Hudson Taylor Armerding, former president of Wheaton College who died Tuesday at age 91, was a member of the Board of Reference for The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He had a long and noted career as an evangelical scholar and author. Below is an abbreviated version of his biography taken from information on Wheaton’s website.

The oldest of five children, Armerding was born in 1918, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his father was engaged in itinerant Bible-teaching ministry among the Plymouth Brethren in the area. Converted at a young age, Armerding wrote that his conversion "resulted from the reading of a Sunday School paper. In this paper was the story of a young man who went to a gospel meeting and filled out a decision card. The paper had a facsimile of the card. I cut it out, completed it, and pinned it to the curtain by my bed. Then I told Mother that if Satan came that night, he would realize that I was a Christian."

In the fall of 1935 the Armerding family sailed for New Zealand, where Carl had again established an itinerant ministry among the Brethren Assemblies. It was here that Armerding stayed until he returned to the United States to attend Wheaton College. In the fall of 1937, while living with relatives in Oak Park, Illinois, Hudson began his freshman year. Armerding participated in many extra-curricular activities while enrolled at Wheaton and eventually graduated with honors in 1941. After serving a tour of duty in the U.S. Navy, Armderding completed received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Asian history in 1948. He served on faculty at both Gordon College and Wheaton before being named provost at Wheaton in 1962. He was elected president in 1965 and served in that office with great distinction until 1982. The college underwent significant growth during Armerding’s administration.

Some of us do not remember a time when it was considered “progressive” for a woman to work outside of the home. In the wake of the feminist revolution women in full-time careers are normative now. For many young girls to grow up and be “just like mom” means to go to college, pick a career path, and climb the ladder of success. One of the interesting aspects of Time Magazine’s cover story last month were the stories of women who had been profiled in the initial cover story in 1972. One was a career woman who stayed that way, one was a woman who was a farmer’s wife who went to work when her kids grew up, and one was a homemaker who was still at home after all these years.

Intrigued by their stories, I went back and read the original stories of the women profiled in 1972. One of the recurring things I noticed with the women who chose to stay home with their families back then was that they would say "it's just what you do." Many of the women believed the husband was the "dominant" one because that is just how it is. And to this day, some of them still would prefer the husband to be the dominant one in the relationship, but would like to embrace some of the more “freeing” aspects of feminism’s effects. In their generation the norm was June Cleaver. The homemaker who is always there to greet her husband, bakes fresh cookies for her boys, and never forgets to wear her pearls. That is just the way it was. It was embedded in the culture, and feminism was simply a fringe movement.

But when it hit the suburban housewife it changed everything. The problem with making a cultural model normative is that it holds no lasting weight. It’s only bearing is the fact that it is tradition that defines you, not an external authority. When the feminist movement of the seventies became culturally relevant to every woman, it allowed for a complete shift of ideology. When culture defines womanhood and the family, a cultural shift takes the norm with it. The shift leftward gave us the new normal. And this is where we are today.

As Christians we are not shaken by the cultural revolutions. We know that God defines our personhood and our gender. If he, who is unchanging, defines us, then no matter what the culture does, his Word will still stand true. So many of the women who stayed home in the 60’s and 70’s, became slowly dissatisfied with their lives because they never had a real framework for why they were home in the first place. It was just what they did. And when all of their kids left home, and they were left with their husbands, they were unhappy with their lives because everyone on the outside looked like they were having a lot more fun.

As Christian women we have a tremendous calling to teach the next generation of women that we are not women by accident. We do not define our own personhood and gender. God does. So many young girls today believe in a norm, just like the women in 1972. Only  now this norm is thinking that you have to go to college and seek a career to be successful in this world. Many of them have no framework for desiring children and a husband. It’s just not what you do anymore, until you have established your own career. I often wonder what they will be thinking 25 years from now when they have the career, but no family and no children. It is a vicious cycle when God is not in the center.

We do a great disservice to our younger sisters in Christ when we teach them womanhood in the context of “it’s just what you do.” We are not creating a new cultural norm in the training of the next generation. We are passing down a legacy. We are passing down a history and a story that was written for us by a good God when he created Adam and Eve male and female (Gen. 1:27).

The hope for the American woman is not better pay, more career opportunities, perceived equality, or even a well-kept home and family. It is in Jesus Christ alone and in his plan for his people. We don’t believe in womanhood because we just think men should be the “dominant” ones. We believe in womanhood because God said that is what we are. And that is what we must be and teach.

At the 61^st annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society last month in New Orleans, Russell D. Moore presented a paper analyzing John Frame’s recent book Doctrine of the Christian Life , the third in Frame’s incredible “A Theology of Lordship” trilogy. Within that paper, Moore applauded Frame’s link between gender roles and biblical environmental stewardship. Along the way, Dr. Moore also furthered the argument by demonstrating compelling links between gender roles and environmental views. That section of Moore’s paper is reprinted below. It is an engaging biblical application of complementarianism. Moore serves as dean of the School of Theology and as senior vice president for academic administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

It seems to me that radical feminist theologians and ethicists who suggest that one’s view of gender affects one’s view of environment are correct. Seeing God as head over his creation is fundamentally different from seeing the earth as “God’s body,” and it is true also that human self-consciousness is affected by these notions. Ironically, though, only a differentiation of humanity from the universe can lead humanity to exercise the stewardship only humanity can exercise to save the natural order from the ravages of human acquisitiveness. Feminists are correct to see an abusive form of “dominion” in harsh forms of patriarchy in human history, and they are correct to see an analogy with human abuse of the earth itself. It is no accident, I think, that a metaphor for human mistreatment of the earth is often “rape.” Sadly, every human culture knows what it is to see the strength of the male directed toward evil, cruel, and self-serving ends.

Frame’s assertion that human servanthood to the universe does not obliterate hierarchy is precisely correct, both in terms of Holy Scripture and the Christian tradition. I would argue that this is the reason a complementarian vision of gender is not irrelevant to the discussion of an evangelical environmental ethic. Humanity does not escape from nature, as though the male/female hierarchy can be transcended. But neither does humanity equate male headship with the kind of anti-Christ patriarchy in which male “power” equals superiority or privilege. The headship of the man over the woman isn’t about privilege but about self-sacrificial servanthood - an iconic representation of Christ’s sacrifice of himself for his church. In the same way, humanity’s headship over the cosmos isn’t about self-gratification but about a loving servanthood, characterized by wise decision-making in the best interest of the earth itself.

Ironically, those evangelicals most concerned, at the moment, about environmental protection seem to sometimes be those evangelicals least likely to see a complementarian symphony of hierarchy and mutual dependence in the male/female polarity. This is a mistake, I believe, not only because it kicks against the goads of the biblical revelation and the Christian tradition, but also because it deadens the very impulses needed to see an “economy” in the created order in which difference does not entail ontological superiority, and these impulses are necessary for ecological stewardship. As Wendell Berry puts it: “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and divided. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” But Berry notes that a household is an economy - not just a “relationship” - an economy based on differing but complementary husbandry and housewifery. The same technological Gnosticism that has seen the earth as an infinitely malleable “resource” has likewise seen the natural family as an infinitely malleable “relationship.” In both cases, nature is seen as an impediment to some other value - quite often to monetary success.

If headship and servanthood are mutually exclusive (or if either is redefined to remove either hierarchy or dependence), then it is difficult to imagine an evangelical ethic in which humanity is charged, specifically, with “tending” and “keeping” the earth, not just for the purposes of self-interest, but because it is in and of itself “good” in the sight of the Lord.

Denny Burk recently spoke at Boyce College on gender confusion in our culture. Denny serves as the Dean of Boyce College and as the Editor of JBMW. He provides clear thinking on these issues, and we thought Gender Blog readers would be served by hearing what he has to say.

You can listen to part 1 here and part 2 here . And be sure to check out Denny's blog for more good content.

Here's the question - in Ephesians 5:21, Paul writes that Christians are to "submit to one another." So, do complementarians hold to "mutual submission?" Piper and Grudem provide a helpful answer:

Yes, we do. But "the way Paul teaches" mutual submission is not the way everyone today teaches it. Everything depends on what you mean by "mutual submission." Some of us put more stress on reciprocity here than others. But even if Paul means complete reciprocity (wives submit to husbands and husbands submit to wives), this does not mean that husbands and wives should submit to each other in the same way. The key is to remember that the relationship between Christ and the church is the pattern for the relationship between husband and wife. Are Christ and the church mutually submitted? They aren't if submission means Christ yields to the authority of the church. But they are if submission means that Christ submitted Himself to suffering and death for the good of the church. That, however, is not how the church submits to Christ. The church submits to Christ by affirming His authority and following His lead. So mutual submission does not mean submitting to each other in the same ways. Therefore, mutual submission does not compromise Christ's headship over the church and it should not compromise the headship of a godly husband.