A Journey to an Egalitarian Complimentarity

Men and women are different in many ways.  This is a pretty well established and accepted fact.  There are some obvious sex differences, and then some less-obvious physiological and psychological differences.  Among these fall the reality that men tend to have greater upper body strength and the saying that "men are like waffles, and women are like spaghetti"—referring to one gender's tendency to compartmentalize topics vs the other's tendency to run them together in a complex flow of ideas.  These latter apply only generally, though, as there are some men who've learned to string together topics like spaghetti and some women who think in highly organized boxes—and also some women with incredible physical strength.  In general, all of these differences (where they exist) compliment each other.  The complimentary virtues of sexual differences are obvious, but psychological differences are also generally complimentary as well with the unique approach of each gender bringing something different to the table (sometimes it's more advantageous to think and speak in topicly-focused waffle squares, sometimes it's better to be able to explore the connections between disparate topics with the flow of spaghetti).  But in Christian circles there is another difference that is often talked about, one that is often the actual topic implied whenever the idea of male and female complimentary differences is raised: leadership vs service.  In this complimentarian view, men are seen as naturally, universally, and divinely suited for leadership whereas women are given the role of serving and helping under that leadership.  Since leaders need followers and followers leaders the relationship is complimentary.  Since Christianity further holds that leaders are not above their flocks in terms of value (at least on paper), it's also a view of equality.  It is, above all, something that the Bible clearly teaches.  This is what I was raised to believe, and this is what pretty much every church I've ever been in has taught.

But that is precisely what I've come to question of late.  To be honest, the idea of a gender heirarchy was never something that set well with me.  It started with the fact that the passages used to support the idea of a male heirarchy are...problematic at best.  Take the prototypical proof-text for the complimentarian position: 1 Timothy 2:12.  While the complimentarian position takes as plain-gospel-truth-seriousness only the part about women being forbidden to exercise authority or hold teaching positions over men, the rest of the passage is something that obviously requires a more in-depth approach.

"Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing--if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control."

—1 Timothy 2:11-15

The whole thing about women keeping silence in churches is not something we practice these days, and in fact, it seems barbaric.  As for that last part, the whole idea that a woman will be saved through childbearing seems like proposing some alternate gospel that applies only to women (salvation by grace through faith for men, but through childbearing and good works for women?).  But looking at the passage beyond the level of using it as a proof text was something that was never really done in any church I attended, same for a lot of the other problematic gender passages (such as 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, or 1 Corinthians 11:3-16).  I confess that I never really knew what to do with these passages, so I did my best to ignore them.  This was where the disquiet started, because I knew that ignoring a difficult passage so scripture wasn't really any way to understand the Bible.

The next blow came, honestly, at Summitview, the church I attended during my college years.  As I mentioned in a previous post, the church took the traditional complimentarian view and defended it well from the Bible (though still without really sorting out any of the complexities surrounding the proof texts).  While I would view their public position as one that is very Biblically supportable, private practice was another matter.  In practice, all women were encouraged to marry, have children, and take support roles in the institutional church, while all men were encouraged to marry, be the dominant authority at home, and enter ministry in some sort of leadership role.  Obviously not everyone could do that, but the popular perception was that those who could and did were better off and more faithful to God than those who did not.  This, however, was but the tip of the iceberg.  The rest of it I glimpsed passing shadow-like beneath the surface of the public facades church couples maintained.  I witnessed a small group leader publicly rebuke his wife for being tired and distracted during his lesson (with no honor, love, service, or understanding for her at all—in contrast to verses which tell husbands they must treat their wives with all of these things: 1 Peter 3:7 and Ephesians 5:25-33).  I heard about men who tyrannized women in private, to the point where one wife had to ask her husband's permission before meeting with her friends.  While I recognized that this abuse was yet another example of the church warping a good public teaching and warping it in to a bad private practice, it had the same effect on me as their warping of emotional purity principles: the abuse of the principle set the stage for me to question the assumed legitimacy of the principle itself.

Still, I did not question the principle immediately.  After all, how else was I to understand these verses?  What other legitimate interpretation of them could there be?  I did not know any, so I simply continued to ignore and avoid the question wherever possible.  However, all that began to change.  The first hint came from online dating, of all places.  There I met a Christian young woman who impressed me by presenting a more egalitarian interpretation of Ephesians 5:22-33 (pointing out that the whole passage begins with a command for all Christians to submit to each other, not just wives to husbands) which impressed me.  While nothing came of that relationship, the stage was still set for taking a more serious look at the topic of gender hierarchy and the problematic passages that seemed to support it.

The opportunity to do so came when I found and bought the book Discovering Biblical Equality: Complimentarity Without Hierarchy.  For the first time, I found a book that wasn't afraid to delve into those problem verses, and one that made an honest effort to set them in context and understand what they meant.  I found their explanations made sense, and were surprisingly insightful.  For instance, with 1 Timothy 2:12, the book reminds readers that the verse is set in the context of a church that was obviously having troubles with false teachers, possibly with early Gnosticism, and reminds readers that this was the site of the huge riots where people were chanting in the street for hours "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" (Acts 19:23-41).  It even goes into a little history on who the Ephesian Artemis was and how she differed from the traditional Greek Artemis, then ties these together by showing how the 1 Timothy 2:11-15 passage is specifically tailored as a rebuttal of a particular woman attempting to bring cult of Artemis and Gnostic teachings into the church by dominating men and teaching the primacy of Eve instead of learning her new faith and insisting on singleness and abstinence from childbearing in order for salvation.  A similar exploration of the passage can be found here.  All in all, I was impressed by the egalitarian position, which asserts that—while men and women differ and are complimentary in many ways, gendered hierarchy is not one of them.  I was forced to admit that even if I did not agree with the egalitarians in the end, I at least had to consider their position defensible, much like my view of Armenianism in the free-will vs predestination debate (I would consider myself a Calvinist, but I concede that the Armenian interpretation is a valid alternative).

But reading this and then getting involved in a feminist debate on Facebook caused me to reflect on my own complimentarian position.  I was forced to look critically at the interpretations of these passages that supported male-only leadership, to reflect on the arguments used to support gender roles from the Bible.  In the end, I found them wanting.  Any argument, sustained long enough, goes back to Genesis and claims of a Biblical male-female hierarchy there, but in an honest reading of the text it simply isn't to be seen.  Men and women are both together given authority over the animals (note the plural in Genesis 1:28).  Adam's sin isn't a failure to properly dominate his wife but rather his decision to listen to her over God (Genesis 3:17), and Eve's isn't breaking out of gender roles (which are established as part of the curse, butted right up against extreme pain in childbirth in Genesis 3:16).  Furthermore Paul's references to this section to justify the complimentarian interpretation are taken out of context in ways that reduce them to nonsense (in 1 Timothy 2:11-15, he was addressing Gnostic and cult of Artemis teachings about Eve as the preeminent being, the embodiment of knowledge, the precursor to Adam, etc—and ignoring these facts make hash of attempts to understand the last verse of the passage, which is why most complimentarian commentators simply ignore it).  In the end I found that I could no longer take the complimentarian position seriously anymore.  While I admit that there's some decent rhetoric out there to support it, I can no longer see that rhetoric holding up to and making good sense of scripture.  When I realized this, I realized that I would need to change my views to reflect what I believed the Bible was actually trying to get across: the idea that women and men are equal, though different, and may be equally fit for leadership roles.

I recognize that this is a minority position, and one maligned as un-Biblical by the majority of Evangelicals, who believe it's a position based solely on pandering to the culture and ignoring scripture.  Such accusations do not change the truth however, and I cannot take them or anyone who makes them seriously.  Such people very often put pandering to their own patriarchal subculture ahead of understanding the Bible, using the latter merely as a collection of convenient proof-texts seeded into difficult passages they ignore.  As for me, my journey was not one of learning to ignore the Bible and pander to culture, but of learning that my (Evangelical, complimentarian) culture did not fit my Bible and choosing a better understanding and alignment with the latter over the former, and I have seen the same is true for the majority of egalitarians Christians.