Category: Review

So I am almost done. On Monday I talked about the things I liked in the Kellers’ book The Meaning of Marriage. On Tuesday I introduced how they argued for a complementarian understanding of gender roles, which I felt was a strange turn for the book to take. Yesterday I tried to demonstrate how natural theology is under the surface of that argument. Today I get to the real objection I have with the book, which is how underneath it all, the Kellers draw on a tenuous theology of the Trinity to develop their theories on gender roles. This is an alarming way to address a relatively open question. It is both problematic that they use such treasures to resolve a minor problem but also how dangerous is their use them.

This is a real problem, which I think justifies all these thousands of words expanded on it.

The Real Problem Is The Trinitarian Machinery of the Argument
I hope it is clear that I have huge respect for the Kellers. And the considered reader will realise that this entire complementarian edifice cannot be built simply on the natural categories I discussed yesterday. On page 200, in the succeeding chapter, they come back to the empty-set that is masculine and feminine and they re-assert that they don’t want them to be defined: “it is nearly impossible to come up with a single, detailed, and very specific set of ‘manly’ or ‘womanly’ characteristics.”

So I propose that the natural theology argument that I went over yesterday is just a habit that is slipped into, a common coin in American evangelicalism that can be traded in without ever noticing that you are passing counterfeit currency. The real machinery of the argument is the source of the major problem I have with this book.

The Kellers lock down their complementarian gender roles argument by reference to the Trinity.

I’ll let that settle in.

The entire question of Christianity could be summed up by asking, “Who do we call when we call on the name ‘God’?” The early church was made up of radically monotheistic Jews and confusingly pantheistic pagans who came to the conclusion that when you call on the name Jesus you call on God. Over time, as they grappled with what it meant to worship this God-who-begets-the-son-Jesus-who-comforts-us-in-the-Spirit, Christians derived the language of persons and essence and formulated a concept we call Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit. One God. Three persons. A single essence. The attributes of God followed and before long you find Thomas Aquinas sitting in Paris writing with both left hand and right at the same time, expounding on all the things we can know if we know this one thing.

So when we talk about Trinity we are talking about the very core of Christianity.

I have thought about this for a week, since finishing the book, and I think I can phrase it gently now. It annoyed me no end upon first reading it. So here goes: To resort to Trinitarian argument to resolve a cultural question about marriage roles is the equivalent of firing a Patriot missile to drill a hole in the wall. In terms of arguments, this is as an astonishing over-reaction. It speaks of the heightened way that American evangelicals go about their business. One could speculate that the bad habits of heresy-hunting, bitching and gossipping and the lack of any real ecclesial bonds means that Christians find themselves using the most explosive and potent and subtle (and dangerously complex) tools we have to resolve relatively minor disputes.

There is a tremendous asymmetry between starting a book about marriage and finishing with a theology of Trinity.

Before we even get into the nuts and bolts of the argument, we have to see how poor a step has been made. We jump from a pastoral book full of cultural commentary into a debate about how the about-dance of God implies gender-roles in marriage (that need to be defined in each particular instance depending on context). These components don’t fit together.

But I am afraid to say, it gets worse. The Trinitarian theology that is espoused is a form of subordinationism. This is a variety of Trinitarian thinking that has re-appeared since the late 1970s. Before this generation, the last major figure I know of to espouse it was John Milton. It itself is not a heresy, but it certainly leads in that direction. If you take it to its logical conclusion it arrives at Arianism, which is the foundational Christological error. You can block its way from going down that dark alley, but only at the expense of veering off into tri-theism.

In short, this is a new and dangerous kind of argument.

What subordinationism argues is that there is a hierarchy within the Trinity. God the Father is above God the Son and the Spirit. The Son is “subordinated” to the Father and so, the Kellers argue, the wife should be “subordinated” to the husband. This is saved from being pure power-play by the perfect mutual love of the persons in the Trinity. “The Son defers to his Father, taking the subordinate role. The Father accepts the gift, but then exalts the Son to the highest place.” (176)

Now that movement can be justified on functional grounds. In the Gospel of John especially, Jesus is seen as the Sent-One, on a mission from God the Father. So you could use this to describe an aspect of Jesus’ work. But the Kellers appear to ontologize this functional arrangement. What I mean by that is that they make this arrangement part of the very being of God. They are not saying that the Father and the Son are on the same team, playing different roles, from incarnation to ascension. They are saying that the Father and the Son are in some deep way placed in an order, one above the other, one below. How else can they make the correspondence “we are differently gendered to reflect this life within the Trinity”?

If it is true that man and woman are fundamentally different, and that this reflects the life within the Trinity, then it follows that Father and Son are fundamentally different. If Father and Son are of different essence, we are no longer talking about the same thing Christians talk about when they talk about God. We must realise what is at stake when we build our picture of Trinity up from our level. The conservative Christian who embraces this argument is running the most serious of risks. It is not good evangelical theology. It is insufficient as a reading of Scripture.

And if you still don’t see the danger in this problem, I refer you to the Athanasian Creed, the Nicene Creed, or even the Westminster Confession of Faith. They all articulate a view of the Trinity that shows no trace of hierarchy, subordination or these sorts of internal roles. To speculate on the inner-life of the Trinity to justify some internal arrangement of marriage is dubious. To do it with a view of Trinity that is so fraught with ambiguity is outright dangerous.

You see the irony here? In pursuit of supporting a socially conservative position they cherish, complementarian engage in a very non-conservative interpretation of the Holy Trinity.

Conclusion: So Here’s My Problem
So can I recommend a book that is altogether excellent, apart from 35 pages that are terrible? Is it just that the solid, good stuff at the start of the book goes awry towards the end and we don’t have to stress about it too much? Or is the stuff at the end, built on a theory about the inner workings of God, the source for all the apparently solid stuff, that in fact, in retrospect, looks super-dodgy?

Books about marriage are much needed. We have so few of them that puncture the cultural idolatry of the institution, avoid getting dragged into political positions that wrestle the life out of Christian witness, and actually offer good, gracious, practical advice. I love Tim Keller’s preaching and aspire to embody his winsome and considered approach to things. I really appreciate how this book is so deeply centred on Christ. It just makes it all the more disappointing that the Trinitarian reflections do not begin from that centre either but speculate loftily.

My problem isn’t simply what do I make of this book but what are we to make of a Christian culture that sometimes seems so devoted to certain kinds of cultural institutions that we’re happy to warp the Scriptures and also our doctrine of God to keep getting the outcomes we want?

I want to recommend this. I want to buy many copies so I can give them away to friends who are getting married. Instead, this will go back on the shelf and I’ll keep looking for the book that hasn’t yet been written.

Tomorrow I will draw your attention to a much better book about gender roles that isn’t going to sell nearly as many copies or be nearly as influential. That book is Equal to Rule by Trevor Morrow.

Your Correspondent, Knows there is just one who is unconfused, unchangeable, indivisible, and inseparable

Recap Of What Is Going On Here
On Monday I wrote about the good things about the Tim and Kathy Keller book The Meaning of Marriage and yesterday I wrote about the veering off-course that happens towards the end where the Kellers advocate a strong “complementarian” position on the roles between the genders in marriage. What is interesting about this argument is how little is being argued. The complementarianism that they advocate is nuanced to the point of losing its vitality entirely. So even though the book’s argument leads to a sort of functional egalitarianism, this sensibility is won at the drastic cost of embracing a view on the roles between genders that speaks more to our culture than to the pattern of the Scriptures.

But as far as complementarian arguments go, this isn’t that offensive a version. So why am I writing all these words about it? I DON’T KNOW! SOMEBODY PLEASE SEND HELP!

Also, because the argument provides an unusually clear view of two elements of the contemporary complementarian arguments that are usually well hidden. Today we look at the role natural theology plays in the argument. Tomorrow, we get heavy with the Trinitarian theories espoused by the Kellers.

A brief definition of natural theology might be well placed here. Natural theology is the belief that you can look to the created world and build up arguments that lead to knowledge about God. Classically, this is summed up by William Paley’s “Blind Watchmaker” analogy. But my difficulty with it is deeper. Siding with Karl Barth, the desire to build arguments towards God without reference to God is a form of delusion that intends to keep us away from heeding God’s revelation. As the London-based theologian Lincoln Harvey quips, natural theology is plagiarism. It copies what can only be known by revelation, passes itself off as itself and therefore is a totally bogus form of theologising.

The “Natural” Slide Into Natural Theology
So I grant that the complementarianism of the Kellers is of a relatively benign variety, but I am still deeply troubled by it. What is my problem?

Well this is the problem I have with the book. It isn’t simply that it denies the egalitarian message of the New Testament. It is how it does it.

Firstly, this argument always appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to natural theology. Underneath the proof-texting, there is always a “plain” “common sense” reading of the created world that does the heavy lifting in the argument. So Kathy writes “even at the atomic level, all the universe is held together by the attraction of positive and negative forces. The embrace of the Other, as it turns out, really is what makes the world go around.” This is finely crafted and humourous sentence but it is also at base, an appeal to a deeply troubling authority. You can’t just leap from sub-atomic attractions to gender roles in modern western marriage and call it theology.

Everytime I hear arguments like this I think of Dr. Ian Malcolm flirting with Dr. Ellie Slater in Jurassic Park, talking about “strange attractions”.

Natural theologians are rarely as cool as Jeff Goldblum however.

One of the best tells of natural theology doing lifting work in theological arguments is when you start noticing terms that haven’t been defined. So the Kellers are insistent that actual, concrete instructions about masculinity and femininity are not provided for in the Scriptures (which is true). But they are still able to deploy the terms masculine and feminine without defining them.

We fill in the definitions from our prevailing cultural mores and don’t even notice.

All that is said towards that is a brief (clear, and accurate) exposition of what it means in Genesis when Eve is created as a suitable ‘ezer. Woman is “like-opposite” to man. Notice though that all we have is a tension. The Scriptures put man and woman into an inter-defining relationship. But that tension can take different forms in different places. But 8 pages on we find discussion of “hyper-masculinity” and “rejection of masculinity”, “hyperfemininity” and “rejection of femininity”. Here, the argument has slid into terms left undefined. How does the chapter still work? It rests on the “natural” categories of masculine and feminine that the reader places into those word-containers.

What better response can there be to this sort of argument than: “Nein!”

Your Correspondent, Nature is a modern invention

A Recap
Yesterday I began writing about the Kellers’ book, The Meaning of Marriage and some of the aspects of the book that I really appreciate. But my problem upon finishing the book was that the argument veers off in a very strange way towards the end, turning into a narrow discussion of a peculiar trend in American evangelical Christianity that has become prominent in the last generation. Today I try to unpack what that “complementarian” argument entails.

The Complementarian Chapter
Chapter Six is the offending chapter and it is entitled “Embracing the Other”. It advocates for an understanding of gender roles in marriage that is called “complementarian”. American Christians created this term and it has spread. It indicates the belief that men and women complement each other in their roles. They are equal but different. I have a friend in Aberdeen who studies the theology of race and whenever he hears talk like this he quips that it sounds a lot like the talk in the southern states of the US in the middle 20th Century.

 

In the Kellers’ instance, such jabs are undeserved, since it is very clear that they are among the best proponents of this position. For example, Kathy writes this chapter alone. But as Wife-unit points out, under the terms of complementarian theology, she can write the chapter in the bestselling book but she can’t preach the same message from a pulpit. That might seem like another jibe, but it actually cracks open the submerged story that evangelicals tell about the sacramental position of preaching in their functional theology. It is somehow special, in ways that probably are never explicated by those who hold this point of view.

I say they are among the best proponents of this position and I mean it. Unlike certain crass preachers [beware, that link is dark and horrible], the Kellers are careful to distinguish their views of gender from the “dominant, swaggering (and sinful) male behaviour” of machismo or the “one of the boys” mentality that women have to often adopt to gain the equality that their society tells them is unproblematically awaiting them now that feminism is finished its work (ahem). I suppose the good in the Kellers’ argument is that they clearly respect feminism and see it as a much needed movement.

How sad is it that simply acknowledging the societal misogyny rampant in our cultures is enough to justify praising prominent Christian teachers?

The Nuance In The Complement
But this positive aspect of their teaching, in contrast to the majority of people who propose complementarianism, also reveals a big hole in the middle of the teaching. I imagine that John Piper and Wayne Grudem and Mark Driscoll and the rest of the angry men in this crowd would be left very unsatisfied by the Kellers in this book because they give the game away. Having advocated for this complementarian position, they then evacuate it of the specifics that allow it to gain such traction in megachurches.

Think about it this way: if a movement springs up in the late 1970s and suddenly gains dominance across the churches of a particular culture while struggling to get a hold in the same sorts of churches in other (similar) cultures (this complementarian stuff is much less prominent in the UK or Ireland, in Sweden or Germany), what would we conclude? Perhaps we would need to investigate whether there is some cultural need in that particular society that requires this response? The late 1970s saw a cultural-political (counter-)revolution in the US with the rise of a peculiar kind of right-wing politics that was very distinct from what had come before. Moralist social positions were bolted on top of a reckless embrace of free market capitalism and the rest is (sad, blood-soaked) history.

Using the methods of reflection that I learned from Tim Keller himself, I would conclude that strong gender roles resonated with the default stories being told by Americans over the last 35 years. The whole point of complementarianism (when looked at from this non-theological genealogy of society lens) is to give religious support to a cultural and political revolution. This is why the Driscolls feel the need to warp the teaching of Paul to teach that women should stay at home and men should be out working or else they are worse than unbelievers! And yet the Kellers admit that their complementarian position simply “means that rigid cultural gender roles have no Biblical warrant. Christians cannot make a scriptural case for masculine and feminine stereotypes.”

All they are left with is a spiritualised account of the different sensibilities man and woman brings to marriage. To their credit, this really is the most defensible form of the position they are advocating. It locates the husband and the wife firmly in relation to Jesus and the end result would probably neither limit the woman, licence the man, or otherwise cause damage. (It damages the church in extensive and unknowable ways of course, by keeping women that the Holy Spirit has gifted to teach and lead out of the pulpit and away from decision-making, but that’s a fight I’ll take up on Friday.) They say “the Bible deliberately does not give answers to you” about what a wife should do and what a husband should do. As far as destructive ideas go, this one seems extensively disarmed.

Conclusion: Why bother?
That’s great. But why keep going with the complementarianism at all? It seems as if the Kellers have been critical and careful enough to tear off all the parts of the structure that are outright destructive or disguised prejudice. What they have left us is a bare skeleton of complentarian argument that is justifiable on its own terms but one is left wondering what it’s purpose is? It cashes out as egalitarian in practice. Why not just call itself what it is?

Tomorrow I will start to examine the risky theological moves in the background that mean even this form of the argument still needs to be resisted.

Your Correspondent, Believes that men are from Earth and also that women are from Earth.

Introduction: On Learning To Read Beloved Writers Critically
Wife-unit scolds me whenever I find a new writer that I get very excited about. She fears that my enthusiastic nature leads me to too easily embrace whatever the writer espouses. I have gone through phases where Bonhoeffer and Marilynne Robinson, C.S. Lewis and Stephen Jay Gould were all devoured and perhaps uncritically accepted. Latterly, things have been made easier because my two main influences, Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas are never wrong. Especially not when they contradict each other!

Wife-unit is probably right. I would say that however, since my enthusiasm over how brilliant she is makes me liable to agree with whatever it is she proposes! But recently I have worked on developing a more critical reception of ideas. Now I can even tell you some of the ways I suspect Hauerwas goes awry (it’s a short conversation).

Tim Keller is a a Presbyterian minister in New York that I have learned a vast amount from. I listen to his sermons every week and apart from Trevor Morrow, nobody has so directly influenced how I preach. But continuing with my maturation, I have to take major issue with an aspect of what this writer, who has deeply inspired me, has published. The question that drives this essay is: “Can a single very bad mis-step ruin an otherwise fine book?”

I wrote this all out and found that I could easily spout 5000 words on reflections inspired by the book. Perhaps that is a really good thing going for it? But I have torn that up into a week of posts in an effort to stop myself from killing you all with boredom.

The Three Main Themes of the Book
The book in question is The Meaning of Marriage, which he co-wrote with his wife Kathy. I deeply enjoyed reading it. Well, most of it. Wife-unit and I listened to the sermons he delivered on marriage before our wedding and we found them very helpful. On one hand, this book is a good example of what I love about Keller’s work. He draws together his sources so sweetly. He riffs on Auden and then moves on to an article in the New York Times and then ties it altogether with some succinct exegesis. Throughout it all is the hunt to expose what grace does to transform us. This is all to be praised.

There are three main aspects to this book.

Firstly, the Kellers want to interrogate the cultural narratives that surround marriage. This is typical of their style. Tim talks often about the importance of finding the submerged stories that people are trying to live out.

The second viewpoint is the pastoral, which again makes total sense. This is not a systematic theology of marriage. This is not a philosophical ethics of matrimony. You read this book and you find yourself in it. The authors are concerned with shepherding people into verdant pastures.

But it is the third emphasis that leaves me so troubled and that is the espousal of a very narrow and limited theology of gender towards the end. The Kellers are notable for how excellent they are at welcoming and respecting different viewpoints, but this book veers off into the darkest and deepest and choppiest waters of American evangelical theology, leaving even supporters like me confused as to why this has happened.

Tomorrow I will write more about the problem with this third emphasis but for now I will draw your attention to the parts of the book I really appreciated.

The book begins with an investigation of the conflicting desires around marriage that our culture exhibits. We are tired with the institution and are suspicious of it. And yet we make such stringent demands on whoever would dare to enter into it with us:

If your desire is for a spouse who will not demand a lot of change from you, then you are also looking for a spouse who is almost completely pulled together, someone very ‘low maintenance’ without much in the way of personal problems. You are looking for someone who will not require or demand significant change. You are searching, therefore, for an ideal person – happy, healthy, interesting, content with life. Never before in history has there been a society filled with people so idealistic in what they are seeking in a spouse.

– Tim (and Kathy) Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, 33.

Even better was his section on how the essence of marriage is covenant. This is a recurring motif in his preaching – the centrality of God’s covenant in any coherent understanding of what the Bible is saying. His claim that “promising is the key to identity” (91) seems to be one of those casual lines that collapses the world from under you. Without being people who bear our word, our identities slip away. We all commit to doing things, and the put-together-ness of our sense of self (and others’ sense of us) is bound to how well we honour those commitments.

Similarly, he is wonderfully clear on the mission of marriage. The entire book is to be read as an exposition of the marriage section in Ephesians 5. The mission is the sanctification of your spouse. “What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.” (123) If that sounds very abstract and spiritualised, the Kellers bring it down into real life. For example: “If your spouse does not feel that you are putting him or her first, then by definition, you aren’t.” (128)

How rare it is for a pastor to be able to give such practical advice without sinking into legalism. That is avoided by constantly returning to the source of our hope. The wedding day should not be considered the happiest day of a couple’s life:

Not if you and your spouse wield the power of truth and love with grace in each other’s lives. Not if you are committed to the adventure of spiritual companionship, to partner with God in the journey to the new creation. Then, to the eye of God, as the years go by, you are making each other more and more beautiful, like a diamond being cut and polished and set.

– Tim (and Kathy) Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, 169.

So if this book settled on examining the cultural attitudes to marriage and then offering pastoral advice about marriage that is grounded in grace, how great would it be? Very great is the answer. Sadly, that is not all it does. More on that tomorrow. (Has there ever been a less suspenseful blog series??)

Your Corresponent, Thinks marriage is a lot like an orange. First, you have the skin… then the sweet, sweet innards…