So John Piper and others coined the expression complementarianism. One of its virtues was its newness: it did not (yet!) have a history of wretched connotations. Denotationally it encapsulated what many of us were trying to say

In their defense of complementarianism, several Council members in The Gospel Coalition have been known to preface their remarks with the insistence that complementarianism is not to be confused with either patriarchalism or with mere traditionalism in men/women relationships. To some observers, however, all three expressions are roughly synonymous. So why do we insist on the difference?  Everything turns on the connotations of the words involved, the mental associations conjured up by various expressions.

An unrelated example may help. At the denotational level, one might suppose that a “Calvinist” is someone who stands in the theological tradition of John Calvin; at the connotational level, however, in some cultural contexts a Calvinist is thought to be a fatalist, while in still other contexts just about everyone supposes that a Calvinist is uninterested in evangelism. One may wonder if such people have ever heard of George Whitefield or Charles Haddon Spurgeon, but in any case both the ignorance of history and the abuse of terms are in some social contexts pretty strong.

Because of my commitment to evangelism, I have once or twice been labeled “a Finneyite Calvinist.” I am still unclear as to which of the two terms is more greatly abused. 

In a similar vein, while “patriarchalism” may refer, rather neutrally, to a social order in which fathers rule, the mental associations connected with the term may be hugely variable. For some, it may conjure up order, stability, and fathers of the “Father Knows Best” variety. When one examines family breakdown in many of our communities, with fathers known rather more for their absence than for anything else, a little “patriarchalism” may have its attractions.

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