Finally finished Warhorn’s republication of Stephen’s Clark’s Man and Woman in Christ. Wow. Well worth the time to work through. A rare combination of book that’s simultaneously enjoyable and mentally stimulating, yet also convicting.
Years ago I heard a church history lecturer complain that Complementarianism was largely a reaction to feminism, and, in his estimation, a rather unsuccessful one at that. Tim Bayly has said something similar. There’s been too much of a focus on responding to or seeking to appease feminist ideology for the movement to have much of a coherent and historically grounded philosophy of manhood and womanhood. Clark’s book is a refreshing antidote to that trend. Reacting neither to feminism nor chauvinism, while at the same time not ignoring either, this is a book based on scripture, rooted in the Christian tradition, and thoughtfully applied to life today in the modern western world. Theologically convicted yet irenic, Clark helps us deal with both the theological and the practical questions we face in seeking to apply scripture’s teaching on what it means to be a man or a woman in this world.
The hardcover is beautiful, and the pdf is free! Thanks to Warhorn’s guys for such a high-quality product that also comes with a free option. Here are a couple tasters, if I can attempt to persuade you to get yourself a copy:
‘Ephesians 5:22–33 has been romanticized a great deal. The passage is often used to discourse about the mystery of marriage and about how the love of husband and wife reveals Christ and the church. While the content of such discourses may not be erroneous, to base them on Ephesians 5:22–33 distorts the main thrust of the text. The text has a practical function in regard to marriage. It does not exalt the married couple, but rather instructs them in their marriage. The passage teaches the husband and wife about the importance of the wife’s subordination and the husband’s care. Their love for one another is not primarily a matter of deep feelings (although these will be present to a great extent if Paul’s teaching is followed). Instead, it is a matter of their living together daily with the husband responsible to care for his wife and the wife responsible to respect and obey him. Moreover, the goal of this family order is unity, an internal oneness that allows the family to be an effective cell in the Christian community.’ (p88)
‘To summarize, Jesus related to women with love and respect. He spoke to them, taught them, healed them. He never spoke of them in a contemptuous or downgrading manner and never treated them as if they were unimportant. In his eyes, they had the same spiritual status as men. At the same time, the evidence is that he accepted a role difference for men and women and that he even respected the normal Jewish customs in the area. He was not, as one recent speaker claimed, “a man who breaks all categories, who goes beyond all accepted norms.” He did break some categories and went beyond some accepted norms, but only the ones that were due to scribal or Pharisaic interpretation of God’s teaching that he judged to be erroneous. Jesus was not revolutionary with regard to the roles of men and women. His revolution lay rather in the area of what constituted true righteousness and of the spiritual relationship of men and women alike to God and to Israel. The consequence of his teaching and approach in this area was a very significant spiritual and social change for women, one that allowed them, as Christians, to have the same spiritual status as men, to be treated with the same “brotherly love” as men.’ (p255)
‘The radical feminist movement has by its success shown its ability to produce vast social change. However, this could be one of the most destructive changes in the history of human society. The roles of men and women have proven useful in previous societies; in fact, past societies functioned well only when these roles were operating properly. Today a strong movement would destroy these roles without a firmly established understanding of the ecological consequences. The rationale is simply that human nature is “unbelievably malleable.” In essence, the human race is told that it should make such changes simply because it is capable of doing so. In the face of such a claim, human beings would do well to acquire a humble sense of the limitations of human knowledge, and to recall recent lessons about some of the painful consequences of technological change.’ (p453)
'A third error in historical analysis found in much feminist literature is a caricature of traditional womanhood based on the late nineteenth-century Victorian attitude that women should stay at home, work as little as possible, and be kept in a protected, restricted, and passive state. Feminist polemics can draw a particularly vivid contrast between this late nineteenth-century view of woman and the new liberated woman of the future. It is reasonable to attack such a view of ideal womanhood, but it is not reasonable to express or presuppose that this late nineteenth-century view was the traditional view of womanhood. The non-working, passive, delicate, protected woman who always stayed at home is a bourgeois Western ideal. It grew partly out of the medieval tradition of courtly love, partly out of a trend toward domesticity in the seventeenth century, and partly out of social conditions in the nineteenth century after the first phase of industrialization had taken the world of work from the home and left the women behind. The late nineteenth-century bourgeois ideal of womanhood is hardly that of the sturdy helpmate found in scripture or in most of the history of Western society.’ (p513)
'3. The approach to the roles of men and women has to be adapted to the circumstances of the modern environment, and to the individual cultures within which that approach is lived out.
Christians must be both faithful to the basic teaching and approach of scripture and realistic about the situation in which they live. Either they have to leave technological society and form special enclaves that operate according to a different socioeconomic system (like the Amish), or they have to learn how to live as a people within technological society itself. If they choose the latter, they must, even in their family and Christian community life, adapt themselves wisely to their secular environment. Adapting to modern circumstances, however, is not the same as accepting or being formed by the principles of modern technological society. The fundamental shape of Christian community life must be determined not by “the world” (in this case, modern technological society), but by the teaching of scripture. Yet twentieth-century Christians, even when they are faithful to scriptural teaching and know how to preserve a way of life and a community that are distinctive, will look different than first-century Christians. Their way of life in community will need to be lived in a way that is viable within a modern technological society. Faithfulness and adaptation depend on many specific decisions which need the wisdom and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Neither scripture itself, nor scripture and tradition together, can provide all the needed guidelines as Christians face new situations, especially in a rapidly evolving technological society. The Christian people also need leaders who know how to lead them under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. These leaders must be able to teach with genuine faithfulness to the Lord’s own teaching, and teach with wisdom and discernment about how to be faithful to the same scriptural commands in different circumstances.’ (pp583-584)
‘The first step in applying the Christian teaching on men’s and women’s roles, then, is to understand God’s purpose for the human race. Christians whose sole goal is to avoid the punishment of hell and gain admittance to heaven, to believe the basic doctrines and avoid breaking the essential commandments, cannot yet fully receive and adequately respond to the scriptural teaching on men’s and women’s roles. An adequate response requires an understanding of God’s full purpose: the creation of a new human race, a new community which lives according to God’s will and teaching. Any attempt to follow scriptural teaching on men’s and women’s roles apart from such an understanding of God’s purposes will suffer from the danger of legalism.’ (p592)
'If Christians are to live as the new humanity, the body of Christ, they need to pay a certain price. They need to commit themselves fully to Christ and to one another, and they need to invest enough of their personal lives in their life together as a Christian people that a cohesive community life can be established. Some form of personal subordination must be part of this commitment. Christians must subordinate their lives to the larger body of Christ if that body is to have any unity, and they must be personally subordinate to those responsible for representing that body and drawing it together. Without such subordination, the Christian people cannot form a social grouping that can live as the body of Christ. Christians should also be separate enough from the surrounding society that they can actually become a new people. Christians who identify primarily with the surrounding society and accept its authority as higher than any Christian authority will never become significantly different from non-Christian society. They will look more like the old Adam than the new. In short, the ideal basis for living the Christian teaching on men’s and women’s roles is to form a social grouping within which that teaching can be applied and within which those following it can be supported.
In a predominantly non-Christian society, the body of Christ must live as a social grouping distinct in some way from the rest of society. However, there are still places in the world where an entire town or district or other social environment is Christian, in the sense that everyone professes Christian belief and perhaps even belongs to the same church. Christians in these places who want to live a full communal life may have to follow a slightly different approach. In such situations, forming a separate body within the society may not be the best strategy for living the life of the body of Christ. With the right circumstances, the entire environment could possibly be transformed into a full Christian community. Nonetheless, even in such situations Christians must have a clear consciousness of the difference between the Christian people and society as a whole so that they are not unknowingly formed by the influences of the broader non-Christian world. They must also be conscious of building the body of Christ, the new human race, with sufficient commitment and acceptance of Christian authority to allow the formation of a fully Christian life as a people. The dynamics may be somewhat different in an area where all or almost all the people are willing to acknowledge themselves as Christian, but the goal has to be the same.’ (pp592-593)
(emphasis mine in these quotations)