How can Christian men and women live faithfully in a world confused over sexuality and gender? The answer is simple — amidst the moral chaos, embrace God’s beautiful design for manhood and womanhood. Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm discuss this subject with pastor Michael Clary. Clary’s new book, God’s Good Design, is a compelling call for men and women to reject the world’s dark vision of sexual madness and fall in love with the way God made them. Today’s young people are crying out for truthful answers of who they are, and this book gives an oasis of hope, explaining how God wonderfully creates each person as “male” or “female” (Gen. 1:27).  

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're going to talk to Michael Clary, who wrote this book, God's Good Design. It's a fantastic book about really the whole realm of family life and manhood and womanhood. I hope you enjoy the discussion. The discussion.

Tom Askell has a podcast, the Sword and Trowel, and he couldn't have been more enthusiastic about this book. So Michael, I hope you paid him a tremendous amount of money for the things that he said on that podcast. He was so fired up about the contents of it. Yeah, so this book, you know what, it covers all the bases. I really loved it.

And I'm just going to call it a deep dive on the biggest issues that really are before the church and the family. So I'll just ask you, what makes this book different from other marriage and family books? The biggest thing that I wanted to focus on was a positive vision of sexuality because so much of... There are things that are scary that's happening in the world with the sexual madness and moral chaos. And the antidote is often frightening for people also.

And so, wheneverÖ the church that I planted was in an inner-city neighborhood of Cincinnati, close to the University of Cincinnati. And so, we had a lot of young people, educated, starting careers, men and women, starting families. A lot of them would on paper say that they are complementarian, but when I saw their lives, they were not living out manhood and womanhood. It was more of a, I want to check the box to where I want to on paper submit to my husband and I'm going to on paper lead my wife. But it was it was only skin deep.

And so I was like, you know, there was a there's a richness and beauty of the way God made the household in man and woman that they're missing out on, but they're terrified of it. I wanted to present a positive vision. That's one part. It is a book that I wanted to write for any pastor that believes these things could very easily, without giving a lot of qualifications, just say, this is a book you can recommend to be edified by because it's not filled with red meat, heated rhetoric against things that I would say in other contexts. I mean, I would throw my zingers at transgenderism and the left and that sort of thing, but that's not the spirit or tone of the book.

It's pastoral and warm and gracious. You really, you cast, I'm just going to call it a beautiful vision, a beautiful design. God's Dine is so beautiful and it's so contrary to the zeitgeist. And you talk about the impact of Gnostic feminism, disembodied understanding, spiritual only kind of vision of life. But actually you describe, I think so well, just the earthy, real, lifelike design that God has put for the family.

Yeah, thank you. And I do, the point that you make there is part of that design. So the complementarian error is, it is, I would say there is a Bibliscist impulse, and I mean that in the negative sense. So if you say Biblical, you'd want that to be true of every Christian. Here's a Biblical case.

A Bibliscist case is the only things that we'll assert as Christians about manhood and womanhood are things that we have a Bible verse that we can proof text with it and put a sticky note on it. Like, I can believe this because here's my Bible verse. But scripture itself invites us to observe nature and to draw moral and ethical conclusions based on things that we can just know generally are true about men and women. One of the ways to think of it is like you have truth with a capital T and that's what you have in the Word of God. But then there's things that everybody knows women are kind of like this and everybody knows men are kind of like that.

And we can observe nature and that's truth with a lower case T. It doesn't have the same authority as the Bible, but we're fools if we ignore it. And I think that's the spirit of the age is to ignore things that we don't have a Bible verse for when clearly men are stronger than women, for example. And so why are men stronger than women? Does that mean anything?

Does that have any ethical implications? Of course it does. Why is it that a woman's body from head to toe seems designed for one overwhelming purpose, and that is to bear children, whereas a man's body doesn't have such an obvious function head to toe. Hey you know I love that the section in the book where you talk about that because Jason this guy goes on and on about the differences. I mean he's listing one difference after another.

In fact we're having a father-son retreat this weekend. I was thinking about I should drag some of these some of these bullet points into this retreat, because you know, we're gonna go hard with our young men here this weekend on a father-son retreat. But yeah, no, I love the way that you described the differences, because they are they are so profound. And you were also careful to say there are similarities, but there are actually ontological differences in men and women, and that actually matters. And I think that points to the mistake that the Complementarian Movement made.

They missed some of the dramatic, fundamental, Would you, is ontological the right word to use? They're just fundamental built-in differences that make a man a man and a woman a woman. That's a word that I'm comfortable with but my editor cautioned me against because that would lend itself to ontological inferiority and superiority as though man is more in the image of God, a woman lesser, and I wanted to avoid those kind of pitfalls. And so we landed with, there's a different nature. Men and women have different natures.

And I'm like, I think we could live with that. And so I've heard good friends of mine say, it's like, well, there's not a fruit of the spirit for men and fruit of the spirit for women. Obedience to Christ is the same. And I'm like, okay, so it's androgynous. That's what he asserted.

And in my view, I mean, obviously, I'm like, that is foolish because there's a feminine kind of love and there's a masculine kind of love and the world needs both. The world needs a feminine, a woman's love and The world needs a man's love because we love in different ways. And so virtue is shaped by our masculinity and femininity. And I heard Jen Wilkins say something once. She said, you know, the Bible pushes the sameness and equality of the sexes.

And I remember hearing that thinking, I think it's the opposite. You see the Bible driving this wedge. It's like there's the acknowledgement that both are created in God's image and there is equality in that sense. But when it comes to our function and our virtue, the Bible seems to continually push men to be virtuous as men and women to be virtuous as women. And you have this complementarity in the best sense of virtue and a wider range of virtue when we're both allowing both of our gendered virtues to breathe?

You know, I grew up as a Christian, seeing the emergence of, I'm just gonna call it the Complimentarian Movement, you know, with John Piper and Wayne Grudem, I read those books, I listened to them. Frankly, they were actually changing the world. I think often people don't really understand how radical and how offensive their message was. But they didn't go far enough. I think that they were, well, I don't know why.

It would be hard to say that John Piper was timid, right? But I don't know what drove that. Maybe I guess I've always felt that, you know, the force of feminism, we all grew up feminists because we went to these universities and stuff like that. The brine of feminism was still in our brains. And so we left either intentionally or unintentionally out actually the full scope of the differences and roles.

And you know it's accurate to say the reformers only took the Reformation so far and that people stood on their shoulders to take it farther. And I think we want to stand on the shoulders of people who have done work, good work before us, you've named some names, but we, we don't think they went far enough. And we do think that we need to go further. What are your thoughts about that? Because I view you and a lot of young authors now as kind of standing on the shoulders of the men who went before.

Yeah, so if you read John Piper and Wayne Grudem, they I think took it further than they're given credit for. I believe the problem is in the Danvers Statement, which is the seminal document that was produced, kind of springboarded the Complementarian Movement, and they authored that, I'm pretty sure. But the problem is that the the Danvers statement limited the difference between manhood and womanhood. It pushed the equality thing and foregrounded that and it limited the differences and the roles to the church and the home and that's where you have proof text for that. They did not push it into society to where you say there's the grounding of man and woman is deeper than mere arbitrary rules that the Apostle Paul gave, but the Apostle Paul was rooting grounding his instruction in the created order.

And so there's something in the way that God created Adam and Eve that are fundamentally different and even in a perfect world if it had never experienced the fall, you would still see Adam was responsible and was head over his wife and she was submitting to his lead in an unfallen state. And I don't think Danvers went far enough to make that clear. And so even though Grudem and Piper did take it further in their writings, the Complementarian movement did not follow their lead into all of those areas. I would say that I respect both of those men. I think Grudem got a bit wooden in his teaching about what a man and woman, like what kind of decisions what a woman submit to a man and There's like a list and I was like it He tried to be too helpful Because there there is an art to it.

There's a dance to it To where it's like I cannot remember the last time I told my wife, okay, I'm pulling rank and you're going to submit to me. I can't remember, it's been years. But there is a general deference and there is a general desire on my part. What do you think, hon? Like, Tell me your input on this because I need your wisdom.

I need what the Holy Spirit has revealed to you, but I'll make a call. She follows my lead, but it's not like, okay, this bucket are decisions I make and that bucket are decisions that you can make without my input. I felt like it was a bit rigid and I think that probably was bad PR for the complementarian movement because it just seems so complicated. Do we need some decoder system to figure this out? Yeah, you know, you pointed out You know they properly acknowledged male headship in the home and in the church, but couldn't take it any farther than that.

And I remember having debates many, many years ago, particularly when Sarah Palin was running for office. Oh, I remember this. You know, he's talking, particularly people. I'm like three minutes from Southeastern Seminary here where we're broadcasting. And so, you know, we were having all kinds of discussions with, I was with professors there, and I kept saying, do you mean to tell me that you think that a woman should be under authority in her home and in the church, but when she steps, when she steps outside the house door, her nature changes.

Because I don't think she changes when she walks out of her house or when she walks out of her house or when she walks out of her church. And you know, really re-establishing male headship in the civil realm is really, really critical. You know, the Bible is very clear. Choose men. That's the pattern all throughout the Old Testament.

The kings, the prophets, the priests, they were men. And that's the way God planned it. But there was a, perhaps a fear of saying that in the public square. It was the most controversial part of it. Yeah, yeah, and that's a great point.

And it exposes the real fundamental flaw in the complementarian because you don't have a Bible verse that says a woman cannot be a civil magistrate. But... Well, wait, let me just stop you for a second. The Bible doesn't say you cannot have a woman elder. What the Bible says is that elders are men.

But in the Old Testament you have the exact same pattern, choose men. So there's not an Old Testament verse that says you can't have women as a civil magistrate, but the only time, the only way it talks about it is with men, so I think it's just, and again, you lack the command, but you see the principle from Genesis to Revelation. Yeah, the pattern is everywhere and the pattern is undeniable unless you're trying to suppress it for some agenda. But that is certainly what I perceive to be the case is that there's an agenda where somebody says I don't like that there are these restrictions and If you come to the scripture with an agenda you can find a Bible verse To say what you want it to say you can you can kind of cajole and manipulate it to get it to say what you want. But the pattern is undeniable if you're just being as fair with the text and just let it speak on its own terms, it is undeniable.

And people say, well, What about Debra or what about Phoebe or something like this or Junia? All of those are different, but even if you were to grant, let's say the Debra for example, even reading the story of Debra on its own terms, that was a rebuke to Israel. The whole book of Judges is like this world is turning upside down things are going crazy So that is it was Deborah's not a model to follow It's funny that she is kind of the heroine of all the women's Bible studies and stuff. Be like Deborah. In the day when every man's doing what's right in his own eyes, right?

Let's go copy that. Bad idea. So, Michael, in a very real way, the three of us grew up in the old world where homosexuality was the subject of humor and scorn and where no one even thought of the idea that someone could be born in the wrong body, you know, a woman born in a man's body. I'm trying to think the first time I ever heard of anything like that, I went to a very, very liberal university, and no one was saying that even there. So, but now our children are growing up in the New World where the floods are going in a very opposite direction.

As a pastor, how are you helping young people in your church who didn't grow up in a world where the biblical ethic was sort of the majority report? Yeah, great question. So, by context of ministry is, excuse very young, because most of our, till just a year ago, we were in a collegiate environment. And so, I've felt like I've always had kind of a little bit of a peek into the future By having so many young people that were in my church and dealing with them I've noticed that the most the most staunchly hardcore Feminist type Christians that would still call themselves complementary, but they're most resistant to what I'm teaching are the older generation People that are 60s and 70s and so on that were just feminism was sort of baked in and unchallenged for so long. The younger generation, these young men and women, they are hardcore in the other direction.

And so the leading indicators young men and it's been studied and demonstrated that young men are trending hard conservative. There's a women are women are kind of veering to the left a bit. I don't think that that will hold. I think we'll probably see a polarizing effect to where the liberal women will continue getting more liberal and their folly will be continually exposed and that will set up a contrast where sane, godly women will see that and it will drive them in the other direction. And so, what- That's kind of how women are wired, right, actually?

Yes, of course. They wanna follow men. Yeah. They do. So as men trend more conservative, I think women will follow.

Yeah, amen. And so, My strategy in my church is to double down and go as full-throated patriarchy. It's part of our membership material. It's baked in. We preach sermon series on it and the young people they love it They're like this is this is an oasis.

This is food. This is water. This is nourishment Thank you. Teach us show us and they're seeing like and there there is a sense of purpose like destiny where a lot of these young men and women are like, okay, my whole life was screwed up. Society screwed up.

The family screwed up, but we have enough common sense to know we need something different. And so they're begging like, please teach on these things. And we're doing that. Some people will get offended. You're always going to have those that do in a church But for the most part it has been life-giving and they're they love it And so I've we've made it more we've made it more of a point of emphasis Rather than something will tacitly acknowledge and that has been really fruitful in our church.

Yeah, you have no idea how thrilling it was for me to hear you say full-throated patriarchy. Because it wasn't that- Oh, he said the word. It wasn't that long ago, you know, I was having people, friends tell me, stop using the word patriarchy. And I thought I think we should use that word because it actually does describe the proposition that the Bible presents. We became afraid of that word.

We were afraid of that word in evangelicalism. Well, Toby, you better get used to patriarchy because heaven is a patriarchy and hell is a patriarchy. So we're headed for patriarchy one way or another. We want to be a father of God in heaven where his role reigns or to follow our Satan, the father of lies into hell. Of course he doesn't rule there because God's wrath is there, but you know what I mean.

It's a, patriarchy is, I've had friends that'll say, patriarchy is inevitable. And I think it's a, it's just, it's the way God made the world. It's God's design for the world. It's patriarchal. We can live in line with it or we can rebel against it.

But it is the way it is. It's reality. It's gravity. It's just the way it is. Yeah.

So, and we could go on and on about that. And you've got a lot of really helpful things in your book about this. You know, we got into all these sort of controversial weeds, but your book is so beautiful to me. I really loved it. So what else do you wanna say about your book before we conclude here in just a couple of minutes?

I would say the book is written for, I think the best audience is young people who people ask like, hey, is this good for high school or college people? And I'm like, that's the perfect audience. Because hopefully it can lay a foundation before you make all the mistakes and have to learn the hard way. The book is intended to, I think it would be good for premarital counseling. So I just tell premarital counseling, read chapters one through eight.

The last three chapters are not directly aimed at marriage, but I think they're fruitful. But read chapters one through eight and that's a very practical. It deals with a lot of the practical objections. I try to, I have the voice of the progressive or the skeptic in my head a lot in the various chapters and I try to answer it with grace and respect but it's for great for young couples for young people I think for people that are for pastors I would I would recommend just like it's it's a great book to just hand out for people if you want to, something that it's safe to recommend. And I want people to just fall in love with the way God made us.

And for a man to read it or a woman to read it and be like, thank God for my masculinity, Thank God for my femininity. And when I live this, you know, fully to the glory of God, that would be to delight in God's design would be what I would hope people would come away with it. Okay, I want to close this out with reading the chapter titles because I think they really reflect, you know, what you just said. Chapter one, the cosmic household. Two, embodied souls.

Three, men and women are different. Four, blueprint for the household. Five, gendered virtue. Six, the productive household, seven, how boys become fathers, eight, blessed motherhood, nine, singleness in the modern world. I was so grateful that you said, I don't think there's a gift of singleness, a spiritual gift of singleness.

Chapter 10, sexual dynamics in the church, 11, sexual immorality, and then conclusion, where do we go from here, where you talk about the beautiful design. Michael, thank you so much for the discussion. I hope everybody goes out and buys your book. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hey, come be with us at our national conference next May, Manhood and Womanhood.

See you there.