Why I'm not an egalitarian

Been re-reading Rebecca Merrill Groothuis' book Good News for Women: a biblical picture of gender equality

Here are some of the things she says that I find myself disagreeing with:

God revealed himself and his plan for his people by means of patriarchal cultures, adapting his revealed Word to fit the understanding and limitations of its original recipients [...] God allowed the subjugation of women and other social groups because people's hearts were not ready to recieve the fullness of God's good news with all its sociocultural implications. But throughout biblical revelation God progressively made known his redemptive plan, whereby the essential equality of all people would ultimately be restored and he practice of gender heirarchy brought to an end. (21)

When many of the roles that require higher levels of spiritual maturity, understanding, and giftedness are the roles from which women are excluded - as is the case in the trditionalist agenda - it is something of a stretch to insist that the essential spritual equality of women is not being violated thereby. The implication that femaleness is spiritually inferior to maleness cannot be avoided when femaleness alone provides sufficient grounds to deny a person the opportunity even to earn the right to fill certain spiritual roles, and when maleness does not restrict a person from performing any ministry he may be quaified to do. (29)

It stands to reason that onyone who is deemed permanently unfit to occupy the superior position must be inherently incapable of performing that function satisfactorily. (53-54)

Underlying her reasoning seems to be an assumption that to be made subject to another must be done on the basis of superiority/inferiority. To say that a woman is subject to a man is to say she is inferior to the man. And this goes to the heart of what it means to be a woman, because 'traditionalists' [to use her term] say that by virtue of being a woman certain roles are not available to her. I struggle with the use of terms like 'deserve' and 'higher status' and 'greater role' for it seems to me to miss the servant nature of our saviour, who did not lord it over anyone but humbly sought to serve.

Difference in role and function does not equal lesser being - an argument that leads straight to the Doctrine of God. Groothuis and other egalitarians stridently argue that the Son was only functionally subordinate to the Father in the incarnation, claiming that to claim an eternal subordination of the Son to the Father is to deny his full deity and make him a lesser being than the Father. But this is not the 'self-evident case' that they claim it is. For the revelation of the Son in the incarnation to be a true revelation, it must not be of something other than what is true of the eternal, triune God. As Rahner's dictum tells us "the immanent trinity is the economic trinity". There is not some hidden God behind that revealed in the Son by the Spirit. The Son's submission is not merely temporal, but eternal and not indicative of a lessening of his being.