Manhood and womanhood cannot be reduced to authority and submission, or to leadership and nurture. But these things are meaningful expressions of what it means to be a man and a woman, rooted not just in the names we give to people but in nature itself. The expression of nature will not look identical in the church and outside the church, married and single, younger and older, but, importantly, it does look like something and should be visible. Sexual difference is the way of God’s wisdom and grace. The most authentic and most attractive complementarianism will delight in this design and seek to promote, with our lives and with our lips, all that is good and true and beautiful in God making us men and women.

Let me get two caveats out of the way at the outset.

First, this post is not about Aimee Byrd’s new book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The post is occasioned by its release and the conversation surrounding it, but I’m not trying to engage directly with the book or the responses to it.

Second, if complementarianism can be thick or thin, broad or narrow, then my perspective lands on the broad or thick side of the spectrum. I don’t want to be coy about my theological convictions. I believe that by God’s design we are born as men or women, and that this distinction is not first of all about ordination or who can preach but is a distinction that functions in all of life and in all kinds of activity. More on this point later.

With these caveats in place, here are four thoughts—clarifying in my own mind, if not in anyone else’s—on the current conversation.

1. There are lot of questions worth asking. We should be clear about the questions we mean to answer without denigrating or altogether ignoring other important questions.

In my own thinking and writing on this topic, I’ve found John Piper’s question extremely helpful: If your son asks you what it means to be a man, or your daughter asks you what it means to be a woman, what would you say? I appreciate the real-world practicality of the question. I have sons and daughters, and they need to know (and as they get older, want to know) what it means to be a man or a woman. I can talk about being made in God’s image and growing in Christlikeness. Indeed, I should talk about these things often. But the question about growing up into a man or a woman sharpens the tip of the theological spear. “Daddy, what does godliness look like for me as a boy?” “What does godliness look like for me as a girl?” Godliness for my sons and my daughters will look the same in all sorts of foundational ways, but it will also look different in a host of other ways.

Complementarianism means not only affirming the existence of “a host of other ways” as a general truth, but also trying to help men and women practically know what these differences entail. If the term means anything, then surely complementarianism is about, at least in part, the inherent goodness in the divinely designed difference between the sexes. If we don’t say anything about that difference—and how it’s wonderfully true and beautiful and promotes the flourishing of men and women and children and families and society—then we are neglecting the uniquely good news of this thing we call complementarianism.

So that’s one important question: what does it mean to be a man or a woman? I don’t believe any substantive Christian conversation about men and women can ignore this question. This is especially true for a conversation among complementarian Christians. But I realize it’s not the only important question. You may feel the question of the hour is something else. “Daddy, are girls worth as much to God as boys?” Or, “Mommy, is it okay for girls to be experts in the Bible?” Or, “Can men learn things from women?” These are important questions too (and the answer to all of them is “yes;” and yes, men can ask women for directions). To ask any one of these questions should not be to deny the legitimacy of other questions. We won’t all be drawn to the same questions, but we can acknowledge—and with more than a clearing of the throat—that when it comes to talking about men and women there are many beautiful truths to affirm and a number of ugly lies to refute.

2. We should be mindful of the way our experiences, and especially our own sense of the most pressing dangers, shape what we want to talk about and what we want to guard against.

I freely admit that I usually see dangers on my left more quickly than I see the dangers on my right. I grew up in public schools—in Grand Rapids mind you, but still I was more conservative than most of my teachers and classmates. I then went to a middle-of-the-road Christian school where the majority of the students and professors were quite a bit to the left of me. I served for most of my ministry in a mainline denomination where my friends and I were considered the rightmost tent peg in the denomination. I see the dangers of liberal theology clearly. I know that some slopes are steep and slippery. I can sniff out theological compromise from a mile away, and I think that nose has served me well.

I’m not naïve that there are people to the right of me, but I tend to think their mistakes are obvious and confined to some alt-right fever swamp. Everyone knows that hyper-conservative patriarchy is dangerous, so why are we talking about it? But perhaps not everyone knows what I think they know or sees what I think surely everyone must see.

It’s also important for me to recognize that I’ve seen in my life mainly healthy gender dynamics. My parents love each other. My churches have been full of godly, intelligent, flourishing, strongly complementarian women. Most of my friends have very good marriages. Whatever I know to be true in my head about abuse or whatever I’ve seen of sin and dysfunction in marriages in nearly 20 years of pastoral ministry, there’s no doubt that it still feels deep in my psyche like most husbands are bound to be pretty good and most complementarian men are apt to be fundamentally decent. I don’t have a bunch of stories of boneheaded complementarians. But I don’t deny they are out there—men in our circles saying and doing cringey, offensive, or genuinely sinful things toward women in the church. That I don’t see them doesn’t make them unreal, and that other people have seen them does not make them ubiquitous. My point is we should all be aware that we tend to assume our experiences are normative and the divergent experiences of others are exceptional. This should make us quick to sympathize and slow to accuse.

So what is the most pressing issue facing the church today when it comes to men and women?

There is no scientific answer to that question. It may seem obvious to you that gender confusion is the big issue, or abuse, or runaway feminism, or a wrongheaded complementarianism, or the worth of women, or the war on boys. I would be foolish to say you aren’t seeing what you think you are seeing. For all I know, you’ve been surrounded by male creeps your whole life. Our assessment of what surely everyone knows and what surely everyone must be warned against may be understandably different. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling for an easy intellectual relativism that says, “I guess we are all equally right (or wrong).” I’m suggesting that we should be honest—first of all with ourselves—about what we perceive to be the biggest dangers and why. In recognizing our own inclinations, hopefully we will be less likely to project the worst of the dangers we see upon those who rightfully see other dangers.

3. We should ask ourselves in these discussions whether we want to poke, to provoke, or to persuade.
4. We need to consider whether the Bible’s “rules” regarding men and women, and even some of our cultural assumptions about masculinity and femininity, are rooted in something deeper than passing stereotypes and something more comprehensive than prescriptive fiat.

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