Lecture 10: Male and Female, Part 2: The Complementarian Position

The lecture, section by section

1. A woman, ninety minutes, and the notes

   Patton begins with the conversation that shaped his prayers for this session. A woman he describes as deeply sensitive on this subject, angry at Paul since her youth and dismissive of the Bible as chauvinism, agreed to walk through these notes with him for an hour and a half. By the end she said she had mischaracterized what the Bible taught, that she felt the Bible gives her dignity, that God is not pressing women down but lifting them up. That, Patton says, is the burden of the session: the church is widely misunderstood here, sometimes by its own fault, in a culture rightly allergic to discrimination, and Christians ought to handle this subject better than anyone. Dyke adds the program’s frame: no consensus is no excuse for no study; the goal is a deep, examined faith rather than a naive one, and, as Paul Tillich observed of theology’s strange work, it sometimes brings doubt to the sure and faith to the doubting.

2. The position defined

   Complementarianism: the Bible teaches that men and women are of equal worth, dignity, and responsibility before God, ontological equality, with no hierarchy of being, on the very pattern of the Trinity, where the Father is not greater in being than the Son though their functions differ. And the Bible teaches that men and women have different roles in society, the family, and the church, roles that do not compete but complement. The names attached: Wayne Grudem, John Piper, Douglas Moo, Chuck Swindoll, John MacArthur. Patton adds a note on vocabulary: he prefers leadership to headship, not because the doctrine changed but because connotations do, the same reason he no longer calls himself a fundamentalist though his principles have not moved.

3. Argument one: leadership from the beginning

   The first argument: the Bible illustrates male leadership from creation forward, all of it functional, none of it ontological. Adam named the animals, and in that world naming exercised authority, which is why God had Adam rather than himself do the naming; Adam then named Eve. After the fall, God approached Adam first, summoning the head and representative. There were no women priests; the ordained rulers of Israel were male; the apostles were male; the bishops, pastors, and presbyters of the New Testament churches were male. A pattern this long, the complementarian argues, is design, not accident.

4. Argument two: the completer, and the crux

   Eve was created as a completer, and the logic is pressed carefully. To be incomplete is to lack something; sinless Adam, walking with God, lacked, and God himself said so. Eve was no second attempt at perfection: she was created with essential characteristics Adam did not have, as Adam was created with characteristics she did not have, so that the role distinction is essential to humanity’s completeness. This is the crux of the whole position: the image of God is represented in male and female together, each functioning as designed, and to make the roles the same, rather than equal in value, is, on this view, to distort the image of God itself. Christ stands as the unique exception, alone imaging God perfectly, because he is God incarnate.

5. Against the individualist reading

   The teachers detour into what this does to modern instincts. Adam is called incomplete while enjoying a perfect, sinless, face-to-face relationship with God, which dismantles the individualism our culture breathes: the phrase personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Dyke notes, appears nowhere in the Bible or in church history; it is a modern, cultural coinage. The gifts of the Spirit make the same point, since no one carries them all and the Spirit’s full manifestation appears only in community. Even the advertisement’s promise of financial independence dissolves on inspection: nothing in an economy is independent of anything else. The Bible relentlessly presses us back toward needing each other, and this is the completeness argument writ large: not that every individual must marry, for singles contribute their gifts to society and church fully, but that humankind as male alone, or female alone, is incomplete. Another man would not have completed what Adam lacked.

6. Correspondence is not smoothness

   A pastoral caution before the exegesis: the one who corresponds to you is the one who fills what you lack, and that is precisely why the relationship can be abrasive. The rational man wants his wife to become rational; the intuitive woman wants her husband to feel as she feels; each tries to make the other stop corresponding. The design holds both in mutual submission in the fear of Christ, from Ephesians 5:21, which the teachers happily grant frames the whole household passage: submission is never domination, and a marriage of two people each submitting for Christ’s sake is the biblical picture. Asked about heaven, where there is no marriage, the teachers offer their minimum: the new creation is at least a perfection of this one, ordered still, with leadership purged of all domination and submission purged of all misuse.

7. Argument three: Paul and the pendulum

   Now Paul, and his supposed chauvinism, met head on with history. The culture of the New Testament was pagan, Greek, and thoroughly male-dominated: Jewish women were kept to the outer court, barred from learning, unpermitted even to read the Scriptures. Into that world came Christ, teaching women seated at his feet, supported by women, a scandal Luke emphasizes more than anyone, and at the cross, when the men had run, it was the women who stayed. The church became a liberation movement, and newly freed, formerly unlearned women in places like Ephesus were, on this reading, standing up, disrupting, and reaching for the pulpit. Picture the pendulum: from male domination the culture of the church swung hard toward identical roles, and Paul’s project was not to swing it back to domination but to stop it at the design. Patton offers his own classroom as analogy: a student may join a later course without the prerequisites, but must sit as a silent observer, not because of worth but because of readiness. And Dyke lands the distinction the whole unit needs: biblical culture is not culture that is biblical. The culture of the Bible’s day was pagan; the Bible never wanted men to dominate as they did; and our own churches, two centuries into individualism, are equally infiltrated by our own culture.

8. First Timothy 2, read whole

   The hard text is read without flinching: I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; for Adam was first created, and then Eve; and it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman. The complementarian’s decisive observation: Paul grounds the instruction in creation, not in culture. If the problem were purely local, he would have cited the local; instead he reaches back to the garden, embedding the principle in how we were made. And then the verse the class is taught to hear as Paul’s tenderness rather than his harshness: women will be preserved through the bearing of children, read as women gain their dignity within their own role, childbearing named because it was that culture’s highest and clearest illustration of the nurturing gifts, the very ones the class’s own board listed, not because motherhood is the only avenue. On the fall itself the teachers keep both edges: Eve was deceived; Adam was not deceived but failed, without discernment, giving in, and God held Adam responsible, a warning to men against enthroning logic over emotion when the stage of truth needs both.

9. What the restriction does and does not mean

   Among complementarians the precise scope is debated across a spectrum: never in any instance; only where no man is available, the Deborah pattern from Judges; or, Patton’s lean, the progressive sense: not continually exercising the pastoral, shepherding headship over men. On the belief scale he puts his exegetical confidence at a one or two, held with open hands. His homely analogy: at his wife’s mother’s-day-out ministry, parents request Christy by name, and Patton, choosing care for his most prized possession, would always choose a gifted woman over a man for small children, always meaning as a settled bent, not a law without exception; so, he suggests, Paul assumes both are present and says: for this role, choose the man. It is emphatically not a claim that women cannot teach: Paul regulates women prophesying in Corinth rather than forbidding it, Patton learns from Elisabeth Elliot on the radio driving home, and gifted women teachers abound. The 1 Corinthians 14 command to silence is read through the same cultural lens as the classroom rule for newcomers, and 1 Corinthians 11’s ordering, Christ the head of man, man of woman, God of Christ, supplies the submission principle beneath the culturally clothed practice of head coverings. Cross-culturally the framework flexes as designed: in China’s persecuted church, led overwhelmingly by women because the men are not there, the complementarian sees the Deborah pattern, not a violation.

10. Argument four: the instruction the culture never wrote

    The New Testament writers constantly address men abusing their role, and this too is the curse at work: his rule over you in Genesis 3 is harsh rule, domination. But the instruction to men is never to stop leading; it is to lead in a way that is sensitive, encouraging, and loving. Here the teachers turn the chauvinism charge inside out: the literature of that day wrote long codes of conduct for wives and none for husbands, because the man in power needed none. Paul gives the wives one line and then turns on the husbands with what Patton calls blow-you-away literature: love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Peter matches it: live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life, co-heir, ontological equality in four words, and if you do not, your prayers are hindered: the penalty for domineering is your own relationship with God. Colossians adds the same note: love your wives and do not be harsh with them.

11. Argument five, and the egalitarian responses

    The final argument, that most of church history has been complementarian, is offered and immediately handled with candor. The egalitarian answers each point in turn: the creation illustrations are descriptive, not prescriptive, a cultural phenomenon like slavery; Eve completed humanity, not man as ruler, hierarchy arriving with the fall; Paul wrote to cultural situations, the Ephesian women being formerly cult-connected, uneducated, and taught only secondhand through their husbands, with Eve cited as the illustration of secondhand information’s dangers, an argument Patton relays and then candidly rates as about the last one he would use, since Paul’s appeal to creation is very difficult to get past; the husband passages regulate how men relate, not that they rule; and appeals to church history cut badly both ways, for the church’s record includes abuse of the Jews, justified slavery, and forced conversions, so, Patton agrees, history carries little weight here and may work against the one who cites it.

12. Two designs: the biology

    The session then descends from theology to biology, because the roles are written in the body. Women store more fat and retain more heat, for childbearing; carry more white blood cells and fight infection faster; perceive more, with finer senses of hearing, taste, touch, and smell; discriminate color better, especially at the red end of the spectrum, which Patton’s own eye doctor confirmed and which some connect to reading fevers and rashes in children; respond involuntarily to a baby’s cry; are more patient, stay with family longer, and under prolonged stress produce cortisol and serotonin, bending toward depression. Men run a higher metabolism with half again the muscle mass; carry more red blood cells so wounds heal faster; carry many times the testosterone after puberty, with the aggression that follows; leave family earlier, seek competition, and are, the notes say and Patton disclaims authorship with a grin, prone to argue; under prolonged stress they produce testosterone, gaining endurance and hypertension. One design bends toward depression under stress, the other toward heart attacks. The conclusion drawn: we are biologically equipped for different roles, the observation Greg Johnson presses in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood from some 250 culture studies, where males dominate rule-making and building and women dominate caregiving so universally as to suggest the behavior is not merely taught.

13. The most important role in society

    Then the argument Patton has been building toward all night, the one he believes actually heals the wound. Talking with women drawn to egalitarianism out of real hurt, he asks whether it is their person or their role that has been devalued, and the honest answer is both, because men devalue the nurturing role constantly: you stay home with the children so we can go do the important things. Patton declares that exactly backwards: we work so that we can support you doing the really important things. Caring for children is, he argues, the most important role in all of society and in the church, for eighty to ninety percent of all believers come to faith by age twelve; the formative years are where the kingdom is actually won. Women would not need to fight for the other role if the church esteemed their own at its true worth. The dignity is in both.

14. The summary chart, and the benediction

    The closing chart gathers the anthropology. Ontological equality across the board. Primary traits: independent, logical, ambitious beside relational, emotionally sensitive, compassionate. The functional hierarchy runs on the Trinitarian analogy, man to the Father as woman to the Son, and it is no dishonor, Patton notes, to be compared to the Son. Theological function: leader and authority beside helper and completer; family function: worker beside childbearer; church function: teaching and evangelism primary for men with encouragement and mercy secondary, and the mirror image for women. Primary marital need, straight from Ephesians 5: he needs respect, she needs love. And the fall’s double signature on each: for the man, toil as the passive punishment and harsh, abusive rule as the active sin tendency; for the woman, pain in childbirth as the passive punishment and the desire to rule, the rebellion against role and authority, as the active tendency. The course’s last word is deliberately the least controversial sentence of the night: whatever you conclude on the disputed scope, men and women need each other, and a church that highly esteems the other’s role, each honoring what it lacks, is functioning theologically proper. With that, Humanity and Sin ends.

1. Patton claims the deepest wound is not the person devalued but the role devalued, and that men do most of the devaluing. Where have you treated the nurturing role as lesser, in your words, your budget, or your assumptions, and what would esteeming it at its true worth change in your home or church?

2. Dyke’s distinction, that biblical culture is not culture that is biblical, cuts both directions: at Paul’s pagan world and at our individualistic one. Name one place your reading of these passages has been shaped more by our culture than by the text, on whichever side of the debate you lean.

3. The course ends with both positions fully argued and the teachers’ lean disclosed with open hands. Set your own belief scale number for this issue, defend it from the strongest argument of the side you reject, and decide what esteeming the other sex’s role will look like for you this week.