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 “Anything you can do I can do better.” So goes the song from the 1946 Broadway musical, Annie Get Your Gun. What was perhaps meant as a playful “battle of the sexes” sort of song has eventually become burned into the secular imagination. There are no real distinctions between men and women. We’re interchangeable. One can do anything that the other can do.  

Enter Christianity, which clearly and consistently argues for a distinction between the sexes. The New Testament even presents differing roles for men and women at home and in the church.  

Those who’ve already bought into the interchangeable nature of the genders have a hard time with these distinctions. After all, if men and women aren’t fundamentally different, aren’t role distinctions simply arbitrary? The answer, in fact, is yes. But, if we actually are different than the different roles makes sense.  

In his book Men and Women in the Church, Kevin DeYoung offers a helpful illustration:  

Suppose you have two identical basketballs—one you reserve for outdoor use and one you set aside for indoor use. The “rules” of complementarianism are not like the arbitrary labeling of two basketballs. They both work the same way and can essentially do the same thing, except that God has decreed that the two basketballs be set apart for different functions. That’s a capricious complementarianism held together by an admirable submission to Scripture, but in time it will lack any coherent or compelling reason for the existence of different “rules.”  

But suppose you have a basketball and an American football. They are similar things, used towards similar ends. You could even attempt to use the two balls interchangeably. But the attempt would prove awkward, and in the long run the game would change if you kept shooting free throws with a football or kept trying to execute a run-pass option with a basketball. They are rooted in the different structure, shape, and purpose for each ball. It’s not the nature of a basketball to be used in football. In other words, the rules are rooted in nature.[1]  

God’s “rules” for men and women aren’t capricious or arbitrary. They’re rooted in nature.

 

[1] Kevin DeYoung, Men and Women in the Church: A Short, Biblical, Practical Introduction (Wheaton: Crossway, 2021), 133–34.