Complementarianism

Complementarianism is the position that men and women, though equal in worth as God’s image-bearers, are created for distinct, complementary roles in marriage, family, and the church. In marriage, the husband bears a headship modeled on Christ’s self-giving love for the church, and the wife responds with willing submission (Eph. 5:22-33). In the church, the offices of elder and overseer are restricted to qualified men (1 Tim. 2:12-3:7), while women exercise a wide range of other ministries. The opposing position, egalitarianism, holds that Scripture places no role distinctions on either sex.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession’s chapter on marriage states the institution’s shape, purposes, and bounds without naming headship or any role distinction between husband and wife:

“Marriage is to be between one man and one woman… Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and the preventing of uncleanness.”¹

The Westminster Larger Catechism, part of the wider confessional family, grounds the general pattern of ordered relationships that complementarianism appeals to: “the performance of those duties which we mutually owe in our several relations, as inferiors, superiors, or equals.”² But neither text names husband and wife as one of those relations the way it names parents and children, or names a sex qualification for church office the way 1 Timothy 3:2 does. Complementarianism’s confessional grounding is exegetical, worked out from specific texts, rather than a named chapter in either confession.

Biblical Basis

Creation: distinct and complementary

Genesis 1-2 presents man and woman together, not either alone, as the image of God’s completed design. Ken Magnuson writes that “God has created male and female to be distinct and complementary, each with roles to play in his purposes. We need one another,” describing either sex alone as carrying “a fundamental sense of incompleteness.”³

Marriage: headship as self-giving love

Paul grounds the husband’s headship and the wife’s submission in Christ and the church, not in first-century custom:

“For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” (Eph. 5:23-27)

Alexander Strauch argues this Christological basis is what rules out reading the passage as cultural accommodation: “Paul’s basis for the husband’s headship is not first-century Greco-Roman culture. Instead, it is Christ and his church… Certainly, Christ’s headship over the church is not a relic of an ancient cultural patriarchy.”⁴ “So too, the basis for the wife’s submission is not first-century Greco-Roman society. It is Christ and his church.”⁵

Magnuson locates the same passage’s internal safeguard: the weight Paul gives to husbands loving their wives “as Christ loved the church” exists “to guard against the potential abuse of his headship and her submission.”⁶ Paul sums up the whole passage plainly: “each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband” (Eph. 5:33).

Church office

The same creation pattern extends to the church’s teaching and ruling office. Strauch reads 1 Timothy 2:8-3:16 as one continuous unit, in which the restriction on women teaching or exercising authority over men in the gathered assembly (2:12-14) governs the qualifications for elders and deacons that immediately follow.⁷

Opposing Views

Egalitarianism holds that Scripture places no gender-based limitation on role in marriage or church. Reading Galatians 3:28 (“there is neither… male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) as the controlling text, egalitarians treat the New Testament’s headship and submission passages as addressed to a first-century setting rather than as stating a permanent creation order, and read the Greek verb behind “exercise authority” in 1 Timothy 2:12, αὐθεντέω (authenteō), as meaning a domineering misuse of authority rather than the ordinary exercise of it.⁸

Objections and Responses

Distinguishing roles by sex treats women as less than equal. Complementarians ground the doctrine in men and women’s equal standing as God’s image-bearers (Gen. 1:26-28), a status role distinctions do not diminish. Strauch writes that excluding women from a role “would be unjust and discriminatory if it were done arbitrarily by males for their own selfish ends,” but holds that a restriction rooted in the Creator’s own design is not the same thing as discrimination.⁹

Male headship licenses control or abuse. The structure of Ephesians 5 itself answers this: Paul’s emphasis on husbands loving their wives “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” functions, in Magnuson’s reading, precisely to guard against that abuse.⁶ Headship modeled on Christ’s self-sacrifice is the opposite of license for domination.

Restricting the teaching and ruling office silences women’s gifts. Strauch points to the range of ministry Scripture records women exercising apart from that specific office: evangelism, prophesying, hospitality, mercy ministry, and teaching other women, citing among other texts 1 Corinthians 7:34 and 11:5, Acts 16:15, Romans 16:1-4, 6, 12-13, 1 Peter 3:15, and Titus 2:4-5. Women were prominent throughout the apostolic church, he notes, even though Jesus appointed no woman as apostle or elder.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 25, “Of Marriage,” paras. 1-2. ↩
The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 126. ↩
Ken Magnuson, “6. Sexual Ethics,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩
Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 5, “Male Leadership,” 73. ↩
Strauch, 74. ↩
Ken Magnuson, “7. Marriage and Sexuality,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩²
Strauch, 72. ↩
Strauch, 72, 76. ↩
Strauch, 69. ↩
Strauch, 77-78. ↩