Cheryl Schatz

John,
Welcome to my blog! I am delighted that you came to answer to our concerns.

1. Although it is already noted that a woman is not to follow her husband into “sin”, there is a whole lot of questionable things your article labeled as “imperfections” that if a woman would follow a man against her better judgment could cause a tremendous amounts of problems. Your article said:

Yet, many may see the husband’s imperfections as an opportunity to exchange roles, as if he has lost his chance to lead.

We believe that it is not the husband’s right to be the “leader” of his wife that the Bible shows, but a joint sacrificial love where neither takes authority over the other.

But when there are disagreements, it is an opportunity not for the husband to take authority over his wife, but for the two to come together in prayer to solve the problem.

In my own marriage, at a time when we had three small children and were barely making ends meet, my husband felt that he wanted to sell our home and give all of the proceeds to our church which had been struggling and move to an apartment with no hope of having another opportunity for having our own home since our parents had given us their savings to purchase this home. I said no. God had not spoken to my heart about uprooting the family to small quarters without a yard to give all that we had to the church. Although we were living a complementarian belief, I could not go along with something that was against my own heart and my better judgment. This is one time that my husband did not take authority over me as we had been taught. If my husband had taken authority over me I don’t know if our marriage would have survived. Teaching men that they have a right to take authority over their wives on decisions that they believe are right decisions but which the wife disagrees is a huge mistake. My husband right now is glad that I didn’t agree to sell our home.

2. Your presupposition needs to answer a lot of questions regarding its validity to the teaching of the Bible. The first question would be why does CBMW teach that the man has authority over the will of his wife when the Scripture never says this and never once tells him to take authority over her?

3. I read your post on men and I believe that it is very faulty. For example you said:

For Baxter, the husband is responsible for the normal teaching and instruction in godliness.

I too believed this when I was a comp and so I felt guilty leading devotions for the family when my husband had not grow up this way and he did not do well in this area. Then I was told that I needed to just quite teaching the Bible and leading my children into devotions and that would cause my husband to take up the slack and do the job. So what happened was that my husband did not continue the job that he felt was done very well by me and we no longer had family devotions. In hindsight, I see that I was misled and that our family would have been much better off with me leading the bible devotions then not taking the lead and having nothing happen. The teaching that the husband must be the spiritual leader hurt my family.

For the record, my husband is now very good at participating with me in devotions and he works with me in spiritual leadership. But the sad thing is that I could have been there much more for my children when they were living at home, if I had not been a complementarian believing that God had different “roles” for the male and female.

The other problem I have is that complementarians rarely answer the hard questions on what specific “laws” God has for women and which things a woman cannot do without being in sin. When I ask a comp which list of sins we will find a woman teaching the Bible to men as a sin and whether practicing this sin will cause a woman to go to hell, comps do not seem to have any answers.

I would be happy if you would continue to dialog here and to give us the answers to things which comps rarely if ever address.