When the WHY behind the WHAT changed Part 1
A new reason for an old practice
As you are probably aware by now, I have been studying complementarianism and egalitarianism. I would prefer to call them hierarchical-complementarianism (HC) and mutual-complementarianism (MC) because I think these names better reflect their similarities and differences. Of course, the old terms are so well known that I am crazy to think a shift could happen.
Perhaps you have heard that the HC/traditional position is the historical position. The position that has always been. What if I told you this is not entirely true? It is more of a half-truth.
I want to start with a simple formula: A+B=C. Think of this debate through that formula. (C) equals the what or the outcome. (A) and (B) are the why that gives the reason for the what. For example, HCs argue that men-only are designed and called by God to lead in the home, church, and society.1 MCs argue that men and women are designed and called by God to co-lead in the home, church, and society.
I wanted to get to the bottom of the “why.” What are the reasons behind the position? In short, what is the (A) and (B) that get us to the conclusion of (C)? More importantly, have those reasons changed over time?
What I learned was that this why has actually shifted in the 19th century. While many HCs claim to have the historic position, that is not entirely accurate. Yes, they have the historical practices. No, they do not have the historical reasons for the practice.
“The practice is the same. The theology is new.”
In the second edition of Women in the Church: A Fresh Analysis of 1 Timothy 2:9-15, published in 1995, there is an appendix written by Dr. Daniel Doriani. This work is a collection of essays by HCs, specifically on 1 Timothy 2. Dr. Doriani, while agreeing with the position, admits there was a change in the why behind the practice. If you bought the book today, in its third edition, sadly, you would NOT find this appendix.2
I want to quote extensively from his essay as I find it rather telling. You will see some concessions and attempts to claim the historical position. However, in the end, Dr. Doriani does admit that the current WHY behind the WHAT is actually new to the debate.
Doriani writes,
“Traditionalists should also admit that past discussions were often framed in terms that could demean women. For example, the Greek question, “Do women have souls?” loitered in the theological discussions of the spiritual capacities of women into the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and beyond.”
“Could demean women” is a soft, intellectually dishonest way of putting the topic. In some of the Greco-Roman thought, there is no getting around the fact that it did demean women. In the next post, I will quote some thinkers over the ages to illustrate this fact.
However, Dr. Doriani tries to call out and dismiss the other side by claiming they are cherry-picking or proof-texting the worst of the worst. He tries to argue, in the early part of the appendix, that these were not “typical of traditional thought.”
“some [egalitarians] making proponents of male headship sound misogynistic or incoherent. It is at best misleading to cull the worst excesses of the past, and cite them again and again, as if they were typical of traditional thought.”
Yes, we should be wise in not taking one quote or one author as the belief for all of historical Christian thought. But, as you will see, it was more typical than we want to admit. And Dr. Doriani, later in the appendix, does admit most theologians held this demeaning view of women. Now, this is not to say that ALL were negative. There were some positive notes regarding women. But it sure seems like the exception rather than the rule.
It seems rather dismissive to argue that quoting church fathers is merely selective and does not reveal a predominant or typical understanding of the ontology of women. I would be curious: what is the tipping point that something is “typical of traditional thought”?
Someone could make the same argument about a number of theological beliefs that had yet to be fully worked out in the first 500 or so years of the church. What Dr. Doriani seems to be doing is minimizing the discussion and inadvertently saying that those who are citing the problematic passages are making a mountain out of a molehill.
I would argue that, in the same way that now agreed-upon beliefs took time to change, we are working out our own aspect of a better understanding regarding this topic.
In fact, Dr. Doriani goes on to be selective in writing,
“The history of interpretation serves current interpretations of 1 Timothy 2 by recovering the best thoughts of the best minds of the church…We hope to discover the reasoning of the church’s best theologians.”
He is saying that the best path forward is to recover the best that the best theologians have to offer. Disregard some of their other problematic writings. Yet, how can you disregard some of the statements about men and women when those have a direct impact on immediate relationships in the home, church, and society?
From there, the essay attempts to examine some of the early church fathers. Yet, he downplays those pesky, problematic passages. And still, it does seem that these “best theologians” had some demeaning thoughts on women.
“Although mitigating passages exist, the following excerpt, loaded with both rhetoric and misogyny, seems to mean Tertullian (155-220 AD) also believed women were spiritually inferior to men: ‘And do you not know that each of you is an Eve?…you are the devil’s gateway: you are the first deserter of divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die.’”
Eventually, he summarizes the historical view up to the reformation as follows,
“Some theologians believed women were intellectually inferior to men, and prone to deception, others held that they were simply less interested in reason. Some believed the sensual nature dominated women.3 One way or another, most theologians doubted that women had the moral and intellectual capacity to meet the doctrinal and apologetic needs of the church’s public life.”
Doriani goes on to admit that Luther, Calvin, and the Puritans, for the most part, discussed the difference between men and women in terms of superiority and inferiority. These were the common terms to discuss the relationship between men and women. You start to see this vocabulary leave the mainstream discussion in the 1960s with the introduction of the terms role and function to describe the difference.
While the Reformation, as stated above, brought the priesthood of all believers and broke the divide of sacred/secular, little changed in the language used regarding the ontological equality of men and women.
Not to mention the other impact the Reformation had on the relationships within the church between men and women. Dr. Beth Allison Barr, in her newly released work, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, has some sections discussing the impact of the Reformation on this whole topic, too.
Dr. Doriani does, though, add a new nuance to the argument. While Puritans still upheld the complementarian position, there was a slight shift away from women's intellectual inferiority while still upholding the idea that men were more fit to lead. The basis of this was the order of society—the divide between public and private life. However, there was a clear consensus that women were not to lead men in any public sphere within society.
As I mentioned in previous posts, many people today believe that women can be managers. But this is a shifted and new interpretation of 1 Timothy 2. I would argue it is an interpretive response to the cultural pressures to see women as actually intellectually fit and gifted to hold positions in society or the public spheres like education, politics, and business.
Now, the discussion shifted to 1 Timothy 2 being written to and for the church, so it does not apply to the whole of society. It only applies to the church. This is, again, a historically new interpretation. And, without going too far afield on a tangent, it cuts the legs out from under the argument that Paul reaches back to creation to make his point in 2:13. If this is the way it is in God’s good creation, his creation and re-creation does not stop at the church walls. God’s influence and goodness are meant to extend out into the world and society. So why limit women’s influence to just the church if God really did mean it for his creation before the fall?
Just to be clear, I think this is not a good hermeneutical practice. In my mind, it seems to be a biased hermeneutic. I think this is an example of trying to solve cognitive dissonance without being willing to question the underlying theology and interpretation of the scriptures. Could Paul actually mean something else?
To continue quoting Dr. Doriani, he concludes his essay as follows,
“Conservative studies of 1 Timothy 2, almost by definition, advance few novel readings of the text. Rather, they attempt to confirm and defend the straightforward grammatical-historical reading. So, for example, complementarians chide egalitarians for failing to draw vital distinctions between offices and function, between preaching and prophecy. They stress the difference between private teaching, which they grant to women, and public teaching, which they do not. They argue that evangelical egalitarianism rests on an over-realized eschatology that leaps directly from Acts 2 to the perfect equality and freedom the saints will enjoy in heaven. They question the egalitarians’ ability to resist cultural trends, such as America’s zeal for freedom and self-actualization.
If you recall my previous post about interpretation principles, the straightforward reading is not as straightforward as we believe. I also have seen that egalitarian scholars do draw distinctions between preaching and prophecy, office and function, and private and public. Yet, they are also willing to call out how the complementarian is giving explanations to passages that do NOT draw these distinctions. The same straightforward reading would not imply a private versus public setting. It has to be read into the passage to fit the interpretation principles that both positions agree on.
Here, Dr. Doriani admits the shift in interpretation,
Nonetheless, the complementarian position has developed. Assertions of the ontological inferiority of women have become rare, so natural law and Thomistic arguments4 based on the size, bearing, and rationality of men have virtually disappeared from serious discourse. Most declare that women are different in function, but equal to men in spiritual, mental, and emotional being. Woman ‘may be given gifts of ruling or teaching, but she may not use them as an elder in the church.’5 She bears the image of God in all but authority….
Vital to the shift toward creation order and away from ontological arguments is a reinterpretation of 1 Timothy 2:14. Traditional interpreters increasingly join feminists in denying that the phrase, ‘Adam was not deceived but the woman was deceived,’ means that women are liable to deception. They deny that Eve’s deception, described in Genesis and 1 Timothy, typifies womankind. The idea, they admit, that women are prone to deception proves too much. (Emphasis added.) If women lack discernment, they should not be permitted to teach other women or children either. Yet the whole Bible, even the Pastorals themselves, permit women to teach women and children (2 Timothy 1:5, 3:15; Titus 2:3-4, cf. Acts 16:1). Besides, if women are prone to deception after the model of Eve, is not man prone to wanton rebellion after the model of Adam? And if so, how would that qualify Adam to lead? This would give us a church in which rebels instruct fools. Recent conservatives, therefore, maintain that the text describes or illustrates what happens when men abdicate and women usurp leadership. The race fell into sin because Adam stood by while Eve took the lead in responding to the serpent’s challenge, and Ephesians women who make Eve’s mistake and seek the roles of men will, as Douglas Moo (A complementarian scholar) puts it, ‘bring similar disaster on themselves and the church.’6 But this line of traditionalist thought is open to critique. Why do traditionalists expect ‘similar disasters’ to occur if Eve in no way typifies women? If women have no more propensity toward doctrinal error than men, why should the church expect disaster if roles reverse? Regardless of this difficulty, recent conservative theologians have shied from ontological arguments for male headship.”
There is clearly a shift in the interpretation of this passage. For HCs to charge MCs with mishandling the biblical text and looking for new interpretations themselves is an unfair assessment. Doriani admits the challenges of not linking male-only leadership to ontology or nature. After all, is not gender a part of a person’s ontology or nature? So, to claim leadership is not based upon ontology but upon gender adds its own wrinkles, its own dissonance, to the discussion.
There are other authors who see this and are trying to go back to those older interpretations. Those in the Douglas Wilson camps will still argue that the nature of women is one of less ability/skill/courage to withstand the onslaught of the enemy. Therefore, we need men to be doctrinal leaders and protectors.
Another note of change I have seen in my reading is now, rather than making the case for male headship relying on 1 Timothy 2:13 AND 14-15, most make their argument solely on the creation order referenced in 1 Timothy 2:13. I will be the first to admit, I had made such an argument. And now I wonder, had I simply been proof-texting? Narrowing the text to such a degree as to remove it from its context? We know and admit that verse numbers and headings within the Bible are later additions. They are NOT part of the inerrant scriptures. I mentioned in my previous post how Dr. Bill Mounce, in an interview, does this very thing by limiting his stance to one verse.
Returning to the overall point in this section, Dr. Doriani seems willing to admit the novel or new theological basis for the historical practice of male headship in church and home. This is a change to the traditional position. And to quote Dr. WIlliam G. Witt again, it makes it a new tradition.
“The same tradition done for different reasons is not the same tradition but a new tradition.”
For the next post, I want to dig more into some of the quotes throughout the ages that illustrate what Dr. Doriani is writing about. But I leave you with this today. I admit that I have tried to level the playing field in a way. First, in previous posts, I drew attention to the many similarities between the positions and what the real divide seems to be centered around.
However, in these posts, I think it is important to show that unless a person is willing to hold that women are inferior to men, less rational, more easily deceived, and unfit for ALL positions of authority over men, then you really do not have the historical position. The current “soft-complementarian”7 position is a reinterpretation of scripture passages.
To admit that would be too much for some. However, I believe it is acceptable to admit when our interpretations change for the better. We have done it before in the past 2,000 years, not least the reformation regarding church structure not being bound up into popes and bishops!
In all of this, I would say that the egalitarian (MC) position is not the only new interpretation at the table. So, if that is the case, both being new, then which position does a better job of understanding scriptural and historical context? Or, perhaps to push a little further, I believe one position wants to maintain the what and will look for a different why. The other is willing to suggest we got the equation wrong, so perhaps the solution was wrong all along…
Not all complementarians (HCs) agree on the spheres of male-only leadership. Also, not all complementarians (HCs) agree on the degree of leadership. You can read a brief summary in my previous post, What’s In a Name?
It was interesting to map out the various versions of books throughout the last century and see the shifts in the argument. Having various editions, though, is not uncommon as the discussion shifts over time.
This is a fascinating argument, by the way; historically, women were viewed as the ones who struggled with sexual lust; men, on the other hand, did not. Note how this has drastically shifted in the modern era.
Thomistic arguments” refer to reasoning derived from Thomas Aquinas, particularly his use of Aristotelian philosophy to articulate natural law, ethics, and the rational order of creation within Christian theology.
Dr. Doriani quotes Susah Foh here, Women and the Word of God (1979). Foh is a complementarian scholar who changed the discussion around Genesis 3:16 and the concept of “…her desire will be for her husband…” As far as I could tell, she was the first to draw a connection to the idea of desire being about ruling over something; she links it to Genesis 4:7, which says, “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule it.”
This is a common argument from HCs. However, it is one interpretation of Genesis 3 and the fall. The passage is not explicit about this being the case at all. Sadly, I think many interpret the fall through these lenses because we have heard this interpretation so many times that it sounds normal and right. There are zero contextual explanations that we should interpret 1 Timothy 2:12-13 and Genesis 2-3 as describing or illustrating what happens when men abdicate and women usurp leadership. To say that “The race fell into sin because Adam stood by while Eve took the lead in responding to the serpent’s challenge…” is just an interpretation. It does not have to be the only one, the right one, or even the best one.
As a reminder, this term is used for the position that believes women can serve as leaders in society as employers. It also limits the authority of the husband at home, often painting a picture of partners working together with the husband leading sacrificially, only exercising a tie-breaking vote when there is a disagreement.