As John Piper rightly argues, “There is nothing new under the sun, only endless repackagings.”[1] In the opening chapters of Genesis, Eve subverted the created order, rebelling against God by usurping Adam’s authority, being deceived, and committing transgression (1 Tim. 2:14). It was promised and prophesied that Eve’s subversion of God’s good order would typify her daughters’ rebellion (Gen. 3:16), however her faithful embrace of God’s calling on her life in view of the promised seed is the template for faithful womanhood (1 Tim. 2:15).[2] At this point people often give a thousand nuances, but the apostle Paul doesn’t, so I feel as though I am in good company to leave it at that and point interested readers to the other Christ Over All articles on this theme.
1. John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 14.
2. For a succinct explanation as to why it is best to see 1 Timothy 2:15 as a synecdoche which “accents the Christian wife’s obligation to embrace a role that God has given to her—to care for children and home,” see Denny Burk’s article, “Women will be saved through childbearing?,” last modified July 28, 2014, https://www.dennyburk.com/women-will-be-saved-through-childbearing/.
In essence, Paul takes the Adam and Eve relationship and universalizes the scope of its application to the sexes in order to ground his claim that only men are to teach authoritatively in the church (1 Tim. 2:12). Accordingly, for a woman to assume authority as pastor/preacher/teacher is to usurp God’s good order in the church and is therefore to share in her mother Eve’s primal sin. We must understand that the ever-expanding field of egalitarian literature is just another example of repackaging this most ancient of conspiracies against God’s creation blueprint. Now, while the egalitarian argument is as old as sin, faithful Christian engagement of its recasting is required, as God’s truth needs to be reapplied in each age. The aim in this post is to highlight and commend to you faithful and thorough reviews of popular egalitarian (or at least, non-complementarian) works that have recently gained traction in the church, so that we can calibrate our senses to mark and dodge the church-wrecker posing as a beachball.
Rachel Green Miller, Beyond Authority and Submission (2019)
This book seeks to chart a course between or around the complementarian vs. egalitarian impasse. But this “third way” never really gets off the dock, as the historical narrative Miller weaves amounts to caricature and she repeatedly misrepresents authors she disagrees with (see Steven Wedgeworth’s review for a detailed analysis of the many egregious misrepresentations). While she does a better job than some of the other books insofar as she does admit a distinction between complementarianism and patriarchy, in the end she functionally lumps them together, as if anyone who teaches some form of sexual hierarchy (be they Mormon, former Federal Vision, or Christian Hedonist) is on the same squad in her mind.
The spectrum in which she is operating puts forward four possible positions: feminism, egalitarianism, complementarianism, and patriarchy (15). One is led to believe patriarchy is an equal and opposite danger of feminism, which is a common tactic of third-wayism (or maybe fifth-wayism in this case), but this is a false comparison. In agreement with Kevin DeYoung, I would argue “the biblical vision of complementarity cannot be true without something like patriarchy also being true.” This sleight of hand where one finds a boogeyman on the right to cancel out the boogeyman on the left so that they can nestle down in the winsome middle is rather hackneyed, and it moves us further away from the Bible’s teaching in this scenario on manhood and womanhood.
The closest one gets to a thesis in this book is that “masculinity” and “femininity” really do not exist in Christian piety and vocation. Being a man makes you masculine, and being a woman makes you feminine (148–149), and apparently this is what takes us “beyond authority and submission.” If someone were to ask this book for a definition of what makes men men, and women women, the answer provides nothing more than biology in response. This is truly disappointing given its aim to offer a “biblical” paradigm, because all the debated texts between complementarians and egalitarians are, at best, only briefly mentioned, and the application drawn from these passages is what they cannot possibly mean. In her zeal to go beyond authority and submission, Miller falls short of a biblical paradigm, one that, under the auspices of removing cultural constructs of masculinity and femininity, calls into question crucial aspects of the nature of men and women.
Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (2020)
Like Miller’s book, Byrd’s lacks a clear thesis as well. It seems to me that one of the reasons this is the case is that those who are “deconstructing” from complementarianism (like Miller and Byrd) tend to be more concerned initially about burning the house down rather than laying a firm foundation. The tone of such approaches tends to be similar to a journalistic hit piece, and therefore, they lack a controlling thesis other than: complementarianism is bad, and here are a myriad of reasons why! Now, to be fair, since Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Byrd has written The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman, which seeks to unpack a theological imagination towards “eschatological womanhood” (among other things) from Song of Songs. It is worth noting that at least Byrd is committed to positively constructing something out of the ashes of the house she just burned.
But speaking of houses, yellow wallpaper is gross and needs to be abolished. This is what Byrd spends Recovering arguing for, building off of the 1892 feminist utopian poet Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel/semi-autobiography, The Yellow Wallpaper. I should note that it is not lost on me that two years following a book Byrd wrote premised around the social imaginary of a woman tearing down the antiquated wallpaper of her husband’s orders and walking over his fainted body to freedom, she has now written another book making the case for eschatological womanhood in which women represent heaven and men represent earth. To put it plainly, I don’t think her trajectory is non-hierarchical, it’s just against male-headship. Byrd’s “eschatological womanhood” results from “the future is female” being illicitly baptized under Christian parlance.
Byrd is making a “new” argument on manhood and womanhood, and when one reads her last two books, the first of which deconstructs from complementarianism, the second of which, she reconstructs a “typological-eschatological” womanhood, they are given a window into how modern this project is. One gets the picture that church history has simply gotten anthropology dead wrong, because we have allegedly been more grounded in Aristotelianism and a “natural theology from below,” rather than an “eschatology from above.”
As Andy Naselli rightly points out in his review of Recovering, Byrd’s methodology is as follows: she focuses on stories or “gynocentric interruptions” as she calls them (while ignoring direct teaching on men and women); she constructs overly imaginative and unlikely scenarios to advance her case; she supports her conjectures by citing feminists but then she does not ultimately specify how men and women are different; and then she ironically uses the very “biblicist” hermeneutic she denounces complementarians for.
I appreciate Naselli’s sage advice to anyone being pulled to so-called “narrow complementarianism”: read Bavinck’s The Christian Family. The reason this advice is astute is because Byrd and Anna Anderson (whom she dedicates The Sexual Reformation to) are fond of citing neo-calvinists like Bavinck, Van Til, and contemporary theologian Lane Tipton in order to advance their novel approach to anthropology, but in the end it is just repackaged feminism, and one that would be soundly rejected by the very theologians they cite. Bavinck’s The Christian Family is a tour de force that demonstrates the incompatibility of his dogmatics with Byrd’s project. It is intellectually dishonest to claim that anything he wrote coheres with her trajectory, as is supremely evident in his writing on the Christian home.
Kristen Kobe Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne (2020)
At first glance, it might seem like “one of these books is not like the others,” and that would be this one. Unlike the other three, which specifically focus on authority and submission within the context of biblical manhood and womanhood, Du Mez hones in on American politics, and seeks to demonstrate the myriad of ways in which “white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation,” to borrow from her subtitle. While this book is certainly more than a critique of complementarianism, it is not less than this. In fact, complementarianism is just another example of white evangelicalism patriarchy and it “reflected the more reactionary tendencies of early-twentieth century fundamentalism. [Billy Graham] added a new twist, however, by wedding patriarchal gender roles to a rising Christian nationalism” (27).
Du Mez weaves a convoluted web of conspiracy throughout her book. As Anne Kennedy astutely observes: “Wending her way past Elisabeth Elliot, Phyllis Schlafly, Ollie North and into the bygone notoriety of the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell Sr., James Dobson, and the LaHayes, all the way through into the excitement and controversy of the Young Restless and Reformed, to Doug Wilson and [CBMW’s] founding body, Du Mez tries to fit everybody in.” Basically every movement within white evangelicalism for the last century seems to have been conspiring against all minorities in their lust for power, just as their patron saint John Wayne would have it, according to Du Mez’s recasting of history.
John Wilsey gets right to the heart of the problem in her sociology: “Du Mez’s work reads less as history and more as ideology, and an ideology with little in the way of faith, hope, or charity. All we have before us as we reach the end of the book is a cliff edge, with no path forward to forgiveness and reconciliation. There is no apparent hope. But hope is central to a Christian historical method.” Not only is hope central to the Christian historical method, it is central to God’s design for male headship in the church and home. In her blitzkrieg against white evangelicalism, Du Mez includes complementarianism as one of many tools of oppression in their dastardly hands, and in so doing she shows her cards. This book goes well beyond its purported historical analysis as a worldview antagonistic to what the Bible deems “good” and a lack of biblical virtues such as faith, hope, and charity poison the well.
Beth Allison Barr. The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2021)
Brad Green hits the nail on the head with his review of Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood: “The book is a mix between (1) an attempt at historical scholarship and (2) an impassioned personal narrative. While the book certainly is an impassioned personal narrative, I wonder if it succeeds as a work of historical scholarship.” For my part, I more than wonder. I am convinced it fails as a work of historical scholarship. Kevin DeYoung ably deals with the book’s historical inaccuracies in the third sub-heading in his review of the book.
In a rather similar vein to that of Du Mez, Barr’s recasting of history is driven by personal animus, but it is more specific than white evangelicals for Barr. It is the patriarchy that she is hell-bent to destroy. And, as should be a common theme by this point, complementarianism is interchangeable with the patriarchy throughout Barr’s book. She defines complementarianism as “the theological view that women are divinely created as helpers and men are divinely created as leaders” (5). Besides being incredibly reductionistic, I can’t think of a single complementarian who would define our understanding of manhood and womanhood this way.
Again, similarly to the last book mentioned, “Barr’s version of ‘biblical womanhood’ relies heavily on her personal experience, broad generalizations, and bite-size quotations from people as diverse as Tim LaHaye, James Dobson, Bill Gothard, Russell Moore, Owen Strachan, John Piper, and Wayne Grudem,” as DeYoung rightly summarizes. One of the common strands in these recent popular critiques of complementarianism by Miller, Byrd, Du Mez, and Barr is that they read like vindictive diaries and are characterized more by histrionics than historical and theological scholarship.
Conclusion
I wish such descriptions of these works were not accurate. Because complementarianism is by no means a perfect system, and I should hope that all of us who consider ourselves complementarian desire to grow and be refined in our understanding of God’s creative brilliance in making us male and female. We should exhibit thick skin and soft hearts towards recommendations for improvement and/or critiques for errors made by leading proponents and adherents in our camp. But, sadly, none of these four popular works highlighted in this essay can be characterized as good faith attempts at correcting complementarianism. In a most frustrating irony, Miller, Byrd, Du Mez, and Barr each regularly call on complementarian men to “listen” to women, while they have not listened to what complementarian leaders have actually said or written. At best, they demonstrate they fundamentally misunderstand those they critique, and at worst, they do not seem interested in representing them fairly.
And more importantly than them or their critiques is that all these caricatures and misrepresentations of complementarianism do is tempt men and women in the church to listen to the most ancient of conspiracies against God’s created order. They call women to rise up and lead in the church to help “fix” things. But Paul teaches us that when daughters of Eve do this, they imitate their mother’s deception and transgression (1 Tim. 2:11–15). They call into suspicion the goodness and rightness of God’s blueprint for the church, home, and beyond, parroting the lies of the serpent and his seed.
As David Schrock reminds us in his essay from earlier this month,
Today, we have many treating God’s Word as a beachball. They are trying to toss it around, as they widen the circle for more people to play. But God’s Word is not a beachball. It is a rock, on which the church is built. And when the Word is painted like a beachball, and used in ways it is not designed, it becomes a wrecking ball. And as is the case with a wrecking ball, a building is destroyed not in one swing, but in many. And today, we see the Egalitarian Beachball swinging, smashing, and demolishing. Unless it is stopped, it will bring about the downfall of many churches, one hit at a time. As the church goes, so go the children of God, their families, and their nation. God’s Word cannot be mocked. It can only be obeyed. And when it is obeyed, it brings security and blessing to everyone in the house.
These four recent books tempt you to see complementarianism as a conspiracy against women, and each would claim that they are simply trying to free women to serve in the church, but we must be able to see these repackaged subversions of God’s creation blueprint for what they are: deceptions and transgressions (1 Tim. 2:14). Mark and dodge these church-wrecking balls.
