Deconstructing... Jesus, Justice, & Gender Roles

When I asked about complementarianism, my pastors offered me Kathy Keller's Jesus, Justice, and Gender Roles as giving basically their position on the matter. It is a very small little pamphlet, easily read in a single sitting. While the first part of the book is (in my view shaky) exegesis, the second half addresses "personal journeys."

The exegesis might be weak simply because of the lack of space, so, between that and my not being a bible scholar myself, I'll leave the responses to that to others. Instead, I want to examine whether the text successfully presents complementarianism as good.

So, let us begin, where Keller winds down the exegesis section and begins transitioning to personal journeys, on page 29:

Earlier I raised the question, "Why did God arrange things this way, with a gender-based division of labor?" At the end of the day, I still don't know. I could speculate, but speculation often leads to error. I will follow that ancient divine who said, "Where God has shut his Holy Mouth I will not venture to open mine." I have found it fruitless, leading only to self-pity and anger in my own life, to question God's disposition of things when I do not understand. Confidence in his goodness (more about which later) has been a better choice.

This sounds quite pious. But shouldn't we worry, if we do not understand what makes certain behavior good, that the behavior is not, in fact, good? And what if we have other good reasons to think the behavior is not good, but positively bad? Certainly, if we are confident in our exegesis, we should trust God's goodness. But few of us are altogether confident in complementarian exegesis. The few texts are unclear, at best--contraindicating complementarianism, in several cases, on my view, but let's give Keller the benefit of the doubt. So, if we are not confident, but suspect that complementarianism harms women (and men!), then we should be looking for an explanation. We should hope to see, in the correct interpretation, a glimpse of the glory of God and his Gospel in the texts.

The best we get from Keller, as far as I can see, is on page 36:

The glory of gender roles, for me, is that everyone gets to reveal an aspect of Jesus' Life. Jesus in his servant authority, dying in order to bring his bride to spotless purity (Ephesians 5:22-33), has redefined authority and has demanded that his followers do the same (Matthew 23:11; John 13:13-17).

What struck me reading this was the little prepositional phrase, "for me." She does not claim that this is the glory of gender roles on Scripture's own account, but merely "for her." Very well, but the account she offers strikes me as rather remedial and only necessary if we already accept her exegesis.

To end her argument, Kathy invokes Divine Command Theory "Justice, in the end, is whatever God decrees. So whether or not you are able to see justice in divinely created gender roles depends largely on how much trust you have in God's character" (p.38). Note the implication that if you disagree with her it is because you don't trust God. And then, as if she was aware of the script, the final sentence: "The rest is clothed in mystery, to which we yield, with full confidence that it is meant for our good."

Of course, if our good is not simply some ephemeral notion, but a concrete shalom to be brought to earth and enacted with love, then our good cannot be clothed in mystery. It would all be well and good for Kathy Keller, as a new believer, to read the Bible and land here, then live with it a bit in the expectation that she would discover its goodness in the living. It is another for Kathy Keller, the seasoned Christian, to say that she still doesn't understand why it is good, to struggle to come to terms with it on the basis of an extra-biblical appeal to imaging the trinity, and finally to imply that the Bible is clear so if you disagree with her you don't trust God enough. It all sounds rather insecure and defensive to me.

I learned from Tim Keller and John Piper that, with God, the indicatives precede and motivate the imperatives. With complementarianism, I see no indicatives able to motivate or ground the proposed imperatives. I think that is simply how ethics works, not just how it is with God: how things are ground how things ought to be, though not always in a straight is-p-therefore-ought-to-be-p sort of way.

I would also like to note that Divine Command Theory is usually more complex than Kathy Keller seems to present it in this text. I want to deal with the misuse of DCT more fully in the next post, but for now I want to simply note that the claim that whatever is good is so because God commands it does not entail that our trust in God is required or sufficient for recognizing the goodness. We might have a moral sense, or God may have commanded in alignment with certain principles which we are capable of knowing through reason, or any number of other accounts. It is not as though Divine Command Theorists think unbelievers are incapable, generally, of recognizing justice.