Back in 2019’s newsletter #30 I wrote an article about why I thought the “complementarian” gender system of evangelicalism was dying. (Note: complementarianism and egalitarianism are defined at the end of this article). I noted that it is a theological and ministry approach largely developed by a specific generational cohort - the early half of the Baby Boomers - and that it is tuned to their sensibilities and the specific circumstances of the era in which it was developed in the late 70s through the early 90s. Sociologist James Davison Hunter accurately categorized it as a third way movement in his 1987 book
How does one square either of these approaches to sex roles with actual scripture? The Word of God.
The bible clearly says that the woman was created for the benefit of man, not the other way around.
Also, how would you square either of these philosophies with what we see in life? Is there any evidence that if women were in charge we would be better off? No, what we have seen is women tend to behave and act and think emotionally. All the honest evidence points to the fact that women cannot in fact survive or thrive without a man, but man can and often does survive and thrive without a woman. It isn't God's best way but it can be done.
One example of this is how well children do in single parent homes. In a home headed by a woman both sexes of children have vastly reduced outcomes in all sort of ways; educationally, income, early and pronounced promiscuity in females, much higher incarceration rates for males and on and on. On the other hand, in a home headed by a man, while the trend is still in the same direction for both sexes, it is not NEARLY as pronounced.
Were it not for civilization, which btw, is not the default for most of human history and is a recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of history, women would become nothing more than a man's property were it not for a man protecting his own wife. I would remind you that civilization is only 9 missed meals from melting away. Something I think we will see within the next 10 or 15 years.
Finally, let's go all the way back to the curse from the first sin. God admonished Eve directly and told her that she will have pain in child birth AND, AND (this one isn't preached on much these days) and I quote from the Holman Standard Version of the bible, Genesis 3:16 "Your desire will be for your husband, YET HE WILL DOMINATE YOU."
Now this part is gonna really make some folks angry and you will likely NEVER hear this preached from an Evangelical pulpit. When God admonished Adam he was scolded FOR LISTENING TO HIS WIFE!!! Genesis 3:17 "And he said to Adam, "Because you have listened to your wife's voice and ate from the tree...""
So, while men and women do in fact have differing and often complementary characteristics; women tend to be more nurturing and men better disciplinarians, for example, this does not mean they are "equal" in how the home is ordered. At least not according to how God ordered the world and according to the evidence.
Feb 16, 2023·edited Mar 14, 2023Liked by Aaron M. Renn
The decline of natural law thinking in Protestant circles has led to the split between the thick and thin complementarians. If you believe that God ordained a natural order that included male leadership/headship, going back to Adam in Eden, as hinted at by Paul and believed by every Jew and Christian from antiquity to beyond the first century, then thick complementarianism is easy to arrive at.
If you do not believe in such a natural order in creation, then the male leadership passages in the New Testament are a mystery. For conservative evangelicals, you must submit to the authority of scripture, but it is a mystery why those passages exist. Thus you get the minimal submission to narrowly-interpreted passages that defines thin complementarianism. "I don't understand why God did this, but there it is in the text, so gotta obey it. But every church role not explicitly referenced in those passages is open to women."
Note that there are also thick complementarians who do not articulate a natural law understanding of male and female, and they tend to be weak apologists for their own position as a result. This can be read as a rephrasing of Aaron's critique of complementarianism from newsletter #30: People who are somewhat on the right track, Biblically, but whose rhetoric is not what you would have gotten from an apostle in the first century who was asked to explain WHY. Rather, they try to explain using the rhetoric of our times, in which natural law is not employed.
(As an aside, the universal belief among Christians and Jews in the first century of a natural order of male and female in creation is one reason that we don't have more New Testament passages addressing male leadership in the congregation. The natural creation order was the water they swam in and needed explaining only if an aberration arose somewhere. The small number of passages itself presents an opportunity for egalitarian reinterpretations.)
Implicit in the article is the evolution in the viewpoint that various individuals and religious groups hold regarding sex roles. In this age of ever-expanding choices, it seems natural for religious principles to evolve. Pastors understandably want to relate well to their parishioners, and so many come to view it as a virtue to be able to please or at least placate their parishioners and followers. Being well-liked and not rocking the boat are seen as an opportunity to more effectively preach Biblical truth. But by degrees, being well-received can become more important. And to be sure, being well-liked does lead to various career advantages. Who wants to be a pariah? Eventually the original message may become unrecognizable and perhaps even transmutes into its direct opposite. But the pastor is the surfing the wave of the times! So much for his calling.
So I deplore this evolution in viewpoint. The only orthodox (correct) Biblical viewpoint is the "thick complementarianism" described in the article. Pastors and theologians must have the guts and wisdom to preach it to the world, even though today it means directly contradicting worldly viewpoints on gender roles. As King David said, "I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness." Those who preach the truth may end up as doorkeepers, but they will keep out of the tents of the wicked. Evil will always reject Biblical truth, even if it is a weakened form of the truth, so it is better to deliver the medicine full dose so that those few who accept it will get the benefit. It's OK to mix a little sugar with it, but the medicine has to be there full strength. It works miracles in people's broken lives.
Setting aside for a moment the question of whether egalitarianism (and specifically female pastors) is itself permitted by Scripture, I have to wonder if something resembling orthodoxy can be preserved under female pastors, or if every church led by women is doomed to be in some state of collapse and/or egregious heresy. The verdict so far hasn't been good, though it could be argued that wasn't the fault of women per se and what happened to the Mainline would have happened with or without female leadership.
My personal feeling is that the very idea of preserving a countercultural orthodoxy is fundamentally masculine, and women rely normally on the cues of men they respect if they're to remain committed to it. If men and women are equally prone to sin, and the sins towards which men are more prone are obvious and well-known, I think that one sin towards which women are more prone is conformity to the world, its fashions and ways of thinking.
But this generation will be interesting, as more groups theoretically committed to orthodoxy, including the conservative Methodist remnant, are permitting female pastors. I don't really wish them ill and hope that they can continue preserving more of the true Gospel than the Mainlines have managed.
2.
It's very difficult to arrive at an ideal arrangement of relations between the sexes by arguing from first principles. If you scrutinize highly patriarchal cultures closely, it seems that women in practice always have more power and privileges than they do in theory. Power always works this way, just as the Czar and Autocrat of all the Russias by the Grace of God was in practice a politician, albeit a very powerful one, who had to conform to political realities or risk being gunned down with his wife and children in a Siberian basement.
Women's power has increased primarily as a result of organic and practical processes and not as a result of new developments in social theory. But our current arrangement isn't sustainable, and the culture that follows ours will surely be capable of achieving a TFR of 3+. I'm not quite sure how relations between the sexes will look in that culture, but I'm confident it will be different than the present moment.
How does one square either of these approaches to sex roles with actual scripture? The Word of God.
The bible clearly says that the woman was created for the benefit of man, not the other way around.
Also, how would you square either of these philosophies with what we see in life? Is there any evidence that if women were in charge we would be better off? No, what we have seen is women tend to behave and act and think emotionally. All the honest evidence points to the fact that women cannot in fact survive or thrive without a man, but man can and often does survive and thrive without a woman. It isn't God's best way but it can be done.
One example of this is how well children do in single parent homes. In a home headed by a woman both sexes of children have vastly reduced outcomes in all sort of ways; educationally, income, early and pronounced promiscuity in females, much higher incarceration rates for males and on and on. On the other hand, in a home headed by a man, while the trend is still in the same direction for both sexes, it is not NEARLY as pronounced.
Were it not for civilization, which btw, is not the default for most of human history and is a recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of history, women would become nothing more than a man's property were it not for a man protecting his own wife. I would remind you that civilization is only 9 missed meals from melting away. Something I think we will see within the next 10 or 15 years.
Finally, let's go all the way back to the curse from the first sin. God admonished Eve directly and told her that she will have pain in child birth AND, AND (this one isn't preached on much these days) and I quote from the Holman Standard Version of the bible, Genesis 3:16 "Your desire will be for your husband, YET HE WILL DOMINATE YOU."
Now this part is gonna really make some folks angry and you will likely NEVER hear this preached from an Evangelical pulpit. When God admonished Adam he was scolded FOR LISTENING TO HIS WIFE!!! Genesis 3:17 "And he said to Adam, "Because you have listened to your wife's voice and ate from the tree...""
So, while men and women do in fact have differing and often complementary characteristics; women tend to be more nurturing and men better disciplinarians, for example, this does not mean they are "equal" in how the home is ordered. At least not according to how God ordered the world and according to the evidence.
The truth is rarely popular and often reviled.
The decline of natural law thinking in Protestant circles has led to the split between the thick and thin complementarians. If you believe that God ordained a natural order that included male leadership/headship, going back to Adam in Eden, as hinted at by Paul and believed by every Jew and Christian from antiquity to beyond the first century, then thick complementarianism is easy to arrive at.
If you do not believe in such a natural order in creation, then the male leadership passages in the New Testament are a mystery. For conservative evangelicals, you must submit to the authority of scripture, but it is a mystery why those passages exist. Thus you get the minimal submission to narrowly-interpreted passages that defines thin complementarianism. "I don't understand why God did this, but there it is in the text, so gotta obey it. But every church role not explicitly referenced in those passages is open to women."
Note that there are also thick complementarians who do not articulate a natural law understanding of male and female, and they tend to be weak apologists for their own position as a result. This can be read as a rephrasing of Aaron's critique of complementarianism from newsletter #30: People who are somewhat on the right track, Biblically, but whose rhetoric is not what you would have gotten from an apostle in the first century who was asked to explain WHY. Rather, they try to explain using the rhetoric of our times, in which natural law is not employed.
(As an aside, the universal belief among Christians and Jews in the first century of a natural order of male and female in creation is one reason that we don't have more New Testament passages addressing male leadership in the congregation. The natural creation order was the water they swam in and needed explaining only if an aberration arose somewhere. The small number of passages itself presents an opportunity for egalitarian reinterpretations.)
I appreciate the insightful analysis.
Implicit in the article is the evolution in the viewpoint that various individuals and religious groups hold regarding sex roles. In this age of ever-expanding choices, it seems natural for religious principles to evolve. Pastors understandably want to relate well to their parishioners, and so many come to view it as a virtue to be able to please or at least placate their parishioners and followers. Being well-liked and not rocking the boat are seen as an opportunity to more effectively preach Biblical truth. But by degrees, being well-received can become more important. And to be sure, being well-liked does lead to various career advantages. Who wants to be a pariah? Eventually the original message may become unrecognizable and perhaps even transmutes into its direct opposite. But the pastor is the surfing the wave of the times! So much for his calling.
So I deplore this evolution in viewpoint. The only orthodox (correct) Biblical viewpoint is the "thick complementarianism" described in the article. Pastors and theologians must have the guts and wisdom to preach it to the world, even though today it means directly contradicting worldly viewpoints on gender roles. As King David said, "I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness." Those who preach the truth may end up as doorkeepers, but they will keep out of the tents of the wicked. Evil will always reject Biblical truth, even if it is a weakened form of the truth, so it is better to deliver the medicine full dose so that those few who accept it will get the benefit. It's OK to mix a little sugar with it, but the medicine has to be there full strength. It works miracles in people's broken lives.
1.
Setting aside for a moment the question of whether egalitarianism (and specifically female pastors) is itself permitted by Scripture, I have to wonder if something resembling orthodoxy can be preserved under female pastors, or if every church led by women is doomed to be in some state of collapse and/or egregious heresy. The verdict so far hasn't been good, though it could be argued that wasn't the fault of women per se and what happened to the Mainline would have happened with or without female leadership.
My personal feeling is that the very idea of preserving a countercultural orthodoxy is fundamentally masculine, and women rely normally on the cues of men they respect if they're to remain committed to it. If men and women are equally prone to sin, and the sins towards which men are more prone are obvious and well-known, I think that one sin towards which women are more prone is conformity to the world, its fashions and ways of thinking.
But this generation will be interesting, as more groups theoretically committed to orthodoxy, including the conservative Methodist remnant, are permitting female pastors. I don't really wish them ill and hope that they can continue preserving more of the true Gospel than the Mainlines have managed.
2.
It's very difficult to arrive at an ideal arrangement of relations between the sexes by arguing from first principles. If you scrutinize highly patriarchal cultures closely, it seems that women in practice always have more power and privileges than they do in theory. Power always works this way, just as the Czar and Autocrat of all the Russias by the Grace of God was in practice a politician, albeit a very powerful one, who had to conform to political realities or risk being gunned down with his wife and children in a Siberian basement.
Women's power has increased primarily as a result of organic and practical processes and not as a result of new developments in social theory. But our current arrangement isn't sustainable, and the culture that follows ours will surely be capable of achieving a TFR of 3+. I'm not quite sure how relations between the sexes will look in that culture, but I'm confident it will be different than the present moment.