This is kind of a long footnote to what I wrote the other day about the supposed novelty of complementarianism. In some respects, you could sum up my response as “it’s more complicated than that.” More complicated than the claim by some (not all) egalitarians that complementarianism is the novel usurper. It isn’t for the reasons I set out and more complicated than some complementarians can imply if they give the impression that there has been this homogenous position from he New Testament through to the present day, interrupted only by feminism. There hasn’t.
What this means is that you will find elements of continuity and discontinuity between the positions (plural) that complementarians take today and those of church fathers, medieval scholastics and the reformers. You will also find some continuity and discontinuity between egalitarians and the church tradition.
Let me explain a little bit more what I mean by this by looking back at how we observed people like Augustine engaging with the question of male-female relationships. Augustine recognises two things. First, he recognises that God in Genesis 1:26-28 makes humanity (not just male mankind) in his image. This means that male and female have an equal value and dignity. There is one human nature. However, he also observes that women are commanded to submit to men at specific points in the New Testament. There is the continuity between Augustine and Complementarianism. Both recognise that man and woman were made “like-opposite-to-each-other”, they are equal but they are also different and this affects the roles and responsibilities that they take on in God’s creation.
However, there is discontinuity too. This comes when we begin to ask why those differences apply. Some complementarians argue that we shouldn’t attempt to go into detail about what it means to be male or female. Instead, we should simply accept that God does assign different roles in the church and the home. They may refer to the way marriage portrays the mystery of Christ and the Church, though even still it may seem that the assignment of the roles to portray has been drawn along arbitrary lines. Other complementarians will attempt to identify some reason why it is fitting for men and women to take on certain roles and a certain posture in the home and the church. Historically, the emphasis was on women being the weaker sex and you’ll see when you read those older writings that this sometimes emphasises not just physical differences but suggestions of intellectual and emotional differences too. In fact, up until quite recently, you might still have read books suggesting that women are more easily deceived, following Eve and so shouldn’t teach and lead. Whilst such views are not completely gone, they still do exist in some quarters. However, it is highly unlikely that a mainstream contemporary complementarian would argue that women are mentally or emotionally inferior to men. In that respect, we can see discontinuity between contemporary complementarians, the church fathers, reformers and even conservative evangelicals from the early 20th century.
Meanwhile, perhaps ironically, you will see a form of continuity between the church fathers and egalitarians. Some egalitarians agree that it was because of intellectual limitations that women were not to teach or leader in the early church. However, their point is that those limitations were from nurture not nature, that women were restricted because of a lack of education at the time but that those restrictions are no longer there because of emancipation and universal education so that the restrictions were culturally limited to Paul’s day.
Notice the discontinuity too with the traditional view seeing something about the nature of men women, either in terms of creation or fall that makes them fitting for their roles whereas the egalitarian take is that it was something socially constructed. This brings us back to another area of difference or discontinuity between modern complementarianism and the approach taken by Augustine. As I mentioned in the previous article, there’s a difference when it comes to methodology. Both Complementarians and Augustine are able to distinguish the way in which men and women are equal in nature but are asked to take on different roles and responsibilities in Scripture. Both might therefore say that there is a sense in which men and women share the same nature but are also different. However, Augustine in effect does this by appealing to a higher aspect of our nature, this is following Platonic thinking with an emphasis on “Form” and “Essence.” Augustine does see differences between men and women but at a lower/more incidental aspect of their nature. As I said in my previous article, I don’t think we’d approach the question using the same methodology today.
However, that’s the point. It is possible to recognise continuity and development even where there is difference, even as we recognise that there might be diversity within complementarianism ad egalitarianism. It is possible too to recognise a level of agreement over the answers, even though we may disagree on methodology.
It is crucial therefore to know what we are and are not saying when we refer back to tradition. We are not appealing to tradition as authority. The claim is not “this is the correct view because it is the view held by Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin. Rather, we are arguing that there is a level of consistency in terms of how Scripture has been understood down through the ages where Scripture is the authority. The point then is that we are not imposing some new and novel interpretation of God’s Word but are firmly in line with how the church has approached Scripture down through the centuries.
Faithroots 