I expect you know from your own experience, as do I, that in the workplace you need input from both men and women to achieve the best results. But this is a subjective statement – how can I prove it to you?
Well, if you watch ‘The Apprentice’, I think you will agree that, year after year, the initial single-sex teams are much less successful at the given tasks than when the sexes are mixed up at a later stage. Stereotypically, women bring a priori thinking, commonsense, intuition and imagination to the table, whereas men bring a posteriori thinking, logic, ‘inside the box’ and clear-headedness.
Christian Complementarianism
This commonsense wisdom has been transmuted by some Christian denominations into ‘complementarianism’ (not, please, ‘complimentarianism’ which, if it were a word, would mean paying each other compliments!). I have no problem with the idea that the sexes are complementary (or complete each other) – this is exactly what I believe. I have always found wisdom in the eastern idea of yin and yang, the two opposing but complementary harmonies, each of which carries the germ of the other: none of us is 100% male or 100% female.
But these denominations then make a huge leap (with no logical justification that I can see, other than selective editing of the Bible) to say that women may only serve the Church in subservient roles. There is a wealth of material on this in cyberspace: James Prescott blogged on 8 November; Rachel Held Evans makes a lot of sense to me in ‘Complementarians are selective too‘; Krish Kandiah blogged today on ‘Women, Men, Church and Twitter‘ , summing up the debate. He concludes:
I know there are evangelical Christians on both sides of the debate. I know there are good and bad arguments being used by both sides. I know there are actually a range of egalitarian and complimentarian positions. There are “hard” and “soft” proponents. There are those that are lead more by the scripture than by the culture and those that are lead more by the culture than the scripture – on both sides. I know there are people that have been hurt on both sides of this debate, and I recognise that women who have felt their God given calling have been dismissed have been particularly hurt. My hope is that we can build a centre ground coalition that champions the centrality of the gospel, the authority of scripture and a gracious respect and honouring of women and the recognition of the need for a hermeneutic of humility when it comes to the scriptures and a spirit of generosity when it comes to those we disagree with. I want to start a peace process – not just that we agree to disagree but that we find a way through an issue that is splitting the church right down the middle…I’d love to know why you think this is the issue that is dividing the church at the moment?
The Wisdom of the Ancients
But is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us (Ecclesiastes 1.10). In this case, it was in 385 BC that Aristophanes’ spoke on the origins of romantic love at Plato’s Symposium, here described by Dr Edward Spence, in ‘A Tale of Two Loves‘:
Aristophanes offers a story dealing with human nature and the human condition. Human beings were once spherical, with eight limbs like an octopus: four arms and four legs, one head with two faces and four ears and two sets of genitals, male or female, or both, so that they were any one of three kinds: male-male, male-female, and female-female. One day they offended the gods and to punish them Zeus cut them in half, scattering the two severed halves in opposite directions. Since that day, we are always searching for our other half. When a half meets its other half, each is overcome by Eros and each delights in being with the other. The reason for this is not, or at least not merely, a desire for sexual intercourse: on the contrary, the soul of each wishes for something it cannot put into words. Lovers desire to live a common life and die a common death, to become One again, in a complete and lasting union. The reason for this is our ancient nature: we were once a unified Whole. ‘Eros’ Aristophanes tells us, ‘Is the desire and pursuit of Wholeness’.
Aristophanes’ Story is the Story of the Fall
Aristophanes’ story is the story of the Fall; not dissimilar to that of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Heaven. We need healing, precisely because, when whole, we were impious and arrogant, prepared in our wholeness to challenge the gods. We find an analogous story of humanity’s fall from grace in Plato’s dialogue the Phaedrus. In that dialogue, Socrates relates to the character Phaedrus, (who also features in the Symposium) how our souls were once winged and circled the heavens with the gods until – getting too close to earth they became enamored with its sights and sounds and lost their wings, crash-landing to earth like Ikaros. But once in a while,upon encountering the face of the beloved, our souls become amorously and strangely agitated, and growing wings again long to take flight to the heavens from which they came.
If you want to understand ‘complementarian’, I suggest you need to look hard at the yin and yang Taoist symbol again:
Yin and Yang illustrated from the Tao Te Ching
Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low oppose each other.
Fore and aft follow each other.
How did the idea of yin being superior to yang, or yang being superior to yin ever come into it?
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This post is based on ‘Why we need both women and men in the church’ first published on 4 November as a guest post on Anna Blanch’s blog, Goannatree.
Complementarianism is part of the much wider topic of Dualism, which you can read a short introduction to here.
Image Credit: ‘Stained glass in the university’ by Nikita Starichenko licensed from Shuttercock.
Image Credit: The Tao image is downloaded from wikimedia under a creative common licence.
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