This is the first post in Mark Baddeley’s series on complementarianism and egalitarianism. (Read parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.)
As I write this it looks overwhelmingly likely that the Church of England will embrace women bishops and—despite commitments made when women priests were introduced—will introduce women bishops without any structural solutions for those who disagree with the change. A structural separation is imminent. Those opposed to women’s ordination—conservative evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics—will leave the Church of England (unless they find a technically illegal mechanism to stay in, such as consecrate their own bishops, who would be Anglican but not Church of England). Consequently, the Church of England will be composed almost entirely by those who agree with, and support, the ordination of women and their role as bishops. Similar moves are afoot in other denominations in different parts of the world.
I suggest that this means we have reached the next stage of the debate on women’s ordination—separation into separate churches and religious institutions making rival claims. For most of us it will be far less emotionally distressing than the brutal years of open and sustained personal debate that occurred two decades or more ago. Unless we happen to be the one on the wrong side as the institution we are in moves the other way, it is all going to seem a bit removed. Nonetheless, this next stage is going to be far more significant in its consequences than those bruising debates ever were.
Supporters of women’s ordination are almost always egalitarian. That means they believe that authority and necessary submission cannot coexist with genuine equality. If I have to submit to you, it can only be because I am inferior to you. Genuine authority must, in some sense, be based upon merit—upon something superior in the person wielding the authority. The only exceptions to this are when the submission is voluntary—when there is no obligation upon the person submitting to do so, or when the submission is mutual—when both parties submit to each other in a give-and-take situation like two friends.
Opponents of women’s ordination are usually complementarian. They hold that genuine authority and genuine equality can go together. While I may have to submit to the prime minister or to a police officer, I am not in any essential way inferior to either—in law, in personal qualities, or in my essential humanity. Genuine authority in a specific relationship can coexist with genuine equality of persons.
This is one of the key issues that is at stake in the contemporary debate over women’s ordination. If women cannot wield authority over men in the context of church, and if in a marriage a woman must be under the authority of a man, then, so it is argued by proponents of women’s ordination, women must be substantially and significantly inferior to men. There can be no other reason for necessary submission than essential inferiority. This is the issue and it means that the debate over women’s ordination is playing for very, very high stakes.
For their part, egalitarians see complementarians as guilty of a kind of gender-based apartheid, of chauvinism or even misogyny towards women that prevents women from blossoming, channels them away from genuine power and influence, and sets up permanent structures that make abuse more likely. For the egalitarian, complementarians believe (either knowingly or unknowingly) that women are inferior to men by virtue of being women, but try to hide this with a claim that someone can be both inferior and equal at the same time. For the egalitarian, the complementarian position that authority and equality can coexist is incoherent.
Further, for the egalitarian, the complementarian practice of keeping women subject to men is a denial of the gospel. For the egalitarian, the gospel is given to redeem us from sin—and oppressive relationships are an expression of sin. Christ died to bring us into the genuine freedom of equality—the freedom of the children of God. For the genuine egalitarian, women’s ordination is a gospel matter—it is a way of showing how the gospel transforms sinful patterns of male-female relationships. Convinced egalitarians do not merely believe that women may or can have authority over men but that they should or must. To deny women this opportunity is to sin against the face of God.
It should be observed that some supporters of women’s ordination will not recognize themselves in this description—you support it, but do not see the issue as commanding this kind of absolute right/wrong loyalty. You think it would be good if women had authority, but it’s not a great sin if they are excluded from such roles. For you, unity or the cause of the gospel trumps opening up public ministry roles to women. For you it’s more of that women may have such roles rather than that they should or even must. If that’s the case, then you might still find some of the discussion over this series of posts helpful to understand the bigger debate into which you fit, but you aren’t really at the centre of what’s being looked at.
This was a great introduction to the important issue in many churches.
This article already heightened my senses and understanding surrounding the issue.
I’m looking forward to the coming articles in this series.
Thank you.
Thanks for a great start to this series. Very much looking forward to it!
It might be worth also noting that there are terminological changes in the wind. I think that CBE International is moving away from the term ‘egalitarian’ and towards ‘complementarity without hierarchy’. An example of this is from the CBE website here: http://www.cbeinternational.org/?q=content/i-believe-male-headship
*Sigh* Not again. Why must people feel the need to take terminology from each other? I fear that “complementarian” may well meet the same fate as “fundamentalist” or “evangelical” and end up with all sorts of inappropriate connotations (and even denotations), or no meaning at all.
Nevertheless, thanks for the introduction, Mark! I eagerly await your next article.
Thank you for the feedback guys, and glad the first post has been useful. I’m going to try a couple of slightly different things this time around.
There’ll only be one post per week on this series – going up (I think) on Wednesday’s.
I’ve tried to keep the posts to around 800 words or so – by cutting some posts in half, so some posts don’t have the usual introduction and rounding off at the end; they just start and stop.
And, a bit like the repentance and forgiveness series we’ll do things ‘backwards’ – there we started with the pastoral and concluded with God’s forgiveness of us. Here we’ll start with the political dimension over two series this year, and tackle the underlying theological and ethical issues next year.
Thanks for the reminder about nomenclature Mark. I had noticed a couple of attempts to try and redefine the names along the lines you indicate. I’m not sure how successful it’ll be – saying “I’m a complementarian-without-heirachy” works okay as a quick description, but I suspect it’s too long and complex to work well as a name in English.
A bit like Alex, my natural instincts are to be suspicious – there’s a lot of attempts today to try and win the argument just by controlling the name used – prostitute rather than sex worker, boat people rather than asylum seeker, anti-abortion rather than pro-life.
The fact that egalitarians want to not just name themselves, but name their opponents as well – describing us as ‘complementarians-with-heirachy’, does suggest an attempt to control the terms of the debate, rather than just find relatively neutral labels that distinguish what is the distinctive emphasis of each side in relation to the other – which is what ‘egalitarian’ and complementarian’ (or even ‘patriachy’) did: made it clear what was the key concern of the two sides. That is, the new terms look more like polemics than information.
Why not pick terms like, “complementarians without authority” and “complementarians with authority”? Or “complementarians with only mutual submission” and “complementarians with different kinds of submission”? Both of those would seem to be descriptions of what Belizikian is trying to argue in the short article you linked – headship with no authority, and a submission that is only mutual submission. One suspects an attempt to trade on a certain negative association with ‘hierarchy’ in their choice of names.
But debates, and names, are funny things. Sometimes (not always), a debate changes one or both sides as they try and take account of criticisms coming from their debating partners. Sometimes that pushes them further off in the direction they were going. But sometimes it pulls them back.
A recurring feature of egalitarian writings has been lots of a strong statements that men and women need to be treated the same if they are to be treated equally, and strong statements that anything one can do (apart from plumbing and reproduction) the other can. They hate being accused of ‘adrogyny’ (and I don’t blame them) – but they have rarely said at length what is different about being a man to a woman other than plumbing and reproduction, about being a husband than a wife, a father than a mother etc. The emphasis on treating both genders the same seems to have made it hard for them to say positively anything about the differences.
It is possible that taking on this new name could either be a sign of a change in that, or even be the stimulus for it. And that could only be a good thing. If egalitarians start talking about the differences between the genders and how that shapes their roles in families and church, then that could only be a positive step forward, and might prepare the ground for other positive steps forward.
But if it’s just a cheap rhetorical trick – of trying to claim a concern for complementarity between genders while continuing to only stress their interchangeability – then it’ll hurt them long term by undercutting their integrity.
If anyone living in Melbourne is interested in thinking through this topic further, there is going to be a conference on the 23rd of October (Saturday). The conference is taking a complementarian perspective and is open to Christians of all denominations. There will be 3 speakers, a question time and a bookstall.
See
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=107929022590709
http://www.equalandcomplementary.org
Thanks Mark!!
I just wanted to point out some recent comments made by Julia Baird in regards to the church and women. She was commenting in “Sunday Life” (Oct 3) about the recent success of “Eat,Pray,Love” among women. She begins with a general observation that women are more religious than men. And then discusses the unhappy influence the church has had on women. She says, “…many of the churches they (that is women) devoted themselves to denied them equality, and treated them as inferior when it came to matters of spiritual discernment, and did not allow them to teach, or interpret, God’s word.” Also, “it would be glib to dismiss this real desire for answers, for a peace or spirituality that does not force women to repress their feelings, or to be obedient to men in an awkward and archaic heirarchy.”
It seems that the simple point she is trying to make is that women will not find true purpose and meaning and fulfillment in church, that can only lead to unhappiness.
Hi Jereth,
Glad to be able to provide a ‘space’ for your plug, the speaker line-up looks great. Do you know what is being covered?
Hi Steven,
Great to have your thoughtful contribution once again, mate.
I think your assessment of the basic point sounds like a reasonable conclusion from what you’ve quoted.
I’ve been kicking the quote around in my head the last day or two and it generated a couple of thoughts, which I’ll share in order to continue my usual practice of making what you’ve made simple and clear into something far more complicated
:
1. Unless the person offering a basically universal claim on the basis of experience is a social scientist with a long track record of lack of bias, and is pointing to the large range of studies that back their conclusions, take out the implied ‘all’ and replace it with ‘some’.
This is particularly the case if it is the experience of men, women, children, orangatans etc. in English speaking western countries. We are quite tribalised – generationally, along the lines of the ‘culture wars’, by education and wealth, by our family situation, and so experiences of some rarely flow out beyond our demographic.
Usually all we can speak for is ‘this is my experience, and it’s the experience of others who have had the same experience that I’ve had’ – and we have little idea how large that latter group is.
So, I’m quite sure that some (a few, many, most?) women experience what has been quoted. I’m quite sure that some men (a significantly smaller percentage than with the women) feel that on behalf of women and that is the genuine reason why they stop coming to church. But I’m also quite sure that some ( a few, many, most?) women have the opposite experience – they want men to get their act together and step up to the plate and take the responsibility, and don’t want women running the show (not all women are sympathetic to feminism, not even all highly intelligent, competent and assertive women are sympathetic to feminism). I’m also sure that some women don’t care either way.
And I’m sure that some women who are married, quite happily belong to churches which are male dominated even if they’d personally rather go to a church that wasn’t, if they judge that that is more likely to help their husband be actively involved (which some studies seem to suggest is the case, which I’ll look at next year, and touch on below). And that this latter experience is especially pronounced when there’s children in the marriage, as I suspect most mums suspect what a recent study I saw indicated – that dad’s active involvement in church is the single biggest indicator of the children’s active involvement when they grow up. Many women do things for their partner that they have little personal preference for, and many parents make decisions for their children that they wouldn’t if they were single and childless. Those shouldn’t be just treated as a sign of weakness, it needs some honour as well.
Experience of moderns is quite broad. You’re likely to hear one from a journalist, another from someone attending EQUIP, and another having a cuppa with a cheerful woman at church whose biggest concern in life is to see her children grow up to know and love the Lord and who isn’t all that interested in doctrine.
2. The two basic errors to make with people’s report of their experience is to either treat that as a self-authorising authority (like liberalism, Pentecostalism, and pragmatism all have a tendency to do), or to ignore it completely as irrelevant.
We need to have the willingness to say, “We aren’t changing a thing because of your experience.” Experience, on its own, is not sufficient to justify behaviour or belief – the experience has to be interpreted.
Part of being a well-functioning adult is to say, “This is my experience, but I know that at this point my experience is wrong/unhelpful/problematic, and so I’ll overrule it and act against my experience.” And to know when to say that and when to say, “This is my experience, and that is telling me something about how the world really is.”
But we shouldn’t ignore people’s experience either, even if we conclude it’s not a basis for action or belief. Their experience shapes the context in which our ministry occurs. And so thought needs to be given to how we minister in light of that experience.
to be concluded
concluding
Tony Payne had a typical astute and efficient observation on this http://solapanel.org/article/self-knowledge_godliness_and_ministry_part_1/#3893 :
Which I think is touching on one of the most important issues at present – how to be genuinely and robustly theologicaly drivien, and yet not dismissive of people’s experience: to be able to avoid both treating experience as an authority, and also just dismissing it. To be open to the world, but to be so as one who is under the Lordship of Christ, and who trembles at his word.
How complementarians go about doing church and family in light of the experience of some/many women that you’ve quoted is then an important issue in its own right.
Depending on other factors you have at work, you’ll do everthing from bend over backwards to make the complementarianism as ‘lite’ as possible, through to making no allowance for it (because to make allowances for it will create structures that socially reinforce that experience and trap people in it), through to taking on that experience directly and calling on people to repent, not just of egalitarian views, but of their experience of alienation from male authority as in itself an expression of a willed sinfulness.
And that’s a whole big issue that I’d like to make a blog series itself some day – possibly using complementarianism and how it should work in practice as the ‘worked example’. Those ‘other factors’ are important and can lead people with the same views on paper to very different praxis – so they’re an important topic.
3. I had a wry chuckle that the fact that women are more religious than men is the starting point of the discussion.
Up until women were allowed in universities, and universities became places more welcoming to women, it was often claimed that men were more intelligent than women, more given to abstract thought than women etc, etc. As it turned out, it had less to do with gender, and more to do with social structures being set up in a way that preferenced one gender over the other.
There’s just something odd about people with feminist sympathies running an argument that feminism itself disproved, and which it devestatingly disproved. What feminism has taught us is, if men are less religious, that probably says less about men and more about organised religion being structured in a way that alienates men.
And I’ll definitely be trying to look at that issue next year as well. I think it could be argued that the push for women’s ordination is the final stage in making church almost overwhelmingly the sphere of women only (not that that’s the intent, simply the outcome). People go, “women are more religious so, as the main stakeholders it should reflect their experience”, when feminism taught us to say, “we need to change the institution to preference the underrepresented gender.”
At present, it seems that where a social sphere becomes female dominant, men leave it as not ‘men’s business’ and, so far, rarely return. When faced with this, people usually either deny the dynamic, or say something like, “That just shows how misogynist men are and we don’t want men like that in our churches.”
But I think it’s a factor that has to be weighed very seriously. We have two experiences here (I’ve said there’s more, but let’s simplify): women who speak up and say that they are alienated from male dominated churches, and men who don’t speak up but just switch off from churches that have been becoming far more feminine over the last couple of centuries, and especially over the last century and vote with their feet without ever articulating why. Neither experience is an authority, but neither should be dismissed either.
And for those with an eye to the two genders and their idiosyncrasies, there’s something whimsical about women speaking up, leaving, and continuing to speak up, and men just leaving without ever letting anyone know (or even giving it much thought, just deciding they’d rather go and watch sports).
I’d like to make a couple of comments on what’s now a fairly long set of blogs.
Mark suggests egalitarians are worried because complementarianism “channels them away from genuine power and influence” but it seems to me that it’s mostly complementarians who are talking about power. Where I come from egalitarians are mostly interested in opportunity for service and use of gifts.
My second comment relates to the question of sameness and difference: “they have rarely said at length what is different about being a man to a woman other than plumbing and reproduction.” I’n sure there are some very good female plumbers around, but that’s probably not what Mark meant. It’s a good question but too often the answer is assumed without thought. When we read in 1 Cor 12 that the Holy Spirit gives gifts, I don’t find any reference to gender. In fact in the previous chapter it’s quite clear that the Holy Spirit gives the gift of Prophecy – i.e. speaking with the authority of God, as I understand it, to women. So should the difference between a man and a woman impact on their use of the Spirit’s gifts except in so far as their human differences may affect how those gifts are expressed? But then again, the way I express the gifts of the Spirit in leading or teaching or preaching are very much different to others I know. In fact Doesn’t 1 Cor 12 teach that all gifts are meant to be complementary.
Finally on terminology I agree we need to watch the shift of words but it does become difficult when egalitarians want to teach complementarity albeit independent of gender. And is it possible that complementarians are really teaching a form of subordinationism? Should they be called subordinationists?
Hi Chris,
Welcome along, great to have your input.
Well, that’s how it has been put to me by egalitarians.
If not talking about power is due to a total rejection of power in favour of service and use of gifts, then that’s one thing.
But if an interest ‘in opportunity for service and use of gifts’ includes use of power and authority as part of that service and use of gifts at times, then that’s another thing – and not showing much interest in the issue of power and authority might not be so virtuous.
No, probably not. But nicely played nonetheless.
Nicely argued summary of an egalitarian perspective. But it also illustrates my point too.
I said that egalitarians have traditionally had little substantial to say about what’s different about being a man to a woman, a father to a mother, a husband to a wife – the emphasis is on how the two genders are interchangeable. The fact that you’ve responded like this kind of reinforces my point – you ‘defended’ egalitarianism here by arguing that gender has little to do with whether anyone has a particular gift. Which I would generally agree with, but had almost nothing to do with what I said.
Heh. Why not? I think that’s about as neutral and dispassionate a name for ‘my’ side as drawing on your comment in the next post:
To say: “…it does become difficult when complementarians want to teach equality albeit independent of androgyny. And is it possible that egalitarians are really teaching a form of anarchy? Should they be called anarchists?”
I’m reasonably sure that that would not be received as anything other than polemics. I might be thought to be making a fair point or an unfair point, but it’s not really a constructive way forward to the issue of names. And that is, with just a couple of words changed, what you kindly offered us on the issue.
More fundamentally still, ‘subordinationist’ is a Trinitarian term first and foremost in theology. And there is little agreement among patristic scholars, and systematicians, as to how the term should be applied.
I can show you scholars who claim that Irenaeus is not ‘subordinationist’ because, while he says that Son is begotten of the Father, he doesn’t make much of it. Millard Erickson can say the Nicene Creed is subordinationist for teaching that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. Another scholar will say that a figure is not subordinationist because they believe that the Father eternally begot the Son from his being, T.F. Torrance will say that you avoid subordinationism by saying that the Son is begotten from the ousia of the Godhead, not the Father, and Greek Orthodox scholars (and, somewhat anachronistically, Athanasius) will say that only by upholding the eternally begetting of the Son from Father avoids subordinationism.
Other scholars will focus on whether the Son obeys the Father, and in what sense, to make accusations of subordinationism, others find that issue irrelevant to the great Trinitarian debates of the fourth and fifth centuries.
Some scholars think all subordinationism is heresy, some think that there is both an orthodox and heretical version of subordinationism.
It’s one of the most controverted terms I’ve ever encountered in theology, so I don’t think we are really going to shed much light by bringing it into this debate. This debate has enough of those problems all on its own. When it comes time to bring the Trinity in (and I’ll do that next year) it has to be more than just a soundbite.
My raising of 1 Cor 12 was not an attempt to avoid the question of the difference between male and female but to point out that in the economy of God’s people God doesn’t seem to raise it much except in the context a husband and wife perhaps. But even there, when you read Eph 5 it seems to me that Paul takes an existing human social paradigm and rather than reinforce it he actually subverts it by pointing to the way Jesus exercises his position as leader of his people. His service is resisted by Peter, and no doubt the other disciples, but he insists that being a servant and receiving service are essential characteristics of leaders in the church. This doesn’t lead to anarchy because they’re still leaders, but it does turn upside down the prevailing paradigm of authority structures.
As for the different roles of men and women, I think much of our understanding of this difference derives from our human cultural history far more than from our reading of Scripture. As you yourself pointed out, it’s only in the last century that we’ve thought that women were capable of higher learning. Well that’s been proved wrong. I hope we don’t believe that any more. But what’s changed our mind? Is it our Bible Study or the experience of the society we live in. If it wasn’t our Bible Study does that make it any less true?
There was a time when men were the soldiers and women were the one who stayed home and worried. Men used to be the wage earners and women the home makers. Men are tough and women are gentle. These are all stereotypes of difference that are constantly proved wrong or proved to be culturally conditioned. Dare I suggest the same may be true of the idea that men are the leaders and women follow. There are numerous examples in the business and academic world, though probably not enough, where this is patently not the case. There are even a few rare examples in the church where women are doing a great job at leading.
Of course all I’ve done is to argue by negation the difference between men and women. I could suggest that there is indeed difference, in general, in the way women communicate, in the way they network, in the way they exercise control or power in their relationships, in the way they lead, perhaps in some cases in the way they teach, though in the latter two cases often they’re trying to follow a male paradigm through lack of confidence and I find it doesn’t always look right.
The point though is not that women can’t do what men can do. It’s that they do it in a way that can complement what men do. You see egalitarians really are complementarians in that they believe that women can complement men as they lead or teach or minster alongside men.
One other thought that came to me this morning, more a pragmatic argument than one from theology. Your comments about egalitarians becoming liberals is a bit unfair (and perhaps falls in the category of polemic) but there is certainly truth to the notion that more liberals are egalitarian than are evangelicals. In the Anglican Church outside Sydney I actually think we’re losing the battle for the church because we don’t encourage gifted evangelical women to speak out enough. I know in Sydney there are lots of gifted and well taught women who because of the prevailing paradigm are unwilling to speak in public forums where their voice might be heard in a fresh way. In Melbourne, lets face it, we have some men (& yes, women) who I wouldn’t let near a pulpit yet who are now leaders of the church. As they say in the States – do the sums! We actually need gifted evangelical women in leadership in our church to restore the (theological conviction) balance.
Hi Chris,
This is great stuff, and it’s going to generate a bunch of comments in response from me.
I’m really glad you took the time to contribute on the thread – hopefully either you or another egalitarian of your calibre will do the same next year when we move into the substantial theological and ethical issues at stake. That really is going to be a phase when emotions are engaged and there’ll be accusations of caricature flying around, so it would be good to have some conversation partners who can push through and try and say something substantial to each other.
My apologies Chris, I wasn’t trying to accuse you, even by implication, of sneaky tactics, or deliberately avoiding the question. I don’t like playing the man unless the person is making their own behaviour a part of the debate. I was trying to observe that your response particularly if we assume it was a genuine answer to my observation about the lack of saying substantial things about what it means to be a husband compared to a wife, father than a mother, man than a woman (an assumption you and I both think we should make) underlined my point. You responded by saying, in effect, – ‘Gender isn’t that important a topic in the Bible.’
Which was a genuinely good and persuasive (and I mean that – that’s not a bit of rhetorical posturing) egalitarian account in just a couple of lines. But it also demonstrated my point. As soon as I raised the issue that egalitarians don’t have much to say positively about gender roles, you responded by saying that egalitarians don’t think there is much to say positively about gender roles in the Bible.
And that’s happened again in this comment too. You give a bunch of paragraphs setting out really well a bunch of key points from an egalitarian perspective, then you reflect:
To which I think I can only say, “Yep, that’s right.”
And you finish by concluding:
Which I think underlines my original point. What’s different about the two genders? Not what they can do, only how they go about doing it. And I don’t think the Bible has much to say about that ‘how’ – there’s obviously a debate between us as to whether it has much to say about ‘what’ the two genders should do in communities (especially family and church) – but I don’t think anyone thinks the Bible has much to say about modern social science views on differences in how the genders go about doing things.
So, given that egalitarians don’t think the Bible has much to say about ‘what’ and the genders, and no-one thinks it has much to say about ‘how’ and the genders. I think it is fair to say that egalitarians will struggle to give a talk with substantial biblical content on “Being a man of God” and “Being a woman of God”. They’re more likely to just do one talk entitled “Being a person of God.” And ditto for ‘husband/wife’ versus ‘spouse’ and ‘father/mother’ versus ‘parent’.
Now, that’s a significant point. Complementarians see that as a bug in egalitarianism. When we say, ‘equal but different’, part of what’s going on there is that we want to be able to say ‘this is what God says about being a dad, and this is what God says about being a mum’ ‘and both roles have equal value and dignity’, and not only say, ‘this is what God says about being a parent’. It’s a ‘selling point’ to some people that complementarianism can talk substantially about gender roles and give counsel that is concrete and particular to each gender, not simply abstract and universal to both.
to be continued
concluding
In light of all that egalitarians need to either go:
1.“Ah, okay, we have traditionally had a problem here, and complementarians are still basically wrong, but that’s a fair call they make about our historic tendency. We don’t have to keep doing that though, egalitarianism does have the ability to talk substantially and positively about gender differences.” And start to take steps to talk positively about gender differences in a substantial way from the Bible.
2. “Yes, we don’t have much positive to say about gender apart from taking on board modern social science findings about how the genders go about their interchangeable tasks differently. I can see that that will be offputting to some people, but we’ll just have to wear it.” Here it is recognised as a weak point in the view, but all views have weak points somewhere – sometimes all you can do is just acknowledge it.
3. “Yes, we don’t have anything positive to say about gender differences, and that’s how it should be. The Bible leads us to say that gender is not significant to what people do, and so God doesn’t want us giving specific advice to men and women, husbands and wives, he just wants us to address everyone equally with the same instructions. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” Here it is seen as a positive feature, and those who are put off by it need to be shown to see things differently.
That’s my kind of point here.
Obviously I am scoring a point in the observation. I do think it’s a telling problem of egalitarianism that, even some like you Chris, when I raised the issue of gender differences and egalitarianism not saying anything positive twice only talked substantially about gender in the negative twice.
But it’s not purely a point scoring exercise on my part. I genuinely want egalitarianism to hear this complaint and work out where out of 1, 2 and 3 above they think they should go in the future. My hope is you guys consolidate around 1 even though it makes you more vulnerable to complementarianism. My fear is you’ll go for 3 as that is the most logical expression of egalitarianism’s basic convictions.
Obviously those hopes and fears reflect a complementarian view about the importance of gender, but they are still a hope that, even if you continue with a view I think is harmfully wrong, you’ll still take a better path within it, not a worse path within it. But even a worse path is probably better than confusion, is my general view.
Hi Chris,
Picking up a couple of other things you raise:
This is why I think that complementarian concerns about incipient liberalism in egalitarianism are not a caricature. We may be entirely wrong, but I don’t think it’s a caricature.
You said this about women’s intelligence, but the surrounding material showed that it is part of your view generally on this issue – the Church has changed its mind about gender roles because of the experience of the society we live in.
That’s a common argument by egalitarians. They’ll say both ‘I get my view from the Bible’ and ‘We changed our mind because of the experience of the society we live in.’
If you can’t see how that raises the spectre of liberalism for complementarianism – of saying, “the experience of the society we live in, and not our study of the Bible, can change our views about something that the Church believes that the Bible has something to say about” – then there really is a problem here.
What you’ve said here is what any liberal would say on any point in which they have rejected a traditional component of Christian teaching and morality. Miracles, virgin birth, atonement, regeneration, revelation, faith in Christ as the only way to know God, sexuality we hear the argument:
I’m not saying you are a liberal. I’m not saying you will ever become one, nor that anyone under your ministry will ever become one. But if you can’t see how your argument here so very closely parallels a key component of liberalism’s theological method then I’d want to suggest that there may be a blind spot.
Even if you have safeguards that distinguishes your methodology here from that of liberals, you instinctively articulated it in a way that any liberal would say, “Amen brother!” And it’s not an isolated incident: when egalitarians speak about why we should change on gender they often say, “Experience of society has taught us”.
It’s why I think the concern about incipient liberalism is not a caricature but a genuine concern that needs careful discussion so people can see why, when everything is taken into account that people on both sides want to say, it should either be upheld or rejected. We may be wrong in our concern, but the argument here does need some serious discussion.
Now is probably not the best time to have that substantial conversation, I’m sure that there’ll be opportunities next year to cover that issue and the chauvinism/misogyny/oppression charge coming back the other way. All I’m saying here is:
1. I do not believe that you Chris Appleby are a liberal in any sense at all.
2. I think what you’ve said here shows that the concern about egalitarianism and liberalism is not just a caricature but needs to be addressed by both sides with arguments. Egalitarians often appeal to culture to justify the change in Christian thinking, and that method of argumentation is a characteristic usually associated with liberalism.
And that means the concern needs to be addressed and not simply rejected out of hand as a caricature. And I’ll try and set something up for that next year.
Hi Chris,
This quote is the bit that intrigues me the most in what you said, because so much of what I think might be important, and I’m not sure has been discussed much in the debate, is in there, depending on how key words are understood.
Let me offer a tale of two cities – two ways of reading your words here. Because I think this is far more important than the question of what public ministry roles women should have.
1. In Ephesians 5 Paul takes the existing human social paradigm of fathers and children, husbands and wives, and slaves and masters. He doesn’t obliterate it, he leaves the paradigm in place and continues to say that there are fathers and children, husbands and wives, slaves and masters and gives concrete and particular counsel to the various parties that is specific to them. He keeps patterns of authority and necessary submission in place – masters, husbands, and fathers all have authority in their three spheres, and slaves, wives, and children must submit to them and obey them. But Paul points to the example of Jesus and so overturns prevailing paradigm of authority structures – patterns that say that the person under authority serves the person with authority and that the person with authority is fundamentally better than the person subject to them. Instead Paul points to Jesus’ example to say that leader is only given authority to serve the and promote the good of the person under their authority, and there is no fundamental difference in worth between the leader and the follower. This doesn’t lead to anarchy, because they’re still leaders, and exercise authority, but it does radically oveturn human notions that leaders are a better class of human beings than followers.
That is a classic complementarian account of your words.
2. In Ephesians 5 Paul takes the existing human social paradigm of fathers and children, husbands and wives, and slaves and masters. He doesn’t obliterate it, he leaves the paradigm in place but everything he says completely subverts the institution and robs it of any substantial reality. By invoking Jesus’ example of leadership Paul is getting rid of any concept of authority and necessary submission from the relationship of husbands and wives, fathers and children, masters and slaves. He leaves in place a concept of leadership, but it is one based on the model of Jesus, where the leader has rejected authority and where the submission is purely voluntary and in no sense necessary. This doesn’t lead to anarchy (in the sense of confusion and disorder) because there is leadership, but it does turn upside down the prevailing paradigm of authority structures by grounding all relationships on mutual and voluntary submission and promoting a view of leadership that does not involve any sense of authority or power.
This is a ‘type 1’ (with the categories I listed in the other comment) egalitarian approach to what you said. You can find it articulated by Stanley Grenz and Denise Kjesbo in Women in the Church and published by IVP America – so it’s hardly crazy talk in egalitarianism.
I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect from what you’ve been saying, that you aren’t comfortable with either option I gave on your words here, but want something that combines bits from both. That’s the thing that intrigues me – the two options I give here are quite internally consistent, but a view that takes bits from each seems to me at this stage to not be internally consistent at all. And I’m not sure if I’m right about that, or whether people holding that view just haven’t articulated it well enough yet for everyone to see how it stands on its own feet as an alternative to these two views.
Hi Chris,
Last one! And a nice concrete and practical issue:
Well, as you said, we’re talking pragmatics and not theology here. So let me give you another perspective on this. I suspect that it won’t go down well, but it’s not intended to be an exercise in point scoring. It’s an attempt to just think unsentimentally about things in light of patterns that seem to have emerged.
I’d suggest that Sydney has lots of gifted and well taught women who, because of the prevailing paradigm, are willing to speak in public forums where their voice is heard in a fresh way. There is a pool of women teachers and leaders, which is being added to by young women, that ‘Sydney’ can pull out to be its spokesperson on a range of issues and which it has a lot of confidence in. It can run Women’s Ministry days and EQUIP conferences, it can produce books like What Women Really Need, it can have capable women speak in Synod and General Synod.
It’s possible that that is because of Sydney’s view on the women’s ministry question, not despite it, and the way that Sydney has some restrictions but also encourages women through MTS, through Moore, and into paid ministry roles.
Conservative evangelical women don’t feel as though the choice is ‘be true my conservative evangelical convictions’ or ‘use my gifts’. Structures exist for them to do both, and women who speak and teach can do so without that being seen to be the first step towards egalitarianism.
One of the features of women who get ordained and seek to utilise their gifts in mixed congregational settings is that, on the conservative-liberal spectrum, they ovewhelmingly draw more from the liberal and moderate end than the conservative end. I think experience (and studies) suggest that they tend to be open and moderate evangelicals, not conservative evangelicals, even when you take out the women’s ministry question from the pot in your definition of ‘conservative evangelical’ ‘moderate evangelical’ and ‘open evangelical’.
In general, if you have to struggle with liberals, you usually need more evangelicals down the conservative end and you want less down the open end. (If you’re just trying to coexist then the numbers change a bit and you probably want more moderates and opens – conservatives almost always don’t get on well with liberals).
This has got little to do with individuals and how good different individual people are. It’s purely numbers and systems. A body like an Anglican diocese will usually tend to drift in the direction that reflects the majority. Lots of left-wing, and even moderate, evangelicals don’t really counteract the pull of lots of convinced liberals – you need a counterweight, people over on the conservative wing.
Hence, what you need on this particular question of strategy is not more women evangelical leaders as such (although I think that would be a good thing anyway if you find that you don’t have many) but conservative evangelical women leaders to change the weight distribution.
And it should be obvious that pushing for women’s ordination and bishops as the evangelical cause will tend to discourage women from that conservative section of evangelicalism from stepping up and speaking out. Once that structure and cause is up and running, it is hard for women to teach and lead and be allowed to restrict themselves to not teaching and leading men. If women are going to be leaders and be respected and honoured as such, they usually have to sign up to the whole egalitarian structure.
Now, there can be all sorts of other reasons why the way forward implicit in that analysis is unacceptable or unwise. But just going, “We need more women speaking up in our tussle with liberalism, so we need women’s ordination” is, I think, a bad strategy purely from the point of view of pragmatics – but there may be other reasons why you think it’s the thing to do. Pragmatics isn’t everything (thankfully) for Christians.
Hi Mark,
This is far too stimulating.
You completely miss my point. What I tried to point out was that the view that men should lead came out of both a Hebrew and a Greco-Roman cultural paradigm where women had no rights and were not considered to be able to learn anything useful. Paul in Eph 5 takes that paradigm and completely undermines it.
The fact that the compl’n side of this debate can’t see that is understandable since the view has been around for 1000s of years but that doesn’t make it right.
The fact that gifted women in Sydney and elsewhere have had their gifts recognised but are stopped from ministering them to men is the issue that concerns me. A classic example I heard recently was a gifted evangelist who would only speak to women because she believed that women shouldn’t teach men. Yet at a diner where she was speaking to women one of the male waiters heard her speaking and decided he should become a Christian. My question is why aren’t her gifts being used for the whole Church and not just 55% of it?
I’m also wondering why you wouldn’t think that we could have an egalitarian conservative evangelical woman. I know several. Unless of course you define conservative as not including egalit’ns. If that’s the case then I suggest that conservative is moving very close to fundamentalist – not prepared to continually assess their theology by using their minds. (See The Younger Evangelicals” – author’s name doesn’t come to mind) Having read some of what you’ve written I’m sure that’s not the case but it is always a danger when we get entrenched in a particular position in a two-sided debate. I hope I’m not sounding the same.
Finally I’m wondering how Complementarians would define the difference between male & female other than by their role in the church. Perhaps that could be a future blog.
A further thought on a conservative approach to theology. I like the title of this blog since it reminds us of the cornerstone statements of the reformation and I want to say hat I’m a strong believer in those 5 solas. In fact I’d want to say that it’s particularly my belief in sol scriptura that led me to an egalitarian position. During the debate on women’s ordination in the 80s I realised that my worries about women being ordained hung more on the history and tradition of the church than on an open study of Scripture. Up till then I, like any good complem’n would have referred to1 1 Cor 11 and 1 Tim 2 and concluded that women needed to be subject to men. But then as I began to look more widely at the Scriptures I realised that maybe there as more to it than those two proof texts. And in fact maybe one of those proof texts was contradicted by the other. Then I thought about Gen 1 & 2. Does the creation story teach a subordinate view of women or the opposite. Well Gen 1 say men & women are equally made in the image of God. in fact we cold go further and say that their being made in the image of God hangs on them being male & female as a unit.
In Gen 2 we see the man needing someone who would be his equal – not his assistant as some interpret helper. We all know that God is described as our helper in various places so the word has no implication of subordinate. This is emphasised where in the climax of the chapter three times the unity and equality of the man and woman are affirmed – “flesh of my flesh, bones of my bones”; “she shall be called Ishah for from Ish she has come – this is not naming this is saying she’s of the same genus – equal in every way with him; “The two shall become one flesh.” There is no hierarchy in one.
Then in Ch 2 we discover that the dominance of men over women is in fact a result of the fall. It’s immediately after God has spoken his curses that Adam names his wife Eve. This is the moment when the subordination of women to men becomes a reality and this spreads through all societies regardless of their connection with God.
I could go on but I’d probably just be going on. I could talk about the way Jesus treats women in a way that’s quite radical for his time. I could mention Paul’s conclusion about the effect of the gospel on our social structures in Gal 3:28. I could also mention how long it took for the reformed churches to change their mind about slavery, and the hermeneutical issues that that question raised – questions that were not much different from those in this debate. I wonder were Wilberforce and Newton considered liberals in their time. Quite possibly. But I think that’s enough from me for now.
Hi Chris,
Well, assuming that’s a good thing, then it’s mostly your ‘fault’. My conversational style in comment threads normally interacts with and builds on the contributions of others – that’s why I’m usually quoting blocks of their words. So when the thread has good qualities that’s usually because of what people like you bring to the table.
Sure, but I didn’t miss your point, I just didn’t explicitly acknowledge it as it didn’t change the point I was making in return.
I don’t want to have a big discussion about whether or not egalitarianism is really in danger of liberalism here and now. Starting with that issue this early will just polarise things in a way that will make further conversation difficult, so I want to bring it in later, when some possibly less emotional topics have enabled those of us who will be interacting in the threads to have built up some good will that we can then draw on to tackle the more emotional topics.
All I wanted to do here was say – “This shows the concern is not a caricature. It might be wrong, but it’s not a caricature, and so needs some discussion later.” Acknowledging your point and responding to it would move us off that and muddy the waters by also introducing my response to your argument – and so introducing some of the argument that I was saying I wanted to hold back on.
But, if you really want to see an early indication of my response to your point here, then it goes like this:
Your point does not add anything extra to how I described your method of argument, it’s simply one component of the argument from social change, and so was included in my description.
Unless you say that the meaning of the texts changes over time (which I’ve heard from egalitarians, but is rare), then an argument from social change necessarily involves the idea that some of what is in the Bible is not the word of God but is an expression of a Hebrew/Greek worldview that we have since learned is wrong.
And that’s true of how liberalism runs the argument as well. I think it was Bultmann who said something along the lines of, (and this is in no way a quote) “The Bible describes people walking on water, the Incarnation, miracles, demons being exorcised, the dead being raised. All of that reflects a worldview which believed in such things. But we live in the modern world, we never see a miracle, the gods do not walk among us, we take medicine to cure illness and don’t believe it’s caused by demon possession, and the dead stay dead. So all of that is not the word of God, but is simply a Hebrew/Greek worldview that experience of society has taught us differently.”
I don’t want a substantial argument about this now. But you don’t defend your view of how to justify a new way of reading the Bible from a charge that it looks very similar to liberalism’s approach by appealing to a component in the argument that any liberal would agree with: that stuff in the Bible and in the mainstream Christian tradition in the past is cultural, not the word of God. And modern society has taught us something new.
Hi Chris,
And my answer is, because your sister in Christ, whom you claim to treat as an equal, has a conviction that she claims has come from hearing the word of God. I would have thought that the way to respond to that would be to try to persuade her to a better frame of mind, while being fully open to the possibility that, since she is fully equal to you, she might be the one who brings you to a better frame of mind.
But what you shouldn’t do is use this an example of how women ‘are stopped from ministering to men’. That is beyond patronising. She wasn’t stopped, she made a choice based on the wisdom God has given her from her reading of Scripture. She wasn’t acted upon by something outside her, she is the active agent – she has made a stand. She’s not a victim, or powerless, she’s made the call as to who God wants her to exercise a public ministry to and who he does not.
She wasn’t stopped. She stopped herself. And there’s a huge difference between those two. Even in Sydney, there are whole tracks of the Diocese that would be happy to have a woman preach to men. She could take that option if she thought that was right.
I won’t even get started on the idea that we try to work out what is the right way to arrange things in the household of God by looking to an event where a guy heard a women preach the gospel and converted, and so just take that as proof that women should normally teach men in public contexts. I’ll just file it in the same folder that has the argument, “My friend got converted by listening to sermon by a practicing homosexual, so it’s obvious that God doesn’t have a problem with homosexuality.” It’s the same argument with the nouns changed.
Yes, I know some too. I didn’t say, “any”, I said, “many”. Egalitarianism and conservative evangelical not a common partnering.
That’s partly because conservative evangelicals don’t like arguments that involve the idea that the Bible in some places is the word of God, but in other places reflects the culture of its day.
So Jesus not picking women to make up the Twelve? That’s cultural – he couldn’t do that in a patriachal society, so choosing only men is not the word of God, it’s just cultural. But Jesus treating women with dignity and honour? That’s the word of God – and is a sign that, if he could have got away with it, Jesus would have had six women Apostles.
That kind of way of treating the Bible (and yes I’ve rhetorically overstated it to make a point) is more a hallmark of moderate and open evangelicalism, not conservative evangelicalism. But getting to egalitarianism without that kind of hermeneutics is hard (not impossible – some people believe that the Bible has always clearly and forcefully taught egalitarianism and it got lost almost immediately as the twelve male apostles died), and so there are few conservative evangelical egalitarians. Not ‘none’. ‘Few’.
Most conservative evangelicals will be complementarian. Not ‘all’. ‘Most’.
Here in the UK where someone stands on the women’s issue seems to be the basic thing everyone uses to classify as ‘conservative’ or ‘moderate’ – so I think the correlation is fairly strong.
No Chris, you don’t sound like that at all. You sound like an intelligent, reasonable man, who is passionately convinced that his position is right and matters and who can enter into genuine conversation while holding that conviction.
Hi Chris,
Yes, there will be one on that issue, or more than one. And will most likely function to divide us complementarians up from each other as many won’t agree with me on it. But I think complementarians have to start making a fist of it and start taking some shaky steps forward on the question. It seems silly to say, ‘gender matters in what you do’, but not to say anything substantial about what it means to be a man or a woman.
I won’t be saying anything like, “men initiate, women respond”. But I will have a crack at it.
Yes, like many egalitarians, you claim that you learned this both from Scripture and from experience in society. It’s evidence of both your lack of fundamentalism (because you learned it from modern society) and your five sola commitment (because you learned it from reading the Bible with an open mind).
I think my question has always been, on hearing this testimony. “In what sense did society teach you this? And in what sense did the Bible teach you this? How could you learn the same thing in the same way from two sources while being open minded as you weighed the evidence from one and then the other? Did you completely compartmentalise and weigh each independently, or did each interact with the other? And if they did interact with the other, how can this be evidence of the purity of your engagement with modern society and engagement with the Bible?”
Again, not wanting to start a big debate here, but just a small indication of where I’m coming from in response.
1. I don’t agree with Barth that being in the image of God hangs on humanity being made male and female as a unit. It’s like most of Barth’s distinctive contributions – stimulating, thoughtful, genuinely new, and highly idiosyncratic.
2. Here and elsewhere you suggest that you used to be ‘complementarian’ but that when you read the Bible you discovered that women were equal to men and imply that this came as a shock to you. “What’s this? Women are in the image of God too? Well then, complementarianism has to be wrong then. Women and men can’t be ‘equal but different’ if they’re equal, can they?”
What part of ‘women and men are equal’ in the idea ‘equal but different’ did you not get when you were a complementarian, that this idea that women are equal (even, horrors!, made in the image of God just like us Y chromosoners) was so radical for you?
My theory is that, within the complementarian camp, there are men and women who talk the language of complementarianism but who actually believe that leaders are better than followers and that women really are, in some essential way, inferior to men. My hunch is that the ranks of the ‘egalitarian formerly known as a complementarian’ probably mostly draws from that group of genuine chavinists who hang out with us complementarians and think they’re one of us.
No complementarian will be shocked to discover that women are in the image of God, as intelligent as men, as gifted and wise as men, as wise and godly as men. Only someone who thinks that women are inferior and that’s the reason why they can’t lead men would find women’s equality confronting.
So, I’ll accept that you used to think women shouldn’t teach men.
But, based on what you’ve said here, I don’t think that you changed because you changed your notion of ‘equality’ from the traditional Christian view to the Enlightenment view of equality (which is what needs to happen for a genuine complementarian to become an egalitarian – they need to change what the word ‘equal’ means). You changed because you realised that women are equal – and complementarians already know and are convinced of that, so ‘discovering’ that won’t prompt them to change.
Finally I’m wondering how Complementarians would define the difference between male & female other than by their role in the church.
Chris, there are some very good books about this. The old classic is <b>Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood</b>, edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem. That one is from the early 90s, when the present intra-evangelical debate was being framed. As I understand it, the complementarian position has not advanced in any substantial way since then; it has just been a matter of addressing new contexts and responding to new arguments from egalitarians.
The book contains essays from psychologists and sociologists explaining how the differences between the genders work out in all of life (not just roles in the church).
regards
Jereth
Hi Chris,
I could say that there is no order in one either. But the Christian Church has always said that there is order in the Godhead and that God is one.
No hierarchy in one body? In one family with children? In one army? In one nation? In one church?
Is it really as simple as saying, “man and woman are one flesh, and ‘one’ has to always mean ‘monistic – everything identical and indistinguishable’, and therefore there is no order in that one where the husband has authority and the wife submits.”? Where a pastor instructs and a congregation submits? Where a ruler, or military superior orders and a subordinate obeys? Where a parent commands, and a child obeys?
Colour me sceptical – and we’ll have the debate next year.
Actually, if you’re right, then Adam’s naming his wife Eve is the beginning of any human being be subordinated to another and any human being having authority over another. If you’re right, it’s not just about gender here, it is a statement that all attempts by one person to exercise any authority over another is a result of the Fall. That is what ‘type 2’ egalitarianism grasps. All attempts to exercise authority begin with the Fall and Adam’s naming of his wife is the first example of that.
Trying to limit it to just a question of genders is unnecessarily narrow when Adam and Eve constitute the whole of humanity at that time.
If you’re right, it’s not just a statement that women being subordinate to men is a cause of the fall, but that anyone having to submit and obey anyone else is a cause of the fall. It’s why I think ‘type 2’ egalitarianism is so impressive. (Dangerous and scary, but impressive.) They’ve followed the logic consistently. They are opposed to all forms of hierarchy, authority, subordination, and necessary submission as consequences of the Fall, and not just said, “Keep it all in place, but give women some of the power”.
Yes, and no doubt that will be done next year. In return I’ll be raising the debate about homosexuality and how the hermeneutical issues that question raises are ‘not much different from those in this debate’. Both are important questions, and we’ll need to look at both and weigh the evidence for both.
*Sigh*.
Not ‘type 2’ egalitarianism in the comment directly above, but ‘type 1’ egalitarianism. The classifications are my own and relate to this comment by me in the thread under the second post in this series http://solapanel.org/article/complementarianism_and_egalitarianism_part_2/#5421 where I outline three strands of egalitarianism that seem to exist in evangelicalism.
So as not to upset anyone by forcing a name on them that they haven’t picked for themselves, I’m just going with the order in which the strands got mentioned in that comment as their ‘names’.
”then Adam’s naming his wife Eve is the beginning of any human being be subordinated to another and any human being having authority over another.”
Naming in itself does not guarantee a right of authority over another. Both Adam and Eve were given guidance over creation before the man named the animals. Any kind of positive authority ultimately comes from God. Adam named his wife ‘mother of the living’ after he was removed from the garden and they brought on death by their disobedience. Has to be some sort of remorse in there IMO, though we’ll never know for sure until we ask him. And people in general name other people all the time, from way back in history, some good names and some bad names. But it didn’t guarantee a right of authority over them.
”all attempts by one person to exercise any authority over another is a result of the Fall.”
Exercising dominance over others though was a result of the fall. Surely you don’t quibble that. What God describes in Gen. 3:16 is NOT by any means positive ministering, leadership, guidance, etc..
”So as not to upset anyone by forcing a name on them that they haven’t picked for themselves, I’m just going with the order in which the strands got mentioned in that comment as their ‘names’.”
Are you attempting to exercise authority over egals by naming them, since you believe that naming is an exercise of authority over another? :^)
Hi Teri,
LOL. Absolutely. Type one, type two, type three.
I think I need to go and exercise my authority some more on something. Almost anyone could do better than that.
LOL good to see something to chuckle at. :^)
On your other post, part 3, there must be something wrong with the programming or techie stuff. I received email notification of comments I cannot find. Tried a different browser but still cannot find the missing comments. My own answer looks to have gone to outer space as well.