A Conversation About Complementarianism (TGC Classic)

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Kathleen Nielson
Now to begin, I’m happy to introduce Don Carson, president of the gospel coalition, who will moderate this panel, Don Carson,

Don Carson
do the ground. Owing to my advanced years, I’ve received instructions that we’re all supposed to sit down. I think the way we’ll begin is by getting Each panel member to introduce themselves, but especially to begin by answering the question as part of their introduction, how did you get to think about complementarianism? How did you come to be where you are in reflecting on man, woman relationships in the light of Scripture, I’m quite sure we’ve arrived where we are by somewhat different routes, and that way you’ll help, you’ll be helped to get to know what some of the issues are, but who we are and so on. And that perhaps is the best way of beginning. We’ll begin with Kathleen Nielsen, how did you come to where you are? Well, say something about yourself, yes,

Kathleen Nielson
indeed, I came here specifically by way of godly family who modeled for me a godly home with a father who was a loving head, a strong, intelligent mother who loved the scriptures, who loved her husband and submitted to him in wonderful ways. I had great modeling at home and also in the church, surrounded by saints who acted out the gospel through their homes and in the church. Now I would love, if I may, to take my couple minutes here to tell you how I got here as the director of women’s initiatives for the gospel coalition, I want to tell you just really briefly why I and we picked this topic for this pre conference. There’s not one person on either of these panels who’s made this issue the defining issue for their lives. We’re all happy to be here at a conference for women, but not all about women, as we often say, but we’re here about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that Gospel comes to us in a book which tells the story of God’s redemption from beginning to end, and a crucial part of that Bible story from beginning to end involves our creation and our lives together as male and female. The first reason I and we chose this issue is that this issue is wound all through the scriptures we love. That’s the first reason, the second reason is that this issue is calling out. The issue of male and female has always been important and vital, but it’s not always been so disputed on so many fronts as it is today, both within and without the church. We’re not looking to add to any dispute. We are looking here to bear witness together that God’s word is a holy, good and trustworthy light for our paths. We want to affirm both the possibility and the deep satisfaction of hearing God’s voice clearly speaking into this issue that’s calling out Third reason, because we on this panel are examples like it or not, of what people call complementarians. We’re living, breathing, relatively normal, imperfect, saved only by grace, examples of people who really believe this. We thought it would be helpful at the start just to read the little paragraph from TGC foundation documents on the creation of humanity to make clear the ground on which we’re standing. This is what TGC has written in its founding documents. We believe that God created human beings, male and female in his own image. Adam and Eve belong to the created order that God himself declared to be very good serving as God’s agents to care for, manage and govern creation, living in holy and devoted fellowship with their maker. Men and women equally made in the image of God, enjoy equal access to God by faith in Jesus Christ, and are both called to move beyond passive self indulgence to significant private and public engagement in family, church and civic life. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his Church in God’s Wise purposes, men and women are not simply Inter. Changeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church. The husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God, the distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall and redemption, and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments. Those are clear words, and a lot of people actually do believe these things that Christians have believed for centuries. Hopefully we examples can be encouragement as we exemplify and tell our stories. Final reason it’s good for men and women to talk about these things together. We’re here sort of as witnesses to the goodness of the way God’s made us, and I’m looking forward to talking about this together.

Tim Keller
Tim, yeah, by the way, Don, I liked how Kathleen addressed people the beginning of the conference. So when you open next year’s national conference, I want you to tell all the participants that they’re beautiful.

Don Carson
You may remember that last year. I can’t remember who it was, but somebody posted some kind of list of differences between men’s conferences and women’s conferences. It was outrageously funny. We just

Tim Keller
had another one. Yeah, that’s one, of course, the women’s conferences, people actually read what it says they should and actually goes to the places where they’re supposed to go.

Don Carson
That’s right. Tim was coming with out of something we were doing this morning, and he said, Where are we going next?

Tim Keller
I it the way to answer the question, historically, how did you get here is that I became a Christian in college, which, by the way, is a long time ago, in the 1960s when I went off to Gordon Conwell immediately after college to study for the ministry. Gordon Conwell was an evangelical seminary, good conservative evangelical seminary, with different positions on this subject represented amongst in the faculty. So I got a chance to hear the various views. I didn’t have a in a certain sense. I didn’t have anything from my background that would necessarily prejudice me one way or the other. I sat down with the scripture, and I thought it was clear that the that the under back back then, the word complementarian was not there, the understanding that there’s male headship in the home and in the church, that our gendered humanity is complementary to what we’re complementary to one another. We have to work those out through different roles. I accept that because it seemed so clear from the Scripture. It just it didn’t seem that the argument was close. Then I met Kathy, and Kathy’s own background, and she’s going to explain in a minute, strengthened my resolve in this area. The only other thing to say is, I was really glad that Kathleen read that that part of the document. Obviously, the three of us, you know, John Don and I and others worked on that some years ago. And one of the questions came up was, why put that in the Gospel coalition statement? You know, why is that part of the gospel coalition statement, I think the balanced answer is, on the one hand, we do not believe that gender roles is one of the gospel, one of the doctrines that makes up the core of the gospel. We do not believe that you have to believe that in order to be saved or believe the gospel. On the other hand, we feel that the implications of moving away from what seems to be clear teaching of Scripture, that when you make that move, it has a ripple effect into how you read the scripture in other ways. And we didn’t think, therefore it was a matter indifferent. So we put it in there, and we’ve gotten a certain amount of heat for it. Sometimes we’re we’re told you seem to think that in order to believe the gospel, you have to be a complementarian. We would not say that, but we also don’t want to go on to the other to the other extreme, and say that this, that this set of beliefs doesn’t have pretty strong implications for how you live the Christian life. So that’s why I’m here, or how I got here,

Kathy Keller
Kathy, please. Well, I’ve, I’ve written some of this story in the meaning of marriage, and in this little booklet called Jesus justice and gender roles that talks more about the whole, the subject as a whole. So if I’m. Repeating myself, I apologize, but I grew up in a family that was not particularly religious, although we did attend and belong to a local United Presbyterian Church. It was what is now the PC USA. It was then the up USA, and when I became a Christian in my teenage years, I felt God’s claim on my life very, very strongly, and knew that I was meant for full time Christian ministry. And right about that time, the United Presbyterian Church started debating the issue of ordaining women, and I thought, cool, I’ll be ordained. That’s, you know. And I happily went under care of my session to prepare for ordination. Started looking at seminaries. Doug Dunderdale was assigned to me for Pittsburgh presbytery to be my advisor as I prepared to go under care for ordination at Pittsburgh presbytery, which at that time was a very deeply divided presbytery debating the pros and cons the win Kenyon case, for any of you are old enough to remember that huge debate about ordination of women. It wasn’t until college that I ran into people who actually believed that the scripture was trustworthy and God’s word and could be relied on and should be believed and accepted. And I started reading my Bible for the first time in college, and it seemed indisputably clear to me that God had assigned different job descriptions to men and women, not better or worse, just different, and that ordination and to the ministry and some other things were not given to women. So when I did end up coming in front of Pittsburgh presbytery, I had changed my status from ordination track to a non ordained tract called commissioned church worker. It no longer exists in the PC, USA. I wish it existed in the PCA, somebody out there listening, where you can acknowledge someone who is full time ministry without having them have an ordained status. That night that I was in front of the presbytery, I had to explain why I had switched tracks from ordained to a non ordained tract. And I said, because I think the Bible doesn’t teach that women should be ordained. 350 pastors and elders divided on this subject. Half of them started booing and hissing at me, which was a very interesting experience, and the rest of the night just degenerated from there, everybody who stood up had to say something about that courageous young woman, or that, idiotically, you know, deceived young woman, or it was just nuts for my sins. They assigned everyone who was under care of the presbytery. Got assigned to one of their committees. They assigned me to the task force on the ordination of women, either because they thought I needed a refresher course on, you know, sensible thinking, or because they, I don’t know why they did it. I think it was punishment, really, but I was really glad to go because I thought, okay, you know, this is where all the most cogent arguments will be. And I’m a fairly young Christian, and I’m new at reading the scripture, and, you know, they’re going to come up with all of the really hard hitting arguments, and I need to know what those are. I don’t want to make a mistake. What if I’m, you know, reading this wrong, and it was so disappointing. I mean, it was just lame. It was like, we know women should be ordained, and if there’s anything in the Bible that says that they shouldn’t be. Or it looks like it might be saying that well, that Paul didn’t write that, or that was a later interpolation, or it was just like, don’t confuse us with the facts. We know what we think. Since then, living in New York, there have been hundreds and hundreds, multiple, hundreds of times that I’ve met with young women in tears who’ve said, I just found out the Redeemer doesn’t ordain. I mean, I don’t know why they don’t notice, but they don’t until they get to the membership class, and, you know, tell me I can understand, and I’m always willing to go back to the beginning with them, read all their books, talk it out, meet, have lunch, et cetera. So we have been, oh, I have been over and over and over and over all of the arguments and counter arguments and hermeneutical arguments and stuff like that for decades. And I have no interest in being wrong about this. It’d make our life a lot easier in New York if we could just say, Yeah, let’s ordain some women, but that’s not what the Bible teaches, as far as I can tell. So this has not been a defining part of my ministry, but it has sure been a big part of it, and having to deal with it starting pretty close to the beginning and all the way till today,

Speaker 1
we can’t top that, but John will try.

John Piper
I have no, no desire to top anything. I owe my complementarian happy position to my mother and father, I’m sure. It, and then to the Word of God, which I believe confirmed what I grew up with. My mother, in my judgment, was Omni competent. My father was away from home two thirds of the time because he was an evangelist. I learned almost everything I know from my mother, from how to make pancakes and how to boil french fries get to make the oil must be boiling before you put the fries in, or they get soggy, and the pancakes have to have bubbles around the edges before you flip them over, because that’s that’s what moms teach sons and pull the grass up by the roots. Otherwise it’ll come back. When you scrape the gutters and paint, it’s got to all come off, otherwise it’s going to chip underneath. I learned everything from this woman. She ran a little business on the side. She kept all the finances of the family. She was better than my dad. Had virtually everything except preaching and when when he came home, so when he was gone, she was just everything, absolutely everything. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. And when he came home to watch the drama shift, to my Dad, let’s go to church, let’s go to the restaurant. Let’s bow for prayer. Let’s have devotions, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s. He’s doing the let’s sing, and she’s loving it. She’s just loving it. Daddy’s home, and I’m not burying this anymore. Take it bill and make this family work. So he’s he’s loving it and she’s loving it, which taught me that the drama of complementarianism is not competency based. It’s just not. It has nothing to do with who’s better at what. That’s the way egalitarians try to figure out marriage, if you’re better at this, you do this, if you’re better at this, and they try to leave sexuality out of it, whereas the Bible says No, something stamped on a man’s heart and on a woman’s heart, that the way they dance together is defined in a certain way, so that that’s the most fundamental influence. 1975 Paul jewetts book, man, male and female. One of my teachers at Fuller came out. He said, Paul made a mistake. Made a mistake in First Timothy 213 and my heart just was crushed. I had no idea he stood there. I was in Germany when I read this book. I had gone three years and didn’t know what they thought. And I thought, you’re saying Paul made a mistake. Yes, that’s what he said. I thought, well, he’s gone, and he wasn’t gone, which means my seminary was gone, and so I was thrown into a set of controversies in the mid 70s, and Elvira and Berkeley Michaelson and Gilbert bilozekian and Catherine craiger and others, and the booing and the hissing of those days was really ugly, and you were obscene. Virginia mollencott called me to my face obscene for what I believed. And so I thought, Okay, this is really heavy and hot. And so we I got to find some friends, and we’re going to wave a flag. And so Wayne Grudem and I began to wave our little flag. We wrote, We edited a book called biblical manhood of womanhood, and we formed the gospel, I mean, council on biblical manhood and womanhood, which praise God is still in existence today and and so that’s my pilgrimage into the thick of the of the fray. And looking at you makes me astonished, because this conference, wherever you are, in your own personal convictions about this, this conference is is flying under the banner of complementarianism, and I just look at and say, You’re I assume you’re beautiful, but I can’t even see you, but you’re Smart. I mean, you’re intelligent, you’re thoughtful, you’re educated, you’re young, you’re not stupid and back water and there you are, at least willing to think about these things. And I say, thank you God, thank You that those battles and you’re taking the hissing and have borne significant fruit. So thrilled to be a part of this pen.

Don Carson
In my own case, I was brought up in French Canada, which, at the time, not today, but at the time, was an extremely patriarchal society. I don’t say complementary, and I say patriarchal. It was really under a form of a medieval brand of Catholicism, so that evangelical Christians were made to look startlingly fresh and open if they lived lives that were closer to what we would today call complementary, that looked freeing in comparison with what we. Saw in the broader culture. My own parents, both had been to seminary. Both had studied Greek and Hebrew. My mother was a better student when my mother led Bible studies for women, which I didn’t normally go to, but to young people’s groups and that sort of thing, which I did. I always thought that she was better at actually handling the scripture in some ways than my dad was. So I had some of the same reflections that you had. That is to say, competence is not the fundamental criterion. But quite frankly, I didn’t really think about these things seriously until I went to England and was doing doctoral studies in the early 70s, because one of the students at Tyndale house, where I was working, was a chap called James B Hurley, Jim Hurley, and Tyndale house is, it’s a residential library where you have elevenses, coffee at 11 and tea at four or 430 and the various doctoral and postdoc students gathered together and talked and talked and talked and talked so we all found out about what the other one was working on and so on. And he was working on these sorts of questions in Paul and that’s where I first began to think about them seriously. That was in the early 1970s eventually, his doctoral dissertation, somewhat revised, came out in 1981 as man and woman in biblical perspective. And I thought at the time it was one of the sanest things I had read. I still think it is one of the better ones. A year before that, by this time, I was getting into more serious literature. I had read a Catholic volume called man and woman in Christ by Stephen Clark. So I was beginning to read, then the literature on both sides and so on, so on, so on. But I got into it out of a heritage of that was really quite different. I didn’t really start facing the hisses until I got to organizations like ETs and so on, so on, so on, where sometimes these things were pretty heated up for a while, but at that point, I was driven so much by exegesis and thinking these things through in synthetic ways that was trying to submit to the whole of biblical texts that it it’s become one of those things for me that defines how you interpret Scripture. I know there are some fine brothers and sisters in Christ who are egalitarians, who really think that that scripture tends in another direction. I have to say, I’m so unconvinced by their arguments that I remain solidly within this this heritage. More importantly, I’ve come to see how important it is to develop broad based, genuinely Christian, gospel centered views of the home that the issue is not, it’s not a woman’s issue, it’s a family issue, it’s a societal issue. It’s a submission to God issue, it’s a, it’s a where’s the Lordship of Christ issue, it’s a, do we bow to the Bible only when it’s convenient? Issue, it’s become that sort of issue with me, a flag that that that speaks to other sorts of things, but more of these things will come out in due course. So I have some questions eventually, we’ll if we take too much time, we’ll speed it up by asking for very short answers, but, but not right away. Right away. I will address questions to all of you, anybody can chip in, but eventually, I’ll narrow it down to one question for one of you at a time. All right, what should we be careful to say that complementarianism is not

Kathy Keller
I love the bash. I am so ready to answer that question, and I almost interrupted you while you were talking, complementarianism is not a women’s issue. The whole name should tell you that it is interlocking gender roles of men and women. And men need to understand complementarianism. Probably more than women. We are the ones that are always dealing well, what does submission mean, and what does that look like, and how do I live that out? And the men don’t talk about it, and they’re the ones I think I’d like. I would be delighted if at the next gospel coalition conference there was a panel like this, or a discussion like this for the men, because the men have to understand that their headship is derived from the way Jesus treats the church, that it’s a servant headship. It’s not about getting the perks and the privileges and the remote and, you know, having everything your way, as much as women have to understand that their submission looks like Jesus in Philippians too, that it’s not about being a doormat. It’s about bringing your gifts to the full thing. So the main thing complementarian is not is not just a women’s issue, it’s a church issue. Anybody want to add

Tim Keller
violet? I would add actually, that complementarianism is not, well, this isn’t quite working. I’m trying to say that complementarianism can be lived out in somewhat different ways. And so I almost want to say complementarianism is not. Necessarily exactly like the church you came from that said, we’re a complementarian church. That a complementarian church in other part of the world, a complementary complementarian church in another city versus the country there, everybody’s going to have to draw certain lines somewhere. As soon as you say, here are the gender roles. The Bible actually leaves a lot unsaid about what that means. So the way you live it out usually means making choices. In our church, men and women do this and that everybody’s going to have to come down somewhere. We need to be a little flexible with each other. I do think that complementarians tend not to. They tend to say, the way we do it in our church, exactly the way our elders say. This is how the gender roles work out. Is the only way you can be a truly complementarian. If you’re slightly looser than that, then you’re really kind of a closet egalitarian. See that, I think is that’s one of the banes of our movement, as it were, because I want you to so i want to say complementarian isn’t that complementarianism is not necessarily exactly like the last church you were in. There are more than you can you can believe the basic principle, it makes us complementarian and yet, different temperaments, different cultures, even different ways of working can be, can be utilized. So there’s a variety. But let me push you on that though.

Don Carson
Let me push you just the same. Be as flexible as you like, but at some point, if it’s all spectrum, where do you cross the line so that you’re not complementarian anymore?

Tim Keller
Oh, well, okay, certainly when we say there to even say there are some things in the church that a woman who embraces her role cannot do. Frankly, even if you say that, I think you’re a complementarian, even if you haven’t defined what that is. Now, I would rather say women shouldn’t be pastors or elders, though I do recognize that there might be parts of the world in which you have churches that don’t have elders, and then, okay, talk to me. How do we still maintain the idea that there are some things that Paul’s forbidding something? Yes, that’s I knew my wife’s gonna say Paul’s forbidding something. The woman has to be obeyed, right? As long as long as you say that there’s something women can’t do in the church as her way of embracing her role, then I think you’re a complementarian, even if we can’t always agree on exactly how many things that is

Speaker 2
in the church and the home and,

Tim Keller
oh, in the same thing in the home.

Kathy Keller
Yes, well, for John stott’s an example. I mean, he determined, and I disagree with him, that because the the authority to admit and dismiss from membership resided in the bishop and not in the priest, that you could have women priests, but not women bishops. Okay, I disagree with him on that, but he was trying to obey what Scripture said about authority being in the hands of men and not in the hands of women in the church, so you may, by your church polity, have to come to different ways of expressing it, but the heart desire of saying this has to be expressed. This has to be joyfully accepted, not grouchily accepted or begrudgingly accepted, but joyfully. We have to find a way to joyfully accept the fact that we’re gendered human beings, and that that’s a good thing, and that that’s something God means for us to enjoy and embrace and use. May look different in different cultures, different church, polities.

Don Carson
Let’s extend this beyond the Kellers.

Speaker 3
Yeah, we’ll talk your ear off if you let

Kathleen Nielson
us maybe one way to say what you’re saying, from the other perspective, you’re saying, if you agree that you have to obey something, maybe from the other side, you could say, if you actually affirm that there is such a thing as authority that must be acknowledged and submitted to. In these different contexts, ultimately, gods, but in the church, the elders, and in the home, the head of the home, and the wife who submits to the head. Now we have to talk about what that means and what that looks like, but that is the truth that we must acknowledge together, and it’s the principle of authority that stems from God Himself that we need to embrace. I mean, it’s the hard thing for all of us, human beings, isn’t it, to embrace that God is God and rules the universe as the King of the universe.

John Piper
I want to make sure Tim, what he said, doesn’t get sound bited out there as a defining characteristic of TGC, because you said, if someone believes there is something a woman can’t do in church. He’s a complimentarian. That’s not good, because she might not be allowed to be the janitor, or she might not be

Tim Keller
allowed to whatever Paul’s forbidden, forbidding something. I see what you’re going go ahead.

John Piper
So I think we do need to be more precise. Namely, to go with in the home, you got this headship and submission piece, and in the church eldership, and we’re all submitting men and women to the elders. And so that’s the that’s the dynamic. There are these two structural roles that complementarians Say are essential for joy in the home and in the church. And what I would say it’s not, is to take those two and say something about them to prevent caricature. So headship should be spoken of more in terms of the burden of responsibility, not the right of power, because that’s the accent of Ephesians, 525, love is Christ loved the church. So whenever we’re talking to the men, and I think maybe more discussion is happening than you say, among men. Because I totally agree that this is mainly a men’s issue. If men did what they ought to do, the way they ought to do it. I think women, by and large, would flourish. So that’s only there, then, then the qualification on the on the submission side is to use language that says my if woman says we mean by submit, which I probably will get to, I would say it means you’re really happy when your husband leads. Well, oh, okay, so I think finding language to say it’s not doormat, it’s not mindless and best, the best place to go if you want to teach a Bible study on this, what it’s not is First Peter, three, one to seven, because there you have a husband who’s a nonbeliever and a wife who’s a believer. And the whole point is, how does it get him saved? Change him, right? This is all about her influence over this husband, and how to do it. So I could collect six things I did, I preached a sermon one time six things that submission is not all based on First Peter, three, one to seven. So you can go find them for yourself.

Don Carson
That’s homework. Let’s, let’s follow up on that one. Then with how do you distinguish between complementarianism and patriarchalism? In fact, this group knows something of the history of where the term complementarianism was coined. Do you want to unpack that a bit because you were part of that?

John Piper
Well, I don’t remember who coined it, but it did come out of the milieu of those controversial days, and the aim was to find a positive, rich, robust word between the abuses of tradition, the abuses of heavy handed patriarchal male dominance on one side and the gender leveling, egalitarian emphases on the other side. We looked at those and said, That’s not who we are. And what I discovered in those days is that all the writers that were attacking me were attacking that, and I just didn’t recognize myself in what they weren’t saying. It was the fallacy of the excluded middle. And so the middle we were saying, don’t lose the distinctions, and don’t lose the distinctions, egalitarianism of your and don’t go to the abuses. In fact, I think that’s the way Ephesians is crafted, because when Adam and Eve fell, they fell into the abuses of their roles, and women became either manipulative or doormats, and men became either passive or domineering, and in the New Testament, the errors of both of those were corrected with a thing in the middle, which we finally landed on complementarian

Kathleen Nielson
actually, that that is so beautiful Because the commands in Ephesians five to submit and to love. Really do overturn, by means of the Gospel, the results of the fall that are expressed in Genesis 316, your desire shall be to control. No, not that. Let’s submit. That’s the gospel answer to that, and not to rule, which would be more like patriarchy, which would be the comprehensive rule of men, but to love, to give oneself for to be that kind of a head, like Christ. So the overcoming by the gospel of these distortions that came about through the fall are so beautiful to put together.

Tim Keller
I think the excluded middle is equal in dignity and value, different in function because of male headship or authority and. So patriarchy does either explicitly or implicitly assume inferiority. In fact, the reason why egalitarians are always trying to make it a competency, whenever they debate with us, they really are trying to say so, you’re just saying women are incompetent. And I’m really glad we were over and over saying it has nothing to do with competence. Kathy remembers that Elizabeth Elliott, who was a big influence on us, Elizabeth Elliot, used to lecture at Gordon Conwell, and one time we heard her say, I’m a better public communicator than most of you in the room. He was saying this to mainly men, and she was right. She essentially saying, I could preach better than any of you. She went

Kathy Keller
on and on. She said, I know the Bible in multiple languages, and I’ve suffered, and I can speak better than all of you. I could make I have more pastoral gifts than anyone in this room. God has not called me to use them in the role of pastors. And she went on to say, there’s a difference between gifts and role.

Tim Keller
Yeah. I mean, it was scary, and so all my life, I’ve been aspiring to be at least as good a preacher as Elizabeth Elliot, but that. But the point is, if egalitarians, the reason they’re pushing you is because they don’t believe there’s a difference between patriarchal patriarchy and complementarianism, they believe that you cannot believe that there’s any differentiation of role unless you believe there’s a differentiation in competence. And I happen to know it’s possible to really believe there’s no difference in dignity, in value or competence, and yet be a difference in role. Of course, I don’t want to get into this, but there’s this but there’s this thing called the Trinity in which you have the father and the son being equal, and yet the father sending the son. Well, actually the

Don Carson
second, the next question I was going to raise, all right, in what sense does a rich, theologically evocative understanding of complementarianism reflect God himself? That’s not an easy question to answer. I know that, but this is such a gifted crowd.

Kathy Keller
I think it’s the foundation actually don because the thing that that took the sting of all of the words submission and headship away from me was Philippians, two where Jesus was equal with the father, but he laid that aside and he took the role of a servant and to accomplish our salvation. And therefore my submission is modeled on Jesus, and if it’s not damaging to the second person of the Trinity. To be in submission, to accomplish a role, it’s not going to hurt me any so for me, that was the big aha moment. As far as looking into Jesus’ submission to the Father in the Trinity, and saying submission as submission is does not have to be something that is compelled from you. It’s something you give. It’s not asked of you. You give it joyfully to accomplish something just the way the Son of God did with the Father. So for me, it was the whole. It was the whole foundation of all of it.

Kathleen Nielson
I would agree with that utterly, that, that that under that beginning to glimpse the Godhead and the way it works, and the way the story unfolds in Scripture, with God sending the son, the son saying, I would come to do the will of the Father. This, this subordination of the son to the Father, this full obedience, this servant, like giving of himself, laying down his life, it revolutionizes the way we think about this, this coming together of equality and yet difference in role, and makes us able just a glimpse how they might go together, and not only how, how they might Go together logically, but how what’s happening here as we live it out, is part of this bigger story of the universe, that there’s this God in charge of it, and we actually get to reflect Him in the way he made us and in the way we get to live. We can read verses like I’ve just come to this verse again recently, and it it’s so astounding. The head of every man is Christ. The head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. That there is this order from God to his son in the universe that we get to participate in. Even the little verse about because of the angels, which none of us understands, gives us this sense. There’s this big story playing out, and the angels are watching, and it’s all from God. It is affirming, encouraging, challenging. We don’t understand it, and yet, it’s got to be the ground of it all,

Kathy Keller
doesn’t it? It’s interesting that every time Paul talks about the roles of men and women, his mind goes right back to Genesis one. I mean, it’s like a Rorschach test or a word association. I mean, gender roles, Genesis, gender roles. Genesis, men and women, Genesis. It’s always back to Genesis. Let me

Tim Keller
just say something about that image of God idea. Kathy and I are not gender stereotyped, and that’s another way of saying, neither of us are. You can correct me later with what we got issued. You can correct me later, and I want you know I’ll receive the correction. But let’s just figure out is I’m not a particularly manly man, and she’s not particularly a frilly woman. And we get into we come to the conviction that I’m supposed to be the head that she submits to me. So we embrace this. We get married, and we found it hard. We found it hard because it wasn’t at first, it didn’t look like it was natural to us. At first, it wasn’t right and I’m actually what inspired me to what made me think about this was actually something that John said just a second ago. And we did find that by submitting to our roles, we came to grips with something that’s very deep in us that we would never have found otherwise. We found something that was stamped on us as gendered differently and together, I wouldn’t say, I wouldn’t say it’s as Don Mr. Theologian here, I wouldn’t say it’s quite as, oh, I don’t know as, as crass is saying that together, the two of us reflect the image of God, you know, as male and female together better, we somehow combine maleness and femaleness and and reflected to God. I wouldn’t say anything quite as gross or crass as that. I would just say that I feel very much that I reflect the image of God better, that I have been shaped and renewed in the image of God by submitting to my role. And it’s a submitting to being responsible, not just having power, responsibility that I didn’t really want. And Cathy has felt the same way. So in some ways, we have been renewed in the image of God by embracing gender roles. I don’t think you get much more theologically rich than that.

Don Carson
Now increasingly complementarians have been saying things like that. Let me throw out a question that flows from that. How do you say that well and wisely without giving the impression that singles are therefore somehow less than the image of God? Because there are a lot of single men and women out there who could hear this and interpret it in such a way as to suggest they’re somehow not fully human, fully in the image of God? So how will you articulate this, then, anybody,

Kathleen Nielson
well, certainly beyond the killers, start with the fact with the basic affirmation that every human being is made fully in the image of God. And it’s important to say that we talk so much about marriage and about complementing one another and coming together to make this whole but God created every human being in his image, and every man, every woman, reflects fully his image and is capable of living it out fully? I don’t think any one of us is really completely qualified to answer this question, because we have not, for a while, anyway, lived out singleness, and yet, as I look at it and have single friends, it seems to me that we need to go to the church to answer this question and talk about what it means to live out in the body of Christ as men and women together, every person lives in relationship with the other gender in one way or another, and especially in the church, we all Do, we have leaders, we have elders who are male, and we all relate to each other as men and women, and we maybe could talk about exactly what that means, but in the church, we live it out all together, and I think that is the huge comfort and joy, not just for single people, but ultimately for All of us as we live it out together. Do you want to come out?

John Piper
John? Well, if Paul, I think, had felt he would be less human or less in the image of God, you wouldn’t have praised singleness to the high heaven the way he did. It, and the way I’ve come at it is to say there are unique blessings to being married and unique benefits of character development and shaping, and there are unique benefits, both for character and for influence from being single and God gets glory he could not get from a married person, from a single person who lives his or her life in 40 or 50 or 60 years of remarkably joyful submitted faithfulness to God that he would never get from a married person who’s always had a person right there to go to sexual fulfillment that the other person didn’t have. All that is denied, and Jesus has made up for that. And so Jesus is getting kinds of glory and praise from that life that they could never get. And and then the reverse is true, so that I would say that the that in the church, the single dimension and the married dimension are facets of a god glorifying diamond. That probably, if we thought it through those people, the those single men, women and men who who are being crafted and shaped by the unique challenges of their situation into the likeness of God in their new creation status. So that what you said, Tim could be said about them. Only the influences would be coming in different in different

Tim Keller
ways, right? If you put that, I think, with Kathleen saying, I just went through First Timothy with my staff, I was impressed. How is inside the church you’re supposed to talk about older men as fathers, older women as mothers, women as sisters or brothers. So there is supposed to be a pretty strong family dynamic inside the church. And being married to Cathy and embracing male headship, in my case, meant taking on responsibility and authority. I didn’t want I think there’s another way in which marriage can help men into their role by there’s some men that are actually too power hungry, and they they tend to swagger, and they tend to be too authoritarian, and very often, a good marriage will knock them off of that too and bring them back into saying, I’m supposed to be a servant leader. I think that idea of being a servant leader, the thing that helped, that I learned through submitting to my role inside my marriage can be learned in the church by single men and women, if they are in a relationship of brothers and sisters, if it’s really a family community, to a great degree, there can be that complimenting going on in there, right? Kathy, I want

Kathy Keller
to take that even a little bit further. We did a conference at Redeemer on singleness back in March, and this was a large part of the discussion, since we are all meant to be finally at the wedding supper of the Lamb, the bride of Christ, men and women, both the Bride of Christ, there are things that a marriage can reveal about how that works out. We can play out in our marriages how that works out. But single people actually have less distraction of a human marriage partner to model for the rest of the church, or before the world, what it means to have Christ as their spouse. So I think it’s the singles, and in particular, the gay singles, who are being chased and living a life of celibacy and depending on Christ for their spousal love, who are going to be the leaders, or could be the leaders in the church, to show the rest of us what it means to really depend on Jesus for the love that we need, and not go looking to a human being for

John Piper
it. That question that you gave us earlier, I came at it a little different way, so let me just say a word here that might be relevant. What why would why would the single women here bother themselves with this. If complementarianism is mainly experienced in the marriage and and one, you don’t become a complementarian on the day that you’re married. And therefore, if marriage might be in the future, it’d be good to know what you are before you get there. Number two, the dance. Of men and women in the workplace and in the church is not just like a bunch of guys and a bunch of gals, it is unique. And how that that rhythm is played out matters what you think about roles. And third, the wider culture, his is, this is just a huge issue, and you’re in that culture, and you need to know what you think, should women be on the front lines in combat? That’s going to flow out of your convictions about this kind of issue. And lastly, you’re all. Should be church members, and you should care about who leads your church. So this is an issue that everybody in this culture who is a Christian must come to terms with, single or married.

Don Carson
All right, let me change gears. We’re going to take two or three minutes, that’s it. Then we’re done. And what I’m going to do is fire small exegetical questions, each one, you could take half an hour to respond to. I want 12 second responses, that sort of thing, almost impossible, but nevertheless, here we go. What does say through childbearing?

Kathy Keller
Mean, Paul is going back to Genesis. He talks about women and men’s roles. He goes back to Genesis. He thinks about the promise to Eve, you screwed up, but through you, the Savior is going to come and going to save the whole world. I actually checked this with Vern Poythress, the New Testament professor at Westminster seminary, when I had to teach on this once, he said, that is one of the millions of many interpretations of that verse, but it’s an acceptable one, and that’s the one that I have gone with that he’s that Paul is just thinking back to Genesis, okay, a woman, not that you’re saved through having children, but that Eve by having a child who had a child who had a child who was eventually going to be the Messiah over 12 seconds.

Kathleen Nielson
Bing, I actually like that interpretation, but I also like the interpretation that takes the child bearing as a kind of representation of what is distinctly female, what is distinct about a woman. And saying that womanness, if you embrace that, that’s part of your living out your faith and

Don Carson
your salvation, that’s the matrix in which you’re saved. Well, that’s two interpretations. Then, all right, what does submit to one another? Why is or is that not perfectly reciprocal?

Kathy Keller
Has anybody ever heard of a heading over a topic that then has many sub topics that was under 12 seconds? Do you want to say

John Piper
anything that was, that was the main comeback. When you turn to Ephesians five, it begins be subject to one another. And they said, so, there you are. That’s not complementarianism, that’s total mutuality. And my answer was, just read the next verse, head and and submission. So my way of handling it, and there’s another way, Wayne and Grudem and I don’t go the same direction on this is to say there is a way that a husband submits to a wife. Namely, he dies for her, but he’s doing it in leadership. So I remember the Michaelson just throw Luke 22 in my face, like, there he is on the floor washing the disciples feet. That’s, that’s submission, I say, right. And nobody in that room doubted who the leader was at that moment, that that is servant submission. So we there is a mutuality, I mean, for you to take that responsibility against your nature, and it’s against every man’s nature to say he’s sorry. First, every man’s nature to go ahead, go ahead and because he knows it’s her fault.

Speaker 4
On that cheerful note, we’ll press on to the last one.

John Piper
Whether it is or not his responsibility is to do the absolutely counter human nature thing and initiate reconciliation in this hard moment. He must do it over and over.

Don Carson
What does it mean to keep silent in the church?

John Piper
Well, it doesn’t mean that she can’t pray with her head covered. It doesn’t mean she can’t prophesy with her head covered. So that’s chapter 11. You quoted chapter 14. So that’s where contextual exegesis matters. You get step 14. Let her ask her husband, what’s going on there and your interpretation, I like is that that’s probably referring something to the authoritative discussion of the prophetic meanings that have just emerged at that moment. At that moment, it’s more fitting that the men tackle this issue than the women, because she’s she’s back in chapter 11, supposed to have some symbol of authority, some culturally appropriate evidence of her submission when she opens her mouth and prays or prophesies in the church. So it can’t mean she can’t pray and she can’t prophesy.

Don Carson
In other words, this discussion cannot go on on a mere proof texting basis. My father used to teach me when I was a boy, a text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text.

Tim Keller
Last word, no, I was just going to say we’re following James Hurley there, by the way, yes, and he originally wrote that up in a Westminster’s theological journal article before, before everything else back in the late 70s. Very, very helpful. Basically, women should keep silent when the prophets are being judged. Judged, because that’s what the elders that’s what we’re just essentially, we’re doing what ordained people do, which is determining the doctrine of the Church. And therefore it’s not saying that every single time there’s a gathering, they can’t pray, they can’t say anything.

Don Carson
All right, we’re two or three minutes over. I’m going to close in prayer. Then we have a 15 minute break, and we’ll start with a second panel, let me lead in prayer. Grant us. We beg of you, Heavenly Father, not only the ability to understand, but a heart cry to obey your most holy word. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.