Using the Trinity to Keep Women in their Place

While there are some reasonable (if ultimately unconvincing to me) arguments for the complementarian position there is no excuse for the sort of mummery where one tries to argue such a position from the Trinity. This novel doctrine is known as Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS). It is, to coin a technical phrase, arse-backwards (and this goes for any other attempt to prescribe human activity based on what the Trinity is like). Don't miss Darren Sumner as he takes those turkeys to task:

The EFS mode of reasoning is what Barth decried as human projection misidentified with divine revelation. Ware takes a human cultural construct and, mistaking it for revelation, reads it upward into the life of God by means of an analogia entis. When he in turn derives from this divine relation a proscription for human gender relations, the circle is complete and the exercise in natural theology is made infinitely more egregious. Ware first reads the authority-submission structure from creaturely existence into the life of God; then he reads it back out again from God to human creatures — only now switching from the parent-child relation to male-female relations. The procedure is entirely self-referential, a theological systole and diastole: Ware has derived from his doctrine of God exactly what he put into it.

Not only that but until today I never knew what systole and diastole was. I had assumed it was some classical reference beloved of theologians akin to Scylla and Charybdis, but turns out it is a medical metaphor from the cardiac cycle. Alright Darren, no one likes a show off.