Thread by @NateSchlomann

This Russell Moore article in JETS from 2006 deserves a thread. This is fascinating, you're not going to believe what you find here. Who is this guy? We NEED this guy right now. I'm just going to quote. Every one of these is a Russell Moore quote:

etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDF…

"Unless evangelical churches are willing to be counter-cultural against not just the secular culture but also the evangelical establishment itself, the future of complementarian Christianity is bleak."

"The answer to this is not a new strategy. It is, first of all, to discover why evangelicals resonate with evangelical feminism in the first place—and then to provide a biblically and theologically compelling alternative."

"When men see themselves as head over their households, they feel the weight of leadership—a weight that expresses itself in devotion to their little platoons of the home."

"Complementarianism must be about more than isolating the gender issue as a concern. We must instead relate male headship to the whole of the gospel...

... And, in so doing, we must remember that complementarian Christianity is collapsing around us because we have not addressed the root causes behind egalitarianism in the first place."

"The biblical evangelistic impulse that leads conservative evangelicals to oppose revisionist “innovations” such as soteriological inclusivism can also be misconstrued to drive them to mute the hard edges of the biblical witness on intensely personal issues such as gender roles—

for the sake of winning the lost. When this is combined with a softening of evangelical language into more therapeutic tones, the question regarding a move toward feminism is not whether but when."

"For too long, the evangelical gender debate has assumed that this was merely one more intramural debate—on our best days along the lines of Arminian/ Calvinist or dispensationalist/covenant skirmishes... And yet,

C. S. Lewis included male headship among the doctrines he considered to be part of “mere Christianity,” precisely because male headship has been asserted and assumed by the Christian church with virtual unanimity from the first century until the rise of contemporary feminism."

"If complementarians are to reclaim the debate, we must not fear making a claim that is disturbingly counter-cultural and yet strikingly biblical, a claim that the less-than-evangelical feminists understand increasingly: Christianity is undergirded by a vision of patriarchy."

"To use the word “patriarchy” in an evangelical context is uncomfortable since the word is deemed “negative” even by most comps. But evangelicals should ask why patriarchy seems negative to those of us who serve the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God and Father of Jesus."

"Many egalitarians are quite willing to concede what some complementarians are afraid to say: a rejection of male headship means a redefinition of divine Fatherhood and divine sovereignty."

"A more patriarchal complementarianism will resonate among a generation seeking stability in a family-fractured Western culture in ways that soft-bellied big-tent complementarianism never can."

"Authentic biblical patriarchy is necessary because the problem is not that evangelicals do not hold to “traditionalist” notions of gender and family, but rather where they find these notions."

"For too long, egalitarians have dismissed complementarian prooftexts with the call to see the big picture “trajectory” of the canon. I agree that such a big-picture trajectory is needed, but that trajectory leads toward patriarchy."

"With this being the case, even the so-called “egalitarian prooftexts” not only fail to demonstrate an evangelical feminist argument, they actually prove the opposite. Galatians 3:28, for example, is all about patriarchy."

"It is noteworthy that the vitality in evangelical complementarianism right now is among those who are willing to speak directly to the implications and meaning of male headship—and who are not embarrassed to use terms such as “male headship.”"

Articles like this let me know we're not crazy, we're not imagining some idealized past that didn't exist. Things really have *radically* changed in conservative evangelicalism over the last decade, really the last five years.