Review Article
How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy Cape Town, South Africa: Spiritual Bakery Publications, 2022 by Terran Williams Review article by Kevin Giles
Terran Williams asked if I would review his book, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy. I feel honoured to be asked because I consider it a first-rate book, a superb piece of work that should be widely read among evangelicals. However, for me to simply outline the contents of his book and comment on what he says is not adequate. I must first set his book in its historical context.
Historical Context What Has Taken Place Since the Late 1960s From the late 1960s, the call to recognize women’s equality in every sphere of life grew in strength and gained wide acceptance. At first, most evangelical Christians stood in opposition. They insisted that God had given men headship and to deny this was to directly contradict the Bible. In support of the traditional view that God had appointed men to lead, a number of well-known evangelical theologians put their minds to reformulating the historic position that gave precedence to men, called patriarchy, so that it sounded acceptable to modern ears. They rejected the historic position that spoke with one voice of the “superiority” of men and the “inferiority” of women, speaking instead of men and women as “equal” (a new idea for many) yet “role differentiated.” Uncoded, this meant that men and women are spiritually equal, of the same value and dignity in God’s sight, but also that some things are the domain of men and some of women—specifically, that leadership is the domain of men. To make their case, they mined the Scriptures to find every text that could be read to say that God had appointed men to lead and women to be subordinate. The impact of their “biblical case” for this view, which became known from 1991 as “the complementarian position,” it must be acknowledged, is impressive. It convinced most evangelicals that this was “what the Bible clearly taught.” Thus, to argue for the unqualified equality of the sexes was to deny biblical authority. From the 1970s onward, the few evangelicals bold enough to argue that the Bible made the substantial equality of the two bodily differentiated sexes the God-given ideal were denigrated as deniers of biblical authority. In hotbeds of complementarianism such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, evangelical egalitarians had a tough time. They were “shunned” and shamed by the complementarian majority. Nevertheless, they kept working toward the biblical case for equality, and in 1988 Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) was founded. This united and gave voice to the many scholarly evangelicals who were convinced the Bible made the substantial equality of the two differentiated sexes the God-given ideal. At an academic level, CBE articulated its biblical case for the equality
cbeinternational.org
of the two sexes in a new journal, Priscilla Papers. This meant the evangelical establishment so heavily invested in patriarchy could not silence their critics nor deny that many well-informed evangelicals believed the Bible taught the substantial equality of the sexes. CBE faced a long uphill battle, but gradually the evangelical egalitarian position came to be seen as a possible alternative to the complementarian position, and then as the position that most accurately reflects what the Bible teaches on the relationship of the sexes. For reasons I will give below, I believe 2016 is the year that the evangelical egalitarian account of what the Bible teaches on the man-woman relationship gained ascendancy in the evangelical world. It was seen at that point in time to capture the teaching of Scripture on this matter most accurately. Sensing that complementarian theology was at the point of collapse, Andreas Köstenberger—the most trusted and theologically able second-generation complementarian—in conjunction with his wife, Margaret, published God’s Design for Man and Woman: A Biblical-Theological Survey (Crossway, 2014). Their effort was unsuccessful: refuted exegetical conclusions were rehashed, telling criticisms of complementarian arguments were ignored, and the book insisted the central issue is male-female differentiation, something evangelical egalitarians unambiguously affirm. The central and fundamental issue in dispute has always been, does or does not the Bible permanently subordinate women to men, never male-female differentiation. In my book, What the Bible Actually Teaches about Women (Cascade, 2018), I make professor Köstenberger my primary debating opponent, contesting virtually every claim and argument he makes.1 My book is only one of several written by evangelical scholars in the last few years rejecting the complementarian “biblical” arguments for the permanent subordination of women. In my opinion, the most important of these is Discovering Biblical Equality, third edition, edited by Ronald Pierce, Cynthia Long Westfall, and Christa McKirland (IVP Academic, 2021, reviewed on pp. 24–30 of this issue of Priscilla Papers). Every biblical text that complementarians quote in support of the permanent subordination of women is critically assessed by the most able of evangelical scholars and found wanting. The texts quoted in fact do not permanently subordinate women to men or exclude them from preaching/teaching in church. With great confidence, I believe no answer to this new edition of Discovering Biblical Equality will be attempted by complementarian scholars. One part of the complementarian “biblical” case for the permanent subordination of women or “role differentiation” is the so-called “Trinity argument.”2 Just as the Father has authority
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