One of the things revealed in many of the comments for these posts on Sarah Palin is that certain subtexts of what “every Christian knows” are quite prevalent, and they do a fine job in controlling the narratives that we try to tell or try to read. One of these is the shared assumption that most Christians have about the time of the Judges — to wit, that it was a time of anarchy and chaos, with every man “doing what was right in his own eyes.” This of course makes us think of urban looters in a time of total breakdown, and that is hardly a time we should want to look for political guidance.
I do have a much more positive view of the time of the Judges than is standard-issue. The influences on me here would include Jim Jordan’s commentary on the book — Judges: God’s War Against Humanism — and an older book called The Hebrew Republic written by a guy named Wines. Hope you can find it. But the basic reason I have being comfortable with an anomaly like Deborah is this. Because of Paul’s clear teaching on the creation order, Deborah is clearly an exception to the general pattern. Because the New Testament tells us what to think of this era, it was clearly not a sinful exception. If we go to the great chapter on faith in the book of Hebrews, what do we find? We do not find our typical Sunday School moralisms. Look at the many positive citations in Hebrews 11 — including a good showing for Barak of all people. “And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets . . .” Not only does the writer mention a number of these characters from the book of Judges positively, but he also hints that he could go on and on about it. So could I, but I won’t.
The bottom line on this issue is biblical absolutism. Feminism is a heresy. Accommodations with feminism on the part of Christians who cannot see what is at stake is worse than folly. But rigid over-reactions to feminism don’t help us.