Reforming Gender?
There are times when you don’t have a dog in a fight, but you still find yourself getting pretty involved from the sidelines. I believe in neither ‘Egalitarianism’, which is anti-Christian, or ‘Complementarianism’, which is Christian cowardice. I am a firm believer in using the word ‘patriarchy’, which has the advantage of actually being in Scripture, at least in its root form, and then spending a lot of time defining it. And not defining it down, either. Most perversions of patriarchy are less patriarchal than they should be, not more. My patriarchy is neither ‘soft’ nor ‘neo’… but old path.
Nor do I normally call myself an ‘evangelical’. That word does have roots in the Scripture, but its modern use is pretty wishy washy. I prefer ‘Reformed’, which drives Presbyterians mad.
So when I see an article by Aaron Renn talking about how evangelicals need to address problems with ‘Egalitarianism’ and ‘Complementarianism’, I should be able to sit back and eat my hot dog. But, alas, it was not to be.
A Shallow Read
Now, my first comment on this article is for someone decrying a ‘thin’ anthropology, they do a pretty ‘shallow’ reading of their opponents. He takes these statements, for example:
1. Both Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood (Gen 1:26-27, 2:18).
2. Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order, and should find an echo in every human heart (Gen 2:18, 21-24; 1 Cor 11:7-9; 1 Tim 2:12-14).
Danvers Statement
And boils them down to this:
This is the sum total of its anthropology. That men and women are distinct and that their roles are likewise distinct.
Aaron Renn
That’s a pretty dramatic understatement. I count at least eight parts to the Danver’s Statement here:
Adam was created in God’s image.
Eve was created in God’s image.
Adam and Eve were created equal
Adam and Eve were created as persons
Adam and Eve were created distinct in their manhood/womanhood
These distinctions are ordained by God
These distinctions are part of the created order
These distinctions should find their echo in every human heart
Now, one can certainly disagree with the way that I have chopped these up; perhaps combing a couple, or perhaps separating one into two or more. But there is a whole lot more here than mere: Men and women are distinct, and their roles are distinct.
Now if he is criticizing the Danver’s Statement for not going far enough; for skipping huge swaths of the creation story and their implications for how manhood and womanhood are to be worked out, then I’m on his side. Or even if he disagrees with one or more of their statements. But, unfortunately, the rest of the article makes it clear that he is doing the opposite. He is saying that Scripture doesn’t say hardly anything about these roles, so we need to look to sociology.
Backwards Reasoning
What do women do who are single, don’t have children at home, etc? Is there a compelling vision for that?
Aaron Renn
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
―C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
I can’t really blame Aaron here. The lack of logic in this statement is reproduced, every day, thousands of times, amongst all sorts of groups. But the reasoning is indeed backwards. Because God actually did give a very specific answer for this:
I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully.
For some are already turned aside after Satan.
I Timothy 5:14-15
The problem with his statement is that he takes a variable and acts as if it is a constant. He speaks of unmarried women as if their unmarriedness was the constant, and what they should do, being unmarried, as the variable. But Scripture speaks of the being unmarried as the variable, and getting them married as the constant.
Let us take another example, whether there isn’t quite so much confusion usually. Let us say that your car is broken. And so you call me up and ask me if I can drive you to work because your car is broken. Well, I have no problem driving you to work but I ask you if you would like me to help you tow your car to Repair Shop, and you respond ‘no my car is broken’. I ask you if your car is already at the shop and you say ‘no my car is broken’.
I hope you see the problem. When your car is broken, you work on getting it fixed. When you don’t have a job you send out resumes. But somehow when people aren’t married, we merely say ‘ah so what shall they do since they aren’t married’? How about getting them married?
Anti-Proof Texting
My hypothesis about why [complementarians] do this is because evangelicalism has an essentially Biblicist view of truth. That is, their view of the Bible is so high that they are unwilling to venture truth claims that can’t be proof texted in the Bible…
Aaron Renn
Let me propose an alternate view. It is because they are cowards. Any serious Bible scholar could sit down and come up with hundreds of nature and role differences mentioned in the Scripture.1 And that’s leaving aside the ‘because I have commanded you’ foundation to the whole issue.
Now let’s deal with the nonsense of ‘truth claims that can’t be proof texted’ straw man. First of all, let’s not use the weasel words ‘proof texted’. Proof texting is a legitimate way of formatting statements of faith. It is not how they are created in the first place.
What we are talking about here is whether a truth claim comes from the Scriptures, is in accord with the Scriptures, or is in contradiction to the Scriptures. The Scriptures either literally teach this, teach principles that allow for this, or teach against this. An understanding of Scripture does not permit any other category.
The category that the complementarians are actually dealing with is, “Scripture teaches something that I am afraid to acknowledge.” The category that mathematical proofs and chemistry experiments fit into is ‘Scripture teaches principles that allow for this.” And nonsense such as evolution and methodological naturalism falls under, “Scripture teaches against this.”
Smart Girl Child Rearing
How can women develop their talents, inclinations, and potentialities in areas beyond being a housewife and child rearing? The point is not to denigrate the role of wife and mother or to say women shouldn’t pursue those things. But is that all they should do?
The obvious case here is the high IQ woman. I didn’t screen shot it but saw at least one person suggesting that what highly intelligent women should be doing is having lots of smart babies. Maybe they should have babies, but shouldn’t they be able to directly develop and utilize their intelligence too? The same could be true for many other interests and talent
Aaron Renn
The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior. Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
GK Chesterton
On a notes thread someone said that they believed that patriarchs were calling for eugenics because they were calling for bright women to have children. As if we weren’t also calling for less bright and even medium brightness women to have children.
There are hundreds of things that brilliant women can be doing while performing their God given roles as women. But there is nothing ‘beyond’ those roles, because those roles, themselves, are of infinite depth and breadth.
What do they teach in these schools?
I’ve noted multiple times before that this defines manhood entirely in terms of how a man relates to a woman. (The definition of womanhood is similar in this regard).
Aaron Renn
There are two problems with the above quote. First of all, it isn’t true. Even in his article he speaks of his opponents of calling women to have children. Which requires a man, and sometimes produces a man, but isn’t a definition in terms of a man.
And it totally misunderstands how definitions work. When you have a definition for a subset of something, you define the subset in terms of the larger set or, in this case, the other half of the larger set. When you wish to speak of what the entire set does, you do not typically do it in the definition of the subset.
So if Aaron wishes to know what a man is within the larger context, what God calls mankind to do, there exists entire theology books on the subject.
And while we’re at it, what’s with going to one little statement by a group of men and pretending as if that one little statement was their entire theology on the subject? The Apostles Creed does not quote the entire Scripture, that wasn’t its job. It was a simple statement of faith which assumed that for harder questions you would look them up in Bible!
Those Brilliant Sociologists
One of the things that makes the Catholic writer Stephen B. Clark’s 1980 book Man and Woman in Christ so superior to the evangelical treatments of the subject is that he devoted a significant amount of space to looking at what the social sciences - anthropology, psychology, and sociology - have to say about gender. Evangelicals aren’t willing to do this for some reason.
Aaron Renn
The irony of writing a book ‘Man and Woman in Christ’ and then devoting a significant amount of space to what social sciences say about ‘gender’. I wonder how much they had to say about ‘Christ’. And if, as I suspect, they said nothing about Christ, then they could say nothing about ‘in Christ’. And if they say nothing about ‘in Christ’, then how could they say anything about ‘Man and Woman in Christ’? And if they say nothing about that, then why would you think that they should be included?
If I read a scholarly study about the difference in blood sugar levels between men and women, or the red blood count averages for a woman at different times of the month, I fully appreciate the work that secular scholars do. That information could be quite useful in taking care of men and women during a medical crisis.
But when one looks at the nature of men and women, just about the last people on Earth that one should turn to are people who have pronounced that God must be ruled out as an explanation for anything. Modern sciences, dedicated to ‘methodological naturalism’, has castrated its ability to say anything, anything at all, about a theology of Man and Woman. Most of them stutter incoherently when asked to define a woman!
Conclusion
But speak thou the things which become sound doctrine:
That the aged men be sober, grave, temperate, sound in faith, in charity, in patience.
The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things; That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands,
that the word of God be not blasphemed.
Young men likewise exhort to be sober minded.
In all things shewing thyself a pattern of good works: in doctrine shewing uncorruptness, gravity, sincerity, Sound speech, that cannot be condemned; that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you.
Titus 2:1-8
The most important aspect of our understanding of man and woman is this… that they were created. Created intentionally and purposely by the God of the universe. That was and is the most important aspect of manhood and womanhood mentioned in the Danver’s statement, and one of those that Aaron skipped in his summary.
If you came about by random chance in a chaotic and purposeless universe then, well, eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die. But if you are a created being, created with a purpose, then that fact is the foundation for everything that you think and do.
At one point Aaron denigrated moderns who homeschooled with the statement ‘that is ahistorical’. As if, somehow, following history was the be all and end all of our goal as men and women, husband’s and wives, father’s and mothers! To follow the trail of history!
We live in a society (and it is not unique) that denigrates manhood, womanhood, and, above all, the creator of men and women, at every turn. Our churches struggle to produce a coherent response, not because Scripture doesn’t offer one, but because they fear the culture they are responding to.
Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Links
Patriarchy Discussion
and I are discussing patriarchy. I’m in favour and think it inevitable. J.S… not so much.
The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Laying some foundation.
The Blessings of the Breast and the Womb: // Podcast Version The role of pregnancy, lactation, and raising children in the inevitability of patriarchy.
What is Marriage // Podcast Version: Adding the issue of marriage, and discussing meritocracy and inheritance.
Differences Make Differences: // Podcast Version Given the differences between men and women, could it be that boys are wired to do their jobs and girls are wired to do theirs?
Not in the letter exchange, but on subject:
What is a man? A response to
on the subject.
The Feminist Problem with Patriarchy: // Podcast Version Some logical issues that feminists have when discussing patriarchy.
Virginity, Chastity, and Children // Podcast version: In a natalist society women go through two phases of life.
Single Income Lots of Kids: The old lifestyle that contrasts with the modern perversions.
Does the Stereotypical Woman have a Vagina? // Podcast Version Is it ‘prejudice’ to say women were designed to bear children?
Misogyny and Agency: // Podcast Version Is it misogyny to say that women are human beings with agency?
Gender Roles: Should you be judged on how well your fulfil your gender roles?
The Modern Problem with Math: // Podcast Version When it comes to kids, modern people can’t count.
INCHEL: // Podcast Version: Involuntarily Childless Women
Generational Wealth: The Foundation
Rights, Wrongs, and Affirming Gender
Depopulation Solutions: Can we solve our fertility crisis?
Problem with Patterns of Patriarchy
Fundamental Contradictions
Delphic Penumbra
The Definition of Dog: Can two men marry?
Note that I said ‘could’ here, not ‘would’.