An excellent article on complementarianism and the hierarchical nature of reality here. It seems applicable to a number of discussions we have ongoing right now, as well as to the wider cultural “conversation”.
As a connected issue, I am intrigued especially by the bits about the economy of the family and how industrialism changed that.
Haven’t read this, but he’s certainly surfing off of Wiley and Renn if he deals with that. It’s gotten to be a bit of a fad, in my mind. I’m not sure what the big deal is, though. Everybody has known for decades that the industrial revolution had a huge impact on the family. I feel like what people want is to return to a “better time,” and so this stuff is playing right into an agrarian idealism (that’s also been around for a long time) that I don’t think is actually helpful at all for figuring out how to live today as men and women or as a family.
What I really want is for someone to look at all of that and start to piece together how we can use the internet and all of these modern tools to build a “new” household economy that follows biblical principles.
I’m not really an agrarian, although I do see a lot of good in certain parts of it. For instance, being closer to food sources, for health reasons and for SHTF reasons. Also closer-knit communities seems to be an advantage that agrarianism has over city life. But we can’t all be farmers, nor should we be.
Pretty much what Kelly said. Thinking through a viable household economy and our technological age is extremely intriguing as an idea, but the nuts and bolts of it have yet to be laid out for me
I think you are definitely on point with your analysis about agrarian idealism. I’ve seen this arguement in men’s ministries that since the industrial revolution men stopped taking their kids to work, there became a vacuum in the home, and then with both WWI and WWII the vacuum became magnified by men disassociated with their families and reality.
I think part of the problem is, even if it’s not intended, as we seek high ground and affirmation of God’s specific revelation regarding fatherhood and womanhood, in God’s general revelation by and through His creation, that ground will always be tainted by the fall.
In other words, though it may be true that God’s creation purposes and affirms what God has said, we are stuck with the problem and effect of sin that twists and distorts everything.
For this reason I think we should be fairly cautious with how we seek to defend biblical principles from nature, or history, or society. However, it’s still helpful to see how biblical principles have interacted in history, nature and society. This is the task of administering God’s word to His people.
It’s a reasoning model, are we trying to reason from the general revelation deductively allowing the hearers to judge for themselves the truthfulness of scripture, or are we reasoning inductively about what we are observing in creation through the lense of scripture?
Just my initial reaction, but maybe I’m off topic.
P.s.
I think the article posted is excellent and helpful in seeing our creation through the lense of scripture.