Chapter 6: Creating Complementarianism
from People's Chosen God, by Chad Hayes
In the religious tradition that I grew up in, there was a lot of emphasis placed on “following God’s will for your life.” The underlying belief is that God has had this whole thing planned out from the beginning of time. Even before you’re born, he knows where he wants you to live and go to school. He knows who you should befriend, and date, and eventually marry. He has a plan for where you go to college, what career you choose, how many children you have. It’s all mapped out, and all that’s left is for you to follow this path.
In the Bible, God tends to make this path pretty obvious. He speaks to people in a dream or from a burning bush. He sends angels, or sometimes even shows up himself. There are pillars of fire or smoke, or even stars to follow. The prophet Jonah was allowed to decide not to follow God’s command to go preach in Ninevah, but there wasn’t the least bit of ambiguity about what he was supposed to do. So when he ended up in the belly of a fish, having been thrown off of a boat in the middle of a raging storm, at least he wasn’t surprised.1
I have heard a lot of people say they “felt a call” to whatever ministry or career they ended up in. Some would go so far as to describe this call as a voice, just as if a person in the same room were talking to them. I never heard that voice. I wanted to. Because if a loving, all-knowing God had a plan for me that was the best way for me to live my life, I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to live that life.
For the first three decades of my life, things went really well for me. Today, I realize that was in large part because of my positionality; I was in the privileged position of being a white, male, cis-gender, straight Christian who had been born to loving parents in a stable relationship that had the resources to provide for me emotionally and financially. I couldn’t have asked for more privilege. I’m also an intelligent, creative, talented, and motivated person with ADHD that allows me to hyper-focus like you wouldn’t believe on things I want to do. (That last bit has its drawbacks as well.) But my religion taught that God rewards those who follow his will, so I interpreted my success as this reward, retrospectively labelling the decisions I had made as God’s will.
I did well in high school and was accepted into college at the United States Naval Academy, my first choice. Three years later, I received my first choice of service assignment as a submarine officer. When the girl that was too cool for me in high school said she wanted to marry me, it was a clear sign from God—she was the one for sure. (She wasn’t.) When, just after completing nuclear power training, medical issues resulted in my medical retirement from the Navy, I saw this as a pre-planned detour, something that happened for a reason, something God had known would happen all along. When I was accepted into my first choice of medical schools, God’s will. Getting matched to my highest-ranked pediatric residency program, God’s will. And when, after two years of planning, things “fell into place” for me to start my own pediatric practice, also God’s will. Everything that worked out was a sign that I was on the right path, and everything that didn’t was a twist in the road that, while it may not have made sense to me at the time, was all part of God’s perfect plan.
The medical practice that I started was the first truly significant thing in my life that didn’t work out well for me. I had done my homework, and other professionals in the area thought it would be an enormous success. But the grand opening was less than grand. Business was much slower than I had projected. But I had faith that it would work out, because I truly believed that God had a plan, and that I was following it. I started listening to several Christian business, marketing, and self-help podcasts. I read their books. I went for runs every day listening to Christian music, taking comfort in the reassurance that God was in control. That felt good, because I certainly wasn’t.
I owned several Bibles already, but because I had decided to spend a lot more time reading it, I wanted a study Bible—the kind with notes to help the reader understand exactly what God was saying directly to them. Because there were so many different translations and versions to choose from, and because I was broke and this was a significant investment, I put a lot of time into deciding which one to purchase.
People that translate the Bible into modern languages have a lot of decisions to make. Translating from one language to another—especially when ancient languages are concerned—isn’t as simple as a word-for-word substitution. One of the most fundamental issues with translation is whether to lean more towards “formal equivalence,” which favors word-for-word accuracy, or more towards “dynamic equivalence,” which doesn’t worry quite as much about specific words, focusing more on preserving the meaning of sentences and phrases while making the text more understandable to modern readers.2
I decided I wanted something that leaned more towards formal equivalence, and that was easier to read than the King James Version favored by my former Christian school, while still sounding pretty “Bible-y”. I landed on the English Standard Version (ESV), a version that was first published by Crossway in 2001 and widely adopted by the evangelical world.
There are, of course, other decisions that Bible translators make. One of these is the use of gendered or gender-inclusive language. There are many places in the Bible where, whether because the English language lacked gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns until recently, or purely because of patriarchy, language like “every man” or he/him pronouns were used to refer to collective groups or to an unspecified individual regardless of gender. Even as a child, I felt this was grossly unfair to women.
While the ESV Bible I purchased continues the tradition of using this masculine language, some other modern versions have switched to using gender-inclusive language when not explicitly referring to a man, making substitutions like “human beings” for “mankind,” “they” for “he,” “brothers and sisters” for “brothers,” and “child” for “son.” These versions include the Today’s New International Version (TNIV), which was published in 2002, and an update to the New International Version (NIV) that replaced the TNIV in 2011. Both of these were met with harsh criticism by evangelicals.3
In 1997, James Dobson had convened a meeting of several prominent evangelical men in Colorado Springs for the purposes of drafting guidelines against using gender-neutral language “when it diminishes accuracy in the translation of the Bible,” although many of the times they oppose the use of gender-neutral language, the text is clearly not referring to a single gender. Many other evangelical leaders have now signed on to these Colorado Springs Guidelines, as the guidelines drafted in Colorado Springs were cleverly named.4 Also in 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US, issued resolutions against “tak[ing] license with the use of particular terms, including, but not limited to, the use of so called gender inclusive language.”5
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), an organization that had been formed in 1987 to combat the influence of feminism on the evangelical church, also stated that they could not endorse either of these updated NIV translations. In addition to claiming that these changes weren’t faithful to the original text, they rejected the gender-inclusive language as contrary to their belief that, while God values men and women equally, he created them to fill different roles, both in the family and in the church. This belief, known as complementarianism, is essentially “separate but equal” as applied to gender roles.6
In 2017, the CBMW (now a vocal opponent of LGBTQIA+ rights as well) issued their “Nashville Statement” which is a statement they drafted in Nashville. In addition to affirming their complementarian beliefs, it also condemns every possible deviation from their “Biblical family values” of strict gender norms, heterosexuality, and monogamy. At the time it was issued, this statement was signed by over 150 prominent evangelical leaders including James Dobson, John Piper, John McArthur, Francis Chan, and Ken Ham.7
While most evangelicals in the pews wouldn’t recognize the term, complementarian beliefs are widely held in the evangelical world. But as the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, separate is never equal.
In the New Testament, at least the way it was taught to me and my evangelical peers, it’s clear that women are to be subordinate to men. And while the repressed feminist in me thought it was unfair, God’s teachings were not to be questioned. Women are prohibited from having leadership roles in the church. Wives are to submit to their husbands. Men in my church used to joke that their favorite Bible verse was Ephesians 5:22, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.” Or maybe it was Ephesians 5:24. Or Colossians 3:18. Or 1 Peter 3:1. They all say the same thing.
This prescribed power dynamic went back to Genesis, and it was present in the church as well as in the family. In the churches I’ve attended, women were confined to certain roles. They certainly weren’t allowed to be pastors. In many cases, the closest they could hope to get was to be a pastor’s wife. There were women involved in the leadership in these churches, but never in a position where they had authority over a man—the leader of the children’s ministry, for instance, was almost always a woman. There were two justifications given: 1) that God created Adam first and then made Eve to be his “helper,” and 2) that Eve had been the one who was deceived by the serpent in the Garden of Eden,8 although as I argued in Chapter 1, Eve couldn’t have been deceived by the serpent because everything the serpent told her was true.
The opposing viewpoint to complementarianism is egalitarianism—the belief that everyone in a family, church, or other organization should have equal access to positions of authority, regardless of their gender. Many progressive Christians espouse egalitarianism and allow women to be pastors or have other leadership roles within the church. They interpret these verses differently than I was taught to. And apparently they read different Bibles.
It wasn’t until years after purchasing my ESV Study Bible that I learned this version was “created by a team of more than 100 leading evangelical scholars and pastors,” all of whom were men.9 The decision to create this version was sparked by the anticipated publishing of the gender-inclusive TNIV in 2002, and the primary goal in creating the ESV was to have a version that was compatible with the complementarian viewpoint that evangelicals believe reflects God’s intended roles for men and women. The Colorado Springs Guidelines that had been drafted by Dobson and his pals in 1997 were implemented in the creation of the ESV.10
The ESV rejects gender-inclusive language, even when a passage is clearly referencing both women and men. One example of this is Galatians 4:7. The NIV reads, “So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.” But in the ESV, the world “child” is replaced with “son.” Lest you think he chose the word “son” because he was writing to an audience of only men, Paul makes it clear just eight verses before that he is writing to both men and women (and, of note, seems to be taking an egalitarian stance): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (ESV)
But gendered language isn’t the only difference. In Romans 16, Paul offers personal greetings to a number of people, many of whom are women. One of these greetings was to a person named Junia. The NIV reads: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.”
In the ESV, despite the fact that Junia has been thought to be a woman for centuries, Junia’s name is footnoted with the suggestion that it’s possible that she was a man named Junius. The reason for this is because Paul refers to her not only as an apostle, but an outstanding one at that. The ESV begrudgingly allows Junia to retain her gender (with just a subtle suggestion that perhaps she was really a man), instead resolving this conflict in another way—by demoting her, because a woman couldn’t possibly be in a position of power: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners. They are well known to the apostles, and they were in Christ before me.”
With this change, the ESV changes Junia’s status from “outstanding apostle” to “someone the apostles know well,” thus supporting the complementarian position that women shouldn’t be in leadership roles. This is the only version of the Bible to interpret the text in this way.11
In 2016, Crossway changed a total of 52 words in the ESV and announced that the 2016 edition would be the last: “The text of the ESV Bible will remain unchanged in all future editions printed and published by Crossway…People who love the ESV Bible can have full confidence in the ESV, knowing that it will continue to be published as is, without being changed, for the rest of their lives, and for generations to come.”12
Two of the words that were changed sparked quite a controversy in the world of Biblical scholarship, especially given the announcement that no further revisions would be made. This edit was to Genesis 3:16, the verse in which God curses Eve before banishing her from the Garden of Eden, where the Hebrew word ‘el was translated to mean “contrary to” rather than “for,” an interpretation that Biblical scholars—my ancient Hebrew isn’t great—found to be wildly inappropriate. Here are the original and updated verses in context (emphasis added):
Original: To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, but he shall rule over you.”
Updated: To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”
The original interpretation is consistent with other versions, and while it clearly places the husband in a position of authority over his wife, it stops short of suggesting continual conflict and subjugation.
Growing up in the evangelical world—and honestly, until writing this book—I knew there were different versions of the Bible, but I never even considered how significant even seemingly small differences in interpretation can be in shaping the beliefs of the reader. I suppose I should have figured it out based on how adamantly some churches insist that their congregations use only the King James Version, or whichever other version best conveys the message they want their congregants to hear.
The world of Christianity is extraordinarily diverse, and just as there is no one Christianity, or one Jesus, there is no one Bible. It isn’t just how the words of the English Bible are interpreted and emphasized within a particular church, but even what those words are that influences those who read it or hear it preached. I didn’t realize the extent to which the beliefs of a Christian subculture actually change the words that are on the page, or the level to which this is intentionally done to support certain theological or political goals.
Despite the many different versions of the Bible, it was drilled into me as a child that my Bible—the very book that I was holding in my hand—was the “inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God.” God had inspired each word that these men wrote, and the finished product was verbatim what he wanted me to read. And it was inerrant, meaning that everything it said was literally true and was not to be questioned. The Southern Baptist Convention proclaims their stance in the Baptist Faith and Message:
The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy. It reveals the principles by which God judges us, and therefore is, and will remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried. All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.13
The words of Jesus in Matthew 5:18 were used to support this doctrine of inerrancy: “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” The word “jot” refers to the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and a “tittle” is a small part of a Hebrew letter—frequently analogized to the cross of a t. This verse was used to prohibit any additions, subtractions, or alterations to the words God had purportedly inspired.
I struggled with this just as I struggled with the subjugation of women, but for practical reasons rather than ethical ones. Obviously, when Jesus said this, he wasn’t referring to the Gospel According to Matthew, in which he was currently playing a prominent role, or to the many other New Testament books, all of which were written after this statement was made. He even used the word “law,” clearly referring to the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament. And obviously, someone had eliminated quite a few jots and a number of tittles when they replaced all of them, as well as all the other Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic characters with letters from the modern English alphabet.
But I grew up in a world where inerrancy was not to be questioned, and neither was the patriarchal power structure in the home or the church. As Dr. Beth Allison Barr writes in The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, “The evangelical fight for inerrancy was inextricably linked to gender from the beginning.” Noting that the debate about inerrancy came about as a response to an increase in the number of female Baptist pastors, she argues, “Inerrancy by itself wasn’t important in the late twentieth century; it became important because it provided a way to push women out of the pulpit. It worked extremely well.”14 I agree completely with Dr. Barr, but as you might suspect from the theme of this book, I would argue that inerrancy is “inextricably linked” to a lot of other things as well.
Dr. Barr’s book completely transformed how I view the New Testament’s teachings about gender roles. While I’m no longer a Christian and didn’t need the Bible’s help in finding my way to feminism, this book showed me exactly how much the Bible had been manipulated to get to what I was taught in the evangelical church.
She provides a shocking (at least to someone who grew up as I did) perspective into the verses in Paul’s epistles that are commonly used by evangelicals to keep women submissive, silent, and out of leadership roles. Known as “household codes,” these passages mirror similar rules for domestic life that already existed in the Roman world with an important exception: The simple fact that these rules were communicated to women was in stark contrast to Roman society, where they were communicated only to men as the heads of their households. By even including women in the communication, Paul was moving away from the patriarchal status quo. While Paul’s household codes do state that wives should be submissive to their husbands, they are truly progressive in that they also mandate mutual respect, and that they direct husbands to treat their wives with love, even being willing to sacrifice their own lives for them.15
Dr. Barr notes that Paul “allows women to speak throughout his letters…Paul is not limiting women’s leadership; he tells us with his own hand that women lead in the early church and that he supports their ministries.” She goes on to describe the revelation she had about Romans 16, in which Paul sends personal greetings to friends, many of whom are women:
I knew women filled those verses, but I had never listened to their names being read aloud, one after the other. Phoebe, the deacon who carried the letter from Paul and read it aloud to her house church. Prisca (Priscilla), whose name is mentioned before her husband’s name (something rather notable in the Roman world) as a coworker with Paul. Mary, a hard worker for the gospel in Asia. Junia, prominent among the apostles. Tryphaenea and Tryphosa, Paul’s fellow workers in the Lord. The beloved Persis, who also worked hard for the Lord. Rufus’s mother, Julia, and Nereus’s sister. Ten women recognized by Paul.16
Contrary to what I was taught in church and in my Christian school, the degree to which women are included in this passage is striking, given the cultural context. Tabitha is identified in Acts 9 as “a certain female disciple,” not as the sole female disciple among an otherwise exclusively male group.17 Mary Magdalene, Anna, and Elizabeth are all Biblical examples of women preaching.18 All of this is inconsistent with what I was told the Bible said when I was growing up in the evangelical church. But it’s consistent with Paul’s comments in Galatians, in which he seems to disregard gender differences altogether, stating that there is no “male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”19
Perhaps most significantly, Dr. Barr encourages the reader to examine how Jesus himself treated women. A woman is allowed to anoint Jesus with oil, a symbolic gesture that was used to confer priesthood or kingship—and typically done by a man of significant power.20 Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’s feet like a disciple and learned from him. He asks a Samaritan woman to get him water from a well, when it wasn’t customary for Jews to associate with Samaritans.21 And the witnesses to his resurrection who would relay the most important news of Christianity? Women.22
The men who wrote the Bible didn’t know they were writing the Bible. Most of the New Testament books now considered canon are epistles, letters written by a church leader to an individual or to the Christians in a particular church. There were a lot of other letters. The gospels included in today’s Bible are four of dozens that were written. The Acts of the Apostles that made the cut was one of many histories of the early church.
It would take roughly 400 years of working through substantial disagreements for church leaders to finally decide which 27 books to incorporate into what we now call the New Testament (although there’s still not complete consensus throughout all Christian denominations today). One of the criteria by which these decisions are said to have been made is that they needed to be authored by an apostle, or by someone closely acquainted with one. But Biblical scholars today widely agree that we don’t know who wrote any of the gospels (despite their titles), and many of the epistles are also of unknown authorship.
But the most important criterion for a book to be included in the New Testament canon was orthodoxy. Unsurprisingly, given the geographic separation at a time when long-distance communication required hand-delivery of a letter, Christianity splintered soon after it began into many distinct sects. The beliefs of these sects diverged, and the Christianities they believed and practiced varied widely. Some believed that Jesus was born human and then “adopted” into divinity at his baptism. Some believed that his entire existence, including his death and resurrection, had been an illusion. Some believed that the hidden truth of God was conveyed by personal revelation, and weren’t interested in hierarchy or dogma. So, as they debated which books to include in the New Testament canon, the leaders of the version of Christianity that had risen to dominance chose to include the ones that aligned with their theology, discarding those that didn’t.
Just as I interpreted the decisions I’d made about my life as God’s will, the men who decided what would become Biblical canon built a Bible that fit their beliefs. They created the Christianity they wanted. Those who publish new versions of the Bible tailor it to suit their theology or politics. Pastors choose a particular version, then preach from the passages they select. The same Bible that guides progressive Christians to strive for racial and gender equity and to fight climate change was used to get evangelicals to vote for Donald Trump. The same Bible that inspired abolitionists was used to justify slavery. And the same Bible in which some women find empowerment is used by others to subjugate them.
[Turn the page to Chapter 7: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do]
[Link to go back to the beginning and start with Chapter 1: Original Sin]
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Jonah 1-2 (NIV)
1 Timothy 2:11-14 (NIV)
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, pp.130-133.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, pp.65-69.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, p. 191.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, pp.45-55.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, pp.63-64.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, pp.35-36.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, p. 92.
Galatians 3:26-28 (NIV)
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, p. 45.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, p. 35.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. United States, Baker Publishing Group, 2021, p. 87.