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The Genealogy of Complementarianism

From Locke’s equal individual to the Danvers Statement.

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Most people assume complementarianism is simply what the church has always taught — traditional patriarchy carried forward under a gentler name. That assumption is wrong. Traditional Christian patriarchy and modern complementarianism start from opposite premises and answer opposite questions. The older system begins with hierarchy and has to account for equality. Complementarianism begins with equality and has to account for hierarchy. That reversal happened somewhere, and the clearest place to watch it happen is in John Locke.

I. What Locke Displaced

Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680) argued that political authority is paternal authority: Adam received dominion as a father, kings inherit it, family and commonwealth are the same kind of thing at different scale. Subjection is natural, not chosen. Hierarchy is the given; equality, wherever it appears, is the thing that needs explaining. Locke’s First Treatise is a sustained demolition of that framework, and the Second is what he builds in its place.

created order → natural hierarchy → paternal authority → political authority

II. Equality Becomes the Starting Point

Under Filmer, authority is presumed and liberty must be justified. Under Locke, liberty is presumed and authority must be justified. Every subsequent argument about who may rule whom inherits that burden of proof.

natural equality → individual liberty → authority requires justification

III. Locke Applies Equality to the Sexes

This is where the genealogy turns. Locke attacks the father’s unique authority in the household on the ground that the mother’s claim is equal to his.

He proposes “parental” in place of “paternal” power, grounding it in a commandment that joins father and mother without distinction. The traditional question was: who naturally possesses authority in the household? Locke replaces it with: what authority belongs to parents, as parents? Father and mother now begin from equal natural standing, and any difference between them has to be argued for on some other basis.

IV. What Locke Did Not Do

Locke does not conclude husband and wife must hold identical authority in every respect. He treats marriage as a voluntary compact, limits the husband’s rule to their common interest and property, and then says this:

Locke has granted equality of nature and retained differentiation of function, justified on practical grounds rather than created order. He hands every later thinker a formula the older patriarchal tradition never needed and never produced.

V. The Anthropology Escapes Politics

Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) carries the same picture into a different field: character is made, not inherited, through the formation of a rational, morally disciplined individual. Once that is the account of what a person is, there is no obvious reason to exclude half the population from it.

VI. Wollstonecraft Takes Locke Further Than Locke Did

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) asks the obvious question: if women are rational moral beings, why is their social position built on the assumption that they are naturally subordinate? Locke’s natural equality becomes rational equality, rational equality demands educational equality, and educational equality produces the claim to civic equality. The old structure now has an argued opponent rather than merely an aggrieved one.

VII. The Pressure Becomes an Argument

By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the case has hardened into something close to a syllogism, and every later fight is a fight about one of its steps.

1. 1

   Men and women possess equal human nature.

2. 2

   Both possess reason.

3. 3

   Both possess moral responsibility.

4. 4

   Therefore both possess equal dignity.

5. 5

   Therefore sex alone cannot establish political inequality.

6. 6

   Why, then, should sex establish ecclesiastical or domestic authority?

Steps one through four are Christian commonplaces no orthodox believer disputes. Step five was won in the public square. Step six is the question that walks into the church, carrying four premises the church already affirms.

VIII. The Premise Enters the Church Through Its Own Door

The Seneca Falls convention (1848) wrote its Declaration of Sentiments in deliberate imitation of the Declaration of Independence — Lockean language put to a new use. In the same century American evangelical women organized abolition societies, temperance work, missionary boards, and holiness revivals in which women taught and preached. The equality premise reached the pews partly through secular argument and partly through the church’s own activity.

IX. Evangelicalism Absorbs the Premise and Keeps the Texts

Twentieth-century evangelicalism did not adopt secular feminism, but it did adopt a substantial part of the liberal anthropology: men and women equally human, equally image-bearing, equally accountable, equally redeemed. Say that in any evangelical church and no one objects. At the same time evangelicals retained male headship, wives submitting to husbands, male eldership, and restrictions on women teaching men — a set of texts they were not willing to surrender.

X. Evangelical Feminism Forces the Question

In the 1970s the question stopped being theoretical. Scanzoni and Hardesty’s All We’re Meant to Be (1974) and Paul Jewett’s Man as Male and Female (1975) argued the case from inside evangelicalism: equal personhood, therefore equal spiritual gifting, therefore equal calling, therefore no permanent authority structure based on sex. The complementarian response denies the last step and only the last step — equality of personhood does not entail identity of vocation or authority. The Lockean distinction, arriving exactly where it is needed.

XI. The Synthesis Gets a Name, 1987–1991

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood organized in 1987; the Danvers Statement became the defining declaration; the label “complementarian” was chosen because “patriarchal,” “hierarchical,” and “traditional” carried the wrong freight. Piper and Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991) made the position systematic.

Ontological equality plus functional differentiation. Structurally that is Locke’s formula, arrived at from Scripture rather than the Second Treatise, but shaped by a problem Locke created.

XII. The Inheritance, and the Irony

Filmer begins with hierarchy and has to explain equality. Locke begins with equality and has to explain hierarchy. Complementarianism inherits the second problem, not the first. You can see the inheritance in how complementarian writing spends its energy — establishing that difference does not imply inferiority, that submission is not diminishment. No seventeenth-century patriarchalist wrote that way, because no one was pressing him on it. On the question of the sexes, the modern evangelical argument, on both sides, is being conducted on ground the Enlightenment cleared.

SOURCES · Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (1680) · John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), First Treatise §47, Second Treatise §4, §§52–53, §§78–83 · Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) · Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) · Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls (1848) · Scanzoni & Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be (1974) · Paul K. Jewett, Man as Male and Female (1975) · The Danvers Statement (1987–88) · Piper & Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991)