you guys in the West is you can’t say anything general about anything.” He goes, you just—“Wisdom doesn’t exist as a category, because as soon as you say something—
[00:23:18]
Tony Payne: You have to qualify it 37,000 times—
[00:23:21]
Paul Grimmond: Exactly!
[00:23:21]
Tony Payne: —and apologize to everybody you’ve just offended.
[00:23:23]
Paul Grimmond: Yeah, absolutely. Whereas he says, the Bible’s full of general statements that are generally true and hold all sorts of wisdom in them, but we basically almost discount Proverbs as a category, right, because Proverbs says real stuff about particular, but general things in the world, and we all go, “Well, that’s not right for that reason and that reason and that reason and that reason.”
[00:23:43]
Tony Payne: It might—yeah. Yes. I know someone who’s different from that in this particular circumstance.
[00:23:46]
Paul Grimmond: Exactly. Right.
[00:23:47]
Tony Payne: Which is the problem of using proverbial wisdom as commands or as laws. That’s—part of our problem is that sometimes we read the Bible a bit flat like that, as if a statement about the way the world is, and therefore the shape of human life and what you should expect and how you can navigate your way through this complex thing we are living, general wisdom and guidance that really helps you in different places is sometimes for us becomes like a command: you have to implement that at every moment of your experience, and it’s not like that. And so we really quickly turn a passage like this one into a, say, okay, what does it look like? What are men allowed to do? What are women not allowed to do? Gimme the rules.
[00:24:21]
Paul Grimmond: But it’s also that “What are we precluding by this activity?”, rather than asking, “What’s good? What’s helpful? What’s real? What expresses actually some of what God loves? What expresses some of the way that God has made the world”, even right? So the precious nature of loving husband and children, which is not an innately easy activity for sinful human beings.
[00:24:44]
I’d say the same things to husbands loving your wives and your children: that’s not simple. It’s not easy as a sinful person. I need the instruction of God and the encouragement of my brothers and sisters in Christ to work out how to do that. But it will take different forms in different places at different times.
[00:25:00]
But there’s no doubt that is a good, do you know what I mean? Within the biblical framework, that is an absolute good that you cannot deny. But we will have—all of our conversation will not be about what is the good of that thing, but will be rather about how is that messing us up—getting us wrong? What are we missing? How is it constraining us?
[00:25:18]
Tony Payne: Exactly. How is it stopping me from being and becoming the person I wish to be? And in a way, I was thinking about this after your talk, the word “feminism” is just such a massive, loose category and raises so many emotions in people, it’s almost not worth having that discussion or raising it around that term, I sometimes think. But you can say there’s been certainly a philosophical and ideological move in our culture: over the past 50, 60, 70 years, it’s been building, of what some have called “expressive individualism”—of autonomous individualism. I want to be me. I don’t want anyone stopping me being me.
[00:25:54]
And if I think about things within the feminist movement, really broadly considered, that I find objectionable, or cut across the biblical story and the biblical teaching, it’s that impulse. If men in some way are going to stop me being me, then so much the worst for men. If motherhood and family life is going to get in the way of me being the actualised me I really want to be, then let’s downgrade motherhood and family life. And if even my body as a woman and my reproduction cycles and who I am as a woman is going to get in the way of me being the person I want to be, pursuing the job I want to pursue, that I’m going to suppress and change that as well chemically too.
[00:26:30]
And of course, that’s the very striking argument of Mary Harrington and her work about feminism and the use of the pill and how the pill was foundational in modern feminism and the problems that led to. But that’s another whole story.
[00:26:42]
Paul Grimmond: But it is striking, isn’t it, Tony? Like even the argument that exists between feminism and the trans world about to what extent biology creates something about our experience and commonality and who we are as human beings that we just notice in lots of different places.
[00:26:59]
I had—one of my children did an Arts degree at Sydney Uni, where gender was a construct.
[00:27:05]
Tony Payne: Purely a construct.
[00:27:06]
Paul Grimmond: Purely a construct, and a son who has done sciences—life sciences—in exercise physiology. And if you are not taking someone’s biology into account in terms of flexibility and strength and ligaments and how they work and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you can actually end up damaging or injuring people by not helping them to exercise appropriately according to how they’re wired to be. So we both have this world that says, who you are biologically has a really big impact on you, and it has nothing say about you.
[00:27:37]
Tony Payne: We can ignore it completely.
[00:27:38]
Paul Grimmond: And then we kind of bounce between those two sets of realities, depending upon what argument I want to make at any one particular time. Which of those things is more important or more significant? Whereas the Bible really wants to say there are things about the created order that are deeply reflective of the nature of God and his purposes for the world and what he wants for us, and you actually need to read those into each other. And the Scripture does that all the time. But for us to say that at our time and place cuts across certain societal values that makes it very complex.
[00:28:13]
Tony Payne: Yeah. Ideological values—things that we’ve come to believe about the world and—
[00:28:17]
Paul Grimmond: At a really visceral, deep sea there.
[00:28:20]
Tony Payne: We’ve been taught them so often and so much, and at every level we’ve been taught them explicitly in schools, but also we’re taught them and discipled in them—in the way we live, the way we dress, the way we relate to each other, the way we work, the way our cultural products come to us. It’s a different vision of men and women and of the created order that sits pretty deeply with us, and it means that even if we can talk and think our way through a passage like this, there’s still an emotional reaction to it because it’s so deep.
[00:28:45]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely. And it’s so interesting, isn’t it, because the thing that we’ve been taught that we are reacting against is a kind of caricature of, perhaps, a western wife and mother in the 1950s or whatever that is—
[00:28:58]
Tony Payne: Which historically is a very unusual—
[00:29:00]
Paul Grimmond: Well, it’s a very thin sliver of the history of humanity, isn’t it? Like, you talk to any woman who has come from a different cultural background from somewhere in Africa or somewhere in Asia or whatever, and that stereotype doesn’t particularly kind of ring any bells for them in terms of their history or experience or any of those kinds of things.
[00:29:20]
We are reacting really strongly to that, and I’ve set up a set of categories to react strongly to that. I just want to say, if you read your Bible slowly, thoughtfully and carefully, it’s just a totally different worldview that imbues those realities in very different ways.
[00:29:35]
But it helps us to realise when I call someone to be working at home in a Titus 2 sense, I am not calling on her to bake and wear a frock and do X, Y and Z. Those things are so far from the centre of what that’s actually on about that we’ve completely missed the point.
Godliness in slavery
[00:29:53]
Tony Payne: Look, that’s very helpful, Paul. I’m tempted not to go this next step in the discussion just because it’s potentially a longer discussion. But it really teases out what you’re just saying, because the passage talks about older men, younger men, older women, younger women, but it also talks about slaves. And in your address at the Priscilla & Aquila conference, you tease that out in some detail to talk about what does it mean that a household in the ancient world had slaves, and the slaves were to work out their godliness in the context of their slavery? And without reproducing the detailed and really helpful work, and I believe if you want to chase this up and listen to that talk, is it available?
[00:30:29]
Paul Grimmond: These will be online. They’re not yet, but they will become available. [Ed: Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.]
[00:30:32]
Tony Payne: Okay. That’s at the Priscilla & Aquila Centre website, which you can find through Moore College. So look out for that. Probably by the time this podcast is released—we’re recording this, but it won’t be released for quite a few weeks—it may be up. And you can chase your stuff in more detail.
[00:30:45]
But can you briefly talk a little bit about the slaves and masters angle? Because for some people, that undercuts the argument that you’re making.
[00:30:51]
Paul Grimmond: I mean, it’s so interesting, isn’t it? We as evangelicals hold it a matter of honour and pride that it was our ancestors who fought against the slave trade on the basis of the gospel, because the gospel makes all men equal. What happened in slavery in the slave trade was absolutely abhorrent, and we fought it until it’s basically been eradicated as a thing in our part of the world and our experience of life. So the gospel has led us to get rid of this thing.
[00:31:17]
Surely the gospel, which says that you get the famous Galatians 3 verse about, “in Christ, there is neither male nor female”—hasn’t the gospel done exactly the same thing to our understanding of gender as it has to slaves and masters? So why have we gotten rid of one but hung onto the other? That’s the big question. That’s the argument.
[00:31:36]
And I think the thing that was really helpful for me, actually, was digging into the details of that and noticing how very differently the Bible talks about slavery in comparison to the way that it talks about being male and female. So interestingly, I—and you can chase this down through a number of different sources: Pete Orr has some really excellent material through the P&A Centre where he goes into this in detail. But actually, slavery was always seen, even in the Old Testament, as a social institution that was to be managed and dealt with appropriately. The Old Testament doesn’t see the need to eradicate it, but it has ridiculous laws in its own context, right? So in Israel, for example, if you have a runaway slave, and we assume they’ve probably run away from another country, rather than from the bloke next door, you are not to return them to their master, but you are actually to provide for them and to give them a home amongst you, right. And that’s because you lived in slavery in Egypt.
[00:32:31]
Tony Payne: You were once slaves.
[00:32:32]
Paul Grimmond: You knew what it was like. You’ve been released from that. You know how badly they’ve been mistreated and you know that they belong, in some way or another, to the same God that you belong to. So when the Bible speaks about things like slavery, it goes, “Here is a thing that needs to be spoken to through the lens of who God is.”
[00:32:52]
I think, and I found this really helpful, there’s a fascinating discussion between Thabiti Anyabwile. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly.
[00:33:00]
Tony Payne: It’s pretty good. Yeah, I know Thabiti and that’s pretty good.
[00:33:02]
Paul Grimmond: —and Doug Wilson, where they come to have some very different positions on this. But the two of them agree on two particular things, which is that the whole shape of Scripture is profoundly anti-racist, and that the actual structure of the gospel and what it means about the equality of human beings will lead a society in which the gospel has been at work over time to get rid of slavery, because, and I think Philemon’s kind of really helpful here, who is this slave who is returning to you? He’s not your slave; he’s your brother.
[00:33:37]
And so every slave culture ends up dehumanising people in the slave class in order to be able to ethically cope with what happens in slavery. And the gospel just says, “You cannot hold any of those tenets.” You actually have to believe that’s another person created in the image of God from who Jesus has died, and therefore you must treat them differently. And so Old Testament and New Testament, both outlaw slave trading categorically and absolutely.
[00:34:05]
Tony Payne: So it’s not a slave trading situation that’s being addressed in Titus, right? It’s not—
[00:34:09]
Paul Grimmond: That’s exactly right.
[00:34:10]
Tony Payne: It’s not someone who’s been kidnapped and is now in enforced servitude. It’s someone who has entered the household sometimes, often voluntarily, because it was a way of working off debt, or it was an economic situation you are in in order to provide service for your livelihood, be part of this economic unit—in a sense, sit under the protection of this economic unit. And in a society where there’s no welfare state, if you find yourself completely—
[00:34:33]
Paul Grimmond: Well, if you’re on the verge of destitution, right?
[00:34:35]
Tony Payne: Yes.
[00:34:36]
Paul Grimmond: I would much rather become a servant in your household than continue in my destitution.
[00:34:41]
Tony Payne: Than die in destitution.
[00:34:42]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely. And even significantly so I can’t remember whether it’s Deuteronomy or Exodus; you need to check the actual references. But in Old Testament law, if an Israelite makes themselves a slave because of their economic circumstances, after six years, you are responsible for providing them enough money to actually reestablish their freedom, and you’re actually supposed to do enough to help them back onto their feet. And again, utterly different to every other culture around about them at the time.
[00:35:10]
Tony Payne: And this is the sense in which, for me, as I was pondering this when you were giving your address, it was very stimulating—very good—the way you dug into the details of what sort of slavery’s being talked about, what sort of bondservant kind of situation here, and chattel slavery and different forms of slavery, and the impetus of the gospel to treat people as people and to liberate slaves—it did strike me that there is an aspect to the way the slaves and masters are referred to often in the New Testament that does reflect the reality of life in the created and fallen world. It’s an ongoing reality. That is, there will always be people who, for some reason or other, because of their own disadvantages or misfortune or bad choices, find themselves in destitution or servitude in a disadvantaged economic state vis-a-vis you, where you have power over them.
[00:35:55]
Paul Grimmond: Correct.
[00:35:56]
Tony Payne: And they’re dependent on you for work. They might be bonded to you for some reason. They might be working off a contract. They might have to—and what happens when there’s an economic imbalance within a household—where there are workers within a household or within a broader community who are economically disadvantaged and placed in a vulnerable position of servitude and others who are more powerful? Now that’s, I would say, in this world, an almost universal human experience, even though the categories and structures of slavery have kind of died away, thankfully in most places in the west.
[00:36:25]
Paul Grimmond: Well, it’s interesting: we had a conversation over morning tea with the faculty about do we think that there’s actually any of this still in existence? But you look at things like the gig economy, right? I mean, the guys who ride Uber Eats bikes around the city, they are basically doing the only job that they can get in a place where all the advantage stands with the employer and almost none of it stands with them. Their workforce work ridiculous hours. There’s not a lot of safety and security in the work. It’s not identical, but there’s certainly a massive imbalance that goes on that many of us benefit from, because we all enjoy the fact that I can ring up at 9:00 PM and get it—
[00:37:01]
Tony Payne: And send something—
[00:37:02]
Paul Grimmond: —whatever it is sent over. So we’re all happy to be part of the economic system that provides that. But there’s a massive imbalance there.
[00:37:09]
So the gospel keeps addressing us as Christians, right? If you are an employer in any of those situations—
[00:37:15]
Tony Payne: If you’re a master in that sense—
[00:37:17]
Paul Grimmond: Yes. Are you going to treat people with respect and care and dignity and hang what the award says? Are you going to treat them genuinely as human beings and love them and respect them, and yeah.
[00:37:29]
Tony Payne: And if you’re a worker, are you going to still, even though you’re in a disadvantaged position, you’re going to work hard, you’re going to be honest you’re going to—
[00:37:36]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely.
[00:37:37]
Tony Payne: Even as a Christian in that context, that adorns the gospel by your attitude of service and your godliness.
[00:37:42]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely.
[00:37:43]
Tony Payne: And because in a way we’ve separated work so much from the household, the sense that all this might be going on within a household is less the case for us these days.
[00:37:52]
Paul Grimmond: Correct.
[00:37:52]
Tony Payne: But it still, I think, does go on. And I think because the Bible keeps kind of directing and teaching us how to think about reality and about the world we all live in, even though the kind of details and contours of the world keeps shifting as times and history changes. It’s the same world, but the same realities and relationships.
[00:38:10]
And so even the slave one, which is kind of very different in a way, it does still does teach us how to think about economic disparity and servitude, and how to be generous and godly within those relationships.
[00:38:20]
Paul Grimmond: Well, and interestingly, it also keeps speaking to the nature of power and authority and stuff within our social structures, right? The world wants to say the way that we solve all these problems is by denying all power. There is no such thing as authority, and I don’t let anybody else be the boss of me.
[00:38:36]
Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:38:36]
Paul Grimmond: But as much as everybody keeps saying that that’s what’s true, it just turns a blind eye to the reality that that’s all of our experience most of the time—that there are people in authority over us, and there are often people under us in some way, shape or form. And the Scriptures, rather than saying, “Oh, you can forget all that. You’re all actually exactly the same as each other and there’s no difference, and authority doesn’t really exist, ‘cause it’s a social construct and a figment of your imagination”, it says, “No, authority is real.” And actually, if you are someone in authority, you have a deep responsibility to God and to other people who are made in God’s image to work out how to enact that authority with grace and wisdom and kindness and generosity and faithfulness.
[00:39:17]
And if you live under authority, you’re actually called not to just denounce it or push it away, or ignore it or avoid it, but actually to work out how to live faithfully and wisely, not by becoming a non-human or suppressing your reality, but choosing to acknowledge where God has given responsibility, and choosing to use your gifts, wisdom and capacity in ways that respect and encourage and help that relationship in good ways. That is a deeply counter-cultural reality, isn’t it?
[00:39:47]
Tony Payne: It’s one Paul raises later in Titus when he encourages them to be subject to the authorities.
[00:39:51]
Paul Grimmond: Absolutely.
[00:39:51]
Tony Payne: And elsewhere in, in the New Testament as well.
Conclusion
[00:39:54]
Tony Payne: This has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks for coming and being part of it, Paul, and driving it really with the work and research you’ve done. But it strikes me as we kind of draw it to a close that what we’re really saying is that the Bible, for all, that it sometimes feels like a book from another place in time and says things that jump out and strike us, that’s some of the best parts of the Bible for us, because the Bible is God speaking about the reality he’s created and in which we live, and the reality that’s been redeemed in Christ, in which we’ve been redeemed in Christ. And there’s so much wisdom that this gets us to stop and think about our whole lives and the way we maybe have adopted ways of thinking and being that maybe don’t fit with the reality that God’s created. And that godliness, for all its kind of unitary nature—we’re all striving to be godly and like Christ—it does reach into our individual lives and different circumstances, and challenge us in different ways.
[00:40:47]
Paul Grimmond: And it calls us, doesn’t it? When you notice that you are reacting, how do you become curious at that moment? How do you stop just rejecting out of hand or throwing the shutters up or whatever, but going, “Wow, this feels really different and I’m feeling really uncomfortable here.” What does it mean to slow down and actually let the whole of the biblical worldview inform me, and put pieces together here in a different way that might actually create a much better vision of what it means to be human and in relationship with God?
[00:41:17]
Tony Payne: What a fantastic thought. How about we pray just before we finish—for those who are listening and for the content of your talk at P&A and the effect that it might have had as well. How about I pray for us and for you before we close on.
[00:41:28]
Paul Grimmond: Thanks, Tony.
[00:41:28]
Tony Payne: Father, we do thank you for your word and for the way that it does challenge us. We read it, and so often, it resonates, and we say, “Yes, that’s exactly the way our world is, and that’s exactly who I am.” But at times, it challenges us that we don’t really understand ourselves or our world. And if we are curious and we tremble at your word and we want to find out what you want to say to us, it drives us to stop and rethink.
[00:41:52]
And when we come to passages like this one that often jump out at us, we thank you so much, Father, for the way you speak to us through them. And thanks for the opportunity to have that conversation about those things today. For Paul, Father, in his role at Moore College, we pray for him and for his work as the Head of the Ministry Department, and for the students that he teaches, and pastors, and for the work of the Priscilla & Aquila Centre that conducted that recent conference: we do thank you for that; for Veronica Hoyt, the new head of that Centre; and for the work that it’s continuing to do to help us think through these issues, especially with regard to men and women.
[00:42:25]
We thank you for all these things, Father, in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:42:28]
Paul Grimmond: Amen.
[Music]
[00:42:43]
Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website. That’s ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we’ve published through the Centre. And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:43:18]
We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch. You can email us at ccl AT moore edu au.
[00:43:38]
Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:43:53]
I’m Tony Payne. Bye for now.
[Music]
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
