I happened to come across some comments which I myself originally wrote in July 2006, on this post on Better Bibles Blog. I repeat them here to preserve them and bring them to a wider audience.

The context is a discussion of John Piper’s Vision of Biblical complementarity, chapter 1 of the book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood which he wrote with Wayne Grudem. In the post Suzanne McCarthy had highlighted some of Piper’s practical teaching on which roles in the church and in the workplace were not suitable for women, such as this:

There are ways for a woman to interact even with a male subordinate that signal to him and others her endorsement of his mature manhood in relationship to her as a woman. I do not have in mind anything like sexual suggestiveness or innuendo. Rather, I have in mind culturally appropriate expressions of respect for his kind of strength, and glad acceptance of his gentlemanly courtesies. Her demeanor-the tone and style and disposition and discourse of her ranking position-can signal clearly her affirmation of the unique role that men should play in relationship to women owing to their sense of responsibility to protect and lead.

In response to these words I made this comment:

Are these rules supposed to be Christian and derived from the Bible? It sounds to me as if they come from a 19th century manual of etiquette. That doesn’t make them necessarily wrong, but nor does it make them right. Piper, Grudem and friends need to distinguish between Christian values and old-fashioned conservative cultural ones. A good course in cross-cultural evangelism, or some in depth first hand experience of a very different culture, would do them a world of good.

I took the matter a bit further in this comment (reformatted):

I just read the first half sentence of Piper’s book, and I think this gives the real key to his thinking. That first half sentence is

When I was a boy growing up in Greenville, South Carolina.

It was in that conservative environment, around 50 years ago (according to Wikipedia he was born in 1946, actually in Tennessee), that his cultural values were formed. In the second paragraph we learn that they attended a Southern Baptist church, and that of course further explains the formation of his cultural values. He goes on to describe supposed differences between men and women which he claims

go to the root of our personhood,

but which it seems to me are at least very largely conditioned by the specific cultural and religious context in which Piper grew up.

Piper writes, just after his introductory paragraphs:

Let me say a word about that phrase, “according to the Bible.” The subtitle of this chapter is “Manhood and Womanhood Defined According to the Bible.” What that means is that I have made every effort to bring the thinking of this chapter into accord with what the Bible teaches.

I beg to dispute this claim. It is interesting that in the introductory section he had already made that comment about differences which “go to the root of our personhood” BEFORE he mentioned the Bible at all – except to say that his parents loved the Bible (but not that they loved God!) and that he later learned something from the Bible. He almost seems to be admitting that he first observed these differences between men and women and only later embarked on

an attempt to define some of those differences as God wills them to be according to the Bible.

It seems to me that he has not so much brought his thinking into accord with what the Bible teaches as brought his interpretation of the Bible into accord with what he had observed about differences between men and women. And all this without realising that the differences which he observed were in fact culturally conditioned. If instead he had started with the biblical picture of humanity, male and female equally, made in the image of God, he might have come to rather different conclusions – although I must acknowledge that my own understanding is also partly based on my own cultural presuppositions.

Concerning the kinds of exegetical arguments on which Piper relies, see my series on The Scholarly and Fundamentalist Approaches to the Bible. There I call this kind of exegesis “fundamentalist”, and (in part 2) I note that

it is possible to support almost any position on any issue of current controversy in the church with this kind of interpretation of Scripture. (Yes, I could even put together an argument for gay bishops if I wanted to!)

To summarise, Piper is making the mistake which I am afraid is so common among Americans, especially conservative ones but not only Christians, of simply assuming that their own cultural values are objectively and absolutely right, and even that it is right to impose these values on others by force. (Piper may not support force of arms, but he does support men refusing to let women take their rightful share of leadership, which is effectively force.) There is a woeful failure to understand the distinction between cultural norms and absolute morality. Americans simply don’t understand why anyone else should prefer their own values over those that are being imposed on them, even at the point of a gun or a bomb. Why are these people so ungrateful that they don’t accept with open arms the entire American Way? I’m sorry, the rest of the world has its own ways, and most people prefer their own ways to the American one. And as for any claim that the American Way is somehow more Christian than any other way, I’m afraid that is pure bunkum! Quite apart from gender issues, how can a way be all that Christian which leads to so many thousand Iraqis being killed?

Sorry to get rather far from the Bible, but I am being led away from it by Piper! And I realise that not all Americans are like this caricature. But when we see this caricature on our news broadcasts every day, even from the White House, it gets hard for us to believe that any Americans actually have any real understanding of the rest of the world.

I qualified part of the above in this follow-up comment (again reformatted):

OK, as Suzanne has quoted, Piper accepts that some of the specific details of the different behaviour of men and women

change from culture to culture and from era to era.

But he doesn’t seem open to the possibility that in some cultures and some eras these differences might be obliterated or reversed.

I note that Piper is quoting our old friend JI Packer when he writes

a situation in which a female boss has a male secretary, or a marriage in which the woman (as we say) wears the trousers, will put more strain on the humanity of both parties than if it were the other way around. This is part of the reality of the creation, a given fact that nothing will change.

Packer apparently bases this on Genesis 2:18-23 and Ephesians 5:21-33, but the only way that these verses can be used to justify the statement is based on a total misunderstanding of the Hebrew word often translated “helper” in Genesis 2:18,20 – a word which is elsewhere in the Bible used only of God!

I am beginning to see how ridiculous this whole thing is when I see that Piper doesn’t even accept women as bus drivers! I suppose women are only allowed to steer vehicles in which there are other women, children, and perhaps the blind, deaf or lame!