Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Complementarianism Is a Means to Joy, Not a Problem to Solve

If you want international media attention, here’s one way to get it: simply quote the Bible on headship and submission in marriage.

That’s what Gavin Peacock just did. Peacock is a pastor in Calgary, Alberta, and a former star soccer player in the UK. (I speak with CBMW at Peacock’s church, Calvary Grace, next week–here are the details.) Following a long career–which included multiple goals for Chelsea against Manchester United (!)–Peacock became a widely-loved soccer commentator for the BBC.

Not long after, he gave it all up. He left Britain and moved to wintry (and beautiful) Canada. Peacock is now a pastor. All of which is just fine with the British media. CBMW covered Peacock’s life in a long-form profile last year, and writer Aaron Hanbury found that Peacock was warmly thought of in his native land.

But on January 6th, Peacock Tweeted about biblical gender roles. He wrote three in particular that set off a firestorm:

“God’s divine design for marriage in male headship and female submission is complementary not competitive.”


“Wives: one of the primary ways you are to respect your husband is by gladly submitting to and encouraging his leadership.”


“Husbands: one of your primary duties in loving your wife is to feed her with the Word of God daily.”

It’s hard to sum up how fierce some of the response Gavin received was. Here’s the Daily MailThe Independent, The Mirrorand The Telegraph weighing in. The blog at The Telegraph said this, for example: “he’s decided to share some rather strange views relating to matrimony on social media…it would be preferable if he could cut out the sexism.” Nigel Adderley, a former colleague of Peacock’s, said this: “I used to really enjoy working with Gavin Peacock on the radio but won’t be implementing his views on marriage at home.”

If you did not read Gavin’s Tweets, you might have thought he had advocated that fathers abuse their children. Instead, he was essentially quoting and explicating Ephesians 5:22-33. In his gracious and convictional way, he explained this doctrine in a blog post.

A husband is called to be a Christlike leader to his wife. He must provide for and protect her spiritually and physically. This is called headship in the Bible. It reflects Christ’s sacrificial love for his Bride, the Church. He took the initiative to die for her. What man who hears the sound of a window smashing downstairs in the middle of the night would send his wife to investigate? Is it not written on a man’s soul to protect and provide for her? And yet such are the distortions of masculinity and femininity in our time that we send our women to fight on the frontline in war, all in the name of equality.

And see this word of personal testimony from his pastoral ministry:

In my church I serve in leadership as a pastor alongside humble men who love and lead their wives, and who love God and our people too much not to teach them his Word for manhood and womanhood. We have seen marriages blossom as men have stepped up to the challenge to lovingly lead their wives, and women have gladly respected and submitted to that leadership. Women are flourishing as strong, intelligent wives who joyfully affirm their husband’s leadership. Single men and women are obeying God’s pattern for sex and sexuality and growing as people of integrity. And in our marriage through 25 years my wife Amanda and I have tried to embrace this biblical pattern because it brings God glory and it does us good.

Read the whole thing. It’s an excellent piece–not a word out of place. It received many good comments on social media, including a good number from Christian women who love the Bible’s teaching.



As the President of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the organization founded by John Piper and Wayne Grudem to promote and defend biblical complementarianism, let me offer some reflections on this fracas.

First, it’s clear that the biblical worldview is now déclassé in sectors of the West. It is sad to see this, because biblical complementarianism is the recipe for marital health and familial flourishing. There is no better system on earth for strengthening marriages and blessing children than God’s design. The sinful human heart naturally inverts God’s wisdom. It calls what is evil good, and what is good evil.

Second, Christians should not take their marching orders from the culture. Our secular age considers complementarity in both physiology and practice to be a threat. In reality, complementarity is a simple biological fact and a core biblical teaching. This is not a fourth-order doctrine (as if we can rank any teaching of Scripture). In the Bible, God makes the cosmos in Genesis 1, and then he makes man and woman, husband and wife, in Genesis 2.

He gives this relationship structure and form. Adam is the head of his wife; his wife is his helper. Eve is created from Adam. Her body depends on his for existence. This is a signal from the very start of Scripture: the position of marital headship given to men is one of responsibility and sacrifice, not ease and self-indulgence. 

 
Complementarity does not undermine women. More than any other idea or belief system in the known universe, it blesses them, offers them protection, and beckons them to God-given fulfillment.

Third, complementarity is not a problem for believers. It is, to be sure, a doctrine that the natural man despises. But it is not a problem for us to solve.

We should explicate biblical teaching. We should make clear where certain doctrines have been twisted or undermined. We should help our unsaved friends understand the difference between the Bible’s wisdom and the culture’s stereotypes. But we must not make complementarianism a doctrinal infelicity or an intractable dilemma. It is not, just as culturally unliked doctrines such as the exclusivity of Christ, the reality of predestination and election, or the reality of hell are not, either.

We may feel pressure to hedge on complementarianism. We might want to drown our affirmation of complementarity in a sea of qualifications.These are human instincts. We all are tempted to hide the light, at least the light that the world does not want shone upon its sin and unbelief. We are under great pressure today to conform our doctrine to the culture’s expectations. Some young evangelicals react to this pressure by seeking to be cool, to be accepted, to be au courant. If we can just convince those around us that we’re not backwater Christians, then our unsaved friends will really, truly like us. They’ll come to faith.

This always seems like a good move, but it’s perpetually a woeful one. That’s not just because there’s often a hint of desperation in our efforts. It’s also because, as I make clear in my forthcoming book The Colson Way (Thomas Nelson, July 2015), we do not pick and choose our doctrine or our ethics. The gospel opens our eyes to the beauty of God’s law (Psalm 119). We see the whole of God’s counsel as impossibly good. In Jesus, we discover the good life, but it is not an unfettered plunge into hedonism. It is the life lived unto God, anchored in his justifying decree, propelled by his transforming grace, and shaped by the whole counsel of his Word.
None of God’s teaching is out of sync. None of it can be hid. None of it can be downplayed. All of God’s Word is good. If it is not, then it must not be from God.

Fourth, we should communicate that the culture is in truth patriarchal. Contra the stereotypes, it has not abandoned the structure of headship and submission. It’s just shifted these realities out of marriage and into pre-marriage romance. In our sexualized culture, which has cast off traditional restraints, men operate as authoritarian patriarchs like never before. They take from women. They prey on them through sex and pornography. They get what they want, and they leave. Many women sadly choose to submit themselves to predatory men.

Though many women believe themselves to be liberated, they find themselves isolated, with little masculine protection and concern. The sexes are divided, competing, hostile to one another, yet unable because of basic human desire to stop entangling themselves. A world of abuse, pain, and sin results, with truly wretched consequences. Abortion wipes out the natural product of sex. Cohabitation stands in for marriage, but is fragile to an extreme degree. When they are allowed the chance to exist, children are an afterthought for many parents, and are not brought up in ordered, happy homes.

It is the culture that is behind. Though it does not know it, the culture’s seemingly enlightened, liberated mores leave it sadly archaic. The pattern of hostility between the sexes, of men using women and women hating men, is as old as the serpent’s whisper. By contrast, it is the church that is future-oriented. We build families and create churches because we believe in hope. We know that tomorrow can be bright with God’s goodness.
(For more on the point about men, see Russell Moore’s insightful address to Humanum, the 2014 Vatican colloquium on the family.)

Fifth, the church offers singles a beautiful outline of their lives. Young men and women alike have been raised in a sexualized culture. The church offers them the opportunity to find their identity not in sex, not in physical beauty, not in hedonism, but in God. Young Christians must see this: it is not biblical complementarianism that has robbed their singleness of its vitality. It is the world, and its sexualization of every person.

The Bible has a major place for singles. Jesus Christ and Paul are two of the best-known single believers. But in a sexualized world, singles seem out of place. They don’t have a role. This is what the world does: it robs singles of their purpose. It tells them to be beautiful, to be attractive, to be wanted. If you’re not, we infer, then you don’t have value. This is a lie, one that exacts terrible consequences from those who believe it.

Men and women have infinite dignity and worth as image-bearers. Men and women find joy and satisfaction in serving in the kingdom of Christ. The sexes are not the same, and our differences are not incidental. Gender gives significant shape to our human experience and our discipleship. But the church must correct the false teaching of the world, and communicate that being wanted by the opposite (or same) sex is not the end of life, as the culture has indoctrinated us to believe. We are sons and daughters of the living Christ. That is our identity.

Sixth, the church offers hope to men and women suffering from sin. It does so through the gospel and its body of ethics. We offer hope, infinite hope, to men and women who have been ravaged by sin and its effects. All around us are women abused by men, with little sense of how to cope with their pain. The church must help them understand how the world’s promise of liberation is bankrupt. The church offers women called to marriage the hope of a husband who will be a self-sacrificing head, one whose very life is dedicated to blessing his wife, treating her gently, and dying to his own wishes in order that she may flourish.

There is no such hope in the culture. This teaching is gone. Alongside it, the church must offer men the biblical script for their lives. Men are trapped today in a narrative of self-gratification. They have no answer to the desire that resounds in their hearts for something greater to live for. They don’t know how to be a virtuous leader, so they lead those around them in the direction of evil. The church offers them the hope of gospel-shaped manhood.

In these confused times, complementarians have a tremendous opportunity before us. We can show a watching world that the Bible’s teaching is good. We can live out what we preach. There is a great, teeming mass of young, vibrant believers doing just this right now. Though the world thinks they’re weird, they’re fighting lust, pursuing fulfilling singleness or getting married, lovingly raising children when given them, doing the hard work of building a God-glorifying home, and serving their local church. This is a group largely unnoticed by elite media, but it is massive in size and spans the globe in influence. Its members are not angry or disillusioned. In the wreckage of our sexualized culture, with happy smiles on our faces, we are building families–natural and spiritual–out of a sense of joyful calling.

You and I need not invent the wheel here. We don’t need to figure out a new way to be complementarian, one that takes away the sting. You can’t take away the sting of the Scripture and its teaching. It’s an offense and a stumbling-block to the sinful heart (1 Cor 1:22-23). Think about it this way: when a sinless man spoke the truth in the purest love, he was arrested, beaten, and crucified. We must always be winsome as we can be. But winsomeness, even at its apex, cannot take away the sting of the world-denying, sin-overcoming truth of God.
Our message, which sounds like death to the world, is after all life itself, abundant and free (John 14:6). This is true of the whole counsel of God, not just the atonement.



****************
I am deeply thankful for the public stance Gavin Peacock has taken. He is a brave and biblical man. He does not deserve the criticism he has received. I am delighted to stand with him on the solid rock of Scripture. The church does not need less believers like Gavin. It does not need to hide its light, hedge its doctrine, or apologize in embarrassment for its reliance on God’s wisdom.

The church needs to find courage in the Spirit and devote itself afresh to biblical complementarity. Thankfully, there is a great host of witnesses who are doing just this. They are not covered or applauded by the press. Joyfully, faithfully, and with great perseverance, they are honoring their God. For their Spirit-inspired obedience, for their endurance despite many attacks on the faith, they will be richly rewarded in the age to come.


By Owen Strachan is President of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW)

Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is Good

Changing culture and changing definitions of manhood and womanhood

It seems that recent tweets I made about biblical manhood, womanhood and marriage have gained attention in the UK. Several national newspapers picked up these tweets and there was reaction from both Christians and non-Christians. Some people were very upset; others were very encouraged. 

Indeed this is a sensitive issue today, like never before. Definitions of what it is to be a man or a woman and definitions of marriage are changing in society. But they have not changed in the Bible. I am a Christian and a pastor of Calvary Grace Church of Calgary and we believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, which is sufficient for all things. We also hold to a “complementarian” view of the Scriptures when it comes to sexuality. Complementarity is the view that God has assigned different and complementary roles to men and women within marriage and the church. In this view, men bear a unique authority and responsibility before God for leadership.


Biblical marriage

It is a sad thing that a changing culture thinks it can determine what God has decreed from the beginning of time and the creation of man: namely, that marriage is a gift from God; that it is the joining of a man and a woman in a covenant relationship; that sex should be enjoyed only within the marriage relationship, so that all sexual activity outside of it transgresses God’s Word; and that it is ultimately given by God for the husband and wife to display God’s faithful relationship with his people by their different roles.

Marriage between man and woman is a beautiful thing created by God for our good and for his glory. Both men and women are of equal value in the sight of God. So the difference in roles is never a question of competency, it’s always a question of God’s design. Biblical manhood and womanhood is good.

However there is a common misunderstanding many people hold (even within the church) that equality means sameness. Well it’s clear that men and women are not the same physically for a start. And just because a wife follows her husband’s lead and respects his God given authority it doesn’t make her any less of a human being. In the home the parents should be the authority over the children, with the husband taking the primary lead in instruction and discipline. So it’s also clear that roles are not the same.

A husband is called to be a Christlike leader to his wife. He must provide for and protect her spiritually and physically. This is called headship in the Bible. It reflects Christ’s sacrificial love for his Bride, the Church. He took the initiative to die for her. What man who hears the sound of a window smashing downstairs in the middle of the night would send his wife to investigate? Is it not written on a man’s soul to protect and provide for her? And yet such are the distortions of masculinity and femininity in our time that we send our women to fight on the frontline in war, all in the name of equality.

Equally, a wife is called to respond to this leadership by her respect for and voluntary affirmation of his leadership. This is called submission in the Bible. She comes alongside him as his helper in the marriage. She respects his position as head of the home and uses her gifts to encourage her husband as they partner together in what the Bible calls “a one flesh union”. Jesus submits to his Father's authority, so it is equally divine to submit as it is to lead.


Authority is the issue

And here we come to the issue behind the issue. It is a question of submission to authority. There is a natural suspicion of authority in society, yet authority is a good thing designed by the one true authority, God. We must look to his Word to define our society and us. If there is not an objective authority to which everyone must submit then you are left with anarchy. Everyone just does what is right in their own eyes. They do what they feel like and they justify it in the name of love. Truth becomes subjective and relative. And we spiral down into moral declension. 

So in education there are no unalterable truths. Novelty, relativity and expediency is enthroned over conservative, absolute, moral truth. This lack of absolute authority spills over into the moral realm of society. Pop music, TV shows, magazines and whatever else is out there begins to promote what they see fit. After all who is to say whether they are wrong or not?


Sexual confusion reigns

And so we have confusion reigning in sexuality. Categories of male and female have been blurred. People have no idea what it is to be a man and not a woman or vice versa. Husbands are not leading wives well. Parents are not leading children, who are consequently not being taught or lovingly disciplined in the homes. They are the decision makers, rather than the ones being led.

Sexual fidelity and permanence within marriage is hardly on the radar. It is morally acceptable to live a homosexual, bisexual lifestyle. Marriage is being redefined according to cultural preferences and cultural changing truths. So in many places marriage is not husband and wife, but wife and wife or husband and husband. Rather than holy matrimony it is now unholy pursuit of what seems right to the individual. In the UK, homosexual “marriage” is now legal and constitutional. Marriage has been redefined with a changing law. Yet marriage is something God defines and creates not humans.

And the problem lies first within the church, which, in many quarters in the UK has lost its trust in the Word of God and has been shaped by culture instead. There is a great need for preachers to actually preach God’s word with sensitivity, yes. But also without fear of what people will say. I believe this will be a key dividing line over the next, few years which will determine who is Christian or not. The church must stand firm on this.

Many Christian women who support a biblical view of masculinity and femininity came out in public support of my comments yesterday. They are not oppressed. They are free to be who they were created to be. They will tell you that biblical submission is not weak but strong. They will tell you that biblical leadership is not harsh but loving. In my church I serve in leadership as a pastor alongside humble men who love and lead their wives, and who love God and our people too much not to teach them his Word for manhood and womanhood. We have seen marriages blossom as men have stepped up to the challenge to lovingly lead their wives, and women have gladly respected and submitted to that leadership. Women are flourishing as strong, intelligent wives who joyfully affirm their husband’s leadership. Single men and women are obeying God’s pattern for sex and sexuality and growing as people of integrity. And in our marriage through 25 years my wife Amanda and I have tried to embrace this biblical pattern because it brings God glory and it does us good.

Abuse of authority is unacceptable. Slavery is deplorable.  But a husband leading his wife as Christ leads the church is not slavery by any means. True, there have been abuses of male authority with the chauvinistic flavor of the 50’s and 60’s. Rape and sexual mistreatment of women is evil. But this is not the biblical picture, not God’s design. There have and always will be abuses of authority. But abuse doesn’t mean disuse of right authority.


Jesus Christ is the answer

Look around you. See the sin and suffering, the sexual and relational dysfunction, the rebellion against any authority. See it in the home, schools, workplace and society at large. And recognize that this stems from a natural rebellion against the authority of God’s Word in all of us. When we disobey God, carnage ensues. Recognize that you need forgiveness of your sins and that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, came as a man to live a perfect life of obedience to God that no-one can live and died on a cross to take the consequence of sin for those who will place their trust in him and have their guilt removed. That’s the good news of God’s love. Recognize he has risen from the dead and will come again. Life is short. What are you living for and where are you going? How do you know what’s right or wrong?  The main issue is not marriage or manhood or womanhood. The main issue is that people need to get right with a holy God and find their identity in Jesus. He is the only way to God, salvation and personal happiness. With the main focus right, the rest of life can be lived in accordance to his Word, because what he says is good for us. It gives purpose and meaning to everything.


The key verses in the Bible that support the view of marriage I am speaking of are: Gen. 1: 26-27; 2: 18-24; 1 Cor. 11: 2- 3; Ephesians 5: 22-33; Colossians 3: 18-19; 1 Peter 3: 1-7.

Written by Gavin Peacock, a pastor at Calvary Grace Church in Calgary, Alberta