Egalitarians, Slippery Slopes, and Biblical Authority

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I just read Joe Carter’s TGC-America article on 3 Steps Christian Institutions Take from Orthodoxy to Sexual Immorality.

Carter opines that Eastern University recently changed its hiring policies and removed discrimination against LGBTIQ students. What he laments is that Eastern was founded during the height of the Fundamentalist controversy as a conservative Christian school and yet has now departed from historical Christian views of sexuality.

I partly agree with Carter’s diagnosis of American culture as many similar things are happening in other places too like the UK and Australia.

First, we live in an age where public ethics are driven by the dichotomies of pleasure/pain and oppressed/oppressor and they play out in conjunction with an intense commitment to expressive individualism. This means all sexual desires - beyond sexual violence - must be fulfilled and anyone who attempts to repress or restrain sexual desire in anyone is considered the worstest person in like the history of forever.

Second, I also agree with the quote from John Neuhaus that “where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.” That does tend to happen and anyone who doesn’t tow the progressive line in progressive denominations gets shown the door sooner rather than later.

Look, I would argue that the sexual culture wars are an in-house post-Christendom debate where everybody is arguing in Christian currency. Traditionalists want to maintain the asceticism and sexual discipline of Christianity where sex belongs in the context of holy marriage in contrast to the predatory debauchery that characterized pagan sexuality. Progressives, in contrast, take up the Christian concern for the marginalized and oppressed and try to raise them up and protect them - which in that sense is a genuinely Christian concern.

I sit in the Traditionalist camp, I’m not gonna defend that or explain that now, suffice to say I have not changed my view of the body, sexuality, and marriage. But I have changed the way I approach the pastoral care of LGBTIQ people in churches and how I speak about sexuality in public contexts. This stuff is irreducibly complex and you can’t give tweet-length answers to questions about gender dysphoria, Klinefelter syndrome, hiring policies at Muslim schools, homophobic violence, vaginal agenesis, polyamory, transgender misogyny, public funding for Christian adoption agencies, and more. So let’s park that one for now.

What I do take exception to are Carter’s claims that egalitarianism rejects biblical authority, it denies the distinctions between men and women, and it is a slippery slope to sexual immorality.

First, on egalitarians denying biblical authority, he cites Ligon Duncan:

The denial of complementarianism undermines the church’s practical embrace of the authority of Scripture (thus eventually and inevitably harming the church’s witness to the Gospel). The gymnastics required to get from “I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man,” in the Bible, to “I do allow a woman to teach and to exercise authority over a man” in the actual practice of the local church, are devastating to the functional authority of the Scripture in the life of the people of God.

Carter himself then adds his two cents:

This destruction of the authority of the Scripture made it possible for LGBT+ groups to gain a foothold in Christian institutions, especially in colleges and universities. Additionally, by eliminating gender distinctives the egalitarian movement undermined the concept of gender essentialism. Egalitarians are not solely at fault, of course. But they’re not altogether innocent either.

Well, as I’m one to say:

As I’ve said more than once before, “While many American evangelicals preached the inerrancy of the text, what they often practiced was the inerrancy of their interpretation and the hegemony of their tribe in certain denominations.”

And if you want to talk hermeneutical gymnastics, consider this:

Reformed American Complementarians struggle to take 1 Tim 2:15 literally, “she will be saved through childbearing,” where women are either saved by having a baby go down the birth canal, or else, no woman who submits to her husband will die in childbirth. They don’t take that literally - for good reason - but insist that not taking things literally is injurious to biblical authority.

Reformed American Complementarians forbid people from speaking in tongues in their churches and yet Paul says, “do not forbid speaking in tongues” (1 Cor 14:39).

Reformed American Complementarians do their best to deny that “Junia” in Rom 16:7 was a woman and they deploy the most imaginative, desperate, and absurd arguments to turn her into a him. Seriously, for a group that is not big on transgenderism, their need to perform a sex-change on Junia is positively pathological.

Reformed American Complementarians know that there were female prophets in the OT and NT such as Huldah, Anna, and Philip’s daughters. They know too that prophecy is didactic and authoritative - and yet I’ve heard Reformed complementarians say with a straight face that when women prophesy it is “congregational suggestions” on the grounds that if women do it, then it can’t be authoritative. Who is convinced by that?

If biblical gymnastics were an Olympic sport, I’d back Reformed American Complementarians over egalitarians any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Second, let’s go for the claim that egalitarians are guilty of “eliminating gender distinctives.” That is problematic because I think complementarity between the sexes is real and good, it’s just that we are aware that “sex” and “gender” are not the same thing. I’d aver that “gender” is the way that cultures negotiate and normalize relations between the biological sexes. For Carter’s Reformed American Complementarianism, they fabricate and then impose a gender culture upon the sexes, so that “men by nature rule” and “women are by nature to be ruled by men” (note, not direct quotes from Carter, my summary of his complementarian position). Yeah, I reject that because it is not scriptural, it is a cultural construct, and it ends very badly. And yet, Reformed American Complementarians continue to believe that their own cultural constructs of gender should be afforded scriptural status: women should not preach to men, women should not work outside the home, women should not wear leggings, women should not even be deacons, women should not … not … not … not. Reformed American Complementarians often fabricate the strangest prohibitions about women that nobody has ever heard of and then have the gall to say, “And that is how it has always been.” But it hasn’t!

Third, what about slippery slopes? Yes, egalitarianism does lend itself to more liberationist tendencies and some egalitarians do become pro-LGBTIQ. Yet that door swings both ways! If egalitarianism can be a slippery slope to being pro-LGBTIQ, then complementarianism can be a slippery slope to enabling an abusive patriarchy. All views have a spectrum, propensities, and trajectories. We should fairly distinguish necessary entailments from value-based proclivities.

I know Carter’s article is for internal tribal consumption, it frustrates me, but it makes me grateful that I do have complementarian friends who do not deploy this type of discourse. People who don’t equate their biblical interpretation with biblical authority, people who know the difference between Christian sub-culture and scriptural canon, who distinguish sex and gender, and people who know that slippery slopes effects themselves as much as anyone else. Props to those complementarians who keep it sane!

I wish TGC-America would introduce some kind of peer review for their articles about women, scripture, and sexuality, because they are becoming progressively worse. They need someone outside of their man-cave to help them think through possible criticisms, potential objections, and point to shallow arguments.