How men and women can have better conversations about leadership, love, and life together.
“Just pick a side.” This message has come to characterize the intermural, evangelical debate over gender roles. Complementarians versus egalitarians. Choose a team; fly your flag; toe the party line. Only two options. Choose carefully.
Complementarians believe that though men and women are equal in worth, men alone should hold leadership roles in the home and in the church. Egalitarians believe that women and men can share leadership in these roles. There can be an unstated belief that these terms, though unrecognizable to most Christians historically and most non-evangelicals currently, are the sole ways of approaching questions about gender and power. But perhaps there is more to sussing out complex truth than just choosing a side.
The complementarian/egalitarian debate has become so stagnant, entrenched, even predictable, that it feels like a stuffy room, windows pulled tight, dim and dusty. In Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate, New Testament professor Michelle Lee-Barnewall seeks to open the windows, let some fresh air in, and set a table where the conversation can begin anew—with new starting points and new questions.
New Lenses
Lee-Barnewall’s analysis of the blind spots that arise in fixed arguments is indeed helpful, not only in the complementarian-egalitarian debate, but in any debate that has become over-brittle and calcified. She writes: “If the question is ‘Is it A or B?’ then there is no option to answer ‘C,’ or even ‘5’ or “blue.’ As a result, there is little room or inclination to explore areas that may provide a different or more nuanced answer.” If we approach the subject ...
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