Complementarianism was a bad idea, forged in the heart of weak-willed men who, lorded over by the threat of monstrous women, tried to find a more polite way of saying, men should lead. Ideas founded upon the sands of rhetorical weakness will eventually collapse into a heap of a thousand misplaced notions.
To the devil’s hell with complementarianism.
It was a failed experiment. We should stick to a better term, a Biblical term, a justifiable notion…patriarchy.
Patriarchy is defined as an organization with male leadership, and that’s exactly what the Bible explicitly commands of the church and of the home, and it requires no large amount of Scripture to justify it. And it takes no small amount of Scripture-twisting to negate it.
God Almighty established the Patriarchy when he set the twelve tribes of Israel by male headship. Do we shirk from the reality that God Himself used the word Patriarch to describe Abraham in his Sacred Writ (Hebrews 7:4)? Do we avoid the holy term as sinister because it makes modern-day feminists howl with indignation?
That God established male headship over the Covenant people of Israel and the Covenant people of the church is indisputable.
There are 66 Books of the Holy Bible. The volumes were written by approximately 40 men over the course of 1500 years. Not a single woman was inspired of the Holy Spirit to pen the Text.
There were twelve judges who ruled over Israel. One, Deborah, was a woman. Unlike the other eleven judges, the Scripture curiously does not mention that God appointed her (Judges 4:4). Her role was that of offering private counsel rather than public instruction (Judges 4:5-6). God used Deborah’s role in the position of judge to mock weak-willed, sissified men (Judges 4:9). In fact, the entire account was meant as a rebuke to Barak, who let her lead, much to his shame and divine scrutiny.
There were 19 kings of Israel and 20 kings of Judah. They were all men. There was one woman who served as queen without a king, Athaliah. She was the daughter of Jezebel and used her power to establish the worship of Ba’al. She was the first of the Monstrous Regiment of Women that would make people tremble before a woman outside of her rightful place, cleansing the kingdom via the murder of all the rightful male heirs to the throne. Her name means “afflicted by God.” It’s hardly the example one might use to suggest women should be in leadership. In Hebrews 11, the author replaces Deborah’s place in history among the judges with Barak, indicating that he was God’s (flawed but anointed) rightful judge.
There are 17 prophets in the Bible listed among the various books. All are men.
Jesus chose 70 (or by some accounts, 72) witnesses to send out with the Gospel. History records their names, and not a woman was among them. Likewise, of 12 Disciples, Jesus chose not a single woman. If you add Paul to the list of those appointed by Christ to lead the New Testament church, that means out of up to 85 ecclesiastical appointments, Jesus chose not a single woman to lead.
The New Testament records precisely zero female pastors or elders in the New Testament, while the names of male pastors are mentioned frequently in the Pauline epistles.
There is no early church record of female pastors in the centuries following Christ, and the first prominent female leaders we see in church history are two prophetesses, Maximilla and Priscilla, who were suicidal hussies who founded a cult and were anathematized by virtually the entire universal church. Consider this in comparison to the “Apostolic Church Fathers” who – as you might suspect – include a list of only men.
Either the post-apostolic church was ‘misogynist’ or they just followed the example of Christ. We would suggest that Jesus built his church (Matthew 16:18) exactly how he wanted it, and it did not include female leaders.
This is not to say that the New Testament does not include the names of many women who played peripheral roles on the sidelines who were important supporting characters. In fact, 57 women are named in the pages of the New Testament. Rather than prove the point that women should lead it defeats it; out of 57 women named in the New Testament, not a single one was a pastor or elder.
Women followed (Luke 8:1-3). Jesus was friends with women (Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus in particular). Jesus was surrounded by older women who cared for him (his mother, his aunt, Joanna, Chuza, Susanna). His female converts were some of the most faithful and the most reckless (Mary Magdalene). But far from proving the point that women must lead in the church, these women are not mentioned anywhere in the Book of Acts as leading anything. Their absence in Acts is not misogyny on Luke’s part, for he was the one who named them in his Gospel.
Israel was Patriarchal. The church is Patriarchal. God designed them both.
There is a slow, dripping stream of estrogen into the American evangelical church. It has softened us. It has made us weak.
The fact is, men do not want to follow women, because it is unnatural. Men want to follow men. For that matter, godly women want to follow men. There is no quicker way to divorce men from the church than to place a woman at the front, and tell them to submit to them as unto an elder (Hebrews 13:17).
Christian men are already passive enough, that we need not emasculate them more by demanding them to obey and submit to women, as the Scripture commands the church submit to its elders. Over time, making men listen to women preach is like making them pee sitting down; sooner or later they will get used to it, see the appeal, and go with the flow. And what comes out of a female preacher’s mouth is usually not better than what happens comes out the urethra.
The only way a person can claim that it is God’s will for a woman to be in a position of leadership in the church is to ignore the facts presented in the Scripture about God’s will for leadership in the church. It is right there, printed in black and white. For the act of female preaching – a role of the pastorate – to be done, there must already be present a theology that amounts to waste from a full bladder. Ultimately, that preaching will be odorous, toxic, and fetid.
Female preaching in the church is not only disallowed in the epistles, but it is disrespectful and disinterested in the Bible from the onset. It is unbiblical, uninteresting, frivolous, spurious, and is usually little more than prattling nonsense. This is not because women are not capable of handling God’s Word. It’s because women are are capable of handling God’s Word already know better than to preach in the Sacred Assembly.
