Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 06:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Advocates, Not Merely Adherents: Lay-Of-The Land Observations And Challenges For Complementarians
Author: Jason K. Allen

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 95

Advocates, Not Merely Adherents: Lay-Of-The Land Observations And Challenges For Complementarians

Jason K. Allen

Dr. Jason K. Allen is the President of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

Editor’s Note: This article is a transcript of Dr. Jason Allen’s CBMW Banquet Address at the 75th Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas.

My first encounter with the Danvers Statement and CBMW was in the late 1990s. I was a young man in college, and I was at my church, a rather large Southern Baptist church, and I was talking to a staff member in his office, and I saw on his bookshelf a big, thick, blue book that said Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. There were two names on it: Wayne Grudem and John Piper. I had heard the latter name, not the former. But I had never heard of the topics to which that book was addressing. And I asked the staff member, “What is this book about?” And he said, “Well, it’s about complementarianism,” and I responded, “What in the world is that?” And he began to unpack it just a little bit to me that summer afternoon, and I stood there really mystified by the whole reality. I grew up in a conservative home and a conservative church, and I knew that generally, men were supposed to lead in the home, and in the church, and that women were not to preach, but little more than that.

As a college student in the late 1990s, the whole topic struck me as an awkward anachronism, a doctrinal hot potato, an angular, often inconvenient truth to which we were to hold. But I sensed then that men and ministers both would speak of these things only when necessary,

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 96

and then do so only uncomfortably. And when it was necessary to speak to them, it would usually be with some glib, throw- away line along the lines that, “When we got married, I told my wife I would make all the major decisions, but in 30 years of marriage, there has never been a major decision!” That was my encounter and my understanding of complementarianism in the late 1990s.

Then you move into the early 2000s, and a huge surge of awareness — thanks to CBMW primarily — took place. The TNIV pushback even had leading voices arguing for a return to the phrase and the concept of “biblical patriarchy,” a call to recover that term. That concept and the room seemed set. And it seemed as though this renewal of Reformed theology, the New Calvinism, that complementarianism was really part and parcel of that movement. Yet over the past five to ten years, it seems to me that we have had a swing of momentum: self-inflicted wounds; moral failings by leaders; crudeness and rudeness on social media and other places; militant eg...