Complementarianism and a Listening Problem?

A Guest Post by Andrew Bartlett

Guest post by Andrew Bartlett who responds to some of the critics of his book.

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Imagine you are eating a nice, crunchy apple. Someone with strong views about food, but whom you believe to be sane, says in all seriousness: “He’s a naughty person, he knows he shouldn’t eat that banana!” What is your reaction? Bewilderment. Why would someone misdescribe an apple as a banana?

That has been my reaction to some of the complementarian responses to my book Men and Women in Christ: Fresh Light from the Biblical Texts (London: IVP, 2019).

In the book, I assess the arguments deployed in the complementarian-egalitarian debate as even-handedly as I can. I draw attention to fallacies and shortcomings in both sides’ arguments about the meaning of Scripture. Many of my conclusions, though not all, are more palatable to egalitarians than to complementarians.

I expected push-back from both sides. But it’s been disappointing to see the misrepresentations of the book which have come from the complementarian direction. They have made me wonder what is going on. Let me explain what I mean, by giving some examples of my apples being described as bananas.

Sharon James wrote a long review for the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. According to James: “Throughout his book, Bartlett uses ‘patriarchy’ … as a smear word”. But I don’t use the term “patriarchy” at all. In the whole book, this word appears just once, in the title of an egalitarian article which I footnote for the purpose of disagreeing with it (pp. 206, 400). Counting conservatively, her review contains thirty-six misrepresentations.

Here are two of the nine misstatements in Claire Smith’s short review for The Gospel Coalition:

(1) In the book I identified three different complementarian interpretations of Paul’s teaching on marriage and an egalitarian one, and I concluded for the softest of the complementarian positions (pp. 32, 67, 346). Egalitarian readers (Philip Payne, Marg Mowczko) understood this. They pushed back against my conclusion that in Ephesians 5 Paul uses an asymmetrical figure (the relation of Christ to the church) to call Christian husbands to take a lead in humble, self-sacrificial love for their wives. But Smith mis-reads the book so radically that she says I put forward an egalitarian position on marriage.

(2) Under the headline “Scripture Pitted Against Scripture”, Smith says I use 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 (equal authority of husband and wife) as a “proof-text” to “silence” what Paul says about “ordered relationships” in other passages. My actual reasoning is the opposite (p. 29). I examine the other passages on their own terms, so that my interpretation of them is not governed by 1 Corinthians 7.

Don Carson, in an editorial in Themelios, characterizes my reasoning as a case of “imperious ignorance”, which is “incoherent and idolatrous”. By “imperious ignorance” he means the extreme hermeneutical claim that no one can know for sure what God intended us to derive from the books that we have in the Bible – as he sees it: “legislating ignorance in order to avoid conclusions one wants to avoid”. He says “more than once (e.g., on 1 Cor 14:34-35) the author argues for the view that the arguments are so finely balanced that it is impossible to decide one way or the other.”

In fact, there is not one instance in the book where I say that the arguments are so finely balanced that it is impossible to decide one way or the other. I do conclude that interpretations of 1 Cor 14:34-35 which have been put forward to date do not fit the context. But I do not claim that it will never be possible for anyone to come up with a viable interpretive solution. And for all the other passages which feature in the current debate concerning men and women (Genesis, Paul’s letters, 1 Peter) I reach a positive interpretive conclusion, using hermeneutical methods similar to those which Carson himself uses in his writings.

Notably, I do use the expression “finely balanced arguments” once – hypothetically. That is in the first chapter, where I disclose what my expectations were when I started writing. In regard to women’s ministry, I thought that I “might find finely balanced arguments on both sides, meaning that any conclusion on that issue could only be tentative” (p. 15). It turned out I was wrong: on close examination, the arguments against women’s ministry were much weaker than I had expected, so I arrived at a firm conclusion that calling women to church leadership is not contrary to Scripture.

When advocates of complementarianism are unable to listen carefully to contrary views, why is that so? Is it in some sense too risky for them? Might it call into question what they have written and published? Are they trapped in a group-think bubble? Is there a deeper cultural issue in play? Is there some kind of insecurity which raises psychological or spiritual barriers? Is there sometimes an Upton Sinclair problem (“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”)?

I do not know what the answer is. Perhaps readers may have some insights.

There is an accurate review of the book in the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 38/1 (Spring 2020), 94, and there are plenty more reviews, some short and some long, on Goodreads and on Amazon.

I repeat a plea I made to both sides:

“To make progress towards unity it will be necessary for those who have taken up opposing positions in the evangelical debate to acknowledge that this is not a primary gospel issue, to look afresh at the biblical arguments, to take care to use only sound methods of interpretation, and especially to pay closer attention and give more weight to context and to the train of thought in the relevant texts.” (p. 356)