Federal Headship Nomism, Part 2: Legalistic Logic

In our opening installment, I defined Federal Headship Nomism (FHN) as a vision of the Christian life in which the husband-father is to be considered disqualified to the degree that “things in the home” do not rise to some standard of order. Such includes his disqualification (1) from active participation in the life of the body in general, (2) service in ministry in particular, and, most crucially, (3) leading his wife and children until some ill-defined pattern of that already ill-defined standard has been recovered.

Because this view has rarely been challenged as “a view,” what remains to our generation is a supposed “left-right” divide between egalitarianism and patriarchalism, with complementarianism essentially exposed as a creeping egalitarianism. That is the whole story. No other story interests us and so proponents of the extremes and the mushy middle will all unite in lashing out at the first hearing of this “strange new doctrine.”

Consequently, it may understandably be asked, “Ok, I have seen abuses, but where do we draw the line? What about the sons of Eli? What about Proverbs 22:6? At what point do we match parental faithfulness to the children’s fruit? 

As understandable as these questions may be at first, I want to make it very plain that I do not advocate ever separating the action of the parents from the fruit of the children. On the contrary: I mean to intensify it. It is part of my claim that FHN paradoxically undermines the most robust community of caring for parents at every stage of life.

FHN bills itself—as all legalism does—as a more serious moral program, yet by fixating on the surface of raw material or the snapshots of results, it actually cultivates a morally lazy resistance to asking harder, more situation-specific questions about how things are going. It cares less about helping a brother back on his feet to fight the next day and more about quarantining and silencing all the embarrassing human wreckage that pretensions to moral perfection cannot sell to their latest recruits. 

Since FNH is, among other things, an erroneous form of reasoning, let us begin there. We could call this chapter the “fallacies of FNH” or “legalistic logic.” But whatever we want to call it, what we need to see first is that such an error actually can be broken down into a basic structure that tends to replicate itself wherever it rears its ugly head. Whatever the specific circumstances, what we will find is a common and predictable flow of thought. 

The Specific Violation of the Laws of Logic

What FHN presents to us in the relationship between the head and the members is the fallacy called affirming the consequent. And it becomes a downright abusive logic. When we first run into this fallacy in a logic textbook, it is all very harmless. With no emotions invested we can see easily enough what is wrong with it. For those with no background in formal logic, here we have a syllogism made of two premises and a conclusion. The first premise is a conditional statement: e. g., If A, then B.

Now a conditional statement has two parts: an antecedent and a consequent. Note that such a statement is making a claim of necessary relationship. If the antecedent (A) is the case, then the consequent (B) must follow. In the valid form of a syllogism that utilizes this kind of statement (called a modus ponens or “way of affirmation”), we affirm the antecedent in our second premise. So, for instance,

If Jesus is the Christ, then all authority is given to Him.

Jesus is the Christ.

∴ All authority has been given to Him.

Of course there is often more work to do in explaining why the antecedent implies the consequent. However the form of the argument itself is valid. The conclusion follows, as Dr. Sproul used to say, “by resistless logic.” The error in view is the opposite of affirming the antecedent. To “affirm the consequent” means to start at what follows rather than to end there. It is to misunderstand the nature of necessity in causation. Consider a few emotionally-harmless textbook examples. 

If Washington was assassinated, then Washington is dead.

Washington is dead.

∴ Washington was assassinated.

Or another,

If Johnny does poorly on his test, then Johnny will be sad.

Johnny is sad.

∴ Johnny did poorly on his test.

I think we get the idea. The assassination of Washington and the sadness of Johnny’s test failure were by no means impossibilities. In other words we do not affirm the consequent simply because we speak of the probability of such a connection. Rather we are guilty of committing this fallacy by thinking that it must be so. The connection is seen to be necessary and universal. This is crucial. Those who are emotionally invested in the legalistic logic of this system typically cannot see this point. We are not denying that the consequent follows, given the antecedent. We are denying that the antecedent follows the consequent. Now (even at the risk of all the emotions invested back in) consider: 

The basic problem with Job's three friends, at least in terms of their reasoning, was that they were committing the fallacy of affirming the consequent: e.g., 

If you sin, you will find misery.

You have found misery

∴ You have sinned. 

Or try this one, as the disciples once did:

If there is sin, there is distortion (like blindness).

This man was born blind.

∴ There is sin (either his parents’ or his).

To recognize this fallacious reasoning is not to deny the link between A and B (sin and misery or distortion). It is to gain insight that there is much more to it. 

It is the same form to reason:

If the head is faithless, his house is out of order.

His house is out of order.

∴ The head is faithless. 

We should indeed examine the causal connection in each case. My contention is that those committed to such a prideful system are also adding moral laziness to pride. They are not in fact looking. They are more concerned with eliminating the embarrassing and the difficult than they are with helping people in a longer, messier road to faithfulness.

The Logic Extended to the System of FHN

FHN can be reduced to a simplified picture that looks a bit like Pascal’s Wager with its four boxes (the above picture). Notice that there is much more going on here than an evaluation of a man for the isolated purposes of marriage counseling or else the equally isolated purposes of evaluating a man for the office of elder or minister. There is a somewhat larger field of claims about how the home relates to the church; and in this “system” there is a kind of antithesis between the activity of the church and the activity in the home. 

The two boxes on the left represent the home and the two on the right represent the church. The two boxes on the top represent the fallacy at work in the home (left) and in the church (right); the two boxes on the bottom represent the antithesis that results. If we begin with the assumption that very few men are actually qualified, then any increase of activity in the church will be viewed with a very particular suspicion. It will be viewed as a kind of crutch or escape or enabling cell that is competing with getting back to where “that should be happening at home.”

To anticipate the predictable misgiving: Is such a use of church community life possible? Sure it is. Sinners can use all manner of diversions from their duties, even those which would otherwise be sanctified. Moreover, many people treat church service as meritorious and so can burn themselves out in that way as well. Both points may be easily granted.

Yet beginning with FHN assumptions, one begins from the posture of suspicion. In my own experience, any ministry that gave a literal place of fellowship to young singles, not-so-young singles, divorcees, and empty nesters—in other words, anyone who was not in that demographic where such present evaluations would be most relevant—was eyed with suspicion. 

The plain truth of the matter is that such things are usually about control and insecurity. Young men and women who are just starting out, and are blessed to find others who are in their demographic, are increasingly emboldened to chart out on a new course of faithfulness. They will do things differently than their parents did. They will resist the culture. They should. Yet in an independent church that is built around these impulses alone, it doesn’t take too long before every nook and cranny of one’s ecclesiology is defined only in these terms, and other gifts and callings and demographics become unintelligible and frankly a risk for things getting out of control.

Before one knows what happened, a group that talks a good game about being “gospel-centered” creates an atmosphere where it is unsafe to have weakness or to have suffered or to be in any sense defective. It is this trajectory that begins to be read into all of the “proof texts” for this way of seeing the Christian life. As much as we want to surround ourselves only with those who validate our convictions (which is necessary enough over essentials), we must also prove out the doctrine. We must make sure not to discredit our talk with our walk.

It still sounds very biblical, doesn’t it?

If the head is faithless, his members are defective.

His members are defective.

∴ The head is faithless. 

How defective are we talking about incidentally? And what kind? This card trick is turned with even greater hypnotic effect by the fallacy of equivocation already at work in the “house of order” term. We will see shortly what is erroneous about that in examining the relevant passages. But here the logic could also apply in the church.

If the elder is faithless, there will be conflict in the church.

There is conflict in the church.

∴ The elder is faithless.

It is interesting how Word of Faith teachers have said that Job was the most monumental failure in the Bible. Not enough faith. Secret sin. Yet if they were consistent, they would go right to The Head. 

I will close with this question: Whose house has been more out of order for longer than any house? And whose bride has been more unfaithful than any bride? You may want to read Ezekiel 16 and Hosea 2 again. Perhaps spend a season rereading the whole of Job and John 9:1-3. For anyone who says, “But that is God,” or “You’re not Job” I can only say that you are entirely missing the point about the pattern of logic.

(To be continued).