What 'Headship' Really Means with Dr. Lyndon Jost

Derek Rishmawy, James Wood, and Alastair Roberts welcome Dr. Lyndon Jost, author of Transfiguring Headship: A Figural Theology of Gender. Jost argues that headship is rooted in Old Testament figural theology rather than Greco-Roman culture, that it fundamentally means representation rather than authority, and that this reframes debates between complementarians and egalitarians alike. 

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Chapters

01:15 - Overview of Transfiguring Headship

03:06 - Headship as Representation, Not Authority

06:09 - Critiquing Complementarian and Egalitarian Readings

10:32 - Figural Theology and the Fourfold Senses of Scripture

17:05 - Against Greco-Roman Readings of Headship

20:13 - 1 Corinthians 11:3 and Trinitarian Headship

25:35 - Ivan Illich, Gender vs. Sex, and Vernacular Gender

32:48 - Headship, Marriage, and the One-Flesh Union

43:23 - Essentialism, Gender Realism, and Minimalist Claims

50:36 - Headship as Unity, Not Opposition

55:59 - Male Responsibility and the Final Account

58:28 - Headship, Creation Order, and External Representation

01:02:14 - Closing Remarks

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexum Press, who publishes books that love the word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexum Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our March book of the month is Keeping Kids Christian Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship by Cameron Schaefer. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting BakerBookhouse.com backslash pages backslash Mere Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes and get 30% off our book of the month from Lexum Press. I'm joined by regular cast and crew members James Wood and Alistair Roberts. Good to see you guys. Happy to be here. Good to be back. We have with us today also a special guest, Dr. Lyndon Jost. Joast. Is it Joast? Joast, you got it. Joast. All right. He's the author recent author of Transfiguring Headship, a figural theology of gender. He's also a PCA pastor, which means he gets extra credit uh on the show. And uh a good friend of James, and and he's here to have a conversation with us about his most recent work, which is let's let's just talk about it. Let's just jump into it. It's a figural theology of gender. So uh give us give us give us the the the overview, not of the the argument, but just tell us what you're what you're arguing, what's your thesis for our readers, our listeners.

SPEAKER_03 1:40

Yes. Uh so one way to think about what I was trying to do here is um there is a lot of work that's been done on Jesus' identity as fulfillment of Old Testament offices of prophet, priest, and king. And uh, you know, people people have noted the ways in which the the Old Testament office of priest is fulfilled in Christ, prophet fulfilled in Christ, king fulfilled in Christ. Uh less work has been done to notice the way that the title of head in the Old Testament is actually connected to Christ. And actually seems that a lot of the biblical studies work that's been done over the last, I don't know, maybe 50 years has really focused on head and headship as more of a Greco-Roman uh concept that Paul takes up and uses and applies then to Christ as the head of the church. And one of my arguments is that um that's not at least fundamentally what's going on. What's happening here is that uh the New Testament sees Jesus as the fulfillment of an Old Testament office, we might call it, or uh uh a function, the head of the household, the head of head of tribe, head of nations, God is head over all, we've got David as um head over Israel. Um this notion of head and headship, as we've come to call it, is uh something that's fulfilled in Christ. So then and then of course we're asking the the second question that flows out from this is um Christ is the head of the church, and at the same time, there's this claim in the New Testament that the man is the head of the woman, which comes up at several different points. And so I think I've heard that before. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like you've read your Bible before. That's good. Um so this comes up again, and then we're asking, well, how does an old testament, uh kind of a Hebrew understanding of this term head and and uh headship, how does this then shape, maybe reshape our vision of what it means now for Christ to be head of the church and for the man to be the head of the woman? So that's kind of pull back big picture. Um my argument is that the Old Testament concept actually um shapes and reshapes our understanding in in at least two ways. Um first, my argument against much of the lexicographical information, I admit, um, is that headship most fundamentally means representation, um, not authority, not source, not chiefdom, but um, the head is the representative member of the body. Okay, this is what the head is most fundamentally, and we can get into the argument for that. Um and then a second important claim along with this is just to understand the way that the head functions within a Hebrew understanding, uh kind of a Hebrew anatomical understanding, uh, where in the West we often suppose that the head is the most important. I mean, the head as house of the brain is where um we've begin began to redefine uh definitions of life and death. The head is the controlling member of uh our intellect and even in some many Western contexts, our our volition, our um our emotions, everything centered in the head. Um and that is just uh not the way the Hebrew Bible speaks about the head. Actually, um, if we're looking for a central body part which is most important um in terms of kind of controlling the interests of the rest of the body, that would be centered in the in the heart. And so um that's another claim I'm trying to tease out here, is just to say the head is actually in in the Hebrew biblical context, not the most important ruling member of the body, but rather that's the heart. And how does that reshape how we understand claims concerning headship? Again, Christ is the head of the church, man is the head of the woman. Maybe that's a good place to start.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

So um Lynn, it's great to have you on. Lynn is an old friend of mine, and uh, as Meg mentioned. And I also I can't be too critical on the podcast because I did endorse it, so I can't speak against myself. Mine was didn't make the back cover. You know, I got pushed out by Van Hooser and Lightheart. Um uh I just uh I don't know how that happened, James.

SPEAKER_04 5:48

Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Somebody needs to talk to people.

SPEAKER_04 5:50

I just saw that. I didn't even notice you were in there, James. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

I'm in there, you know. Nobody will ever notice it now. Nobody will ever notice it.

SPEAKER_03 5:57

It was a fine endorsement, too.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Uh yeah, yeah. And um, but okay, so to frame the like what you're interjecting here, so I'm gonna kind of push you to the spicy a little bit. Is you are also trying to interject into the contemporary debates of like, and you already kind of signaled a little bit there, but like you it's not, you know, I'm not saying source, you know, so you're already kind of cutting off certain egalitarian views of like how how we interpret Kafale as the New Testament counterpart to Roche and the Old Testament, and and how that would kind of undermine more um authority type views, but you're also you do have a critique of certain complementarian uh uh uh interpretations of these matters. Because can you speak into that? Like what do you what are you trying to interject here? Like, why do you think complementarians and egalitarians are missing something fundamental? What's your third way? Yeah, there you go. It's always it's always suspicious.

SPEAKER_03 6:50

Hey. Hey, hey, hey, the Bible will always speak over and against every uh every ideology. Um yeah, I I I I don't mind being characterized as a third way. Actually, maybe I do. We could talk maybe that's a separate conversation. No, it is not, yeah, it's it's not a conversation. All right. Um so what I'm what I'm trying to address, say, beginning with uh the complimentarian side, is that it seems to me that the way that headship can be um understood and spoken about is in a way that gives one person authority over in a way that their interests are potentially separated from the interests of the body of which they're a part. And I see within the scriptures, if if if if headship fundamentally is about uh representation, then that actually informs the way that we think about um the authority of the head. So one of the things I should just be clear on, um people might misread my argument and saying, oh, because headship is representation, therefore the head has no authority and it's not at all about authority. That's that's not what I'm arguing. I I do think that headship is clearly about authority and carries a certain kind of authority, but it's an authority that I call uh an authority with and for the body. It's it's it's uh bound up together with the interests of the body. Um all of its authority is in order to represent um, again, the interests of the flourishing of the whole. So that the the the fundamental function of the head as representative is to pursue the the flourishing of the whole body. So that's um that's maybe a critique to the right, I guess you could say, pot not all of the right, but but potential ways that headship could be could be talked about or communicated, um, as though it's just kind of um rule, like as though the the head is given this function of rule, irrespective of the manner in which that rule is used. I'm I'd be critical of that. Um on the other side, of course, I mean it seems to me, and maybe it's just worth saying, this is really the context in which I was doing my thinking and my writing, um, was more with what we might call the left or um people on the more progressive end of this question, um, in more of a mainline context, uh in the the context of uh Toronto, Canada, which is something of a center of, you might say, progressive Canadian thought. Um and this is the context in which I'm writing. And I'm writing uh centrally with people in view who have just um dismissed any biblical notion of headship out of ant. Um they're saying this can't possibly be relevant to us. It might have been relevant to the first day, or we're gonna reinterpret what this could possibly could mean. Um and I'm saying, no, um, the claim concerning Christ as the head, the man as the head, uh, these are actually claims that are rooted in the Old Testament. Actually, I would argue, we can get into this, um, all the way back to Adam and Eve. Like that the way that Paul is reading the Genesis 1 to 3 account is he's identifying the man as the head in relationship to the woman, Adam in relation to Eve. And that this is actually a fundamental um category for understanding who we are as humans. So it's not just a cultural category in the New Testament that we can dismiss, uh, but rather, I mean, I'm I'm actually content to use the the language of it's an ontological category. This is a category that concerns our being, which is to say um folks who are maybe prone to dismissing this, you can't. This is actually a piece with the whole scriptural narrative from creation all the way to eschaton. I mean, this is um uh this is the uh this helps us to understand the whole thing. And to pull this out of our own um Christian understanding and discipleship would be to miss something fundamental within the scriptures.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

So it seems to me that one of the differences between various positions on the question of headship historically and more recently has been the move in certain Catholic circles, for instance, to go in a more symbolic direction, particularly in context of debates about ordination, the priest, for instance, representing Christ. Or we might think about more evangelical positions that have been very biblicists. They've focused on a particular set of texts and treated those as settling the debates without actually probing that much into the deeper, as you say, ontological questions. And uh there's something about the reform position that from the very beginning has been more open to uh uh sort of natural law aspect to these debates, recognizing that these are not just referring to symbolism detached from nature, nor to just biblical commands that are imposed upon nature, but uh eliciting something about the way things really are. Um could you discuss how your position relates to those sorts of differences? To what extent do you find yourself pushing against maybe more biblicist evangelical positions? And how might your emphasis upon figural and symbolic reading maybe push against certain Catholic understandings of that?

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Yeah, Delinda, I was gonna say it'd probably help at that point to introduce the language of figuralism to the reader. Uh I think a lot of our readers are probably very unfamiliar with what's going on with that, or at least.

SPEAKER_03 12:20

Okay, so maybe I'll take a longer way around to your question, Alistair, and just introduce uh what is this figural theology thing, which I think many people are probably unfamiliar with. Um so one way that think about uh figural interpretation is that this is actually a category, um this is an umbrella under which terms like typology or um I mean even literal reading, um typological reading, anagogical, kind of the fourfold uh senses of scripture fit under this broad umbrella of figural interpretation. One way to think about what's what's happening with figural interpretation or or the basic commitment um is to say, what are the New Testament writers? How does how is and Jesus himself as as given in the New Testament, um, how are they reading and interpreting and wrestling with and applying the scriptures of Israel? Uh what are they doing? And this is what figural interpretation is seeking to um to follow in line with, to to say, we want to follow that. We want to do uh engage the scriptures in the manner in which the the apostles and and Jesus himself as given in the scriptures um are doing it. So um so maybe w one way to distinguish it is to say typology tends to relate particular people, um, events, um uh uh institutions of the Old Testament to the New Testament, or earlier periods of the Old Testament to later periods of the Old Testament. Okay, it's kind of an intra-textual claim. Um, you know, there's a type and the antitype all contained within the text of scripture. Figural interpretation says, yes, that's that's part of Christian faithful reading of the scripture to see kind of type and antitype within within the narrative of the scripture. Um, but because scripture is such as it is, it is the living word of God, we expect that these types and anti-types actually break out from um uh the the world contained within the scripture and actually address us here and now in the world as it is. In fact, um the world as given in the scriptures, the uh the world as we're introduced to it, is the real world. If we w if we want to actually access access the world as it is, interpreted by uh the Lord God Himself, um, this is what the scriptures present to us, the world as it is, and this world addresses our world. And so we can um so we can begin to see ways in which um uh I mean maybe one example of this would be to look at a place like Isaiah 29, where uh the prophet talks about these people who honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Uh there's an original audience there, and yet Jesus takes up these same words and says, This is about you uh to the Pharisees. Right? Um and yet, as Christian interpreters, we don't just want to say that the words of Isaiah apply um kind of Old Testament and now in the New Testament, but also that the the these people who honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, uh, these people are alive today. Uh, we too are addressed uh by these words. Um that story is a figure of our own um uh of our own context. And so these are the multiple dimensions um of figural interpretation uh that are at work. Uh one of the claims that I don't think you necessarily have to have to have in affirming a a figural um a figural interpretation of scripture, uh, but one which I I certainly am comfortable with and and happily adopt is to speak about um uh script scriptural ontology. That there's a sense in which um the world as given in the scriptures is is more real, uh more more accurate, more um more like the the goads and the nails that are spoken of in Ecclesiastes as that which is real over and against that which is vaporous. Um, that the scriptures themselves, these words, um uh have a reality which which shapes and informs the reality which we seek to live into. And so um this is a very roundabout way of getting to your question, Alistair, um, about what uh how a figural interpretation engages these matters of of headship. Um I would say when we come to a figure like the head, the way that it plays out in the Old Testament, the way that Christ is said to have fulfilled that um that Old Testament office, if I can call it that, uh the way that the male-female relationship relates to uh Christ the head in relation to his bride, the church. Now these are giving uh giving us ontological categories uh within which we are invited to uh uh understand ourselves in relation to God and to our neighbor.

SPEAKER_04 17:17

So the you've you've got the you've got the broader picture of that. So what you're talking about with figural reading is is kind of a uh like a depth, depth Old Testament, New Testament relationship where and this is this is why you're very clearly cutting against a lot of the a lot of the just kind of parallel uh parallel etymology work of well, Kefali and the Greek, uh all the Greco-Roman stuff. It's like you know we've got we've got we've got an entire literary corpus that is not just a literary corpus, it's it's God's divine, you know, use of the term head over centuries in the history of Israel, and that that divine use is what is being taken up in uh in the description of Jesus within Paul uh for for a figural theology, right? Yeah, just to summarize.

SPEAKER_03 18:03

Yeah, no, but that's right. And so even when we get to a place like um 1 Corinthians 11, uh a classic place where again many many biblical scholars claim that Jesus is taking this Greco-Roman household code of of the head of household, right? Paterfamilias, the the the uh the one under whom uh uh everything kind of has life and death, uh that that Paul is using this as a category, and I'm saying that's not what's happening. Uh the fundamental framework in which Paul is um is offering us this category of the man as the head is the scriptures of Israel. So even in a place like 1 Corinthians 11.3, where it's sometimes assumed, you know, uh it's 1 Corinthians 11.3 where we have this um uh these these three headship relationships of God as the head of Christ, Christ as the head of man, man as the head of woman. Um, and what we see very clearly in what flows out from 11.3 in the rest of that uh passage is that Paul is simply engaging with Genesis 1 through 3. He speaks of woman as the glory of man. And some people might imagine that Paul is just kind of asserting that as uh you know something that he's inventing on the spot, saying woman is the glory of man. That's not what's happening. What's happening is he's he's read and knows and is surely memorized, uh, Genesis one through three. Um, and he knows what happens when the woman comes before the man, and the man exclaims, This is bone of my bone, you know, flesh of my flesh. Right? It's kind of this first poem that comes out of the lips of the man. She is his glory. Um, she is the culmination of creation. Paul's reading this, and he's saying, The man is the head of the woman, uh, the woman is the glory of the man, for man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Like all of this is very much close, we could almost call it midrash on the text of Genesis 1 through 3 that Paul is doing. But he's seeing this uh this head-body relationship right from the opening chapters. I mean, this is in some ways just a translation of what happens when um when uh when the man calls the woman body of his own body or f flesh of his own flesh. She is his body. That's a claim from Genesis, uh, that the woman is the body of the man or the flesh of the man, and uh he relates to her as head of the body. Okay, that this is from the very beginning. And then again it flows out from there into um all all the way into the culmination in Christ who's revealed to be head head over his body of the church.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

You mentioned um 1 Corinthians 11 3, which is a strange verse in many ways, not least given the order that the parties are mentioned in. It's the head of every man is Christ, the head of every woman is man, I think, and then the next being the head of Christ is God. Why that particular order and what is there about those relationships that is analogous? Um, and how are we supposed to understand this in a more properly theological sense, saying that the head of Christ is God? Is that just Christ in his humanity?

SPEAKER_03 20:59

Yeah, so I I would I would understand that it is principally speaking about Christ in his humanity. Um what I one of the things that I'm wrestling through in one of the later chapters of the book is if it's the case that headship fundamentally means representation, how does this orient us or or how does this actually help us to understand, how does this illuminate some of the New Testament passages which characterize Christ as the head of the church, man as the head of the woman? And this is one I would say this is probably the most challenging one, um, to be sure, because um, if headship, as I argue, is about um not just representation, but actually uh soteriological representation, it's in the head that that the whole body lives or dies, is blessed or is cursed. Um and if that's the case, then what is it, what could it possibly mean that God is the head of Christ? Um I do think that there's a number of ways that we can we can. Think about that in terms of the Father who sends the Son to accomplish salvation for his people. The Son is then to present the bride with him back to the Father. So there's a sense in which Christ uh represents both humanity to the Father, but is also sent from the Father in order to accomplish salvation. It does get it doesn't follow the same pattern, which in some ways I think we should actually expect. So we need to be careful in pushing this too far. But it seems to me that the representation category does make sense, uh very good sense, of the relationship of Christ and every man and uh the man of the woman.

SPEAKER_04 22:54

I think what you what you could start to say is uh you start to appeal to things like the the covenant of redemption or the pact of salutis of of not not eternalize relations like of God in eternity, in himself. The the we're not talking about um relations of origin, so on and so forth. We're we are perhaps then speaking of you know kind of pretemporal covenantal um arranging of the the the execution of salvation among God's people, and which you know, classical form theology, you know, Christ, that that is where Christ is appointed as uh the covenant head who's going to redeem those who are fallen in their first head, Adam. And so that that's where that is one category that starts to bridge that without reading without reading obedience and submission into the eternal relations of the Father and the Son, but more within the historical relation of Christ as mediator to you know the father. And you you have you have to like pull on the panoply of of terms around appropriation and and and and that sort of thing. That's how I I think that could work with that headship language. And I think it's how you have to, otherwise you get really weird.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Well, and also Lyndon Artie flat, you there's disanalogy in all these analogies. So these relationships, and it's like not only with Christ, with God being the head of Christ, but also the relationship of of man and woman as mirror and Christ and there's gonna be disanalogies there. So the relate the way that the headship of God relates to the person of Christ is gonna be different from the way that the headship of Christ relates to the man, and and all trickling down, all analogies work like that. Another way, another little device you could use also if you're just thinking about uh Christ in his you know economic mode as in the incarnation is also just like kind of clastic Thomistic theology of how Christ lived by faith, you know, uh uh and uh he did that vicariously for us, but he also didn't live he also lived by faith during his earthly life by in the spirit. Uh and that's just that's not only classic trinity, it's not only classic Thomistic, that's like all over John Owen. I mean, and so you could do that in a way of like how does God still have that sort of like representative leadership in a way that he's entrusting his life to him. He's entrusting his life to God.

unknown 25:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:17

So this has been getting us into some of the theology, and uh, we can kind of come back to the figural um uh developments because I really did, really did enjoy the chapter tracing all of the um essentially just the the various heads within scripture pulling on that thread. That was really uh helpful of just seeing the office of head was kind of a new thought for me in that in that sense, even though it's it's it's kind of just baked into Reformed Covenant theology in a lot of ways. And we just use other language. Um you have a lot of other stuff going on in your book, though. Uh so you you you're you you're you're you're doing a lot of also cultural analysis of kind of the the rise and fall of headship within Western culture and society. Uh the challenges you're and you're obviously very concerned with criticisms of like bad patriarchalism and okay, baby are we throwing baby out with the bathwater, but there's still some bathwater that needs to get thrown out, that kind of thing. And one of the big conversation partners you have there is uh Ivan Illich? Illich? Yes. Ivan Ivan Illich, yeah. Ivan. I like saying Ilich I think. I mean, you're pr probably Ivan is closer to the original. Um, you know, I Ivan Illich uh and why why I I'm kind of curious, what does Illich offer to your um understanding of, in a sense, gender as it relates to headship? Because we've been talking about headship, but this is a figural theology of gender. So tell me, what is yeah, and we can add a third thing in why gender not sex? And then also what is Illich doing for your theology of gender as it relates to headship? So so let's pull on like this whole other half of your book that we haven't talked about yet.

SPEAKER_03 27:06

So so uh maybe first to say it is a theology of gender that I'm doing, but it's theology of gender really very much through this figure of the head. So I uh I want to be careful in saying I'm not trying, I'm not trying to do a comprehensive theology of gender. Um in this book, I'm saying how does this particular figure of head and headship uh illuminate and help us to grasp a larger theology of gender? Okay, so um, if you're looking for a larger theology of gender, um don't look here. Uh so Illich is a fascinating figure. Uh to me, he's he's been praised by folks like uh Charles Taylor as one of the great kind of critics of uh modernity. Um uh he was a Roman Catholic priest who kind of gave up his priesthood at a at a certain point, was quite critical of um of uh say many of the strictures that were coming into place, including things like um in the Roman Catholic Church on birth control, which is interesting. He was quite quite critical of that, the way that it was playing out in his own mission.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

The weakest thoughts in his thought. It's like Mexico, I know.

SPEAKER_03 28:08

Yeah, so he had a number of criticisms. He um many people who were quite critical of capitalism and more inclined towards a kind of socialist um movement were were attracted to Illich. Um and then he writes this book entitled Gender, which was based on a series of lectures that he gave at Berkeley, California. And interestingly, um uh he was kind of written off after he gave this series of lectures. People thought, oh, he's just he's just up to recovering a traditionalist um patriarchal vision for the present day. This is what he this is what he's doing, which really misunderstands what Illich is doing, and um and others have noted this since. But one of the things that that Illich is doing, and why I find them both so fascinating and and helpful, is I I think it's it is hard. It's hard for us to get back kind of before the Industrial Revolution, to get the feel of human landscapes generally and the way that gender um uh the role that gender played uh in a pre-industrial context, uh in the you know, vast majority of contexts worldwide. And he does some very interesting sociological and anthropological work to demonstrate this. But one of the things he's trying to get us to is he's seeing uh what he calls uh a movement from under the reign of gender, uh, which was kind of this all-encompassing uh reign over all major human civilizations that the world has known, um, the reign of gender, and he sees uh this what he calls broken gender, and then uh after the Industrial Revolution, what he calls coming under the regime of sex. Okay, so he uh he talks about the way in which um uh in our own era, we've come to so reduce our understanding as sexual beings that it's become reduced to the biological. So this is where he uses the word, uh, the term sex to denote kind of biological differences, mere biological differences between male and female, and that in the under the present regime of sex, uh all we have left is kind of the mere biological differences. And what he's trying to help his listeners, his readers to understand is that uh the world has not always been so. Um, and that uh before this, from the earliest age, um, you know, he uh he he reflects on the the way in which a mother um gazes upon her in her infant son or her infant daughter, and how uh those two gazes are actually have a difference between them. All of her expectations, um, her expectations of the kind of relationship that she's going to have with this infant son or infant daughter is actually quite fundamental, maybe the wrong word, but but um significantly different in terms of what she's going to expect from her son to do and to be and and and the way that he's going to be raised, in terms of his own education and the role he's going to play within um kind of the family agrarian context. Um, these are going to be actually very different. He he notes one one uh instance of uh of a a Bemba the a Bemba tribe where the girl, it's something like the girl is trained by the age of 12 to be able to identify 40 different mushrooms. Um and the the young boy is is trained to be identify something like 20 different uh calls of birds because he's gonna be out hunting. And just the the um the realm of knowledge that each gender was expected to know um differentiates from the earliest ages uh and that this was actually quite quite normal um again across across the human landscape before the Industrial Revolution. So I mean, some of this is just helpful to reflect on um to reflect on our present in light of the past, and it doesn't give easy answers in terms of how to move forward, uh, but nonetheless helps us to imagine uh the way in which the notion of the man as the head in relation to the woman as the body um actually finds a fit in virtually every human civilization before before the Industrial Revolution where things get quite complicated.

SPEAKER_02 32:10

Yeah, I guess the question then is was the maybe getting a bit back to some of your earlier comments about headship in um First Corinthians and elsewhere, typically the language that one encounters in the wild is the man is the head of the household. But Paul says the man is the head of the wife and elsewhere the Christ is the head of every man. Um is there a difference between saying that for instance the man is the head of the household, the man is the head of the wife, is the man the head of the children in the same way as he is head of his wife? What what what is the reason why Paul uses that language in ways that slightly differ from the ways that we habitually use it? Is there anything going on there?

SPEAKER_03 33:00

Right. Yes. I mean what's happening there is um is uh I think we have a a clue to what's happening there at the end of Ephesians 5, where he talks about the man as the head of the woman or his wife, and at the end of it we find that uh actually what he's been talking about is this mystery. Uh I'm talking about Christ in the church, he's this. And so I think um what we need to understand from from there and elsewhere is that the the the category of the head of the body is given in creation with the most fundamental purpose of signifying who our God is in relation to God's own people and who Christ is then in relationship to the church. That this is this is the most fundamental category for which headship exists, you might say, Um, is that we would understand something of the relation of God to his people and our salvation in him. That this is a marriage. We're we're talking about a marriage. When we're talking about headship, the the relation of a head to a body, we're talking about Adam and Eve, we're talking about Christ in the church, we're talking about every man in relation to his his bride. Um uh we're talking about something that actually is caught up with the sweep of salvation, uh, and through which we can understand the very nature of God's salvation, that it's union with him. It's nothing short of union with him, of a head and his body uh bound up together without the even possibility of separation.

SPEAKER_04 34:29

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SPEAKER_01 36:24

Um Lyndon, you uh I I also am fascinated by Illich, and I think he has resources to interject. Well, you didn't answer uh Derek, this will be related. You didn't answer Derek's question about why gender instead of sex. I think people could probably connect the dots there. I I think one of the things you're doing is also like gender is first of all, you don't I don't think you would say you view them as really that distinct and in the way that that's come to be in the modern era. But I think you ill one of the things that Illich is saying is like the problem of how we talk about sex today is it's they're interchangeable kind of competitors in the market. And gender has this whole kind of like broader sociocultural uh expression that's grounded in the distinction between the two sexes. Uh, but it's it's much more there's a thicker tapestry. Uh and but he also then connects that with the whole vernacular gender thing, right? And so what I wanted to do is could you maybe could you discuss how that's playing a little bit a role in your framework, but also connected to your preference for the term not only gender versus sex, but gender realism versus gender sex uh essentialism.

SPEAKER_03 37:24

I I think what you've articulated is really helpful already, just that uh sex, the the way that we speak about sex tends to focus on biolog kind of mirror uh biological difference, whereas the term gender tends to encompass within itself a um the manner in which our biological differences are actually embodied in the world. And so um this is certainly what what uh Illich is doing and the way that he's using it. Um and one of the helpful categories that he uses is this uh vernacular gender. So one of the things um that Illich himself is kind of um pushing back against is a kind of gender essentialism that tends to be um assumed in the tradition. Uh, you know, there's obviously a long tradition of um of seeing certain essential traits associated with what it means to be a man, certain essential traits of what it means uh to be a woman. And and Illich is saying we need to be very careful with identifying particular traits and characteristics that are universalizable um uh for men and women generally. And this is where he comes up with this term vernacular gender, uh, that gender is as vernacular as language is to a particular time and place. Um, that where you don't expect that um that language is is necessarily transferable from one place to the next, the manner in which language is used and the way that terms develop their own kind of unique um flavor or edge within a particular time and place, um, it's unique. And Illich is arguing that so it is with gender. That gender actually the way that women uh the way that women conduct themselves, the vision for what it means to be a woman in a particular time and place will differ across times and places. So I mean one example of this would be, you know, um people might expect that the men everywhere will be the ones who are working the fields, and and the women are the ones who may be looking after kind of domestic creatures. Um well, that's not always the case. Sometimes it's the women in the fields and the men who are more concerned with the uh with the animals' livestock, um, or the reverse. Like oftentimes these roles will differ from place to place, and yet what is consistent is that there are different roles, um, different different tools, different kind of uh what he talks about, a different symbolic universe um for each of the genders uh across each time and place.

SPEAKER_04 39:52

Aaron Powell So the the thing to pull on that for me is is interesting here is that we we've had the gender-sex split for a while now uh in a lot of the discourse around transgenderism and all that sort of thing. And so um one thing I think is interesting, the the difference between you know Illich's context and ours, he's worried about a degradation of a richer concept of what it means to be man and male, just purely to the biological. Whereas the last 10 years we've been just fighting tooth and nail to tie the two things together to the point where it's like, all right, I, you know, you can talk about masculinity. I just want to nail down the fact that you think there's a male and a female, and that whatever a man is is tied to being a man, and whatever a female is is tied to being a woman. Like, what is a woman? It's minimally, it's minimally biology.

unknown 40:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:42

Right? To the point where one of the things I've seen is like, hey, let's actually like the reduction of the biological would be a step forward for a lot of people. Uh because part of what I see people uncomfortable with is historically, hey, uh being a man uh is this particular vernacular. I'm not good at that at speaking that vernacular. Maybe I'm not a man. Maybe I'm something else. And and so that that's that's how I see some of the tensions here of some people struggling to speak the vernacular, and so they reject the connection between the vernacular and the biological substrate that like grounds it, right? Right uh across the cultures. Um and I it's it sounds like for for some people, this is why it's interesting to read your book and think for some people, some people haven't even some people have lost the the intrinsic connection between that there's always there, there's always men and women, and there's a way of speaking men and women, per you know, doing that kind of thing. Um but that the danger of our culture is that there's like a hyper, there's a hyper consciousness of the fact that these things are spoken or performed. I mean, this is what's her what's her name? Butler. Judah Butler. You know, we're performing gender and that kind of thing. I guess the the the question is that I was wrestling with is um there's something good here, um, but doing like retrieving Illich in a in a in a in a time where people have like he's speaking against a danger that is like pre-our contemporary danger, such that like we like we've lost biology. He's worried about reduction of biology. We've lost biology in a lot of ways. And so anyway, I was wondering if you could speak to that dynamic and the way maybe we don't throw the we don't throw the bathwater uh we don't throw the baby of gender out with the bathwater of of transgenderism as an ideology uh or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 42:43

But it's isn't can I isn't it interesting though that even that as we've untethered this, even the performativity assumes that there are differences in the vernacular. Yeah. And that just and that's what's so like that's what's crazy, right? Like it makes no sense.

unknown 42:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 42:58

I do this with my students. I the the conversation I have with my students is like, hey, yeah, that's fine. You know, men wear and you know, I don't know if they ever actually wore kilts in Scotland or whatever it is, but like the the thing that we have is you know, men do one thing in another culture and they do another thing in this culture, but every culture has a rule about how to has rules for like how to dress like a man. So that that's a universal, even though there's a bunch of particulars.

SPEAKER_01 43:22

Well it's already but it's also implicit in the trans because, right, because they want to perform what is stereotypically the other gender.

unknown 43:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:30

Anyway. No, that's totally I mean, there was a fascinating study that came out some time ago about um one tribe that that uh the kind of early trans movement was was very interesting. This tribe where the men during this specific holiday uh would all dress up in ways in ways and patterns of female dress, and they thought, oh, here's evidence of like an old vision of kind of transgender where the the genders are becoming complicated, and and then more recently other anthropological. Just came, studied the same tribe, and just saw, oh, actually, these ceremonies were precisely to kind of re-entrench the fact of uh male-female difference. Like just the way that these things have been interpreted and used is fascinating. Um, I could just say about but about uh Illich, I mean, certainly he presupposes that fundamental biological difference. So if anybody reads him as though he's kind of like uh um pulling gender apart from that, that would be a a misreading. It it emerges from the biological. Um it's probably important just to say when when engaging Illich, you are entering into um kind of his own thought world, you might say. Right? Like he he is uh you're right, Derek, to just raise the fact that um the way he's using gender doesn't exactly map on to the ways that we tend to use gender, and it in some ways complicates um the present discourse. And so you really do have to kind of enter into his world and understand what is he doing. Um and the best summary that I can give um as to what he's doing is he's speaking about gender as kind of a holistic vision of how uh of how humans, from their biological um strata, are moving forward into the world as male or as female, and the sh the particular shape that that then takes in particular times and places.

SPEAKER_02 45:16

You talk about um you mentioned uh issues with biological um essentialism, but is there a sense in which you're talking about a sort of symbolic essentialism? Is headship essential?

SPEAKER_03 45:31

Um Yeah. So I I certainly I I do push back against a certain type of essentialism. I I mean I should just confess that um I'm not opposed to all all forms necessarily of essentialism. And um I think what I'm more nervous about is the the kinds of essentialism that say more than than the basics, uh that want to that want to use essentialist categories in order to say the man always must serve as provider and protector, even, um, in a way that uh well um in a way that women could never possibly participate in um in their own way of provision and protection, or uh the man is the one who must be assertive, or the man who must be the one who is um you know making every decision, say, in the home. Like there's ways that I think essentialist understandings of gender can fill in uh a certain identity, male type, that ends up being harmful when it's imposed cross-culturally.

SPEAKER_04 46:49

I I had I'd heard rumors.

SPEAKER_01 46:51

Heard rumors, rumors of rumors.

SPEAKER_03 46:54

Uh is it by a guy with a first name, Alistair? Is that yes?

SPEAKER_01 46:58

I have heard of this.

SPEAKER_03 46:59

I've heard these rumors.

SPEAKER_01 47:00

Okay, so but getting back to the essentialist point, then like um uh so you are concerned about stereotypes kind of back, you know, reading those back in. And and uh and so but um now when it comes to like theol Christian theology and like church offices and all of these things, you know, you know, are there some basics that you we can't uh run from?

SPEAKER_03 47:25

Well, th this is this is what I'm seeking to do. And maybe maybe this is uh a helpful way to understand what I'm doing here, because I I realize that probably many people, particularly people um who are expecting from a theology a figural theology of headship, you know, a list of here's what it is now as a result to be a man and here's what it is to be a woman. I I actually don't think that that's um bad work to do contextually. Um but what I'm seeking to do is really ask the question of what must be said at a minimum in order to remain like uh biblically faithful, uh uh faithful within the larger Christian inheritance in which we live, what what must be said at a minimum about male-female difference? And what I want to say to those who have tended to uh de-emphasize or dismiss male-female difference is that there there is a minimal that we need to say, and that this minimum certainly involves uh the man's identity as head in relation to uh the woman as flesh of his own flesh, as as body of his own body.

SPEAKER_04 48:29

So that's not funny, because the book, on the one hand, i it's like you're trying to give a maximalist biblical theology of there is a head.

SPEAKER_03 48:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 48:41

With a minimalist application of what it means to be a head.

unknown 48:47

Right.

SPEAKER_04 48:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 48:49

I think that's very fair. And I think if I could just say about um in part this is this is this is a question of audience. Um it seems to me that that many people across evangelical and mainline divides have tended to just dismiss the relevance of headship. And if if if what I could accomplish through this book um is to convince folks that um that we can't dismiss it, that we have something to do with this notion of uh male headship, uh and uh uh you know the man as the head, the woman as the body, the man as the representative, the the woman as as his glory. Um if I can if we can get there, uh there's lots more work that can be done from there, but let's at least start there. And it seems to me that uh actually the majority of Christians in you know in Canada, anyways, um aren't even there. And so I'm trying to get people to a starting point.

SPEAKER_04 49:41

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And and that the worst, I mean, the worst form is having minimalist biblical theology and maximalist application. So there are thank you for saying that. I mean, well, yeah, because it I mean this that's actually part of what creates some of the psychological and existential pressures for people. If they think a whole theology of headship is hanging on two or three verses, uh just just two or three verses in in um in a couple of places in Paul, and then off of that, here's the 50 things that you need to know about being a man or a woman, then that creates it it's too much pressure on the system for people. Yeah. And it just seems implausible. Whereas I do think the big backbone of biblical theology and or figural theology that you give it suddenly then makes more it gives you a lot more room, a lot more, you can put more pro more pressure and more weight on it. It is a thing where I because of how much biblical theology you had put in, how much figural representative force there is to the head, um, that was where I was thinking, well, actually that this kind of makes um the slightly more maybe not mo not maximalist application, but whatever the the med whatever the whatever a medium, whatever the term, the mediumist, uh the mediumist application. Um a little bit more. It's called the third way. The third way.

SPEAKER_03 51:12

Um Did you just get Derek to subscribe to the third way, Alistair? I did I've I've been at the Keller fellow.

SPEAKER_04 51:21

Okay. I'm contractually obligated to find one third way every quarter uh in in some way, whatever it is. Um no. So that that was that was as I was reading it, I was like, you could build out a lot more. And I understand the concerns. Um uh but yeah, that that that's that's helpful for clarifying what your audience and and where this is going.

SPEAKER_02 51:44

It seems to me there is a very natural, thick application of this sort of approach, which is in contrast to the typical approaches to headship within complementarian circles, where headship is seen in a very sort of executive and oppositional way, um, where the head stands over against the body and makes decisions for it, and you see the head most clearly in that situation of opposition. So it's who makes the final decision when there's an argument. In the case of your approach, it seems the most natural drive of that is headship is seen uh most powerfully when there is uh unity led by where the head represents the unity of the body and where the head is able to unite the body in um united action. And even I think about this in terms of a lot of different uh bodies of people, whether it's a nation or whether it's a family or it's whether it's an organization, the person who is at the center of that is not necessarily at the center primarily in decision making, but just in their presence, in keeping everyone from losing their heads. And when you have an unstable person at the center, everyone else loses their heads. Whereas if you have someone who is really uniting everyone and representing people in the pro appropriate way, there is a power to that headship that galvanizes and enables that body to function, but it's not oppositional, it's not um hostile or um antagonistic.

SPEAKER_01 53:27

And I think you could say, Lyndon, you could have done a one of the things you could have, like tags you could have, I think, used even for your project or could use now, is there's a type of like post-liberal theology built into that of like Milbankian style, of like one of the one of the things that out when that came to mind when Alex was talking about these, even how we often think about leadership or whatever. We tend to think of like power structures and like it's oppositional, and like this person is so privileged because the it's like if you've ever been in a leadership position, I I don't like I've been in invited to lead in in a lot of different situations, and I don't like it. Like it's it's stressful. That's why I have all these gray hairs, and I have lost a lot of hair in the back. And uh, but but the idea that like this is just some privilege, I think is a very it's just unrealistic, but but also like in the post-liberal Milbankian thing I'm talking about is that's related to your project, is you're trying to get also away from just these relations of power and an assumption of opposition, and that you're actually beginning with with the soteriological representation framework of your assuming that these relations are also ordered towards peace and harmony and love and service.

SPEAKER_03 54:33

And of course, the great example of this, I mean, one of the ironies in all of this is that um, you know, the New Testament makes it very clear who the head of the body is and it's Jesus. One of the ironies is that is how little Jesus' own relationship as it actually functions in his lived ministry as revealed in the gospels, his own relationship to the church, to his disciples, is often missed. Right? If he is the head of the body, we should be asking the questions, what does his headship look like? And it is remarkable how little, if ever, we find Jesus coercing, Jesus making decisions um uh that would even limit um potential pitfalls of his disciples. Like oftentimes his leadership, his headship entails him allowing his disciples to walk into uh difficult things and to allow them to make mistakes and to uh to go in directions that he might not otherwise go. But it is it's significant um how how loving and how compassionate he is. I mean, he has hard words too for his disciples, of course. Um, but uh if we're if we're taking Jesus as the example of what it is to be the head and to exercise headship, I mean I think we don't see anything other than a kind of representative authority enacted by Jesus towards those who follow him.

SPEAKER_04 55:51

Yeah, so I mean the the representation and the organic unity Christ loves, I mean, it's it's there in Ephesians. Christ loves his body, he cares for his body, he washes, but nobody ever hates his own body. What you know, the head always wants to take care of the body. Now, in a typically organic metaphor, that the the body also depends on the head, uh to some degree. Uh so there's a there's a there's a feedback loop that's not entirely doesn't it's that doesn't entirely fit with Christ because here the the body depends on the head and so on and so forth. Although Jesus identifies with the sufferings of his body. Oh, it's it cares. Yeah. Um I will say there are there are I think some some some folks who read this and their challenge is is actually it's the classic abdication of the head being the head. There's like there's like I'm willing to let the you know, body, you can go first, um as it were. And it's like, no, the head's gotta go first. The head has to I mean the head has to take the hit first, so there has to be willing to go first. And and and and and actually uh at times um yeah, take the take the hit uh that comes with assuming the responsibility for the whole. And that that is also there that gee, that's what Jesus does. Jesus takes the responsibility, but it also means he has it. And so that's I do think, you know, I and I say this as a guy who when I when I entered into marriage, when I entered in these things, I was very much more like, oh well, you know, like uh I I I like like like James. James, I I was even more stressed than you. I have less hair. Um and uh and and so uh you know that kind of thing. But but I do think there's a challenge there, right?

SPEAKER_01 57:33

When you're already received the authority kind of leadership point still with this thick.

SPEAKER_04 57:38

I i i there's there, I mean there's there's some guys who who err in terms of authoritarian fear. And there's some guys who are just like over cautious, over I I don't want to overstep, and and and they're very conscious. And you know, you're not gonna get certain kinds of errors, uh, but you'll get other ones.

SPEAKER_03 57:54

And so um it is interesting how of uh how um how differently these arguments land depending on the particular person. So I've talked to to to men who tend towards more uh authoritarian rule and t men who tend towards more passive um uh engagements uh with their wives. And um how this argument lands is gonna be different. I mean, it is a fundamental argument. So uh maybe I don't think I've even said this yet, but what I'm arguing for here is that headship is most fundamentally um about uh uh the the head is responsible in what I call a first-order manner, because it's not that the woman has no responsibility to share in this, but uh the head is fundamentally responsible for pursuing and perfecting uh this one flesh union of which he is the head. This is what it means to be the head, is to be the the one who is fundamentally responsible before before God, um, that he will be held held to account. Right. This idea that the man is to lay his life down um for the good of his body, uh, there's a responsibility given in a sense, in the same maybe in a similar sense to which teachers are going to be held to higher account on the final day before the Lord, um the the head of the of the household, the head of the bride will be held to account in a similar manner, that they're expected to pursue and to per to perfect this one fleshed union. Um if if if this relationship is at a stalemate, um if there's something wrong going on here, uh it's the man. It's not to say that the woman can't help things along and and um and initiate. Uh and yet who's gonna be judged for this for pursuing and perfecting this union? Uh it will be the head of the body.

SPEAKER_01 59:36

Do you think um in the future, Lyndon, you will uh be able to write more on some of those applications? Um so maybe not maximally applicable, but some application for our present context. So that's one question. And do you also think you would explore the theme of woman as the glory of man and expound more on that? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 59:58

You're saying in future writings or right now?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:00

Yeah. Do you have these things like uh in the docket, you know?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:03

Yeah, uh chapters you cut out. Um well, yeah, there are some of those. But um yeah, I mean I'd I'd love to spend more time on that, right? I uh I'm not sure I have time for it right now, but um eventually. Yeah, like I'd love I'd love to to definitely do more of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:21

Well, I I think oh one aspect I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on is you've spoken a lot about the man as the head, Christ as the head relative to the internal unity of the um body or the um church. But when we think about the concept of headship as it applies within the original creation, Paul puts a lot of weight upon the fact that the man was created first, and there's a sense in which the man has an ordering towards the wider creation and the wider world before the woman is created, and that seems to be constitutive in part of the headship. Likewise, when we talk about Christ's headship in Ephesians 1, Christ's headship is expressed very much in representing the church, not just in its internal unity, but to the powers. But how does that play out within that more external um aspect of representation within your account?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:24

Right? Yeah, I I think that that that that plays out a little more uncomfortably. Um or I should just say I I was very careful not to not to pursue that in part because I do I really do think that that Illich helps to signal a pretty f fundamental break with what it means to be male and female in our own day. And I think in some ways we're we're still living through the consequences of a newly ordered um uh social system that we live with. Um I I I spent quite a bit of time in the book just talking about the manner in which uh uh the the industrial revolution just changed the way that we relate. The industrial revolution was a sexual revolution. Um, you know, no longer were men and women together in the shared task of uh of kind of uh the household economy, but now uh uh the the long story short is that that um wage earning labor becomes the prerogative of men. Uh so that the the the esteem that accompanies that um is given over to men, and then the domestic sphere becomes a newly denigrated sphere um in terms of things like social esteem. Um and that that just provides like a really challenging context in which we now live out our tasks. Uh and so to say now in this context um that the man uh has uh a more basic interest in engaging the world in which he lives and the woman, say, engaging with the the man and the the children, in some ways, um in some ways that claim doesn't it doesn't find a fit within a larger social framework that actually helps us to see that as a claim that offers great dignity to male and female alike. And so I guess one of the things that I'm concerned with is that reasserting that claim of kind of male prerogative to engage the world and the woman's prerogative to engage the home, it just seems to be um it seems to be in some ways a tall ask, uh a high ask. And I think many men who have, uh my wife included, who have wives who are engaged in the home with their children, um, we recognize that today is not what the world was in the past, where there was a where there is a whole um system in which uh w women could collaborate with other women and the task of child rearing and and engaging um uh in economic productivity. Uh given that all of that has kind of uh become eroded in our own day, I I I just get a bit nervous about trying to reassert some of those traditional claims in the present context.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:00

You know, that's a claim I would love to keep going on, but we can't because unfortunately our current context is the end of the episode. So um, Lyndon, thanks for coming on uh again for those who are listening. The book is Transfiguring Headship, a figural theology of gender. It's it's been uh it's a really challenging, helpful, um stimulating read. Uh, you'll come away with a lot. And so you can go check that out in the show notes. And I think we might even link uh James James had a James had a reflection on Illich, uh, mere orthodoxy that uh we might throw down there in the notes as well for those interested in pursuing Illich. But Lyndon, thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:36

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Man, great to have you.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:39

And if you have listened so far, I'll just say uh please rate and review us on iTunes. Get the word out if you found this beneficial and a blessing. But for now, it's been Mere Fidelity.