Rejoinder

Responding to Brad Harper’s request for delineating theological ramifications of his essay Relative Grit, Jon Coutts asks this question: what happens in a church where men and women come together “in Christ” to “get their man”?  The author argues that there is in the Body of Christ a newborn freedom for male and female to find themselves in an interactive and mutual self-giving that is forwarded in the fellowship and truth of the Holy Spirit. In this, there is neither a denial nor an essentializing of gender roles and cultural norms, but the submission of these relative constructs to a greater defining factor and a greater common cause. The film True Grit will serve well as a modern parable as we seek the culturally subversive gospel idea of mutual submission in our own contexts.