Episode 54: On “Broad” & “Narrow” Complementarianism
What does the Bible say about complementarianism? Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman start by discussing what the Bible says about gender and its history in the church. They define what it means to be an Egalitarian or Complentarian and what “broad” and “narrow” complementarianism means. In this conversation, they address common assumptions about gender that culture holds today and what the Bible has to say about those assumptions. They finish the conversation by advising caution to both “broad” and “narrow” complementarians, encouraging careful exegesis and patience.
- What Does Scripture Teach about Gender
- What is Egalitarianism?
- What is Broad and Narrow Complementarianism?
- Modern Assumptions About Gender
- Cautions for Christians When Thinking about Complementarianism
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
I am Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
I’m Mark Dever.
Jonathan Leeman:
And welcome to this episode of Nine Marks Pastors Talk.9Marks exist to equip church leaders with a biblical vision and practical resources for building healthy churches. Learn more at ninemarks.org. Mark, what is complementarianism?
Mark Dever:
The idea is that gender is a good gift from God and has the aspects of the image of God that are stable in individuals that are both reflecting God’s image but distinct from each other. And that there are two categories of this fixed from creation itself.
Jonathan Leeman:
So gender is not entirely a social construct.
Mark Dever:
Gender is not entirely a social construct,
Jonathan Leeman:
Though different societies do different things with it. There is a fixed thing that crosses from society to society.
Mark Dever:
Both are true.
What Does Scripture Teach about Gender?
Jonathan Leeman:
And where is this taught in scripture?
Mark Dever:
It’s taught fundamentally in Genesis that when God makes Adam, Adam does not find a companion suitable, and then God makes Eve out of Adam and mentions the distinction and that it’s good.
Jonathan Leeman:
And even before that, I’d say in 1 27, before he names ’em Adam and Eve, male and female, he created them. We get a male kind and a female kind of human,
Mark Dever:
He’s prepped him to understand really, I think by the whole animal kingdom.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Now, that’s not where a lot of the controversy, at least in the first instant rises up. The controversy that we hear in conversations has more to do with rules and regulations. Right. Let’s fill us in on that real quick.
Mark Dever:
Well, I mean in the New Testament we don’t really see women serving as elders and husbands.
Jonathan Leeman:
We don’t see or we don’t really see,
Mark Dever:
We don’t, and husbands are regarded as having a distinct kind of position in the marriage, and wives are regarded as having a distinct kind of position in the marriage in church history. There are different things that go on, but those basic things are pretty universally held to, there are
Jonathan Leeman:
Headship of men and home elders,
Mark Dever:
Men of the preachers,
Jonathan Leeman:
Men are the preachers and elders.
Mark Dever:
In the 19th century, you do see, particularly in the Wesleyan Holiness movement, some women preaching. And by the 20th century, early on, there are some very notable examples of this. And the most famous one by far is Amy Simple.
McPherson, the one who founded the Foursquare Church out on the West Coast, was an early kind of Pentecostal and founded Angelus Temple, a huge church still out there in Los Angeles. Then that was pretty much the way it was.
I think there were some European Protestant denominations that began in which people began to explore women being ordained as ministers in the 1960s. And that can be off by a decade here, either forward or backward, and in the United States that more was happening in the 1970s.
What is Egalitarianism?
Jonathan Leeman:
Now were people just doing that or were there theological conversations alongside them justifying the practice? There was just more happenstance,
Mark Dever:
As you know, probably better than I do. There were conversations going on more generally in theology about the nature of authority in the church, about the nature of scripture, but then even among those who affirmed the authority of scripture, there were conversations usually about a decade later to be a kind of evangelical echo of the main conversation that was going on with the more people who were more skeptical in their attitude toward the authority and sufficiency of scripture.
That kind of conversation would be reprised in evangelical circles. So when I became a Christian in the 1970s, I assumed I was probably kind of egalitarian, meaning that there are no, I mean, men should only marry women.
Women should only marry men. But other than that, there’s no particular role. There’s no reason a woman shouldn’t preach if she feels called to. And certainly, some women would be better preachers than some men.
Jonathan Leeman:
In the home, neither is head over the other.
Mark Dever:
I would take Ephesians 5:21 as a kind of summary
Jonathan Leeman:
Submit to one another
Mark Dever:
As a summary headline, here are various examples of it. And then that certainly as a religion major at Duke University, I was only encouraged by such thoughts. I went to A-P-C-U-S church, which I don’t know if they had women as elders there at the time or not, and went to Gordon Conwell, which was largely egalitarian.
And then Roger Nicole whom I studied under was strong, he described himself as a biblical feminist. And it’s funny, I was his teaching assistant and it was actually having to grade the papers for Roger’s exams and work on that. That turned me into a complimentarian.
This is before the Danvers’ statement, so it’s before all that happened. It’s in the, I mean it happens in Danvers, right by Gordon Colemans. It’s Gordon CommonWell faculty like David Wells who were involved in it. But it’s being in that soup and needing to grade papers according to that soup that made me feel intellectually slimy.
Mark Dever:
I was taking a very clear first Timothy two 12, and I was kind of mugging it because there were questions I had about it and I was using those questions to justify the opposite being the case from what this prohibition of pause on women teaching men seems transparently to say. And I just began to feel sort of bad before the Lord.
So this is before there’s A-C-B-M-W before there’s a big blue book before there’s Dan’s statement, probably about three years before 1984 working for Roger. I flipped on the issue, I said, and I was going to the UCC church at the time, so I was even a liberal church.
I was just an evangelical witness in that church and that church was certainly egalitarian. So I thought scripture was pretty clear on it. And of course, since then the next 30 years happened.
Jonathan Leeman:
I remember you saying in some conversation that you felt like one instructor is the way he talked about the Bible in general, you went along with it, but when he talked about this issue, he sounded different. The egalitarian.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
He’s like, you sound different here than you sound everywhere else.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
And my sense is to trace the history kind of into the present,
Mark Dever:
He would use more language about justice and indignation. His tone would get shriller and his biblical evidence slider, and that positive would be, he would work more from general principles, look at how Jesus deals with women compared with women in the culture around him.
And I think that’s valid. I agree. I mean Christianity has been a gigantic force for the uplifting of the treatment of women and the protection of women, so the value of women. So I agreed with all that. I just thought the conclusions he was drawing from that, particularly in the life of the church were not,
Jonathan Leeman:
Was the exegesis becoming lighter?
Mark Dever:
Yeah, oh yeah, much.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m letting general principals guide me less than the exegesis guy
Mark Dever:
I want to be very careful. He was a systematic theology prof, and you’re a systematic theology dude. I mean, I’m very respectful of systematic theology. I don’t want it all anyway, try to be an arrogant liberalist.
Mark Dever:
Pushing the naked text of scripture over and against needing to bring all of the witness’s scripture together. Of course, you have to do that, but it’s always a kind of inductive, deductive spiral, how you understand what the truth is.
There’s stuff that’s taught clearly in scripture and there’s stuff you have to reason to get the trinity. And whenever we’re pretending we’re not doing that on the Bilis side, we’re fooling ourselves.
And that’s where I so appreciate you and our people who are so careful with the text. Like Don Carson is very careful with the text, but he’s sensitive to theological systems correctly. So I think,
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, the fact of the matter is I’d say we all have an implicit or explicit system in operation. You can say I’m just a biblicist, but the fact is you put the text together in some form or fashion,
Mark Dever:
And if we’re Bible believers, we’re always trying to submit that scripture and to make it more and more in accord with scripture. That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
There’s no point in leaving it in the dark. Bring it to the light, say what it is, and then try to,
Mark Dever:
So I certainly have a category for egalitarians who don’t really believe in the authority of scripture or just trashing it and going with cultural norms.
Mark Dever:
I’ve got a category for that. I also have a category for people who believe the Bible’s inherent word of God and just disagree with me on this issue. And I don’t suspect their intentions. I don’t suspect their motives.
That’s between them and the Lord. I understand that. I think they’re wrong, and I think those errors are significant. And I certainly then inside of the Complimentarian camp, however widely you put it, understand that different brothers and sisters are going to practice this differently.
And that doesn’t mean it’s of no consequence. Different decisions will have different kinds of consequences to them, but I want to be very careful. Well, you just published an article on this that was really good, brother, just to point that out. What did you call it anyway, just came out on the 9Marks website, if you check on February 8, 2018.
Jonathan Leeman:
A word of empathy, warning, and counsel for narrow complementarians there.
What are “Broad” and “Narrow” Complementarianism?
Mark Dever:
Yeah, well, and I think maybe you cautioned the broad complementarians a little bit too. And by broad you mean the people who think it applies to all of life and the narrow means we would try to stick exactly to what the text clearly says Complementarianism applies only to home and church marriage,
Jonathan Leeman:
Maybe specific
Mark Dever:
Marriage and church in this role.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. So I think you were trying to step in and ask for adult conversation, not virtue signaling, not like, Hey, hey, I’m kind of with the cool guys hating on the bad guys,
Jonathan Leeman:
Right?
Mark Dever:
And I really appreciated, and you were as you typically are, man, you were nuanced. You were on the one hand saying, yeah, I’m kind of broad. But then, on the other hand, you were disagreeing with the broads. I mean, it’s like what I’ve come to expect from Jonathan.
So I appreciated that. But my larger point that I’m trying to make is I think if we’re going to have a fruitful conversation with others on this other evangelical Bible-leading Christians, we have to understand that someone can disagree with us, and then we have to just ask questions that bring light and not heat.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, I appreciate the way you model that with even Egalitarians. Let me fast-forward us in the conversation. Your theological training was in the mid-eighties at Gordon-Conwell.
Mark Dever:
Well, the late seventies. I’m doing my Greek in the seventies. Yeah. So 78 to 86, those eight years.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m like a generation behind you because I’m doing my MD at Southern and the early two thousand.
Mark Dever:
Right. So I’m doing mine at the same time Al Moer is doing his at Southern, which is more liberal at the same time League Dun was doing his at Covenant, which was more conservative 10 years after Tim Keller did his at the same school, Gordon Conwell. So Tim and I had largely the same faculty. We’ve often talked about that.
Jonathan Leeman:
So my impression is that the conversation has evolved since then. So in the
Mark Dever:
The eighties and Piper would’ve been like 20 years before us at Fuller.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right.
Mark Dever:
Back when Fuller was kind of a peer to transition.
Jonathan Leeman:
So then the pitched battle in the eighties, nineties, even early 2000s was sort of between Egalitarians Complimentarians. My sense of the conversation since then is that,
Mark Dever:
Do you want to stop your phone mic?
Jonathan Leeman:
I can. It just keeps beeping. I’m sorry.
Mark Dever:
Can you just silence it off?
Jonathan Leeman:
I turn it off. Turn it off on the computer.
Mark Dever:
You just turn it off.
Jonathan Leeman:
Here we go. In some ways the
Mark Dever:
Seriously, really.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, there we go. Since then,
Mark Dever:
Guys, this is what are like with Jonathan Leeman. You just need to know this.
Jonathan Leeman:
This is what conversations are like with Mark Dever.
Mark Dever:
You’re in the nineties and early two thousand,
Jonathan Leeman:
The evangelical egalitarian camp is kind of passing, it’s my anecdotal sense passing with your generation. So the older guys are still having that conversation, but the younger guys, guys, and girls are either moving towards an affirming position towards homosexuality and therefore adopting either a non-evangelical identity or at least a conflicted relationship with an evangelical identity.
And for Complementarians, the conversation is increasingly, okay, what does this complementarianism mean? And we’re trying to work it out in these different domains and areas of life. So among say, 45 and younger, I don’t see a lot of cross-dialogue between Complimentarians and Egalitarians.
It’s kind of in-house conversations about, okay, what does this mean? What does it mean for seminary? What does it mean for Sunday school? What does it mean for the military, et cetera? Do you see something similar or is that just,
Mark Dever:
First of all, do you get out more than I do on the internet? I mean, you read a lot of things much more widely, I think, than I do. So I think you’re in a better position to know. Certainly back in the 1980s when I was kind of thinking this one through, I certainly said that’s what would happen.
And I was not unique in being a prophet. I mean, that was a very common more conservative concern that if you begin to undermine something so clear on gender, it will continue on necessarily.
Jonathan Leeman:
At the time I was prescient.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. At the time some people thought that was a bit extreme, though. Again, I wasn’t alone in saying that Jack Rogers of the Presbyterian Church, USA is a perfect example of that in the seventies, advocated the ordination of women in the general assembly there and said, that any tying this to homosexuality was approval of homosexuality. Affirmation is simply a red herring of conservative rightness
Jonathan Leeman:
Slippery slope argument.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, exactly. People always dismiss the slippery slope of arguments. Sometimes slippery slope of arguments is incorrect, but sometimes they are correct. And sure enough, Rogers some couple of decades later is back at the general assembly pushing in the very direction that he denied.
And one of his speeches to the general assembly who remembers this, right? This is 20 years ago now, or 15, probably more than 20. He said we made this decision back in the 1970s when we decided to ordain women. He literally contradicted how he himself had been arguing.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s interesting.
Mark Dever:
I can’t remember the specifics, it’s not like Al Muller could give you chapter verse date to speech, but I just remember that was so striking at the time. It’s like, wow, this is really, it’s all kind of coming to pass. But you’re making a slightly more sweeping statement. You’re saying there aren’t the evangelical egalitarians
Jonathan Leeman:
Around. No, I’m saying it’s a shrinking.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, and certainly again, back then I certainly said I thought that would be the case that evangelical egalitarians would be kind of like mules. They wouldn’t reproduce.
There were kind of limited-time offers with the generation of really almost more the generation above me and me. And I think that’s proving true. I couldn’t say it as firmly as you are, but I think that’s proving true.
Jonathan Leeman:
I had a brother recently say to me that he feels like people’s conceptions of manhood and womanhood are somewhat region-specific. So I can have a conversation about it. Hey, we need to find manhood and womanhood coming from Washington DC, or other places I’ve lived.
And he said, well, here where I live in the South, people are going to feel, as soon as you introduce the conversation, they’re going to import all of their experiences of soft patriarchy into hearing what I say. Is that fair that to some extent,
Mark Dever:
Extent other regions will be affected. So if you go to rural Kentucky and you try to suggest that gun-toting is unique to the male species, the women there would be very upset by that. So as a committed female, there are a lot of cultural specificities to some of the normal ways gender’s work out. That’s definitely true.
Modern Assumptions About Gender
Jonathan Leeman:
So as you’re pastoring in Washington DC what assumptions about gender do you think people walking into church are bringing with them?
Mark Dever:
I think the people who are walking into our church are mainly 30 years old. So let’s say a 30-year-old walking in, let’s say somebody born in the mid-1980s, 1985 to 1990, somewhere in there, a person walking into our church these days probably assumes from creation that there are differences that they know just biologically.
So it doesn’t matter how strong even the transgender kind of waves are coming out of your TV tube, there aren’t tubes anymore out of your TV pixels flat in the Constitution that God made us with evidence of his gift of gender. I think that most people, almost all people, are operative.
I also think on a self-conscious level, even people who are egalitarian probably have to work to overcome some things that they probably identify as just cultural hangovers. And some of that is probably not a cultural hangover.
Some of that’s probably the image of God in its distinct sense in that person. Others of it is, I assume, cultural hangover. I don’t know that a lot of people walking in assume a happy gendered theology.
Jonathan Leeman:
What do you mean by that?
Mark Dever:
Well, maybe from homeschooling families would, I just think our culture is so thoroughly offended right now by the idea of gender that I think even reading carnal French responses to the Me Too movement, which responses were both, as I’ve read them, regrettable and French, and I don’t have any offense to our French listeners. We do have French listeners, but I mean there’s a complete thumbing the nose at Americans as they would see Puritanism.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, I’ve seen that
Mark Dever:
Even though there is not a Christian basis explicitly, some in an intuitive sense that there is something about gender that’s fixed and that’s good. So however twisted it may be in America or France or wherever.
I assume that in my 30-year-old, even if they’re not self-consciously thinking that even if they’re basically attitudinally egalitarian, even if they know the Bible’s true and mean to believe the distinctions between men and women, but don’t really understand ’em at all, I assume there’s something in them intuitive that affirms the goodness of gender,
Jonathan Leeman:
The bottom line is conflicting intuitions.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Seriously, God-given ones and culturally constructed times are helpful at times, unhelpful.
Mark Dever:
And I want to quickly say, that I think you and I as Bible-believing Christians are similar. We are always working to reform our theology according to the word of God. And there are gray areas galore, I think in our understanding of and implementation of God’s good gift to gender,
Jonathan Leeman:
Is complementarian in a position that’s harder to hold today than it was five years ago in Washington DC? Harder for you as a pastor, and is it harder for members?
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I feel the answer has to be yes, but I can’t honestly say I feel that. So I think the question that is faced more directly in people’s families and neighborhoods and schools and works probably comes through the more direct assault of transgender or even of same-sex marriage, affirmation. Those are where the pressures come in terms of things that work that people need to
Jonathan Leeman:
Those are the overt pressures, but those presume a lack of defined masculinity, femininity, manhood, and womanhood. I can only get to those positions in some ways if I’ve already begun to land. Those understand what you mean, understand mean by that, at least transgender.
Mark Dever:
Okay. Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
These things are malleable or fluid and open to self.
Mark Dever:
I define myself in lots of different gradations. Yeah, you must be at least partially right on that. Well, what I mean by that is I think sometimes evangelicals misunderstand homosexuality as a kind of androgyny, and sometimes there’s not that at all. I mean, you have females who very much want to be with other people who are very female.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right.
Mark Dever:
And men with other men who are very male. So I understand what you mean by that, but I think it’s more
Jonathan Leeman:
I’d agree with that.
Mark Dever:
Okay.
Jonathan Leeman:
What are, you would call yourself a broad complementarian?
Mark Dever:
Yeah. By Kevin, the Young standards that you mentioned in this article you’ve just written.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Narrow, broad, maybe a little broader than you. Yeah. I sense that
Mark Dever:
Because older than you,
Cautions for Christians When Thinking about Complementarianism
Jonathan Leeman:
What cautions would you have for people in the broad camp? What are the dangers?
Mark Dever:
That we just ize our cultural assumptions and that we become quickly intolerant and charitable in our conversations with others?
Jonathan Leeman:
How should we avoid that?
Mark Dever:
That? I think by trying to listen very carefully to what somebody who’s disagreeing with us is saying. Now, it’s hard in these kinds of issues because you get down to doing one thing or another and then what you’re going to do then also ends up apparently promoting one thing or another.
So it can pretty quickly get to be more important than somebody may initially mean when they make this decision or that decision. So yeah, I think there has to be charity on both sides. People understand that this is more significant than a matter of indifference.
Jonathan Leeman:
Nope, it’s not that.
Mark Dever:
So it’s not
Jonathan Leeman:
Cereal for breakfast.
Mark Dever:
It may not be a gospel issue directly. It may be a gospel issue directly depending on why a particular assault on gendered roles and this or that situation is going on. It could be a gospel issue, but I think very often it could not be a gospel issue.
Instead, it’s simply disagreement on important, but secondary matters, some of which Christians can work together through others of which they really can’t. Very practically.
Jonathan Leeman:
You say you think you’re more broad than me. I think you and I share the same methodological commitments.
Mark Dever:
I think that’s true.
Jonathan Leeman:
Which makes this conversation possible.
Mark Dever:
I think I’m sure that’s true.
Jonathan Leeman:
And whereas you and I might come down in different judgments on any given specific area of application,
Mark Dever:
And I want to be sure, I want to be clear. I’m not sure we do, or that’s just my guess.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’d be curious to hear what you think
Mark Dever:
Only from the way you dress and how you keep your facial hair
Jonathan Leeman:
Wearing a pink shirt today.
Mark Dever:
Well, no, no, no. I’m just saying the length of your facial hair, I mean you’re very,
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s not true.
Mark Dever:
You dress younger than you really are.
Jonathan Leeman:
What? I don’t think so. If I had long facial hair, that would be hipster.
Mark Dever:
Oh, you’re right. See, I don’t even know my cool.
Jonathan Leeman:
I do do facial hair like guys did in the eighties and nineties.
Mark Dever:
I think we are wasting people’s time.
Jonathan Leeman:
Probably. So I think the methodological commitment that you and I share is that let’s bind the conscience where scripture clearly binds the conscience on those matters of explicit precepts. Right.
But I think you and I also think that those are sort of what we’d call straight-line issues, but I also think you and I recognize that there are creation designs in play and we need to work our exegesis carefully and recognize that men and women are different and use wisdom in these other areas and work our way through each of those cases by case issues and we might come down to different judgments.
Mark Dever:
Definitely. Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Any last words of counsel for either narrow or broad complementarians Mark as we work our way through disputable matters?
Mark Dever:
Yeah, the guys on the left should be careful not to use sort of cultural justice language, and fry guys to their right guys on their right need to be very careful about using sort of inside-house theological heretic language to cause burnings of guys to their left. Now, depending on how far the right and left are, I would amend that statement.
But talking as you and I are about sort of broad and narrow, I can think something’s so important. Even inside those distinctions. I’m not going to publicly cooperate in certain ways with a person, but I’m going to be as respectful of them as I am of League Duncan when he is doing an infant baptism.
Well, I love my brother’s league. He intends to serve the Lord. I don’t think he is in that particular thing, but he certainly is with his life and more generally in his teaching. And I am going to do nothing but honor him in my public speech.
Jonathan Leeman:
Are you not scoffing at him on Twitter?
Mark Dever:
No. No. Honestly, when I know somebody who disagrees with me on something like this, and that would not be Ligon, in this case, you and I are talking about my respect for the person actually causes me to think more carefully about the issue. It causes me to be less dismissive.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, that’s right. I think these are really tough conversations. I think we need to keep having them and be patient with one another and give one another the benefit of the doubt, charity, and so forth. Thanks for your time, brother. Thank you.
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