Let's retire some terms

Complementarianism and Egalitarianism are both broken. We should move on.

A few notes on this article, by Gordon Hugenberger.

1. I know Gordon personally. One of his chief strengths (beyond his truly outstanding powerpoints) is his ability to be idiosyncratic in his approach to the biblical text. This CT piece- complementarian at home, egalitarian at church- is one such example.

2. I wish, however, that he had gone further. Complementarianism and Egalitarianism are both artificial, modern frames, intending to provide a consistent approach to a few passages of Scripture that are truly puzzling regarding how men and women should behave in church.

3. That a few puzzling parts of Scripture cause challenges for interpretation is not limited to whether women should preach. Whether baptism was “family baptism” (for adults) or intended to continue the covenant of circumcision- and so intended for children- is another. In both the cases of baptism and gender, traditions of interpretation of sprung up to support two different practices. These traditions are intended to strengthen what are practices minimally attested to in the biblical text.

4. For this reason, the schools built around minimalist biblical texts should be seen as… minimal.

5. However, “egalitarianism” and “complementarianism” have taken on lives of their own. They have come to represent wholesale approaches to life that seek not only to determine what women can *do* in church, but who men and women *are*.

6. To support this kind of project- what might be called a theology of male and female, or something like this- you’d need the entire biblical text. You’d also need a comprehensive vision of human life, that included things like sex difference but also looked at the taxis or order of creation. You’d also need to ask what sex difference is for, and what it is not for.

7. But just as complementarianism has oversold its good by making universal claims about women’s roles outside of the local church, egaliatarianism has also become too expansive. It seeks to sell itself as the school that “supports women” and affirms their inherent value and dignity before God. Egalitarians sometimes explicitly say that complementarians cannot value the image of God in women, or that they see women as ontologically lesser. Though I am sure certain people-who-are-complementarians make this argument, that does not mean it is intrinsic to complementarianism broadly.

8. Egalitarians also too quickly borrow the language of equality to trace out the relation between men and women, which puts them in conversation with nobody. Complementarians at no point say men and women are not equal. The volume with which some egalitarians point to equality makes it seem they have misunderstood the terms of the debate.

9. I think it would be better if we retired both terms and were more explicit both about the textual difficulties and the terms of disagreement. Is the concern that women cannot preach? That they cannot be priests? That domestic violence remains too prevalent in the local church? We will all benefit from greater precision in language.

10. For the meantime, insisting that individuals who think women should not pastor somehow think women are lesser makes the office of pastoring an odd rubric for determining human value. It also misunderstands the role of ordination. As usual, it seems that gaining clarity about the terms of one theological argument has unearthed a deeper theological misunderstanding.