Complementarians Issue New Manifesto on Gender Identity

CBMW’s Nashville Statement addresses shifting notions of sex and sexuality.
America’s top complementarian leaders have shifted their focus from gender roles to gender identity.
On Tuesday, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) released a new declaration that reasserts the significance of biological sex and traditional marriage over society’s growing LGBT acceptance.
“We are persuaded that faithfulness in our generation means declaring once again the true story of the world and of our place in it—particularly as male and female,” according to the group’s Nashville Statement.
At the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) national conference in Nashville last week, it was endorsed by about 150 conservative Christian leaders—many of them male, Baptist, and Reformed. (The mayor of Nashville, though, was not happy about the name.)
Initial signatories include many CBMW and ERLC leaders; pastors like J. I. Packer, Francis Chan, John MacArthur, and James MacDonald; and authors Rosaria Butterfield and Christopher Yuan.
At its founding by theologian Wayne Grudem 30 years ago, CBMW issued the Danvers Statement, which affirmed the complementary differences between the genders. It came in response to an increasingly feminist society (and church), where conservative leaders feared men and women were losing their biblical distinctions.
That foundational document, often seen as the textbook definition of complementarian convictions, critiques “feminist egalitarianism” and women rising in church leadership, and upholds “vocational homemaking” and wives’ submission in marriage.
The 2017 Nashville Statement, instead of outlining how the genders should live in relation to one another, makes several …Continue reading…