The popular author, preacher and speaker John Piper espouses a complementarian view of gender roles. This view states that men and women have different but complementary roles and responsibilities in marriage, family life, religious leadership and elsewhere.
I don’t mean to say that a belief in the difference between two people’s responsibilities equates to hating one of them. And I don't think Piper thinks he's a misogynist. But I'm going to offer a few examples that might suggest otherwise.
Exhibit A
In this interview, he says, "A woman who is a civil engineer may design a traffic pattern in a city so that she is deciding which streets are one-way and, therefore, she is influencing, indeed controlling, in one sense, all the male drivers all day long. But this influence is non-personal…. If a woman's job involves a good deal of directives toward men, they will need to be non-personal in general, or men and women won't flourish in the long run in that relationship without compromising profound biblical and psychological issues.”
The defining factor here is that women can influence men if the men can’t see the women leading them. In other words, it would all be right and good if women could lend us their abilities without us ever having to see them—regardless of some important Biblical examples. Stephen Holmes, senior lecturer in Theology at St Andrews University, responded: "How about Rebekah's instructions to Isaac in Genesis 27? When Josiah discovers the Book of the Law and sends for guidance from the prophet Huldah, her response –––'Tell the man who sent you to me, This is what the Lord says...' –– sounds at least moderately directive!"
And what does this really mean in practice? Is Piper restricting women to either get married and raise children or only work entry-level jobs? Should a male university professor in a female-led department resign? Should a woman pass on any promotions that would result in managerial responsibility over men? Should no woman run for any political office (because after all, their face would be very visible)? Should all men who have female bosses resign, and all female bosses with male employees resign? Should a single mother cease to lead her family when her sons become teenagers?
Exhibit B
His claim that “Christianity has a masculine feel” quite frankly seems a little sad and reeks of Mark Driscoll’s misogyny. Piper says that he, and men like himself, better ‘feel’ Christianity due to their gender.
Piper would have been correct if he meant that men have had more power in the Church throughout its history. This male-dominated heritage would naturally have an effect on what we know as Christianity today.
But can we not separate that from the nature of God? The world’s use of violence to silence women and empower men, even in the church, was and is sinful. The movement of the Spirit (referred to with feminine language in Hebrew) has led the Church towards repentance as more people recognizing that God embodies both mothering and fathering characteristics.
And while pastors are addressed in a number of passages in the NT, not once are they told to be masculine. Piper draws on an American evangelical tradition sparked by Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday, who encouraged male Christians to play sports among other things in order to avoid an appearance of femininity, or softness, or weakness. So Piper’s claim about masculine Christianity reflects the influence of American culture, or the "wisdom of the world," if you will.
If you watch the rest of Piper’s speech, none of the eight marks of leadership he references are really "masculine." For example, he cites attributes like bravery in the face of criticism. One can only assume that he associates opposite of bravery—cowardice—with the opposite of masculinity. Are feminine people, namely women, inherently cowards? Is our natural femininity an inherit flaw to be overcome in order to act bravely like the rest of the guys?
I’m not saying anyone has to refer to God with feminine pronouns, but Piper’s insistence on “masculine Christianity” is a strange way to speak of the Bride of Christ. Piper seems to have forgotten that women were also created in the image of God, were appointed by God as leaders at critical times in the history of Israel and the Church, and were the first to whom Jesus appeared when he inaugurated his new Kingdom on Resurrection Day.
Exhibit C
In this video, he addresses the question of how a wife should respond to an abusive husband:
“If it’s not requiring her to sin, but simply hurting her, then I think she endures verbal abuse for a season; she endures perhaps being smacked one night, and then she seeks help from the church.”
I didn’t include the full context for length purposes, but it just gets worse.
It’s hard to describe how patronizing and dehumanizing it is to describe abuse as something that “simply” hurts women. Whew, good thing getting whacked by a baseball bat doesn’t require her to sin, right? Otherwise she might really need to act fast.
Given Piper’s status as a man in a complementarian community, the odds of him facing emotional or physical abuse are slim. His callous language demonstrates a deep lack of empathy, which I hope he would reconsider if someone “smacked” a woman he cares about.
According to Piper’s own theology, if his daughter’s husband “simply” abuses her, she should first wait for “a season” (how long, exactly?) and secondly place the authority to act in the hands of the church, thus removing all autonomy from the victim. This kind of thinking has allowed thousands of abuse causes to continue unchecked.
And if her husband hits her too hard before this “season” passes, or before the church elders have done whatever they’re supposed to do to stop this, she will die.
This theology kills women.
