Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 03:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: Is Complementarianism A Man-Made Doctrine?
Author: Denny R. Burk

Eikon 3.1 (Spring 2021) p. 23

Is Complementarianism A Man-Made Doctrine?

Denny Burk

In 2019, I contributed an essay to this journal titled “Mere Complementarianism.”1 I wrote the article in part to confront an idea that seemed to be gaining traction within evangelical discussions about gender. A growing chorus of voices had been making the claim that complementarianism is a doctrinal innovation invented by Baby Boomer evangelicals in the late twentieth century. They claimed it was a theological novelty that would peter out when the Baby Boomers are no more. In his newsletter, Aaron Renn makes this case at length, writing that…

The future of complementarianism looks grim, because it was developed as a response to a specific set of cultural circumstances in the late 1980s that no longer exist, and because it’s a theology of the Baby Boomers, especially the early half of that generation, that seems likely to fade away along with them.2

In Renn’s essay, the term “complementarianism” reduces to a sociological descriptor rather than a theological one. This basic stance toward complementarianism has been extended in a spate of recent books which treat the doctrine as if it were created out of whole cloth by white men who wish to assert and maintain a destructive patriarchy.3 In an April 2021 social media thread, Beth Moore apologized for ever having supported such a man-made doctrine and admonished anyone who treats complementarianism as a first order doctrine.

Let me be blunt. When you functionally treat complementarianism—a doctrine of MAN—as if it belongs among the matters of 1st importance, yea, as a litmus test for where one stands on inerrancy & authority of Scripture, you are the ones who have misused Scripture. You went too far.4

Eikon 3.1 (Spring 2021) p. 24

I beg your forgiveness where I was complicit. I could not see it for what it was until 2016. I plead your forgiveness for how I just submitted to it and supported it and taught it. I trusted that the motives were godly. I have not lost my mind. Nor my doctrine. Just my naivety.5

The Religion News Service published a report with reaction to Moore’s thread from historian Kristin Du Mez, who is even more pointed:

This whole complementrian[sic] ideology is a historical construction… All the packaging that comes with it — what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman — that’s a historical and cultural creation, ...