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Well... I lied. I said I'd post an article from Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen last Friday, and here it is Monday already. But better late than never... this was Ms. Stewart Van Leeuwen's contribution to the 2004 Evangelical Theological Society conference, and one example of why I appreciate both her conclusions and the rigorous way she arrives at them. This is, of course, reprinted here with her express permission and should not be reprinted elsewhere without that permission.
[A few technical problems I'm trying to resolve. Footnote hyperlinks do NOT work, though footnotes are listed at article's end. Sorry... ]
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What Do We Mean by “Male-Female Complementarity”?
A Review of Ronald W. Pierce, Rebecca M. Groothuis, and Gordon D. Fee, eds.,
Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy
(Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004)
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen
Professor of Psychology and Philosophy, Eastern University, St. Davids PA
Discovering Biblical Equality is a voluminous (500-page) contribution to an exegetical debate that has been going on at least since the 1989 between the followers of two organizations: The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), and Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE). The basic contours of this debate – at least as it is represented on paper – are by now fairly well-known. CBMW deplores “the increasing promotion given to feminist egalitarianism” and asserts that “Adam’s headship in marriage was established by God before the fall, and was not a result of sin.” Although affirming that “both Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, equal before God as persons,” and that “in the church, redemption given by Christ gives men and women an equal share in the blessings of salvation,” CBMW’s founders assert that “nevertheless, some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men.”
[1]Christians for Biblical Equality has taken a different exegetical stance. In its reading of the Bible, women and men were created for full and equal partnership. Further, Adam’s rule over Eve occurred only as a result of the fall, and “through faith in Jesus Christ we all become children of God ... heirs to the blessings of salvation without reference to racial, social or gender distinctives.” Consequently, for the adherents of CBE, in marriage “neither spouse is to seek to dominate the other, but each is to act as a servant of the other ... [sharing] responsibilities of leadership and the basis of gifts, expertise and availability.” And in the church, “spiritual gifts of women and men are to be recognized, developed and used ... at all levels of involvement.”
[2]Discovering Biblical Equality (
DBE) is a response to an earlier (and equally weighty) edited volume by adherents to CBMW titled
Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (
RBMW) which is itself subtitled
A Response to Evangelical Feminism.
[3] The two volumes are organized in rather similar fashion, which underlines the fact that both sides agree as to what are the crucial issues in the debate.
RBMW had twenty-six chapters divided into five sections: “Vision and Overview,” (two chapters); “Exegetical and Theological Studies,” (seventeen chapters); “Studies from Related Disciplines,” (five chapters); “Applications and Implications” (six chapters); and “Conclusion and Prospect” (one chapter).
DBE has twenty-nine chapters divided into five sections covering roughly the same disciplinary territory: “Setting the Stage: The Historical Background” (three chapters); “Looking at Scripture: The Biblical Texts” (ten chapters); “Thinking It Through: Logical and Theological Perspectives” (six chapters); “Addressing the Issues: Hermeneutical and Cultural Perspectives” (five chapters); and “Living It out” Practical Applications” (five chapters).
The contributors to
Discovering Biblical Equality have done a thorough job on the issues represented by the second part of the book’s subtitle – namely, the historical, exegetical, hermeneutical and theological arguments as to why gender relations in home and church should be “without hierarchy.” They represent an international group of evangelical scholars with a high view of all Scripture as God’s word, and academic qualifications that are impressive. The tone of their arguments is mostly irenic. Like their counterparts in CBMW, the adherents of CBE recognize that the issue of male headship vs. gender equality is not a confessional issue – that is, one which can be used as a litmus test to separate orthodox from heterodox Christians – and that they must recognize, in the words of CBMW’s founding statement, “the genuine evangelical standing of many who do not agree with all of [their] convictions.”
[4]The editors of
DBE have included two chapters explicitly challenging the assumption that biblical egalitarians are on a slippery slope towards ‘soft androgyny’ – the view that virtually no differences exist (or should exist) between males and females other than the most obvious anatomical and physiological ones.
[5] Thus in Ch. 23 (“Gender Equality and Homosexuality”) William Webb shows that while the redemptive-historical flow of the NT passages on gender relations goes in a less restrictive direction than the customs of the surrounding Greco-Roman culture, those on homosexuality point in an emphatically more restrictive direction. This undercuts the accusation that that gender egalitarian arguments are likely to lead to the condoning of same-sex marriage via soft androgyny. Webb writes that
Paul appeals [in Rom l] to God’s intention for male-female sexuality as something that is clearly revealed in nature and thus, by specific inference, within the complementary gender design for men and women ... The Romans I ideal that God’s revelation is clear in the created world around us verifies that the core biblical issue is sexuality that accords with God’s creation of male and female. [Three important texts: Lev 18:22, Deut 22:5 and Rom l:18-32] show that the biblical problem with homosexuality is not really about equality or a lack of equality of sexual partners. The deepest issue for the biblical authors is a breaking of sexual boundaries that violates obvious components of male-female creation design.[6]
Secondly, in Ch. 24 (“Feminism and Abortion”) Sulia and Karen Mason document the inconsistency of proabortion feminists’ insistence on rights for themselves that they are not willing to accord to either their unborn children or to the fathers who might like to see those children born. These authors also deny that biblical egalitarianism necessarily leads to an endorsement of androgyny, let alone to the automatic support of abortion on demand. “Traditional society,” they write, “made the mistake of treating women as women without granting them their human rights. A proabortion society turns the tables, treating the woman as a human being without recognizing her womanhood.
Prolife feminists finally get it right: ‘In opposing abortion we stand against society’s devaluation of women as mothers and commit ourselves to giving women the support they need to bear children with dignity.’”
[7] This is not the stuff of liberal feminist androgyny: it sounds more like the ‘domestic feminism’ in which many American evangelicals were involved in wake of their participation in the anti-slavery movement. The 19th century domestic feminists of both sexes argued for women’s expanded participation in church and the rest of the public sphere more on the basis of their supposed differences from men (such as their greater nurturing qualities and sexual purity) rather than on their similarities (such as their capacity for rationality and autonomy).
[8]However, on both sides of this debate, the discussion of those so-called complementary differences is nothing if not bewildering. I have already said that I believe
DBE’s contributing biblical scholars, theologians and historians have made a cogent case against gender hierarchy in church and family – as much as I am able to judge their arguments as a non-expert in their disciplines. So since I am first and foremost a social scientist, I have chosen to focus most of my attention not on the ‘Without Hierarchy’ aspects of the book’s subtitle, but rather on the vexed issue of the meaning of gender ‘Complementarity’ (the other key term in the book’s subtitle). It’s pretty clear that the authors of
DBE agree as to what gender complementarity isn’t: it’s not permanent male headship in church or family, and it’s not the androgynous notion that women and men are actually or ideally interchangeable, except for sexed body parts and functions.
But the authors are hardly of one mind as to what gender complementarity actually is. And if you peruse RBMW and its updates on the website of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, you will find that, aside from a formal insistence on male headship in church and family, these ‘hierarchical complementarians’ are also pretty vague about the actual content of gender complementarity in terms of differentially-gendered traits and behaviors, actual or ideal. Masochist that I am, I did a fine-grained analysis of all the contexts in which the term ‘complementarity’ (of the ‘without hierarchy’ sort) is used in DBE, which turned out to be about forty times – not to mention numerous other places where the idea appears to be under discussion, but without the actual use of the term.
A representative sample of the diversity that I found is included in Appendix C of this paper.
What it shows, in sum, is that we have authors in DBE variously suggesting that complementarity means:
1) Women and men do have different but equally beneficial psychological traits, and that is one reason for making sure both sexes are included in church and home leadership roles;
2) Male-female personality and behavioral differences (e.g. in aggression, in relational skills) are ‘general’ or average differences only, not absolute differences, but this still counts as gender complementarity. This means not only that each sex can bring its ‘average’ strengths to church and family tasks
[9] in a non-hierarchical way, but each sex can teach the other sex some of those strengths, so that both can more fully carry out the cultural mandates of sociability and dominion.
3) It is impossible to separate the natural from the cultural in order to get at the essential traits of masculinity and femininity, either in an absolute or general way. Men and women do in some sense complete each other, though not in a way that predetermines hierarchical or any other gender roles or traits (other than reproductive ones) for all times, people, and places;
4) Whether women and men have differing, beneficial traits is irrelevant to leadership in home and church, which should be assigned on the basis of gifts, not on the basis of either gender or some principle of proportional gender representation;
5) In creation, women and men were different in ways that were both physically and psychologically positive, and not ordered hierarchically. But after the fall, male hierarchy and female subordination emerged as a negative kind of complementarity, which the redemptive trajectory of Scripture calls us to correct;
6) The trinitarian God is our model for optimal gender relations: just as there is equality of being but differentiation of task within the Godhead, so too the heterosexual complementarity and mutual respect called for in creation, and made possible again in Christ, can be a witness to the world as to the nature of God and a signpost pointing toward the full justice and reconciliation that will be completed by God in the new creation;
7) Sexuality is irrelevant to the image of God in persons: it is simply one of the God-given functions which humans share with plants and animals, and thus testifies to our creaturehood. But it is in women’s and men’s call to subdue the earth that they jointly image God and transcend their sexed creaturehood.
This diversity of definitions of gender complementarity, while arguably signaling some confusion on the part of
DBE authors, also testifies to the complexity of the issue. From a theological standpoint, if, like all other human activities, gender relations reflect a mix of good creation and tragic falleness, then it’s not likely to be any easier sorting out what’s creational and what’s fallen about them than it is in our discussions of politics, economics, the arts, or any other sphere of life. Moreover, if gender complementarity somehow mirrors the relationship of members of the Trinity as they work together in creation and redemption (a point on which both sides in the debate seem to agree) then it is probably not going to be any easier to nail down than our understanding of the Trinity. And as Judy Brown reminds readers in ch. 17 of
DBE, “[A]fter we make every attempt to better understand the Trinity, it remains one of the greatest mysteries among Christian doctrines” (p. 299).
However, as unwitting children of the Enlightenment, we seem to have a Tower of Babel-like craving for absolute certainty. And so both sides in the debate recruit biologists and social scientists as latter-day natural theologians who are supposed to help close the theological gaps by telling us, from a ‘scientific’ perspective, what gender complementarity ‘really is.’ Thus, RBMW has chapters on biology, psychology and sociology, and DBE has chapters written or co-written by therapists, a sociologist, and an academic psychologist.
[10] But as an academic psychologist and gender studies scholar who did not contribute to either volume, I am now going to try to explain (not for the first time)
[11] why this is a misguided exercise. My basic points are these:
1) Research in neither the biological nor the social sciences can resolve the nature/nurture debate regarding gendered psychological traits or behaviors in humans, let alone pronounce on whether any of these should be retained or rejected. In a fallen world – however good it remains creationally -- we cannot move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ on the basis of science alone.
2) There are very few consistent sex differences in psychological traits and behaviors. When these are found, they are always average – not absolute-- differences, and for the vast majority of them the small, average – and often decreasing -- difference between the sexes is greatly exceeded by the amount of variability on that trait within members of each sex. Most of the ‘bell curves’ for women and men (graphing the distribution of a given psychological trait or behavior) overlap almost completely. So it is naïve at best – and deceptive at worst -- to make essentialist (or even generalist) pronouncements about the psychology of either sex when there is much more variability within than between the sexes on most of the trait and behavior measures for which we have abundant data.
3) To adapt one of Freud’s famous dictums, we cannot assume that anatomy is destiny until we have controlled for opportunity. Thus, even when appeals are made to large cross-cultural studies that have found ‘consistent’ behavioral and/or attitudinal sex differences, we cannot assume universality for those conclusions until we have controlled for the existence of differing opportunities by gender across the various cultures.
Let me now address these three points in more detail, after which I will make some modest proposals about how the social sciences might more reasonably be expected to be helpful to both sides in the egalitarian/hierarchicalist debate.
1) Research in neither the biological nor the social sciences can resolve the nature/nurture controversy regarding gendered psychological traits and behaviors in humans:The crucial terms here are the words ‘human’ and ‘psychological traits and behaviors.’ First of all, we should not be surprised that, given our creational overlap with all other living organisms (strikingly shown in the various genome projects that are underway) much can be learned about the structure, function, and healing of the human body from animal research models. But without doubt the most salient biological feature of human beings is the plasticity of their brains. The legacy of a large cerebral cortex puts us on a much looser behavioral leash than other animals, with the result that, more than any other species, we are created for continuous learning – for passing on what we have produced culturally, not just what we have been programmed to do genetically. We are, as it were, hard-wired for behavioral flexibility.
[12] Indeed, how could we carry out the cultural mandate to “subdue the earth” (Gen 1:28) as God’s accountable regents if this were not so? And at the other end of the biblical drama, how could we “bring the honor and glory of nations” – however suitably cleansed – before God (Rev 21:26) if all the people of all the nations had no more freedom within their common biological form than that which exists in even our closest primate neighbors? And in between, what would be the point of reading and taking to heart Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matt 25:14-20)?
Ah yes, some will say, but the biological and social sciences have shown us that men and women have clearly different talents, and that these are rooted in biology. Really? Well, let us ask what we have to be able to do in order to conclude that biological sex clearly causes even a small, average behavioral or psychological difference between human males and females. First, we would have to be able to manipulate sex as an independent, experimental variable – that is, randomly assign people to be born with an XX or an XY pair of chromosomes apart from all the other genetic baggage they come with. Clearly we cannot do this: babies come to us as genetic ‘package deals’ – who, we should remember, have also had non-random environments for nine months prior to birth.
Well then, perhaps we could take advantage of that marvelous natural experiment known as identical twins, each pair of whom have the same genes, have shared the same uterus, and have been shown to stay pretty similar on many behavioral and psychological measures even when raised in different environments. Surely that says something about the power of biology? Yes, it does – although not as much as you might think
[13] – but it explains nothing about the origins of gender differences, because identical twins are always of the same sex.
Well then, perhaps we could randomly assign members of a mixed-sex group of infants to be raised as boys or as girls after they’re born, and see just how much they remain stubbornly ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ despite being raised as members of the other sex. But aside from the fact that this comes close to the sort of science that was done in Nazi Germany, but repudiated in our own society, it wouldn’t even begin to approximate a double-blind experiment -- of the sort we use, for example, to test the effectiveness of new medicines -- because the cat would be out of the bag (so to speak) as soon as the babies’ caretakers began changing their diapers.
[14] And even if we could unambiguously ascertain that boys (for example) are hard-wired to be aggressive, or girls are hard-wired to gossip a lot, this would tell us nothing about the desirability of either state of affairs. In a fallen world, we cannot automatically assume that what seems ‘natural’ is thereby desirable by the standards of God’s kingdom. This is a point repeatedly and cogently made by psychologist Cynthia Neal Kimble in ch. 27 of DBE.
So it is impossible to disentangle biological sex from the other genetic and environmental forces in which it always remains embedded, and with which it constantly interacts. This means that the two essential conditions for inferring cause and effect – the manipulation of one factor (sex) and the control of other (biological and environmental) factors – cannot be met. Consequently, “all data on sex differences, no matter what research method is use, are correlational data,”
[15] and as every introductory social science student learns, you cannot draw conclusions about causality from merely correlational data. “[I]n that sense, it is more accurate to speak of ‘sex-related’ differences than of sex [caused] differences.”
[16] So let us be very clear: when we read about a study – experimental or correlational -- that describes an obtained, average sex difference of such-and-such a magnitude, that’s all it is: a description of the results of a study done in one particular place and time with a particular sample of persons, but unab
