Your salvation is not tied to your interpretation of gender roles (complementarianism). Period. What’s more, you can still believe in biblical inerrancy – the belief that the Bible is true, accurate, and “God-breathed” – and NOT subscribe to fundamentalist beliefs (more on that in a minute).
Maybe you read that paragraph and thought, “yes, I believe that.” Maybe you even are complementarian and think that. Great!
But that’s not how Conservative Evangelicals teach complementarianism…
Inerrancy, in a Nut Shell
If you google inerrancy, you get a lot of long articles. Basically, it’s that the Bible is true and accurate. You’ll often see the phrase “God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16). That’s a good belief. I think every Christian should believe in that.
However, it’s often tied to fundamentalist beliefs – which means that everything is taken literally. For example, God created the world in a literal 24 hour day and it took six days to do so; or the flood covered the entire world, not just a portion of the Middle East. Barr reminisces about being told this, with her Bible study teachers saying, “if you don’t accept Genesis literally, creation and the flood, you might as well throw out the rest of the Bible.”[1]
I had similar experiences, probably a decade or so later. One experience stands out in my mind.
We watched a Ken Hamm video where he talked about creation and dinosaurs. In his presentation, he made it clear that if we didn’t believe in a Young Earth Creation (the earth is only 6,000 years old), then we were questioning the veracity of the entire Bible. I remember confessing to my Bible study that up until that moment, I had believed in Old Earth Creation (believing the earth was millions of years old). But now, I understood my sin and knew better.
When I got home, I told my parents all about it – and was shocked to hear they’d heard of this debate. They said it could be either. I remember thinking how sad that they couldn’t see the truth. (Remember when I talked about the younger evangelicals being radicalized? This is a snapshot of how this happened.)
Inerrancy and Women
But how did this effect women? First, let’s look at Ephesians 5:21-33 in full:
21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body. 31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Barr has an excellent analysis of what inerrant, fundamentalists (people who believe the Bible is true and should be taken literally) have done with this passage:
“If Ephesians 5 told wives to submit to their husbands, the plain and literal interpretation demands that wives submit to their husbands. Those who disagree were not faithful to Scripture. And just like that, evangelicals baptized patriarchy. Women could not preach and had to submit – not because their bodies were too flawed or their minds too weak [previous reasons used], but because God had decreed it through Paul’s inerrant writings. Those who doubt these biblical truths doubt the truth of the Bible itself.”[2]
Here we see the culmination of the themes we’ve looked at. How evangelicals believe they are the only true followers of scripture. That their translations are the only ones that are accurate. And that if you differ in interpretation, you aren’t a true believer.
What I Believe
The thing is, I do believe the Bible is inerrant. But I’ve also come to believe in the cultural bias of the writer. I’m not always sure how both go hand in hand, but I know they do. It’s an ambiguity that’s part of faith: that God is who I’ve always believed him to be (that is, loving, gracious, and desiring us to experience freedom in Him); and yet, He also uses writers who are steeped in a particular culture with that cultures biases.
I do believe the flood covered the entire globe; but I also know that ancient writers often talked about the earth in terms of what they knew. So the entire earth could be every civilization they knew of. It could be either; a different interpretation doesn’t make the Bible less true.
Of Husbands and Wives
In regards to Ephesians 5:21-33, I believe Paul was writing to the people of that culture – where a husband’s word held life and death over his wife. In the Greco-Roman world, the wives had to legally submit; and so Paul gives them a godly reason to do this. We do the same thing when we apply the Bible to our own cultural issues. And yet, it is to the husbands that Paul gives most of his commands, telling them they must not abuse their power.
For our culture, I believe that husbands and wives should be submitting to each other (Eph. 5:21). I believe we should be “bearing with one another in love” (Eph. 4:2), understanding where our short comings are and pointing each other to Christ. And Isn’t it interesting how that verse comes before Ephesians 5:21-22? I believe Paul was giving an overall way to live and then giving specific examples on how his audience could carry it out in their day. This does not make the Bible less true, or “inerrant.”
But I understand why people believe that wives must submit; I really do. I can see multiple interpretations in keeping with an inerrant view of the Bible.
But that is not the way inerrancy is taught. Inerrancy emphasizes only one interpretation of a Bible passage. It makes it so if you don’t believe in that single interpretation, then you aren’t really a Christian.
It effectively ties non-salvation issues to the Gospel in ways that make it impossible for people to question and wrestle with it. And this is dangerous.
No. It’s sinful.
Why Am I Writing This?
If you want to know why deconstructing millennials are leaving the church, this is it. They’ve been taught that fundamentalist teaching – which complementarianism is a part of – is the only way to interpret the Bible. If you question one thing, you’re questioning everything. If you stop believing one thing, you no longer believe any of it. Boom, no longer a Christian.
Once again, Barr sums up the issue that so many of us who are deconstructing are facing: she believed “that adhering to complementarianism [was] the only option for those who believe the Bible is the authoritative Word of God.”[3]
So we leave.
The travesty is that the loving, gracious God of the Bible is obscured because some are too narrow-minded to see that there can be multiple interpretations of an issue.
This is gatekeeping at its worst, and it is shamefully sinful. Period. In fact, Jesus spoke strongly against this type of behavior (Matt. 23, specifically verses 13-36).
You can believe in multiple interpretations; that doesn’t invalidate the word of God, but rather makes it richer. And yes…you can view it from only a fundamentalist point of view. That’s ok, too.
But don’t you dare gatekeep belief in God. Don’t you dare bar the gates of heaven. That is what this movement has done, and it needs to end.
Salvation is not tied to complementarian belief. It’s tied to the cross of Christ. That’s the only hill worth dying on, and the irony is we don’t have to – Jesus did.
So stop dying on the hill of complementarianism – or even fundamentalism, for that matter. Jesus didn’t die on that hill. Neither should you.
Notes
[1] Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press, 2021),188.
[2] Barr, 190.
[3] Ibid., 204.
