There is nothing like a provocative title to get people’s attention. If you are offended by it, don’t worry. I could have just as easily entitled this post “Paul Was Not Complementarian.” I debated which to use and decided that our readership would probably be most intrigued (upset, pissed off) by the claim that Paul wasn’t egalitarian. But he wasn’t. Sorry. To demonstrate this, we need to take a look at the worldview Paul was operating within.

Paul lived 2,000 year ago. He was a first-century Jewish Christian who was conversant in Greek philosophy. Which means that there was a world of difference between him and us. And I mean that quite literally.

Consider the changes in our view of the cosmos that have taken place in the past few centuries. Just 100 years ago it was a minority view that the universe was expanding. Albert Einstein hated the idea that the universe was dynamic so much that he built into his equation for General Relativity a term that made it static, a move he later called his greatest blunder. All of our ideas of black holes, of vastly distant galaxies, of an expanding universe (and therefore of a beginning to the universe) have only recently become the consensus view of scientists.

Go back a few more centuries and you get to the era of Galileo and Copernicus who asserted that the sun and not the earth were at the center of the solar system. This was a huge disruption to the model of the cosmos that had held sway since Aristotle’s time (which was a few centuries before Paul lived). The Aristotelian model of the universe was the way people in the Western world viewed the cosmos for over 1,500 years.

This model was pretty simple. The earth was at the center of the universe and around the earth were a series of concentric spheres each a little larger than the other. The number of these spheres changed with time and there were different calculations of how distant the various spheres were, but the foundational pieces of the model were consistent. There were spheres for all the “wandering stars” (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; in that order). As you moved up through the spheres things became more celestial, holier. This is because beyond all the spheres was the Heaven of heavens, literally the abode of God. (This is why Jesus ascended into the clouds - through the spheres - to take his place at the right hand of God the Father.)

All that is to say, that for Aristotle, for Paul, and for most Christians throughout history, the universe was a hierarchy. It was an ordered universe. There was a structure to it. At the “top” of the physical cosmos was Heaven. And at the “bottom” was humanity. And the space between was filled with spheres of decreasing holiness, going down, until you reached earth.

As humans we can’t help but think of ourselves in terms of the universe we live in. When we look out at a clear night sky we are looking out into a vast expanse of nothingness, pockmarked by occasional stars, islands in an otherwise empty universe. We feel no connection to that universe. We feel isolated on one fortunate rock spinning around one random island of light.

Go back a few centuries, into the medieval age, when people lived in the geocentric, spherical cosmos of Aristotle and Paul, and their experience was quite different. C.S. Lewis describes this experience in his book The Discarded Image, he writes, “To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building…it is vertiginous [inducing vertigo].” And they weren’t looking into emptiness. “Their system is in one sense more heliocentric than ours. The sun illuminates the whole universe….Night is merely the conical shadow cast by our earth.” So when a medieval looked out at the night sky, it “looks black only because we are seeing it through the dark glass of our own shadow. [To think like a medieval] you must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music.” You are not looking out into emptiness, you are looking into a realm that is holier than earth, a place that is closer to God.

Paul, just like those around him, viewed the universe as intrinsically hierarchical. And humanity was a microcosm of this macrocosm. Owen Barfield makes this point in his book Saving the Appearances. He writes, “Whatever it is we call our ‘selves’, our bones carry it about like porters. This was not the background picture before the scientific revolution. The background picture then was of man as a microcosm within a macrocosm….In his relation to his environment, the man of the middle ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo, than we are.” So the ancient view of humanity was related to their view of the cosmos. Which means that for Paul and everyone else around him, humanity was intrinsically hierarchical. He had no other way of imagining it.

We see this clearly when Paul deigns to talk about mundane things like the order of a household. He consistently assumes the order of husband over wife, parents over children, and master over slave. These are all reflections of the more fundamental hierarchy, Christ over the church. Paul viewed everything in terms of hierarchy. He had no framework to do otherwise. He does assert that the gospel supersedes all the categories that we used to divide humanity. And he does assert that mutual love and submission should be the center of all our relationships. But his fundamental view of humanity was hierarchical, with Christ as the head.

Paul wasn’t egalitarian or complementarian, because these are modern categories rooted in modern assumption and modern ways of thinking. Heck, the categories themselves were only created a few decades ago by a group of white men.

We lose something when we seek to force the Bible strictly into our modern habits of thought. It would seem to me that Paul’s vision of humanity has a Trinitarian bent to it. One that recognizes inherent differences among people (and even among classes of people) and celebrates the way that these differences are united in Christ. He doesn’t destroy the differences. He doesn’t have a view of humanity individualistic enough to even allow him to fully destroy the differences between us. No ancient person did.

So what do we do with this? Well, it may well be that the modern category of egalitarian is our best approximation to Paul’s true position. Maybe. It may also be that by continuing to fight over complementarianism and egalitarianism we are simply perpetuating a narrative that was constructed by a group of white men thirty years ago. One that keeps them in power, but has little to do with what Paul really meant. Maybe.

What I’m more certain of, is that the more we commit to modern terms such as egalitarian and complementarian, the more they blind us to essential aspects of human relationships. Can we really say that there is no hierarchy in humanity? Not even a spiritual one? It would seem to me that without that the assertion that Jesus is Lord loses its meaning, and discipleship become an exercise in futility.

I would suggest that, at bare minimum we need to recognize a spiritual hierarchy. We need saints, people we look up to, learn from, and seek to emulate in our faith. And we need people who look up to us and seek to emulate us. We need some spheres of holiness between us and Jesus, lest our whole view of the Christian faith become flat, with Christ infinitely far away and no way to move any closer to him. Indeed, the distance may be infinite, but a spiritual hierarchy can at least help us see what our next steps towards Christ look like. Doesn’t discipleship require something along these lines?

If the only options are egalitarian or complementarian, then I’m egalitarian. But I don’t like the label. I’m convinced that we lose as much, if not more, than we gain when we argue about such divisions. And I’m convinced that the more we dig our heels in to one side, the more we become blind to nuances that are probably pretty important.

When it comes down to it, I’m really just tired of the ways that modern, manufactured terminology has become the only language we have to talk about our ancient faith. It doesn’t seem to be deepening our faith, building up the church, making disciples, or reaching the world. So, why are we so committed to it?