Justin Taylor links to an article by Kevin DeYoung on how it is the the new Calvinists are overwhelmingly complementarians. For those unfamiliar with the jargon, complementarian is the name of the position that resists the ordination of women, while egalitarians support that ordination. There are other issues involved, of course, but that is the current flash point.
DeYoung makes a number of good points, but I would like to add another one, one that I think is foundational to the whole mess. Calvinism has hard edges and defined boundaries. The debate over women’s ordination is simply yet another manifestation of pomo goopy thought, and the two kinds of thinking comport not well together. The real resistance that Calvinism shows to this kind of thing is not really a battle over women; it is a battle over words.
(And yes, Calvinism has its own pathologies. There are some really hard cases, confessionally hard core, safely ensconced in their seminaries, who think that being a hard core qualifies them to be the whole baseball. And everybody strikes out because you are pitching them something the size of a walnut. But it is a really hard walnut.)
But in the outside world, at the other far more common extreme, everything has gone squishy. If we pursue it long enough, we will discover that to fight the good fight over the integrity of words is actually to fight for the integrity of everything else. If this is this, and that is that, and we can keep them both in their own containers, with honest labels, then at the end of the day we will not be struggling with whether men should have sex with men, or if women should grow beards and sing bass, or if evangelicals can remain evangelicals because of their “central values,” even though their chief ability appears to be that of tying texts into Pauline pretzels. The late departed sad case, Michael Jackson, is the poster child of this kind of pomo-morphing. He is also a good illustration of how well it works. And if you don’t like how the end of the road looks, then I suggest you get off it — which is exactly what the new Calvinists are in the process of doing.