Review: Freeing women from oppression

The title of this book is misleading. Unless you are an American evangelical you are bound to misunderstand it. ‘Biblical womanhood’ doesn’t mean what it says. The phrase should really be in inverted commas because it means ‘the complementarian view of man and woman that has been pushed in recent years, where a woman’s highest calling is to play a domestic role in the home under her husband’s authority, and which forbids her from leading or teaching in the church.’ The book is

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the subjugation of women became Gospel truth by Beth Allison Barr (Brazos Press, 2021)

It’s the subtitle that tells you where the book is going. The author, herself brought up in the belief that complementarianism (over against egalitarianism) was ‘Gospel truth’, tackles head-on the views popularised by the likes of James Dobson, John Piper, Bill Gothard and Wayne Grudem. She does it with grace, but also with the bluntness and vigour that many of us feel those views deserve, especially in light of the appalling way she and her pastor-husband were treated by complementarian church leaders.

As a university lecturer in mediaeval history, Barr has a solid grasp of the background to patriarchy in society at large and how at different times it has infiltrated the church. She also has a wide picture of the periods when women occupied key roles in the church, before patriarchy again suppressed them and they were ‘written out of history’. In addition, she has a sound grasp of the Bible passages usually touted in favour of complementarianism, from the accounts of creation and the fall to the statements by St Paul. She doesn’t expound these passages in detail—others have done that adequately already—but focuses instead on the broader picture, to powerful effect.

Along the way, she exposes the bias of the English Standard Version (ESV), showing how the editors’ complementarian convictions, rather that the plain sense of the Greek, determined its wording and paragraphing of key passages in certain of Paul’s letters. Alongside this, she exposes the vigorous but unwarranted opposition of its supporters to the gender-inclusive language of translations like the Today’s New International Version (TNIV), and later the NIV itself, and shows how such inclusive language was being used in the English Bible centuries earlier, and with good reason.

The book shows how the debate about the role of women got entangled with two other issues in the twentieth century: the biblical inerrancy question, and Arianism (the view that the Son was subordinate to the Father not just during his incarnation, but eternally).

It’s powerful stuff, and well expressed. If you are comfortable with the way things are in evangelicalism today in respect of women and their roles, this book is not for you. It would seriously rock your boat. But if your only desire is to see this aspect of life come into line with Jesus and his kingdom teaching, I invite you to be tough with yourself and give it a fair reading.

Here’s a selection of quotations, with page numbers.

My husband was fired after he challenged church leadership over the issue of women in ministry.  (p3)

So much textual and historical evidence counters the complementarian model of biblical womanhood and the theology behind it. Sometimes I am dumbfounded that this is a battle we are still fighting.  (p6)

Complementarianism is patriarchy.  (p13)

[Russell] Moore may claim that women only owe submission “to their own husbands,” not to men “in general,” but he undermines this claim by excluding women as pastors and elders.  (p18)

What if patriarchy isn’t divinely ordained but is a result of human sin? What if instead of being divinely created, patriarchy slithered into creation only after the fall? What if the reason that the fruit of patriarchy is so corrupt, even within the Christian church, is because patriarchy has always been a corrupted system?  (p25)

Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world.  (p36)

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood may start with Genesis 2 in their overview of complementarianism, but their reading of this creation narrative stems from 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Timothy 2.4…  So here is my question for complementarian evangelicals: What if you are wrong? What if evangelicals have been understanding Paul through the lens of modern culture instead of the way Paul intended to be understood?  (p40)

Pope John Paul II’s stance in his 1988 apostolic letter…suggests that using Paul’s writings in Ephesians 5 to justify male headship and female subordination in marriage would be the equivalent of using those passages to justify slavery.  (p45)

The subjection of women is highlighted in the ESV translation of Ephesians 5, and the call for husbands to submit is minimized—not because Paul meant it that way but because the complementarian translators of the ESV wanted it that way.  (p51)

Instead of justifying male authority on account of female inferiority, the Christian household codes affirm women as having equal worth to men. Instead of focusing on wifely submission (everyone was doing that), the Christian household codes demand that the husband do exactly the opposite of what Roman law allowed: sacrificing his life for his wife instead of exercising power over her life.  (p55)

Most people who attend complementarian churches don’t realize that the ESV translation of Junia as “well known to the apostles” instead of “prominent among the apostles” was a deliberate move to keep women out of leadership (Romans 16:7).  (p69)

…a favorite quotation from New Testament scholar Ben Witherington: “No, the problem in the church is not strong women, but rather weak men who feel threatened by strong women, and have tried various means, even by dubious exegesis, to prohibit them from exercising their gifts and graces in the church.”  (p87)

While medieval Christians couldn’t forget the truth about female leaders in Christian history—Jesus made certain of that through his interactions with Mary, Martha, and even the Canaanite woman—medieval Christians also couldn’t accept female leadership as normative. Why? Because the medieval world inherited the patriarchy of the Roman world.  (p90)

Despite the significant role women play in church history, and despite clear historical evidence of women exercising leadership, these popular, modern church history texts present a masculine narrative of church history that minimizes female leadership.  (p98)

Before the Reformation, women could gain spiritual authority by rejecting their sexuality. Virginity empowered them. Women became nuns and took religious vows, and some, like Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen, found their voices rang with the authority of men. Indeed, the further removed medieval women were from the married state, the closer they were to God. After the Reformation, the opposite became true for Protestant women. The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers, the godlier they became.  (p103)

“The heritage of Protestantism for women was deeply ambiguous,” writes Roper. While it could have affirmed women’s spiritual equality with men, the Reformation instead ushered in a “renewed patriarchalism” that placed married women firmly under the headship of their husbands.  (p105)

Some of the evangelical scholars and pastors who are most vocal about male headship and female submission argue that the relationship between husband and wife models the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Wives follow the leadership of their husbands, just as Jesus follows the leadership of the Father. The marriage hierarchy, like marriage itself, they argue, is embedded in the imago Dei.  (p112)

Reformation theology might have removed the priest, but it replaced him with the husband.  (p117)

As a medieval historian, I know that Christians translated Scripture in gender-inclusive ways long before the feminist movement.  (p133)

Grudem may complain that the TNIV capitulates to non-Christian culture (feminism), but the ESV also capitulates to non-Christian culture (patriarchy). People are products of the world in which they live, and translators are no exception.  (p143)

Early modern biblical scholars found that marriage was puzzlingly absent from the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), especially for an institution thought to be championed by God.  (p149)

It wasn’t until the early modern world that domesticity became linked with women’s spiritual calling. Instead of just being something that women usually did, domestic prowess in the home (centered on the family) now became something that good Christian women should do because it is what we are designed to do. It is our primary calling in this world. Domesticity, for evangelical women, is sanctified.  (p159)

While the Industrial Revolution certainly created a boom in jobs, and even precipitated the hiring of high proportions of women during the early stages, it didn’t improve women’s wages. Indeed, it seemed to provoke arguments that women deserved to be paid lower wages than men simply because they were women.  (p163)

By the early nineteenth century, the separation of work from home, scientific claims about female distinctiveness and weakness, and Christian teachings emphasizing the role of wife and the natural piety of women melded together. The cult of domesticity was born.  (p165)

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly. That God ordained some people, simply because of their sex or skin color (or both), as belonging under the power of other people. That women’s subordination is central to the gospel of Christ.  (p173)

Instead of reading Larsen’s article “Evangelicalism’s Strong History of Women in Public Ministry” and Collier-Thomas’s Daughters of Thunder, we are listening to John Piper state unequivocally that it is not okay and never has been okay for women to teach men.  (p181)

Patriarchy within Christianity reasserted itself with a vengeance during the twentieth century. Two significant (but related) shifts happened within evangelical theology that helped seal biblical womanhood as gospel truth: the championing of inerrancy and the revival of Arianism.  (p187)

The early twentieth-century emphasis on inerrancy went hand in hand with a wide-ranging attempt to build up the authority of male preachers at the expense of women…  Inerrancy introduced the ultimate justification for patriarchy—abandoning a plain and literal interpretation of Pauline texts about women would hurl Christians off the cliff of biblical orthodoxy.  (p189)

Throughout church history, what I had just heard come from the mouth of our pastor had been declared heretical over and over and over again. Yet here was a twenty-first-century evangelical pastor boldly stating that Jesus is eternally subordinate to God the Father. This was a heresy so serious that the fourth-century church father Athanasius refused to recognize those who supported it as Christian. Heresy.  (p191)

It should also not surprise us that evangelicals resurrected Arianism for the same reason that evangelicals turned to inerrancy: if Jesus is eternally subordinate to God the Father, women’s subordination becomes much easier to justify. Arianism, like inerrancy, proved the perfect weapon against women’s equality, the perfect prop for Christian patriarchy.  (p195)

Evidence shows me that just because complementarianism uses biblical texts doesn’t mean it reflects biblical truth. Evidence shows me the trail of sin and destruction left in the wake of teachings that place women under the power of men.  (p205)

We can no longer deny a link between complementarianism and abuse. So much evidence now exists that John Piper, Al Mohler, and Russell Moore have gone on the defensive, trying to proclaim how their “Christian patriarchy” is different.  (p207)

Ideas matter. Ideas that depict women as less than men influence men to treat women as less than men.  (p212)

What if we recognized women’s leadership the same way Paul did throughout his letters—even entrusting the Letter to the Romans to the deacon Phoebe? What if we listened to women in our evangelical churches the way Jesus listened to women?  (p214)

Complementarianism is patriarchy, and patriarchy is about power. Neither have ever been about Jesus.  (p218)