Complementarity in the created order – and in particular when speaking of male and female – is a fraught topic. Perhaps though it shouldn't be? Perhaps what is at fault is the frame, rather than the notion itself? In rushing to frame complementarity with the language of hierarchy, we get sucked into the power games of today's fallen world. Domination is not the calling of creation but rather "shalom" - the kind of peaceful coexistence that is best captured by the word, 'harmony'. Thus, it appears to me that there is more warrant for framing complementarity in the language of symphony rather than hierarchy. Biblical complementarity is divine harmony realised in created form.

Consider how one voice singing a melody might be beautiful, pure, uplifting even... but it can never be majestic, glorious, transcendent. What makes it all these things is the simple addition of at least one more, complementary, voice. That is what complementarity is all about: being the same but different; singing in harmony, rather than jostling for space within the existing melodic line; maintaining enough volume to be heard as clearly and distinctly as the melody, but never so much as to drown it out; exchanging the exclusivity of power for the power of mutuality.

Humanity is a symphonic reality: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." (Gen 1:27). There is one humanity, but this one humanity is polyphonic, from the beginning, by design – and therein lies its majesty. We are the image of God together, male and female, created to exist in perfect harmony with each other. Not taking over and colonising each other, but coming alongside and completing each other, like dancers making space for each other, while still moving together, to create a more beautiful whole.

And yet we are simply one section of God's orchestra. For nature has been singing longer and more gloriously than we, in our forgetfulness and denial of God, have tended to. Perhaps we are the choir, giving words to the already-present, glorious, symphony orchestra of nature. That is why shalom cannot ever be realised without us coming back into harmony with nature. I do not presume to know what that means in practice, but I do know that our flagrant disregard for our own bodies (working ourselves to death, ignoring healthy rhythms of rest and relation, enclosing ourselves in concrete and artificial light) and also for the creatures we share this world with, is a form of jarring dissonance that obscures and destroys the possibility of true life in its fullness.

Let me close with one of Tim Keller's favourite quotes, by Leonard Bernstein, who had the following to say about reality as being symphonic:

“Beethoven broke all the rules, and turned out pieces of breathtaking rightness. Rightness – that’s the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant, in that context, then chances are you’re listening to Beethoven... Our boy has the real goods, the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at the finish: Something is right in the world: There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently: something we can trust, that will never let us down.”

If we get this feeling from listening to Beethoven, then imagine what it must be like to be written into the symphony of the one who made Beethoven... the one to whom, whether consciously or not, all Beethoven's genius was pointing.