Leviticus 15 depicts intercourse and its physiology as a tabernacle scene. It places ordinary and proper sexual intercourse at the center (v. 18), and, as the chiastic structure makes clear, varying levels or degrees of impurity occupy the surrounding "areas" of that center just as in Israel's encampment and wilderness.

I cannot refuse the Church while I plead for her health: after all, in divine grace, the solution is in her, too. Yes, in her. As I point to what the Church must become in order to be, in deed and not just in word, the safest place for a woman, I will ask us to love our Mother:

Modern criticism has functioned for at least a century with a default reading of Leviticus which regards it as undeniable proof-positive that the Bible is part of the problem. Instead of dismissing this notion, attending to it carefully enriches our appreciation of how Leviticus is in fact part of the solution.

The statutes and ordinances of the Law, the narratives, a wide range of biblical types and figures, the wisdom literature, and the New Testament Gospels and Writings all commend to us a vision of the unique theo-ontology of a woman as a kind of sacred space.

I would like to invite you into the biblical solution for a grievous problem—the principled maltreatment of women in culture and too often in the Church—by way of a most intriguing and theologically rich biblical motif: the eschatological ultimacy of the feminine as a kind of sacred space.

There is much talk of church planting, missions, doctrinal orthodoxy, and the rosiest versions of a given denominational history. Meanwhile men are harming their wives and calling it an exercise of their headship.