Men and Women in the Church by Kevin DeYoung

Thinking about a woman's place

Early on in Men and Women in the Church: A Short, Biblical, Practical Introduction (Crossway), Kevin DeYoung explains that his aim in writing the book was to provide a resource that people in his church lobby could pick up that “explained the Bible’s teachings about men and women in the church in a way that the interested layperson could understand and in a size that he or she could read in a few hours” (16). In this, he was partly successful. It is certainly short—the book has only 137 pages of text, not including an interesting appendix. And he certainly covers a broad range of material, from the relevant biblical passages to the ways complementarian doctrine ought to play out practically. But, I think, his concision works against him. The topic of men and women in the church is too big to tackle in such bite-sized portions. This book will convince no one who does not already agree with him, and even those who agree will wonder if these are really the best arguments for his position.

DeYoung is a complementarian. As he puts it, “I believe that God’s design is for men to lead, serve, and protect, and that, in the church, women can thrive under this leadership as they too labor with biblical faithfulness and fidelity according to the wisdom and beauty of God’s created order” (19). And he marshals the biblical text in many ways that are responsible. He sensibly points out that, though in Genesis, man and woman are created with equal worth and dignity, they have different roles, which are executed in particular ways, both in their initial design and in their respective punishments for sin. He explicates the, perhaps for some, inconvenient truth that when the Apostle Paul writes, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet,” in 1 Timothy 2:12, such an admonition is grounded not in cultural matters, but in the order of creation itself. And, in many ways, he strikes a helpful tone throughout much of the book. (This is especially important, as too many complementarians have engaged in boorish behavior toward women.) He emphasizes that the submission, which Paul calls for women in Ephesians 5 toward their husbands, “is a submission freely given, never forcibly taken” (66). He quotes John Calvin: “The man who does not love his wife is a monster” (72). (File that away for a future sermon!) And DeYoung shows himself to be a fair interlocutor with those with whom he disagrees, never making one’s opinion on the matter the essence of the gospel truth. He ought to be commended for that!

There were, for this reader at least, some downsides. In attempting to show that, in the Bible, only men exercised official leadership, DeYoung unnecessarily negates Deborah’s position as a judge because she “did not exercise a military function” (37), even though she certainly exercises the other capacities of a judge, considering that “the people of Israel came up to her for judgment” (Judges 4:5). Though he certainly did not mean it this way, his writing on women’s roles could tend toward the condescending: At one point, in relaying all the things women can do in the church (positive!), he notes that they can “bring meals, sew curtains, send care packages, and throw baby showers” (94). (A little tone-deaf, Kevin!)

Most frustratingly, he continued a serious trinitarian error that some complementarians have made for years now. It stems from this verse, in 1 Corinthians 11:3: “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” Here is how DeYoung, and many other complementarians, understand the word “head” (kephale) used here: that it means some kind of authority. Thus, for Deyoung and others, “we should understand 1 Corinthians 11:3 as saying that Christ has authority over mankind; the husband has authority over his wife … ; and God has authority over Christ” (51). This sort of argumentation has led many complementarians to argue that Christ has eternal functional subordination to the Father, that, while the Father and the Son are, in essence, equal, functionally, the Son is subordinate, underneath, under the authority of the Father. There is a logical-consistency issue with this view—why would the Trinitarian God reveal himself functionally in ways that were at odds with his eternal essence? (Is God some kind of magician, using sleight-of-hand to trick us?) And there is a theological issue—Jesus says, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Are they really one if the Son is somehow subordinate to the Father? And if the Son is actually subordinate than the Father, how, exactly, does he accomplish our atonement on the cross?

There are many thorny issues with this view. I find Madison Pierce’s treatment, in the very good Trinity Without Hierarchy: Reclaiming Nicene Orthodoxy in Evangelical Theology, edited by Michael F. Bird and Scott Harrower (Kregel), to be very helpful. There, he argues that kephale ought not be understood hierarchically or as somehow dealing with authority, but as dealing with order. The Father is unbegotten, and the Son is eternally begotten from the Father, and they are co-equal in their divinity. As Pierce writes, regarding this passage, “Therefore, should we ground our understanding of gender relationships in the ‘immanent' Trinity’ (or the relationship between the Father and the Son)? No. What Paul offers is one connection between the two relationships. If Paul seeks to establish relative mutuality, but with elements of dissimilarity between the two genders, the relationship between the Father and the Son is a helpful image indeed. It is when we draw too strong a connection between the Trinity and gender dynamics that our interpretations become overdetermined, and we imply that an understanding of the triune nature of God is fully within reach” (TWH, 51). To say it perhaps more simply: while relations between men and women may point to the Triune God, they do not perfectly illustrate them. The relationship between husband and wife is emphatically not akin to the relationship between the Father and the Son. Though DeYoung is rightly careful not to draw any sweeping trinitarian conclusions from 1 Corinthians 11:3, I find his exegetical work to be quite unhelpful on this point.

The complementarian-egalitarian debate is not going away. (That is, the debate between those who believe that the roles of men and women, in marriage and in the church, complement one another but are different, and those who believe that men and women should be able to serve in all of the same roles as one another.) I know and trust many who fall on the complementarian side, and many who fall on the egalitarian side. I myself, along with my denomination, fall in the mushy middle. But I am grateful for DeYoung’s efforts to continue to seek biblical truth. I hope to continue to do so as well.