Complementarianism and the Dignity of Women

Of the making of books trying to argue for or against women's ordination there is no end.

I'm tired of books rehashing the same arguments over and over—as Tom Schreiner recently noted has become the case. Instead, I think it may be time to talk about complementarianism for the rest of us—because for complementarians in the real world, the conviction that women should not serve as ordained pastors is just one very small aspect of this particular theological stance on the differences in the roles of men and women on this earth. There are many more important matters to consider in daily life at home, at church, and in society. After all, only a tiny fraction of church members (whether in complementarian or egalitarian churches) serve in pastoral roles in their respective churches. What important questions should we be thinking about instead?

While theological views on ordination certainly matter, the myopic zooming in on just this one matter in recent debates is a remarkably modern distraction from everything else that has historically mattered a great deal more for most people in talking about gender in the church. I would like us to foster these other conversations. I do not aim to identify all of these other conversations in a short essay, but I will consider one that I consider particularly key, as other conversations stem from it: Healthy complementarianism (which, as Gregg Allison reminds, is very different from unhealthy patriarchy) can help us appreciate God’s purpose for life in our physical bodies, see the biological and theological differences between male and female bodies, and why these differences are good.

Life in Our Physical Bodies

A decade and a half ago, a former colleague, long since retired, was fondly reminiscing about the early days with his oldest baby. He and his wife were juggling responsibilities for the baby, including feeding. So he decided to purchase a special contraption that allowed him to put on a bra of sorts, into which he could then insert the bottle of pumped milk, and then proudly nurse the baby just like mom did. “We thought this would be less confusing for the baby,” he explained.

This story seems less funny today, as stories of gay couples purchasing surrogate babies have gone decidedly mainstream. Like much of the secular culture today, images of men cosplaying motherhood with newborn skin-to-skin post-delivery-room photos, sometimes even while posed artificially on a delivery bed, insist on something that secular feminists have been saying for decades as well: modernity and fairness demand that men’s and women’s bodies should be completely interchangeable. But are they?

At the risk of sounding overly obvious here, God’s creation of human persons begins with this reality: that there are two different types of bodies, each one specially and deliberately designed by a loving God. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). The bodies of men are different from the bodies of women—have been from the time of creation on. Both are made in the image of God, but they are biologically different, and this biology cannot be unmade or remade. For one thing, with all the gender reassignment surgeries, this biological truth still prevails: Only women can (but only with the aid of men) get pregnant and bring a baby to birth. This makes motherhood special—biologically and theologically.

To us today this latter point may seem very obvious and not worthy of comment. But it is worthy of much more attention than we give it—not least because this is a unique point for Judaeo-Christian theology. The theology of the body that we find in Genesis 1:27 is unlike anything found in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Scientific misogyny has a long history in antiquity. Poets like Simonides of Amorgos wrote their invectives on the evil that is women, connecting different types of wives to animals, going from bad to worse. Plato’s Symposium glamorized the romantic love of men for each other—since women were viewed as intellectual lightweights unworthy of proper love. And theories of medicine articulated by authors like Aeschylus, Hippocrates, and Aristotle declared that the father made the baby—all the woman contributed was a container for growing said baby. Therefore (the argument went) perhaps mothers weren’t even parents to the children they bore. It is no coincidence either that, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when Pygmalion crafted the ideal wife out of stone, she was at first just a statue—mute, unable to do anything. When miraculously revived by the goddess of love, all this ideal wife can do is remain mute and fulfill her creator’s imagined wishes.

There is no question about it: people in antiquity outside the Judaeo-Christian circles firmly believed that women were different from men. They were not, however, complementarians in the sense of valuing these differences and distinctions. It was obvious to most ancient thinkers that women were undoubtedly worse human beings than men. Marriage is a curse Zeus gave to men, the Archaic Greek poet Hesiod notes matter-of-factly. Aristotle, furthermore, described women as defective or incomplete men—because of their ability to get pregnant, which indicated their imperfection according to his logic.

In this cultural context, the declaration in Genesis 1:27 that God wanted to create both men and women in his own image is unique and special. Neither men nor women are a mistake. Neither type of body represents creation that is flawed or incomplete. Both types of bodies were God’s design. Modern science is continuing to reveal the depths of these differences, which include much more than just pregnancy and its effects on women’s bodies and brains. Fatherhood affects men’s brains too, incidentally—differently than motherhood affects women’s brains. And for women who never bear children, their bodies maintain undeniable characteristics of womanhood as well.

Too often, though, we live today as if these differences between men’s and women’s bodies aren’t true, or as if they are a problem to eradicate. Indeed, the egalitarian mindset stems from the modern assumption that men and women are perfectly interchangeable in every area of life. If women can nurse babies, then men should be able to do the same. If women can get pregnant and give birth, men should be able to do the same (trans activists insist). If men can work in a particular career field, whatever it is, then women can do it too.

And yet, healthy complementarianism is sex-realist in its recognition that women are special—and so are men. We are not interchangeable, and this is a good thing theologically, biologically, and practically. Yes, there are certain things that we can all do by virtue of our human dignity and our citizenship in America, for instance (e.g., yes, both men and women can vote, and this is a good thing too). Still, there are certain things that only men or only women can do, and this too is good and beautiful—the result of a careful and treasured divine design.

The differences in men’s and women’s physical nature extend well beyond merely reproduction, of course, as Louise Perry has emphasized. These differences form the core of sex-realist feminism—a feminism that recognizes that we should encourage women to flourish as women while encouraging men to flourish as men. We cannot deny that the average man is taller, stronger, and faster than the average woman. To state this is not to insult women—it is a statement of fact. But also, studies of healthy marriages repeatedly show the goodness of the different traits of men and women serving each other together. Marriage benefits men and women precisely because it places these complementary traits in the service of the other person.

In other words, modern social science research is only beginning to explain something we saw articulated in God’s design of human beings as two different kinds of bodies—male and female. These differences in and of themselves do not mandate complementarian theology. Still, they are a good starting point for considering the goodness of God’s design for men and women in everyday life.