Writing for the most recent issue of World Magazine, John Piper starts a brief essay with these riveting words:
If I were the last man on the planet to think so, I would want the honor of saying no woman should go before me into combat to defend my country. A man who endorses women in combat is not pro-woman; he’s a wimp. He should be ashamed. For most of history, in most cultures, he would have been utterly scorned as a coward to promote such an idea. Part of the meaning of manhood as God created us is the sense of responsibility for the safety and welfare of our women.
Piper also points to an interesting new book by Kingsley Browne, a law professor at Wayne State University in Michigan: Co-ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn’t Fight the Nation’s Wars
If you leave God out, the perceived “hard-wiring” appears to be “evolutionary psychology.” If God is in the picture, it has other names. We call it “the work of the law written on their hearts” (Romans 2:15). We call it true manhood as God meant it to be.
While I find the biblical data to provide clear and compelling support for the complementarian view, I welcome broad support for complementarianism from scholars like Browne who, while blind to the wisdom from God’s special revelation, nevertheless witness the inescapable evidence from God’s general revelation. In the wisdom of God, men and women are “hard-wired” differently: equally glorious, divine image-bearers, but significantly different in a myriad of ways. God designed us this way so that His glory would shine all the brighter: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them…..and it was very good.” (Gen 1:27-31)