Issues around gender roles in the home, the church, and the world have become secondary themes for most American evangelicals, largely due to the cultural, political, and social blitz around same-sex behavior and gender identity issues. Nevertheless, gender roles remain critically relevant for Christians all over the globe and Neither ComplementarianRead More
Michelle Lee-Barnewall has added considerable weight to a complex and controversial divide within evangelical circles arguing that the way forward is to first step back in the gender debates. Both sides in the discussion need to get a biblical grip on the relevance of kingdom values as they relate toRead More
This paragraph not only sums up much of I. Howard Marshall‘s masterful contribution to Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy, but has profound hermeneutical and pastoral implications. You’ll have to read the entire essay (pp 27ff) to feel the weight of what I’m getting at (hint: it’s not just aboutRead More
Darren O. Sumner has a very nice contribution to Advancing Trinitarian Theology titled “Obedience and Subordination in Trinitarian Theology”. In critiquing Barth’s thesis that God the Son is eternally subordinated to the God the Father, Sumner writes: The distinction between ontological and functional subordination finally rests upon a metaphysical division between God’sRead More
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:2-3 I praise you for remembering me in everything and for holding to the traditions just as I passed them on to you. But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and theRead More
Matthew Richard Schlimm‘s This Strange and Sacred Scripture: Wrestling with the Old Testament and Its Oddities clears the fog and answers common questions and concerns raised by believers struggling to find relevance in the first 39 books of the Bible. There are many valuable lessons here and Schlimm offers some importantRead More
This is a fine piece full of insight written by Jen Wilken who asks men to consider how we interact with women in ministry, in the church, and (I would argue) in the world. She enjoins us to follow a thought experiment about three female ghosts that “haunt staff meetingsRead More
Recently I commented on a Facebook post that I disliked the word “feminist/feminism” when used to describe what I would brand an evangelical egalitarian position (that men and women may serve equally in the home, the church, and the world as God has so apportioned and enabled them). Even when adding the adjective “evangelical” in front of “feminism”Read More
I’m reading N.T. Wright’s latest popular installment entitled Surprised by Scripture and chapter 4, “The Biblical Case for Ordaining Women” caught my attention. Having read his stance on this issue in other writings, I expected not to be “surprised.” Though I wasn’t “shocked, amazed, stupefied, or bewildered” (all synonyms ofRead More
I just finished reading through Craig Blomberg’s excellent Can We Still Believe the Bible?. It’s a tour de force that tackles topics such as the trustworthiness of our copies of the Bible instead of original manuscripts, canon of Scripture (both Old and New), King James Version controversies, inerrancy, historicity and genre,Read More
Dear Complementarian: If you embrace the theological position that God the Son is eternally (read “permanently”) subordinate to God the Father and then ground your belief that submission of the wife to the husband is permanently true because of this theological position, then what does this text mean? At theRead More
