affirming biblical principles, as the Southern Baptists did. Others are
establishing egalitarian principles as part of their policies, as Willow
Creek Community Church has done.^50 There is a sifting, a sorting, a
dividing going on within the evangelical world, and I believe that insti-
tutions that adopt an egalitarian position on this issue will drift farther
and farther from faithfulness to the Bible on other issues as well.
What is “the way forward” regarding biblical manhood and wom-
anhood? I believe the way forward is to add a clear statement to the
governing document of your church, your denomination, or your
parachurch organization.
Why should we do this? First, because it affects so much. As
Christians, we can differ over issues of the Tribulation or the
Millennium and still live largely the same way in our daily lives. But
differences over this issue affect people’s lives and result in “increas-
ingly destructive consequences in our families, our churches, and the
culture at large,” to use the words of the Danvers Statement
(Affirmation 10). Where biblical patterns are not followed, husbands
and wives have no clear guidance on how to act within their marriages,
and there is increasing stress that brings harmful and even destructive
consequences to families.
The second reason I believe that organizations should add state-
ments to their governing documents is that egalitarians have run out
of new exegetical arguments, and they simply are not winning the
arguments on the basis of the biblical text. As a result, it seems that
their books increasingly deal not with detailed analysis of the words
and sentences of Scripture but with broad generalizations about
Scripture, then with arguments from experience or arguments from
philosophical concepts such as “fairness,” or from the supposed neg-
ative results of a complementarian position (such as spousal abuse,
which they wrongly attribute to our position, but which we strongly
oppose and condemn as well).^51 But it seems to me, and increasingly
it seems to many others, that the egalitarian position has simply lost
the arguments based on the meaning of the biblical text, and there are
no more arguments to be made.
A third reason why I think organizations should add a statement
The Key Issues in the Manhood-Womanhood Controversy 67