Could a Complementarian / Egalitarian Marriage Work?
00:00:00.000 | A listener named Joe writes in, "Hello Pastor John, I am a young complementarian man dating
00:00:11.440 | a young evangelical feminist woman.
00:00:14.920 | We are considering marriage.
00:00:16.860 | What do you think would be good or bad about a marriage with this dynamic?
00:00:20.680 | Would this make a more accurate portrayal of how the church follows Christ, or would
00:00:25.120 | it be a heavier distraction?
00:00:26.900 | How do you think a complementarian and egalitarian marriage could work out practically, and how
00:00:31.520 | do you think the relationship would suffer?"
00:00:34.820 | My question, Joe, is which of you, you or your wife, future wife, will choose to sacrifice
00:00:46.300 | your conscience and with it your integrity to make the marriage work?
00:00:55.400 | There is no doubt one of you will have to sacrifice a good conscience.
00:01:03.260 | You would enter the marriage believing that it is God's will for you to fulfill the
00:01:08.920 | role of head, as you see it laid out in Ephesians 5, 22 to 33.
00:01:16.180 | She would enter the marriage believing that it is God's will that you not assume a
00:01:21.900 | special role as leader or head.
00:01:27.460 | You will enter the marriage believing it is God's will that your wife be subject to
00:01:33.980 | your loving leadership the way the church is subject to Christ in Ephesians 5, and she
00:01:40.700 | will enter the marriage believing that there is no such teaching in the Bible, and that
00:01:46.340 | God does not expect that of her, and it would be wrong, in fact, to say that God does.
00:01:55.140 | You will enter the marriage believing that God calls you to raise your children in the
00:01:59.940 | instruction of the Lord, including his instruction that your sons should be husbands who lead
00:02:07.660 | out in marriage, and your daughters should be wives who submit gladly to their husbands,
00:02:13.180 | and she will enter the marriage believing that God calls you to raise your children
00:02:17.980 | to be egalitarians.
00:02:22.360 | It is not possible, Joe, that both of you will be able to carry out your beliefs.
00:02:29.620 | They contradict each other.
00:02:32.340 | One of you will have to assume a role that your conscience dictates is wrong, and my
00:02:41.180 | question is, which of you will sacrifice your conscience and with it your integrity to make
00:02:47.780 | the marriage work?
00:02:49.900 | Martin Luther said, "To act against conscience is neither safe nor right."
00:02:57.100 | Conscience is not an infallible guide to right behavior, but even when conscience is badly
00:03:03.140 | informed, to act against it is sin.
00:03:07.060 | That's what Paul meant in Romans 14.23, "Whatever is not from faith is sin."
00:03:13.900 | The solution to a badly informed conscience is not to go against it, but to transform
00:03:19.580 | it with biblical truth.
00:03:21.320 | So even if your wife decided to conform to your expectations, she would be sinning.
00:03:30.580 | If she still believed in her heart that she was right about egalitarianism and you were
00:03:37.620 | wrong.
00:03:38.620 | Now, there are many things husbands and wives can disagree about and still have a biblically
00:03:45.260 | sound and godly and even joyful marriage.
00:03:50.600 | But in matters of biblically informed conscience that affect the dynamic of the relationship
00:03:58.300 | at every turn, disagreement of that sort is unworkable.
00:04:05.180 | Someone has to give in.
00:04:06.180 | Someone has to go against conscience and belief.
00:04:11.260 | Giving in on our color preferences for the carpet or giving in on how many guests should
00:04:18.860 | come over for dinner is not a sin.
00:04:23.660 | It's a way good marriages work.
00:04:26.060 | But giving in when your position is a biblical conviction and a matter of conscience, that's
00:04:33.540 | not what Christians do.
00:04:36.020 | That's a sin.
00:04:37.860 | So in my judgment, walking into a marriage with this level of disagreement about your
00:04:45.040 | respective roles would be walking into a relationship that it is a sin to leave and in which someone
00:04:54.680 | must sin to make it work.
00:04:57.100 | Yeah.
00:04:58.100 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:04:59.100 | I want to underscore that last point that you made.
00:05:01.620 | It would be a sin to leave the marriage, thus guarding couples in this very situation from
00:05:06.900 | thinking that this answer to Joe can be used as a basis for dissolving their own marriage
00:05:12.460 | through divorce.
00:05:14.060 | Not so.
00:05:15.060 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:05:16.060 | Well, we have many questions coming in to the podcast, and we appreciate them very much.
00:05:21.020 | Please keep sending those questions in to us, and we get a lot of hard questions like
00:05:24.720 | this one, but we welcome them.
00:05:26.560 | Get those questions to us via our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:05:34.000 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with John Piper.
00:05:37.200 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:05:38.200 | I'll see you on Monday, and I hope that you have a wonderful weekend.
00:05:41.400 | Bye.
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