Short Take 4: Resurgence Turned Divergence in the Southern Baptist Convention, Part 1

Complementarian theology became such a high core value that it inadvertently, by proof of what we have seen, look at the fruit of what happened, became elevated above the safety and well-being of many women. So high a core value has it become that in much of our world, complementarian theology is now conflated with inerrancy. Case in point, notice how often our world charges or dismisses egalitarians by saying they have a low view of Scripture.

Because unless they think like us about complementarian theology, they do not honor the Word of God. Maybe you could explain the history there and what she means in that particular soundbite. And then she gets into the egalitarian issue that's saying that people who are complementarian think egalitarians have a low view of Scripture. There's a world of background to that. Let me deal with the sexual abuse thing first. Those 400 cases in what we have, I think it's 46, 47,000 churches, 15 million approximately Southern Baptist names in those church roles, 400 cases, that's been taken to become the foundation for saying we have a crisis.

Everywhere you turn in the SBC, there's sexual abuse taking place against women. Well, that's simply not true. If you just use the statistics that they themselves are relying on, it's not what they're portrayed to be. One case is wrong, one case is bad, but it is not of the crisis proportions that it's being described as. She ties that into complementarianism in a similar way that Dwight McKissick did in the debate that I had with him that you referenced earlier by saying that if you are complementarian, what you're doing is you're providing the groundwork for abusing women.

And here's the way the thinking goes. This is the argument that they are making. If you oppress women by not allowing them to be pastors, you're not allowing them to preach to men because you say the Bible forbids that, then what you're doing is you're encouraging oppression of women in other ways. So people who listen to your complementarian theology and say, oh, it's okay to oppress women by not allowing them to be pastors of churches, they will go on to reason, well, it must be okay to oppress women by sexually abusing them or taking advantage of them. Again, it's ludicrous. It's ludicrous. True complementarianism protects women.

It values women. The problems that have been highlighted and come to light where abuse has been covered up is indicative of a deeper issue where we are basically not really being in submission to God's word. And that's one of my contentions is we've got a bunch of theoretical inerrantists, not just in the SBC, but beyond the SBC, people who say, oh, yeah, we believe God's word, but they're not going to live according to God's word. They're not going to repent where God's word corrects them, and they're not going to submit to the instruction of God's word that tells us how to deal with sin in the church.