Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Manhood and Womanhood in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.
However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’—which is the first commandment with a promise—’so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.’
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people, because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free. And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
Last night, I spoke on the topic of how we decide what to do when the Bible is silent. I brought up a number of highly disputed topics in order to illustrate the points I was trying to make, but the criterion for choosing what topics I would include was not whether or not a topic is disputed because, first, almost all biblical topics are (or have been) disputed. Secondly, different topics are more severely disputed in different ages.
Let me unpack that. We talked last night about different views of baptism. We talked briefly about different views on marriage and divorce. The fact of the matter is, in the history of the church, there have been long debates on the doctrine of Christ. “Is Christ really, truly God?” There were huge debates along those lines in the third and fourth centuries, and they recurred in debates with Socinians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Trinitarianism was up for grabs more than once. Substitutionary atonement has surfaced again and again as a point of contention, flatly denied by some sectors and considered non-negotiable by other sectors. In other words, if the fact that something has been disputed is a sufficient criterion for deciding, “Well, it all depends on your point of view, and different denominations are going to do things differently” and this sort of thing, then, finally, everything is up for grabs.
Just because something is disputed, it does not mean that biblically faithful Christians want to view it as disputable. No, the criterion for being included in the list last night included such things as:
1. Rare mention in the Bible. “Greet one another with a holy kiss” or, “Women have to wear certain things on their heads.”
2. No theological connection. There is no theology of kissing in the Bible.
3. A long history of dispute among godly and informed interpreters. That is, this one has always been a hard one to nail down in the history of the church.
4. Topics that are not directly, but only tangentially, addressed by the Bible. Multi-site ministry, for example, as there is no passage that addresses it directly.
There are some topics, however, which … though they are, in fact, disputed, as most topics are somewhere … should not be disputable in our churches for several reasons.
1. There may be a long history of confessional interpretation.
In other words, we’re not the first generation to deal with people like Jehovah’s Witnesses and other Arian heretics who deny that Jesus is fully God. This has been fought over again and again. It is well-established. The fact that some can deny it does not mean that it is really, if you bury yourself in the evidence, genuinely disputable. It’s merely that it is, in fact, disputed.
Nevertheless, confessing that Jesus truly is Lord, that he is truly God, and that we align ourselves with Thomas, who falls before Jesus and says, “My Lord and my God,” is part of our Christian confessionalism. If you ask Jehovah’s Witnesses what John 20 (“My Lord and my God”) means, they have two responses. I’ve ransacked their literature in this respect. I’ll mention only one; I don’t have time to go into both of them.
One response that they give is that what Thomas really said when he saw Jesus was, “My Lord! My God!” which meant that what he basically did was blaspheme when he saw Jesus. Mind you, there’s blasphemy found in every culture, but it is impossible to think., on the mouth of a pious, first-century, conservative Palestinian Jew, that particular blasphemy would have been used.
In any case, what stands decisively against it is the little word and. Even if you could imagine that Thomas got around to saying, “My Lord! My God!” how do you turn that into, “My Lord! And my God!”? It’s bizarre. No, no, I think it’s a little easier to go with confessionalism, don’t you? You can do this with passage after passage after passage.
There is a long history, then, of testing the interpretation. It’s been fought over and thought through, and we rest on the shoulders of others. I always worry about people with major new interpretations that nobody has ever seen in the history of the church. It’s true that, occasionally, you see something new that others have missed in some corner of a text or other. It does happen, but one of the responsibilities of faithful preachers is not only to say things freshly but also to show that what we are preaching is what Jude calls “the faith once delivered to the saints.”
There’s historical rootage as well. You don’t want to be so clever in the way you are reformulating things that you don’t recognize that, in some measure or other, on some doctrine or another, you’re standing on the shoulders of Ignatius. You’re standing on the shoulders of Irenaeus. You’re standing on the shoulders of Augustine. You’re standing on the shoulders of Aquinas. You’re standing on the shoulders of Calvin. You’re standing on the shoulders of Wesley. There is a long heritage of this across the centuries. It did not begin with you!
So part of our confessionalism tests things by this sweep across redemptive history. It’s one of the reasons why church history is an important topic in our theological colleges and seminaries. Moreover, such doctrines, also, are crucial in broader structures. They may be central to the faith, such as substitutionary atonement. You can’t really understand the cross without seeing that substitutionary atonement lies so close to the heart of the New Testament that you start stripping off many other things if you lose that one.
2. It is culturally needed in a particular time.
That is, there may be certain disputes in certain generations which elevate some doctrine or other to a higher pitch, simply because that’s the point that is being denied.
In the third and fourth centuries, for example, there were not a lot of disputes about justification by grace alone through faith alone. There were a lot of disputes about the nature of the Trinity: about whether Christ was truly God and truly man and what it meant to say things like one person with two natures. Eventually, there was the great formulation of Nicaea and then of Chalcedon. Those have come down to us.
Some have therefore said, “Well, great. We sorted out the Christology way back in the third and fourth centuries. Those confessions have come down to us, so why do we have to split hairs now about justification? Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Calvinists: we all hold to justification. I mean, those people back in the fourth century didn’t argue about those things. So why should we?” Well, there are two reasons.
A. A lot more was said about justification in the patristic period than people realize.
There’s a lovely little book by Thomas Oden called The Justification Reader, which works through the approximately 300 sources that have come down to us that have said something or other about justification. It’s not that the early church said nothing about justification, the nature of the cross, substitution, or any of those things. It’s that they didn’t fight over them quite so much. That was not where the center of the debate was in their day.
B. In certain days, some topics are more disputed than others, and that largely depends on what is being denied.
You start getting clarity on things, on occasion, when you get people denying something. They deny something, and others begin to say, “Whoa, wait a minute. If you deny that, then what about this?” Then there’s a debate that starts going on back and forth, back and forth. Finally, you get a lot of Christians thinking accurately and carefully, with their finger on the text: this text and this text, the flow of the argument, this fits here and this fits here.
Sometimes you do not get really great clarity on a particular doctrine until somebody comes along and denies it. Nobody was denying the inerrancy of Scripture in the second century. Nobody. There’s a lovely little book written by my colleague, John Woodbridge, called Biblical Authority, which simply looks at the primary sources. He’s one of these primary-source dudes who doesn’t believe in secondary sources. He reads only the primary sources.
He shows that in the first century, in the second century, in the third century, in the fourth century, in the fifth century, in the sixth century, in the seventh century, in the eighth century, in the ninth century, in the tenth century, and on and on and on … people believed in inerrancy. They believed that the Bible was really the Word of God. It spoke the truth. It was reliable. You could trust it.
And in the twelfth century, in the thirteenth century, in the fourteenth century, in the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth century, everybody believed it. They might not have believed anything of it if they were atheists or something of that order, but if they were Christians of any stripe, that’s what they believed.
Eventually, however, you get a rising number of voices starting, really, in the seventeenth century, though just barely. In the eighteenth century, it was a little bit more, and in the nineteenth century, it was in full flood. Out of those sorts of denials there were closer and closer debates and struggles trying to say:
“What’s the best way of formulating this so that we don’t stick our foot in it? The Bible’s not a magic book. We recognize that, after all, the book was given in the original languages; it wasn’t given in English. We recognize that there are manuscript variations. How do you account for those kinds of things? We recognize that the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, and sometimes in fairly creative ways. How does that get accommodated in a sophisticated doctrine of Scripture?”
It becomes a little more sophisticated because there are denials out there that are undermining things. In other words, sometimes doctrines are really important to hold up, not only because they’re true and central (they’re structured into the very nature of Christianity), but also because, in your particular generation, they’re being denied. At that point, it becomes a question of faithfulness to affirm the truth over against the denial. Luther used to say, “He who is orthodox on every point, save where the truth is being denied, is a heretic.”
So now we come to today’s topic. I fully acknowledge that there are different opinions on the whole subject of complementarianism and egalitarianism. Where does it fit in our discussion? My job tonight is not to defend complementarianism. I will mention a few things, but that’s not my job tonight. My job tonight, rather, is to answer the question.… If complementarianism is true, and we understand it to be true, then how important is it? Should it be relegated to one of those relatively peripheral issues where some buy it and some don’t and we just agree to disagree?
My thesis is this: Complementarianism, though currently disputed, is sufficiently clearly taught in Scripture, sufficiently structurally important, and sufficiently needed in our culture that churches and Christian organizations ought to defend it, especially with respect to the teaching function of the church and, therefore, make it, in that sense, a line of demarcation. I know that in our day and age that immediately sounds like intolerance and narrow-mindedness. Hear me out; then we’ll have a question-and-answer time, and we’ll see where we go.
1. Complementarianism is sufficiently clearly taught in Scripture.
I don’t have time to work through all the Scriptures that are relevant. It just so happens that about a year ago, another chap, Bob Yarbrough, and I gave six lectures on the subject (each about an hour long), working through all the relevant passages of Scripture, to about 280 pastors connected with one particular denomination in North America. You can access all of those yourself on The Gospel Coalition website. Everything is free on the site.
In this country, the best recent book on the subject, in my view, is the lovely little book by Claire Smith called God’s Good Design. If you haven’t read anything recently on the subject, that’s a very good place to start. There are lots of thicker volumes, but that book is full of good sense and clear thinking. So let me mention two or three passages, explain where the lines of debate run, and tell you why I come out where I do. This is just for illustrative purposes; this is in no way exhaustive.
In Genesis 1, God makes man and woman in his image. It is very important to say that on all kinds of fronts, men and women are linked. They’re tied. They’re equivalent. They are human beings equally made in the image of God and are of equal significance. We are not to go down any of those wretched traps in which women are considered to be two-thirds of what men are in terms of value or worth or the like.
In chapter 2, however, when creation is re-told, she is made “as a help suitable for him.” What some say is, “Yes, but don’t forget that the word help or helper is sometimes used for God himself. There is nothing intrinsic to the word helper that suggests any sort of even functional inferiority. If God is my helper, as the psalmist can say, then the husband might say, ‘The women is my helper, too, and might be like God.’ ” I would say that that’s a spectacular example of trying to understand a passage by merely studying words and not syntax, flow, or argument.
Of course, the word can refer to God, and it can refer to other human beings. It can refer to peers and so on. The point is that she is created as a helper to him, not the other way around. Moreover, that fact is picked up as part of the reason behind Paul’s argumentation in 1 Timothy 2. It’s not an isolated point. It’s something that is picked up as being significant. Then there are two or three passages in the New Testament that speak of the husband as being the head of the wife: 1 Corinthians 11 (the passage that we spoke of), Ephesians 5, and so forth.
Here, there has been an astonishing effort to demonstrate that the word head, when it is speaking of something metaphorical as opposed to that which wobbles on the top of my neck, often means something like source. After all, she came from him, but all of the “hes” and “shes” thereafter come from her. She’s the source. She’s the head, in that sense, and he is the head in that he is the source for her. She is taken from his side.
The difficulty is that when studies have been done of every use of the word kephalē (head) from about 300 BC to about AD 300, the evidence doesn’t really line up to support that view. In a handful of cases where head is used in the plural, metaphorically, it can mean streams that are the sources of things, like the heads of a river, but I have yet to see a single example of head used metaphorically, in the literature from 300 years before Christ to 300 years after Christ, that unambiguously means source.
There are three or four texts (out of about 3,700) where it is, perhaps, disputable. But, on that basis, to try to take away the fairly plain meaning of the passage like the one we read in order to inject the notion of source strikes me as trying to escape the obvious. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body.” Does that mean just source? “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” It just sounds like exegesis that is approximately too clever by half.
Of course, this question of submission in chapter 5 is taken up, also, by both sides of this discussion. Verse 21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Verse 22: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands …” Verse 21 is taken my many to be the controlling verse. In other words, everybody is supposed to submit to everybody. Therefore, if there are some texts that say, “Wives, submit to your husbands,” well, yes, but that falls under the blanket rubric of everybody submit to everybody, “Submit to one another.”
If that’s the case, then when you find, in other passages in the New Testament, in other so-called house tables of household responsibilities … in Peter, for example, and Colossians, where you have, again, the wife being enjoined to submit to her husband … then immediately there is recourse back to Ephesians 5:21 as if that settles the issue.
One should be initially a wee bit suspicious of that kind of exegesis when, in text after text after text, the wife is enjoined to submit to her husband and the husband is never specifically enjoined to submit to his wife. The only cover for that interpretation is Ephesians 5:21, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Everything, in that case, turns on the meaning of the pronoun (it’s a single word in Greek): “Submit to one another.” The question is.… Is that word always reciprocal? Does it mean that they mutually submit to one another?
Well, in the book of Revelation, for example, on occasion you find passages where, in the gorier scenes, everybody kills one another. It’s the same word. So what takes place? There are 60 people in the room, and they kill one another. So what do they have? Do they have 60 machine guns and all shoot at exactly the same time so that they all actually manage to kill one another at the same time? That’s what you need to have perfect reciprocity. Now there are some instances where it is clearly reciprocal. “Love one another.” It’s clearly reciprocal.
Whether it’s reciprocal here depends on context. A text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text. In this context, what you have is submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, and then wives submit to the husbands, children to the parents, and slaves to the masters. If you want perfect reciprocity in the flow of the argument, you also have to have parents submitting to their children too.
Then there are passages like 1 Timothy 2, which are usually domesticated by one side of the debate by arguing that 1 Timothy 2 is given in a context where there’s a particular heresy involved that thrusts forth women into awkward stances that are dividing the entire church. Alternatively, in those days, women were ignorant and ill-trained, and that’s why the apostle Paul says what he says. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made any restriction on women having teaching authority over men.
The problem is that this alleged heresy turns out to be very difficult to define. Moreover, in the ancient world, although there were sectors of the world that kept women very ignorant, Paul worked and moved amongst some women that were international businesswomen, like Lydia, for example, who is a transcontinental businesswoman. She is the first one that he baptizes in Europe, but she comes from Asia.
Undoubtedly, there were some women that were kept down and were ignorant, but there were also some women in Roman society that were very well educated, very well trained, and had a fair bit of independence. A lot of that measurement depends on where you were. In Athens, for example, men had the vote. Women did not. Women were really quite put down in Athens. But in some cities in Asia Minor, that was simply not the case at all.
More importantly, when Paul gives the reason for his apparent restriction of some sort in 1 Timothy 2, he does not say, “Because this is a socially temporary situation, until we manage to jack up the level of education amongst our women, it’s better if they keep quiet.” That’s not what he says. The reasons he gives turn on creation order and the significances of the fall order. It is difficult to find examples of things that are more culturally transcendent. That’s what the text actually says.
So if I had to give a summary of what, it seems to me, a well-established complementarianism would say, it would be something like this: Men and women are equally important to God and equally made in his image, but there are certain distinctions in roles beyond the fact that one can have babies and the other can’t.
The distinction in roles mandated by Scripture is located in the home and in the teaching office in the church, the church-recognized teaching authority over men. (I want all those words in.) It seems to me that in the New Testament it is forbidden for a woman to have a church-recognized teaching authority over men. We’ll come back to some of those words in a few moments.
In other words, in my view, this matter is sufficiently clearly taught in Scripture. It is, today, widely disputed. I could name 10 books on each side of this debate, but at the end of the day, you have to work through the text and listen with the kind of attention that doesn’t care how the answer comes out so long as you’re submitting to the text.
I say that to both sides. If you have an agenda and are clever, you can always make the text come out on the side you want it to. You always can. That doesn’t mean that the text is as ambiguous as all of that. It just means that with a few years of Greek, a couple of courses of hermeneutics, a little bit of independence, some imagination, and reading one another’s works, pretty soon you can build a whole school of thought. It’s been done again and again on every topic under the sun.
Sometimes, these debates in earlier forms are forgotten, and one of the things that happens in the church when errors come up again is that people then dig out the previous debates. So in my judgment, until about 30 years ago, here in the Western world we were becoming pretty sloppy about our understanding of justification by grace alone through faith alone. We had the formulas down (we had inherited them), but we became pretty sloppy.
Then there arose various types of debate under the rough rubric of the new perspective on Paul. Some of it was pretty accurate and encouraging and helpful, and some of it was really quite dangerous to the doctrine of justification. Out of this, then, came a lot of books and articles back and forth. Sometimes it was a lot more heat than light, but eventually, there were some pretty serious books poking away at that sort of thing again.
I was involved in a couple of those myself with another person from Australia, Peter O’Brien. Peter O’Brien, Mark Seifrid, and I wrote two books that were 600 pages each. We edited these two books that were 12,000 pages of small print loaded with Aramaic and Greek and stuff like that. This was not popular fare.
Then I gave it the title. My wife laughs at my titles; she just laughs at them. Justification and Variegated Nomism. Boy, that really is a best seller, isn’t it? When John Piper wrote a book called The Future of Justification, it sold like hotcakes. I gave the title of Textual Criticism and Translation Technique: An Introduction to one of the earlier books I wrote. Mercifully, the publisher changed the title to The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism and it sold like hotcakes.
So you can’t trust me with titles too much, and yet I rather like the title Justification and Variegated Nomism. It was a pair of books written for scholars. Considering that it was 12,000 pages of small print with Aramaic, it actually sold pretty well because it was such a hot topic. We weren’t the only ones. There were scholars in Germany, in Scandinavia, quite a few in North America, and elsewhere who were working away at this topic.
Gradually, the whole consensus changed. In the world of scholarship it began to be perceived that this new perspective on Paul was not the greatest thing since sliced bread and, on too many fronts, had taken us away from the texts. Gradually, that worked down again to the seminaries. There are still some seminaries that are trying to push this thing as if it’s wonderful, but it has basically died.
One of the things that happened in this connection was that people began to read earlier disputes on the same subject. We’d forgotten to do that. We knew it, so we didn’t have to go and read what Calvin or Luther said. We didn’t have to go and read the debates with the Catholics when the Council of Trent started producing its doctrines. We didn’t have to do that anymore. We knew that stuff. We knew the formulations.
But now, again, there was a re-examination of the fact that Christians had debated these matters at profound levels in the past. You start digging it out again, and you become a little more careful with various doctrines. In this particular topic, there is not much of a history of debate on it until the twentieth century, and so there’s been a fair bit of new ground broken as people have worked through these texts, precisely because the matter had not been up for grabs the way it has been.
2. Complementarianism is sufficiently demonstrated to be structurally important.
It’s not that the questions of man-woman relationships just have to do with marriage and a bit of social dynamics so we can agree to disagree on just about everything here because it doesn’t have much bearing on the gospel. The Geneva Push is all about planting churches and proclaiming the gospel, so let people disagree on this one.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. One of the reasons why I chose this passage in Ephesians 5 to read is because this passage is one of many in the Bible that have to do with the parallelism between husband and wife, on the one hand, and Christ and the church, on the other. That goes back to an earlier parallelism between God and Israel in the Old Testament.
That embraces a still-wider discussion in the Old Testament. Apostasy is sometimes figured as a kind of spiritual adultery. That starts in Deuteronomy. The whole prophecy of Hosea is full of that. Then there are passages like Ezekiel 16 and 23 that are so gross that you can scarcely read them in public, but it’s a way of getting across what apostasy looks like. It’s a personal kind of betrayal when we turn away from God, whose only adequate representation in our experiences is the kind of betrayal you get in adultery and divorce.
We live in a culture where divorce, remarriage, and adultery are things you joke about. They are things that happen. It’s a plaything. It’s freedom. “I’ve lost my love for him or her” or whatever. Yet these questions of loyalty and fidelity and one flesh have a kind of parallel, a kind of ultimate reality, in the relationship between Christ and the church, so much so that one of the images of the final state is the marriage supper of the Lamb.
One of the things that apocalyptic likes to do is mix metaphors. For example, in the book of Revelation, chapter 5, Jesus is the lion and the lamb. The interpreting elder says to John, “Stop your crying. Look, the Lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed to open the scrolls.” “So I looked,” John says, “and I saw a Lamb.” What are we to think? Two animals, parked side by side? No, no, no. The lion is the lamb.
I’ve been in cathedrals in Europe where in stained glass windows they’ve tried to make a figure that is sort of half lion and half lamb. I look at it and think, “Does that remind me of Jesus?” It’s bizarre! Jesus is not half lion and half lamb. That’s just stupid! Then he has seven horns sticking out of his head and a sword coming out of his mouth.
I want to say, “Don’t you know anything about metaphor?” And not only metaphor but mixed metaphor. He’s a lion and a lamb. That’s why you cannot possibly represent it in pictures. That’s one of the reasons why apocalyptic has to be done in word ministry, because if you actually paint in or design it, it is full of mutual self-contradictions.
So now you come to the final stage. The new heaven and the new earth: okay, that’s one glorious image. What’s it going to be like at the end? A new heaven and a new earth. Cool! What else is it going to be like? It’s going to be like a New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. Okay, a big city. But it’s built like a cube. Okay, I get the symbolism: a cube, the Most Holy Place, and everybody is in this New Jerusalem.
And this New Jerusalem is like a bride. Whoa! Listen, if you’re not married and are about to get married, when your bride walks up to the altar, do not say to her, “Boy, you remind me of a city!” It’s a mixed metaphor. Then you have the marriage supper of the Lamb. Lambs don’t have marriages! They just go into the field and do it, you know? Talk about mixed metaphors! Yet each of those pictures is contributing something really, really important.
The theme of the marriage supper of the Lamb is reminding you that the one to whom we’re being united is Christ, the Lamb of God, who bore our sins in his own body on the tree. He’s the sacrificial lamb, but the symbolism of Revelation 5 shows that he’s also a warrior lamb. Talk about a mixed metaphor! He’s a warrior lamb. He has horns on his head for kingship.
Then there’s the marriage supper of the Lamb in order to show that the ultimate state of union between Christ and the church can only be adequately be described in our truncated little vision of things by a honeymoon. The greatest joy, happiness, and intimacy that human beings can know this side of the new heaven and the new earth is sexual union in a really good marriage, and God dares portray the consummated state along those lines. The church is so united with Christ in absolute bliss.
That’s why I sometimes tell people, both men and women, who are not married and who jolly well wish they were married but can’t seem to find the right one, “Don’t go through life thinking, ‘You know, I’ve been robbed,’ because 50 billion years into eternity when God’s people are in the most amazing union of joy with Christ no one’s going to think, ‘I was robbed.’ ”
Now why did I take so much time on these issues? Merely to show that marriage in Scripture is interwoven with a lot more than just what headship means. It’s more than just a social accident. There is structure. There is something that finds its ultimate antitype in Christ and the church. Be very careful.
3. Complementarianism is sufficiently culturally needed.
We can’t flinch from this one. When people say, “Why is complementarianism so important?” I don’t think the place to begin is with complementarianism. The place to begin is marriage. It may be worse in North America. I don’t know enough of Australian statistics, but I suspect that they’re not that far off. In many of the cities of North America, 67 to 70 percent of children are born into single-parent families. The social ravages are past finding out, and we will reap that harvest for decades.
When the gospel is planted in our inner cities, one of the things that the gospel must do is plant homes with daddies and mummies and children. Don’t tell me about your rights until we get the family right again! That means, as often as not, that I’m far more concerned in any inner-city church plants about what the father is doing, or even where he is.
I don’t want complementarianism to be a movement whose basic one-note song is, “No! No! No!” as if complementarians essentially try to be cosmic party poopers. Rather, the priority should be, “How do you build a Christian family?” I’m looking for dads who do not exasperate their children and who bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I’m looking for fathers who love their wives as Christ loved the church, which means self-sacrificially, for her good.
I want to know, men, when you’re exercising your church-planting ministry, what you are doing self-sacrificially for your wife’s good, as a matter of priority in your life. Otherwise, you are defying almighty God. I want to see adults not viewing children as a massive inconvenience to their lifestyle but as an inheritance from the Lord. Within that framework, I’m happy to talk about complementarianism, but those planks need to get laid down first.
Moreover, even at the pragmatic level, I do worry (perhaps more than I should) about the feminization of the church. Let me feed in a bit of background. I’m speaking, in part, out of the fact that I was brought up in French Canada, which is off the charts a different culture. When missionaries went out in the mid-nineteenth century, the mid-1800s, they went out either as single men or as couples. The odd single woman went out but always attached to a couple.
Missionaries under SIM going to Central Africa were required to go as single men for a whole year. If they survived that year, then they could bring out their wife or the woman who would become their wife. One-third of them automatically died from disease. In some countries, they brought their caskets with them just in case.
Suddenly, we find ourselves in a world where something like two-thirds of world missionaries are women. How did that happen? It happened for a lot of reasons. It happened, for a start, out of World War I, where we mowed down approximately 10 million men, which meant that there were 10 million women who didn’t have spouses. Then we did it again in World War II.
Moreover, in North America, which began to influence a lot of other parts of worlds, our strategies for evangelism were often bound up with the Sunday school and with women. The theory was that you get the children and their mummies are going to come, and that will bring their daddies too. So you go after children first, and then you go after women.
The women have women’s Bible studies because, in those days, most women didn’t work outside the home. So they were the free ones to do this and that and the other. So you had women’s Bible studies, women’s evangelistic outreaches, women’s sewing clubs, and women’s mission clubs. What do you have for the men? The monthly deacons’ meeting.
I remember, when I was a student at seminary in Toronto many moons ago, somebody saying with a straight face, “Research shows that you’re far more likely to become a Christian if you’re under the age of 18; therefore, it’s important to focus most of our evangelistic efforts on people under the age of 18.” I’m Reformed. Is God unable to convert people who are older? Is the gospel so weak that you have to be under 18, very malleable, a bit emotionally unstable, and still sorting things out before God can save you?
Even more importantly, I was brought up in Quebec, which in those days (not today, but in those days) was an extraordinarily patriarchal society. You couldn’t get the kids. You couldn’t get the wives. If you did get the men, then you got the men, the wives, the children, and the pocketbook. Nobody did evangelism going after women first or going after children first. Nobody. It didn’t work.
Then so little happened in Quebec that as recently as 1972 there were only 35 evangelical churches of any description in a population of 6 million people. Between 1972 and 1980, we grew from 35 churches to 500, and the growth was overwhelmingly in young men. During that time, 70 to 80 percent of the new converts were young men, whereas, in many churches that I visit in the Western world, the overwhelming majority of Christians are young women.
In other words … because we have had false strategies of evangelism, false priorities, dangers, and the impact of two world wars … we’ve moved into structures of things that take us away from what is straightforwardly there in the text and then try to justify it after the fact. It’s just so messy. I want to argue that complementarianism is a needed stake in the ground today, not in and of itself but as part and parcel of bowing to Scripture on what the family is and how authority structures work in the church.
Secondarily, it is a hermeneutical issue. If you find your interpretative principles so flexible and so elastic that you can get around all of these texts which, as far as I can see, are really far more straightforward than people think, then I can’t see why you cannot use the same hermeneutical arguments to justify, likewise, homosexuality and its practice. Now I mention that word and, immediately, I have to put in a whole lot of caveats today because sensitivities are so high.
I do not think that homosexuality is the worst sin or that it’s the sin against the Holy Spirit. I think distinctions have to be made between homosexual desires and homosexual practice. I am sure that the discussions about the causes of homosexuality, which are almost never portrayed fairly in the media, are very complex indeed. When I have seen homosexuals converted (and I have seen quite a lot of them converted), a very small percentage actually reorient and become heterosexual, but it’s a very small percentage. Rather, other things happen.
By American government standards, 80 to 87 percent of male homosexuals are bisexual. When some of them get converted … if they are well discipled and disciplined, if family life is modeled, and if there is a very sympathetic and understanding woman … sometimes they get married, have children, and have happy marriages, even while they will still tell you that when they are tempted to a dirty fantasy life it’s a homosexual dirty fantasy life. These issues are very complex.
Others are entirely homosexual. When they get converted, their orientation does not change, but they decide that their self-identity is not their sexuality. Their self-identity is Christ, so they will be celibate for Jesus’ sake. All those things have to be addressed. They are complicated. They are sensitive in our age where we’re far more interested in talking about tolerance and intolerance than dealing with the fundamentals of human nature.
But the hermeneutical issue that troubles me is that if we are hermeneutically sloppy on the passages that deal with man-woman relationships, for the life of me I cannot see where there’s a hermeneutical barrier to being equally sloppy on the next stage. Then where do we go from here? Pedophilia?
No. The reason this sort of thing has become a touchstone in our churches is not because there are a lot of cranky old men that are just trying to say, “No.” It’s because sooner or later, you have to address the question.… Will we live under the authority of the Word of God or not? There are transparent implications that flow out of this, of course.
If the definition I have given you is a fair summary, the church-recognized teaching authority over men is forbidden the woman. If that is a fair summary of the church side of the matter, it doesn’t rule out a Priscilla and an Aquila helping Apollos to get his theology straight, but it does rule out a woman being a pastor-elder-bishop because part of what defines that job is the authority to teach. Moreover, I would insist that once you have established the principle, the outworking in practice might be quite diverse.
That is, there are complementarians and there are complementarians. There are complementarians who are very restrictive, indeed. Others will allow, for example, on occasion, a woman to speak from a pulpit so long as she’s under the authority of the senior pastor, or something along those lines. I think some of it is a bit equivocal, but I won’t have a heart attack over it provided that the hard cases are not being used to undermine the point. As in law, so in theology.
Just as hard cases make bad law, hard cases make bad theology. If you say that a woman is not allowed to have a church-recognized teaching authority over men. Okay, how about children then? How about children who are fifteen? Sixteen? Seventeen? How about eighteen? Eighteen and a half? Nineteen? How about twenty and a half? Twenty-one? Oh, no, not twenty-one. No, no. How about twenty and a half?
Gradually, you see, the hard cases can be used to say, “Well, if you can’t really decide that issue, then good grief, the whole point is rather stupid. Why make such a big deal of it?” Thus, the hard cases are being used to undermine the principle. If you want to argue about the hard cases, God bless you. Go in peace, so long as you’re not using the hard cases to undermine the principle.
I’m prepared to be quite flexible on the outworking of these things so long as the principle is there. That is, God’s Word does make a distinction in roles in two domains between men and women: in the home and in the authority structure of the local church.
I’m happy, on another occasion, to tell you how I would adjudicate this or that or the other, but I want to make sure that my adjudication and my judgment on the matter is based on what I described last night as prudential wisdom rather than on the authority of the Word of God. In other words, do not make hard cases undermine the Word of God.
Finally, if this is, in truth, what God’s Word says then it is, to use the title of Claire Smith’s book, God’s good design. It is not to be fought against; it is to be rejoiced in. It is to be worked out. It is to be cherished, defended, and lived out with pleasure, because God knows the end from the beginning. He knows what is really good.
It does not justify men becoming exploitative. It does not justify women becoming mice. It doesn’t stop Hanna Gray from being president of the University of Chicago. But it does seek to restore the family to the church, to the home, to the culture, and to society. It does seek to call men to be men in a biblically defined notion of manhood that includes compassion and gentleness and the love of Christ, who sacrifices himself for others.
It calls women to be women, including the kind of woman who was described in Proverbs 31, who sells real estate, runs a farm, and orders the household. We were talking earlier about patrons. One of Whitefield’s great patrons was the Countess of Huntingdon, without which, humanly speaking, there would have been a great deal less fruit in the Evangelical Awakening. Let me pray, and then I’ll ask the powers that be if we have time for questions. Let us pray.
Lord God, where we are wrong in our understanding of texts, correct us. Where we are wrong in attitude, enable us to see it and repent. Where we are fudging with the evidence, grant us a passion for submitting to your most Holy Word. And grant that, in our generation, young men and young women will rise again with a joyful determination to submit to the whole counsel of God. In Jesus’ name, amen.
