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.
In the first part of my review of God’s Yes to Women, I outlined how the book editorially tells a story in which complementarianism is cast as an antagonist to women and their viable and impactful gospel ministry. But over against the villain who says a ‘No’ to women, there is also a hero who offers a ‘Yes’ designed to secure their freedom and flourishing. In this second part of my review, I’ll explore how God’s Yes to Women presents egalitarianism (or at least that which holds to its tenets even if it does not always adopt the label) as the hero we have been holding out for.
Displacing Conviction by (Re)Definition
A hero’s virtue is best revealed when held up against an opponent’s flaws. To continue with my Wicked illustration from part 1, Elphaba’s goodness first comes into focus when contrasted with the Wizard’s deceit. This comparative approach is well demonstrated in Erica Mandi Manga’s ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ that form part of the book’s concluding material. Compare, for example, the first point in her ‘Nutshell’ definitions of each of the two protagonists:
Complementarianism: ‘God made men and women for partnership in his plans for the world (Gen 1:26–28).’ (p. 190)
Egalitarianism: ‘God made men and women for partnership in his plans for the world (Gen 1:26–28), giving them a shared commission and dignity (both being made in the image of God).’ (p. 191. Emphasis added)
While the first phrase is repeated verbatim, more is added in the second definition, thereby strongly implying that commitment to the shared commission and dignity of men and women is unique to or, at least, significantly inherent in egalitarianism but not complementarianism. Mandi Manga acknowledges that shared participation in the image of God is intrinsic to complementarian theology (p. 190). But reserving the additional description for egalitarianism falsely suggests that complementarians don’t hold to the shared commission and dignity that flows from their image-bearing. This is the first of several small, cumulatively effective displacements of complementarianism from its own core beliefs.
A second appears in the very next point of comparison. Mandi Manga explains that, in complementarianism, ‘Partnership has two main components, similarity and difference (complementarity)’ (p. 190). But when it comes to defining egalitarianism, she writes:
Although men and women are distinct from each other (egalitarians also believe men and women are complementary), what they have in common cannot be overlooked. For example, the first woman is made from the first man (or ‘human’). The fact that she is not made from some other material underscores this fundamental sameness of being. (p. 191)
Here, the same (likely, unintended) pattern recurs: a claim true of complementarianism is granted also to egalitarianism, then elaborated on egalitarianism’s side alone (here, that egalitarianism uniquely recognises that sameness of being is too vital to overlook), thereby subtly ascribing to egalitarianism an important theological distinctiveness that is, in actual fact, a theological conviction shared between the two.
The effect of these and other examples is something like: ‘Sure, complementarianism says it is about the partnership of men and women. But only egalitarianism actually backs it up. Complementarianism says it believes in similarity and difference, but only egalitarianism upholds our commonality and underscores our fundamental sameness of being.’ Delicately but effectively, complementarianism is ousted from any genuine claim to some of its own theological convictions and egalitarianism steps into the breach.
Displacing Conviction Through Comparison
This is further amplified by all the small but cumulatively significant comparisons that consistently paint complementarianism as the less spiritually mature position. For instance, Mandi Manga writes that egalitarians’ appreciation of difference rejects any sense of ‘men having one kind of image of God and women having another’ (p. 193)—by implication falsely imputing to complementarianism a belief in different ‘kinds’ of the image of God. She goes on to say that you’re ‘more likely to find egalitarians asking the question, “How do I show kindness like Christ?”’ (p. 194), while complementarians treat gender as ‘the primary lens through which maturity and godliness ought to be expressed’ (p. 193). Where complementarians view relationships primarily through the lens of roles, egalitarians ‘conceive of their obligations to each other as grounded in mutual love, care and respect’ (p. 195). Subtle stuff. But when read closely, complementarians come across as consistently preoccupied with making everything about gender, while egalitarians focus on Christlike spiritual formation. This portrayal of complementarianism irresponsibly drifts towards caricature.
I don’t believe Mandi Manga has intentionally set out to mislead the reader by what she has left out. Rather, as she writes:
Whether [those we disagree with] are aware of them or not, they have likely reached that conclusion based on a number of different choices, and we should seek to understand those. (p. 192)
Her view is as shaped by her choices as anyone else’s. And so it is possible she has not been alert enough to her own biases so as to ensure her critique of complementarianism is a fair or accurate one. Regardless of how she got there, the effect is the same. The FAQs continue complementarianism’s villainous re-narration—albeit far more subtly than the foreword—while also displacing (especially Australian evangelical) complementarianism from its self-declared theological turf.
This didn’t have to be the outcome. Throughout the book a more balanced case could have been mounted that complementarianism’s own professed commitments to partnership, dignity and shared image-bearing don’t (always) hold up under scrutiny. Of course, such a claim would need to be evidenced, not simply asserted. But the book’s editorial framing consistently takes the shorter route. It defines away the more complicated reality that both egalitarianism and complementarianism share an eagerness to declare God’s ‘Yes’ to women, even as they disagree on the shape of that affirmation. And so irresponsible description ends up displacing that truth in order to clear space for the humble hero of egalitarianism.
A False Opposite
Nowhere are the effects of this re-narration more evident than in the epilogue, authored by editor Anna Boxwell:
I am full of hope in the beauty and power of gospel witness that can emerge when women and men work together. God’s purpose is for men and women to serve him in partnership so that the message of Jesus Christ will reach the ends of the earth … it is such a refreshing contrast when discipleship and evangelism in local churches are carried out by women and men in genuine partnership …
Women and men are not in competition with one another; we get to joyfully serve together without taking on fallen-world patterns of relating … We long for the church to stop looking at one another with suspicion and mistrust. Let’s get on with the work God has set before us! (p. 203–205)
As someone well-read in complementarian literature, I recognise that this vocabulary would sit very comfortably in the final paragraphs of a thoughtful complementarian book. But God’s Yes to Women’s editorial framing has so thoroughly displaced complementarianism from its own language and convictions that these words are presented as the opposite of everything complementarianism is purported to be. Displacement is swiftly followed by replacement, and complementarianism’s asserted ‘No’ is vanquished by egalitarianism’s eager ‘Yes’.
And yet, for reasons we will now consider, this ‘Yes’ remains a dissatisfying one.
Defining Difference Through Denial
I have already noted Mandi Manga’s claim that ‘men and women are distinct from each other (egalitarians also believe men and women are complementary)’ (p. 191). This is not an isolated assertion. Indeed, a similar one is made in the first chapter proper, authored by editor Amy J. Erickson: ‘Of course there is difference, deliberate and significant difference, between male and female humans’ (p. 18). But belief asserted is not the same thing as belief demonstrated, and God’s Yes to Women never adequately demonstrates how God’s created difference between men and women is meaningfully deliberate and seriously significant within the home and the church.
For example, in its context, Mandi Manga’s admission that egalitarians also believe men and women are complementary might be seen to be a striking concession since it is the very defining claim of complementarianism. And yet, she hurries past it, leaving her statement regarding difference to remain in both grammatical and conceptual parentheses. Similarly, Erickson’s claim, that there is deliberate and significant difference between men and women, rings with real insistence. But the subsequent pages do not describe what that deliberate and significant difference truly consists of, whether theologically, ethically, ecclesiologically or pastorally.
The editors of and contributors to God’s Yes to Women consider difference between the sexes to be important within egalitarianism’s framework of ‘mutuality’ (see p. 194–5). And yet the book fails to offer an adequately constructive account of that difference and its implications. Instead, readers are repeatedly told what such difference does not mean. It does not mean ‘hierarchy’ (a term the book uses of complementarianism around forty times). It does not mean ‘male domination’, nor ‘headship’, nor male ‘leadership’, nor distinct roles, nor anything else that may be ascribed to complementarianism. Put otherwise, gendered difference in the home and the church is not constructively defined by the book’s editors within their own system of thought. Instead, it is merely defined against what complementarians say it is.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of God’s Yes to Women’s contributors on this point. But an egalitarian claim to meaningful, significant difference will only carry weight when it also provides a positive and scriptural account for what that difference actually means, rather than simply asserting what it does not mean.
Complementarianism offers such an account. It holds that, alongside equality in personhood and shared gospel mission, deliberate and significant differences between men and women find appropriate expression in male headship within marriage (Eph 5:22–33)—sacrificial service rather than domination— and male eldership within the church (1 Tim 2:12–3:7; Tit 1:5–9)—humble, accountable shepherding rather than unilateral control. These are not arbitrary conventions drawn from isolated passages of Scripture, but patterns grounded in God’s good design for sexed humankind (1 Cor 11:8–9; 1 Tim 2:13) and worked out in minds renewed and lives transformed by the gospel.
It is right to be critical of abuses of headship and eldership. But a fair critique distinguishes abuse from the category being abused, and this is precisely the distinction God’s Yes to Women collapses. Complementarian theology, by contrast, names the distortion as sin precisely because it seeks to hold a faithfully constructive expression of deliberate and significance difference in view. That same standard must also apply in reverse: a persuasive egalitarian counter-argument that maintains meaningful differences exist between men and women must itself constructively account for how those differences are indeed meaningful, particularly in the two sexed relational contexts into which Scripture directly speaks: the home and the church. God’s Yes to Women does not evidence this assertion.
Across this two-part review I’ve argued that the overall narrative told by God’s Yes to Women is one that is expected to be believed more than carefully examined. Its villain is cast before the case is heard. The hero is installed before the account is given. But real theological conversation about what complementarians and egalitarians actually believe regarding the vital and beautiful partnership of men and women deserves a fuller—albeit a more complicated—kind of telling.
