For years the world has looked on at the church’s interminable debates about the role of women and rolled their eyes at this backward social institution that just can’t get with the programme. It is possible, however, that our tardiness may turn out to be a blessing. Because all the while conservative Christians have been digging their heels in, the wider culture has careened headlong into a gender ditch.

In the intervening decades(!), same-sex marriages have been successfully legalized and normalized throughout the western world and despite the denials it soon became clear what would be next and that was sex itself. Not the act but the distinction between the sexes. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. I don’t think I was the quickest out of the blocks but even I wrote about it in 2012.

This has offered up an interesting conjunction in the cultural stars, because as egalitarians try to push for increased space for women in the church they are facing a much bigger battle to protect spaces for women in society. It would be quite the pyrrhic victory.

As women (sic. adult human female) take up the battle in the face of unrelenting and vicious opposition the fundamental point is that women are not men and men are not women. That there is an defining connection between who we are inside and out. In other words you can’t change the sex of your body or the gender of your soul.

When it comes to tackling this issue, it seems complementarians are much more comfortable with having a crack at it. Perhaps because highlighting difference is in their camp so to speak. But I’m not alone in seeing that gap. Andrea Turpin says,

I believe one reason complementarian teaching remains popular is that many people consider being male and female a central part of their identity. They want it to mean something. And Christians who hold a theology of a purposeful creation rightly ask what God intended by two sexes. Unfortunately, I have yet to encounter a robust egalitarian theological treatment of the meaning and significance of sexual difference.

Andrea Turpin

I think she’s right. I went and looked at hundreds of book reviews on CBE and I couldn’t see any that attempted to work this out.

CBMW meanwhile have made their journal Eikon about anthropology and are covering wider issues of gender, sexuality, the theology of bodies and so on. Bethlehem Baptist Church released a series of Affirmations and Denials on Manhood & Womanhood and just as Ms Turpin challenged complementarians to make their view beautiful, a complementarian had a go at doing just that. The point is not whether you agree with them or think they are right, the point is the attempt.

I see complementarians asking questions like this and this. I also see them working on the distinctions between patriarchy and paternalism, pushing back against their own on issues of theology or history. I see them making efforts to adjust ministry patterns within their convictions. I guess if you think complementarianism is patriarchy or that all these things are signs that your side is winning then perhaps you can shrug these things off.

But at this moment the need in the world is to be able to talk about men and women that responds to that identity question that Ms Turpin raised. Not only that but it is necessary in order to protect the entire category of ‘women’ from being meaningfully changed or worse erased. If you think I’m overplaying it then just ask JK Rowling. But when it comes to trying to draw these connections from Scripture to our bodies that does demonstrate something beautiful and good then it seems the egalitarian camp are, at the very least, slow out of their blocks.