More Compliments to Complementarianism

Soon, Ligon Duncan will be blogging through the T4G Statement. But until then, he offered a continuation of Mark Dever's thoughts about egalitarianism. Some good quotes are:

By the way, this is one reason why I think we just don't see many strongly inerrantist-egalitarians (meaning: those who hold unwaveringly to inerrancy and also to egalitarianism) in the younger generation of evangelicalism. Many if not most evangelical egalitarians today have significant qualms about inerrancy, and are embracing things like trajectory hermeneutics, etc. to justify their positions. Inerrancy or egalitarianism, one or the other, eventually wins out.

Cultural cooption of the church's reading of the Bible, robs the church's ability to speak prophetically to the culture and to live distinctively in the culture, which in turns undermines the church's Gospel witness.

If the egalitarian impulse wins out, the church is compromised precisely at the point where paganism is assualting the church today. For, as Peter Jones has brilliantly demonstrated, paganism wants to get rid of Christian montheism by getting rid of the Creator-creature distinction. And one way paganism likes to do that is through gender confusion. Hence, the bi-sexual shaman, the sacred feminine, goddess worship, etc. Paganism understands that one of the best ways to prepare the way for pagan polytheistic monism over against the transcendent Creator God of the Bible is to undermine that God's image in the distinctiveness of male and female, and in the picture of Christ and the church in marital role distinctions, and in the male eldership of the church. Egalitarianism is just not equipped for that fight, and in fact simply capitulates to it.

When these men published "the statements," there was a great deal of commotion about this very topic. Many people accused them of being rude, divisive and splitting hairs. However, as these men have articulately and intelligently responded about this issue, the cries of egalitarianists seem to have grown fainter (at least in the blogosphere circles that I run in.)

I would encourage you to read the whole blog entry.