The Function of Men and Women in the Church and in the Home (Part 1) | Theocast

Theocast on Men, Women, and the Home

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I have a conversation about the relationship between men and women, not only in the church, but also in the home, and how the history of our understanding of culture, and even modern day culture, has influenced our understanding.

Of scripture.

And in doing so, we believe has caused a lot of pain, legitimate pain and frustration. And we want to offer some help in understanding the law and the gospel, and understanding the role of Christ and his church in the kingdom, and how it can bring not only relief to a lot of the tension that is here, but we think unity and harmony.

This is just part one. We aren't doing a Semper Firmanda here because we needed to spend extra time on these episodes. So those of you who support us on Semper Firmanda, thank you for being patient with us, and we hope you enjoy.

We are excited to announce we have a brand new podcast available called the Kingsmen.

Podcast.

It's where we are reclaiming biblical manhood by training and equipping men for the work of the kingdom. You can find it anywhere you download a podcast, you can also watch it on YouTube. We have new episodes that come out every Monday.

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the Christian life, as spicy as they may be, from a Reformed confessional and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I am John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Justin, I'm just going to throw this on you. I had the opportunity to talk to Ken Jones on the phone, and he was so thankful to be.

On our podcast.

I twisted his arm. I think we might be able to get him on there again. I had many of you guys reach out, and we're thankful to have Ken on.

I've had the irony of all these things, too. I agree with everything you said about Ken. I'm super thankful for him. We plan to do the first two episodes, the Christ-centered preaching and then the revivalism.

Stuff.

I've gotten more feedback on the third episode that we hadn't even planned to do, that we only talked about for about 90 seconds before we hit record. Christian, there will be sin. I can't even tell you how many personal messages I've received on my cell phone from people who listen to Theocast and are just like, bro, that episode was a banger, and it was a balm for my soul.

We just chalked that up to the Lord's providence. I'm just thankful for Ken Jones and his friendship, and I'm glad people were encouraged by it.

Yeah, same.

We've got some plans for some more. But Justin and I, for the sake of time of our day and for the sake of the subject, we don't want to belabor today's episode. Normally, we come up with a title beforehand.

I have no idea what we're going to title this.

We'll do it later.

But we're going to be dealing with the biblical role of men and women in marriage. And really, I'll set it up this way, and then I'll hand it over to you, Justin. The tagline we have been using lately is clarifying the gospel and reclaiming the purpose of the kingdom.

And this conversation is a little bit different than what we normally do, but I feel like it falls in that realm of, here's the kingdom of God and the structure by which God has given to the church for our rest and comfort.

And I think there's been some clarity that's been lost in the culture that has come in. So, Justin, why don't you give us a little bit of a setup of why we're doing this and.

Where we're going. Sure, man. So, I'll start with this. John, you've started a couple of other podcasts under the Theocast banner, one entitled The Kingsmen Podcast, which is a podcast for men, and then another one called Outside Eden, where you and your wife Judith are having conversations about marriage and parenting and things like that.

So given that there is a large listenership to Theocast and people are interested in the content that's released and are interested in these new podcasts that you have started to do, we've gotten a number of questions from our listeners, understandably, on, hey, how do you, John, or how do you guys, John and Justin, as sort of the faces of Theocast, understand men and women and in the church, in the home, because this is an often debated.

Issue, right?

And so, this is not our normal fair. This is not something we talk about much. We're very doggedly committed to the law and the gospel, union with Christ, the sufficiency of Christ, and we aim to stay in our lane when it comes to the stuff we record on the regular show, just like we try to stay in our lane pastorally, right?

That's another podcast for another day. But this seems good to talk about to us, seems necessary to talk about, given the questions that we've received, and we want to begin this conversation by acknowledging that not only is there a lot of trepidation for us as pastors and as men, as husbands, as dads, to talk about these things, because this is such a freighted conversation, we know from personal experience and through relationships with a number of others that this is a topic that is, it's a sensitive issue for many, and there are a lot of people who have been hurt significantly by abuses of this topic of men and women and male authority and things of that nature, and we know that, and we are very sympathetic toward our sisters who have suffered from it, and we hope that we're able to set a tone and have this conversation in a way that would be helpful to everyone, but in particular would be encouraging to our sisters in the Lord who are co-heirs with us in Christ.

And I'd love to interject for a second, where the same tone that Justin and I have taken with dealing with pietism and how theology has been done wrong in the past with things like pietism and how that has created a confusion in the law of gospel distinction, and I would say confusion in what our union in Christ is, we want to try the same situation and acknowledge that in the past this has been done wrong.

I think an improper view of Scripture and a confusion of law of gospel has caused the union in Christ between two husbands and a wife, a confusion, and I think that's the way in which we want to approach that and acknowledge the past, but not spend all of our time there.

Justin Perdue. We don't claim to have all the answers here. We don't claim to have the corner on the market. This is a secondary issue, too. We need to make that plain that in terms of the primary issue of theology, you need to believe this to be a Christian.

This is a secondary matter where it is going to be important that you agree on this subject matter high level in order to be in the same church. You might disagree on some of the particular implementation, and that's okay, and I think some of that might become a part of our conversation here in a little while.

I guess we should say, John, at the outset, or maybe we'll do this in the intro, but we're going to just have one longer conversation today given the nature of the topic, and we're going to cut that into two parts, and there's not going to be the typical SR stuff.

There's a lot that John and I want to get to. We're going to start in this first portion of the conversation. As we've already prayed individually for mercy and for the Lord's wisdom, we trust that you as the listener are praying for the same things for us as we're having this conversation.

We know that you care about the cause of Christ, and we know that you care about John, you care about me, and we've been encouraged by you guys at so many turns. May the Lord be good to us all even as we have this conversation.

Let's start by talking the field, as I like to say. Let's talk about some things that need to be talked about in the interest of clarity. In no particular order here, I say that. But I'll just go ahead and start with the doctrine of the Trinity.

That maybe is most important, right?

When you do this, one of the discussions that's been very helpful, Justin may have mentioned this, but we've had multiple hours on the phone talking and FaceTiming trying to make sure that what we're doing here is meaningful and helpful.

One of the things that keeps coming up between Justin and I is that there tends to be, in theological debates as sensitive as this one, an overreaction at times where we swing one way too far. What you're about to mention is something I think is really important.

My view is not a response to this view. I understand what they're saying, but both of our views are not a reaction to that. We have to be careful theologically that we don't create theological positions based upon reaction.

I want people to understand that as Justin is explaining this, we aren't reacting to that, but we are pointing out how it's wrong.

In the interest of not being a professional podcaster here, I'm going to make one additional comment. Sorry for the meandering setup here. I trust you guys can understand how we may feel about this. To John's point, we have had hours of conversation over the last four days.

We talked for a long time this morning. I don't know if either one of us have ever felt quite like we have felt in recent days looking forward to a recording. Not looking forward to as in like we're eager to do this, but looking forward to it and thinking about the significance of it, the weight of it, the difficulty presented, even John and I having to really go in with one another and ask questions and clarify and sharpen and push back.

We've done a lot of that over recent days. This is no small matter, and may the Lord be good to us. Let's begin with the doctrine of the Trinity. So, in the last several decades, there has been a tendency to use a manipulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in order to argue for any number of gender and societal roles.

In particular, what's in view here is a doctrine oftentimes referred to as the Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son, EFS, or the Eternal Submission or Eternal Subordination of the Son, ESS, or ERAS, Eternal Roles of Authority and Submission.

So, ESS, EFS, ERAS are all headers for this kind of theology where what people do is they see or read into a doctrine of the Trinity an inherent hierarchical structure between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In terms of the Trinity, as the Trinity exists imminently, there is a hierarchy there. And that is a problem when we think about Nicene orthodoxy. In terms of Trinitarian orthodoxy from the Patristic era, how even the roles and the distinctions that exist between the persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, those are referred to historically as eternal relations of origin.

So that we understand how the Father is not the Son, how the Father is not the Spirit, how the Son is not the Father, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, the Spirit is not the Son.

We would say that the Son is the only begotten of the Father, and the Spirit is spirated by the Father and the Son. So that stuff matters in terms of eternal relation of origin. That said, all the persons of the Godhead are equally God, and there is one will.

There is perfect unity in the Godhead. There are not multiple wills in the Trinity. It is true that when God the Son took on flesh, He had not only the divine will, because there is only one, but He also had a human will, which is what you hear Him speaking in as a human being about doing the will of His Father, or about not my will, but yours be done.

That is Him speaking as a human with a human will, also possessing the one divine will. So that whole dynamic of the Trinity working is often referred to as the economic Trinity. What we don't want to do is take economic categories and hoist them over onto the Trinity in its imminent sense.

Let me just boil this down and stop nerding out theologically. What many have done is argued that because of the ontological hierarchical structure of the Trinity, we then would overlay that onto men and women, and we would see this ontological hierarchical structure that we would learn from the Trinity.

We then overlay that, and that is how we understand male and female relations wholesale. We would say it is always bad to manipulate the doctrine of the Trinity in order to argue for any kind of social or political anything, which is very common in our day, and I think you are seeing it happen a lot right now amongst people who are very concerned about the trajectory of culture.

We have talked about this in other ways related to theonomy and Christian nationalism, and there is more to come on some of those topics as well. Hopefully that was somewhat clear. We affirm Nicene Orthodoxy.

We don't use the doctrine of the Trinity to argue for gender roles. Stop that. It is bad.

Justin Perdue. That was great. If you want a longer treatise on this, Matthew Barrett's book, Simple Trinity, we will put it in your notes. You have talked about Nicene Orthodoxy and the doctrine of the Trinity.

That is important.

Next, there are two opposite errors that have been made culturally over the millennia. One is much older. I think we can all acknowledge this. Societies historically, the majority of them were patriarchal.

What this has meant is that whether you are talking about Greco-Roman culture, whether you are talking about Aristotelian thought on the home and society, or whether you are talking about a Victorian perspective on men and women, through history there has been a tendency culturally to view things in terms of male-female relations in ways that don't square with Scripture and that are unhelpful.

That kind of cultural baggage is imported into the Bible, or those cultural lenses are on our eyes as we go to the text. That is one error that has been made historically and culturally. Another error is newer.

It is more contemporary. This is where we erode any distinction that exists between men and women, and we just effectively flatten the sexes. We flatten the genders, and there is really nothing that we can say that is distinct about a man or about a woman.

We would say that both of those errors are just that. They are unhelpful and they are problematic. We don't want to fall off either side of the horse. We don't want to be those who are ruled by Greco-Roman, Aristotelian, Victorian thought, but we also don't want to be those who erase and erode any distinction that can be made between men and women.

Jon Moffitt. That is right. I think that is really helpful. Justin and I have had a lot of conversations on how do we say this in a helpful, understanding way, being open to reason and meek and humble about it.

There is a side where Justin and I have drawn a line in the sand saying we are not going to allow the culture, nor are we going to allow theologically crazies to come in and change the purpose and the meaning of anything.

I know a lot we get shot at for being Calvinistic. We also get shot at for being Covenantal. Both of those have sides where people have fallen off on either side of the road and have caused damage. The way I look at it is that just because someone has misused something does not mean that the essence of itself is wrong.

That is where we are trying to say the Bible has been clear, particularly in certain areas, and we cannot allow outside influences to skew our view of what Scripture has to say. For instance, I will put it this way, Justin.

The intentions of God's view of the church are amazing and wonderful, but churches have abused people profoundly. The conclusion cannot be that the church is wrong.

Justin Perdue. Or just because ecclesiology can go badly that ecclesiology is bad. I agree.

Jon Moffitt. That is where sometimes I feel like in my own life I have overcorrected because of PTSD. I don't want to continue to do that where I am like, this is wrong and this is wrong. I cannot allow that to push me one way or the other.

I have to let Scripture guide me here. Justin Perdue.

We are all reactionary creatures. It is a good statement from you. I agree. As I look over my life, let's say even just the last 15 years, I am just going to use a relatively recent span of time. Over the last 15 years, I have done the same thing.

In spite of all of my effort to not do so, in reacting against something that was off-center, I have gone a tick too far at points myself and have had to correct that over the course of time and over the years.

That is something that we all need to be sensitive to in this issue. It is so visceral. A lot of us do have PTSD and a lot of scar tissue from abuses. We don't want that to be the driver in any of our theological formation.

Jon Moffitt. I also don't want to sweep under the carpet and say they are not legitimate because they are. They are legitimate pains that sometimes are really hard to get over. I understand that. I fully understand that.

Justin Perdue. A hundred percent.

Justin Perdue. The last piece of this section one is, I am going to use an illustration from history again. I am going to at least speak for myself. I think, Jon, you agree. J. Gresham Machen, many are familiar with him 100 years ago or so.

He is a confessional Protestant who is one of the founders of Westminster Theological Seminary, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, etc. He is living in the time where there is this controversy between liberals and conservatives or fundamentalists and modernists, as it was framed at the time.

He was known to say that when forced, like, J. Gresham Machen, are you a fundamentalist or are you a modernist? He would say effectively, I am not crazy about that dichotomy. You are giving me those two choices.

I am kind of neither one. If you are going to force me to say one or the other, I guess I am a fundamentalist, but I am really not either one of the two as you define them because he was a confessional Protestant.

I am not a fundamentalist. I am not a modernist. I am actually something else, which is a confessional Protestant. That is how Machen felt in his day in the midst of a controversy in his time. Granted, that was a little bit more of a primary issue of theology, but still I think his response is helpful because I personally feel the same way when it comes to this current moment.

Most people in the conservative-ish evangelical world know of two camps when it comes to the male-female stuff. One is you are a complementarian, the other is you are an egalitarian. If people ask me, Justin, are you a complementarian or are you an egalitarian?

My answer is, well, I am kind of neither one based on how you define them. I am actually something else. It is similar to when people ask me, Justin, are you an evangelical?

Justin Perdue Well, based on how they are being defined now. Does it mean how they were in their originations?

Sure. I would argue that the complementarianism as defined by C .B .M .W. and Piper and Grudem, I do not agree with it, but that is kind of the more modern representation of all this. All of this to say, when somebody asks me, are you an evangelical?

It is like, well, if you are asking me if I am an evangelical or a Roman Catholic, well, I am not a Roman Catholic. Are you an evangelical or are you a liberal? Well, I am not a liberal, but I am really not an evangelical either.

I am a confessional Protestant. That is kind of how I feel there. It is how I feel here. I am not a complementarian as you define it. I am not an egalitarian as you define it. I am neither one. I am arguing for something that is different, and I trust that is going to come through even in what we record today.

I hope that is helpful for some people who have these categories. I am not going to erode all the distinctions that exist between men and women. I think God has been intentional in His design that He has made us male and female on purpose.

There are things that are distinct between men and women, and God has called us to unique things that are of equal value. That matters. I want to respond to something you.

Said offline, so I will not let you say it. You should give the illustration of protection,.

And I will respond to that. I was maybe going to say this later, but this is a good illustration of the reductionist thinking.

Justin Perdue. I guess this is me saying not throwing the baby out with the bath water. I thought it would be an illustration for that.

Jon Moffitt. Yes, sure. This is a good illustration. This is not unique to me. I have read this from a number of folks. This is an example that Amy Byrd even gives in her book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

I am not trying to trigger anybody by bringing her up in any regard, but this is a good example. Oftentimes in the reductionistic complementarian camp, there is this siloing of men and women and these siloings of callings in a way that is unhelpful.

For example, in that world, it is often said that men are called to protect. I would say that the instinct to protect, and even a calling to protect, is not uniquely male, in that females are going to protect things too.

What mom on the planet who is in her right mind is not going to have an instinct and an obligation to protect her children. That is written into nature. Women are going to protect their. Now, having said that, there is a call to men to protect their families.

Men, we can all agree, have an increased capacity to protect in a fallen world where violence is sometimes the order of the day. So men have an increased capacity to protect. It does not mean that women do not protect.

They do. We do not want to remove that from our sisters. They should protect, but then there is a sense in which the man protects as well. Because of his increased capacity to do so in that instance, he would then be the first one to literally lay his life down for the sake of his wife and kids.

That is a good illustration of how we do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to use your language. We do not want to completely silo this as though only men protect and women do not protect.

Women do protect, but there is a distinction in the capacity that the man has been given physically to protect his home. So he would appropriately do so should that be.

Needed. Justin Perdue. Right. I know a lot of people cringe because we want to create equal capacity. I will be the first to admit that I cannot sustain another human life with my body, but women can.

That is a capacity that is just not given to me. I do not have the capacity to do that. I think there is a safe way to look at it and say by nature there are distinctions. God has designed them to work symbiotically together where it is a beautiful thing.

We should not downplay either one of those because they are for God's glory and honor and grace, but yet there is not one that is more significant or sufficient than the other.

There is not a superiority here. That is a lot of times the issue. I have said this to you a lot over recent days, and you and I agree on this. There is an inherent superiority about being male and an inherent inferiority about being female in the minds of some, and we want to blow that up because that is unhelpful.

Men are not women and women are not men. God has a beautiful complementary design in that. Like you just said, our marriages in particular, you and I both understand that our relationships with our wives are symbiotic relationships.

There is a mutualism in them where we are coming together and we defer to one another depending on what the situation may be. We might be getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. We will save that maybe for later.

Let us talk a little bit more about some high-level theology here on some of these matters. Do you want to take us down that road a little bit? What do you want to talk about? Do you want to talk about Genesis 2, Ephesians 5?

Where do we want.

To go? Before we ever get into the structure of the home, at times we bifurcate it. We separate it from the global understanding of our relationship and union with Christ. It is like we have our relationship with the union with Christ in the church, and then we have our relationships at home.

Christ never separates them in that way. As a matter of fact, there are two unequal opposite positions where we create our own little kingdoms where the husband is the shepherd and the king of the home.

That is wrong. Then we will have an over-reliance eschatology in that we disconnect any type of relationship within the home because it is like there is no male, there is no female, there is no giving into marriage.

That does not happen until the new heavens and the new earth. They are still functioning. Christ is the ultimate king, but yet we are still called to submit to our leaders and our governors. There is broken world function.

That is how I would like to describe it. Broken world function creates a reflection of God's kingdom, and I think that is important. When we are thinking about relationships inside of marriage, they cannot be disconnected from our relationship and the benefits that we have in union with Christ.

You have the primary mission of the life. Why has God not stopped the world from spinning and brought in the new heavens and the new earth? As Paul is writing to Timothy, he is like, you will suffer many things, but he says it this way, you will suffer them for the sake of the elect.

In other words, the world is still spinning because God is still saving. While this is happening, while the kingdom of God is spreading, spiritually speaking, then there is a form and a function, and that kingdom is advanced through God's people, which is His church.

The ultimate mission is to seek first the kingdom of God. We pray for His kingdom to come. The church is the one by which in our life and in our message we are spreading the good news of that. He literally says that we are the ambassadors of Christ.

So the mission trickles all the way down from the king to how we parent our children. The whole function of that is in a kingdom-mindedness. What I think is interesting, and we had a conversation about this, so I think we do go into Ephesians, not five, but I think we back up.

The first three chapters of Ephesians are union in Christ. He starts with our relationship with our King. You are one with Christ, and here are.

All the benefits and the joy. Justin Perdue. And the mystery of Christ that has been revealed, etc. Jon Moffitt.

Right. Your salvation and sovereignty are given to you. Your sanctification is sovereignly given to you. Your glorification, which is to come, is sovereignly given to you.

Justin Perdue And Jew and Gentile alike are saved into the one body of Christ. Jon Moffitt One body, one baptism. That is right. Justin Perdue One with Him and one with each other.

He goes from your identity to your union, and then he keeps just flowing it down. It is like, here is your relationship in heaven. Now, how does this relationship with heaven function on earth? That is Ephesians chapter four.

In that whole entire section, he is still playing on being eager to maintain the bond of peace and unity. It is all about the unity of the body.

Jon Moffitt. Unity is the emphasis.

Unity of Christ in the body. We have our union with Christ, which then reflects to our union with each other. Our unity, not union, but unity with each other. The whole emphasis of the book so far is who you are in Christ and how that functions in the body of the church.

Then he gets to chapter five and he starts dealing with relationships because, Justin, those who are in our family are also part of this church. I will say this up front. The concept of there being equal sinners, but yet sinners who are responsible for the protection of the congregation, we all know these passages.

Ephesians four talks about how the Holy Spirit has gifted men who are going to be there to lead, guide, and protect the congregation. Hebrews, submit to your elders for they watch over your soul. I will point this out now.

The role of the elder is not the same as the.

Husband. We will not hold that position. Justin Perdue. In other words, you ought not import ecclesiastical categories directly into the home. It is unhelpful. This is what a number of people do. This is what Doug Wilson and others do.

They overlay those categories where the man then becomes the pastor of his household. It is unhelpful. Collapsing categories ought not be.

Collapsed. Justin Perdue. That is right. There is structure to all about God's kingdom. In other words, even those of us who live in God's kingdom, we are to submit to the governing powers of our state and countries.

In God's kingdom, there is structure. These structures all have purpose and function. Structures are not necessarily based upon whether it is the capacity of one over the other. In other words, you have sinners who are leading sinners, and that is how God has designed it.

For instance, God could have had angels lead the church and not sinners at all. He could have, but he did not. For whatever reason, he chose to have sinners lead sinners underneath the head shepherd Christ.

When you get to something like Ephesians chapter five, it says, as the church submits to Christ. We do not have a problem with that. We love Christ and we love who he is. He is compassionate. He is kind.

He is a sympathetic high priest. He loves and cares for us. He guides us with a gentle hand. He gives us mercy and grace and wisdom at no end. You look at all that and you are like, wherever you want to go, Jesus, I am going to go.

It is not because we are doing it because of the benefits, but we are doing it because of who he is for us. When it says, the church submits to Christ, that to me creates a beautiful symbiotic flow of, here is the purpose of the kingdom.

The church submits to the king for this function. It says, so the wife submits to her husband and all things. As we said earlier, Justin, you cannot disconnect that from chapters four and three and one and two and one.

Justin Perdue. Yeah, if I can just jump in real quick.

I agree. You cannot disconnect it from what has come before it. In particular, the verb submitting occurs in verse 21 of Ephesians 5. Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, which is an exhortation to the whole church that this is what the church is to be.

This is how the church is to function with this mutual submission out of reverence for Christ one to another. Then what Paul effectively does is he is going to illustrate that with three different kinds of relationships that would occur in the context of the church.

What we would say, there is a call for mutual submission one to another in the church, and the relational illustrations, wives and husbands, parents and children, slaves and masters, do not subvert that calling.

A lot of times that is how it comes across. It is like Paul is just going to go silo, isolated, here is a treatise on male headship and female submission, and that is what this is here for. Not at all how we would understand that text.

The illustrations do not subvert the calling of mutual submission in the church, but rather help us to better understand it. Out of reverence for Christ and because of him, we all submit ourselves to one another in various ways.

That is there. I think effectively, the last thing I will say about the Ephesians 5 text, and then I will flip it back over to you. I preached Ephesians a couple years ago. We may link to the sermon in the notes or whatever.

I think effectively what we tend to do as evangelicals that codify everything, we go to Ephesians 5, 22 to 33. The point is we read in a lot of stuff about male leadership and female submission, and then we give 25 different principles on what that means.

We extrapolate it out, and we do all this kind of stuff. That is very unhelpful and I think completely misses the point. In reality, what Paul is doing is pointing and saying, Husbands, consider Christ and love your wives.

Wives, consider Christ and respect your husbands, to which we can all listen to that and we can say amen. That is a good thing that husbands would love their wives in this way and be sacrificial and serve as the head, and then the wife would respect him in all of this out of reverence to the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is a good thing. Just backing up Ephesians 5, 17. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is, and do not get drunk with wine. For that is debauchery, but be filled with the Holy Spirit, addressing with one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your hearts, giving thanks always for everything to God and the Father and the Lord and Jesus Christ.