Complementarianism: Essential or Expendable? (Panel I)

Heavenly Father thank you for this opportunity to talk about you about your word about your gospel and about your church as we talked about a matter that is disputed not only in the world today but even in your churches give us Grace and wisdom make our conversation useful to serve all the brothers and sisters here in Jesus name Amen with me on the panel is dr. Russell Moore from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Greg Gilbert from the third Avenue Baptist Church here in Louisville Kentucky and dr. John Piper Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis st. Paul and we're here to talk about complementarianism and let me just start by asking dr. Piper to tell us where the term came from you were there when a group of folks started talking about how can we articulate what the Bible says about this in a term that is not liable to some of the misuses or misnomers right I don't have a good memory of the timing but I can tell you what I remember Wayne Grudem and I were a part of the production of the Danvers statement which happened in the late 80s in Danvers Connecticut and the Danvers statement is found just type Danvers da nver s statement in Google and you'll find it at the biblical manhood and womanhood website in which we tried to articulate a vision of how men and women are equally gloriously in the image of God with that worth and that dignity and yet complement each other in their differences both in marriage and in church and in society in such a way that the flourishing of manhood and womanhood happened best when those complementary differences are honored rather than minimized and what we saw happening in feminism and Eve Jellicle again egalitarianism was a minimizing at best or a nullifying of those differences and over on the other side we saw a historic abuse of women kind of machismo that would define manhood as miss handling or bossing or putting down and we said well the Galit arianism we don't see that in the Bible this abuse and belittling of womanhood we don't see that in the Bible and this is goes under various names like hierarchical ism or traditionalism or whatever and so we said we need another name because we're just going to get called traditional otherwise and then there will be no distinction between this and I don't remember who thought it up but we it came into being in one of those conversations that why don't take the word complement that's complement with a EU not an AI complement we're not paying each other compliments we are completing one another it's not good for the man to be alone here's a woman fit she's a compliment for him that's the origin and the essence of the term so the gist of it today is it's a vision that steers we hope a biblical path between the Nullification or minimization of differences that are to be lived out in church and in home and society and the abuse of those differences that I think the New Testament are is written to correct and it seems to me that in in the garden and then corrected in like fissions 5 the abuses can be either men domineering or being passive and the women being domineering or being doormats and mindless and coquettish and and we want to call women to full articulate creative personhood and men to step up to the plate with a kind of christ-like sacrificial leadership in the home that enables the woman to flourish in all that she is and him to flourish in a christ-like demeanor if I could follow up with one more question a Galit Arianism had been around in Evangelic ilysm from the beginnings of neo-evangelicalism why in the late 80s did what became the council on Biblical manhood and womanhood and what became the Denver statement why did a group of folks get together and say it's important for us to articulate this now what was pushing that particular issue I don't remember except personally I mean you you probably know culturally Iseman I was teaching at Bethel College and between 74 and 80 and the speakers that were coming in were increasingly strident in their feminism so that Virginia Mallinckrodt for example who's gone her peculiar way since those days called our view obscene in the Bethel Chapel and it was it was that kind of rising tide of aggressiveness of the evangelical wing that caused me at least to say okay I'm gonna say something about this because I don't see any of that in the scriptures Russell you are now the chairman of the Council on Biblical manhood and womanhood given where they were then can you assess where we are now give us an idea of where you think eben Jellicle ism is where the culture is on this well what I fear is that we have an evangelical ISM many people within evangelicalism who can check off complementarian on a box but who aren't really living out complementarian lives and so sometimes I fear that we have marriages that are functionally egalitarian because they're there they're within the structure of the larger society and if all we're doing is is saying male headship and wives submit to your husbands but we're not really defining what that looks like in a christ-centered Way of discipleship in this kind of culture when those things are being challenged then it's it's simply going to go away people are going to conform to the pattern of this age which means we have any creasing struggle when it comes to questions that previous generations never had before in the same way so I have had in in recent years people who have come and said my woman came to me once and said my husband has told me he wants to be a woman he wants to have gender reassignment surgery and become a woman he doesn't want to leave me he wants to stay together Martin Luther never had to deal with that I can only imagine what he would have said but he didn't have to deal with pastors now have to deal with that yeah al Mohler is famous for saying used to a father said he son down and said now son when it comes time to get married it's important for you to marry a good Christian girl oh yes - sitting down saying a son when it comes time to get married it's important to marry a woman that's right and and what that means is and then he has to explain Greg you're a pastor what kind of issues do you see going on with regard to what Russell has just talked about in the local church yeah I think Russell's exactly right I I pastor a church here in town it's it's not a large church at all but I do a good amount of premarital counseling for instance and functional egalitarianism among the young people that I counsel is it's just all over the place so you have men who think that being a complementarian and leading their wives really has no feet on it until they come to a decision that they're disagreeing about but up until that moment it's just an egalitarian sort of living together without male leadership and headship kind of creating the atmosphere of the home you know a lot of folks have said why include this issue in a conference call together for the gospel aren't there wonderful people that hold high views of God high views of the doctrines of grace that are egalitarian why would we want to highlight this given that it divides some parts of evangelicalism I'd like to hear from each of you on that maybe I'll start with John Wow it is really a good question because I I don't think you have to be a compliment Aryan to be saved and so it's not essential at that level but as soon as you move beneath that level and ask what are the implications of not following through with what Ephesians 5 seems to say or first Timothy 2 seems to say those would be classic marriage church texts the implications let me just mention two or three implications hermeneutical II for the gospel are significant if you if you do the kind of gymnastics that I think you have to do in order to escape Ephesians 5 you're gonna get the gospel wrong secondly but that's that's an overstatement you will tend to go in that direction and sooner or later you're gonna get the gospel wrong here's the second thing marriage as its described there is the gospel in portrayal and the husband is to love like Christ loves the church and suffer for her died for her and she is to submit to him as the church submits to Christ if you come along and say there is no head and there is no submission do you just simply cancel out the visible gospel in in marriage and then I would say in the in the church where the gospel is - it's the pillar and bulwark of the gospel and if you at the core of its structure deny that men because of their call of God to be men should be the leaders here and women should be leaders it's going to malfunction along the way and I would say that in spite of the fact I don't know their Bible women in China and I know their major women pastors in the charismatic renewal in in the global South I would say notwithstanding it is written on male and female hearts to malfunction long term where that the church is not being led by strong male Proclaimers and leaders the way Christ would so outside for those three reasons at least it gets very close to the center in in the kinds of things that are around the gospel protecting it and making it spread and and vital in the world Russell right well I would just I would echo that and and just push it push it again and simply say that in order to get I think to an egalitarian position you have to bring into your hermeneutic some bad DNA you have to have some principles and ideas that that tend in a certain direction to corrode the authority of Scripture and and once you do that the corrosion isn't just gonna stop on those particular passages that you you you want it to stop at it's gonna move on to other passages until eventually you're sitting like you said right at the heart of the gospel and letting those corrosive principles work on those texts also so it's just a very dangerous and unhealthy thing I think Russell you know when the United States military went into Iraq one of the images that we saw all over the world was that statue of Saddam Hussein being torn down because that was a repudiation of Saddam Hussein pastor Piper is exactly right Ephesians chapter 5 Paul says this is a mystery marriage is designed to show you Christ in the church not the other way around God says it is not good for Adam to be alone not simply because he needs company he could have designed Adam to subdivide like an amoeba but he creates Adam to have someone taken from him who's like him but who is different from him and the two become one flesh Paul says the mystery is Christ in his church when you strike at that and the satanic powers always want to strike at that you're striking at the very picture and sign of the gospel itself and in the fullness of time the gospel will not be credible when you raise up children who see the image of the gospel being torn apart in front of them all the time the second thing is I don't think it's a question of whether or not we have male headship I think it's a question of what kind of male headship we will have we live in a culture right now that is dominated by pagan patriarchy in which there are restaurants that are there expressly for men to come in and ogle women internet pornography is prey upon women when you have a male headship that is unhinged from the gospel and unhinged from Christ like discipleship women and children are going to be harmed and hurt and that is what we see all around us right now so part of what complementarianism is saying is not women submit he is saying wives submit yourselves to your own husbands when a woman submits herself to her own husband or when a young woman who's not yet married submits herself to that future husband whose name she does not yet know she is refusing to submit to men generally so she's not seeing her identity in terms of how men view her in terms of sexual attractiveness and availability which is why the Apostle Peter when he's talking about what it means to be sanctified as a woman this is not what the culture demands of you in braided hair and external appearance but that quiet beauty of the heart that's a countercultural statement and if we don't preserve that and show the kind of male headship that is self sacrificial that washes feet that goes to the cross then we're going to wind up with the kind of male headship that is satanic to the core one of the things that we saw in you from the very beginning of together for the gospel was we saw a real passion on this issue because you recognized that when you committed yourself to the truth of Scripture you are going to bump up against the culture at so many different points that you weren't afraid to do that in this particular area nevertheless I still see guys going three ways some guys will lean into the complementarian issue and they'll recognize I'm just gonna have to be countercultural here I know I mean I'm going to there gonna be a lot of people that won't step across the threshold of where my church worships because of my stand on this and it's what the scripture says and it's good for men and women and it's the way the church is to be ordered so I'm going to do it but others say now we're gonna backburner this why why offend folks upfront we're gonna backburner this and then eventually we'll get around to addressing this maybe in some of the places and then I still see and I think this is because of the dominant cultural bombardment because I think the situation that John described in the late eighties is worse now than it was then both in the general culture and in evangelical institutions colleges maybe maybe the seminary situation better than colleges but I think the college situation may be worse than the 1980s there's still others that begin to question the issue itself and say have we have we just have we bought into something that's traditional and cultural and we've baptized it with our how do you respond to that when you're talking to your generation let me ask Russ and Greg first well I think there's a fourth category to which is to have a kind of hyper masculinity and hyper femininity that tries to push back on it with a caricatured form of masculinity that really could apply in the Bible to Nimrod more than it could apply to Jesus of Nazareth and to Joseph and so I think there's an overreaction in a sense that that really does take some cultural norm and try to baptize it so I think that does happen but I think when people embrace this issue they are first to become countercultural in this society to say I love what it means to be a man for a godly woman say I love what it means to be a woman for simply to love children and to and to love families and to do what it takes to love families so when you when you see that man who is working two or three jobs so that he can provide for his wife and children when you see that mother who is not not seeking her own career advancement but really sees pouring herself into nurturing the next generation and Titus to women to women ministry as being valuable and worth it you're seeing something that looks increasingly strange to the outside culture but strange and I think the glorious kind of a way which means we as the church need to stop mimicking the outside culture even with the kind of pictures that we put of women for instance in our printed materials we give this picture that seems to say the supermodels shall inherit the earth rather than saying what we really value is not that Madison Avenue caricature or something else good Greg well a couple of things to say about it one is that when you're the pastor of a local church it's really impossible to backburner the issue because it is so practical you just have to make decisions week in and week out about who's gonna fill the pulpit not even just for preaching but for reading the scriptures or for praying or for teaching Sunday School classes and as soon as you begin to make decisions about that you're in the discussion and so you better have some well formulated thoughts about it the second thing would just be that I think it's possible for us as pastors and especially those of us that are complementarian to mess up in talking about this when we frame it purely in terms of negatives you start the conversation by saying what women cannot or should not do in the life of the church I don't think that's the best way to talk about it you know so it's third Avenue we when I'm asked about it or when I'm talking about it I'll say that I want women serving in every way in the church that scripture allows women to serve in and you can take those off over a few minutes and say this is the kind of flourishing that I want to see women doing in my church but there are certain roles that God has reserved for men in the church and that that shouldn't be offensive to you because God has the right to set out those roles as he wants to as our creator John you are in gatherings like this more frequently than any of us certainly on this panel what what where do you see with regard to the receptiveness of the complementarian message where do you see the receptiveness in the places where you are not just places like t4g but passion etc is there an acceptance is there an embrace of the importance of this message in the places that you talk amongst the young folks in our culture yeah I talk to pretty conservative places so it's not a fair sample the answer is yes and it amazes me the difference between say the 20s and 30s crowd today and the crowd I dealt with in the late eighties I I fought battle after battle with college students who were viciously opposed and now you have the likes of these young guys down here who ready to hear from all of them embracing this and having churches filled with thousands of young articulate educated flourishing women who are saying yes to what they're saying that's new it was it's just amazing to me that that's that's the case can I answer your other question ad was there's a line of continuity between simple homespun conservative evangelical complementarianism and so-called gay marriage and in those days I used to say you're gonna quote Galatians 3:28 on me there's neither male nor female the way you're quoting it I know where that's gonna go and they would scoff at me just scoff at me nobody's scoffing today nobody scoffing today there's neither male nor male see there really isn't neither male nor female with that hermeneutic now here here's here's the question that I found the question you asked was what do you say to people who might know skeptical or whatever the the question egalitarians have never satisfactorily answered for me is if you're raising a eight-year-old little boy or little girl and your mom or dad and that little girl says to mom mommy what does it mean to grow up and be a woman and not a man or the little boy daddy what does it mean to grow up and be a man and not a woman it will not do to just talk in terms of plumbing biological because that's not your personhood and it won't do to simply say courage humility righteousness Christlikeness because little kid's gonna think no no I mean a woman and not a man no answer no answer and that's the question I would ask these folks what will you say to an 8 year old or 10 year old who says what does it mean to grow up and be a man and not a woman what separates me and I don't just mean body I mean is there anything that matters in anything personhood in any rich deep sense of masculinity why are you going to say if you can't give some articulation to complementarity between them and and by large you don't I read book after book after book in those days when I was trying to fight the battles they never would address the issue they always are talking in terms of personhood in in things that crossover from male to female so be be christ-like in a marriage it's be humble be kind be gentle be forgiving be like Jesus but that doesn't help me know what I am as a man and not a woman you just keep flattening it out and flattening it out and that backfires I think you're right it's not like mad man who and show itself if you don't help a man know what a manhood is it'll show itself we could give statistic today a lot worse than what he just gave about what it's doing to cultures John you just segue into what I think can be our concluding conversation we've got about five minutes and we know that there's some friendly interlocutors out there who not everybody that comes to t4g is complementarian and and there's some folks that are that are waiting to be persuaded either that this is biblical or that it's important or both your pastors persuade them you first jump Russ well I think first of all you have to deal with those biblical text fusions five first Peter three first Timothy - I think Pastor John is exactly right that there are just in terms of sanctification there are some things that the scripture gives to all people as persons and then there are specific things for men and specific tendencies that the scripture warns against pugilism and quarrelsome nests and those kinds of things and then specific aspects of womanhood that quiet spirit that Titus to function and all of those things and specific dangers don't fear Peter says that which is frightening for instance and so you have to deal with those texts I also think you have to deal with biblical complementarianism in terms of what it is and not in terms of a caricature whether that's a caricature from the outside or a caricature from people who think they're complementarian and what they mean by that is woman get me my chips which is not Ephesians 5 or blessed why please get me my chips and then less correct that's not complementarianism complementarianism bears across and complementarianism is thinking about what is in the best interest male headship is what is in the best interest of my bride and of my children it's as Christ washed his bride with pure water when Jesus does that in the upper room when he washes his church those foundation stones of his church with pure water the church objects initially you'll never wash my feet Peter says Jesus doesn't respond with passivity well try to do something nice but nor does he respond with raw sovereignty what does Jesus do he leads and he teaches with his word unless I washed your feet you can have nothing to do with me when Jesus is giving himself up at the cross for his bride his bride doesn't want him to will fight for you Peter says you'll never go to the cross Jesus always lovingly and gently but decisively leads through teaching and discipleship and moving forward so you have to deal with complementarianism in terms of Christ not simply in terms of who's in charge good Greg well I'm mostly just gonna yield time to I told these guys I'm mostly here to demonstrate biblical masculine high just real briefly I I think the I think the objection that I that I run into from from the young people I tried a pastor most of the time it's just a misunderstanding that an understanding of role between men and women somehow speaks to dignity and and I would just shoot it that with with everything I have to say no god-given role does not speak to god-given dignity men and women are both created in the image of God that's as clear as it can be in Genesis 1 and 2 but what's also clear in Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 and then and then on through the rest of the Bible is that within that context of equal dignity God has every right to give out roles to his created people and he does that throughout the Bible sometimes it's men and women other times it's it's different things but but God as creator and his Lord has every right to give us roles and that doesn't speak to the dignity of a created person John so the question is help-help the uncertain with the bible shorts new Bible and I think where I would probably go as I'd start with decisions because I think that's the clearest that a woman should submit to her husband and a man should be the head and even if you don't know any Greek like grudem to look up 3800 uses of Kepha la you can just follow the context through and say well if it means source it means source of provision and source of authority and source of protection and so we've got the real deal anyway whatever you call it and so I just think Ephesians 5 carefully walked through beautifies marriage and it's what every woman wants a man who cares for her late on his life for and be strong for her and lead in devotions and open the door and take her to the restaurant and just respect her in every possible way I mean just that's what so that start there then I go over to first Timothy 2 and I would say the two things that a woman is forbidden here to teach and have authority are the two things that distinguish an elder from a deacon governance and teaching and therefore what he's saying is elders should be men that's the distillation of first Timothy 2:12 13 and then he grounds it in the order of creation nearly all orders I have to do with because the analyst blah blah blah and then you go back and then you go back to Genesis 1 and 2 and you just walk through there and say now look here's Adam why did he create him and then the woman later and why did he give him the rules of the garden like don't eat here which apparently he had to tell her because she's never told that and why does he name her and and then why in the world didn't he step up to the plate because it says he was there while she was being tempted and he blew it from the first point and and I think probably what what Paul is getting at when he said the woman was deceived and not the man is that she was simply taking initiative in dealing with the tempter and the guy was not saying a word like he should have been to protect his woman from this tempter and you just walked through the eight or nine evidences from Genesis 1 and 2 that this is from the beginning what wrecked the world that the beauty of his headship wasn't owned by him maybe he fell first you have don't lean the real fall there what's going on is they fell together she didn't fall and then he he fell they fell together cuz they're both there at the tree and he's not doing his role and she's not doing her role and the whole sin collapse is happening as they reject their roles which is right at the heart of it so there's B the three places I just start thank you John thank you Greg Thank You Russell C BMW org will provide you tons of good resources on this CB MW org they have a booth here in the exhibit hall recovering biblical manhood and womanhood a great book you ought to read on this you

Channel: Together for the Gospel (T4G)

Views: 25,536

Rating: 4.6305733 out of 5

Keywords: complementarian, manhood, womanhood

Id: 5WJMD5VJLuQ

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2016