Counterparts Not Copies
Counterparts Not Copies
My wife and I make decisions in wildly different ways. We recently became homeowners, and that difference really came out. I was asking questions like, can we afford this? Is there enough room? Does it have a big enough kitchen (I'm the cook in our family), and most importantly, does it have a gas stove? (Real cooks know what I'm talking about!) Melanie, on the other hand, was concerned with deeper, more visceral questions like, is it safe? Will our kids have friends? What school will they attend? Now, each couple going through a big decision like this will approach it differently, but it's very likely that one will see things the other is completely oblivious about. Together, our decision was stronger than apart. I believe it's what God is pointing toward when He says, “It is not good that the man is alone.”
That moment, and a lot of others like it, hasn't shaped what I believe so much as it's driven me back to Scripture, again and again, to see what God says about how men and women work together. I don't want my marriage to be the lens through which I read Genesis 2. I want Genesis 2 to be the lens through which I read my marriage. So when I keep going back to the text, what I've found is that the standard answers I was handed growing up don't quite match what's actually there. And the more carefully I read, the bigger the gap gets.
It's not only marriage where this question shows up, of course. The same question runs through how we lead and serve together in the church, how we read the whole story of God and His people. That's what I want to lay out in this article — and what this whole series is going to work out, passage by passage, in the weeks ahead.
Why this matters
One of the pillars of our denomination, ECO Presbyterian, is what's called egalitarian theology. “Egalitarian” is a kind of fancy word for a fairly simple idea — we believe that men and women are both called equally into any role in the church. Pastor, elder, deacon, teacher, you name it. In the wider church, this gets classified as a “secondary issue,” meaning it's not about who is saved and gets to go to heaven. There are plenty of people who love Jesus and read the Bible carefully who land in a different place on this. But “secondary” doesn't mean unimportant. I think this is incredibly important, and one of the reasons I felt so called to ECO in the first place. To lead alongside and to learn from incredible women of faith has been a fixture of my own journey for as long as I can remember. When God called me toward being a pastor, the denomination that kept showing up in my path was the one that actually let me teach Scripture the way I was reading it.
So I want to lay out, in one place, what I think the Bible says about men and women. Not just the handful of “problem passages” that come up every time this gets discussed — though we will get to those and many more along the way. The broader question. The shape of the whole project. What is God doing with men and women from Genesis 1 forward, and where is that story heading?
There are really two settings where this question gets most pointed in the church today: leadership in the local church (who can pastor, preach, lead, teach), and leadership in marriage (who decides, who submits, who “leads the home”). The contemporary debate often gets framed as egalitarian versus complementarian, with strong feelings in both directions and a lot of energy spent on a relatively small set of texts. My own conviction is that the two settings are really expressions of one underlying question: what are men and women, made together in God's image, supposed to be to each other? Once we answer that, the church question and the marriage question stop feeling like separate problems. They become two sides of the same answer.
The phrase I keep coming back to is complementarity without hierarchy. Men and women are different, and those differences really matter. But difference is not the same thing as rank. The Bible never quite says what it's so often assumed to say about who has the last word — and the broader pattern of Scripture looks much more like mutual partnership than like a chain of command. That's the case I want to make.
The framework: complementarity without hierarchy
Start at the beginning. Genesis 1:27 says human beings are made in the image of God, male and female, together. I think we tend to skim past that, but it carries more weight than we usually give it. It means that I cannot be a full image-bearer by myself — the image is located in male-and-female partnering to reflect God's light into God's world. In Genesis, men and women are made for each other in a way that goes deeper than romance or reproduction. We are created as co-rulers — kings and queens set over creation. Wherever one is shut out of a sphere, the other becomes deformed too. It is not good when man is alone.
The mid-20th century theologian Karl Barth once said that a world where men make decisions without women becomes “demonic and tyrannical.” That's a strong word. But the more I sit with it, the more I think he's right. We need each other in ways that go deeper than convenience or practicality. We're not interchangeable, but we are made for each other — and what we lose when we cut one side out of the conversation is much bigger than we usually realize.
And here's the thing: our difference is not erasable either. Men and women are not the same. The Bible takes this seriously, and so do I. We were made for each other as counterparts, not as copies. So we are made for each other, and yet history is full of manipulation and conflict between the sexes. A really helpful distinction here comes from the theologian Ray Anderson, who talked about divine preference versus biblical precedent. Divine preference is what God actually wanted for human flourishing — the picture of Genesis 1 and 2, two image-bearers co-ruling creation in partnership. Biblical precedent is what God condescends to work within after the Fall — the bent, patriarchal, often violent arrangements humans make of our freedom. Much of Scripture is God working within precedent while quietly pointing back toward preference. The question isn't, “What did the ancient world look like?” We know what it looked like, and the Bible doesn't pretend otherwise. The real question is, “Where is God pulling all of this?”
The answer the Bible keeps pointing toward is mutual partnership, not hierarchy. Real difference between men and women, honored rather than ranked. That's actually what the word “complementarity” was meant to capture in the first place — though in a lot of Christian usage today, “complementary” has come to mean something narrower. Fitting roles. Men do these things, women do those things, and the fit between them is what makes a marriage or a ministry work. The older meaning is, I think, far more interesting. Men and women complete each other's humanity by being genuinely other. Not by performing assigned roles, but by being present to each other as image-bearers who are not the same. Erase the differences and we lose something. Rank the differences and we lose something else. The third way is to honor them without ranking them.
What Scripture shows
Here's what's wild to me. If you read the Bible looking for women, you find them everywhere — and almost always in positions that, by the cultural logic of their day, should not have been theirs. The Old Testament was written inside societies where women were property and their testimony was discounted. And yet the narrators keep going out of their way to highlight women whose faith and courage and theological clarity outshine the men around them.
Rahab professes one of the sharpest declarations of Yahweh's lordship in the entire book of Joshua: “The LORD your God is God in heaven above and on earth below.” Deborah judges Israel and leads its armies, and the text doesn't register any surprise about her gender at all. Manoah's wife — unnamed, which is itself the cultural tell — is the one the angel of the LORD (likewise unnamed) speaks to, twice. When her husband tries to get the angel to confirm the message to him instead, he gets rebuffed. The narrator is making a point. And even in the stories that are genuinely horrific in their treatment of women (Judges 19 is the obvious one), the writers signal in a hundred small ways that this is not how it should be.
Then Jesus comes along and turns the volume up considerably. Mary of Bethany sits at His feet — that's the disciple's posture, a recognized male role at the time — and when Martha tries to call her back to a more culturally acceptable script, Jesus defends her. Luke 8:1–3 names the women who funded Jesus' ministry — women who were likely some of Luke's eyewitness sources for his Gospel. The first witnesses to the resurrection are women, in a world where women's testimony wasn't even admissible in court. The church has historically called them the apostles to the apostles. Yes, Jesus chose twelve male disciples — but that was a tightly bounded symbolic act, regathering the twelve tribes of Israel around Himself. It wasn't a template for ecclesial office. The wider movement around Jesus is absolutely full of women.
Acts and the letters keep the pattern going. Saul rounds up men and women when he persecutes the early church (Acts 8:3) because if you want to stop a movement, you target the leaders. Lydia hosts the Philippian church in her home. Priscilla teaches Apollos. Romans 16 names Phoebe as a deacon, entrusted by Paul with carrying and delivering his letter to the churches in Rome. She's the first teacher of Romans. The same chapter names Junia as outstanding among the apostles — even if some translators have tried to change her sex or her apostleship, the Greek is quite clear. Euodia and Syntyche, over in Philippians 4, were almost certainly the overseers of the Philippian house churches; Paul addresses them by name precisely because they lead.
A few years ago I sat down and counted the named first-generation Christian leaders mentioned in the New Testament. The total comes to roughly 130 — about 93 men and 37 women. That's 28% women, coming out of first-century Judaism, in a world where the public sphere was male. That figure is astounding, and points to the Spirit's pattern from the beginning.
Where the burden of proof lies
Here's the question I keep wanting to ask. If Scripture really teaches that men hold a permanent position of authority over women — in marriage, in the church, in the home — where does it actually say that? Not where is it implied, or inferred, or assumed. Where is it stated?
Turns out, it's surprisingly hard to find. The hierarchical model is built by inference from a handful of verses, and most of those verses, on closer reading, don't support it. Genesis 2 gets invoked because Adam was formed first — but that's a sequencing observation, not a hierarchy claim. “Head” in 1 Corinthians 11 and Ephesians 5 is taken to mean “authority,” but the Greek word more naturally means “source.” 1 Timothy 2 gets read as a universal ban on women teaching, but the chapter contains only one imperative and it's “let her learn.” You can build a careful theological case for hierarchy if you want to. But you have to build it. It's not just there on the page.
Meanwhile, there is only one place where Paul does explicitly use the Greek word for authority — exousia, the standard New Testament term — when speaking about men and women. It's 1 Corinthians 7:4: “The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.” That's the Bible's one direct, explicit statement on the question of authority between men and women. The husband has authority over the wife's body; the wife has authority over the husband's body. If we want to know what Paul actually thinks authority looks like in a marriage, this is the verse to start with. And what we find is mutuality, not rank.
Here's another thing that's started to bug me the more I sit with it. If Scripture were really teaching a complementary scheme — these roles for men, these other roles for women — you'd expect some symmetry, right? You'd expect a complementary list that only women are allowed to perform. But all I've ever been given is a list of roles women are barred from. The so-called “role distinction” only ever runs in one direction. That's not complementarity. That's hierarchy with a friendlier name.
And meanwhile, the broader pattern of Scripture — women leading, teaching, prophesying, hosting churches, carrying letters, witnessing resurrection — just sits there in plain sight. The pattern is so consistent that those committed to hierarchical readings have to keep explaining it away: Phoebe wasn't really a deacon, Junia was only known by the apostles, Priscilla taught Apollos under the authority of her husband, Deborah was a judge but only because the men were too weak and passive. At a certain point the simpler reading just becomes the more honest one.
About the harder passages
Of course, anyone who's been in this conversation knows there are a handful of passages that, read in isolation, seem to push the other direction. I won't try to handle them in one breath here. But here's a taste of where each one is going, and why I don't think any of them says quite what it's most often taken to say.
Genesis 2's “helper.” The Hebrew word translated “helper” (ezer) is the same word the Bible most often uses for God Himself as Israel's deliverer. Not “assistant.” Not “sidekick.” Something much closer to “rescuer.”
1 Corinthians 11 on “headship.” The Greek word for “head” (kephalē) almost always means “source” rather than “leader” in metaphorical usage. The Greeks even had a separate word — archē — they preferred when they wanted to say “leader.” Paul explicitly uses the source metaphor in this passage. And he takes for granted that women are praying and prophesying out loud in church — the exact phrase he uses to describe what the men are doing.
1 Corinthians 14 telling women to be silent. Just three chapters after Paul took for granted that they were prophesying out loud. Either Paul contradicts himself, or something else is going on. The giveaway is in a single phrase: “as the law says.” Because what's being attributed to the law isn't anywhere in the law.
1 Timothy 2's “I do not permit a woman to teach.” The only imperative in the entire chapter is “let her learn.” And the word translated “have authority” (authentein) appears nowhere else in the New Testament — it carries a domineering, controlling sense quite different from the ordinary Greek word for authority that Paul uses everywhere else.
“Husband of one wife” in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. In Greek the phrase is literally “a one-woman man.” The emphasis falls on the oneness, not on the maleness — like saying “dear brothers” to mean “brothers and sisters.”
Ephesians 5 telling wives to submit. Verse 22 doesn't contain the verb “submit” in the original Greek. It borrows the verb from verse 21, where it's plural and applies to everyone submitting to one another.
1 Peter 3 on wives being subject. Read the verse before. The context — a believing wife with an unbelieving husband — changes everything about what Peter is telling her to do.
Each one of these gets its own article in the coming weeks. The case I'm making here in broad strokes gets built out, verse by verse, in those.
So what does this actually look like?
If complementarity without hierarchy is right, what does it mean for the church and the home? A few things.
In the church, it means we stop treating certain offices as off-limits to women on the basis of their gender. It means we look for the gifts the Spirit has actually given — to teach, to lead, to pastor, to disciple — and we set people loose into the callings that match those gifts, regardless of whether the person carrying the gift is a man or a woman. ECO has been one of my favorite places to live this out, because it's a denomination that actually takes both the authority of Scripture and the leadership of women seriously. Those don't have to be in tension.
At the same time, I want to be clear about where I disagree with the broader “egalitarian” tent. There are movements that have pushed women forward by fiat, pursuing a church version of certain cultural assumptions about identity and power that has little to do with Scripture and calling. Just as I think many complementarian theologies are more grounded in culture and preference, I also know many egalitarians who make their arguments from the wider culture and are doing more harm than good to the foundation of the church. I don't believe my being a man gives me any special ability or status to preach the gospel — as if God desired His Word to be preached through a male embouchure — and I don't believe someone else being a woman gives them the right to lead automatically. What I do believe is that our world desperately needs women and men who are called by God's Spirit, grounded in God's Word, and committed to His Mission to boldly use their voices for His glory.
Turning back to marriage, we've already seen how the Bible never uses the term authority to describe what is often assumed about marriage. I want to approach this with real pastoral sensitivity. I know many marriages that hold to a complementarian theology and are some of the happiest, healthiest couples I know — and I know egalitarian marriages where no one is responsible for anything and both people are slowly wilting. The shape of a marriage isn't reducible to a theological label.
Still, one idea that has long puzzled me is the “tie-breaker” theology that says the husband has to be the deciding vote when a couple disagrees. Doesn't that basically assume Christ isn't a real third party in the room? Because He is. Both spouses are under His lordship, and the patient work of figuring out a hard decision together — with prayer, with conversation, with actual submission to each other — is part of how marriages get formed into the image of Christ. In my own marriage, we have haltingly found out which area of our life and family best fits each other's gifts and temperament, and our marriage is best when both of us are fully leading together.
And here's the common pushback I want to take seriously: doesn't this just produce passive men? “When women lead, guys go fishing” is the slogan I've heard tossed around. Look, passive men are a real problem in the church, in marriage, and in society. But it's not a women-in-leadership problem. It's a discipleship problem. If a man can only lead when there isn't a strong woman in the room, his leadership wasn't really leadership in the first place. The answer isn't clearing the room of strong women. The answer is discipling men into the kind of active, sacrificial leadership the gospel actually calls them to. Men and women, leading together as men and women, both refusing the temptation to either dominate or shrink back. That's the picture.
Where this leaves us
Complementarity without hierarchy. Differences honored, never ranked. A Bible that, when you read it as a whole, has been telling this story all along — even in the passages that have been used to tell a very different one.
Revelation 5 paints the end of the story: a kingdom and priests, ransomed by the blood of the Lamb, ruling on the earth. Men and women, together. That's where this whole story has been heading since Genesis 1.
But getting from here to there means doing the actual work — going back to the harder passages, one at a time, and seeing what they actually say instead of what we've been told they say. That's what the rest of this series is for.
Next time: Genesis 2, and what “helper” really means. The Hebrew word might not say what you think it does.
