counterculture or kingdom?

My day job (besides taking care of my own babies) is helping families build healthy and sustainable sleep foundations for their babies and toddlers. One of the first things I try to instill in every set of parents I work with is the following principle:

Respond, don’t react.

When you respond to your baby’s crying in the middle of the night, you might pause for a moment and listen. You might evaluate the sound of their cry. You might compare it to how they normally communicate with you when they’re hungry, sick, cold, or just annoyed. Based on all of that information, you’d then decide what kind of response they need, and offer it to them accordingly.

This way of operating allows your baby, not yourself, to be the guide of your actions—in contrast with when you simply react, rushing to stop the crying in any way that you think might work, even if it’s not what your baby needs.

I think a lot of us as believers and believing churches could stand to work on this.

Among congregations that highly value the Bible and the holiness of God, there is a temptation to recoil from the secular culture and go in the opposite direction—ironically, instead of actually following the guidance of the Bible.

We react instead of responding.

Consider one example from my formative years: A book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye was published in 1997, at the height of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board’s extremely popular and widespread “True Love Waits” abstinence campaign. The book and the associated purity culture movement gained enormous traction in evangelical Christian circles. And it was a reaction to the Sexual Revolution’s influence on church youth in the 1970s and 1980s.

But instead of achieving any meaningful “purity” or teaching a healthy sexual ethic, sound data now overwhelmingly indicates that the principles of purity culture primarily succeeded in warping an entire generation of Christians’ understanding of sex and sexuality (see the work of Sheila Wray Gregoire).

Or how about another that is both as old as time and very current (and, clearly, on my mind): The effort to stop any movement toward true mutuality in husband-wife relationships, let alone toward equality of men and women in a church setting, has in the past several decades largely been a reaction to the feminist movement. More recently, it has gained a new momentum as we recoil from the confusion in society around gender and the gender binary.

And instead of putting on display God’s glorious Genesis 2 vision, in which men and women work in equal partnership to achieve His goals on earth and reflect His nature, the church’s grip on complementarianism has only succeeded in handicapping our witness by Christianizing the idea that some human beings naturally rank higher than others. This idea is anti-Scripture, anti-Gospel, and anti-Christ, but nevertheless has been used by the church to justify atrocities throughout history, from slavery to the Holocaust to many forms of abuse.

When the Bible calls us out of the patterns of the world, it doesn’t say “Observe the way the world is going and run in the opposite direction.” Instead, the Word of God calls us to discernment. Discernment is what we need to navigate an environment that is rarely black-and-white. Discernment is what we need if we intend to respond instead of react. Discernment is what we need when the answers aren’t easy.

Discernment is what keeps us off the endlessly swinging pendulum of react, react, react.

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

- Romans 12:2

Like taking a moment to breathe and tune into my baby’s cry in the middle of the night prevents me from acting out of my own panic or frustration and allows my baby’s need to dictate my response, taking the time to investigate the Scriptures and listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit when we notice unholiness in our culture allows God, not the culture, to be the leader of our actions.

Doing a 180-degree turn away from the culture does not make us holy or our culture better. There are often pieces of goodness even in the parts of our culture that we find most abhorrent, and in our haste to react, we lose the good along with the bad. Thus the traditional Christian church, desiring rightly to uphold Scripture’s clear teachings that men and women are not interchangeable, at the same time lost hold of Scripture’s clear teachings that God made men and women absolutely equal in both calling and value.

Holiness comes through transformation—transformation that takes place through the renewing of our minds. Our thoughts, intellect, reason, perceptions, judgments, and determinations must be made completely new. We think of the kingdom of heaven as the “upside-down kingdom” not because it operates exactly opposite of how earthly kingdoms do, but because it operates in a way that is entirely foreign to all of us. It is not instinctive, it’s transformative. To be part of that kingdom, we can’t just change course; we must be born all over again, into an entirely new way of thinking, understanding, judging, acting.

Then alone can we discern the heart of God, which doesn’t fit neatly inside any of our comfortable categories.

But if we study our Bibles through the lens of our culture, it will be culture, not Scripture, that gets the last word.

taste and see

The other night I scanned through my entire blog archive, pulling a few articles here or there for potential use in a future project, and it was fascinating to see how much I have changed as a person and a writer and a student of the Bible over the last 7.5 years and 200+ blog posts. I started out a little naive, a little too sure, and twenty-two years old—a fresh-faced newlywed with no children, yet to experience profound loss, betrayal, despair, or sacrifice.

I am grateful that God does not give us a preview of our lives.

But being able to look back now, as I sit here 7+ years older, family expanded to four, and permanently altered by simply having survived the year 2018 (and its repercussions), I can see now the blessings He is crafting out of the pain.

There is softness in me where I once had only hard edges. There are questions where I once had too many arrogant answers. There’s prayer and surrender and release of control in some of the places I used to grip with white knuckles; there is color—not mere shades of gray, but brilliant, living color—in areas I could only ever see in black and white before.

And He has done it all so graciously, so gradually, that even though I look back from here and the difference is stark, I felt His shaping work as only the gentlest of touches in the interim.

Last week while I was standing in the customer service line at Costco was the first time in my memory that I ever desired, from a true joy and delight unadulterated by guilt, to talk about Jesus with total strangers. I have known the Gospel for my entire life, but only in the last few weeks has it become Good News to me—that my King has come, that He has conquered sin and death, and that He has set free those captive and oppressed into jubilee.

And that I, even I, count as one of the freed: Freed from the condemnation of self-righteous men, like the adulteress; freed from the invisibility of being female, like the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears; freed from the deep pain of being unloved and uncared for, like the woman at the well; freed from chronic isolation and suffering, like the woman with the ongoing hemorrhage; freed from the grip of sin and death, like Mary Magdalene. And it’s not “freed” in the way I’ve sometimes heard the word used, as if this were only a metaphorical freedom from the spiritual burden of such circumstances while I wait to die and go to heaven where my freedom will become a reality. This freedom is a reality for today. Jesus, becoming human and knowing what it is to suffer a human life and death, sees us in our shackles of wrong and being wronged, and does not ask us to stay in them.

The news is good, and it’s good for everyone. Even for these women, even for today’s women, even for me.

I’ve tasted the fruit of the True Vine—and now, anything less, even if it’s produced within the Church itself, is acrid on my tongue.

Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.
Psalm 34:8

a poisonous doctrine

I recently asked a (male) proponent of complementarianism these questions: What is some beautiful, kingdom fruit you’ve seen complementarian theology bear for Christ? How have the women in your life, specifically, been blessed by it?

His answer was precisely the generic statement I expected: he talked about greater stability and less power struggle in the home, wives who were better loved/protected/contented, and children who had “strong guidance and a firm foundation.” Putting aside that I could point to dozens of examples of families who would fit that exact description from the outside while their members were suffering on the inside, I think his response reveals how utterly and completely the conservative Christian church has missed the point of Paul’s vision for marriage and family in the New Testament. In our service of the complementarian doctrine, we have killed and buried the kingdom ideal.

(Note: I use the pronouns “we” and “our” because I am currently, and have always been, a faithful attendee of a conservative Christian church. I was also until quite recently a complementarian. In writing this, I hope to acknowledge the ways I, too, have contributed to the problems I now see.)

A favorite passage cited by complementarians (including the one I was conversing with) is Ephesians 5:21-33. This is the famous “Wives, be subject to your own husbands” and “Husbands, love your wives” text that made books like Love & Respect by Emerson Eggerichs an unfortunate default for evangelical marriage and pre-marital counseling for an entire generation. The feeling for complementarians is, generally, that egalitarian thinkers are trying to argue with something Paul has very plainly stated. But is it so plain?

Countless incredible Greek scholars have already done the technical work in understanding the exact grammar and vocabulary Paul used in this passage (you can find one such overview here). I’m not here to throw around words like hypotasso as if I have any business doing so—rather, what I want to do is ask: What was Paul’s intent for the audience of Ephesians 5? And what, then, is the meaning for us?

We know that the Ephesian church existed in a highly stratified society. Men ruled the Greco-Roman world; women were a class beneath them, and children were lower still, followed finally by slaves. Everyone in the church at Ephesus knew where they fell on the spectrum of power and importance.

And then Paul said,

Be filled with the Spirit . . . submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.

- Ephesians 5:18b, 21 CSB

Greater stability, reduced power struggle, wives who seem to be more protected and contented, and children with firm foundations—it’s all exactly the kind of fruit I’d expect complementarian theology to produce. And I have two problems with that.

First, as I alluded to before, plenty of this fruit looks shiny, red, and juicy on the outside only to reveal a flesh of worms and rot when you bite into it. Of course there is more stability and less power struggle in a home where only one person—the husband/father—has the ultimate power. But is that a good thing? Are we looking for conflict-free marriages or for good marriages? I know from experience that they are not the same thing.

And of course the wives in these families appear “safe,” “protected,” and “contented.” They are operating under a religious requirement to defer to their men. If a wife felt unsafe with her husband, or even discontented within their relationship, what could she do with that information? Certainly not bring it to the attention of her husband or her complementarian church leaders!

And of course the children appear to be standing on a firm foundation. They have been raised on the belief that they are naturally evil and need to be emotionally (sometimes physically) beaten into submission. Do they dare even find out what might happen if they test boundaries, throw a tantrum, or assert their independence like developmentally normal children?

But my second problem is an even bigger one: This “fruit” doesn’t just miss Paul’s heart for Christian families and the church, it fundamentally opposes it.

Because in Ephesians 5 (and Colossians 3, and 1 Corinthians 7, and so on), Paul is not reinforcing the secular gender roles and power dynamics that have plagued humanity since the Fall. He is tearing them down.

Be filled with the Spirit . . . submitting to one another in the fear of Christ. Wives, to your own husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, he himself is the Savior of the body. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. . . . In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”

Ephesians 5:18b, 21-25, 28

Can you see it? Can you pull away the haze of complementarianism, set aside the words that aren’t even in the passage (“lead,” “obey,” “follow,” “authority,” “responsibility”), and see?

See the Roman man on his pedestal, all of society existing several notches beneath him. See him touched by the transforming power of the Spirit of God and suddenly he steps down so that he can better reach the hand of his wife to pull her up. See her, likewise transformed, refusing to become corrupted by this newfound status.

Can you see them now? They are standing together, one flesh, on level ground.

They are equals. And not only equals in worth with unequal roles, as some complementarians have tried to parse, but one unit. One flesh, head and body, each dead without the other, both halves of the whole image of God. One.

This may be a tough pill to swallow for a certain population of conservative American Christian, but Paul didn’t write Ephesians 5 to shore up the image of strong masculine leadership over meek wives and well-behaved children. He wasn’t worried about how good your family looks on Sundays, or any other day of the week.

And he certainly didn’t intend for it to be used as the sacred text of patriarchy.

Instead, he paints for us a picture of marriages that can be defined by a unified pursuit of Christ rather than a paranoia of usurpation; of women who see themselves with the value Christ’s sacrifice places on them, which no one can remove; of men who, imitating Christ, set their rights and power aside to raise up the oppressed and powerless.

It is stunning—because it’s a reflection of the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels, a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven on earth. And that makes truly beautiful kingdom fruit.

But we are never going to taste it, let alone get to share it with the hungry around us, if we continue to spend our energy defending a poisonous doctrine.