For women, the question of headship isn’t just an exegetical exercise or a question of culture wars. In complementarian circles, it fundamentally shapes, shades, and limits the boundaries of our participation in church, our roles in the home, and our opportunities outside of it. It’s profoundly personal, impactful, and inescapable.
With these stakes, Lyndon Jost, associate pastor of Christ Church Toronto (PCA) and director of the Reformed House of Studies at Wycliffe College (University of Toronto), begins the arduous task of summarizing his own work on the topic of the sexes, “Transfiguring Headship: A Figural Theology of Gender” (Pickwick, 2026).
Jost sets out to reclaim the language of “headship” within a proper scriptural framework, while challenging modern notions of authoritarianism and abuse often associated with it. He hopes to speak “a better word for women and men alike” (20), in which women are able to flourish in their marriages and in life.
In some ways, he achieves this goal; however, I also think his exegesis, rhetoric, and framework fall short of his own intentions.
The Representative Head
Jost presents what he calls a “figural approach” to the questions of gender as they appear in Scripture, wherein Christ is the “interpretive clue and center for the Scriptures as a whole” (8). As he considers the texts of Ephesians 5:22–33 and 1 Corinthians 11:2–12, he frames the discussion of gender around Christ as the paradigmatic human, who is both head and body of the church, which, he argues, provides a basis for studying gender duality from a biblical lens.
Jost builds the case against a modern understanding of headship in the first three chapters, where he explores sexual difference from both secular and theological perspectives, maps out the etymology and evolution of head and headship as words and social concepts, and summarizes the history of the patriarchal use of headship. In Chapter Four, he addresses feminist theologies and attempts to connect those to the current climate in which the idea of man being the head of a woman is inherently sexist.
Not until Chapter Five does Jost begin his own exegetical work, positing that the head is a “soteriological representative” (103). His exegesis includes a concise study of representative heads in the Old Testament, and their foreshadowing of Christ, to “establish more clearly the meaning of headship, christologically understood, in order to be in a position in the final chapter to apply ‘headship’ to a contemporary theology of gender” (125).
His final chapter makes the case for representative — rather than authoritative — headship in Ephesians and 1 Corinthians, and his conclusion seeks to draw out the implications of that interpretive difference.
It is Jost’s Old Testament work on representative heads that provides the greatest contribution to the complementarian debate. Heads under the old covenant are almost entirely seen as representative figures, although Jost concedes that there is an element of authority within the use of the word. Some of these heads have a soteriological function in redemptive history (e.g. Adam, Noah, Abraham), but heads of families as well as the priests and kings of Israel serve a representative function, too.
This is the type of headship Paul is describing, Jost argues: “The man’s representative status is not explicitly linked to his ‘leadership’ but instead to a set of self-giving responsibilities, chiefly his responsibility for the purity and perfecting of the body” (140, emphasis original).
Additionally, the husband is not a soteriological head in the new covenant — that head is Christ. So what does headship look like in the marriage relationship to which Paul refers in Ephesians 5? Jost suggests “that the man/husband is to take full and final responsibility under God for the flourishing of his marriage, and will be held accountable for this” (141). As the wife submits to her husband, “as her own willing self-offering for their mutual good, to that extent he will be held accountable for the ways he loves, leads, serves, and sanctifies — or fails to do so” (142).
Perhaps most helpful is Jost’s explicit articulation that there is no room for domineering in a scriptural understanding of headship: “Members of a body are of such a unity that each member is by nature utterly bound together with and in the service of the rest of the members, such that it is nonsensical to speak of one member having authority ‘over’ any other (see 1 Cor 12:21–26)” (143).
Even this year, the PCA had an overture commending the Danvers Statement on complementarianism as biblically faithful. In the grounds for this overture, the presbytery stated, “Approving it would signal that complementarianism, rightly understood, opposes authoritarianism and promotes mutual flourishing under Christ’s lordship.”
It is refreshing to read a biblically-based boundary that presses up against the tendency of “headship” to be leached for its potential to be wielded as a rod of authority and dominance and instead defines what headship cannot be.
A Critique of Methodology
Despite these strengths,“Transfiguring Headship” falls short in some areas.
First, Jost assumes and articulates several problematic premises. He provides a survey of gender differences in society, particularly in the economic realm, proposing that “modern theological approaches to gender” have presupposed a “characteristically modern” understanding of personhood and created a “stunted, quasi-theological anthropology” (135).
It should be noted here that the bulk of his cultural and historical contextualizing interacts with the progressive and feminist objections to headship. Yes, there are problems outside our walls in the surrounding culture in the form of cultural feminism. But there are also problems within our walls.
The responses by allegedly Reformed men to the recent clip of Rebecca VanDoodewaard encouraging single women to consider graduate studies exemplify this viewpoint at work. Among the critics, their viewpoint leaves no room for a Christian woman, single or married, to exercise any agency. Jost would have served the church better by also interacting with this ideology.
Jost adopts the works of Catholic theologian Ivan Illich and anthropologist Susan Carol Rogers. Both writers claim that the pre-industrial, agrarian society with distinctly gendered expectations of men and women promoted a more balanced space for the sexes to co-exist, not in competition with one another, but instead each seeing themselves as valued for their role. But Jost fails to point out the consequences of women’s lack of agency and social standing during those periods.
Instead, Jost seems to accept this premise that the modern-day woman’s participation in the workforce has created a competitive landscape where “sexism is inescapable — the man ever remaining ‘on top’” (72). In doing so, he makes an allowance for sexism rather than calling it out as a sin. He accepts a framework where men and women are in competition with one another because of an economic system rather than because of our fallen natures.
He only challenges Illich’s observations that men and women are “‘equals’ vying to be ‘on top’” because, Jost argues, they are not, in fact, “equals” (73). “‘Inequality’ (in its literal sense of ‘not the same’) is basic to the fundamental duality of the sexes,” he writes, “and such duality is foundational to the naming of man as head” (73). He claims that the “economic woman would no longer be man’s complement, but man’s equal” (98).
It is accurate to define men and women as “not the same” (e.g. melody and harmony, 73). But it is a serious error to say they are not equals. Rather, being equals and being “the same” are two different categories. Equality refers to the value of men and women, which complementarians would affirm. Men and women are both made in the image of God and therefore equals, though not the same.
The language we use in the discussion of headship is incredibly important. People can take good words like “headship” and “submission” and turn them into weapons for power and destruction. Imagine what they would do with “inequality.” Let me be clear, I don’t think this is Jost’s intent. However, I fear others will use his words in harmful ways.
To defend a truly scriptural view of complementarianism, employing words that say precisely what is true and accurate is an essential element of the debate.
You can see the proper use of language in the Nashville Statement, which the PCA approved in 2019 as a biblically faithful declaration. It states,
“We affirm that God created Adam and Eve, the first human beings, in his own image, equal before God as persons, and distinct as male and female.
We deny that the divinely ordained differences between male and female render them unequal in dignity or worth.”
Exegetical Concerns
Although much of Jost’s work is insightful, particularly his dissection of 1 Corinthians 11, there’s a point that must be noted about his exegesis that impacts his conclusion.
Jost uses man/woman and husband/wife interchangeably. The Greek words for husband and wife used in both passages can also mean, simply, man or woman. From the context of Ephesians 5, we know that the direction is for husbands and wives exclusively, but it’s hard to tell in 1 Corinthians 11 if husbands and wives are being spoken to or men and women in general.
Are all men heads of all women? Or is the language of headship limited to those who fill a role in their churches or families, specifically as heads? Not only does that make a significant difference in how we interpret the text, but also in how we apply it. Women raised in strict complementarian circles know too well that some interpret this to mean that all women must submit to all men as their head.
The Same Unanswered Questions
My most pressing critique of this book, however, is that Jost simply does not address the most pressing question in this conversation: What does headship look like, practically?
Even the work he has done to clarify what it can’t be — domineering, self-interested — joins the already existing, often ambiguous rhetoric regarding how complementarians properly apply headship. Descriptions of a husband’s “self-giving” and “covenant responsibilities” (140–141) can suffer many interpretations, as can a woman’s submission. Jost describes a woman’s role as: “laying aside any and all ambitions for self-glorification for the one who has already laid down his life for her — not as a relinquishing of agency but as an agential act of self-giving love” (154).
Acknowledging a woman’s free agency in this dynamic is helpful, but it also misses the reality that such “agency” in some circles is often just spiritual coercion. By some, “laying aside any and all ambitions for self-glorification” will be wielded to restrict women from pursuing financial independence, education, or even avenues of personal edification, the opposite of what Jost encourages in his conclusion. Jost sincerely argues that these verses should allow women the freedom to flourish, but his rhetoric leaves room for many of the same abuses the church has always seen.
Ultimately, Jost tackles the wrong problem: We don’t need a new way to understand headship, but a way to apply it. Where do authority, representation, and “self-giving” responsibility meet when a couple is sleep-deprived with a new baby or financially pressured? What about when they disagree over accepting a new job, moving to a new city, or receiving an untimely visit from the in-laws?
What does this look like for the single woman who is given second-class citizenship because she doesn’t have a “head” to mediate her participation in church, or the young man who doesn’t have a family and so feels he has no value among the men in his church who are “heads”?
I deeply appreciate Jost’s clearly demonstrated heart for women in the church, and his exegetical work of headship as representation is helpful. But this particular study does not build the foundations necessary to answer the questions about gender and headship reverberating between the weary men and women of our churches.
Mary Van Weelden serves as content manager for Sola Media and is a member of Skyview Presbyterian Church in Centennial, Colorado.
