Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson answers questions on the topic of Manhood and Womanhood in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Question: “Can women lead mixed Bible studies?”
Don Carson: In my view, that’s one of those areas where a certain amount of difference of opinion may prevail from church to church committed to complementarianism. When I was in pastoral ministry myself, what I did in such cases was try to get husband/wife complements working together.
I can remember one couple, for example. She had a master’s degree in theology. A pretty sharp mind. She also had a bit of an acidic tongue, and her husband didn’t know as much but was much more gentle and pastoral. I tried to coach them on the side to run some of these house groups together in a way that played to one another’s strengths. I think there are sometimes ways of doing these things without teasing things out.
I’m a little nervous about articles like one that was written by a friend of mine. The title was “Sixteen Things Women May Do and Seventeen Things They May Not Do.” I mean, I know what he was trying to do. He was trying to take the principle and apply it to life. Do you know? That surely is a good thing to do, and if he wants to do that in the context of his own local church, God bless you. I’m not sure I want to go to that church, but God bless you!
On the other hand, I’m really reluctant to say what I would do or not do exactly in all of these cases because there can be other determining factors around, and I’m nervous about turning this merely into a set of prescripts. “Well, Don Carson says what this means is, ‘No, she may not.’ ” It depends, but what I do not want to duck is the principle of the complementarian structure. Good question.
Question: “This question is not meant to be rude or funny. I know, culturally, the question sounds politically incorrect, but where do female authors fit in teaching men, e.g., Claire Smith?”
Don: May the Lord produce a lot more Claire Smiths. In other words, again, the notion of complementarianism is not, “She mustn’t say anything under any circumstances to anybody about anything to do with the gospel.” That’s not the issue! Clearly, Paul can speak of women who have served with him and this sort of thing. No, no. I try to define things pretty tightly. The church recognized teaching authority over men.
I don’t say, “She can’t teach any man under any circumstance.” That’s just not the case. Do you see? There’s a structural question of authority (the magisterial offices, it’s called) within the church, so I’m all for the multiplication of Claire Smiths. These things are all recorded. She’ll probably hear this, but I’ve had a long friendship with Rob and Claire, and I hold both of them in high esteem. This next question is a good one for clarification.
Question: “When you disagreed with the approach of using ‘God is helper’ too to suggest women are not functionally inferior, are you saying women are functionally inferior?”
Don: I don’t like the word inferior, although it’s the word I used. It’s hard to find the right word. One of the reasons why the word complementarianism is used so much today in these debates is because what you’re trying to get across is you’re called to two slightly different roles and the roles complement one another, so there is a complementarianism, but that complementarianism is viewed as bringing two people together in slightly different roles, and in the authority structure of the family, of the home, one is the head and the other submits.
Is the head with all the self-sacrificing love of Christ for the church …? Still Christ remains the head of the church, and in that sense and in that sense alone, the church submits to Christ and is, so far as the authority structure is concerned, inferior. That doesn’t mean ontologically inferior or anything like that. That was the context in which I was talking about inferior. The helper is helping the other one in a differentiation of roles that cannot be overcome by saying sometimes the word helper can actually have God himself as the referent. That’s all I was trying to say.
It is not trying to say there is an ontological inferiority or that the helping function is an distinctively and intrinsically inferior role. It’s not saying any of those kinds of things. It’s saying in an authority structure one has more authority than the other one. In other words, there’s a superior and an inferior along that axis itself. Those might not be the best words because I want to preserve complementarianism as the big flag here rather than something else.
Moderator: Just to help people out, I know what you’re saying when you say ontological. Can you say that a different way because that might be a key word for people to understand.
Don: Ontological comes from the Greek word on which has to do with being. Ontological really means at the level of being. If there is an ontological inferiority or equality, then you’re saying at the level of their very being, they’re either whatever the thing is. Ontologically, at the level of their being, they’re equal, or ontologically, one is inferior or superior, but that’s not what anybody is talking about in this debate.
It’s about function, a distinctive function, and even at the functional level, inferiority or superiority doesn’t quite cut it when you’re talking about two functions being mutually complementary. Do you see?
But at the level of the authority structure, in most English usage except that it’s not very acceptable today because everybody is trying to be politically correct, then the one who has more authority is said to be superior and the one who has less authority is said to be inferior on that axis, but that does not mean an intrinsic inferiority at the level of function overall or at the level of ontology overall, the level of being.
Question: “How important is the historicity of Adam and Eve to the theological justification of complementarianism?”
Don: Fairly, but the historicity of Adam and Eve, it seems to me, is.… We’ve been having some long discussions in some circles elsewhere. The historicity of Adam and Eve is, I think, essential to make sense of Christ’s headship over the new humanity. That is more central yet and becomes finally non-negotiable.
Now I know what some geneticists are arguing, that the genetic evidence they say shows human beings descended from a pool of several thousand, but now there are some geneticists who have argued back that’s just not the case, so the literature is becoming quite complex in that domain. In my view, there is a fair bit of room for flexibility in all kinds of things in Genesis 1 to 11, but there are a couple of things that are non-negotiable.
That is, human beings have descended from one pair, and there is a space-time historic fall. I don’t see how you can make sense of the rest of the Bible without seeing those two things. Now within that framework, Adam and Eve being of relevance to complementarianism is a relatively minor issue compared with those, but still it’s there.
I do like the approach of Francis Schaeffer on many of these subjects in a book that’s long out of print, probably, as far as I know. I haven’t seen it for quite a while. It was published in the late 60s and called Genesis in Space and Time. If you haven’t read it, sell your shirt, get it, borrow it, download it on Kindle, or whatever you do. Genesis in Space and Time. He goes through the first 11 chapters of Genesis and asks just one question.… What is the least these chapters must be saying for the rest of the Bible to be coherent and true?
That’s not saying everything those chapters say, but it is asking the right question. What is the least that those chapters must be saying for the rest of the Bible to make sense? I think that is sometimes a place to start in discussions when you’re in university evangelism and that sort of thing. There are a lot more I could pick up here, but we can take some from the floor now.
Male: I’m just trying to bring together two things. From this morning you talked about the incredible unity Christians have together, and some of the stuff you’ve talked about tonight.… How should Christians who hold these things to be true and so on relate to other Christians who it seems are Christians, so we share this incredible unity, but we may differ on some big things such as complementarianism or inerrancy of Scripture or big things, but still things where you’d say, “I’m probably still talking to a Christian who is my brother”? How should that work in Geneva? How should it work in the way we relate to churches around us in sharing platforms and things like that?
Don: That’s a very important question, brother, and I had a lot of notes on the whole thing, and I thought, “I don’t have to bring this up in my talk because somebody is going to bring it up in Q&A,” so thank you. Let me give the easy part of the answer first. It’s one thing to say somebody or other is a brother or sister in Christ and to embrace him as a brother or sister in Christ.
It’s another thing to say he or she can be part of a local church which has defined views on, let’s say, baptism or the sovereignty of God or Reformed theology versus Arminian theology or something like that, so there are many Arminian who view Calvinists as brothers in Christ and the reverse, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily think the Bible is with the other party on church order.
The same is true when you push further. If somebody is in the church who disagrees with you on some important issues, you might accept him or her as a brother in Christ but not allow him in a teaching office, or occasionally in a teaching office but in a teaching office that is only restricted. “You may teach on this topic or that topic but not on this topic. You haven’t got yourself sorted out yet.”
I would argue that sort of differentiation is already found in the New Testament. Paul writing to the Philippians, for example, in chapter 3 says, “If you disagree on these, then God will show you this too. He’ll reveal these things to you in due course.” He recognizes there are stages of growth.
To say that somebody is a brother or sister in Christ does not automatically mean that person should be given a leadership role in the church or a public voice for teaching or preaching or whatever. When you come to institutional structures like Geneva Push, clearly one of the things Geneva is doing is working with a variety of churches that hold different views on baptism and on church structure and so on. It isn’t close enough to their center to fight over these things.
On the other hand, Geneva so far has not been really, really tightly in bed with, let’s say, the Assemblies of God. There are some demarcations (explicit or implicit) about second-blessing theology, in my view, for good reason, but that does not mean we think everybody who does buy into second-blessing theology is not a Christian.
It just means when you start planting something toward the future, you realize there are entailments down the road if you do that kind of thing, and it may actually weaken your ministry. We heard tonight some of the guys who were talking who were in Geneva from the beginning. They raised questions along the lines of, “If we do more of this together, can we do it faster and better?”
The assumption is by doing it together it will be more fruitful, but then that notion of doing it together can become so big that you try to have a boundary-bounded set, which is what we were talking about last night, that is so broad that you can get as many people as possible into it, all the way out to people who you’re not even quite sure they’re saved but they’re sort of self-confessed evangelicals and they’re in at some level or another, because, “The more we do together then the stronger we’ll be.”
I want to say, both historically and pragmatically, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are some things we do better together, but endless bigness toward an even bigger togetherness does not always produce greater efficiencies. It might actually mean we develop greater bureaucracies and we have structures so large we start moving in different directions. It means there are certain things you can’t talk about anymore because you’ll offend somebody else who has a different point of view. You’re producing divisiveness for all kinds of reasons.
The conclusion is often a matter of prudential wisdom. That is, where you draw lines in order to be maximally effective to do the kind of ministry you have in mind. I want to argue that, granted the trends in our culture and granted the pressures amongst us, I think myself one of the lines that really does need to be drawn is in favor, in defense of, happily … happily … without malice, without condescension, without bitterness or mischief …
One of the lines that has to be drawn is to protect complementarianism, but having said that I freely acknowledge that’s not grounded on a single biblical text; it’s grounded on a judgment call about how important this stream of thought is in Scripture to the very structure of what the gospel is and to what is needed in our society and culture, which is falling apart on so many fronts, and to building for the future and so on and so on and so on.
I started to say earlier something about the feminization of the church, and then I got distracted and I didn’t get back to it, but let me say something a bit more about that. In North America, IVCF, which is the American version of IFES, is pretty regionalized, but in many of its regions it’s pushing very hard now to have complete egalitarianism in all of the university chapters.
What I’ve observed increasingly is you get more.… This is going to sound so politically incorrect. Forgive me, but I’m going to say it in any case. You get so much feminization going on that you tend to get more and more and more (I don’t know what to call it) sentimentalism, sentimentalism in the singing, in the presentations and so on, and what begin to fall away are men.
The least evangelized demographic group in American universities today and in varsity circles is white males. The Asians have their own groups. They’re not doing too badly, thank you. (A wee note of triumphalism there! Repent!) At the same time, there are not many guys going after football hunks. Do you know what I mean?
To go after football hunks, you need some men who love Jesus, and sometimes unwittingly the feminization of the church actually begins to work after a while against robust evangelism of men, which then multiplies the problem in the local church where the leadership really is. I think there are social and cultural entailments that can turn around and bite you, too, on this one.
It becomes, after a while, a prudential judgment about, “Is this important enough to draw a line?” I say, yeah. With all due respect, I think so. If somebody takes a contrary view, I’m not going to say they’re not brothers or sisters in Christ or they’re not really Christians and there’s no context in which I can work with them. There are lots of contexts in which I can work with them, but a church-planting organization where you’re trying to establish the direction of something for the future? I don’t think so.
Moderator: Don, thank you. That was very helpful, and it’s great that we had the question you were hoping for. That’s excellent. There’s a question from the floor asking to explain the very tight definition you’ve given, which is teaching with authority. Can you give a little bit more explanatory space to that just to help us understand exactly where that might sit for us?
Don: On teaching with authority, what I said was the church-recognized teaching authority over men. That is to say there are clearly instances in the New Testament where a Priscilla and an Aquila (interestingly enough her name is regularly put first and she sounds as if she’s the dominant voice) is charged with helping a Paulist to understand the way of God more perfectly, to use the King James Version.
I would say that’s a jolly good thing. I just can’t see anything wrong with it, but that’s outside the domain of what Paul seems to forbid in 1 Timothy, chapter 2, because Priscilla is not one of the elders who has taken this young man aside to try to improve him. This is a couple, with her being the more informed or loquacious or something, helping somebody along in the context of family to family or person to person and so on. That’s a bit different from a church-recognized teaching authority.
The primary church-recognized teaching authority in the New Testament is the elder/pastor/overseer, the elder/pastor/bishop. In all of the lists that are provided to describe their qualifications, able to teach is required. Deacons may teach, but it’s not required of them. It’s no part of their job, and for that reason (I know some disagree) I don’t see any difficulty with a woman being a deacon, except in some denominations deacon has come to mean junior elder.
Suddenly, because we use some of our labels differently from the way they use the labels in the New Testament, we get into all kinds of difficulty because we use the same word but mean something different by it. Church-recognized teaching authority? In other words, the church itself has certain voices that have a kind of ecclesiastical authority built into it.
James tells us not to be many teachers knowing that you will face more severe judgment on the last day. It’s one of the verses (James 3:1) that scares me witless on occasion. Don’t be many teachers because you’re going to be judged more severely on the last day, so I go around the world teaching everybody. You know? I’m sort of asking for it. What that does is show, although there is a sense in which in the church everybody should be teaching, at one level …
If you share your faith, you’re teaching the faith in the family, or you have a small group.… I mean everybody should be teaching something or other. As you share a verse or teach something to a neighbor or whatever, yet in terms of the church-recognized teaching authority, then the warning is there shouldn’t be too many of you because you face the greater judgment and not everybody is qualified and so on. It’s that, it seems to me, that has finally forbidden the woman in the New Testament.
Male: I think this will be our last one. “Would it be possible for you to give practical illustrations to how a wife is a helper and the husband is the head, e.g., in the home, discipling children, wife working, etc.” I think it’s following on from your impassioned plea for whole families, and it’s asking for a little bit more practical exploration, if we can.
Don: There are so many things that could be brought up. I worry, for example, about homes where only the mother prays with the kids or leads family devotions or supervises their homework or plays with them. There’s so much of nurture that goes on in terms of modeling. If you’re a dad and your kids never hear you pray, then the chances are very good that eventually your son thinks praying is for women and children. If you are going to be the head of the home, then you take primary responsibility for family devotions or for family catechesis.
Am I allowed a bit of advertising here? We’ve just put on our website (you can download it onto an iPad for free) what we call the New City Catechism. It’s really a kind of slight simplification of Westminster and Heidelberg. It’s 52 questions and answers, so we’re encouraging families to use it one week a year. In one year, you’ve done it all.
Sometimes churches are doing it. There’s a little video clip that explains things. There’s a children’s version for kids up to the age of 8 with simplified English. All of those words in the simplified English are actually found in the adult version as well so you don’t have to unlearn stuff when you graduate to the larger one.
I’m not sure every family is going to do that sort of thing. All I’m saying is, if you’re going to do it in your family, make sure it’s the head of the home who is organizing it. Make it fun to memorize stuff. My daughter, Tiffany, had memorized about 23 chapters of Scripture by the age of 3-1/2 because we made a game of it. I could tell you how we did it. It was great fun. Then she began to …
Moderator: You just said a 3-year-old memorized 23 chapters of Scripture. You have everyone’s attention, and you said you could tell us. How the heck did you do that?
Don: She was a verbal little tyke to begin with. She just was. My wife is English, and the English have endless nursery rhymes and books and stuff like that. By the time she was 2, we had four nursery rhyme books, and in each book there was a picture on one side and a nursery rhyme on the other side. Because we had read these things to her again and again and again, she could open up any one of those books, look at the picture, and recite the whole nursery rhyme. That was 100 poems.
It suddenly dawned on me.… She was just about two weeks shy of 2 at this point. It suddenly dawned on me if she can memorize nursery rhymes, she can jolly well memorize some Scripture. In family devotions we always had the kids with us. You make them short and make them snappy and make them funny. Whatever. She sat in her high chair at the end of supper in our case, and we’d read a brief passage of Scripture.
What we did on this occasion is we started with 1 Corinthians 1. I read 1 Corinthians 1, the first paragraph, and 1 Corinthians 13, the Love Chapter. The next night 1 Corinthians 1, the second paragraph, and 1 Corinthians 13. The next night 1 Corinthians 1, the third paragraph, and 1 Corinthians 13. After about two weeks of this, I dropped off the last word of each phrase. I said, “Though I …” I looked at her.
“Speak.”
“… with the tongue of men and of …”
“Angels.”
“… but have not …”
“Love.”
“… I am only a resounding …”
“Gong.”
She just dropped them in there. Bing! Bing! Bing! All the way through. About two weeks after that, she said, “Tiffy do it.” She grabbed my Bible, stuck it in front of her, and she recited 1 Corinthians 13. Now mind you, my wife and I fell off our chairs when she got to the bit about, “When I was a child I understood as a child.” Yeah. We eventually started doing other things, and you get to a stage where it’s no longer fun, and I don’t think devotions should be not fun.
She got to the stage where what she really needed was less of that and more narrative, so we started reading in family devotions all the narrative stuff of Scripture. When kids go through narratives they want the narrative read and re-read and re-read. Eventually when she was 11 or 12, “I know that story. It’s boring. Why can’t we read some Ecclesiastes or Isaiah or something?” I said, “No, no. You’re not ready for that.”
With her, reverse psychology always worked. With Nicholas, it never worked. With her, reverse psychology always worked. “Oh, yes, I am ready for it. Try me. You’ll see.” You tease it out a little longer. We started doing other things at different times of their lives. We reviewed stuff every once in a while. Then when she was 15 or 16, we were on a family holiday somewhere. We were visiting a church and somebody read Psalm 8. She poked me and said, “That’s one I memorized, isn’t it?”
They’re not all at the top of her memory right now, but it would take very little for them to come back because they’re sort of buried in there. Do you know what I mean? It was meant to be fun, and you can do that with catechesis.… You can do it with a lot of stuff. I mean, how much stuff do we memorize of junk music? Why not memorize some Scripture?
