"What a Man Must Be..."

This short book is about biblical manhood in the context of marriage. There are lots of great parts, but what interested me the most was the chapter contrasting egalitarianism and complementarianism. Egalitarianism is the novel idea that because men and women are equal in personhood, there are no such thing as "gender roles" in the context of marriage. Complementarianism is the historical idea that men and women are equal in personhood but yet distinct, and that distinction is reflected in marriage in different gender roles. In short, husbands are to lead their wives, and wives are to submit to their husbands. A lot more goes into it, of course, but what fascinated me in this chapter was how the author showed the recent growth of egalitarianism happening in tandem with the growth of radical philosophical feminism.

He quotes professor Daniel Doriani (who looks a lot like Bob Saget, IMHO): "For over eighteen centuries the church was confident that it understood... biblical texts central to the Christian concept of marriage and gender relations. The church's leading pastors, theologians, and exegetes held that Ephesians 5 taught mutuality and service within the structure given by the leadership of a husband and father. The church judged Ephesians 5 and other passages, such as Genesis 2 and 1 Timothy 2, difficult to perform perhaps, but not difficult to understand... A handful of Christians began to question this consensus in the early 1800s, but the onslaught began with the onset of feminism a few decades ago. As it often does, the church started to echo a new cultural movement by adopting the questions and sensibilities of feminism, about a decade after its arrival. Theologians then began to read teachings about submission and leadership in new ways. Not surprisingly, feminist interpretations of Ephesians 5 started to appear in commentaries around 1970."

As a former egalitarian, I can tell you that most diehard egalitarians will tell you they simply interpret the text through the cultural lens of the original readers/hearers. What we are to make of the tandem growth of feminism and an egalitarian approach to leadership and submission? It must be nothing other than coincidence. OR Douglas Wilson is spot-on when he writes, "The church's reading of scripture in the western world has often become very influenced by the humanistic, egalitarian thought of western culture... Contemporary humanistic philosophy is becoming the grid through which scripture is read, and in order to make it work, the more culturally unpalatable aspects of Christianity must be explained away as outdated, situational, or just downright wrong." The reason I "switched sides" on this little debate within Christian circles is because I found many of the egalitarian arguments (which I at one time paraded through the streets) to be flatly untenable. I think Wilson is indeed on the mark with his analysis, and I think the rise of egalitarianism in sync with the rise of radical philosophical feminism isn't coincidental.