A ‘fierce’ book on complementarianism

RECOVERING FROM BIBLICAL MANHOOD AND
WOMANHOOD:
How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her
Purpose
By Aimee Byrd
Zondervan Reflective. 224 pages. £12.99
ISBN 978 0 310 108 719

If you are a reader of Christian blogs or active in the Christian Twittersphere you can’t have missed mention of Aimee Byrd.

A co-host of The Mortification of Spin podcast, speaker and writer, this year she published her fourth book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose. Storms of strong opinion have been stirred up by this; according to some Byrd is a courageous saint, speaking necessary truth to abusive oppressors; for others she is a dangerous liberal, even a (horror of horrors!) feminist. As usual, the truth is neither of those extremes.

Aimee Byrd is about the same age as me, and like me encountered Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem,1991) as she was leaving university and getting married. For her and many of my generation this big book of essays defending complementarianism (the belief that some governing/teaching callings in the church should be held only by suitably gifted men, and that husbands and wives have distinct, non-reversible callings) was of great significance. Here was an often-beautiful picture which depicted submission not as oppression but as a Christlike strength and great ballast for those in leadership under pressure to deny the Bible’s teaching. There may have been aspects of application which seemed old-fashioned or culturally limited, but on the whole the book centred on sound Biblical exegesis.

The need to recover?

But times have changed, and Byrd now claims that we need to ‘recover’ from this teaching. She remains committed to a broadly complementarian practice in church and home, but disavows the label and much of the teaching which went with it. In Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Byrd’s treatment of Scripture is fresh and insightful as she shows how integral the female voice is to the Bible itself and to the growth of the church in the New Testament. Likewise, her insistence that Christian men and women are first and foremost repentant sinners who need to work together to enjoy and proclaim Christ is spot on.

When she attacks complementarianism, however, Byrd’s arguments are less sensitive. She claims that the categories of Biblical manhood and womanhood lead to all kinds of trouble. First, that men and women have different spiritual needs, and then reducing Christian living to issues of submission and authority. Women are palmed off with fluff, whereas men get serious theology. In the church, women’s gifts and voices are sidelined or seen as dangerous. Parachurch organisations gain too much power, marketing their resources to hungry women. Some of this is surely true, in some places.

From where I’m standing, however, I see loads of rigorous resources which are aimed at, or accessible to women. I see women trained in theology, and paid to serve in churches, taking responsibility for a variety of ministries. In sermons, I don’t hear discipleship for men and women being discussed differently, and I have heard plenty of talks on marriage in which submission and headship are presented as Christlike sacrifice and reasoned response, not as governance and unquestioning obedience. There’s definitely progress to be made, especially in how male church leaders listen to female insights and promote their voices, but the UK Reformed church is on the way.

Taking the extreme

One of the problems seems to be that Byrd takes complementarianism at its most extreme and sees this as representing the whole. I have sympathy with her anger, as she’s received hideous misogynistic abuse online from supposedly mature Christians. Extremes of male authoritarianism really do exist. But Byrd blames this on the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and particularly, the Danvers Statement (1989), for implying that all women must submit to all men, which they transparently do not do. Expressed in terms of victimhood and patriarchy, complementarianism is depicted as something which has been used to trap and deceive women. The danger of this misrepresentation is that many, especially a younger generation who have absorbed the universal secular suspicion of powerful men, will reject not just the wicked extremes, but also the Biblical understanding of complementarianism.

The same method of argument is evident when Byrd addresses the view that the Son of God is in some way in submission to the Father eternally, not just in the incarnation. This controversial position, which many would say undermines the equality and unity of the Godhead, has been promoted by some complementarian writers as a model for a wife’s submission to her husband. For Byrd, (who ignores the long and ongoing debate around the relationship between the incarnation and the eternal relations of the Trinity), the use of this theological position fatally discredits the complementarian movement, even though many never held it and others have moved away from it more recently.

This is a fierce book. It says much that is true, good and important, but also sustains a narrative which may do harm. As the church moves forward, we must surely call out abuse and scrutinise our culture, but do so carefully, working together to promote gospel unity.