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I& #39;ve had some pushback from faithful followers on my recent claim that complementarianism presupposes androgyny. Please understand that I& #39;m looking at complementarianism as a whole system; I& #39;m not necessarily talking about what you take it to mean, nor what John Piper expresses.
As a whole system, complementarianism is a recent innovation; a model created to hold back feminism in the church on the basis of specific prooftexts, rather than on the basis of a holistic sexual theology.
If the CBMW had been interested in defending the historic Christian view, it would not have needed a new term for its theology, because that theology was always called patriarchy. So why did they coin the very awkward term, complementarianism?
I think the answer is straightforward: they were embarrassed of patriarchy and wanted something that wouldn& #39;t sound offensive at the Cool Table of the academy. That embarrassment, inevitably, went beyond labels; it went to the theological underpinnings.
What I mean is this: gender complementarity has a telos. It is not an incidental feature of human nature; it is rooted in the fact that God made men and women for different purposes. This means that complementarity goes all the way down, to every part of life.
In other words, gender complementarity in the domestic and ecclesiastical spheres is an *effect* of the distinct purposes for which the genders were made. Telos is the cause; complementarity the effect. So necessarily, this telos will cause complementarity in other spheres too.
This is the key thing that complementarianism functionally denies. Now it& #39;s true that *some* complementarians affirm *some* complementarity outside the home or church. John Piper caused quite a ruckus a while back by stating his conviction that women ought not to be cops.
But notice who caused the ruckus: it was *other complementarians.* The conservative evangelical world lost its mind over this issue. It was a witch-hunt. They were burning Piper in effigy on every street-corner for stating the commonsense view of our recent spiritual forefathers.
This should tell us that complementarianism was not an effort to defend or restate the historic theology of sexuality. It wasn& #39;t an effort to just refocus on roles rather than purpose, to downplay the offensiveness of gendered telos while showcasing the social beauty it produces.
Rather, it tried to brush the shameful matter of gendered telos, summated in the doctrine of father-rule, under the carpet—but retain in home and church, on the basis of specific passages that can& #39;t honestly be explained away, the complementary roles that arise from it.
Hence complementarians will forcefully eschew the term patriarchy. Hence complementarians are typically comfortable with women firefighters, police officers, and even soldiers—and when they& #39;re not, they are dazed and perplexed as they try to explain why. They have excised telos.
Hence complementarianism has been *so ineffective* at preventing the very thing it set out to prevent: "the emergence of roles for men and women in church leadership that do not conform to Biblical teaching" (Danvers rationale #7).
Beth Moore and Jen Wilkin are de facto pastors in the SBC—a confessedly complementarian denomination. Mortification of Spin, Theology Gals, Heidelblog and their ilk are run by people in confessedly complementarian Presbyterian denominations.
The ESV, which removes effeminacy from 1 Cor 6:9 and replaces man and woman with husband and wife in 1 Cor 11, is produced by a complementarian translation committee. Shameful movements like Revoice grew under the shade of a complementarian PCA seminary, defended by PCA pastors.
There is no need to multiply examples; anyone who has eyes knows what is going on. A tree is known by its fruit. @thisisfoster and I have experienced this fruit many times: not just apathy, but hostility toward the idea that God made men and women for different purposes.
Hostility toward the idea that men are made to rule, and women are not. Hostility toward the idea that women are naturally submissive and men are naturally dominant. Hostility toward the idea that different genders means different fundamental duties toward God and man.
Hostility toward the idea, taken for granted by our fathers in the faith throughout the history of the world, that men and women are different in their *spirits* as well as in their bodies, and that this matters for all of life, not just in the home or church.
So as a response to feminism, yes, complementarianism was compromised from the beginning. It was compromised by the idolatry of Athens: the desire to have a place in the academy. And this led to functionally jettisoning the very grounds for gender complementarity: gendered telos.
As the de facto "conservative, biblical" position against egalitarianism, it therefore left no alternative than implicit androgyny—which has been working its way out more and more explicitly in "conservative, biblical" churches for the past 30 years.
