I was sitting in the van with some colleagues from work. We were on the way back from a series of meetings in Chicago. I was newly engaged at the time; the big day was less than a year away.
Seeing as I was the only unmarried person in the van… and it was a three-hour drive back to Grand Rapids… and my coworkers had plenty of marriage advice to dispense, I was in for an earful, whether I wanted it or not. (As it happened, I did.)
One of my coworkers said to me, “Look, it’s fine if you want to believe all that stuff about husbands leading their wives. Just don’t try to make your marriage work like that — if you want your marriage to work, that is.”
The advice kept on coming.
Sitting behind me, characteristically quiet, was a man named Stan Gundry. Stan was no stranger to the gender roles debate. I was still in diapers when Stan was forced to resign from his teaching post at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute because of his wife’s egalitarian views.
I had heard of Stan long before we ever met. He’s a well-known biblical scholar, respected by even some of the most dedicated proponents of complementarianism. (It probably doesn’t hurt that he’s their publisher, but still.)
I knew Stan had been a complementarian at one point, and I was curious what had changed for him. But I was also a little intimidated by Stan. Or maybe I was just worried his answer might force me to rethink my views. Still, I asked.
Cover design just ain't what it used to be.
As we broke free of the Chicago gridlock, Stan told me his story. I won’t repeat all of it here, because he’s already shared it at length in a post well worth reading, called From Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers to Woman Be Free.
(In case you’re wondering, the title is a reference to two books — one his fundamentalist father gave him and the other a book his wife wrote, which led to his dismissal from Moody.)
Stan told me how when he was a young pastor, his wife started asking questions about the Bible’s teaching on women. He confessed to being troubled by her questions at first — largely because he didn’t have very good answers.
Inspired by his wife (and by his own desire to read the Bible more holistically), Stan began reassessing his views. Gradually, they began to shift.
The final nail in the coffin came when Stan was researching American church history for his doctorate at Chicago’s Lutheran School of Theology.
He told me how one night, he was studying arguments used by 19th-century theologians to justify slavery…
- They argued that slavery was sanctioned by Scripture.
- They said that certain groups of people were intrinsically subordinate to others — by God’s design.
- They accused abolitionists of capitulating to the worldly whims of a godless culture.
- They insisted that to reject slavery was to reject the Word of God.
That night, as Stan was fighting his way home through the Chicago traffic, it dawned on him that he’d heard these arguments before. As Stan later wrote:
In fact, at one time I had used [these arguments] to defend hierarchicalism and argue against egalitarianism. By this time I was close to home and I still remember the exact spot on Manchester Road where it hit me like a flash: Someday Christians will be as embarrassed by the church’s biblical defense of patriarchal hierarchicalism as it is now of the nineteenth century biblical defenses of slavery.
By the time we pulled into Grand Rapids, I was an egalitarian. I came to realize that any theology which insists on subjugating an entire class of people cannot be reconciled with “in the image of God he created them.” It flies in the face of “neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.”
Using the same arguments once used to justify slavery should be a huge red flag that our theology isn’t merely flawed. It’s dangerous. It stands against everything the early church stood for: upending the social structures that kept some people down and creating an alternative community where all could stand on equal footing before the cross.
The next day, I told my fiancé about the conversation on the way home from Chicago, and how I felt that I was called to submit to her just as much as she was to me. Given that we attended a church where women were taught to unilaterally submit to their husbands, I wasn’t sure how this would go over with her.
I should’ve known.
She was already ahead of me.
After nearly 10 wonderful years of marriage, I can say one thing: I’m glad I finally caught up to her.
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P.S. Matthew Paul Turner’s blog has a guest post on Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers by the great-grandson of the book’s fundamentalist author.
Andrew Himes
/ 18 February 2012Ben, thanks so much for this lovely reflection on egalitarianism. I am also a great fan of Stan’s, and I loved his essay on the CBE web site. I am a grandson of John R. Rice, so I have an unusual perspective on the subject (and on the book on “Bossy Wives”). You may be interested in my own book, published last year — “The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family”
Ben Irwin
/ 18 February 2012Thanks, Andrew. I just ordered the book. Looking forward to reading it!
Stan Gundry
/ 19 February 2012And just for the record, I am a fan of Andrew! His is a really good book. Andrew and I got to know each other over a long lunch in San Francisco at ETS last November
randy lemke
/ 20 February 2012I am an outsider following your posts, very interesting and thank you for taking the time to give your thoughts.
I must say though you lost me a bit with this last post. Seriously? suggesting and believing in ‘differing roles’ (as I understand many “so called complimentarians” saying) to slavery? That seems quite the stretch to me?
In saying that, no doubt there are many men who would hold a twisted and more serious view of women being less then men, and perhaps seeing them as property per se. That seems like the exception to me. That is not what I see the main thrust of complimentarianism as portraying, especially in some of the men you have mentioned.
Tim Jahr (@timjahr)
/ 20 February 2012One of the tremendous advantages to marrying above yourself is that your spouse usually is way ahead of you. Well, one of many huge advantages!
Ben Irwin
/ 20 February 2012Randy: thanks for reading. The point of this last post was that if you read the theological literature of the 19th century, then read some of the arguments put forward by modern-day complementarians, you will find some strong parallels between the theological arguments used to justify slavery and those used to justify a hierarchically-based role differentiation between men and women.
I think most egalitarians (myself included) accept that there are differences between men and women, and that these differences “complement” each other in some ways. (In fact, I think you could argue the term “complementarian” would be better applied to our view.) But when someone argues that such differences imply the subordination of one to the other and that such hierarchy is etched into the natural order, that’s where the argument begins to resemble the one made to justify slavery (which was also thought to be based on hierarchical differences between people that were embedded into the natural order).
Tim: indeed.