toward God's heart, part 1

I’ve been asked a few times recently what, exactly, has led to the changes in my understanding of God’s design for the sexes. I appreciate this question; too many people quickly assume that when a woman starts “waffling” on the doctrine of complementarianism, it’s because she doesn’t want to follow it, or because she wants power, or because she thinks God isn’t fair. There’s a strong tendency for stalwart conservative Christians to catastrophize, wondering where her obvious disregard for Scripture will take her next.

I’m sure that a subsequent rejection of orthodox Christian beliefs does happen sometimes—the inability to see shades between black and white is not limited to any one “side”—but ecclesiastical dismissiveness toward those who are conscientiously rethinking tertiary doctrines serves only to shut down what I think is a very important conversation we should all be having, if we care about knowing and imitating God’s heart for women, men, and the Church in light of the Good News. I reject the idea that any change in how we understand Scripture can be waved away as “deconstruction,” or that deconstruction is, itself, a dirty word. I don’t serve a particular denomination or statement of faith or political ideology; I serve God, and as soon as I insist that God fits into any human thought structure that exists on earth, I have become an idolator.

So this series is meant to be a small part of that conversation. I hope to keep having it, and learning from it, for some time to come.

A little backstory

I have been walking with God for 30 years. For those who want a specific point in time when my trajectory changed from hell-bound sinner to citizen of God’s kingdom, I first “asked Jesus into my heart” at about age 3, in the year 1997, with the help of my older brother Stephen. But thanks to the faithfulness of my parents, I was in practice living under the authority of Christ and in the reality of His resurrection from birth. As is typical for children, the real choice to follow Jesus out of personal conviction rather than family pattern didn’t happen until my early teens, and then it was more of a natural transition than a particularly memorable experience.

The home I grew up in was strong in “traditional” conservative evangelical values. (I put “traditional” in quotes because many of these traditions are, by comparison, quite young and not well-rooted in actual church tradition. This is not a criticism, just a clarification.) My dad is naturally a strong leader, protector, and provider. My mom is naturally a strong nurturer and guardian of the home. I am a child of the “ideal” complementarian environment, through and through. And yet, my journey toward equality and mutuality in marriage and in the church did not begin from reflecting on my own family of origin.

I share these pieces of backstory for context; I think it’s important for you to know that I have always been, and still am, an unwavering believer in the Scriptures and follower of Jesus Christ; and that I have concerns about complementarian theology that, while impossible to fully sever from my upbringing, do not arise from those experiences exclusively or even primarily.

A few caveats

Here’s what this series won’t be: It won’t be a verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter dissection of all the relevant texts in their original languages. Plenty of people have already done that, people with far greater qualifications to do so than I possess; Dr. Carmen Imes, Cynthia Long Westfall, Julie Zine Coleman, and Marg Mowczko are just a few. And it won’t be a proof-texting of egalitarianism—I do my best not to subscribe to “-isms.”

I should also acknowledge, even though it seems superfluous, that I’m writing from my own lifelong experience with Jesus, the Bible, complementarian spaces, and complementarian literature. Inevitably, there are limitations to my experience. There will be times that my experience doesn’t represent yours. There may be times I even sound dismissive of the good intentions I believe most complementarians have.

So I will say at the outset: I do not believe most complementarian Christians have any malice toward women or are consciously trying to marginalize us; in fact, I trust that many of them wholeheartedly believe they are doing what God wants, for the good of everyone. This gives me grace and compassion toward my complementarian brothers and sisters, but it does not excuse or invalidate the lived reality of all too many women in these spaces, myself included.

If you’re male and you strongly believe complementarian theology is a positive good, or you simply don’t see it as a big deal, that’s fine. Your experience of it is without question completely different from mine, simply by virtue of being male. Perhaps this series can give you a small taste of a different perspective.

If you’re female and you strongly believe complementarian theology is a positive good, or you simply don’t see it as a big deal, that’s also fine. I spent two-thirds of my life there with you. But your positive or neutral experience of Christian patriarchy does not make the negative experiences of many, many others less real.

In short, you may not understand where I’m coming from or why this matters to me. I’m okay with that. I just challenge you to keep front of mind that how we love and honor one another as the Imago Dei matters a lot to God.

With all that said: I’ll be exploring some of the contradictions I’ve noticed in complementarian doctrine, along with its incongruities with how God created humans and designed His good world to work according to the Scriptures, in the next several posts.

one God and one mediator

My very favorite childhood movie is the original Pirates of the Caribbean. Toward the climax of that iconic film, when Captain Jack Sparrow is attempting to double-cross both Commodore Norrington and Captain Barbossa so that he can secure his freedom, his ship, and his revenge in one fell swoop, the Royal Navy soldier Murtogg asks, “Why aren’t we doin’ what—what Mr. Sparrow said? With the cannons and all?”

Commodore Norrington responds, “Because it was Mr. Sparrow who said it.”

Since I started writing out and publicly sharing my thought process for how and why I’ve shifted away from my long-held belief in strict complementarianism, I’ve had the privilege of participating in some fascinating conversations with both men and women on this topic—some of them in agreement (or at least open to agreement) with me, and some of them strongly disagreeing.

But one common, and unfortunately unsurprising, theme has emerged from these conversations which I think illustrates the insidiousness of the complementarian doctrine: Wise and God-fearing women are becoming suspicious of their own communication with God through the Holy Spirit solely “because it was a woman who said it,” as if the Holy Spirit can only speak and act in their lives through the umbrella authority of a man.

And that’s dangerous territory.

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, Himself human.”

1 Timothy 2:5 HCSB

For example, I’ve noticed that when Christian women talk about their role as wives or women of the church, they will invariably think of some instance where they weren’t “submissive enough” to male authority, and things didn’t go well for them. Even women I’ve spoken with who knew they were being called by God and equipped with His wisdom would see something go awry and think, “This is because I’m trying to lead, and I shouldn’t be, because I’m a woman.”

Or wives who have had serious reservations about their husband’s choices for their family would simply go along with it, things would turn out okay, and they’d think, “God blessed me because I obeyed my husband, even when he was being foolish.”

Thus, submission is no longer a beautiful opportunity for each of us to voluntarily imitate Christ toward one another (as Paul teaches in Philippians 2 and Ephesians 5), but rather a weapon that anyone can whip out to slash holes in a woman’s trust in the voice of the Spirit who dwells within her. It’s the serpent in the Garden all over again: “Did God really say…?” And to question the questioning just comes across as even greater defiance. So we are silenced.

But I’m done being silent, so I’ll ask anyway: What if some of the things that went wrong under the woman’s leadership happened not because she shouldn’t have been leading but because, unlike Barak when he followed Deborah, the men “under” her lacked the humility to follow her? Or because things simply go wrong sometimes, no matter who is in charge?

And what if God has called a wife to protect her home and family even when it means putting her foot down on her husband’s foolishness, like Abigail when she defied Nabal? What if wifely submission is actually not another facet of prosperity theology, directly proportional to the measure of your blessing?

When we teach that the primary role of women is subjection to men (at minimum, to their own husbands), we inevitably end up with men who feel very little need to actively seek the guidance of God (because it’s implied that they have God’s blessing on their decisions simply by being male) and with women who feel they need not only the guidance of God, but must also take the extra step of getting approval from their husbands or other relevant male authority figures. The ultimate result across the board is that the voice of God Himself is diminished or even dismissed.

Hear me when I say: A wife’s submission to her husband is good. A husband’s submission to his wife is good. Christians’ submission to fellow Christians, to Christ, and to worldly governments and authorities is good. Submissiveness, humility, and peacemaking are key characteristics of Christ and outworkings of the Spirit that Paul encouraged the early churches to strive for.

Pigeonholing all women into a place of perpetual, one-sided, mandated submission to their husbands and/or other men merely because they are women is not good. At best, it leads to an unhealthy hierarchical dynamic that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to reflect the full image of God. And at worst, it sets human men in the place of Christ as mediators between women and God, leading to deception, disobedience, abuse, and even idolatry.

Let us tread carefully.

a poisonous doctrine

I recently asked a (male) proponent of complementarianism these questions: What is some beautiful, kingdom fruit you’ve seen complementarian theology bear for Christ? How have the women in your life, specifically, been blessed by it?

His answer was precisely the generic statement I expected: he talked about greater stability and less power struggle in the home, wives who were better loved/protected/contented, and children who had “strong guidance and a firm foundation.” Putting aside that I could point to dozens of examples of families who would fit that exact description from the outside while their members were suffering on the inside, I think his response reveals how utterly and completely the conservative Christian church has missed the point of Paul’s vision for marriage and family in the New Testament. In our service of the complementarian doctrine, we have killed and buried the kingdom ideal.

(Note: I use the pronouns “we” and “our” because I am currently, and have always been, a faithful attendee of a conservative Christian church. I was also until quite recently a complementarian. In writing this, I hope to acknowledge the ways I, too, have contributed to the problems I now see.)

A favorite passage cited by complementarians (including the one I was conversing with) is Ephesians 5:21-33. This is the famous “Wives, be subject to your own husbands” and “Husbands, love your wives” text that made books like Love & Respect by Emerson Eggerichs an unfortunate default for evangelical marriage and pre-marital counseling for an entire generation. The feeling for complementarians is, generally, that egalitarian thinkers are trying to argue with something Paul has very plainly stated. But is it so plain?

Countless incredible Greek scholars have already done the technical work in understanding the exact grammar and vocabulary Paul used in this passage (you can find one such overview here). I’m not here to throw around words like hypotasso as if I have any business doing so—rather, what I want to do is ask: What was Paul’s intent for the audience of Ephesians 5? And what, then, is the meaning for us?

We know that the Ephesian church existed in a highly stratified society. Men ruled the Greco-Roman world; women were a class beneath them, and children were lower still, followed finally by slaves. Everyone in the church at Ephesus knew where they fell on the spectrum of power and importance.

And then Paul said,

Be filled with the Spirit . . . submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.

- Ephesians 5:18b, 21 CSB

Greater stability, reduced power struggle, wives who seem to be more protected and contented, and children with firm foundations—it’s all exactly the kind of fruit I’d expect complementarian theology to produce. And I have two problems with that.

First, as I alluded to before, plenty of this fruit looks shiny, red, and juicy on the outside only to reveal a flesh of worms and rot when you bite into it. Of course there is more stability and less power struggle in a home where only one person—the husband/father—has the ultimate power. But is that a good thing? Are we looking for conflict-free marriages or for good marriages? I know from experience that they are not the same thing.

And of course the wives in these families appear “safe,” “protected,” and “contented.” They are operating under a religious requirement to defer to their men. If a wife felt unsafe with her husband, or even discontented within their relationship, what could she do with that information? Certainly not bring it to the attention of her husband or her complementarian church leaders!

And of course the children appear to be standing on a firm foundation. They have been raised on the belief that they are naturally evil and need to be emotionally (sometimes physically) beaten into submission. Do they dare even find out what might happen if they test boundaries, throw a tantrum, or assert their independence like developmentally normal children?

But my second problem is an even bigger one: This “fruit” doesn’t just miss Paul’s heart for Christian families and the church, it fundamentally opposes it.

Because in Ephesians 5 (and Colossians 3, and 1 Corinthians 7, and so on), Paul is not reinforcing the secular gender roles and power dynamics that have plagued humanity since the Fall. He is tearing them down.

Be filled with the Spirit . . . submitting to one another in the fear of Christ. Wives, to your own husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, he himself is the Savior of the body. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. . . . In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”

Ephesians 5:18b, 21-25, 28

Can you see it? Can you pull away the haze of complementarianism, set aside the words that aren’t even in the passage (“lead,” “obey,” “follow,” “authority,” “responsibility”), and see?

See the Roman man on his pedestal, all of society existing several notches beneath him. See him touched by the transforming power of the Spirit of God and suddenly he steps down so that he can better reach the hand of his wife to pull her up. See her, likewise transformed, refusing to become corrupted by this newfound status.

Can you see them now? They are standing together, one flesh, on level ground.

They are equals. And not only equals in worth with unequal roles, as some complementarians have tried to parse, but one unit. One flesh, head and body, each dead without the other, both halves of the whole image of God. One.

This may be a tough pill to swallow for a certain population of conservative American Christian, but Paul didn’t write Ephesians 5 to shore up the image of strong masculine leadership over meek wives and well-behaved children. He wasn’t worried about how good your family looks on Sundays, or any other day of the week.

And he certainly didn’t intend for it to be used as the sacred text of patriarchy.

Instead, he paints for us a picture of marriages that can be defined by a unified pursuit of Christ rather than a paranoia of usurpation; of women who see themselves with the value Christ’s sacrifice places on them, which no one can remove; of men who, imitating Christ, set their rights and power aside to raise up the oppressed and powerless.

It is stunning—because it’s a reflection of the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels, a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven on earth. And that makes truly beautiful kingdom fruit.

But we are never going to taste it, let alone get to share it with the hungry around us, if we continue to spend our energy defending a poisonous doctrine.