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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Speech therapy session to help you biblically process the world of anthropological confusion. I'm Jonathan Swan, your host and editor of Icon, a journal for biblical anthropology. I am joined today by the full cast, Denny Burke, our president at cbmw, and Colin Smothers, our executive director at cbmw. Guys, I had a. I've had a very American week so far. Me and my boys enjoyed the Home run derby. Our St. Louis in here. Jordan Walker won the Home Run Derby in dramatic fashion. And then yesterday we did watch, or I watched most of it. The All Star game was pretty boring. But were you guys interested in these very American baseball festivities? Are you just checking out World Cupping?
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B
You know, I was just celebrating all week the fact of Denny Burke's book release.
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A
Oh, look at that.
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B
Mere Complementarianism.
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A
Wow.
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C
Colin, why are you interrupting our opening banter with that? I don't understand. You're not going with our format here?
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B
Sorry, sorry. Bucking the system derail the podcast I
- [01:23]
A
was going to go on before Colin said that I was next going to transition into this introduction of our special guest today, who is well known in the evangelical world, a prolific blogger, author of numerous books, professor of biblical studies at Boyce College and elder at Kenwood Baptist Church. He's released a new book, just mentioned Mere Complementarianism, male and female, in the image of God. And this special guest just so happens to be a regular host of this podcast. Denny, happy book release week.
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B
Hear, hear.
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C
Hey, thank you very much. I am so happy it's finally out there in the wild so everybody can start piling on.
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A
Denny, we've of course talk about complementarianism and so many other related topics on this podcast. Your book is titled Mere Complementarianism and I am seeing somewhat of a confusion maybe online about what that actually means. Before we started recording here, Colin and the three of us were talking about C.S. lewis book, mere Christianity. At times, people look at this term and think of mere as a minimalistic term just trying to give a bare bones definition of what Christianity was in CS Lewis's case. Is that what's going on here in your book? What is exactly Mere Complementarianism?
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C
You know, Jonathan, I've seen some people online already start commenting on the book just based on the title and what zoom the title means. And I'm thinking to myself, oh brother, at least, I mean, you could be right in your theories, but you should at least test them out by reading the book first. So when I wrote the title Mere Complementarianism, it was not to say, hey, yeah, I want to advocate some kind of a soft complementarianism or some kind of minimalist complementarianism. That's actually not what the point of the title is at all. The whole reason for one of the main reasons for writing this book is that what I've seen in debates about complementarianism over the last decade or two is that a lot of people are just confusing what complementarianism is like, what the basic doctrinal proposition is. And you have, on the one hand, some people are saying too much, and then on the other hand you have people who are saying too little. And so what do I mean by too much? People are adding things to complementarianism that don't really have anything to do with the doctrine. And the example that I use here is like the doctrine of efs, the eternal functional subordination of the Son, which exploded online 10 years ago, actually this summer in 2016. Huge conversation, debate point within evangelicalism, but then within complementarian circles more particularly, was a big debate about is there any sense in which the preincarnate son submits to the father? And then 1 Corinthians 11, 3, where it says God is the head of Christ and and man is the head of woman. Based on that analogy, how does that help us to understand gender roles? And so this was a huge discussion and it was pitched as kind of an intra complementarian discussion. And what a lot of people don't understand is that you don't have to hold to any version of EFS in order to be a complementarian. And you've had guys like Kevin Giles write entire books against efs. And then the thesis of his book is, is that if you demolish efs, you've demolished complementarianism. You've had other people like Amy Byrd, Rachel Green Miller rejecting efs and because of that, saying that they're rejecting complementarianism. And what I'm trying to say is you don't understand what complementarianism is if you think EFS is at the heart of it. If you look at what complementarianism actually is in its basest form, it's the Danvers statement. The Danvers statement is the doctrinal proposition that was put together by John Piper and Wayne Grudem and a number of others almost said John Wayne, but John Piper, and he was not a part of it. How about that for a smiling providence? We got John and Wayne as the two guys who spearheaded Danvers.
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B
Just fantastic. Just fantastic there.
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C
Yeah. So anyway, but the original doctrinal premise of complementarianism is the Danvers statement. So named because it was hammered out in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1987. So complementarianism is not like an ethos or a vibe or like a sociological thing. It's a doctrinal proposition. And the word complementarianism was coined to refer to that particular doctrinal proposition. And EFS is no part of it. There are a number of other things I could mention here that are important in their own right. I mean, I think the discussion about the Trinity is really important, and I've talked about it a lot myself. I'm just saying that whether you hold to it or not, it doesn't say anything about your complementarianism. There have been people from the very beginning who didn't hold to any version of efs, even though there have been some that have held to it. So you could be saying more than what's in Danvers, and that's confusing to people. And then you could be saying less than what's in Danvers, and that would be your soft complementarian end. And then if you look at software, so called soft complementarianism, now, they're all over the place. I mean, you've got some who've got female pastors at this point, you've got some who have women who are standing in the pulpit and preaching. And I would argue that those practices are saying less than what Danvers would indicate because Danvers says that some governing and teaching roles are limited to men as qualified by Scripture. Well, if the highest are office in the church, the pastoral office, and the most prominent teaching position in the church, preaching in the pulpit on Sunday morning, if neither of those are off limits, then how's that different than egalitarianism? So it all gets very confused, I think, sometimes on the soft complementarian side of things. And so I'm not arguing for mere complementarianism is not soft complementarianism. Mere complementarianism is what's the original doctrinal proposition of complementarianism? And it's the Danvers statement. And the word complementarianism was coined by the framers of that statement as a one word summary of their position. Now, it's an eight syllable word, okay? And so I admit it's a long, cumbersome word, but that word came into our theological lexicon to refer to Danvers. That's where it came from.
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B
I've never counted all the syllables. Eight syllables. That's amazing.
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C
There are sentences that are shorter than eight syllables.
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B
Obviously your title is a callback to C.S. lewis's Mere Christianity. And some listeners might not know that that book Originally was actually a series of addresses that C.S. lewis gave during World War II to argue for the essential doctrine of Christianity. So he wasn't trying to present some kind of minimalist, you know, presentation of Christianity, but he really was advocating for the goodness and the beauty of Christianity. He included the Christian doctrine of marriage between man and a woman and male headship. You can go look it up. Male headship is part of C.S. lewis's mere Christianity. So, Denny, I appreciate your project, and I think any detractors, they can just simply open up the book and look at the table of contents. If you are presenting some kind of minimalist or soft complementarian, you know, project, your first chapter wouldn't be Mere Complementarianism in Nature. So that's what caught my eye is, is your focus on natural law. Maybe, you know, for the first several decades of CBMW's ministry, we were light on, you know, natural law and discussions on nature, but that certainly was there from the beginning, even in Danvers. Can you unpack that a little bit for our listeners?
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C
Yeah, I think what you see reflected in, like, the early history of CBMW is basically what was going on in North American evangelicalism in general. There was kind of a de Emphasis on natural law. You see that with Carl F. H Henry and others. They really were not so much into natural law. Now, the substance of it wasn't all gone because they still held to a pretty thoroughgoing doctrine of created order. Right. And so created order was another way of talking about it. And if you look at the early framers of Danvers, they were very much invested in seeing male and female distinction as a consequence of the created order. And that that created order has implications, you know, everywhere you can find men and women. And so if you're reading Danvers correctly, you're going to recognize that God, you know, created men and women different. And he did it as a consequence of, you know, he did it through creation order. So that's very much a strong part of it. So natural law theory was for a long thought of as this Roman Catholic thing in the 20th century. And a lot of people were suspicious of it. I get it. I think I was kind of there for a while, but I think that was a mistake. I think that if you look at our Protestant heritage, Protestant reformers just assumed a natural law. This was not something they were protesting against. And it's really hard to understand Protestant Christianity apart from natural law, because it was just a part of it. But it's really important for this discussion because at the very Beginning of the book I accessed the distinction that Joe Rigney talks about the difference between so called natural complementarians and ideological complementarians. What does he mean by that? Natural complementarians are those who are recognizing that complementarianism isn't just about the interpretation of a few verses in Scripture. It is that. But it's also a recognition that those verses are reflecting an underlying created order, a nature that God has created for male and female. And that that nature has implications for all of life wherever you find men and women, certainly in the church and the home, but even beyond that, and so you have, even in our foundational book for CBMW is the Recovery Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. You have a whole chapter there where John Piper is explaining what he thinks the essence of masculinity and femininity is. And he's talking about the fact, he's talking about things that have to do outside of the church, in the home, because he's saying that Danvers doesn't spell all of that out, but he's saying the implication of created order has to have implications outside of the church, in the home. And so I think the original people who are paying close attention to the original Danvers definition understand that it's a natural complementarianism, which is another way of saying a created order complementarianism over and against an ideological complementarianism which views male female distinction and male female roles just in light of a few, you know, a handful of verses in Scripture. But other than that, men and women are basically interchangeable. That's kind of the softest of complementarian position and it's a weak position because you find a lot of soft complementarians trying to do everything they can to get around the biblical guidelines for male and female roles. And you also see a great resistance from them to any notion of what the philosophers call gender essentialism, that there's any kind of an essence to masculinity or femininity that would have defining differences in the roles we have. And so you find that on the soft complementarian side all the time. And so mere complementarianism is not trying to split the difference between those two positions. In fact, I'm arguing for a natural complementarianism, a creation order complementarianism. That's, that's the whole point of the book.
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A
Denny, in the, I think it's the fifth chapter on applications, you just basically say mere complementarianism is this natural complementarianism that you just described. So when we get into specific questions, say well, can women preach under the authority of male elders? Should A female address and teach in Sunday school. How does an adherence to mere complementarianism give us a consistent application of complementarianism to those specific questions?
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C
Are you talking about preaching in, well,
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A
preaching and say, teaching Sunday school? Either one of those. You have sections that address both of those.
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C
Yeah, yeah, I have different sections on that. And at the beginning of that chapter, I do say. I say at the very beginning of it. Now, I'm going to do something here that's not mere complementarianism anymore in the sense that you can't read Danvers, and there's not a section in Danvers on women Sunday school teachers. And there's not a section in Danvers on that particular question about preaching in those terms. Right. But what I'm arguing is that once you understand what mere complementarianism is, it answers those issues. Okay. It has necessary implications for those issues. And so what I'm doing in that application chapter is I'm trying to say this is how I think mere complementarianism applies to those crucial questions. And yeah, there is creation order issues there, because if you look at the main text in dispute that everybody has to wrestle with when answering those questions is 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul says, I do not allow women to teach or to access authority over man, but to be in peace and to. And quiet. And so there's a difference in interpretation there. But you notice when Paul gives that prohibition, he grounds it in for Adam was formed first and then Eve, he grounds it in creation order. So what's Paul saying there? The whole logic is, I want you to assume these roles in the church's teaching ministry because of the way God made marriage. God designed marriage for the husband to be the head of the wife. And it can't be the case that when husbands and wives come to churches, they role reverse. Like the church's ministry order is not going to upend the home order. The church's ministry order is going to reflect what's going on at home. God created Adam first and then Eve. Adam is the head of his wife. And when you come to church, you're not going to have women assuming a role that would make her the head of her husband while she's teaching and preaching, because it's what's happening there. In 1 Timothy 2, you have this prohibition on teaching and exercising authority. Now some egalitarians, soft complementarians, will say, Paul's not prohibiting those two activities, he's prohibiting one activity. Teaching with authority or teaching with the intent to dominate. Right. And so there's a certain reason that they have that interpretation. And so your egalitarians like Linda Belville will say, he's talking about, he's not prohibiting all teaching. He's prohibiting teaching with the intention to dominate. As long as a woman's not intending to dominate, it's totally fine for her to teach with authority over men. Your soft complementarians, like, I don't know if she would label herself as a soft complementarian, but I view Kathy Keller's view as a soft complementarian view. In her little book she wrote Jesus justice and Gender Roles. And she argues, reflecting scholars like Craig Blomberg and others, that it means to teach with authority, and that teaching with authority means to teach as an elder. And so Paul is saying, you can't teach while holding the office of elder, but as long as you're not holding the office of elder, you can teach other men in a variety of settings. And so a lot of other soft complementarians have taken that and have run with it and have said, well, then, if that's the case, then as long as she's not the pastor or the. An elder in the church, she could teach Sunday school. She could even teach on Sunday morning from the pulpit because she's not the pastor. We've had enormous controversies about this in our own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, because you've seen a number of women preaching on Sunday mornings for special occasions, sometimes more regularly, depending upon the church. It's not a widespread practice, but it is there. And where's that coming from? It's coming from that soft complementarian view. As long as she's not teaching with authority, as long as she's not teaching as the pastor, she could teach over men. And that doesn't make any sense with a natural complementarian view, a mere complementarian view, because what's happening, what happens when you're preaching in a church, A preacher, his job is to stand up there to explain the Bible, explain the meaning of the Bible, and then to apply it and to command people to obey it. And so what's happening in preaching, and it's what we call preaching, is what Paul's talking about when he says teaching here. It's always done in the imperative mood. It's done with commands. So if a woman, how can a woman stand up and be commanding people to obey God and be in submission at the same time to proper male authorities, in particular, her husband? Can't happen. And so that's why Paul's logic is, I don't allow a woman to actually teach, recognize authority over men. That would upend creation order in marriage because Adam was formed first and then Eve. So there's a specific biblical command there. Right. But it's rooted in an understanding of the created order, which is another way of saying of the natural law. And so that's why all of this has to be taken together.
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B
You know, one of the things that I appreciate about your book, your project, Denny, and also what you're calling natural complementarianism, what Rigney argued for in that ICON article is really the coherence that it brings to everything. It's the statement that God's world and God's Word are not arbitrary, they're not out of step, they're not capricious. But what God affirms in His Word, he has designed accordingly according to how he made the world, made mankind male and female. And so when we come to his commands, we see that male and female are already fitted for obedience for those commands, and they're not going against their natures insofar as they carry out these particular roles in the home, in the church, and outside of those spheres. And what we've seen, I think, in the past decade, two decades, et cetera, is really the soft complementarians, those that want to kind of co opt that term. And they're out of step with the founders, they're out of step with cbmw, the leadership, with the council, and yet they're using this term in a way that it was never intended. And again, here's the president publishing this book, mere complementarianism, showing the vision for Danvers and the position that we are arguing for at cbmw. And that's created some confusion and I think, understandably for folks on even to our right with this term, they're confused about the term. Well, does complementarian mean you can have women pastors, women preachers or whatever, and natural complementarianism, mere complementarianism, sort of, I hope, should put that conversation to bed. No, complementarianism is a doctrinal proposition with genuine commitments that are in line with God's Word. And that's what gives it power, is the fact that it is in step with God's Word and God's world as we see it. And it's all intelligible.
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A
Denny.
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C
Absolutely.
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A
We are living in an age that has progressed beyond just feminism being an issue. We have homosexuality in our culture and transgenderism. Given the fact that we're so far down the road, we have these massive issues as to whether or not there are even two genders. What is a man? What is a woman? Why spend the time to write a book on complementarianism when it could seem like, hey, we need to be talking more about homosexuality, we need to be talking about these, these other, farther down the road, gender issues, these manifestations. Why is it that we need another book on complementarianism?
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C
Well, because it's getting confused today. As I said before, there are people who have written whole books rejecting complementarianism on the basis of doctrines that are actually not essential to complementarianism. Rachel Green Miller's book that I mentioned earlier, Amy Byrd's book. When you look at their main reasons for objecting to complementarianism, it has nothing to do with the essence of the doctrine. It's often caricature, misunderstanding, or all of the above. And when you've got that kind of widespread misunderstanding about what the doctrinal proposition is, you have to re. Articulate it. Also, when you think about the moment that we find ourselves in now, it's quite different than what it was when Danvers was published in 1987. And in 1987, everybody kind of understood what a man and a woman was. There wasn't a widespread dispute about that. The question was one of roles in light of second wave feminism that was overcoming the culture and coming into evangelicalism. I have a long footnote in the book. That's a private email that John Piper sent to me several years back after we did the Nashville Statement. And the Nashville Statement is an explicit statement, confessional statement, that deals with the definition of marriage, homosexuality, and then also transgenderism. And at the heart of that question is, what is a male? What is a female? And this long email that Piper gave me permission to share in the book was about the fact is, how does Nashville, the Nashville Statement, relate to Danvers? And what he said in that email was, I thought, profound. He said, logically, even though Danvers came first, Danvers came first chronologically. And then Nashville came 30 years later. He said, logically, Nashville is the more basic statement because Nashville is articulating what we were all assuming when we did Danvers. Right. And it was only when it became contested that we had to articulate more clearly in, in, in Nashville what we mean by what a man is and what a woman is and the basics of that. And so I have a whole chapter in here trying to set forth what was the assumption of Danvers. What is, what is a man, what is a woman? And how do you know that? From nature and from Scripture. So there's a whole chapter on that. And then I get into the biblical material after that. But these questions are closely related. And now, because you have different things being contested now than were the case back in 1987, you have to articulate them. So a lot of what we say about complementarianism is a direct challenge to the transgender false teaching that's overcome the culture.
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B
Well, and I would even say that, yeah, if the church particularly was committed to and modeling mere complementarianism in the home and in the church and in our lives and in the social order, there would be so much less confusion and so much less sort of bandwidth for these errors to be able to not only affect culture, but creep into what the spheres that we've seen in evangelicalism. In other words, if we're clear about who we are as men and women and how we show up at church, how we're living according to God's design in our homes, that is catechizing not only this generation, but the next generation. And we are teaching them implicitly about those very important design issues regarding who we are as male and female. And so they're absolutely related. And I think that, again, this book implicitly addresses that. But, Denny, of course, you've done a lot of great work even on those issues, specifically with other books that you've written. My question for you, Denny, is if you were to identify, like John mentioned, there's several other complementarian primers out there or other books talking about complementarianism. If you're to sort of boil down one or two things that you hope readers take away from this particular book, what are you doing in this book to push that conversation forward that you hope to steer the argument or the conversation in a certain direction?
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C
Yeah. What I'm really hoping will happen is that I do say in the beginning of the book is that this is a primer. So we're not. I'm really trying to introduce the position to people so that they will understand what it is. I print the entire Danvers statement at the end of the book, the entire Nashville statement at the end of the book. And then I'm trying to give you the exegetical justification and rationale for why we hold this position. So I really do want a new generation to consider complementarianism anew against those who are saying that it's some soft distortion or some other distortion in the other direction. I just want them to understand what the biblical position is and to embrace it. And I'm really not even that interested in arguing about labels or terminology. I just want people to believe the Bible. Okay. Even if you don't use the word complementarianism, if you just believe what the Bible teaches, then mission accomplished. I still like the term complementarian, but I just want people to understand what the position is and then to believe it. So that's kind of the main goal here. And then to distinguish it from the caricatures that are out there. They're so widespread. And so also another contribution of the book is I do want people to understand that complementarianism as originally conceived really does dovetail with natural law. Even though we don't use the word natural law in Danvers, it is chock full of created order concepts which are right in keeping with natural law. And if that's the case, then obviously, as we said before, there's going to be implications for men and women, wherever men and women can be found. So it's a more thoroughgoing complementarianism than sometimes is alleged about what we hold.
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A
Denny, last question here. You have been writing and speaking about these topics for a long time. I'm just curious, in the process of writing and editing and finalizing this book, what did you personally get out of it?
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C
For me, the most rewarding items here are just the time spent in scripture to actually dig in and to look at the literature, look at the alternative interpretations, to consider exactly what is the Bible speaking here. Reconsider my own views on things. Sharpen my own views on things. Biblically, the hard work of writing a book means that you've got to just have your head down in a bunch of books and also in the text of scripture, and you have to figure out what it means. And so for me personally, that's one of the best things about writing a book like this is just taking the time to do that for all the relevant texts. So I love that part.
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A
Well, everybody, Mere Complementarianism is available wherever books are sold. And we of course encourage you to get one and get one for your friends, your pastors, your family members. Denny, thanks so much for writing this book. For your leadership at cbmw. We are so appreciative of you.
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C
Thank you so much. I really appreciate you guys doing this. Very grateful.
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A
Absolutely. Well, we're happy to have our special guest and regular co host, Denny Burke on today. Hey, thank you all so much for listening. For more resources on complementarianism and everything we talk about at cbmw visits cbmw.org.