00:01:47.500Well, let's go ahead right here from the outset.
00:01:49.260Let people know how they can keep up with your work and follow you.
00:01:52.860Sure. Just go to my website, AaronRenn.com, A-A-R-O-N, R-E-N-N.com, and sign up for my newsletter. There's lots of great free stuff on there, including a lot of what we're going to talk about. So you'll want to be in on that.
00:02:06.700Okay. So it's just AaronRenn.com. That's right?
00:02:10.800And I try to give people—exactly. I try to give people deep insight that you can't get anywhere else about what's going on in the world and the church today.
00:02:19.300Great. Well, what I wanted to talk about was part of your content that came out recently. It's probably been about a week or two at this point, but you wrote an article and sometimes you'll read your articles and record them on your podcast as well. That's where I typically follow you.
00:02:35.940but you did one on complementarianism. Basically, the gist that I got was that this middle ground
00:02:43.460between egalitarianism and biblical patriarchy, this middle ground is starting to kind of shift
00:02:51.260and really just like a sink pit, it's starting to disappear. And some of the guys with the new
00:02:57.920Calvinism, young, reformed, restless leaders, including Tim Keller before he passed,
00:03:03.420um we're making a push it seems like an explicit push for the complementarian new calvinist type
00:03:10.700of folks to uh to link arms with uh the egalitarians who are at least still within the realm of
00:03:17.720orthodoxy they haven't you know they haven't embraced uh lgbt those kinds of things so
00:03:23.680can you kind of sum up a little bit of what you were writing what you're getting at what
00:03:28.540what are some of the problems that you perceive i like to take the things that you're seeing and
00:03:35.320observing in the world and put a framework around them that helps you to understand what's going on
00:03:42.720to see the bigger picture so the thing i'm best known for is my three worlds of evangelicalism
00:03:48.820framework which i wrote in first things magazine which talks about how we went from a world that
00:03:53.060was positive towards christianity to one that was neutral towards christianity to one that's
00:03:57.040negative towards Christianity. This is an attempt to do something like that at a smaller scale.
00:04:03.080It has been said that conservatism is merely liberalism 20 years too late. And that might be
00:04:10.940a little bit unfair, but it does get at a reality is that there is a tendency for people who are
00:04:19.380conservative to get dragged left as the left continues to make further moves, ever further
00:04:27.640left. And several years ago, I came to the conclusion that complementarianism was really
00:04:33.700going to run into some challenges because of that. As society moved left, it was going to put
00:04:39.780enormous pressure on complementarianism to move to the left. And especially as the baby boomers0.99
00:04:48.060who created and sustained complementarian theology, largely in the 1980s, started moving
00:04:55.220on from leadership, this was really going to expose complementarianism to new kinds of pressure
00:05:01.640that would particularly lead people on the thinner end of complementarianism,
00:05:08.220the ones who try to have the most egalitarian view of gender relations possible. It was going
00:05:15.440of caused them to probably flip egalitarian at some point. Not that the older generation
00:05:21.060themselves would, but that the younger generations might do that. So that's kind of the background
00:05:27.180hypothesis that I had in mind. I said, let's test that by seeing what is coming along with
00:05:33.860various things we see in the world. And one of the things I noticed was a strategy document that
00:05:40.460Tim Keller put out November of last year. It had actually been mostly developed in the previous
00:05:46.240year or two, and he brought it all together, added some new stuff, and published it then
00:05:51.700about six months before he died, which was a series and a strategy about the decline and renewal of
00:05:57.420the American church. It was basically his diagnostic for what's gone wrong in the American
00:06:01.240church combined with his view of where the church ought to go. This is essentially the last thing he
00:06:08.580published before he died, along with his new book, Forgive. So it was obviously something that he
00:06:12.320thought was really, really important. And one of the central features of his new strategy
00:06:20.160is essentially rethinking differences on the matter of gender. Keller was and remained his
00:06:28.520whole life in a complementarian, excuse me, complementarian. So he didn't flip to egalitarian,
00:06:34.640but he essentially posits that conservative christians should take a different approach
00:06:43.080to their partnerships one that says we're going to add to our coalition egalitarians who are on
00:06:51.280the more conservative side say those who want to affirm a gender binary they claim men and women
00:06:57.400could both be pastors for example but they still affirm that there are only two genders
00:07:01.420add those kind of conservative egalitarians to the coalition and subtract from the coalition
00:07:10.140fundamentalists so people on the ultra right of the spectrum if you will it's this new
00:07:17.680alliance if you will this new movement would be structured around a sort of a centrist vision of
00:07:26.140kind of more left-leaning complementarians and more right-leaning egalitarians that would come
00:07:34.000together in the center to create this new movement and there's a lot more to it than that
00:07:40.000by the way he talks about the christian mind project there's there's many great things and
00:07:43.560they're actually i suggest that people people read it and so that i said he's really again
00:07:49.880suggesting two things one is to dissolve this notion that gender your theology of gender is
00:07:56.160sort of a barrier to working together and uh or to make it a much less of a barrier to working
00:08:04.300together than it previously would have been and then also kind of getting rid of the more
00:08:10.200conservative people again fundamentalist etc so i saw that that's actually that's actually a
00:08:18.020strategy. That's actually an explicitly stated strategy that he lays out. You don't need to
00:08:22.680interpret anything. And I'm like, that is very much the kind of move I would have anticipated
00:08:27.280in this sort of complementarianism coming under pressure world.
00:08:33.740Yeah, that's helpful. With that, I want to define some terms, but before I do, let me ask one
00:08:39.760follow-up question. In Tim Keller's paradigm and everything that he was publishing towards
00:08:45.780the end of his life on this subject, how does his definition of who is a fundamentalist differ,
00:08:53.320if at all, with the traditional view of what it means to be a fundamentalist?
00:09:00.100He has an extensive section on fundamentalism in that document. And there's basically originally
00:09:07.860four chapters, one of which was on the decline of evangelicalism, which he centers very much
00:09:14.080in the fundamentalist tradition and he sort of draws on george marsden the historian for his
00:09:19.500definitions and i don't remember all of the marks that he associated with fundamentalism
00:09:24.980uh but certainly uh sectarianism would be among them a rejection of things like social justice
00:09:32.920would be among them it's sort of a highly combative attitude uh would be one so he does
00:09:38.720have a definition of fundamentalism that's in there. Elevating of secondary and tertiary
00:09:47.620doctrines above where they should be, that would be another one of it. So I don't think he has a
00:09:54.560particularly bespoke definition of fundamentalism. He draws on other people, and I think the way
00:10:02.300that he describes it is, you know, more or less accurate. I'm sure there's experts who would
00:10:08.920probably quibble on it, but I don't think it's a lie to say there's something of a kind of
00:10:14.040fundamentalist style, if you will. Okay. To me, it seems as though one of the shifts with
00:10:20.360fundamentalism, that last point that you mentioned in terms of elevating secondary and tertiary
00:10:27.040doctrines as though they were primary, giving them perhaps too much emphasis as dividing lines
00:10:32.200between different camps. It seems as though that is true. The posture, the principle behind that
00:10:38.460remains true, but it seems as though the secondary doctrines in specific that are being elevated
00:10:45.800are not the same ones of the past. When I think of even just 20 years ago, it seems as though
00:10:50.980mode of baptism between paedo or credo was a bigger issue than it is for kind of this new
00:10:58.260fundamentalism. Um, or another example would be, uh, your view on the sign gifts of the spirit
00:11:04.880continuationism as articulated, a third wave charismatic position is articulated by Sam
00:11:10.720storms, Wayne Grudem, John Piper, uh, versus cessationism. Um, you know, the cessationism
00:11:16.660that we would, uh, connect with someone like Sproul or MacArthur. These seem to be, uh,
00:11:21.980larger issues and not just 50 years ago, but even just 10 years ago, perhaps even,
00:11:26.860even just five years ago it seems like uh you would uh draw clear lines in separating tribes
00:11:34.700and camps around uh a person's or ministry or a church's view of the gifts of the spirit
00:11:41.880and baptism whereas now it seems like um the fundamentalist the new fundamentalist and i would
00:11:49.160you know i probably not the term that i would choose for myself but i know that i probably
00:11:53.280would fall into that category. For me, I'm finding as a credo-baptist far more commonality
00:11:59.580with pedo-baptists and my fellow Presbyterians, guys like Doug Wilson and the Moscow Tried.
00:12:05.760We're partnering on lots of different things there, but we're drawing harder lines on issues
00:12:12.820of roles between men and women. So patriarchy versus a soft complementarianism seems to be
00:12:20.700a starker uh divide than you know paedo versus credo baptism have you noticed that as well and
00:12:28.460and what do you think uh what do you think might be going on there if that's true
00:12:31.720i would put a little bit of a different spin on it when it comes to gender specifically
00:12:37.500i do believe you're correct that the issues have changed around what the controversies are
00:12:43.160part of what i saw going back a few years ago looking at the pressure complementarianism was
00:12:50.820going to come under is it's very clear that complementarianism itself was originally designed
00:12:57.920as a sort of third way doctrine it's a halfway house this is very clear from the works of
00:13:05.520sociologist james davison hunter who wrote a book in 1987 the year the danvers statement came out
00:13:12.000called Evangelicalism, The Coming Generation. And he talked about the three strands of thought
00:13:17.720on gender roles, sort of the traditionalist position, which sort of unapologetically look
00:13:23.420back to sort of pre-sexual revolution, 1950s style gender roles as the way it should be.
00:13:30.780There were the feminists, and then there were the strand that he doesn't call them complementarian,
00:13:37.160but it's clearly the strand that's evolving into complementarianism at that time,
00:13:41.080where they say, we are not going to affirm 1950s gender roles, which I agree, we're more culturally
00:13:48.840bound than per se a product of scripture. But we need to hold, also need to hold firm on the
00:13:55.780things that the Bible specifically says around husbands as the head of the home and a male-only
00:14:02.920pastorate. And they left a lot of wiggle room in there, I would say, as to terms of how much
00:14:09.280differences there are between men and women but those were essentially the two kind of main focus
00:14:15.520points of it and they also did try to acknowledge certain feminist critiques uh in the danver
00:14:24.480station uh danver statement talks about an upsurge and abuse for example it essentially began the
00:14:32.620movement began to redefine being the head of the home as servant leadership, essentially
00:14:39.860undermining the way it was traditionally understood. And ultimately, it came together
00:14:46.040into a sort of third way position, you might call it. And just as it's now kind of the thin
00:14:54.860complementarianism is sort of collapsing on, you know, kind of the left flank, we also see people
00:15:02.060on the right who are very dissatisfied with the same approach, and they are moving in a more
00:15:08.680neopatriarchy direction. So we see that there's pressures coming to bear on complementarianism
00:15:16.200from a variety of perspectives. What I would say on neopatriarchy, though, is that it is
00:15:23.080kind of a niche, largely online movement. You know, Doug Wilson sort of has some of that,
00:15:29.060Although Doug himself, I sort of classify as a little bit of, you know, he's a boomer figure himself.
00:15:36.440And, you know, much of his writing, you know, from the past, I think would be some stuff that certainly some of the Christian Manosphere guys criticized him as being too feminist friendly.
00:15:49.840So he's he's maybe not as full throated a patriarchalist as some would like.
00:15:56.700But that's certainly another piece of pressure that's hitting the complementarian position and complementarianism, in my view, congealed at a particular point in time in response to a particular set of social pressures and a particular set of people that were involved.
00:16:17.100and it created something that sort of held for a while but as time has moved on it's a little bit
00:16:23.420coming apart and what we see is you know i think if you talk to some of the complementarian
00:16:31.500biggest complementarian promoters they would simply say look what's wrong with you know a
00:16:37.360male only pastor i mean that's what we believe in we believe in the bible uh and i think they're
00:16:42.600they're sort of true on that they're true on that point but it's really sort of this broader vision
00:16:48.140that extends beyond um sort of the you know narrow definitions of who could be a pastor who's the
00:16:55.040head of the home into a much broader conception of substantive complementarity of the genders
00:17:01.940and what does that actually mean and how substantive is it and interestingly uh although
00:17:09.380So the main complementarian book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, was written to be co-edited by John Piper, and it really doesn't go into any detail on substantive complementarity.
00:17:22.900It talks about complementarity, but it really doesn't focus on it.
00:17:26.000Piper himself is really probably the foremost advocate of a sort of thick or broad complementarian vision in which the differences between the sexes have pervasive effects on what they should and shouldn't be doing in his life.
00:17:40.820I believe he says things like women shouldn't be police officers, for example, and has gotten criticized over that.
00:17:47.960And so, you know, I don't want to suggest that all of these people thought exactly the same.
00:17:53.100I mean, part of it is with complementarianism, there are people who had kind of different perspectives and they had to create something that everybody could agree with.
00:18:03.380uh you know once you try to actually create an institution in create a movement create
00:18:10.100a document you can all sign on to that causes uh you know it's a lot harder because you're
00:18:17.120dealing in the real world you're not just dealing in intellectual abstractions or
00:18:20.600you know aaron wren putting out what he thinks in a newsletter now you're dealing with oh wait a
00:18:26.280minute i have people that i have to actually work with and that you know kind of strains what we
00:18:31.300can do right yep um you're right to say that there's a sliding scale a spectrum uh within
00:18:38.580the complementarian world from you know i've articulated in the past as um kind of narrow
00:18:45.840and soft versus broad and hard the the hard and soft piece i use those to describe um you know
00:18:53.820you could hold to a woman can't be an elder but she could still preach underneath the authority
00:18:59.020of the elders. I would say that that's a soft complementarian view, whereas hard would be,
00:19:04.320you know, she cannot exercise authority or teach, seeing it as not one prohibition in 1 Timothy
00:19:10.940chapter 2, but as one prohibition, meaning she can't teach with authority, but as two separate
00:19:18.480prohibitions, she cannot teach or exercise authority. So that's the soft and hard. That's
00:19:23.400an example of that piece. And then the narrow and broad would be, do these differences, these
00:19:28.680distinctions only have application in the home of the church, or is there a broader application?
00:19:34.500You brought up the example of John Piper, who would be what I would describe as both hard and
00:19:40.260broad complementarian. Just for our listeners, let me, in my assessment, show a little bit of
00:19:48.300the distinction between egalitarian and complementarian and then complementarian and
00:19:51.700patriarch. And I'd love to get your feedback if you would agree with these definitional
00:19:57.200distinctions for the record um i would place myself into the patriarchy category uh for the
00:20:03.620view that i hold but the differences as i see it is that um some of these egalitarians that the
00:20:09.060softer complementarians are being encouraged to link arms with um that would be the more
00:20:13.980conservative egalitarians they would still see a gender binary still see male and female
00:20:18.140um but at the level both the home and the church um it's not that uh the husband is the head of
00:20:24.180his house, but it would be this mutual submission under Christ. And the emphasis would be placed
00:20:29.900there. So there's not a male headship in the home and there's not a male headship in the church
00:20:35.080within complementarianism. In my assessment, 1988 is when Wayne Grudem and John Piper coined
00:20:42.480the phrase, I think it's always meant to be a halfway house, a third way option. And it seems
00:20:49.500as though they said there are distinctions and roles that do actually stem from a distinction
00:20:54.540and nature so it's not just male and female roles he assigned them but male and female natures he
00:20:59.400designed them he made them but the only difference in nature is in the physical realm that women have
00:21:06.120hips and men you know can can bench press and so even in the broad iteration of complementarianism
00:21:13.940You know, it would extend beyond that, like certain roles like police officers or combat roles in the military, those kinds of things.
00:21:21.600But it would it would limit the distinction of nature to the physical, whereas patriarchy, by comparison, most of the patriarchal guys that I'm familiar with, there would be, you know, a spectrum of iterations and applications.
00:21:35.140but most would agree that the distinction in roles is not just relegated to the home of the church
00:21:42.500but the whole of society and those distinction of roles are not arbitrary or capricious. They
00:21:48.340stem from a distinction in design nature but that distinction in design is not merely physical
00:21:54.840in our physical anatomy but they would also cite passages. I would be one to cite passages like
00:22:01.260first corinthians or i'm sorry like a first timothy chapter two that where paul doesn't just
00:22:06.460rely on the order of creation but he also relies on the order of the fall and so going back to
00:22:12.360some older theologians that would put some emphasis on the fact that the woman was the
00:22:17.340one who was deceived and became a sinner so it's not just her physical anatomy being different than
00:22:23.080a man that she's not physically built to lead but emotionally psychologically that there are other
00:22:29.380components of the whole person of men and women that are distinct at the level of nature not
00:22:35.660merely role and that the role stems from that difference not just a physical difference in
00:22:39.880nature but a psychological emotional that all the way down god made us different and that that
00:22:45.280applies not just in the home of the church but in society as a whole that's my understanding of
00:22:50.540biblical patriarchy and there are other iterations is there anything that you feel like i missed or
00:22:55.520anything that you would add to some of those definitions? Well, I think you kind of covered
00:23:02.720up some of the differences between these camps within the evangelical world. One thing that I
00:23:10.800would say is when it comes to patriarchy, you know, patriarchy is not just a set of interpretations
00:23:16.960about scriptures. I would have said that historically we would have thought of patriarchy
00:23:20.420as an actual cultural legal system in which, you know, the father held genuine rules.
00:23:28.940So the Roman paterfamilias really did hold legal, social, cultural power over his household.
00:23:38.140Whereas, you know, in our society, we live in a legally and culturally egalitarian society.
00:29:17.220I do see evidence that people are putting the Keller strategy into practice, which is – we saw it with some writing columns that Russell Moore has recently done.
00:29:31.180Russell Moore, former Southern Baptist entity chief, now editor of Christianity Today, wrote a column where he essentially repented of being the old patriarchal Russell Moore.
00:29:42.580In fact, Russell Moore used to be an overt patriarchalist, and he now says, I want to partner with these conservative egalitarians, and I want to be less associated with people like the old Russell Moore.
00:29:58.720So like Keller, he sort of divides the world into sort of good and bad egalitarians and good and bad complementarians, and he's like, well, the good complementarians and the good egalitarians need to work together.
00:30:08.440We also see a lot of debates over gender roles in the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:30:15.980There's a proposed amendment that would clarify constitutionally that churches can't be part of the SBC unless they have exclusively male pastors.
00:30:29.280So I do believe there is going to be kind of an elite movement more in an egalitarian direction.
00:30:37.460The first step is to essentially downgrade egalitarianism as constituting one of these barriers that would have defined tribes and say, well, rather than we have the complementarians over here and the egalitarians over there, why don't we just work and partner more with these egalitarians?
00:30:56.580Why don't we just embrace them as more authentic?
00:31:00.740So we just essentially downgrade the gender roles to a sort of lower status, maybe from – this is illustrative here – from a second-order issue to a third-order issue.
00:31:10.680So let's start downgrading that and sort of treat it as a matter of conscience.
00:31:14.780That seems to be the move that's going now.
00:31:18.460i believe that's going to be something that's going to have a lot of appeal
00:31:23.220to a lot of people who are highly educated and it kind of leads off in a direction towards
00:31:30.400ultimately egalitarianism um i think it's going to be very difficult to sustain any sort of
00:31:40.000complementarian vision that has a very narrow and thin view of the differences between men and women
00:31:47.080and essentially treats the difference between men and women
00:31:53.320as coming down to two arbitrary rules God made.0.99
00:31:57.280Only men can preach and be pastors and men are the head of the hum.0.63
00:32:01.060There's a lot of people who believe that.
00:32:02.580That is essentially the Keller position.
00:32:05.460You know, it's summed up in the Kathy Keller line.
00:32:07.940You know, a woman can do anything an ordained man can do.0.99
00:32:11.400And I think that's going to prove to be unsustainable in the long term0.99
00:32:16.120because it's it's really weird you know if you think about it it kind of is a weird position
00:32:22.120uh the uh you know so i think that that that sort of is going to go in one direction
00:32:28.620i think the uh you know we're also going to have this sort of neo-patriarchal split
00:32:33.580off the other side and i think for the people who want to remain complementarian and or
00:32:41.960patriarch kind of patriarchalist they're going to have to find some way to make that viable
00:32:50.080to actually live out in modern industrial society in which the official culture of society and the
00:32:59.040legal system you know are deeply hostile to it you really can't you really can't say well the
00:33:04.440husband is the head of the home but if the wife decides she doesn't like him anymore for no reason
00:33:09.840at all she can divorce him and it's going to go pretty much in her favor or certainly not against
00:33:15.100her in the divorce court and oh by the way then she can show up at a church and they're going to
00:33:20.400treat her as this victim of emotional abuse when she claims that you know her ex-husband is no good
00:33:26.600and that she's a poor single mother who needs help and the church is going to actively underwrite
00:33:31.020that divorce right and it happens all the time and so when you're in that environment uh
00:33:37.640Now, you have to come up with some sort of a vision that's actually functional in that environment, and that's going to be a very big challenge.
00:33:50.180Now, having said that, when you look at the votes at the recent SBC, which came down, you know, 80, 90 percent on some issues in favor of complementarianism, it does not look like essentially, you know, evangelicals, certainly conservative evangelicals are planning to abandon complementarianism anytime soon, although we see things moving in certain particular directions.
00:34:15.440Right. Yeah, no, I think you're right.
00:34:17.480at a societal level um you don't have some of those safeguards um but that's you know i mean
00:34:25.920that's in some sense it feels like saying it's going to be really hard to practice integrity
00:34:30.840and not lie uh because of social media and ai um you know like there are always going to be
00:34:37.640certain cultural and technological advancements um that are going to force people if they want
00:34:43.780to live in accordance with their conscience, and what they believe the Bible teaches, that they
00:34:49.660won't have the social constructs to keep them in that lane, that it'll have to be a conscience
00:34:54.940choice, that it'll have to be, you know, they'll actually have to be willing to do that, and so0.77
00:35:00.060right now, you're absolutely right, at any point, the trad wife can decide, that's it, I'm done,
00:35:06.700you know, I've been LARPing as a 1950s, you know, housewife for the last decade, and, you know, I
00:35:12.920had my fun and I ran my social media accounts and I, you know, did these kinds of things. Um,
00:35:18.440but I'm kind of done with that. I don't like my husband anymore. And she could tap out in a way
00:35:24.280that a woman actually in the 1950s could not tap out. She could say, I don't like this, but she
00:35:30.280wouldn't really have anywhere socially to go. Um, so all that being said, I think you're absolutely
00:35:35.820right. Uh, that does make it more challenging, but in my assessment, it doesn't make it impossible.
00:35:41.440you still have you know your will your ability to choose to abide by a certain set of principles
00:35:48.940that you believe in regardless of what the law happens to be in that particular place in time
00:35:55.820so any any other thoughts on on that i don't think so okay um for the patriarchy guys last
00:36:05.580question um you do your best or also feel free to decline to answer it's up to you but for the
00:36:11.040patriarchal guys the theo bros whatever you want to call them um it seems like we don't really have
00:36:18.120any institutions um you know it's it's going to be a really uphill climb uh certainly seems um
00:36:25.800disheartening and uh all but impossible the one thing i think that we have on our side
00:36:32.620um aside from i believe the word of god and because i hold to that position so obviously
00:36:37.840i'm convicted that that the word of god speaks to it in addition to that we also have nature
00:36:42.080and nature usually tends to be a force to be reckoned with so we don't have the social and
00:36:47.560legal system um but uh but we do have um some just some natural things that it's just hard to
00:36:54.260go against the way that god designed the world no matter how technologically advanced you may
00:37:00.120become. They're just certain things that, uh, that God has built into the fabric of the world,
00:37:04.120uh, that will eternally ring true. Um, all that being said, again, uh, despite those advantages,
00:37:11.140there are lots of disadvantages. Uh, what do you think the, the patriarchal guys, that side of the
00:37:17.780aisle, do you think there's any hope for them with this, you know, this shift you're saying,
00:37:21.920I already see institutionally this shift of what Keller was advocating for towards the end of his0.53
00:37:26.760life that you know the arms are being linked the the allegiances are being made with the egalitarians
00:37:32.740i see that happening um do what do you see with the patriarchal side of the aisle do you think
00:37:38.540it's just just um these guys are just going to be larping around all 14 of them you know on twitter
00:37:45.320or do you think that do you think there's actually a chance i always say that you know the first
00:37:52.140thing we have to do is discern and align ourselves with the truth and so we need to make sure that
00:37:59.120we are not just regurgitating things and that we actually know what the truth is or we at least
00:38:06.800know where we don't know you know because a lot of my work kind of came out of the fact that i
00:38:13.820thought i believed one thing when i came to church and i was taught all these things i just took it
00:38:18.240I said, well, this is what they're teaching me. These are the good guys. And so I'm going to
00:38:23.020follow this. And then all of a sudden I realized some of the stuff they're telling me actually
00:38:26.120wasn't accurate. And so I think we need to have the courage to admit that we ourselves could be
00:38:32.920wrong. And so I think that willingness to do it ourselves is important and to know where we don't
00:38:39.400have all the answers. How should we live today? That is a hard question without an obvious answer
00:38:48.220maybe an answer that can't be boiled down to a set of rules i think a lot of times people want to
00:38:54.620have this biblical rule very bright line that's one of the reasons i think that you know women
00:39:02.000can't be pastors things appeals to people because it's it's a rule we can apply a rule whereas a lot
00:39:08.280of the things that we have to do today involve wisdom where should i live what kind of career
00:39:13.980should I go into? How do I find a spouse in this environment? How do I actually stay married?
00:39:21.160How do I raise my kids in ways that they will not abandon their faith when they're older and
00:39:27.820they'll stand on the truth? These are hard questions that we have to equip people with
00:39:32.900tools to answer. That's one of them. The other thing I say is, again, I think a lot of this
00:39:39.440stuff tends to be an online movement and i think some of the online interactions are very
00:39:44.360counterproductive uh you know when tim keller died people are trashing him on twitter i mean
00:39:52.600that's just not going to win many admirers from people we have these social rules like don't speak
00:39:59.980ill of the dead and you know you do that you're in trouble and the other thing i'd say is you know
00:40:04.660you see some of these people this is not necessarily all of them picking fights with
00:40:08.960women online if you believe when men and women are different then you would go back to that old
00:40:14.240rule from the playground you can't hit a girl and basically i would say you know the odds are very
00:40:22.220low that anything good is going to come out of getting in a fight with a woman if you're a man
00:40:26.940it typically doesn't go well for you and so uh how do you operate in that environment is not always
00:40:34.220is is not always key uh but i think it goes almost like the political idea of owning the libs
00:40:40.400becomes like the the motivator uh a little bit and i would dial back some of that and think more
00:40:49.280about some of these other issues substantively um and you know what does it mean to live out
00:40:56.540you know the bible's um calling in this world today practically speaking right and that is a
00:41:04.600very difficult question dude i do not plan you know profess to have all the answers to myself
00:41:10.560you know and you know i i do believe certain things i do believe you know it's good to be
00:41:16.120married for the most for most people i think that's the normative call people's lives there's
00:41:20.460things i i do think but i think we need to focus a lot more on kind of the the practical uh the
00:41:27.460practical side of some of these things uh as well that's what i would say and again that's not like
00:41:34.800how do the how do these people win or get traction i don't know but those are the things that i i see
00:41:40.620in the movement that i might uh suggest focusing on yeah no i agree uh definitely in terms of the
00:41:48.500getting into arguments online with women it's a ironic posture to take for somebody you know i
00:41:55.800would say patriarchy you know one of the things that i would say that differentiates the work
00:42:01.600that i did and my newsletter was originally called the masculinist and it very much focused
00:42:05.760on men's issues and i still write about men's issues but it is not rooted in anti-feminism
00:42:12.220and i was thinking about this it wasn't something i self-consciously thought of when i started it
00:42:17.820But as I was thinking about people who get in arguments with all these women, I said to myself, you know, nothing that I'm doing is a response to something women are doing or saying.
00:42:31.960It's just, you know, I've got an agenda that I'm pushing.
00:42:34.820If anything, it's other men that I'm interested in pushing back on.
00:42:39.260And I do think there's a sense, if you went back to this sort of pre-feminist era, you know, men were not obsessed with what women were doing and saying, it wasn't like, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't something that was like, you know, men kind of had their own world, you know, men had their own social world.
00:42:59.200In fact, that'd be one thing I'd do is recreating sort of a men's social world in an era where there are no more all-male clubs, no more all-male spaces, or very few of them.
00:43:07.000uh you know men operated largely in the world of men they didn't really spend a lot of time
00:43:12.580concerning themselves with the affairs of women i think a lot of the kind of conservative
00:43:16.440people i see seem to have a very explicitly anti-feminist posture and it's always
00:43:22.260a bad idea i shouldn't say always but it's a general rule it's a bad idea to define yourself
00:43:30.000in opposition to something instead of being in favor of something yeah we can make some
00:43:35.380exceptions there it's probably good to be anti-slavery but for the most part being anti-something
00:43:41.280creates an identity that is simply a reflection of that thing that you're against instead of
00:43:46.620being something you're for yeah that makes sense uh the last thing that i'll say is this um i think
00:43:52.300part of the difficulty on this particular issue really any issue but i always say that um as a
00:43:57.720pastor i always say that faithful preaching is comprised of uh three primary components it's
00:44:04.140revelation, interpretation, and application. Revelation being I have a text, not a dream or
00:44:09.300a strategy, but a text. The interpretation being a faithful exegesis of that text. And as the late
00:44:15.320great R.C. Sproul once said, there's only one accurate interpretation. You can have a thousand
00:44:21.880different faithful applications of a singular text, but God means what he means by that text.
00:44:28.800so it's god's meaning god's interpretation the exegesis so revelation the text uh interpretation
00:44:34.880the exegesis god's meaning of the text but then application and one of the things that i've
00:44:39.440noticed is um that a lot of the reformed guys i think were light uh with the new calvinist movement
00:44:46.160over the last 20 years a lot of them were light on that third piece application whereas the old
00:44:52.000calvinist if you think of the reformers and especially the puritans um the puritans i mean
00:44:57.360they would they would go a whole extra hour sometimes in their preaching of just giving
00:45:02.380practical applications and that's really in many ways that's where you know the the term you know
00:45:07.820the pejorative puritanical comes from is that they you know that they were constantly being accused
00:45:14.180of being legalist because they were taking the word of god and saying in this particular practical
00:45:20.040instance it means you need to do this there were commands actually being issued and so all that
00:45:27.760being said i think that a lot of the more modern reformed new calvinist preacher types
00:45:33.920i would say are the equivalent of an audible commentary an hour-long audible commentary on
00:45:41.100lord's day it's it's revelation and interpretation but very little if any at all application that
00:45:47.420third piece and i think part of the reason why is because that third piece is the most controversial
00:45:52.720piece um you can read the text and and just read the text and sit down and offend you know somebody
00:46:00.100who's maybe deeply progressive and lgbt affirming um but with your fellow brothers in christ across
00:46:07.820the aisle and different tribes if you just read the text and even go further from revelation to
00:46:12.500interpretation and give a reformed exegesis, conservative interpretation of a particular
00:46:17.500text, you still won't have a lot of enemies on your right. Um, but the moment that you give an
00:46:23.200application and you say, um, you know, so like for instance, you know, I've asked people, uh,
00:46:28.660not theoretically, not in theory, but in practice function, um, what kind of authority does a man
00:46:35.300have in his home? If you are a complementarian or patriarchal, if that is your position and you
00:46:40.480believe that the husband is the head of his wife what does that mean because on the church side
00:46:45.320complementarianism is a lot more practical we all have at least this working definition of what
00:46:52.980that means is that a woman can't preach and she can't be an elder and so we we have a real clear
00:46:58.620we don't have that on the home side on the home front when we come to the home with the same0.92
00:47:04.160doctrine of complementarianism or even biblical patriarchy in both views when it comes to the
00:47:10.200home, practically, what does this mean? And essentially, what it usually boils down to,
00:47:14.760and I think I've heard this from a lot of guys, including you talking about Mark Driscoll, that
00:47:18.600when you really get down to the nuts and bolts, the application, practically, that Driscoll was
00:47:24.180kind of a little bit egalitarian. For as macho as he sounded and those kinds of things, what does
00:47:29.760it mean for the husband to be the head of his home? It means you exercise that authority to
00:47:33.740do what your wife wants. Exactly. And that's it. And so really at the end of the day, you know,0.87
00:47:40.300I I'm actually running a poll on Twitter right now, which is probably something that you want
00:47:44.660to do. Um, I'm being a little facetious, but I'm trying to make a point and I'm not trying to be
00:47:48.720overly, uh, offensive. Uh, but I said, uh, practically speaking, aside from theory,
00:47:54.400practically speaking, how much authority does a husband have in his home? And then I gave two
00:47:58.900options none i'm an egalitarian and none i'm a complementarian so i wanted to see you know you
00:48:05.540know which option people would pick and so i think part of what the patriarchal guys are trying to do
00:48:10.200and and i'm not saying that everybody's doing it well but i think uh what they'll have to do if
00:48:15.820it's going to be a viable position is they're going to have to get into the realm of application
00:48:20.160not just revelation interpreted but the realm of application and you cannot get in that realm
00:48:25.560without creating enemies in my experience not just me and the complementarian the soft
00:48:32.020complementarian and the hard patriarchal we're both going to share enemies on the left for the
00:48:37.120for the the person who doesn't even identify as being a follower of christ who's you know has the
00:48:42.060rainbow flag and they're on the front porch we're both going to have that person as an enemy um but
00:48:47.420but the person who begins to talk about not just revelation and interpretation but application is
00:48:52.280going to quickly, uh, find enemies amongst, uh, genuine brothers in Christ. Um, and so,
00:48:58.880but I don't see any other way, uh, to outline a position like the roles between men and women,
00:49:05.680uh, without getting into the practical piece. Well, any, any final thoughts on that? And then
00:49:11.540we'll go ahead and wrap up the episode. Yeah. I would say in many of the areas that I highlighted
00:49:19.600about how we need to be creating applications and tools to help people live in the world,
00:49:25.600that it's not all up to the pastor of the church to come up with that.
00:49:30.660Pastors of churches have become a little reticent to give life applications
00:49:35.480as a result of some things like purity culture.
00:49:39.300You know, I Kissed Dating Goodbye really wasn't a biblical application.
00:49:43.980and so i think certainly it's within the role of the pastor to give applications of scriptures
00:49:53.480in people's lives and help them do that and make it tangible and practical but today evangelicals
00:50:00.220essentially assume the pastor's got to have the answer for everything the pastor isn't going to
00:50:04.480have the answer to everything we need people who are lay experts in various things who can step up
00:50:11.320and show the way on certain things like, oh, how do you find a spouse today in this world?
00:50:19.080Maybe the pastor's going to know something about that.
00:50:22.120Maybe there are going to be a lot of other people in the pews that are going to know
00:50:24.520things about that too and could share the wisdom that they've learned.
00:50:28.200So the application one is one that goes beyond just the pastor.
00:50:34.560It's unfair to put that much pressure on a pastor to come up with all of the answers
00:50:40.520for how to live now it has to be a more full spectrum uh approach agreed um okay final
00:50:47.600question so how do you feel about the puritans i don't know that much about the puritans
00:50:56.480uh to to be honest i'm and i'm not a puritan scholar uh so i'm afraid i really can't say
00:51:04.080too much about that okay fair enough all right um anything if you could ask another question
00:51:08.660And if that wasn't sufficient, you could take a mulligan on that.
00:51:11.900Well, then I'll ask you this question.