Theological Reflection on Male-Female Complementarity
At the recent Festival of Theology, nosotros heard 8 fascinating presentations on a range of subjects. I have previously posted John Allister on drawing on secular insights in ministry, and Alistair Roberts on virtue ethics in an age of social media. This is a revised version of David Shepherd'due south presentation on theological perspectives on male-female person complementarity—in which he reaches some surprising conclusions.
In her Chicago University Constabulary School newspaper, The role of the popes in the invention of complementarity, Professor Mary Ann Case makes this bold exclamation: 'I tin notice no trace of sexual complementarity in the Gospels.' Her claim which would resonate with many ardent feminists and same-sex marriage supporters both within and exterior of the Church of England. For they believe that the concept of complementarity is patriarchal, oppressive and a recent subpoena to the trajectory towards greater equality in Christian tradition. In improver to this exclamation, Tobias Haller (the author of Reasonable and Holy, which has become a pregnant theological sourcebook for those who affirm same-sex sexual relationships) challenged me on complementarity in an exchange on the Thinking Anglicans weblog:
Y'all are mistaken on complementarity…Something is complementary when it goes to make upward for what is defective in some other thing.
In testing their claims, the dictionary definition of complementarity yields the following descriptions:
- A relationship or situation in which 2 or more different things improve or emphasize each other'due south qualities
- the concept of contrasting characteristics which together account for a phenomenon in a manner that each cannot define separately.
As an instance of the latter, we know that lite exhibits a form of complementarity, known as moving ridge-particle duality. Wave and particle characteristics are both contributory and integral to our understanding of light. So, in terms of this integral complementarity, a physicist would never suggest that the behaviour of light as a particle makes up for its deficiency in wave properties. Therefore, to believe in male-female complementarity, as a Christian, is to believe that God has imparted differences between the sexes:
- To enhance each other in the mission of founding bonds of natural kinship;
- To emulate that mission, where appropriate, in the wider community (e.m. 1 Tim. v:one,ii).
This is not the same as believing that God created static and stereotypical differences between the sexes. What are the issues arising from the question of male-female complementarity in dominical, churchly and patristic teaching?
Dominical instruction
Farther on in her paper, Mary Ann Case also suggests that the argument from complementarity originated with Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), simply was developed in the 20th century past Dietrich von Hildebrand and Edith Stein. Even so, in reflecting on the NT, this view dismisses the most significant scriptural locus of debates over male-female complementarity, which is Jesus' own teaching from the Genesis narrative.
Curiously, in the Theology of Marriage report prepared by the Scottish Episcopal Church building'south (SEC) Doctrine Committee, Gen. one is mentioned once to highlight a decision favouring the orthodox position from Church building of Wales written report. Paragraph 96 of the SEC written report reads:
Opposition as expressed in the quotation from the Church building in Wales Report (para. 59) is becoming circular. Clearly, if marriage is defined as an exclusive lifelong relationship between ane and one woman, same-sex partnerships will not count every bit union. But the matter under consideration is whether nosotros are bound to that definition, or whether in that location is do good in expanding it.
Now, this allegation of question-begging might exist valid, if Gen 1:28 was just invoked in response to the much broader question: 'is non-heterosexual union immoral?' And Jesus might take courted similar criticism, if his reply was in response to the question: 'is divorce without a crusade immoral?' Instead, we know that Jesus was asked, 'Should a human be allowed to divorce his married woman for but any reason?', i.due east. 'By what authority should a man exist allowed to/prevented from divorcing his married woman for any cause?' His response grounded in the Genesis narrative was 'information technology was not so from the commencement'. Supporters of marriage orthodoxy are not question-begging, but echoing Christ's reply to a similarly framed question: 'By what (scriptural) authorization should a marriage be solely male-female person?'.
So, in Matt. 19, Jesus unites the Priestly (Gen. 1) and Yahwist (Gen. 2) narratives to present the God-given archetype (pattern) of union:
- Male-female person
- Primary organic kinship ('Flesh of my mankind…')
- Monogamy ('What God has joined together…')
Despite this, we should remember that the gospels tape Jesus every bit challenging patriarchal notions of fractional complementarity. For instance, Mary'southward faith gave her precedence in existence first to see the risen Christ.
Apostolic Teaching
In one Cor. 11:11,12, St. Paul explains that:
Even so, in the Lord adult female is not contained of man, nor is man contained of woman. For every bit adult female came from man, so also man is born of woman.
So, when complementarity is biblically defined, it should be explained as mutual male-female interdependence. In describing male-female polarisation equally the result of the Autumn, Pope John Paul II wrote of Gen. 3:sixteen:
This 'domination' indicates the disturbance and loss of the stability of that fundamental equality which the human being and the woman possess in the 'unity of the ii': and this is specially to the disadvantage of the woman" (Medico, x)
Apostolic writings, specially Paul, constitute our central equality (1 Cor. 11:11,12; 1 Cor. 7:four-6), but with differing emphases for husbands, wives and children. These are owing to missional differences which fulfil differing kinship responsibilities, rather than ontological differences. The mission of spouses is to found and sustain caring bonds of loving natural kinship, whether affinal (Eph. 5:25-27), or lineal (Eph. 6:4; Col. 3:21).
A proficient alternative case of complementarity is the Church's purpose and mission, described in Eph. iv:thirteen. The corresponding gifts and ministries bestowed upon members of the Church are describedas complementary to each other (one Cor. 12:21). This is what I call missional or vocational complementarity.
Nosotros as well demand to distinguish complementarity from compatibility. Andrew Davison (author ofAmazing Dear and member of the 2022 Education Certificate working party) wrote the following in a piece entitled: 'Gender what difference does it actually brand' (Church Times 4/04/2017):
If opposite-sexual activity partners are not automatically complementary, so the only manner to gauge whether they are is to see whether their human relationship works in practice. Such a shift towards the empirical is perilous for opponents of same-sex activity relationships, since information technology is plainly that some same-sexual practice couples are complementary, are compatible. The two people work together, which is why their human relationship lasts.
Yet, this statement conflates complementarity with the 'straw human being' of compatibility. Complementary and compatible are not synonymous.
Church Fathers
The era of the Church building Fathers spanned from c. AD 100 – 451. Several writings (Cloudless of Alexandria; John Chrysostom; Tertullian) comprise celebrations of both the virtue of Christian union and consecrated virginity. Consequently, they opposed Gnostic contempt for God-given material apotheosis and marriage.
In debating the Valentinians, St. Cloudless wrote:
Only they who corroborate of spousal relationship say, nature has adapted us for marriage, as is evident from the structure of our bodies, which are male and female.
In refuting Julius Cassinus, Clement cites Gal. iii:28 as a statement that unity in Christ involves abandoning, not embracing desire:
Only when a man gives in neither to wrath nor to desire, both of which increase in consequence of evil addiction and upbringing so equally to deject and obscure rational thought, but puts off from him the darkness they cause with penitence and shame, uniting spirit and soul in obedience to the Word, then, equally Paul also says, "there is among yous neither male person nor female." (Stromata 3.xiii)
In her afore-mentioned paper, Professor Case invokes St. Paul's authority on the matter, writing: 'When he speaks of equality, it is equality in non-differentiation'. Despite this, those who back up the church affidavit of same-sex sexual relationships are wont to assert that this scripture is inclusive of sexual want and is the scriptural footing for abolishing male-female person complementarity from every aspect of man endeavour, including and especially union.
Others have asserted that, in Gen. 2, it is not difference, just likeness, by which Adam is drawn to Eve through the God-given impetus for marriage. So, in the Church Times, Andrew Davison wrote:
Adam's first response to Eve was to her similarity with him – "this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh'—non to her difference." Yet, in the Good of Union, Augustine states:
God willed to create all men out of ane, in guild that they might be held in their society not merely by likeness of kind (generis), but also by bond of kindred (cognationis vinculo tenerentu).
So, across just likeness of kind, marriage imparts this God-given organic kinship as a common bond wrought through sexual differentiation (1 Cor. xi:12). St. Paul returns to Genesis to explain male person-female person interdependence as the effect of their reciprocal derivation from each other. It is this bond of kinship which prompted Adam's proclamation. Furthermore, St. Augustine describes spousal relationship as 'the first natural bond of human being society is man and wife'. Therefore, significantly, instead this bond being based on similarity (Gen. 2:23), he highlights that Adam and Eve were joined by the bond of natural kinship (Gen. 2:24).
In the aforementioned instruction on union, Augustine also explained that, procreation bated, the enduring good of marriage is the natural alliance betwixt the sexes (naturalem in diverso sexu societatem):
There is skilful ground to inquire for what reason it exist a good. And this seems not to me to exist merely on account of the bearing of children, just also on business relationship of the natural guild itself in a departure of sex. Otherwise it would not any longer be called union in the instance of old persons, especially if either they had lost sons, or had given birth to none.
In the Law of Obligations, Reinhard Zimmerman writes of Roman times that: 'societas is not based primarily on an antagonism of interests; its essence is the pooling of resources such equally money, property, or labour for a common purpose.' Therefore, fifty-fifty if nosotros agree that procreation is not essential to marriage, we cannot eliminate this gendered natural alliance of male-female deviation (naturalem in diverso sexu societatem) from the enduring good of union without rejecting a primal conclusion of the most significant treatise on marriage in patristic tradition.
How do these relate to the question of Gnostic dualism? Gnostic dualism contrasted the ethereal other-worldly goodness of spirit and light with the transient worthlessness of flesh and matter. Consequently, Gnostics held that anything which perpetuated our God-given physical embodiment (including marriage and procreation) was to exist rejected as evil, or, at best, inconsequential past comparison with spiritual pursuits.
Fast frontward to the 17th Century and Descartes' heed-torso dualism ('I think, therefore I am') gave precedence to the mind over the torso, conceiving the former to be essential and indicative of the true person, whereas the latter is relatively inconsequential to who nosotros really are. Modern-day Gnostics have quoted Gospel of Thomas 22, as an encouragement to explore their sexuality. In New Dawn magazine, Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller wrote in support of this:
It is generally understood that at the non-physical level, people are not limited to their bodily gender. Jesus declared in the Gnostic scriptures that he "came to brand the male person and the female into a unmarried one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female person." [Gospel of Thomas Maxim 22] We may take this to hateful that in order to attain to the Wholeness of the Pleroma, all persons are striving toward a spiritual androgyny. In the hyletic phase of evolution this frequently manifests as polymorphous bisexuality, in the psychic phase every bit homosexuality, and in the pneumatic phase it moves increasingly into the area of a spiritually based androgyny. None of these are sinful or should be condemned in Gnostic thinking.
The thought of a "crime against nature" is meaningless to the Gnostic, for our nature is not merely physical nature, such as our gender, but our total nature inside which all dualities exist. When asked about homosexuality, the bang-up mod Gnostic C.1000. Jung merely said:
Well, they are the only people who are trying doing something against over-population. The attraction of persons of the same gender toward each other meets with the near powerful taboos of the patriarchal-psychic phases of cultural evolution and is therefore encumbered by many unnecessary ideas and apprehensions.
Today, gnosticism also finds expression in identity essentialism, where the body is merely the vehicle and the over-painted canvas of cocky-identification.
In the SEC Doctrine Committee'due south Theology of Marriage, this Gnostic precedence of the mind is continued:
It is the way people treat each other that counts, non the shape of the fleshly tools they utilise to express this. As we understand circumcision to be of the center and non the penis, so the way in which we must care for each other sexually is dictated by the center and the Spirit and not the genitals.
This is an anti-incarnational false dichotomy, which sets up a false distinction betwixt how we should employ both mind and body in relationship to others. Information technology is also Hellenistic virtue ideals, which presumes that evidence (read, whatever declaration) of a virtuous motivation ('I ended her life out of compassion. I couldn't await for marriage considering I was and so in love.') is a true bellwether of right and wrong, rather than the deportment in themselves, or foreseeable consequences of them.
What are the dangers of male person-female stereotypes and the problems with a complementary 'essentialism'?When we compare the ongoing debates over LGBT inclusion, the Church affirmation of aforementioned-sex sexual relationships and women bishops, the common thread is the repeated dispute between essentialists and constructivists on both sides. Every bit recently as last year, the Nashville Statement was issued as a confessional declaration of biological essentialism:
We Affirm that the differences between male person and female reproductive structures are integral to God's design for self-conception every bit male or female.
WE DENY that physical anomalies or psychological weather nullify the God-appointed link betwixt biological sexual activity and cocky-conception equally male or female.
In 2012, the Church of England response to the Government's SSM Consultation revealed similar essentialism:
Matrimony has from the outset of history been the way in which societies have worked out and handled issues of sexual difference. To remove from the definition of marriage this essential complementarity is to lose any social institution in which sexual deviation is explicitly best-selling.
In dissimilarity, in Marie-Amélie George legal report, Expressive Ends: Understanding Conversion Therapy Bans, we read:
In brusque, whether sexual orientation is in fact immutable, many individuals experience information technology as such and it forms a constitutive part of their identity. Gays and lesbians consequently form a "quasi-ethnicity" based on a shared "fixed, natural essence, a cocky with same-sexual activity desires," which provides the ground for claims of status-based discrimination.
Equally i author has explained:
At its core, essentialism assumes at minimum that a pure and perfect definition of a item thing can be found…that some definition can be framed that is irreducible in the sense that information technology has all the necessary descriptors and no unnecessary ones, and that is constitutive in the sense that, something exists wherever the qualities described by those terms appear in a single thing.
In an substitution of comments on Dr. Mike Higton'south blog, I agreed with him that: 'the map of sexual differences is non a map with two singled-out territories: it is much messier than that'. Yet, I maintained: 'nevertheless we also simplify nationality, when nosotros know it's much more than complex than our current legal/cultural models allow'.
The key danger of both male-female stereotypes and complementary 'essentialism' is that (as much every bit sexual identity essentialism) they beget unwarranted and exploitative generalisations about how men and women should collaborate, whereas St. Paul was specific in urging but husbands and wives to model their human relationship on the mystery of Christ and His church. While the Church community should emulate these bonds of kinship, where appropriate, Pauline theology cannot exist extended into a blanket need for all male-female person interactions to conform to this model.
These kinds of essentialism (whether biological gender or sexual identity variants) also have the potential to polarise whatever discussion into irreconcilable conflicts over the characteristics which should irreducibly ascertain human being personhood.
Does a 'missional complementarity' provide a ameliorate alternative to the electric current misuse of Trinitarian theology in this area?
Some have fifty-fifty predicated complementary essentialism upon the nature of God. So, Carrie Sandom explained the view of Reform that: 'God'south discussion demands a complementarity of roles that has its roots in the Godhead itself'. Notwithstanding, this basis for complementarity has been strongly contested as based upon a heretical Eternal Subordination of the Son. So, we should re-iterate that: 'The trinity is non our social program'!
In contrast, sexual identity essentialism seeks to reify the impossible. So, there are courtroom cases in which same-sex couples demand that marriage law should exist gender-neutralised to impart them with articulation principal parental recognition, thereby extinguishing a child's correct to its known natural father. (e.thou. Thing of Q.1000. vs. B.C. (New York); In re: Chiliad.C. (California). The International Lesbian and Gay Clan wants parenthood to be 'regardless of genetic connection'.
Missional complementarity has its basis in scripture (Eph. iv:11,12; Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:21) 'The center cannot say to the manus, I have no demand of yous.' God'southward mission can involve different callings to different segments of social club. God'due south calling tin can exist:
- Personal, e.g. the OT prophets, such as Samuel, Isaiah and Jeremiah; Peter and Paul – Gal 2:8; Barnabus and Paul – Acts 13:2
- Corporate, e.k. Levites – Num. 1:47-54, Israel – Ex. 19:five,six; church building – i Cor. 1:2; Heb. iii:ane.
- Complementary in emphases, e.g. wealth (James 2:five, i Tim. 6:18); marital status (1 Cor. seven:35, Deut. 24:5); widowhood (1 Tim. 5:9-12); historic period and sex (Titus 2)
These segments within the Church received diverse callings to complementary missions in the world, but all in pursuit of their united, common purpose in Christ. For the married, the scripture's commands are gendered, reflecting their complementary contributions to the mission of kinship formation. In terms of the apostolic authority, St. Paul differentiates the mission of husband and wife as they emulate the mission of Christ and the Church: 'Husbands love your wives; wives obey your husbands.' It'south worth noting that, equally some do today, Peter similarly questioned the mission which Christ gave him:
'Jesus said, "Feed my sheep. Very truly I tell y'all, when y'all were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are quondam you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will apparel you and lead you lot where y'all do not want to go." Jesus said this to point the kind of decease by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me! Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them…When Peter saw him, he asked, "Lord, what well-nigh him?" Jesus answered, "If I want him to remain live until I return, what is that to you? Y'all must follow me." (John 12:17 – 22)
So, in place of implacable essentialism on all sides, I would suggest that information technology is the mission of founding and protecting natural kinship and its emulation, but simply where appropriate, in order, which requires male-female complementarity. If we can accept a missional complementarity in ministry which is not fractional, but integral, then we can accept the same for marriage in its mission of founding and extending the bonds of natural kinship.
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