toward God's heart, part 2
/This post is part of a series in which I’m answering a question I’ve gotten a lot lately: “Why have you changed your views on complementarian roles?” For the introduction to this series, click here.
I went to Bible school at 18 years old, while in the middle of a very serious long-distance relationship (“courtship,” a la I Kissed Dating Goodbye) with my now-husband, Sam. As soon as I graduated, we started talking about getting married. Within three months we were engaged, and sitting in my pastor’s office on a regular basis to talk about what we had learned in Love & Respect and its accompanying workbook that week.
I was young. I was a sponge. I was terrified of getting married, and I desperately wanted God’s approval so that my marriage would go well. The only people speaking into my life at that time, whether personally or through books or some other means, were complementarians, and they all said the key to making a marriage work was to follow this doctrine.
So Sam and I dove all in, devouring Christian marriage book after Christian marriage book. To me, they all seemed to say the same kinds of things: Having a disagreement? Defer to your husband. Feeling hurt? Pray that you will stop needing so much from your husband. Unloved? Probably because you’re not being respectful enough of your husband.
It wasn’t until almost half a decade into our marriage that I finally gave myself permission to rethink the complementarian indoctrination I had received from those books. That’s when I first began to realize that none of it made intellectual sense.
Separate but equal
“Women are equal in value with men, but separate in role”—the most popular talking point among defenders of complementarianism—does not hold up against basic critical scrutiny. When the husband holds the “tiebreaking vote” in the marriage, for example, the basic fact is that he has two votes and his wife has one. Correct me if I’m wrong, but 2 ≠ 1. The entire idea of a tiebreaking vote and the obsession with creating a leader-follower dynamic in marriage is predicated on the assumption that two people cannot work together unless one of them has some kind of “final say” over the other. Not only is that claim unsupported by reality (Where else do we insist that two people cannot work together as equal teammates? That one of them has to be “in charge” or they can’t succeed?), Genesis 3:16 makes it clear that such dynamics are a product of sin, not part of God’s good design.
(I’m all too aware that some complementarians consider Genesis 3:16 prescriptive, rather than a description of the catastrophic effects of the fall. Just last week I had the misfortune of coming across a man ranting about his “God-given right” to rule over his wife, citing this verse. I have to wonder if he also believes that it’s sinful for a woman to opt for an epidural during childbirth, or to take ibuprofen for menstrual cramps? Is a man allowed to use a lawnmower or weedkiller to take care of his yard, or must everything be done by hand in order to “obey” Genesis 3:17-19? Where in the Gospels do we see Jesus throw a fit about His God-given right to rule—a right He actually had, unlike this man, but relinquished out of love?)
Furthermore, if we were truly “separate but equal” in the church, then there would be limitations placed on men, too, preventing them from exercising some gifts they are otherwise perfectly capable of using solely because they are men. But such limitations apply only to women, and only because we are women—resulting in anything but equality.
Until 1920, all women were banned from voting in the United States (and many women, primarily non-white women, continued to be banned long after). Are we supposed to believe they were still equals in that time—that they simply had a “separate role,” a non-voting role, from the male citizenship? Were black people really equals under the Jim Crow laws, which supposedly offered “separate but equal” accommodations to both white and black people but notoriously led to better experiences for whites than blacks (and allowed for many convenient loopholes to prevent black people from fully engaging as American citizens)?
The complementarian response would be, “They’re equal in value! They are spiritually equal!” Duh. But practically, what does that matter, if it doesn’t change the way you treat them? God already knows that women, people of color, and every other subset of humanity have equal worth as His image bearers. We are the ones who prove by our actions that we don’t agree.
Love and respect
The common complementarian interpretation of Ephesians 5 doesn’t hold up to the actual content of the Scriptures, either. When the wife’s level of respect influences (even determines) the husband’s ability to give her his love (which is what too many pastors, Biblical counselors, and Christian marriage resources either state or imply), he’s not loving her as Christ loved the church, unconditionally, and long before she ever loved Him. He is loving her the same way any selfish pagan would love someone: in direct proportion to getting what he wants from her.
Did Christ come to usher in the new kingdom, or merely to set up His throne in the failed state of the old?
Not to mention that the Bible never instructs a husband to lead his wife, as complementarianism does ad nauseam; the command is to love her in the same way that Christ loved the church, which I’ve written more about here. The Bible also never pits men and women against one another as opposites, the way complementarianism does (in a practical sense—I realize that they do not say this in so many words, and in fact would claim the reverse, but that just doesn’t hold up in real life). Instead, God’s Word holds men and women up as “suitable partners,” a matched set, an equal pair—completely interdependent.
This is why Adam says, “This at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23) and why Paul tells husbands to “love their wives as their own bodies” (Ephesians 5:28). They are the same creature—both humans, both images of God, exact equals. It’s fairly depressing that such a statement has ever been revolutionary, but even more so that we still have to say it today.
And along the same lines, how can we treat love and respect as opposites? Show me the man who can feel respected when he is being unloved! Show me the woman who can feel loved when she’s being disrespected!
But we are expected to accept that a woman must tolerate disrespectful treatment from her husband in the name of “respecting” him, and assume that he is “loving” her even when he clearly isn’t. It’s as if all the hallmarks of a sound Christian-to-Christian relationship—accountability, discipleship, submission, selflessness, correction, exhortation—can suddenly only work in one direction once the two Christians are married to each other, while obvious biblical vices, such as ego, greed, and selfish ambition, are transformed into virtues when they characterize a husband.
Exegesis and ministry
These are just the surface-level logical contradictions. Once I started diving into the exegesis of Paul’s letters, it got even worse: Men we respect as theologians have completely rejected simple rules of hermeneutics—like the fact that Paul’s writings grow out of his deep roots in the Tanakh and not the other way around; or like the principle of using clear texts to illuminate less-clear texts—in favor of their pre-determined view. They cannot muster even the basic scholarly humility to acknowledge that, although the dehumanization of women is as old as Genesis (and rampant among the church fathers as well as the secular world), the modern doctrine of complementarianism is built on a shaky foundation of comparatively recent and highly Westernized interpretations of Paul’s most difficult-to-understand passages. Instead, they’ve gone so far as to enshrine their debatable position into the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, making it harder and harder for regular, thoughtful Christians to come to informed conclusions on this matter.
To their credit, many complementarians do strive to find the heart behind Paul’s seemingly-patriarchal stance, pulling from chapters like 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 to remind us that the goal was to create an orderly church gathering, not to suppress women or treat them as less. But to believe that this principle should be applied the same way today as it was in Paul’s time requires you to also believe that women, not disorder, are the real problem—that we are uniquely foolish, gullible, distracting, or dangerous. That when we take up space and have a say, we make things worse by default. “It is not good for the man to be alone” becomes “It is not good for the woman to be involved, because she only complicates things for the man.”
If you can teach one half of the room that they can’t be trusted (and can’t even trust themselves), and that their simply existing fully in the corporate assembly would be “disorderly,” it’s not hard to keep them under control. It’s the easy way out for church leaders who don’t want, or have never learned how, to treat women as human beings.
I could keep going, but I’ll just raise one more point: Every church I’ve ever been part of has been totally fine with women going into the mission field. Indeed, many godly women I know have done so, and why not? Their gifts that are disdained by the American church are often welcomed in foreign places. But what makes being a missionary fundamentally different from teaching the truth in other settings? The Great Commission is to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”—and what do our churches exist to do, if not make disciples, baptize, and teach? If we are happy to send women to Africa or Asia, why are they not good enough for America?
And unfortunately, along with our missionaries and our Good News, we export our flawed understanding of gender roles as well—and it is stunting the growth of the church worldwide. May God forgive us.
Over the last 5+ years of life, study, and reflection, I’ve found that my brain simply cannot do these kinds of logical gymnastics.
I’m not saying there are no intellectually honest people who have arrived at different conclusions on these issues than I have. I know there are; I know some of them. And, as I would hope from any healthy conversation, they could raise some potentially colorable rebuttals to my points. But to claim that there is just one “plain reading” of Scripture—as far too many complementarians do—that clearly disqualifies women from being true equals in marriage and in church, while also claiming that somehow women are still in fact equal, is neither intellectual nor honest.
