Pastor Joel Webbin and Aaron Wren dissect Timothy Keller's "Blueprints for Christendom 2.0," a strategy urging complementarians to bridge divides with conservative egalitarians by excluding fundamentalists. Wren applies his "Three Worlds of Evangelicalism" framework, arguing that shifting societal norms force gender theology dissolution to prevent generational loss, while redefining biblical patriarchy as psychological design rather than mere anatomy. The discussion warns that clinging to oppositional feminism or rigid secondary doctrines risks unsustainable isolation, ultimately calling for lay experts to prioritize practical faith application over theoretical conflict in a hostile modern culture. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Theology Applied00:02:07
Join Douglas Wilson, Dr. Joseph Boot, Brian Sauvay, Eric Kahn, and myself on March 1st, 2nd, and 3rd for our 2024 conference.
It's called Blueprints for Christendom 2.0.
Our early bird pricing ends on Thursday, August 31st.
So go and visit RightResponseConference.com to register today.
We hope to see you at the conference in March.
All right.
Welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.
I am your host.
Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
In this episode, I'm privileged to have as a special guest Aaron Wren.
The title for this episode is Timothy Keller's Deathbed Strategy for Evangelicals.
What we're discussing in this episode is one of the final pieces of work that Timothy Keller completed about six months before his passing.
And unfortunately, one of the main things that Timothy Keller presents in this final work is a strategy for complementarians.
To bridge the gap with egalitarians through compromise.
That's what we'll be discussing in this episode, and I hope that you enjoy.
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries, and in this episode, I'm very privileged to welcome back, it's been a long time, almost two years, but welcoming back a second time now, Aaron Wren to the show.
Aaron, thanks for coming.
Thanks for having me.
Wow, it's been two years.
Time flies.
Time flies when you're having fun.
Well, let's go ahead right here from the outset.
Let people know how they can keep up with your work and follow you.
Sure.
Just go to my website, aaronrenn.com, A A R O N R E N N.com, and sign up for my newsletter.
There's lots of great free stuff on there, including a lot of what we're going to talk about.
So you'll want to be in on that.
Okay, so it's just aaronrenn.com.
Shifting Fundamentalism Views00:15:44
That's right.
That's right.
Two years.
And I try to give people, exactly, I try to give people deep insight.
That you can't get anywhere else about what's going on in the world in the church today.
Great.
Well, what I wanted to talk about was part of your content that came out recently.
It's probably been about a week or two at this point, but you wrote an article, and sometimes you'll read your articles and record them on your podcast as well.
That's where I typically follow you.
But you did one on complementarianism.
Basically, the gist that I got was that this middle ground between egalitarianism and biblical.
Uh, patriarchy, this middle ground is starting to kind of shift and really just like a sink pit, it's starting to disappear.
And some of the guys with the new Calvinism, young, reformed, restless leaders, including Tim Keller before he passed, were making a push, it seems like an explicit push, for the complementarian, new Calvinist type of folks to link arms with the egalitarians who are at least still within the realm of orthodoxy.
They haven't, you know, they haven't.
Embraced LGBT, those kinds of things.
So, can you kind of sum up a little bit of what you were writing, what you're getting at?
What are some of the problems that you perceive?
I like to take the things that you're seeing and observing in the world and put a framework around them that helps you to understand what's going on, to see the bigger picture.
So, the thing I'm best known for is my Three Worlds of Evangelicalism framework, which I wrote in First Things Magazine.
Which talks about how we went from a world that was positive towards Christianity to one that was neutral towards Christianity to one that's negative towards Christianity.
This is an attempt to do something like that at a smaller scale.
It has been said that conservatism is merely liberalism 20 years too late.
And that might be a little bit unfair, but it does get at a reality is that there is a tendency for people who are conservative to get dragged left as the left continues to make further moves ever further left.
And several years ago, I came to the conclusion that complementarianism was really going to run into some challenges because of that.
As society moved left, it was going to put enormous pressure on complementarianism to move to the left.
And especially as the baby boomers who created and sustained complementarian theology largely in the 1980s started moving on from leadership, this was really going to expose complementarianism to new kinds of pressure.
That would particularly lead people on the thinner end of complementarianism, the ones who try to have the most egalitarian view of gender relations possible.
It was going to cause them to probably flip egalitarian at some point.
Not that the older generation themselves would, but that the younger generations might do that.
So that's kind of the background hypothesis that I had in mind.
And I said, let's test that by seeing what is coming along with.
Various things we see in the world.
And one of the things I noticed was a strategy document that Tim Keller put out in November of last year.
It had actually been mostly developed in the previous year or two, and he brought it all together, added some new stuff, and published it then about six months before he died, which was a series and a strategy about the decline and renewal of the American church.
It was basically his diagnostic for what's gone wrong in the American church, combined with his view of where the church ought to go.
This is essentially the last thing he published before he died, along with his new book, Forgive.
So it's obviously something that he thought was really, really important.
And one of the central features of his new strategy is essentially rethinking differences on the matter of gender.
Keller was and remained his whole life in a complementarian, excuse me, complementarian.
So he didn't flip to egalitarian, but he essentially posits that.
Conservative Christians should take a different approach to their partnerships.
One that says, we're going to add to our coalition egalitarians who are on the more conservative side.
Say, those who want to affirm a gender binary.
They claim men and women could both be pastors, for example, but they still affirm that there are only two genders.
Add those kind of conservative egalitarians to the coalition and subtract from the coalition.
Fundamentalist, so people on the ultra right of the spectrum, if you will.
It's this new alliance, if you will, this new movement would be structured around a sort of a centrist vision of kind of more left leaning complementarians and more right leaning egalitarians that would come together in the center to create this new movement.
And there's a lot more to it than that, by the way.
He talks about the Christian Mind Project.
There's many great things in there, actually.
Suggest that people read it.
And so that, I said, he's really, again, suggesting two things.
One is to dissolve this notion that gender, your theology of gender, is sort of a barrier to working together, andor to make it a much less of a barrier to working together than it previously would have been.
And then also kind of getting rid of the more conservative people, again, fundamentalists, et cetera.
So I saw that.
That's actually a strategy.
That's actually an explicitly stated strategy that he lays out.
You don't need to interpret anything.
And I'm like, that.
Is very much the kind of move I would have anticipated in this sort of complementarianism coming under pressure world.
Yeah, that's helpful.
With that, I want to define some terms, but before I do, let me ask one follow up question.
In Tim Keller's paradigm and everything that he was publishing towards the end of his life on this subject, how does his definition of who is a fundamentalist differ, if at all, with the traditional view of what it means to be a fundamentalist?
He has an extensive section on fundamentalism in that document.
And there's basically originally four chapters, one of which was on the decline of evangelicalism, which he centers very much in the fundamentalist tradition.
And he sort of draws on George Marsden, the historian, for his definitions.
And I don't remember all of the marks that he associated with fundamentalism, but certainly sectarianism would be among them.
A rejection of things like social justice would be among them.
Sort of a highly combative attitude would be one.
So he does have a definition of fundamentalism that's in there.
Elevating of secondary and tertiary doctrines above where they should be.
That would be another one of it.
So I don't think he has a particularly bespoke definition of fundamentalism.
He draws on other people.
And I think the way that he describes it is.
You know, more or less accurate.
I'm sure there's experts who would probably quibble on it, but I don't think it's a lie to say there's something of a kind of fundamentalist style, if you will.
Okay.
To me, it seems as though one of the shifts with fundamentalism, that last point that you mentioned in terms of elevating secondary and tertiary doctrines as though they were primary, giving them perhaps too much emphasis as dividing lines between different camps, it seems as though that is true.
The posture, the principle behind that remains true, but it seems as though the secondary doctrines in specific that are being elevated are not the same ones of the past.
When I think of even just 20 years ago, it seems as though the mode of baptism between pedo and credo was a bigger issue than it is for kind of this new fundamentalism.
Or another example would be your view on the sign gifts of the Spirit, continuationism as articulated.
Third wave charismatic position, as articulated by Sam Storms, Wayne Grudem, John Piper, versus cessationism.
You know, the cessationism that we would connect with someone like Sproul or MacArthur.
These seem to be larger issues, and not just 50 years ago, but even just 10 years ago, perhaps even just five years ago, it seems like you would draw clear lines in separating tribes and camps around a person's or a ministry or a church's view of the gifts of the Spirit and baptism.
Whereas now, it seems like the fundamentalist, the new fundamentalist, and I would, you know, probably not the term that I would choose for myself, but I know that I probably would fall into that category.
For me, I'm finding as a Credo Baptist far more commonality with Pado Baptist and my fellow Presbyterians, guys like Doug Wilson and the Moscow Tribe.
We're partnering on lots of different things there, but we're drawing harder lines on the issues of roles between men and women.
So, patriarchy versus a soft complementarianism seems to be a starker divide than Pado versus Credo.
Have you noticed that as well?
And what do you think might be going on there if that's true?
I would put a little bit of a different spin on it when it comes to gender specifically.
I do believe you're correct that the issues have changed around what the controversies are.
Part of what I saw going back a few years ago, looking at the pressure complementarianism was going to come under, is it's very clear that complementarianism itself was originally designed as a sort of third way.
Doctrine.
It's a halfway house.
This is very clear from the works of sociologist James Davison Hunter, who wrote a book in 1987, the year the Danvers statement came out, called Evangelicalism, the Coming Generation.
And he talked about the three strands of thought on gender roles sort of the traditionalist position, which sort of unapologetically looked back to sort of pre sexual revolution 1950s style gender roles as the way it should be.
There were the feminists, and then there were the Strand that he doesn't call them complementarian, but it's clearly the strand that's evolving into complementarianism at that time, where they say, We are not going to affirm 1950s gender roles, which I agree were more culturally bound than per se a product of scripture.
But we need to hold, also need to hold firm on the things that the Bible specifically says around husbands as the head of the home and a male only pastorate.
And they left a lot of wiggle room in there.
I would say, is the terms of how much differences there are between men and women.
But those were essentially the two kind of main focus points of it.
And they also did try to acknowledge certain feminist critiques.
The Danvers Statement talks about an upsurge in abuse.
For example, it essentially began, the movement began to redefine being the head of the home as servant leadership.
Essentially undermining the way it was traditionally understood.
And ultimately, it came together into a sort of third way position, you might call it.
And just as it's now kind of the thin complementarianism is sort of collapsing on the left flank, we also see people on the right who are very dissatisfied with the same approach, and they are moving into more neo patriarchy.
Direction.
So, we see that there's pressures coming to bear on complementarianism from a variety of perspectives.
What I would say on neo patriarchy, though, is that it is kind of a niche, largely online movement.
You know, Doug Wilson sort of has some of that, although Doug himself, I sort of classify as a little bit of, you know, he's a boomer figure himself.
And, you know, much of his writing, you know, from the past, I think it would be some stuff that certainly some of the Christian Manosphere guys criticized him as being too feminist friendly.
So he's maybe not as full throated a patriarchalist as some would like.
But that's certainly another piece of pressure that's hitting the complementarian position.
Complementarianism, in my view, congealed at a particular point in time in response to a particular set of social pressures and a particular set of people.
That were involved, and it created something that sort of held for a while, but as time has moved on, it's a little bit coming apart.
And what we see is, you know, I think if you talk to some of the biggest complementarian promoters, they would simply say, Look, what's wrong with a male only pastor?
I mean, that's what we believe in.
We believe in the Bible.
And I think they're sort of true on that point, but it's really sort of this broader vision that extends beyond.
Sort of the narrow definitions of who can be a pastor, who's the head of the home, into a much broader conception of substantive complementarity of the genders.
And what does that actually mean?
And how substantive is it?
And interestingly, although the main complementarian book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, was written, it could be co edited by John Piper, and it really doesn't go into any detail on substantive complementarity.
Talks about complementarity, but it really doesn't focus on it.
Piper himself is really probably the foremost advocate of a sort of thick or broad complementarian vision in which the differences between the sexes have pervasive effects on what they should and shouldn't be doing in life.
I believe he says things like women shouldn't be police officers, for example, and has gotten criticized over that.
And so, you know, I don't want to suggest that all of these people thought exactly the same.
Broad Complementarian Distinctions00:07:57
I mean, part of it is with complementarianism.
There are people who had kind of different perspectives and they had to create something that everybody could agree with.
It's like any sort of statement.
You know, once you try to actually create an institution, create a movement, create a document you can all sign on to, that causes, you know, it's a lot harder because you're dealing in the real world.
You're not just dealing in intellectual abstractions or, you know, Aaron Wren putting out what he thinks in a newsletter.
Now you're dealing with, oh, wait a minute, I have people that I have to actually work with in that.
You know, constrains what we can do.
Right.
Yeah.
You're right to say that there's a sliding scale, a spectrum within the complementarian world from, you know, I've articulated in the past as kind of narrow and soft versus broad and hard.
The hard and soft piece, I use those to describe, you know, you could hold to a woman can't be an elder, but she could still preach underneath the authority of the elders.
I would say that that's a soft complementarian.
View, whereas hard would be, you know, she cannot exercise authority or teach, seeing it as not one prohibition.
And 1 Timothy chapter 2, but as one prohibition, meaning she can't teach with authority, but as two separate prohibitions, she cannot teach or exercise authority.
So that's the soft and hard.
That's an example of that piece.
And then the narrow and broad would be do these differences, these distinctions, only have application in the home of the church, or is there a broader application?
You brought up the example of John Piper, who would be what I would describe as both hard and broad, complementarian.
Just for our listeners, let me, in my assessment, show a little bit of the distinction between egalitarian and complementarian and the complementarian and patriarchy.
And I'd love to get your feedback if you would agree with these definitional distinctions.
For the record, I would place myself into the patriarchy category for the view that I hold.
But the differences, as I see it, is that some of these egalitarians, that the softer complementarians are being encouraged to link arms with, That would be the more conservative egalitarians.
They would still see a gender binary, still see male and female, but at the level of both the home and the church, it's not that the husband is the head of his house, but it would be this mutual submission under Christ.
And the emphasis would be placed there.
So there's not a male headship in the home and there's not a male headship in the church.
Within complementarianism, in my assessment, 1988 is when Wayne Grudem and John Piper coined the phrase.
I think it was always meant to be a halfway house.
A third way option.
And it seems as though they said there are distinctions and roles that do actually stem from a distinction in nature.
So it's not just male and female roles he assigned them, but male and female natures he designed them, he made them.
But the only difference in nature is in the physical realm that women have hips and men, you know, can bench press.
And so even in the broad iteration of complementarianism, you know, it would extend beyond that.
There's certain roles like police officers or combat roles in the military, those kinds of things.
But it would limit the distinction of nature to the physical.
Whereas, patriarchy, by comparison, most of the patriarchal guys that I'm familiar with, there would be a spectrum of iterations and applications.
But most would agree that the distinction in roles is not just relegated to the home of the church, but the whole of society.
And those distinctions of roles are not arbitrary or capricious, they stem from a distinction in design.
Nature, but that distinction in design is not merely physical in our physical anatomy, but they would also cite passages.
I would be one to cite passages like 1st Corinthians, or I'm sorry, like 1st Timothy chapter 2, where Paul doesn't just rely on the order of creation, but he also relies on the order of the fall.
And so going back to some older theologians that would put some emphasis on the fact that the woman was the one who was deceived and became a sinner.
So it's not just her physical anatomy being different than a man.
That she's not physically built to lead, but emotionally, psychologically, that there are other components of the whole person, of men and women, that are distinct at the level of nature, not merely role, and that the role stems from that difference, not just a physical difference in nature, but a psychological, emotional difference, that all the way down, God made us different, and that that applies not just in the home of the church, but in society as a whole.
That's my understanding of biblical patriarchy, and there are other iterations.
Is there anything that you feel like I missed, or anything that you would add to some of those definitions?
Well, I think you kind of covered up some of the differences between these camps within the evangelical world.
One thing that I would say is when it comes to patriarchy, patriarchy is not just a set of interpretations about scripture.
I would have said that historically we would have thought of patriarchy as an actual cultural legal system in which the father held genuine rule.
So the Roman paterfamilias.
Really did hold legal, social, cultural power over his household.
Whereas, you know, in our society, we live in a legally and culturally egalitarian society.
So that is the background.
And I do think if I were to put one challenge to the patriarchal position here, is to me, it's a little bit like I believe in the divine right of kings.
Well, we don't have a king.
You know, so that's, I think that is a huge issue for practically speaking.
What does it mean to believe in patriarchy?
I think that that has not been fully kind of teased out in terms of, in light of this belief system, how does one live in a society like today where fathers are actually disadvantaged by the cultural and legal systems?
Creates a really kind of an interesting conundrum, I think.
But I do think that basically, with the proviso that I think patriarchy is actually essentially a legal and cultural system.
In addition to being an interpretation of the scripture, that would be the only thing, the only twist I would put on there.
Okay.
Yeah, that's helpful.
But yeah, you're right.
It's difficult to actually practically carry it out when we are so far from that system in the West today.
That really, and part of that is not just our views of men and women, but it's also views of households and individuals that we're an atomistic society, that the basic building block for many is considered to be the individual person.
And not the household.
And so, this idea that I don't want to get too far afield from our discussion here, but yeah, there's a lot of things like that.
Just the fact that we live in a mass urbanized, highly technological society compared to the pre industrial household based society of the Bible, it really creates a radically different environment today versus the past that makes things quite complex in terms of thinking about how to live.
You know, what does it mean to live in any kind of biblical manner in that environment, which is radically different from the past, kind of unprecedented in many ways?
Modern Environment Challenges00:18:01
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All right, well, go ahead and share any other thoughts that you might have in regards to.
Well, I'd love to hear, not that you're.
You have a crystal ball, and so we're not going to hold you to it.
But if you could indulge in some speculation, what are some of your predictions for the evangelical church on this particular issue of men and women?
What do you think is going to happen?
That's a good question.
I do see evidence that people are putting the Kellar strategy into practice, which is we saw it with some writing columns that Russell Moore.
Has recently done.
Russell Moore, former Southern Baptist entity chief, now editor of Christianity Today, wrote a column where he essentially repented of being the old patriarchal Russell Moore.
In fact, Russell Moore used to be an overt patriarchalist.
And he now says, I want to partner with these conservative egalitarians and I want to be less associated with people like the old Russell Moore.
So, like Keller, he sort of divides the world into sort of good and bad.
Egalitarians and good and bad complementarians.
And he's like, well, the good complementarians and the good egalitarians need to work together.
We also see a lot of debates over gender roles in the Southern Baptist Convention.
There's a proposed amendment that would clarify constitutionally that churches can't be part of the SBC unless they have exclusively male pastors.
So I do believe there is going to be.
Kind of an elite movement more in an egalitarian direction.
The first step is to essentially downgrade egalitarianism as constituting one of these barriers that would have defined tribes and say, well, rather than we have the complementarians over here and the egalitarians over there, why don't we just work and partner more with these egalitarians?
Why don't we just embrace them as more authentic?
So we just essentially downgrade the gender roles to a sort of lower status, maybe from, this is illustrative here, from a second order issue to a third order issue.
So let's start downgrading that and sort of treat it as a matter of conscience.
That seems to be the move that's going now.
I believe that's going to be something that's going to have a lot of appeal to a lot of people who are highly educated.
And it kind of leads off in a direction towards ultimately egalitarianism.
I think it's going to be very difficult to sustain any sort of complementarian vision.
That has a very narrow and thin view of the differences between men and women, and essentially treats the difference between men and women as coming down to two arbitrary rules God made.
You know, women can't preach, only men can preach and be pastors, and men are the head of the hum.
There's a lot of people who believe that.
That is essentially the Keller position.
You know, it's summed up in the Kathy Keller line a woman can do anything an ordained man can do.
And I think that's going to prove to be unsustainable.
In the long term, because it's really weird.
If you think about it, it kind of is a weird position.
So I think that that sort of is going to go in one direction.
I think we're also going to have this sort of neo patriarchal split off the other side.
And I think for the people who want to remain complementarian andor patriarchalist, They're going to have to find some way to make that viable to actually live out in modern industrial society, in which the official culture of society and the legal system are deeply hostile to it.
You really can't say, well, the husband is the head of the home, but if the wife decides she doesn't like him anymore for no reason at all, she can divorce him, and it's going to go pretty much in her favor or certainly not against her in the divorce court.
And oh, by the way, then she can show up at a church and they're going to treat her as this victim of emotional abuse when she claims that her ex husband is no good and that she's a poor single mother who needs help.
And the church is going to actively underwrite that divorce.
And it happens all the time.
And so when you're in that environment, you have to come up with some sort of a vision that's actually functional in that environment.
And that's going to be a very Big challenge.
Now, having said that, when you look at the votes at the recent SBC, which came down, you know, 80, 90% on some issues in favor of complementarianism, it does not look like essentially, you know, evangelicals, certainly conservative evangelicals, are planning to abandon complementarianism anytime soon.
Although we see things moving in certain particular directions.
Right.
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
At a societal level, You don't have some of those safeguards.
But that's, you know, I mean, that's in some sense, it feels like saying it's going to be really hard to practice integrity and not lie because of social media and AI.
You know, like there are always going to be certain cultural and technological advancements that are going to force people, if they want to live in accordance with their conscience and what they believe the Bible teaches, that they won't have the social constructs to keep them in that lane.
That'll have to be a conscience choice.
That it'll have to be, you know, they'll actually have to be willing to do that.
And so, right now, you're absolutely right.
At any point, the trad wife can decide, that's it, I'm done.
You know, I've been LARPing.
As a 1950s housewife for the last decade, and I had my fun and I ran my social media account and I did these kinds of things, but I'm kind of done with that.
I don't like my husband anymore, and she could tap out in a way that a woman actually in the 1950s could not tap out.
She could say, I don't like this, but she wouldn't really have anywhere socially to go.
So, all that being said, I think you're absolutely right.
That does make it more challenging, but in my assessment, it doesn't make it impossible.
You still have You know, your will, your ability to choose to abide by a certain set of principles that you believe in, regardless of what the law happens to be in that particular place and time.
So, any other thoughts on that?
I don't think so.
Okay.
For the patriarchy guys, last question.
You do your best or also feel free to decline to answer.
It's up to you.
But for the patriarchal guys, the Theo bros, whatever you want to call them, it seems like.
We don't really have any institutions.
You know, it's going to be a really uphill climb.
Certainly seems disheartening and all but impossible.
The one thing I think that we have on our side, aside from, I believe, the Word of God, because I hold to that position, so obviously I'm convicted that the Word of God speaks to it.
In addition to that, we also have nature, and nature usually tends to be a force to be reckoned with.
So we don't have the social and legal system.
But we do have just some natural things that it's just hard to go against the way that God designed the world.
No matter how technologically advanced you may become, there are just certain things that God has built into the fabric of the world that will eternally ring true.
All that being said, again, despite those advantages, there are lots of disadvantages.
What do you think the patriarchal guys, that side of the aisle, do you think there's any hope?
For them with this shift, you're saying, I already see institutionally this shift of what Keller was advocating for towards the end of his life that the arms are being linked, the allegiances are being made with the egalitarians.
I see that happening.
What do you see with the patriarchal side of the aisle?
Do you think it's just these guys are just going to be LARPing around, all 14 of them on Twitter?
Or do you think there's actually a chance?
I always say.
That the first thing we have to do is discern and align ourselves with the truth.
And so we need to make sure that we are not just regurgitating things and that we actually know what the truth is, or we at least know where we don't know.
Because a lot of my work kind of came out of the fact that I thought I believed one thing when I came to church and I was taught all these things.
I just took it in.
I said, well, this is what they're teaching me.
These are the good guys.
And so I'm going to follow this.
And then all of a sudden, I realized some of the stuff they're telling me actually wasn't accurate.
And so I think we need to have the courage to admit that we ourselves could be wrong.
And so I think that willingness to do it ourselves is important and to know where we don't have all the answers.
How should we live today?
That is a hard question without an obvious answer.
Maybe an answer that can't be boiled down to a set of rules.
I think a lot of times people want to have this biblical rule, very bright line.
That's one of the reasons I think the You know, women can't be pastors, things appeal to people because it's a rule.
We can apply a rule.
Whereas a lot of the things that we have to do today involve wisdom.
Where should I live?
What kind of career should I go into?
How do I find a spouse in this environment?
How do I actually stay married?
How do I raise my kids in ways that they will not abandon their faith when they're older and they'll stand in the truth?
These are like hard questions.
That we have to equip people with tools to answer.
That's one of them.
The other thing I say is, you know, again, I think a lot of this stuff tends to be an online movement.
And I think some of the online interactions are very counterproductive.
You know, when Tim Keller died, people are trashing him on Twitter.
I mean, that's just not going to win many admirers from people.
We have these social rules, like don't speak ill of the dead.
And, you know, you do that, you're in trouble.
And the other thing I'd say is, you know, you see some of these people, this is not necessarily all of them, picking fights with women online.
If you believe men and women are different, then you would go back to that old rule from the playground you can't hit a girl.
And basically, I would say, you know, the odds are very low that anything good is going to come out of getting in a fight with a woman if you're a man.
It typically doesn't go well for you.
And so, how do you operate in that environment is not always key.
But I think it goes almost like the political idea of owning the libs becomes like the motivator a little bit.
And I would dial back some of that and think more about some of these other issues substantively.
And, you know, what does it mean to live out, you know, the Bible's calling in this world today, practically speaking?
Right.
And that is a very difficult question.
Dude, I do not profess to have all the answers to myself.
And I do believe certain things.
I do believe it's good to be married for most people.
I think that's the normative call of people's lives.
There's things I do think, but I think we need to focus a lot more on kind of the practical side of some of these things as well.
That's what I would say.
And again, that's not like how do these people win or get traction?
I don't know, but those are the things that I.
I see in the movement that I might suggest focusing on.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
Definitely in terms of getting into arguments online with women, it's an ironic posture to take for somebody who has biblical patriarchy.
One of the things that I would say that differentiates the work that I did, and my newsletter was originally called The Masculinist and it very much focused on men's issues, and I still write about men's issues, but it is not rooted in anti feminism.
And I was thinking about this.
It wasn't something I self consciously thought of when I started it, but as I was thinking about people who get in arguments with all these women, I said to myself, you know, nothing that I'm doing is a response to something women are doing or saying.
It's just, you know, I've got an agenda that I'm pushing.
If anything, it's other men that I'm interested in pushing back on.
I do think there's a sense if you went back to this sort of pre feminist era, You know, men were not obsessed with what women were doing and saying.
It wasn't like, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't something that was like, you know, men kind of had their own world.
You know, men had their own social world.
And that's sort of been destroyed.
In fact, that'd be one thing I'd do is recreating sort of a men's social world in an era where there are no more all male clubs, no more all male spaces, or very few of them.
You know, men operated largely in the world of men.
They didn't really spend a lot of time concerning themselves with the affairs of women.
And I think a lot of the kind of conservative, People I see seem to have a very explicitly anti feminist posture.
And it's always a bad idea.
I shouldn't say always, but as a general rule, it's a bad idea to define yourself in opposition to something instead of being in favor of something.
Yeah.
We can make some exceptions there.
It's probably good to be anti slavery.
But for the most part, being anti something creates an identity that is simply a reflection of that thing that you're against instead of being something you're for.
Yeah, that makes sense.
The last thing that I'll say is this.
Avoiding Oppositional Definitions00:07:14
I think part of the difficulty on this particular issue, really any issue, but I always say that as a pastor, I always say that faithful preaching is comprised of three primary components it's revelation, interpretation, and application.
Revelation being I have a text, not a dream or a strategy, but a text.
The interpretation being a faithful exegesis of that text.
And as the late great R.C. Sproul once said, there's only one accurate interpretation.
You can have a thousand different Faithful applications of a singular text, but God means what he means by that text.
So it's God's meaning, God's interpretation, the exegesis.
So revelation, the text, interpretation, the exegesis, God's meaning of the text, but then application.
And one of the things that I've noticed is that a lot of the Reformed guys, I think, were light with the new Calvinist movement over the last 20 years.
A lot of them were light on that third piece, application.
Whereas the old Calvinists, if you think of the Reformers and especially the Puritans, The Puritans, I mean, they would go a whole extra hour sometimes in their preaching of just giving practical applications.
And that's really, in many ways, that's where the term, the pejorative puritanical, comes from, is that they were constantly being accused of being legalist because they were taking the word of God and saying, in this particular practical instance, it means you need to do this.
There were commands actually being.
And so, all that being said, I think that a lot of the more modern, reformed, new Calvinist preacher types, I would say, are the equivalent of an audible commentary, an hour long audible commentary on the Lord's Day.
It's revelation and interpretation, but very little, if any at all, application.
That third piece, and I think part of the reason why is because that third piece is the most controversial piece.
You can read the text and Just read the text and sit down and offend somebody who's maybe deeply progressive and LGBT affirming.
But with your fellow brothers in Christ across the aisle and different tribes, if you just read the text and even go further from revelation to interpretation and give a reformed exegesis, conservative interpretation of a particular text, you still won't have a lot of enemies on your right.
But the moment that you give an application and you say, you know, so like for instance, you know, I've asked people not theoretically, not in theory, but in practice, function what kind of authority does a man have in his home?
If you are complementarian or patriarchal, if that is your position and you believe that the husband is the head of his wife, what does that mean?
Because on the church side, complementarianism is a lot more practical.
We all have at least this working definition of what that means is that a woman can't preach and she can't be an elder.
And so we have a real clear definition, we don't have that on the home side, on the home front.
When we come to the home with the same doctrine of complementarianism or even biblical patriarchy, In both views, when it comes to the home, practically, what does this mean?
And essentially, what it usually boils down to, and I think I've heard this from a lot of guys, including you, talking about Mark Driscoll, that when you really get down to the nuts and bolts, the application practically, Driscoll was kind of a little bit egalitarian.
For as macho as he sounded and those kinds of things, what does it mean for the husband to be the head of his home?
It means you exercise that authority to do what your wife wants.
Exactly.
And that's it.
And so, really, at the end of the day, you know, I'm actually running a poll on Twitter right now, which is probably something that you wouldn't do.
I'm being a little facetious, but I'm trying to make a point and I'm not trying to be overly offensive.
But I said, practically speaking, aside from theory, practically speaking, how much authority does a husband have in his home?
And then I gave two options none, I'm an egalitarian, and none, I'm a complementarian.
So I wanted to see, you know, which option people would pick.
And so I think part of what the patriarchal guys are trying to do.
And I'm not saying that everybody's doing it well, but I think what they'll have to do, if it's going to be a viable position, is they're going to have to get into the realm of application, not just revelation interpreted, but the realm of application.
And you cannot get in that realm without creating enemies.
In my experience, not just me and the soft complementarian and the hard patriarchal, we're both going to share enemies on the left for the person who doesn't even identify as being a follower of Christ.
Who has the rainbow flag on their front porch?
We're both going to have that person as an enemy.
But the person who begins to talk about not just revelation and interpretation, but application is going to quickly find enemies amongst genuine brothers in Christ.
But I don't see any other way to outline a position like the roles between men and women without getting into the practical piece.
Any final thoughts on that?
And then we'll go ahead and wrap up the episode.
Yeah, I would say in many of the areas that I highlighted about how we need to be creating applications and tools to help people live in the world, that it's not all up to the pastor of the church to come up with that.
Pastors of churches have become a little reticent to give life applications as a result of some things like purity culture.
You know, I kissed dating goodbye really wasn't a biblical application.
And so I think certainly it's.
Within the role of the pastor to give applications of scriptures to people's lives and help them do that and make it tangible and practical.
But today, evangelicals essentially assume the pastor's got to have the answer to everything.
The pastor isn't going to have the answer to everything.
We need people who are lay experts in various things who can step up and show the way on certain things, like, oh, how do you find a spouse today in this world?
Maybe the pastor's going to know something about that.
Maybe there are going to be a lot of other people in the pews that are going to know things about that too and could share the wisdom that they've learned.
So, The application one is one that goes beyond just the pastor.
It's unfair to put that much pressure on a pastor to come up with all of the answers for how to live now.
It has to be a more full spectrum approach.
Agreed.
Okay, final question.
So, how do you feel about the Puritans?
I don't know that much about the Puritans, to be honest.
And I'm not a Puritan scholar.
So, I'm afraid I really can't say too much about that.
Okay, fair enough.
Pre-Order Your Book Now00:00:52
All right.
Anything that you can ask another question if that wasn't sufficient, you could take a mulligan on that.
Well, then I'll ask you this question, and it'll be serving for you.
How can anything else that you want our listeners to know about?
We already talked about your website.
We can plug it one more time here at the end, but anything else that you would like our listeners to know about that you're working on?
Yes, I do have a book coming out in January called Life in the Negative World.
You can pre order it on Amazon, and looking forward to that.
And it does.
Come up with a few ideas for how we ought to be responding.
So, coming up with an application is not just something I'm saying you need to do, but I'm trying to take some of that too.
So, you could go pre order that on Amazon.
And then don't forget to sign up for my website at aaronren.com.
Cool.
Great.
Well, I'll be looking forward to your book.
And once it comes out, we'd be honored to have you back on the show.