Complementarianism: A Small World After All

From Beth Allison Barr’s wonderful blog post — I grab a bit for your eyes — gets us all ready for her wonderful new book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood:

Yet, despite the reality of women preaching and teaching throughout Christian history, many modern evangelicals continue to find women preaching uncomfortable. Just read Denny Burk’s initial response to my forthcoming book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. While insisting that complementarianism—the teaching that men are divinely ordained to lead and women are divinely ordained to follow—is not part of the gospel, he simultaneously insists that “history has proven that complementarianism is a second order doctrine that frequently implicates first order doctrines.” The belief that women and men are equally called by God to both leadership and submission is, he suggests, dangerous to Christian faith. It leads away from the gospel.  Pointing directly to my book, he writes that an “embrace of egalitarianism goes hand-in-hand with a denial of inerrancy. More and more this embrace goes hand in hand with an affirmation of LGBT. These trajectories are not new. They are well-worn paths that discerning Christians will be wise to avoid and that faithful pastors will lead their flocks away from.”

The discomfort of some of my students in Canterbury Cathedral stemmed from their lack of church experience. Their Christian world was too small. It had not prepared them for an Anglican church service conducted in a medieval cathedral.  Could it be that complementarians like Denny Burk have the same problem? Could their equating of egalitarianism with a lack of discernment and biblical unfaithfulness stem from a too narrow understanding of church history?

Could their Christian world (and world of Christian scholarship) simply be too small?

It strikes me that when medieval Christians heard stories about Mary Magdalene preaching, they heard how she led people to the Gospel instead of away from it. It also strikes me that the voices Burk elevated (in his recent article doubling-down on complementarianism) were all from a small circle of white males connected to The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. In stark contrast, three of the four voices he dismissed were women.

Just something to think about, y’all……

And, don’t forget, #makingbiblicalwomanhood releases next week.

Burk’s claim that complementarianism is a “second order” doctrine (who’s deciding this?) and not a “first order” (who’s deciding this?) but that second order doctrines implicate first order doctrines is a slippery slope to saying complementarianism is a first order doctrine after all.