The Framing of ‘God’s Yes to Women’ Part 1: (Re)Narrating Complementarianism

Part of a series of interactions with God’s Yes to Women: Why the Bible’s Vision of Partnership Is Good News for Us All.

The genius of Wicked lies in its re-narration of a very familiar story. While the events themselves don’t change, the story is strategically retold such that fiction’s most infamous villain is dramatically recast as its most tragically misunderstood hero. God’s Yes to Women undertakes a re-narration of an entirely different story. In doing so, the book selectively recasts one protagonist (complementarianism) as the villain, while elevating its preferred protagonist (egalitarianism, though I note some contributors demur from using the label) as the humble hero. My two-part review of God’s Yes to Women will trace each movement in turn.

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It would be unfair to suggest that all of the book’s contributors self-consciously engage in this re-narration project. Rather, my argument is that the re-narration occurs (whether incidentally or intentionally) at the framing level: the foreword, introduction, the first editorially authored chapter of each of the book’s two parts, and the concluding material. The function of these sections is to shape and steer readers’ approach to the other chapters and set forth the book’s argument as a whole.

The editors, Anna Boxwell, Amy J. Erickson and Laura Rademaker, invite (‘dare’) the complementarian to read the anthology with an open and humble mind (p. xv). However, their framing editorial narration quickly exhausts such goodwill. To be honest, for this reason it took real fortitude for me, and several friends and colleagues, to keep reading past the opening pages. Moreover, even as someone who believes broader complementarian practice has, at times, warranted real critique, this framing left me far less equipped (and, indeed, less inclined) to give a generous reading to some of its other chapters. The editorial framing of God’s Yes to Women compromises serious engagement with some of the book’s most profitable material.

Casting Before the Story Starts

While some later contributors are more even-handed, the book’s foundational pages—Amy Byrd’s foreword and editor Laura Rademaker’s introduction—paint an unrelentingly dismal picture of the opportunities for women’s ministry in complementarian contexts, the dignity that it is afforded and the impact that it is allowed to have.

For American author Byrd, being a thinking woman in a complementarian church ‘was a lonely station’, with ‘no avenue’ to enter ‘into its creative, intellectual, and theological life’ (p. xiii). Complementarian women were not permitted ‘to comingle in the heart of biblical teaching and theological discussion with men’, nor ‘to walk in the doors of [their] churches as [their] full selves’ (p. xiv). Meanwhile, the Sydney-Anglican-raised Rademaker recounts her younger self’s dismay that being ‘limited’ to teaching women and children meant it ‘wasn’t clear how ministry could be a viable job for a woman like me’. She concluded that ‘any teaching gifts I might have would be wasted’ (p. xx).

While Byrd and Rademaker’s personal experiences are their own to recount, the same is true for the women who do serve within broadly complementarian contexts (e.g., somewhere around 300 women currently serve vocationally in the Sydney Anglican diocese alone). Many of them would tell you that they do have viable jobs, that their teaching gifts are not wasted, and that they are invited into the creative, intellectual and theological life of the church alongside the men they partner with. Of course, no ministry context or team is perfect (whether egalitarian or complementarian). But this wholesale negative recasting of complementarianism as a ‘No’ that locks women out of any impactful and viable teaching or speaking ministry not only renders us invisible but dismisses meaningful aspects of our kingdom service.

When the editors communicated with me personally about this book project early in its development, the intention was not to cast complementarianism in such a pervasively negative light. Clearly, that changed somewhere along the line.

Unpacking the Backpack… Selectively

Between its introductory and concluding material, the book divides into two parts: ‘Reading the Story of the Bible’ (theological and exegetical) and ‘Stories from on the Ground’ (personal testimony), each introduced by an editorially authored chapter. The second of these, also authored by Rademaker and titled ‘Unpacking the Backpack’ continues the re-narration of complementarianism through a potted history of ‘women’s ministry leadership’ (p. 112) in Australia, and particularly the Sydney Anglican diocese.

Unfortunately, the dive into the backpack is selective and shallow. Rademaker begins her account in the contentious 1980s, but a full century earlier, the diocese had already established a lay order of deaconesses to serve in its churches and hospitals.[1] By the time the 1980s ordination to the priesthood debates arrived, Sydney Anglicanism had been committed to the active ministry partnership of men and women for over one hundred years.

Her recounting of those debates is similarly selective. For instance, she writes that a 1984 Synod report held ‘the conservative position [against women’s ordination to the priesthood] argued that “women do not bear the image of God to the same extent as men”’.[2] In fact, that line appears only in an appendix summarising arguments from existing literature on both sides: one bullet point among roughly fifty, compiled by a single unnamed committee member, and presented specifically as not part of the report’s argument.[3]

Selectivity is also evident in what Rademaker omits. For example, the Doctrine Commission published its own report the very next year which, in arguing against women’s ordination to the priesthood, emphatically asserted the equal and shared divine image bearing of men and women.[4] It is conspicuous that she chose to draw readers’ attention to a (shocking) line taken from a general literature summary, while excluding the exact opposite theological assertion that formed part of the conservative position’s actual argument.

A similar thing occurs when Rademaker summarises complementarianism’s ten theological affirmations as found in the Danvers Statement:

Adam’s headship in marriage was established by God before the Fall, and was not a result of sin … Governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men. (p. 114)

Condensing a five-hundred-plus word statement into a brief summary is one thing. It is another thing entirely to omit a key word from the original document, which reads: ‘some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men’ (emphasis added). The effect of the omission is to incorrectly portray complementarianism as barring women from any and all governing and teaching roles in the church.

Withholding the Assumption of Good Faith

The book’s framing depicts complementarians hanging their theology on, Erickson writes, ‘isolated verses treated as data points that can be extracted and removed from their whole’ (p. 12), and unwilling to ‘approach studies on women in the church with good faith because they know it might cost them something’ (p. xv). Because it ‘may cause some trouble in your life’ (p. xv), apparently many decide it is ‘[b]etter not to go there’ at all (p. 120). Such characterisations are unjustifiably sweeping and cynical.

The editors and framing authors are right to critique complementarians who have made equally sweeping claims—that egalitarians don’t take God’s word or faithful theology seriously (see, e.g., pp. 195–196). Yet they don’t extend complementarians the same assumption of good faith they insist has been denied them.

Complementarians are portrayed as those who believe their ‘job is done’, having looked at just two verses (p. 5), who wholesale ‘ban women from roles that entail speaking and teaching in church’ (p. 5), and who thereby promote a ‘male-only reading’ of Scripture (p. 6). Further, complementarian theology is also displaced from its own convictions, a matter I’ll return to in my next instalment.

Leisa Aitken’s chapter, ‘Hope on a Tightrope: When the Church You Love Doesn’t Let Women Preach’, helpfully warns against casting the other ‘as the enemy or outsider’. She urges readers to ‘be deeply respectful to those with whom we disagree’ (p. 178). It’s regrettable that the book’s broader strategy (and, I might add, the social media campaign that has, independently, grown up around it) didn’t commit to that exhortation. I believe the end result of how God’s Yes to Women is framed is that it does not encourage respectful disagreement, but rather disdain. It recasts complementarianism from the antagonist that everyone loves to disagree with to the villain that everyone is obliged to hate.

Of course, where there is a villain, there must also be a hero. We’ll consider that in the next part of this review.

[1] Proceedings of the Third Session of the Sixth Synod of the Diocese of Sydney (Sydney: Joseph Cook & Co Printers, 1885), 128. The Presbyterians did similar around the same time.

[2] Committee Appointed Pursuant to Synod Resolution 7/83, Report Concerning the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood Pursuant to Synod Resolution 7/83 (Sydney: Anglican Church Diocese of Sydney, 1984), 5.

[3] From the introduction to the appendix: ‘The following has been prepared by a member of the Committee and is a summary of arguments for and against the ordination of women to the priesthood taken from the current literature on the debate. The arguments on each side may appear to be inconsistent with each other. This is because the summary sets out a range of viewpoints as they are presented without attempting to form them into a coherent argument in the form of a debate or dialogue.’ 7/83, Report Concerning the Ordination of Women, 3. Emphasis added.

[4] Sydney Diocesan Doctrine Commission, Ordination of Women to the Priesthood of the Anglican Church (Sydney: Anglican Church Diocese of Sydney, 1985), 2–3.