Complementarianism is not enough. In this talk, Tom Ascol will discuss how this recent attempt to redress the many failures of the relationship between men and women stopped short of providing what is needed, which is a return to biblical masculinity and femininity in both the church and the world.

Well, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, or CBMW as it is commonly known, was formed in 1987 by a group of evangelical scholars who were meeting together at the Evangelical Theological Society. Their mission was, quote, to set forth the teachings of the Bible about the complementary differences between men and women, created equally in the image of God because these teachings are essential for obedience to Scripture for the health of the family and the church. In pursuit of that mission, they created what has come to be known as the Danvers statement. This is largely regarded to be the key complementarian statement in conservative evangelical circles. It's been regarded as the great bulwark against the inroads of feminism and egalitarianism in the Christian homes and Christian churches.

In fact, in the stated rationale for the existence of CBMW, you read this, CBMW was established primarily to help the church defend against the accommodation of secular feminism. At this time, many evangelicals were beginning to experiment with an ideology that would later become known as evangelical feminism. This is from their own document about the history of their beginning. This was a significant departure from what the church had practiced from its beginning regarding the role of men and women in the home and local church. The effects of this departure have not been benign.

As evangelical feminism continues to spread, the evangelical community continues, needs to be aware that this debate reaches ultimately to the heart of the gospel. Well, so far so good. I don't have any qualms at all about the mission or the purpose of CBMW, and it'd be surprising to me if anybody in this room would object to anything that I've read in the statements that they themselves have published. And similarly, I find the affirmations in the Danvers statement to be things that I can generally affirm such as statement one both Adam and Eve were created in God's image equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood number two distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order and should find an echo in every human heart. Affirmation three, Adam's federal headship in marriage was established by God before the fall, was not a result of sin.

Four, the fall introduced distortions into the relationships between men and women. And then it elaborates, in the home, the husband's loving, humble headship tends to be replaced by domination or passivity, recognizing that sin tends to make us want to check out or to overbear in the responsibilities. The wife's intelligent, willing submission tends to be replaced by usurpation or servility, again, overbearing or withdrawal. And then it adds, in the church, sin inclines men toward worldly love of power or an abdication of spiritual responsibility, overbearing or withdrawal. It inclines women to resist limitations on their roles or neglect the use of their gifts in appropriate ministry.

Again, so far so good. So where's the error? Scott asked me to speak on the error of complementarianism. What's not to like in what I've read? Well, the complementarian error is found not in what it affirms, but what it unfortunately leaves unaffirmed.

In one sense, that's not so much as an error as an omission. To think rightly about the role or about men and women in God's world, we need to understand his will for both men and women in every area of his world. And we need to think about them beyond the mere roles that they have been assigned, which seems to be where the emphasis is in complementarianism. In other words, we should ask why God made us male and female. What is a man for and what is a woman for?

What is a man? What is a woman? In a day when We have a sitting justice on the Supreme Court of the United States who says she cannot define what a woman is because after all, she's not a biologist. We can no longer take such fundamental questions for granted. And the reason that Justice Jackson Brown could not answer that question during her confirmation hearings is because she has imbibed very fully in the idea that each person can determine his or her or its or zeer or whatever it might be, their own sexuality.

Jackson Brown is simply an example of what the historian Carl Truman calls our current anthropological crisis. Truman goes on to say that in the West, and particularly in America, we're facing a cultural crisis over what it means to be human in the most basic sense. And a primary reason for this is that over the last 60 to 70 years we have been consumed in our culture with the question of identity. Now I have personally lived through this era and I can personally testify that one of the resounding lessons that parents and teachers and media drilled in to children and continue to do is that You can be whatever you want to be. That message was announced in classrooms, dinner tables, Disney movies, and even from pulpits.

When I was young, it was an aspirational type of lesson, usually followed by something like this, even the President of the United States. But today, children are being told they can be whatever they want to be without regard to reality. Boys can be girls, girls can be boys. Both can be furries. You can choose not only your own adventure, you can choose your own identity and identify yourself however you want to and then demand that others affirm you in that identity and if they don't you can accuse them of being oppressive against you and perhaps even literally trying to murder you, as has been charged.

So to provide a better context for considering the shortcomings of complementarianism, I want to do just a very quick flyover to try to set the backdrop against which Danvers' statement and CBMW emerged as the stated position of conservative churches on the relationship between men and women. Second wave feminism was the cultural context out of which this movement arose. Yesterday, Scott Brown opened the session of the conference by mentioning these various waves of feminism and modern feminism, how it had its beginnings in the late 18th and 19th century, continued on that first wave through the first few decades of the century. And then in the During that first decades of the 20th century, this first wave feminism was largely associated with the suffrage movement for women, getting women equal rights, the ability to vote along with men. Second wave feminism began in the early 1960s and continued on through the 1990s.

And second wave feminism was characterized by leaders like Betty Friedan and her famous book The Feminine Mystique. In that book, she describes what she believed to be the silent struggles of the suburban housewife. And this is what she writes. She said this housewife, as she made beds and shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and brownies, lay beside her husband at night and was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question, is this all? Claire Smith has convincingly argued in a paper delivered last year at the Priscilla and Aquila Center of the Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia, that this second wave feminism morphed into a radical feminism that regards all women as part of an oppressed class of people and all men are either potentially or actually their oppressors.

And the problem as framed by these feminists is not merely a political problem for women or that they need social or legal equality. The real problem according to radical feminism is that Western society itself is inherently anti-woman, misogynistic, and that all men benefit from it at the expense of all women. In other words, the problem is the patriarchy. And as Smith describes it, in second-wave feminism, society is regarded as, quote, irredeemably patriarchal and male-dominated. Even language systems reflected this patriarchalism, such as the generic use of the word man.

Why don't we say woman? Are women's personal titles being based upon their marital status, Mrs. And Miss, men only have Mr. Or wives taking husbands' last names, or English words like, chair man, and his story, and woe man. All of that's so oppressive against women.

Patriarchy's everywhere. It's unavoidable. And it's operating on a societal and structural level as well as an individual level. And second wave feminists say that is immoral. That is oppressive.

First wave feminism claimed only to want the rights equal for men and women. Second wave feminism wants nothing less than the complete destruction of the patriarchy. They wanted to reconstruct culture based upon feminized values and norms. One of the leading proponents of second wave feminism was a woman by the name of Kate Millett. She was the principal founder of the National Organization of Women or NOW as it came to be known.

She's the author of a book called Sexual Politics and in that book she writes, patriarchy's chief institution is the family, serving as an agent of the larger society. The family acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state, which rules its citizens through its family heads. Patriarchy, Millett writes, has God on its side. And that's a problem for feminists. In an interesting providence of God, Kate Millett had a sister by the name of Mallory, who when she was a divorced young mother was encouraged by Kate to move to New York City to be near Kate.

Well Mallory Millet later went on to become a very faithful evangelical outspoken Christian. But before that in 1969 when she was living in New York City, Kate invited her sister to what she called a consciousness raising group that was a part of the very beginning of the National Organization of Women. And Mallory Millett, years later in an interview, described what she experienced in that meeting. She writes, We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation like a litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice.

And then she says, this is the catechism around the table. Questions being asked, answers being given. Why are we here today, she asked, to make a revolution, they answered. What kind of revolution, she replied. The cultural revolution, they chanted.

And how do we make cultural revolution, she demanded. By destroying the American family, they answered. How do we destroy the family? She came back. By destroying the American patriarch, they cried exuberantly.

And how do we destroy the American patriarch? She replied, by taking away his power. How do we do that? By destroying monogamy. How can we destroy monogamy?

By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, and homosexuality. That was the agenda of second wave feminism. The cultural context out of which complementarianism arose. Feminism began to make inroads into the church. By the 1970s, many mainline denominations began ordaining women as priests and ministers.

In 1978, the Evangelical Theological Society had a major debate on women's ordination. Various feminist Christian organizations began to spring up during that decade. 1975 the Evangelical Women's Caucus was started. It eventually split over the question of whether or not homosexuality is compatible with Christianity. And those who said that's too far, they couldn't go that far at that time, they formed Christians for Biblical Equality, or CBE, in 1986.

Well, these and other formal organizations and informal organizations began to agitate for women's rights to function in the same way that men function in the home and in the church. This was the context from which complementarianism arose. Through the Danvers Statement and CBMW, conservative Christian scholars like D.A. Carson and Wayne Grudem and John Piper and Mary Cassian acted in an effort to push back the inroads of feminism into the home and church. And they did so by writing extensively good biblical material, teaching on men and women, emphasizing the basic equality that we all have before God, while emphasizing also the different roles that God has assigned to men and women in the home and in the church.

Now, there's been some excellent complementary in literature, wonderfully expounding biblical texts. I've benefited from it. I'm sure many of you have as well. Taking the historic Christian perspective on passages like Ephesians 5, 22, and 23, which says, wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior. Feminists have tried to take that word for head, kethelay, and say that simply means source.

It doesn't mean head, and has no regard whatsoever for authority. Well, complementarians like Tom Schreiner and Carson have provided very careful rebuttals to those kinds of assertions. Similarly, feminist scholars have tried to twist some very clear statements of scripture in order to support women pastors. And we've been helped by complementarian scholars who have convincingly refuted them. And One of the famous passages or favorite passages of feminists to go after is 1 Timothy chapter 2 verses 12 and 13 where Paul says, I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, rather she's to remain quiet.

When the feminists get through with that verse it says, I do permit women to teach and exercise authority over men, they can talk all they want to. And fortunately we have good scholars on the other side like George Knight and Daniel Wallace that just show how absolutely ludicrous those exegetical arguments are. Complementarianism has largely held the line on maintaining the distinctions in roles of men and women in the home and the church. And that is exactly what the Denver Statement emphasizes and what the Mission Statement and Rationale Statement for CBMW also emphasizes. But as helpful as it is to maintain proper roles for men and women in the church and home, that is simply not enough.

The cultural context, the onslaught of feminism in which complementarianism was given birth was never interested in merely getting equal rights for men and women in churches and homes in their roles. The goal of the feminist agenda is to completely destroy the patriarchy by destroying the family and rendering the church completely irrelevant in society. They want to overturn nature itself by erasing all distinctions between men and women in every way. Not just what men and women do, but what men and women are. It's an attack on reality, on creation itself.

To suggest that sexuality, or as it's now referred to, gender, is simply a social construct, something that a person can decide for himself with no reference or regard to God's design is not only a denial of creation and reality, it is an attack on the Creator Himself. You cannot be whatever you want to be. You are not whatever you think you are. You can be what God says you can be, and you are what God says you are. Because this is true, bare complementarianism is not enough.

Over the years, there have developed within the complementarian understanding two major camps. Those that regard themselves as narrow complementarians or thin complementarians, and they want to look only at the home and the church and say, yeah, there's differences and men need to be the leaders in the home and in the church. But Beyond that, it's open because God doesn't forbid anywhere in the Bible a woman to be a police officer or a military soldier. And then you've got broad complementarians that say, no, that's not enough. We need to look not just at roles and not just at church and home.

When you start thinking about ontology and being in the world and what men and women actually can do anywhere. Both kinds of complementarians, however, gladly sign their name to the Danvers Statement. What I think we need today is a more rigorous approach to understanding maleness and femaleness. Rather than being reactive to cultural pressures, the church needs to go back to a more careful reading of what God says about men and women. And when we do that, we'll discover that we will not merely be defending role distinctions in the home and in the church.

We'll see that God intends for men and women to fulfill different roles because he created them with essential differences. And it is those God-designed essential created natural differences that fit the specific roles that God calls men and women to fulfill. So let's think just very quickly again selectively at what scripture has to say to us about the differences between men and women in the first three chapters of Genesis we see in creation. God created Adam and he created him to lead as a man. He was created first.

Woman was created from his side to be his helper. Adam names the woman indicating there is authority over her. God gives the assignment to tend to the garden, to keep it, to protect it to Adam, which means that when Eve comes that he is the one responsible to help her understand what the mission is. And when sin comes into the world, though Eve is the one who sinned first, Adam is the one who is held responsible for the whole human race because he is the head of that race. God created Eve to assist Adam, to be a helper suitable for him, he brought her to Adam and gave her to the man.

And we see differences between men and women taught throughout scripture. First Peter 3, 7, women are weaker vessels than men. Husbands are to live with their wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel. One of the differences that's seen in creation between men and women is that men generally are physically stronger than women. Obviously, there are exceptions to that rule, so you can find one woman who is stronger than one men or even than many men, but generally the rule is true.

We see this in realities of realistic areas like law enforcement and military where because of this feminist onslaught, physical requirements and standards are lowered for women so that they can pretend to be equal with men in the work of law enforcement or military engagement. These foolishly lowered standards have already had consequences on both the battlefield and in our streets. We see the innate differences clearly revealed in sports as well. The reason that biological male athletes should not be allowed to compete with females, no matter how they identify themselves. The female, the feminist egalitarian apologists may want us to believe that there's no difference significantly between men and women.

But when given an opportunity, nature always wins out. This was seen just over the last couple of weeks when the University of Washington, and its women's soccer team, which had won the Big Ten Championship for women's soccer, played a 14 and under boys' soccer team and soundly lost. Now that's no shame to a university women's soccer team. It's just another expression of nature, of reality, How God created men and women to be different. It's for that very reason that husbands are to honor their wives more generally, and that men are to honor women because women are the weaker vessel.

This is something that we try to teach even our youngest children at church in terms of doing the hard work and opening doors and letting girls go first. We want boys to learn that We honor girls. That's what God calls boys to do. First Timothy 2 again in verses 12-14 where Paul forbids a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. He gives the reason for Adam was formed first, then Eve.

Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived. The reason that Paul says these roles have the restrictions that they do is because of creational realities. Adam was made first. Eve was first in being deceived. If you want a temperature check on the difference between the historic Protestant Reformed understanding of these issues and where we are today.

Listen to John Calvin on this verse. Calvin writes, women by nature, that is through God's normal laws, are born to obey. Just say that in polite company today. The government of women is rejected by all wise men as it is monstrous and goes against nature. For a woman to usurp A man's right to teach is like mixing up heaven and earth.

So Paul tells women to be silent and stay within the bounds of their own sex. Calvin wasn't a misogynist. He used to understand there are creational realities into the distinctions that God's woven in men and women. Isaiah 312 says, my people, infants, are their oppressors, and women rule over them. That's an expression of God's judgment that he said he was going to bring on them because of their rebellion.

It's his covenant responses to his disobedient people. To have a woman magistrate is an expression of divine judgment. Does that mean there are no competent women, legislators, or civil leaders? No, it doesn't mean that at all, but it does mean that this is not what God designed women to do. And when it happens, Good things can come from it, but nevertheless, as Calvin puts it, it's monstrous and goes against nature.

Our first Thessalonians, chapter 2, verse 7, Paul describes himself, as we heard in the pastor's conference, in his relationship to the Thessalonians, both in terms of a mother with gentleness and as a father who exhorts and encourages and charges his children. And we know immediately what Paul means when he says, like a mother, like a father. Why? Because that's the way God created men and women. We're different and it's by design.

I use this illustration with the church and different groups in our church regularly. If I'm at home and somebody bangs on the door and runs away and I go out and look on my porch and there are 10 little abandoned babies, I'm going to call 10 women. I want women to come help me with these babies. But if I my neighbor calls me from down the street says, oh my goodness, said there's a gang of MS-13 fellas and they're coming to your house. I'm not calling women to help me.

I want dudes, real dudes like Joel. I want, he was telling me about somebody calling him a dude the other day. I want men to help fight off the hordes. Titus chapter 2, Paul tells Titus, teach what accords with sound doctrine. And then he goes into specific instructions for five different types of church members.

Older men, older women, younger women, younger men, and then slaves which could have been comprised of all four other types. And it's instructive just to notice the different types of lessons that Paul has tied us give to different types of church members. I'm not gonna exegete this, but just listen to it. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and instead fastness. These are fitting qualifications for those that you want to lead you in fulfilling what God would have honor him.

And then in verses 3 and 4, older women to be reverent in behaviors, not slanderers or slaves to much wine, to teach what is good, to train younger women. A very fitting description for those who assist others in leading a God-honoring life. And then young women, to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. Again, fitting virtues for those who will make a home warm and nurturing and will assist the leader of the home, the husband, to fulfill the mission that God has assigned. Girls, do you see that this is what God wants you to aspire to be?

And no matter how young you are, You can learn from your mom by watching her and listening to her, to be trained by her, to grow up to be that kind of woman. And Paul says when this happens, the Word of God is not reviled when it doesn't happen. It is reviled because skeptics and deniers will be able to dismiss what God has said because they'll see those who know God not living according to what God has said. Younger men are to be self-controlled. That's the only thing he says about them.

The implication seems to be that if they don't give vent to their sinful passions of youth, they'll grow into men who will be like the older men, sober-minded, dignified, sound in faith. So boys, you realize this, you are future men. You need to begin learning right now what it means to be a man and aspire to be godly men. Learn self-control now so that you can grow into the kind of men who will serve and lead and honor God in his world. Why didn't Paul just tell everybody the same thing?

I mean, Aren't we all in Christ no matter if you're a man or a woman, old or young? Well, yes. Every Christian, man, woman, old, young is in Christ. And before God, men and women stand on completely equal ground. But becoming a Christian does not change the nature of men as men or women as women.

Grace does not cancel nature. Rather, it elevates it, It perfects it as it moves toward its intended person, a purpose. When a man becomes a Christian, he doesn't stop being a man. Neither does a woman stop being a woman. We remain what God originally created us to be as either female or male, but in Christ and by the power of His grace and through the indwelling ministry of his spirit, and by the truth of his word, we're now able to pursue manhood or womanhood in the way that God originally intended for it to be.

So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. Men and women are different by design. And that design has a purpose.

And that purpose is fulfilled in the roles and responsibilities that God gives to women as women and men as men. The measure of a woman is not a man. And the measure of a man is not a woman. God didn't just arbitrarily decide to make men pastors and to call women to be mothers. He gave man the role to be head of the woman, to be the one who leads the home, because that's what God made the man to be.

He didn't just arbitrarily decide that the woman would be the helper of the man in marriage. He gives the wife that role because that's how he created her to be. Sins obviously distorted God's good design, but sin did not cancel that design for men and women. A sinful woman is still a woman, and a sinful man is still a man. When the grace of God in Jesus Christ comes to us and we repent of sin and reconciled our God, that grace doesn't change our natures.

That grace enables us to pursue the purpose for which God created us, male and female. And so he commands the man to love his wife as her head, just like Christ loves the church, and he commands the woman to be submissive to her husband as his helper and to do so as to the Lord. The roles that God assigns us fits the natures he's given to us as men and women And that's true in the home, it's true in the church, and it's true in a well-ordered society. God intends for men to lead, to fight, to build and protect. He designed women to nurture, beautify and support.

Where God's grace is operating, where God's blueprint is followed, God's blessing will be experienced. Some call this broad complementarianism. Others call it biblical patriarchy. I don't really care what we call it. As I see it, it's simply realism.

It is in fact the way God has created his world and designed his image bearers to live in it. This is God's world and God alone gets to set the rules. Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for your Word. We thank you for your Spirit.

We need your Word and your Spirit. We've been discipled so effectively by the world in so many areas that it's hard for us to even see it. And so we pray that you would take your word and by your spirit, wash us, cleanse us, and help us to think rightly, especially God help us to think rightly about your design of men and women and boys and girls. And help us, help us to pursue that, to celebrate it, to recognize that we are who we are, what we are by your intentional purpose in creation. And oh God I pray you'd raise up a generation from these children and young people here who see these things clearly, who do not flinch in the face of the onslaught of those who would seek to destroy and overturn that which you have created and you designed to be good.

Do it for your sake. Do it for the honor of King Jesus. For we pray in his name, amen.