Tracing the Roots and Intent of Modern Complementarianism
You may have heard the word complementarianism. I first encountered it in a church I attended in Minneapolis — a congregation formed around a mission to reach university students, drawing from the University of Minnesota and a dozen other campuses within a few miles of downtown.
I had heard the term in passing but let it slip by. It seemed ancillary to the main mission. Then I took the membership class — one three-hour session, followed by an interview with a church elder. Near the end of the class, in a section on church leadership, this statement appeared:
“We believe that ever since man and woman were first formed in the garden, God has created men and women equal in dignity, value, and worth. We also believe men and women have been given different complementary roles in church leadership. This Church is led by qualified and confirmed elders. While the qualifications of an elder are something that every church member could strive for, only some qualified and confirmed men are to be elders of the church.“
I pushed back on this with a pastor I thought I knew. He responded with visible irritation — this was a core belief of the church, not open for debate — and cited several proof-texts, primarily from 1 Timothy: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve.”
Case closed. God said so. If I didn’t like it, I could worship elsewhere.
I ended up leaving the church. That conversation was one reason.
What I didn’t know then — and what took years to piece together — is that complementarianism didn’t exist as a theological construct, or even as a word, until 1988. And the story behind it is darker than most people sitting in those membership classes ever get told.
It starts with the word itself.
Complementary is a 400-year-old word rooted in the Latin complementum — “that which fills up or completes.” Across three centuries and a dozen fields, its meaning was remarkably consistent: two things, neither complete without the other, combining as equals to form a whole. Complementary colors on the color wheel — neither dominant, each requiring the other. Complementary angles in mathematics — two incomplete angles that together make 90 degrees. Complementary strands of DNA — the double helix held together by mutual pairing. In physics, Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity described light as both wave and particle — two descriptions, neither subordinate, both necessary.
In every field where the word had been used, complementarity meant mutual completion between equals. Neither element ranked above the other. Neither submitted to the other.
Where Does the Complementarian Argument Come From
In 1861, Alexander Stephens — Vice President of the Confederacy — delivered what became known as the Cornerstone Speech. He was refreshingly honest. The Confederacy’s foundations, he said, rested upon the “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Founders had been wrong to treat slavery as temporary. This arrangement was not a necessary evil. It was a divinely ordered good.
Stephens wasn’t improvising. He was summarizing a theology.
For decades before the Civil War, Southern clergy and scholars had built a rigorous biblical case for racial hierarchy. Thornton Stringfellow argued from Genesis, the Mosaic law, and Paul’s letters that slavery was woven into the fabric of God’s created order. R.L. Dabney — theologian, professor, and Stonewall Jackson’s personal chaplain — went further, insisting that the subordination of enslaved people was not only permitted but required by Scripture’s plain teaching.
The argument had a recognizable shape: appeal to creation order, appeal to specific texts, dismissal of broader biblical themes of liberation and solidarity, and the framing of any challenge as capitulation to secular cultural pressure rather than faithful exegesis.
That argument lost the war. But it didn’t disappear. It adapted.
Same Method, New Hierarchy
By the 1980s, racial hierarchy had become publicly indefensible — at least explicitly. The Civil Rights Movement had done its work. No serious theologian was writing systematic defenses of white supremacy anymore.
But a new front had opened.
What had become known as the egalitarian movement had been gaining ground in evangelical churches throughout the 1970s. Scholars like Catherine Clark Kroeger, Gilbert Bilezikian, and Paul Jewett were making rigorous biblical arguments that men and women were fully equal not only in worth but in calling — that church roles ought to be filled by those most gifted, regardless of gender. Their view was spreading across denominations and resonating with a generation shaped by the broader cultural shifts around women’s equality. The word they used for the relationship between men and women was complementary — two equal persons, each enriching the other.
In 1987, Wayne Grudem — a Reformed theologian whose Systematic Theology had become one of the most widely assigned texts in conservative evangelical seminaries — convened a meeting in Dallas with John Piper, a Greenville, South Carolina born Baptist pastor who had built a significant following through his Minneapolis church Bethlehem Baptist, along with Wayne House, S. Lewis Johnson, and others.
Their stated concern was precisely this egalitarian momentum. Under Piper’s leadership — the pastoral voice to Grudem’s doctrinal architecture — the group drafted what would become the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) was formally incorporated shortly after — and at a breakfast meeting in December 1988, they formally appropriated the egalitarians’ own word and redefined it as their banner – complimentarianism a brand new word for the world.
They needed a word to describe what they were for – maybe even a word they could introduce as “theology”. They explicitly rejected calling it “traditionalist” — too much implied resistance to Scripture challenging tradition. They rejected “hierarchicalist” — too honest about the actual power arrangement they were defending. They chose complementarian instead, because it suggested equality and beneficial difference. It sounded like partnership.
They took the other side’s word — a word whose entire history pointed toward mutual equality — and quietly redefined it to mean hierarchy.
Brilliant!
The institutional soil this movement grew in was not neutral. The Southern Baptist Convention — the denomination whose theologians had built the antebellum biblical defense of slavery, and whose flagship seminary had been founded explicitly to train ministers in that tradition — became CBMW’s primary institutional champion. The SBC provided early financial backing, gave CBMW a home on its campus at 2825 Lexington Road in Louisville — the address of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — and eventually embedded the Danvers Statement’s framework into its own confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. A glance at the CBMW council membership confirms the overlap: Al Mohler, President of Southern Seminary; Bruce Ware, Professor of Theology at Southern Seminary; Dorothy Patterson of Southwestern Baptist Seminary; Daniel Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Seminary. These were not institutions arriving fresh to the question of hierarchy. They carried that history in their bones.
So,despite complementary colors not dominating each other. Complementary angles not submitting to each other. CBMW took a word with three centuries of consistent meaning and pointed it in the opposite direction.
That is not coinage. It is appropriation. And it tells you something important about what the movement understood itself to be doing.
What the Danvers Statement Actually Says
To understand why the institutional lineage matters, the statement itself requires a close reading.
The Danvers Statement opens not with affirmations but with a list of ten rationale — the “contemporary developments” the founders found alarming enough to organize around. Read carefully, the list reveals an organization driven primarily by fear of social change. It begins with concern about cultural confusion over gender differences, moves through the rise of feminist egalitarianism, and then — in the same breath — lists pornography, physical abuse in the family, and the erosion of biblical authority. The rhetorical move is deliberate: egalitarianism is placed alongside a cascade of cultural pathologies, implying that the two are related causes of the same social unraveling.
The statement’s ten affirmations then build the positive theological case. They are worth reading carefully.
The first affirms that Adam and Eve were created equal as persons but “distinct in their manhood and womanhood.”
The second immediately defines what that distinction means: “Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order, and should find an echo in every human heart.”
The third goes further: “Adam’s headship in marriage was established by God before the Fall, and was not a result of sin.” This last point is load-bearing. By locating male authority before the Fall, the statement removes it from the category of things Christ’s redemption might undo. It is not a consequence of brokenness. It is the design.
The fourth affirmation acknowledges that the Fall distorted these relationships — but notice how. In the home, it says, “the husband’s loving, humble headship tends to be replaced by domination or passivity; the wife’s intelligent, willing submission tends to be replaced by usurpation or servility.” Sin manifests in two ways: men abusing authority, or women resisting it. The framing treats a wife’s resistance to her husband’s authority as morally equivalent to his abuse of her. Both are sinful distortions of the same created order.
The fifth affirmation states that both Testaments “affirm the principle of male headship in the family and in the covenant community.”
The sixth applies this to practical life: wives are called to “willing, joyful submission” to their husbands’ leadership, while in the church “some governing and teaching roles are restricted to men.”
The tenth closes with a warning: “a denial or neglect of these principles will lead to increasingly destructive consequences in our families, our churches, and the culture at large.”
The statement’s vision, as CBMW’s own website declares, is for “the vast majority of evangelical homes, churches, academic institutions, and other ministries” to adopt the Danvers Statement as part of their “doctrinal confessions.”
This was never intended as a pastoral suggestion. It was a doctrinal program with institutional ambitions.
The Language That Should Stop Us
What’s striking is not just the institutional continuity with the antebellum world. It’s the continuity of language.
Stringfellow had argued that slavery received “the sanction of the Almighty in the Patriarchal age,” that it was woven into God’s national covenant with Israel, that Christ never condemned it, and that therefore it remained a legitimate feature of the divinely ordered social world. Those who challenged it, he insisted, were imposing secular values onto God’s plain Word and threatening both the church and the social fabric. The argument’s architecture was precise: hierarchy is embedded in creation, Scripture confirms it across both Testaments, and resistance to it is capitulation to the spirit of the age.
Now read the Danvers Statement alongside that. Masculine and feminine role distinctions are “ordained by God as part of the created order.” Male headship is grounded in both Testaments. Those who challenge it are succumbing to “feminist egalitarianism” and an “ailing culture.” The clarity of Scripture on this matter is so plain that sophisticated counter-arguments represent a threat to biblical authority itself — what the statement calls “hermeneutical oddities devised to reinterpret apparently plain meanings of Biblical texts.”
The conclusion changed. The sentence structure didn’t.
What Scripture Actually Says
There is also a counter-witness the Danvers Statement rarely engages.
The early church was not the male-led institution it imagines as its precedent. Paul commends Phoebe as a deacon, greets Priscilla as a fellow worker, and in Romans 16 acknowledges Junia — a woman — as “outstanding among the apostles.” Lydia led a house church in Philippi. Nympha led one in Colossae. The historical evidence for women in leadership roles in the first-century church is considerably stronger than the evidence against it. The proof-texts that pastor cited to me — a handful of verses from 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians, written to specific communities navigating specific local problems — are carrying more theological weight than they were ever meant to bear.
And the Genesis foundation the Danvers Statement treats as settled is far less clear than it claims.
Genesis 1 is unambiguous: both male and female are created in God’s image, both given the same blessing, both given shared dominion over the earth. There is no hierarchy in the text. Even most complementarians concede this and move quickly to Genesis 2.
Genesis 2 is where the argument is made — through a chain of inferences, none of which the text states directly.
Adam was created first, therefore he leads — an argument from primogeniture – the rightfulness of succession to the firstborn child – that requires a father who dies, unequal inheritance, and sibling rivalry, none of which appear anywhere in the narrative.
Eve is called ezer — helper — therefore she is subordinate. But ezer is used repeatedly in the Old Testament for God himself as Israel’s helper. Clearly God is not subordinate to Israel. Ezer is a word of strength, not submission.
Adam named Eve, therefore he has authority over her. But the naming in Genesis 2 is an exclamation of joy and unity — “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” — not an act of dominion.
The Danvers Statement’s most load-bearing theological claim — that “Adam’s headship was established before the Fall and is not a result of sin” — rests on inferences read back into Genesis through Paul’s letters. But Genesis 3:16, where God says to Eve “he will rule over you,” comes after the Fall, inside the description of the curse. The egalitarian reading — that male domination entered the world through sin, not before it — is not a liberal imposition on the text. It is what the narrative sequence actually shows.
The complementarian reading of Genesis requires importing a conclusion the text never states, from a later letter written to a specific troubled church, and calling the result “the plain meaning of Scripture.” That is precisely the hermeneutical move Stringfellow made with slavery. And it is precisely what the Danvers Statement condemns others for doing when it warns against “hermeneutical oddities devised to reinterpret apparently plain meanings of Biblical texts.”
The irony is complete.
The selectivity is also telling. The same household codes that complementarians cite for gender hierarchy also instruct slaves to obey masters — a parallel the antebellum theologians embraced wholeheartedly, and that modern complementarians quietly set aside. The hermeneutic bends toward what the interpreter’s world can tolerate, and then claims to be simply reading the plain text.
A Modern Invention Wearing Ancient Clothes
Defenders of complementarianism often point to the ancient and universal church as their tradition. Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin — none of them were egalitarians. But nor could they have been complimentarians – since this usage of the word didn’t exist until 1988.
But this misses something important.
The world was patriarchal until recently. Pre-modern male authority was assumed, not defended. It was the unexamined social water that theologians swam in, rarely requiring systematic justification. Augustine did not write treatises defending male headship against egalitarian alternatives. There were no egalitarian alternatives to defend against.
What’s new about complementarianism is that it is a reactive formulation. It arose specifically because the old assumption was being successfully challenged. You don’t found institutions and write systematic theologies to defend what no one is questioning.
The word itself doesn’t appear in any Reformation document, any church father treatise, any council. It was appropriated and redefined in 1988. A tradition that needed to steal someone else’s word to describe itself is constructing something, not transmitting something ancient.
What it was reacting against is also worth naming. In 1987 — the same year as CBMW’s founding Dallas meeting — evangelical leaders including Catherine Clark Kroeger, Gilbert Bilezikian, and Gretchen Gaebelein Hull were forming what became Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE). These were not secular feminists. They were committed evangelicals with deep exegetical arguments, their own journals, and their own institutional networks. When the Danvers Statement was published, Kroeger called colleagues almost immediately: “The Danvers Statement cannot be the statement for evangelicals.” CBE drafted their counter-statement, meeting in Hull’s New York City apartment.
The egalitarian tradition, it turns out, has deeper historical roots than CBMW. Evangelical arguments for women’s full equality trace back to abolitionists like Katharine Bushnell and Amanda Smith in the 1800s — whose theological case for women’s equality was built alongside, and intertwined with, their case against slavery.
The egalitarian tradition and the abolitionist tradition grew up together.
The complementarian tradition and the pro-slavery theological tradition also grew up together.
That parallel is not incidental. It is the story.
What the Cross Says — And What Fear Reveals
There is a question underneath all of this that is more than historical.
Read the Danvers Statement’s opening rationale again, slowly.
Cultural confusion.
Unraveling fabric.
Feminist egalitarianism.
Pornography.
Physical abuse.
Ailing culture.
Increasingly destructive consequences.
The document is saturated with anxiety. Whatever else complementarianism is, it is a theology born in fear — fear of cultural change, fear of women’s expanding authority, fear of an order being overturned.
This matters theologically. Scripture returns again and again to a consistent divine refrain: do not fear. Fear-based theology — theology organized around protecting an existing order from perceived threat — has a persistent record of producing harm. The antebellum theologians were afraid too. Afraid of what emancipation would mean for their social world. Their fear did not make their theology faithful. It made it a weapon.
Any theological system can be evaluated not only by its textual arguments but by its consistent social effects. Who does this arrangement protect? Who does it constrain? Whose voice is amplified, and whose is managed?
The evidence from the world the Danvers Statement feared is instructive. Where women have been educated, empowered, and given equal voice, the results look nothing like the catastrophe the statement predicted. One landmark study drawing on data from 175 countries estimated that half the reduction in child mortality since 1970 is attributable to increased educational attainment among women. Economies have grown — a one percent increase in female education raises GDP growth rates measurably across dozens of countries. Communities have become more stable, more democratic, and more resistant to authoritarianism. Research published in the Journal of Happiness Studies found that gender equality improves life satisfaction for both men and women — and that it is not a zero-sum game. The rising tide lifts everyone.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians describes Jesus emptying himself of power — taking the form of a servant, becoming obedient to death. For those reading Scripture through a cruciform lens, this is the interpretive key. The cross does not just save individuals. It indicts every system that organizes itself around hierarchy snd domination.
A theology that consistently ends up protecting those with authority and limiting those without it has a Philippians 2 problem — regardless of how many proof texts support it.
The planter class’s theologians were wrong not primarily because they misread a few passages. They were wrong because they used Scripture to legitimate power rather than interrogate it.
That pattern is recognizable. And it did not end in 1865.
A Question Worth Sitting With
None of this is only academic.
For those of us who came out of environments shaped by these theological traditions — where male authority was presented as the plain teaching of Scripture, where questioning it felt like questioning God — the historical lineage matters personally.
It raises a question worth sitting with: What was this actually for?
Not what it claimed to be for. What it was actually for.
History and theology can take us only so far. The answer the historical record suggests is not comfortable.The stated theology even more troubling. At some point the question becomes personal.
But sitting with uncomfortable questions and answers, and letting them do their work in us, is part of what spiritual formation requires.
SeePhas 