Why ‘complementarianism’ matters: reflections occasioned by Carl Trueman
Carl Trueman has an excellent blog post on the Reformation21 site, expressing puzzlement at why so many (American, evangelical) parachurch organisations make complementarianism (male-only leadership) a defining point of their platform. He highlights the potential absurdity of this in characteristically sharp and witty fashion, pointing out that the historical divisions that these organisations choose to bridge (baptismal practice; church polity; doctrines of grace) are, or should be, far more basic than complementarianism, and asking some sharp questions about practice (he imagines a situation of a male, paedobaptist, Presbyterian minister and a female Baptist minister visiting a Baptist church that is part of one of these coalitions, and asks how this will be played out, indicating that every possible answer is absurd.) As a committed evangelical (indeed, someone who has defended inerrancy in print a couple of times), who is also committed to the principle that not only should all areas of church life be open to women, but that every local church should in fact have female leaders, I might be expected to applaud Carl’s post. He certainly makes his point well, but I think he misses something about the significance of praxis in defining unity. Reflection on that point illuminates something about British evangelicalism also. Carl’s post asks about theology, and considers practice in the local church; what he misses, I think, is any consideration of what organisations like the Gospel Coalition actually do. I have commented before that church division generally happens on issues of practice rather than doctrine: two people can probably find a way of negotiating a disagreement over (say) Christology, particularly if they both agree not to preach on it; if they disagree over how to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, they are fairly soon going to be worshipping in different congregations, simply because they cannot both practice their beliefs in the same one. The original genius of the first evangelical parachurch groups back in the eighteenth century was their ability to negotiate differences over church order and sacramental practice by removing their organisational activity from the context of the local church: a Bible Society meeting in a town hall can be attended by Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians indifferently. At this functional level, what a group like The Gospel Coalition does is hold conferences and write stuff; the fracture points for such a group, then, are going to centre on disagreements over how to organise a conference and/or what stuff gets written and by who. The question of who is allowed to speak in public, then, inevitably becomes a point of division, and so of identity. If the group is going to organise conferences, and is only going to invite men to preach/teach at them, then the restriction of the teaching ministry to men is a defining point of the group, and it is as well to be honest about that. Why has this not generally happened this side of the Atlantic? We might point to the generally more relaxed attitudes of British churches (Carl’s illustration of a Presbyterian pastor being refused admission to the Lord’s Table because he has not been baptised as a believer does not describe something that would happen in very many British Baptist churches, rightly or wrongly). We might also point to some more nuanced accounts of complementarianism that operate in Britain, largely due to the weight of influence of the Church of England. I suspect, however, that the most honest response would be to say that the same point of division has happened in British evangelicalism, but we have generally been less than open about it. To take the issue of nuance, a common form of British complementarianism has focused on the issue of authority, rather than the issue of teaching per se. So there are many British evangelical churches which have articulated a position where women are allowed to teach, indeed to be part of the ordained ministry team, but are not allowed to hold the senior role in the team. Churches holding such a position could cheerfully be a part of a conference with both male and female speakers, although they may want some visible asymmetry to reflect their theology. (In some cases this gets convoluted to the extreme, with certain central platforms being denied to women; I have never been able to fathom what theological principle is at play in allowing women to speak to only a certain size of audience…) That said, some British evangelical parachurch groups do in practice restrict their platforms to men only; I have been told by people on UCCF staff that this is, or recently has been, common amongst university Christian Unions, for example. The rhetoric deployed...
Read MoreReflections on Spring Harvest 2012
We’re recently back from Spring Harvest in Skegness, where I worked with Norman Ivison of Fresh Expressions each morning, and had my usual mixed set of lectures and seminars in the afternoons – this year discussing ecclesiology (SH’s theme this year), women and men in leadership, using social media, and dealing with divorce. I was also, for the first time, on the Event Leadership Team – a role which involved ‘early morning’ (7.45, but in SH terms…) prayer meetings, which turned out to be really good times, as wonderful stories were shared of what had happened around the site the previous day. The event was excellent; Ness Wilson, pastor of Open Heaven Church in Loughborough, gave the morning Bible readings and was, by universal consent, quite stunningly good; someone pointed out to me that the main platform speakers were about 50% female, and about 50% under 35/40 (the latter statistic depending on some guesses that, in view of the former, might be considered ungallant…). This was my sixth SH on team; for the first time, my big memory of the event is not the talks I gave. Two in particular were difficult in advance: divorce, because I know little about the subject; and women and men in leadership, because I care deeply about what people think. I did some work and coped, I think, with the former; the latter was rendered easy by the context. I spoke after Ness had given a Bible reading that morning, and after Bev Murill had preached powerfully the previous evening; my notes had a list of great female preachers and leaders from history, with the question – can you really believe God did not gift and call? To say to folk, given what we’ve heard and experienced over the last 24 hours, can you really believe… was easy – Ness and Bev were both wonderful – and powerful. (I think I said that almost any preacher must be jealous of the gifts God has given to the pair of them – certainly my feeling…) Working with Norman was great – an easy relationship from the word go, and we instinctively shared a vision of what the church is called to be, without having to work at it. My lasting memory, though, was not any of this, good though it was. Two snapshots, perhaps. First, Pete Greig, of 24/7 Prayer, preaching one night. It was an extremely powerful message, but in the course of it he recalled with much humour his first dabblings with friends into what an earlier generation would have called ‘experimental Christianity.’ These experiments in prayer and discipleship all took place in Pete’s mother’s shed, where they would meet together and see what God would do. Second, one of our daughters, arriving home at lunchtime, shyly telling me that she prayed for a friend to be healed, and that as she prayed, her friend was healed. She and friend (daughter of others on the team, so I could follow up the story) were astonished… Both snapshots capture a sense of God running ahead of us in ministry, doing more than we ask or imagine. And there was a sense for me, and for others on the speaking team who I talked to, that we were being taken places in ministry we’d not been before. No doubt other colleagues were well within a comfort zone, but I found myself repeatedly in a place where there was a temptation to look around the room/tent and say something like – ‘the guy there? with the beard? Pete Greig – he does this stuff; why don’t you go talk to him?’ A boldness that comes from grace, however, kept me going. The night I walked past the ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ session, was grabbed by a despairing steward who needed backup because too many people wanted to come in, and ended up forgetting the party I was headed to and diving in to minister to all comers for ninety minutes – this is not my normal experience (altar calls at the end of lectures are frowned upon where I work…). There were other examples. It wasn’t just me, either. No names, of course, but one colleague told a lovely tale of seeing someone fall over in response to offered prayer ministry; a concerned friend asked ‘Does that mean God is doing something special?’ to which my colleague replied in the heat of the moment, ‘I don’t know – it’s never happened to me before…’ For much of the event, my overarching experience was the sense – familiar to many of us, I guess, from youth group/student days – that God was...
Read MoreTranslocal ecclesial identities
The theme of the recent – and excellent – Evangelical Alliance Council meeting was ‘It takes a whole church to raise a child’. Amongst the points made, two seem to me to connect interestingly. First, there was emphasis on the increasingly post-Christian, and so alien, nature of our society, which means that churches must become counter-cultural communities successfully modelling different values to the cultures around. Second, further reflection on the fact that young people tend to drop out of church when they move location – and the assumed mobility of many parts of our culture. We listened to testimony from Jesus House, and lots of helpful guidance as to what had worked for them. It struck me, however, that they seemed to be able to assume a fairly continuous process of catechesis and discipleship that began when a child entered the church and continued until she was into her twenties. My own cultural expectations are that it is unusual for a professional white British family not to relocate once or more often during a child’s schooling, and that on completing her schooling, she will attend a university some distance from home, and then relocate again away from both her university and the family home on graduating. The continuous discipleship practiced by Jesus House becomes an seemingly-impossible ideal in that context. Perhaps in a counter-cultural church geographical stability should be taught and modelled to and for families, but at present it isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and there are obvious issues in thinking that way: most British Baptists seem to expect pastors to move on every seven to twelve years, taking their families with them, for example, and we seem to assume that this is both a right discerning of God’s call, and good for the development of both pastor and congregation. More promising might be a much more denominational outlook(!) The Free Church of Scotland recently agreed to allow the use of hymnody, and not just metrical psalms, in worship; one of the arguments against, as the debate was explained to me, was a serious concern for uniformity: a Free Church member coming from Lerwick to Glasgow should feel ‘at home’ in the service he experienced there, should recognise it as part of the same community; psalmody facilitated that. I think it was right that this argument was rejected, but that nonetheless there is something we can learn from it. Uniformity in style of music in worship is trite and almost irrelevant (at best it might be a part of a symbolic construction that points to what is truly important); what if we succeeded in creating a denominational, or quasi-denominational, network of Christian communities that were united by a deep commitment to owning and exploring the same set of counter-cultural values? Imagine if a teenager, moved by her parents from Stirling to Bournemouth, knew that if a community in the new town branded itself as ‘Baptist’ (or whatever), it would understand and encourage the life of discipleship she had been trying to construct, would support her in ways that she had been supported before, would be an experience of continuing the same journey, albeit in a different place and with different people. Now, as I hinted above, trappings like music or dress styles, shared lectionaries or shared liturgies, or owned symbols, could all contribute helpfully to creating a shared symbolic structure that gestured to the shared ideology that was driving this. And for those who were in the process of relocation – and experiencing dislocation, as inevitably people do – such obviously-familiar symbols might be very important as a reassurance. What matters, though, is a continuation in a process of cultural formation, a coherent set of narratives and values that successfully shape someone into that oddest of things, a ‘Christian’. Networks like this might succeed as Jesus House has succeeded, in growing people up into maturity in Christ. The EA couldn’t of course, but maybe in a mobile society like contemporary Britain we should have met under the slogan, ‘it takes a whole denomination to raise a...
Read MoreThe place of theology in exegesis: reflections inspired by Kevin DeYoung
I have seen several references – all positive – on FB & Twitter to a recent blog post by Kevin DeYoung, in which he asserts that, for evangelicals, systematic theology is the result of exegesis, and then argues that theology should in turn shape exegesis. His point is a fairly standard one: all reading is shaped by our preconceptions, so allowing our theology to be involved is a good idea. As I say, people I respect have praised the post; I find DeYoung’s account of the relation of Scripture to theology inadequate, however. DeYoung begins: Systematic theology looks at the whole Bible and tries to understand all that God says on a given subject (e.g., sin, heaven, angels, justification). Exegesis is what you do when you look at a single text of Scripture and try to understand what the author–speaking in a specific culture, addressing to a specific audience, writing for a specific purpose–intended to communicate. Good systematic theology will be anchored in good exegesis. The sum of the whole is only as true as the individual parts. No Christian should be interested in constructing a big theological system that grows out of a shallow and misinformed understanding of the smaller individual passages. I don’t know of any evangelical pastor or scholar who disagrees with these sentiments. OK, I am an evangelical scholar, and I disagree with at least one thing DeYoung says – his opening sentence. Or rather, I don’t disagree with what it says, but it does not say so much that it is dangerously misleading. Theology is not primarily an exercise in collating Scriptures, although good theology is certainly attentive to that. In a sense, real theology is what you do after the Scriptures have been collated. On all interesting matters, the witness of the Bible is complex – on many it can appear contradictory. God is sovereign, but human beings are free to chose as they will; Jesus is one with the Father, but says ‘the Father is greater than I’; God created all things good, but the world is broken by the power of evil; a final judgement and separation will come, but God will be all-in-all, and every knee will bow; the list could go on and on… Theology is the task of coping with such complexity, and with the apparent contradictions. It is about the construction of conceptual schemes which enable all, not just some, of the texts to be taken seriously. The Trinitarian and Christological debates of the early centuries are deeply exegetical, in the sense that they turn on differing attempts to make sense of a (fairly quickly defined) set of apparently-contradictory texts. All the significant contributions to the arguments are essentially lists of proposed exegeses of texts, indeed. In each case, however, there is also the development of a conceptuality which will shape the exegesis, and offer exegetical possibilities that were not available before. A couple of examples: first, Hilary of Poitiers is completely concerned with exegetical arguments in his reflections of the Trinitarian debates collected in De Trinitate; however, as he becomes more familiar with the Greek debates, he realises that certain arguments are not helpful (dropping the old Latin ‘X from X’ arguments, for instance). In Book VII, he suddenly stops, and offers careful reflection on how God is named, and what ‘birth’ means when applied to the divine. This gives him a set of concepts which allow for more adequate exegesis of texts he has already considered, which he then turns to offer. Similarly, if we look at the Cappadocian theology that led to the Constantinopolitan settlement, it is about the development of concepts which will allow texts to be read better. This is true whether one agrees with Zizioulas that their core achievement was the development of a relational ontology, or whether one follows more recent historians of doctrine in finding accounts of how language applied to the divine to be central. At the same time, adopted concepts limit possible exegesis. This is true of those judged by the tradition to be in error – Eunomius has a neoplatonic account of language which makes him unable to accept anything like Nicene doctrine – and by those judged to be impeccably orthodox: Athanasius and Basil both work with a two-state ontology (the only possible ways of existence are eternal, necessary, divine being, and time-bound, contingent, created being; there are no middle ranks) which rules out a whole series of possible accounts of the Father-Son relation which were being explored by their contemporaries. Because of this, theology has to be attentive, and in a sense responsible, to those conceptual possibilities that are live in...
Read More‘If God is male…’
‘… then the male is God.’ So wrote Mary Daly in a – perhaps the – classic text of early feminist theology, Beyond God the Father (Beacon, 1973). Daly’s argument in the book was that the predominantly masculine imagery deployed for God in Judaeo-Christian traditions inevitably led to a patriarchal society in which women were multiply disadvantaged; the proper ethical response, in her view, was to reject all Judaeo-Christian religious traditions as demonstrably immoral and so unworthy of belief. (This is a too-brief summary of a brilliant book; I actually had the pleasure of discussing it briefly with Daly a few years before she died when she rang me up out of the blue – a long story. As an evangelical minister, I unsurprisingly tend to disagree with most of her conclusions, but the book is strikingly powerful in argument and expression. It takes thought and precision to find ways to disagree with many of the arguments she advances.) The conservative response back in the 1970s was largely to deny the premise: Christianity does, it is true, privilege masculine imagery for God, and perhaps that cannot be substituted or avoided, but that does not mean that Christians believe in a male God; the united, and somewhat strident, witness of the tradition is the gender-categories cannot be applied to God. God is perhaps most often described in masculine imagery, but God is not male, and so there can be no argument that the male is God. In the last few years – no more history, I think, than that – it seems that an alternative argument has been offered – most recently, and already rather famously, in some brief comments by John Piper that prefaced a discussion of the legacy of the great J.C. Ryle (full text here – with thanks to Danny Webster for the link). I hesitate to criticise John Piper – I have been greatly helped by his writing in the past; almost everything I know of him as a man and a pastor, I respect; and it happens that one of my daughters and one of his granddaughters were best friends when both were three (another long story). His argument here has been endlessly reproduced around the web, however, and summarises a position that others have been advancing; it therefore deserves some reflection. (And Rachel Held Evans specifically invited male Christian bloggers to respond, for some sound pastoral reasons, which she explains.) The predominantly masculine imagery for God, Piper suggested, leads us to believe that authority, leadership, &c., are essentially masculine traits, just as Daly had proposed. However (I’m filling in some logical gaps here, but this is my best reconstruction of the argument) the true God uses His authority to promote the best interests of His creatures, and so masculine authority – male headship – properly exercised will lead to the flourishing of women as well as men. To recast – perhaps unfairly – Piper’s argument in Daly’s terms, God is male, and so the male is – head, if not God – but the God who is male is caring, self-giving, and nurturing, and so the patriarchal society established by Biblical male headship is the best possible social context for women as well as men to grow to their full humanity. Although this has become popular just now because of Piper’s brief summary, it goes behind and beyond him, so in the remainder of this post I will refer to it as the ‘God-as-masculine’ thesis. What are we to make of these differing responses? Firstly, we should note that the 1970s responses were generally – there were exceptions – rather simplistic in their analysis of gender. Assuming a straight equation between biological sex and gender, the argument tended to go ‘God is spirit, and therefore has no bodily parts; therefore God cannot be either male or female; God is beyond gender.’ As I’ve noted before on this blog, contemporary analyses of gender suggest that the relationship between biology and gender identity is rather more complex than this, and I’ve discussed one or two examples from the history of the church that in different ways support such analysis. The ‘God-as-masculine’ argument also relies on an assumption of gender essentialism, of course, even if on this view it is divinely mandated rather than biologically determined. A view of gender which sees the stable essences of masculinity and femininity as attitudinal, rather than physical, does seem to allow for a – guarded, admittedly – ascription of gender to God. The united witness of the church through the ages is unquestionably that God is beyond gender, and that speaking of God as male, or even as promoting...
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