Should men and women have identical roles? Or is there something distinctive about men and women that reflects correspondingly distinct roles? Surely if ever we could come up with a question of contemporary relevance and significance this is it!
Hi, I’m Fred Zaspel, executive editor here at Books At a Glance, and we’re talking today with Owen Strachan, co-author with Gavin Peacock of the new book, The Grand Design: Male and Female He Made Them, from Christian Focus Publishers. He is president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Associate Professor of Christian Theology and Director of the Center for Public Theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Owen and Gavin have teamed up to write this interesting and very contemporary new book, and we’re glad to have Owen with us today to talk about their work. Owen, welcome!
Strachan:
Thank you so much, Fred, it’s great to be with you and we appreciate your work.
Zaspel:
Let’s start by simply defining our terms. What is complementarity? And you might want to contrast this with egalitarianism … and maybe at the same time clarify what complementarianism is not!
Strachan:
Yeah, there’s plenty of work to do here isn’t there? There’s so much confusion over these issues. Essentially, in a quick form, complementarity is the conviction that men and women are created equal by God, invested with incredible dignity, worth, and potential, but also even before the fall (and that’s a key phrase there) even before the fall are given different responsibilities and roles. Men are called to be head of the home and of the church and to be leaders wherever they can be and women are called to submit to men in the home and the church and find worth and identity in being a helper in those contexts. Complementarians have historically argued in the context of the local church that men are not simply elders, but are the ones who provide theological teaching and training in the church.
Egalitarians by contrast would argue that yes, men and women are created equal by God but that men and women do not have differentiated roles in any real meaningful way when it comes to the home and the church. They share leadership in the home and effectively they share leadership in the church with women being able to be elders and pastors and teachers in the local church. You also asked what complementarianism is not. Complementarianism is sometimes caricatured as men getting all the good stuff and women not having any role to play in the home and the church. In reality, in my view and in the view of many complementarians there is no system or worldview that more a) ennobles men and calls them to be something greater than they are in Christ and that b) raises women to a level of dignity and worth that the culture so often has not given them. A key conviction here is that roles are not demeaning or bad for us. That’s something that we can talk about in moments to come but that’s all interlaid there when we’re talking about complementarity.
Zaspel:
You’re emphasizing that what you’re after is a biblical complementarity – summarize for us just briefly how the Bible establishes a complementarian understanding of the sexes.
Strachan:
Yes, you go to Genesis 1:26 and 27 and you see that as we were referring to a minute ago both men and women fully bear the image of God. And that’s hugely important for us to note. They are equal and over the centuries, over millennia, so often sinners like us have argued that there are some ways in which men are greater than women or perhaps in today’s culture, the idea that women are more advanced than men. Anyway, Genesis 1 nullifies both of those claims and causes us to recognize the beauty and dignity and worth of both sexes. But in biblical complementarity we can’t simply stop with the equality. We have to go on to Genesis 2. The foundational chapters Scripture are so important for understanding who we are, and who we are is men and women by the way, and we see that Adam is created first. So later on in the Scriptures we will find out that Adam is the head of his wife in Ephesians 5:22 – 33 and he has created us to be the leader on this earth. And then his wife is formed as a helper for him by Yahweh. There’s not a helper fit for him, suited to him, and so that is her God-given identity. Those are realities that we seek to explore and unpack in Scripture. The women’s role of course is also, we would say, fulfilled through the gospel in Ephesians 5. She is not simply in the role of helper, which is a godly and honoring role, this is a matter of her being like the church and so complementarity at its apex is not simply a structure for living that is wise and God honoring, but it is also a living display of the gospel of grace with the church submitting itself to Christ as Lord lay down his life for his bride.
Zaspel:
One huge obstacle to embracing complementarity today is the assumption that authority structure necessarily implies notions of superiority and inferiority. Would you address that for us?
Strachan:
Yes, a great question, and so to me, one of the things we very quickly have to say, just in doing a little bit of apologetics culturally here, is, you know we all, whether we like it or not, have to submit to, for example, well actually, several forms of government, don’t we? Local government, state government and federal government. We want to just recognize that yes, government can be evil and bad but it’s not fundamentally demeaning or subhuman for us to be citizens as part of a broader body. And part of that body would be authority structures within that kind of guide and shape life. In a similar way a child is not the authority of the home, at least historically has not been in Western society or in any society really. And yet most of us would not say that children have to submit to follow the leadership of their parents are subhuman; that they only become human when they get to lead themselves. So we want to recognize even before we talk about biblical texts that the concept of submission and authority is woven into life and it’s not necessarily a bad reality.
In fact, I actually think authority in biblical terms rightly understood is very good for us and submission is fundamentally the shape and nature of faith in Jesus Christ. In other words, when we come to faith in Christ we are doing nothing other than submitting to him and saying, “You are Lord; I am wrong and you are right and I am following you all the days of my life.” There has been a serious cultural pushback to any concept of authority. The natural family was argued to be the powerhouse of repression. In the 1950s and following, if you were taking a class on gender theory at a secular university in many cases that’s the way the natural family, with the father as leader and a mother following him and being a homemaker in the sorts of things that kind of mid-century domesticity model with kids happily doing generally what their parents asked, that would be seen as a storehouse of repression.
And what we need to make clear as Christians working off of the Scripture both philosophically, theologically and exegetically is that this is not the storehouse of repression. The natural family, the biblical family even, is the garden of flourishing that God has ordained for us. Too often families don’t live up to that ideal but that’s what they can be and should be by divine aid and even natural order.
Zaspel:
What is the essence of manhood and of womanhood? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman?
Strachan:
Crucial questions. I would want to go to places like Ephesians 5 and Genesis 2. We’ve already talked about Genesis 2 a little bit, so let’s talk a little bit more about Ephesians 5. In Ephesians 5 we have the husband being called to be essentially like Jesus Christ. And we learn there that Jesus lays down his life for his bride, protects his bride, is kind to his bride, is gracious to her. So I think that every man can read a passage like that, whether married or single, and say, “Okay, there’s something here that I can glean from this text. I want to be courageous; I want to be a leader however I can be; I want to treat women well; I want to take risks in a gospel sense.”
And you can look at other texts, you look at I Kings 2:2 where you have David calling Solomon to be strong and show himself a man and you recognize that even in the Old Testament mind, in the old covenant era, there is this idea that men are called to be those who step up to the plate, who take the duty of leadership provision and protection on themselves, who are responsible for modeling godliness, by the way, for the covenant community and certainly for the family.
Men today are often presented culturally as if we are idiots, goofballs, babies, what we really need are women who can come in and effectively civilize us and then sort of steward our obsessions with golf or football or basketball or comic books or video games or whatever we might be interested in. In the biblical mind, men are called to be strong but not strong in the sense that they lord their strength over others or use their position for their own good. They are called to be strong for the good of the community, for the good of the family, for the good of their loved ones. And when you frame all of that in a gospel sense you just recognize that our culture is pretty much lying to us about what men are. Men have tremendous potential, nobility and dignity and we need to find that by becoming who we can be in Jesus Christ, becoming a leader, working to be strong, working to be those who protect women, working to be those who build families and take on big things in the name of God. We really need to recover that sense of manhood today and Gavin and I are after that in The Grand Design.
The essence of womanhood – these are very big questions that we really need to labor to get right. I can’t do full justice to them but in Scripture and here where we are talking about biblical womanhood we just have to recognize for a minute that we really do run fully and squarely into the teeth of our secularizing culture on this subject. Because no matter, no issue, no area has been more sort balmed over then womanhood. Satan has always been about the business of attacking women. He started this horrible trend in Genesis 3 when he targeted Eve and Adam failed to step up and protect Eve. But what we need to make very clear is that biblical womanhood at its core is presented in Genesis 2 in the context of marriage, so we need to note that, but I think there’s something to learn there for all women. The fact that Eve is a helper to her husband I think, and Gavin thinks, is very important to womanly identity. That’s not to say that every woman is going to be a helper in the context of marriage, but I think when you are a godly mom and you’re training your little girl to grow up to be a Christian woman, you honestly don’t know if she’s going to be married. Of course many women are, most women are, but you’re training her to follow that blueprint. In other words, you’re trying to train her to welcome manly leadership, to follow it, to support it not simply accept it grudgingly, but welcome it. And you’re training that little girl ultimately in the Ephesians 5 way, as I was mentioning, to be submissive.
Of course none of this means passivity though. That’s the key that we need to make very clear here. Godly womanhood, though being under the guise of helper, does not at all eventuate in passivity and what we might think of as weakness. A helper is somebody, in the Genesis 2 sense, who is actually able to provide skills and abilities that the man does not have. So many men have lives that are impoverished when they are called to be married but they are not. And we just recognize that women fulfill all sorts of roles and provide all sorts of blessings that men do not. So we want to make very clear these sorts of things. We want to make clear as well that godly women are not asked by godly men or by the church to essentially dampen themselves down but are called to be righteous in Christ. Even, in a sense, like Judges 4, where Deborah and others lead very courageously when men will not step up. So as complementarians we’re not asking to make themselves quiet as church mice; we are asking them to pursue the Lord with full hearts, to be strong in the grace of Jesus Christ and to fill their God-given role with passion and love for Christ.
Zaspel:
I have several more questions that I’d love for you to explore for us, but we’re running short on time. Can we talk again?
Strachan:
Yes, I’d love to, Fred. Thank you.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Owen Strachan, co-author with Gavin Peacock of the new book, The Grand Design: Male and Female He Made Them. It’s a massively important subject for our day in particular, and we encourage you to get a copy of their book and enjoy!
Owen, many thanks for talking to us today.
Strachan:
Thank you so much, Fred. I appreciate it.
Buy the books
The Grand Design: Male and Female He Made Them