THE 1995 FILM The Usual Suspects, written by Christopher McQuarrie, directed by Bryan Singer, and starring Kevin Spacey (long before the #MeToo movement unveiled allegations of sexual assault against him), is a rather brilliant story about five criminals who meet in a police lineup and plan a heist together. Suspense builds as the evidence points toward a legendary criminal mastermind, Keyser Söze. The final, surprising plot twist is worthy of a screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan. Spacey’s character delivers a line I have never forgotten: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
I haven’t forgotten the line, because I disagree with it. 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.
I am still surprised by an article Russell Moore wrote in 2006 titled “After Patriarchy, What?” I hope he no longer believes what he wrote, because in the article he argues that women’s subordination belongs with the gospel: “We must . . . relate male headship to the whole of the gospel,” he writes.1 Summarizing the scholarship of several sociologists, Moore laments that evangelical households are functionally feminist, with decisions made “through a process of negotiation, mutual submission, and consensus.”2 Moore argues that while evangelicals pay lip service to male headship, most don’t practice it. Because feminism pervades modern culture, bubbling up through the everyday experiences of life, it has infiltrated the evangelical family. Seeing Beth Moore preach so often has made evangelicals more receptive to women preaching and hence (he seems to imply) more receptive to egalitarianism. He concludes that it is time to cast a new vision of Christianity that “provides a biblically and theologically compelling alternative” to egalitarianism—one “that sums up the burden of male headship under the cosmic rubric of the gospel of Christ and the restoration of all things in him.”3 It is time, in other words, to write female submission into the heart of Christianity.
By the time Russell Moore wrote this article in 2006, the groundwork for his vision had already been laid. The devil had already pulled his trick on evangelical Christians. Let me tell you how it happened, just as Special Agent David Kujan finally did at the end of The Usual Suspects. Let me tell you why evangelicals believe that biblical womanhood is gospel truth. Maybe you, like Kujan, will drop your coffee too.
Forgetting Our Past
In June 1934, the deacons met at First Baptist Church Elm Mott, an old Southern Baptist congregation near Waco, Texas. They voted unanimously to invite Mrs. Lewis Ball of Houston to come as their revival preacher. The deacons recommended “Mrs. Lewis Ball of Houston to come and assist us one week during our coming Revival, she being a great inspiration to the young people. Mrs. Ball has been exceptionally successful as a soul-winner.”4
On July 3, 1934, Mrs. Ball preached the morning service. Handwritten church records state that Jack Wiley and B. H. Varner both “professed Christ as their personal Saviour.” When Mrs. Ball preached the evening service for the young peoples’ prayer meeting, Miss Mary Brustrum made a profession of faith. Mrs. Lewis Ball preached throughout the week, including a message titled “Is It Well with Your Soul?” on July 5, during which six people made professions of faith. The 1934 revival witnessed the largest crowd in the sanctuary yet recorded at First Baptist Church Elm Mott (139 people), and the Sunday school attendance that week broke all their records (176 present). Overall sixteen baptisms resulted. Ball proved so popular that she was asked to return in 1935 and 1938.
In 1934, no one at this Southern Baptist church had a problem with Mrs. Lewis Ball preaching. The deacons’ recommendation had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with preaching ability. Ball was a “great inspiration” and “exceptionally successful as a soul-winner,” so they invited her.5 The attitude toward Ball represents broader attitudes of the SBC at this time. In 1963 the Southern Baptist denomination ordained Addie Davis, and in 1974 it sponsored a conference affirming women’s role in ministry. This resulted in an edited collection published by Broadman Press: Christian Freedom for Women and Other Human Beings.6 Baptist historian Charles Deweese notes how the SBC once used New Testament passages to support women in public ministry (instead of using these passages to push women out of ministry, as they do today).7 For example, The Broadman Bible Commentary, a commentary that began in 1969, read Phoebe as a deaconess in Romans 16.8 Religion scholar Timothy Larsen wrote a 2017 essay showcasing the long history of female leadership in the evangelical tradition, including the Baptist tradition. He went so far as to call women’s involvement in public ministry a “historic distinctive of evangelicalism.”9
I have to pause here to tell you about the first time I read Larsen’s article.
I struggled the first year after my husband’s firing. Sometimes I would find it hard to breathe inside the basement walls of my faculty office. So I would leave, walk across the street, and sit on the carved stone benches in front of Carroll Library on Baylor’s campus. Every day the light surfaces of those benches soak up the hot Texas sun. I found I could breathe there, sitting in the open space with the warm stone at my back. I would often carry papers or a book to make me look busy, like I was preparing for class or grading. That way I could just sit, alone, and breathe.
One day I forgot my reading camouflage. It had been a hard morning, early in fall 2017. Much of our future was still uncertain. The wounds left by our abrupt departure from our church family of fifteen years felt all the fresher with the start of a new school year. Gone was the usual pattern of back-to-school youth ministry activities; gone was the hope of starting the children’s programs our kids had been looking forward to with their friends at church; gone were the couple we had spent so much of our time with and their not-yet-replaced friendships; gone was our son’s answer when friends at school asked what his father did. I was so wrapped up in the emptiness of our lives that it wasn’t until a well-intentioned friend sat down next to me on that warm stone bench and struck up a conversation that I realized my mistake.
As soon as she left, I picked up my phone and clicked on an article link that a colleague sent. It was just camouflage reading, making me look busy. And then my eyes focused on the title: “Evangelicalism’s Strong History of Women in Ministry.” What a gift on that hard day! The question that had sparked our family trauma was whether our evangelical church would allow a woman to teach youth Sunday school, and here was a respected evangelical scholar outlining how women throughout evangelical history have been teachers, leaders, and even preachers.
Listen to what Larsen argues: “Women in public Christian ministry is a historic distinctive of evangelicalism. It is historic because evangelical women have been fulfilling their callings in public ministry from the founding generation of evangelicalism to the present day and in every period in between.” He defines public ministry as “service to adult believers” and includes preaching, teaching, pastoring, and other forms of spiritual care. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, moved from prohibiting women as preachers to embracing them. Larsen notes how Wesley affirmed the preacher Sarah Crosby (among others), writing that she had an “extraordinary call.” This persuaded Wesley to accept her as a preacher, just as he accepted male lay preachers. “It is fascinating,” writes Larsen, “that [Wesley] affirmed the ministries of these women in explicitly egalitarian language as of the exact same order as that of the men who had not received Anglican ordination whose public ministries he was also affirming.”10
Despite John Piper’s hardline complementarian stance, even Calvinist evangelicals of the past have affirmed women’s calling by God as public ministers. Larsen explains how the first American Calvinist denomination to emerge from the eighteenth-century evangelical revival was founded by a woman, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. The denomination still exists as a member of the Evangelical Alliance, and the denomination still bears her name: “The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion.”11
Many evangelicals believe that supporting women in ministry is a slippery slope leading to liberalism and agnosticism. Wayne Grudem argues that female leaders in the church (especially pastors) disobey God’s Word, opening themselves to “the withdrawal of God’s hand of protection and blessing.”12 According to Grudem, female leadership erodes orthodoxy in churches, leading to misinterpretation of Scripture and lack of trust in the Bible. Female leadership also erodes proper family roles, undermining masculine authority and creating gender-identity confusion among children. Grudem even provides a specific example of a female preacher who suffered the loss of God’s protection in her life—a pastor named Judy Brown. Grudem is quick to point out that Brown contributed a chapter to a book edited by Gordon Fee: Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity without Hierarchy. (The book was published in 2004; another edition came out in 2012 with Brown’s article removed.) Yet Brown ended up in prison for attempting to murder the husband of her lover. When the interviewer asked if Grudem thought Judy Brown’s tragic fate was “related to her views about women preaching,” his answer was clear: “In this case it seems to me there’s an area of disobedience to the command of scripture regarding male leadership and teaching in the church.”13 Allowing female leadership is symptomatic of cultural compromise, Grudem implies, as the push for women as preachers and elders comes from outside Christianity. Female leadership is not a part of Bible-believing evangelicalism. It is sin, and—like the trajectory of Judy Brown’s life—it leads to destruction.
Timothy Larsen’s essay proves Wayne Grudem wrong.
Historically, women have flourished as leaders, teachers, and preachers—even in the evangelical world. Instead of opposing women as preachers and teachers, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals did the opposite—they supported women in public ministry. My favorite part of Larsen’s essay is how he flips our understanding of why evangelicals support women in ministry. For Grudem and Piper, women in public ministry is evidence of how evangelicals have caved to contemporary culture, succumbing to the peer pressure of modern feminism instead of remaining faithful to the timeless standard of God’s Word. Indeed, their book Rediscovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is subtitled “A Response to Evangelical Feminism.” Larsen inverts their argument: “When evangelicals have cared more about the Bible and the gospel than they did about being perceived as respectable by the wider society, these commitments have often led them to affirm women in public ministry.”14 When evangelicals have supported women in public ministry, they are most closely aligned with the gospel of Jesus. It is when evangelicals succumb to the peer pressure of contemporary culture that they turn against women in public ministry.
What a reframing of our perspective!
Larsen is not alone in arguing that evangelicals have a strong history of women in public ministry. Historian Bettye Collier-Thomas has found women actively preaching and leading in denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, AME Zion Church, Baptist Church, Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and in Holiness movements. She published a collection of thirty-eight sermons by fourteen Black, female preachers who worked in the US between 1850 and 1979—showing, again, a continuous thread of women as leaders, teachers, and preachers long before the rise of evangelical feminism.15
The title of Collier-Thomas’s book is brilliant: Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850–1979. She discusses women who paved the way, like Mary J. Small (ordained an elder in 1898 in the AME Zion Church), as well as twentieth-century preachers like Texas Baptist Ella Eugene Whitfield, who became a missionary for the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary National Baptist Convention and, in 1911, preached almost five hundred sermons and visited over one thousand homes and churches. (To me, the public nature and widespread visibility of Whitfield’s ministry in the early twentieth century sounds like a precursor to the public ministry of her later Texas Baptist sister Beth Moore.) The voices of Black women thundered from pulpits, just like the voices of their brothers in Christ did.16 Baptist minister Samuel W. Bacote praised Whitfield’s public presence as “a woman of untiring zeal and commanding appearance.” “She can hold an audience indefinitely,” he wrote, “by the intensity of her earnestness and the clearness and appropriateness of her well-chosen words. The utility of her subjects and the excellence of her delivery have rendered her extremely popular as a public speaker.”17
When Mrs. Lewis Ball preached at First Baptist Church Elm Mott in the 1930s, she did not preach because the church was succumbing to feminist pressures. She preached because the church regarded her as a great soul-winning preacher and because—like Ella Eugene Whitfield and so many other women of their time—her calling was affirmed by the Christian community around her.
The problem is that evangelicals simply do not know this history.
Instead of reading the powerful 1941 sermon “If I Were White” by ordained minister Florence Spearing Randolph or learning about the sixteen people baptized after the revival service led by Mrs. Lewis Ball in 1934, evangelicals flock to John Piper’s Desiring God website (it has had six million visitors during the last six months alone), where they listen to Ask Pastor John podcast interviews like “Can a Woman Preach if Elders Affirm It?” or read articles like Mary A. Kassian’s “Women Teaching Men—How Far Is Too Far?” 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.18 Because we lack a historical context in which to evaluate Piper’s claims, evangelicals accept his teachings.
By forgetting our past, especially women who don’t fit into the narrative that some evangelicals tell, we have made it easier to accept the “truth” of biblical womanhood. We don’t remember anything different.
Redefining Holiness
Evangelical women preached to public crowds just like women preached in medieval Europe. Yet evangelical women preachers look rather different from Margery Kempe’s great cloud of female witnesses. Let’s look more closely at Mrs. Lewis Ball. We don’t actually know her name—records simply identify her by her husband’s name. She was not paid for her services. The records note that she would not be paid—although the women of Elm Mott got together and hosted a “pounding” for her to show their appreciation.
It is remarkable that First Baptist Church Elm Mott invited a woman to preach from the pulpit on several occasions during the 1930s. It is also remarkable that this preaching woman managed to do so without challenging male authority. She identified herself by the name of her husband, Lewis Ball, emphasizing that she preached with his permission. Instead of accepting money to preach (as if it was her job), she gave money back to the church, donating $25 to their Lottie Moon Missionary Fund. Mrs. Lewis Ball earned a reputation as a great soul-winning evangelist while maintaining her reputation as a conventional wife. She even managed to convey the message that preaching was just her side gig. As a married woman, of course, her primary job would be caring for her family.
If we rewind almost three centuries, to the early years of Baptist history, we can see a similar emphasis placed on another female Baptist preacher. In 1655, Katherine Sutton asked God to “pour out of his blessed Spirit” upon her, and she began to preach and prophesy through singing.19 Sutton’s Baptist pastor, Hanserd Knollys, wrote the preface to her spiritual autobiography. His purpose was to defend her public ministry, but he did so by grounding her spiritual calling in her feminine distinctiveness. Just as Mrs. Lewis Ball did not directly challenge male authority, Knollys made sure Sutton didn’t either. Using John 6:12 as a framework, Knollys describes how God poured out his Spirit first on his faithful servants (men), and then the women (handmaids) came behind and gathered up the “crumbs of that spiritual bread.”20 While the men received the Spirit of Christ directly, the women followed and picked up the leftovers. Knollys justifies Sutton’s right to prophesy while simultaneously emphasizing her secondary status. She was not a threat to male authority. Sutton was a preaching (well, actually, singing) prophet, but she also was a godly woman dedicated to family. Knollys justifies the extraordinariness of her spiritual gift by emphasizing her ordinariness as a woman—she was loving, gentle, wise, virtuous, maternal, and dedicated to family.
What I noticed about Mrs. Lewis Ball’s leadership in the 1930s is similar to Knollys’s characterization of Sutton’s leadership some three hundred years prior. Both women had the right to preach and prophesy as long as they maintained their traditional female roles and did not usurp male authority.
As a medieval historian, I was really struck by this similarity. Remember Margery Kempe’s great cloud of female witnesses? The leadership of medieval women was also qualified, but, instead of having to maintain their female distinctiveness, they had to rise above their sex. “Holy women and men who moved closer together, were also moving away from the extremes of sexed temperament and were becoming more similar in body and in soul,” explains Jacqueline Murray.21 Medieval women gained spiritual authority by casting off their female roles and acting more like men.
So the medieval world told stories about women like Saint Cecilia. Compare Cecilia’s leadership style with those of Mrs. Lewis Ball and Katherine Sutton. One rendering of Saint Cecilia’s story is found in a fourteenth-century sermon collection titled “The Mirror.” The sermon concludes with a story about a man named Stephen. Stephen is a rich Roman who lived a rather ordinary life—neither completely saint nor completely sinner. For example, when he decides to add on to his luxurious villa, he steals land from his next-door neighbor—a church dedicated to the virgin martyr Saint Cecilia. He refuses to return the land or to apologize for his actions. Stephen dies before his priest can convince him to repent, and he goes to eternal judgment carrying this sin.
But something interesting happens on Stephen’s way to judgment: “Then came St. Cecilia by Stephen, and as she passed him, she took him by the arm and pinched him. And it so greatly pained him that had he been alive, it would have killed him. Then he was called before the judge and damned for his sin against Cecilia.”22 Stephen eventually does get a second chance. The judge relents—Stephen is resurrected and immediately restores Cecilia’s church. The pain caused by Cecilia’s pinch, however, is never healed. For the rest of his life it serves as a constant reminder of his previous sin. Kathleen Blumreich, editor of the 2004 edition of “The Mirror,” notes that Cecilia is depicted as a tormentor who prefers “vengeance over mercy” and behaves “more like a stereotypically scorned woman than one of the blessed.”23
Yet Cecilia’s behavior is not condemned. In fact, the moral of the story is to think twice before you trespass against saints. Cecilia’s aggressive personality matches her medieval persona as rebellious and insubordinate (just read Chaucer’s fourteenth-century rendering of her story24). Her harsh punishment of Stephen might not match modern notions of biblical womanhood, but—as Karen Winstead reminds us—it wouldn’t have bothered medieval hearers.25 “The Mirror” sermon concludes by praising Cecilia for her behavior: “God grant us such saints to serve and maintain Holy Church that we may come to the bliss of heaven and dwell with the saints without end.”26
Cecilia’s story vividly shows that the touchstone for female holiness shifted after the Reformation. For women in the ancient and medieval world, rising above their sex and behaving in ways we would consider unbecoming for women today buttressed women’s religious authority. Chaucer, for example, praised Cecilia for her “good and prudent behavior” even while describing her as shouting rude insults at her Roman judges and preaching for three days with blood gurgling out of her throat, lying in her gore after a botched beheading.27 I can’t help but wonder what Marabel Morgan, who in her book The Total Woman advised women to be “feminine, soft, and touchable,” would think about Cecilia.28 By the time of the Reformation, Cecilia’s brand of biblical womanhood was already disappearing and being replaced by an emphasis on female distinctiveness that included a more passive submission.
In a fascinating conclusion to her book Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850, Marilyn Westerkamp argues that from 1600 to 1850 even the words women used to describe their spiritual callings became more passive while the words men used became more active. She writes that “while men and women used many of the same descriptions, labels and formulas in their testimonies, their spiritual autobiographies were not telling the same story.”29 Women were controlled by God and spoke only when God spoke through them; men made bold choices as leaders for God and spoke with their own voices, empowered by God. Women were passive; men were active. While men were the fleet feet of Jesus carrying the good news, women were stationary vessels overflowing with what God poured into them. The touchstone of holiness had shifted so much for women that—in quite a contrast to Cecilia shouting vulgar threats at Roman officials—women’s self-described spiritual callings now included being quiet and still.
Women from Katherine Sutton to Mrs. Lewis Ball could still preach, teach, and prophesy. But they had to ground their ministry in feminine distinctiveness. In fact, as women’s holiness became more and more rooted in submission, passivity, and their roles as wives and mothers, women increasingly needed to demonstrate that their callings did not challenge men’s authority.
Biblical womanhood teaches that women are designed by God to be different from men and submissive to (at least their husband’s) masculine authority. By forgetting our long history of women in public ministry and by redefining holiness for women as rooted in both female distinctiveness and female submission (the core of biblical womanhood), evangelicals moved closer to making biblical womanhood gospel truth.
Redefining Orthodoxy
As I have argued throughout this book, it is impossible to write women’s leadership out of Christian history. We can forget it and we can ignore it, but we can’t get rid of the historical reality. It is also impossible to maintain consistent arguments for women’s subordination because, rather than stemming from God’s commands, these arguments stem from the changing circumstances of history. New reasons have to be found to justify keeping women out of leadership. Jemar Tisby accurately writes, “Racism never goes away. It just adapts.”30 The same is true of patriarchy. Like racism, patriarchy is a shapeshifter—conforming to each new era, looking as if it has always belonged. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emphasized women’s distinctiveness from men and used this distinctiveness to justify women’s subordination. Pious rhetoric described a woman as the “angel of the house” and sentimentalized her role as a domestic goddess.31 By assigning women primarily to the household, their work outside the household held less value. In this way, employers could justify paying women lower wages than men, and thus women would be less likely to compete with men on the job market. Women could also be kept out of the political realm, allowing men to govern without women’s interference. Once again, Christian patriarchy spilled out into the wider world, further limiting women’s opportunities.
By the early twentieth century, advocates for women argued that women should not be categorized by their biological differences from men but should be understood by their sameness as human beings. Dorothy L. Sayers writes this in her 1938 essay “Are Women Human?”: “A woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.” When we differentiate women because of their sex, we objectify them and deny them their humanity.32
Despite the traction gained by ideas like Sayers’s, 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.
Championing Biblical Inerrancy
I can still see her standing at the chalkboard, gesturing with her Bible. She was teaching my youth Sunday school class that morning. She was one of the women’s Bible study leaders in our church, and she mentored many younger women. I don’t remember exactly how old I was—a freshman or sophomore in high school. I still remember her claim though; it stuck with me. “If you don’t accept Genesis literally, creation and the flood, you might as well throw out the rest of the Bible.”
I didn’t know until years later that her words, rather than stemming from the Bible, stemmed from one of the sides of a theological battle that engulfed the Protestant world in early twentieth-century America: the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. I once grabbed my Baylor colleague Andrea Turpin after a conference session and made her explain the controversy to me. My evangelical life made more sense after that.33
The fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century split Protestants into liberal and conservative camps, laying the groundwork for the modern culture wars. Liberals wanted a more ecumenical approach to missions and the freedom to modernize traditional beliefs; conservatives wanted to protect traditional beliefs against encroaching cultural pressures. Margaret Bendroth gets to the point: “The central drama of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was a conflict over the nature of biblical truth. For fundamentalists, all other debates over evolution, the conduct of foreign missions, or the coming millennium boiled down to a single principle: their insistence on the utter reliability of God’s word.”34 The fundamentalist-modernist controversy helped evangelicals stake out the importance of biblical inerrancy—the belief that the Bible is completely without error, including in areas of science and history.
For many, inerrancy meant not only that the Bible was without error but that it had to be without error to be true at all.35 Just like my youth Sunday school teacher, conservative evangelical leaders employed a slippery-slope mentality to weaponized inerrancy. If we can’t trust the biblical account of creation, they argued, then how can we trust the biblical story of Jesus? Either we believe the Bible, literally and in its entirety, or we don’t. When presented with these options and “forced to choose,” as Hankins writes, it is not surprising that so many twentieth-century evangelicals chose inerrancy.36
Growing up Southern Baptist during the 1980s and ’90s, I honestly thought inerrancy was a Baptist idea. How surprised I was to learn that Calvinist theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary actually led the inerrancy charge! This connection between Calvinism and inerrancy helped me better understand the connection between Calvinism and complementarianism. Because of their belief “that the subordination of women was inherent in the created order,” explains Bendroth, “Calvinists were only guardedly optimistic about the possibilities of social amelioration in women’s status.” God elected women to be subordinate and domestic and elected men to be intellectual and public. Preaching women were simply “embarrassments.”37
Indeed, 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. As we have seen, preaching women peppered the landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America: they flooded the mission field as evangelists and leaders, and they achieved popular acclaim as preachers among Pentecostal and even fundamentalist denominations. As these women rose in prominence, so too rose inerrancy teachings. And these teachings buttressed male authority by diminishing female authority—transforming a literal reading of Paul’s verses about women into immutable truth.38
“We may like what Paul says, or we may not like it,” proclaimed Princeton Seminary professor B. B. Warfield in 1920, “but there is no room for doubt in what he says.”39 The divinely sanctioned patriarchy entrenched in his words would sound the death knell for preaching Baptist women like Mrs. Lewis Ball. The concept of inerrancy made it increasingly difficult to argue against a “plain and literal” interpretation of “women be silent” and “women shall not teach.” The line between believing the Bible and believing a “plain and literal” interpretation of the Bible blurred. If Ephesians 5 told wives to submit to their husbands, the plain and literal interpretation demands that wives submit to their husbands. Those who disagree were not faithful to Scripture.
And just like that, evangelicals baptized patriarchy. Women could not preach and had to submit—not because their bodies were too flawed or their minds too weak, but because God had decreed it through Paul’s inerrant writings. Those who doubt these biblical truths doubt the truth of the Bible itself. 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.
From my experience as someone who grew up Southern Baptist and remained in conservative evangelical churches throughout most of my adult life, inerrancy creates an atmosphere of fear. Any question raised about biblical accuracy must be completely answered or completely rejected to prevent the fragile fabric of faith from unraveling. After my husband was fired, for example, we pled with the elders for an audience to share our views in person. We had never been allowed to do this. We had to raise our concerns through an email to one elder (which was then forwarded without our permission to the others) and were then told to respond in writing within a certain time frame. The only part done in person was the actual firing. Eventually, my husband received an answer from one of the elders. We couldn’t present our views in person because they simply would not be considered. If the elders considered allowing women to teach or exercise authority over men (i.e., teenage boys in Sunday school), it would lead to the “slippery slope” (this was the actual phrase used) of cultural compromise.
The evangelical fight for inerrancy was inextricably linked with gender from the beginning. Kristin Kobes Du Mez explains how, in the SBC specifically, the direct challenge to male headship caused by the rising number of female Baptist preachers put conservative Baptist leaders on the defensive.40 Inerrancy wasn’t important by itself in the late twentieth century; it became important because it provided a way to push women out of the pulpit. It worked extremely well.
Are you ready for the final piece in making biblical womanhood gospel truth?
Hang on to your coffee.
Reviving Arianism
If I had been holding coffee, I would have dropped it that Sunday morning. As it was, I almost fell out of my seat—which wouldn’t have been a good thing since I was sitting in clear sight of the pastor. But, seriously, I had just heard him preach heresy. I am not using the word heresy lightly. 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.41
I looked around, expecting to see others reacting. No one seemed concerned. My husband hadn’t come in yet (he often helped with behind-the-scenes work during services). I didn’t have anything else to do but keep listening. Maybe I heard wrong? I really hoped I had.
I hadn’t. That sermon was a wake-up call to how far the argument for women’s subordination had gone—to the point of rewriting Trinitarian doctrine.
But before we talk about the heresy, let’s talk about the historical context. Droves of women went to work outside the home during World War I and World War II while men (and a few women) fought. However, when the wars ended, the rules changed. Women were pushed out of jobs to accommodate the returning soldiers, and rhetoric once more began to emphasize women’s roles as keepers of the home. Katherine French and Allyson Poska relate well how old laws subordinating women were revived after these wars. These laws put women under the household authority of their husbands, rewarded women for getting married and having children (just like in ancient Rome!), and even restricted women from working outside the home and filing for divorce. As French and Poska write, “Despite women’s importance to the wartime workplace, government policies quickly reverted to prewar promarriage and pronatalist policies.”42
But women weren’t interested in going back to the way things were. Just like the suffrage movement was born during the most suffocating years of the cult of domesticity, modern feminism was born in the aftermath of World War II. Women fought to work outside the home, to receive educations equivalent to men’s, to have the same legal rights as men did, and even to preach the gospel when called by God.
This is when the heresy I had just heard preached began to resurface in Christian history. Even C. S. Lewis toyed with a version of it.43 This heresy is the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father. By the end of the twentieth century, it had a new twist: because Jesus is eternally subordinate to God the Father, wives are eternally subordinate to their husbands.44
Listen to how Bruce Ware describes the relationship between the Father and the Son in his children’s theology book Big Truths for Young Hearts: “As the Son of the Father, Jesus lives always under the authority of his Father—in all times past and now in all times future . . . , the Son always stands under his Father and does the will of the Father. Jesus takes great joy in doing exactly what the Father wants him to do. The Son is not upset about this; he doesn’t wish to be the one in charge.”45 The Trinity, according to Ware, is hierarchical. While the Son is equal to the Father in glory and power, the Son is unequal in his role.
This teaching, called “the eternal subordination of the Son,” has infiltrated the evangelical world. Aimee Byrd describes a 2001 Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood document that teaches “the Son, the second person of the Trinity, is subordinate to the Father, not only in economy of salvation but in his essence.”46 She also tells of how Owen Strachan sent her a copy of his recently published book, which grounds the council’s “understanding of the complementarity of men and women on a relationship of authority and submission in the nature of the Trinity.”47
My fear is that many evangelicals have already converted without realizing that the eternal subordination of the Son is a teaching outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. Complementarians may claim that women preaching violates Christian orthodoxy, but the eternal subordination of the Son really does violate Christian orthodoxy. As philosophy professor Phillip Cary writes, gender egalitarians’ “disagreement with the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Tradition about such matters as the ordination of women are minor . . . compared to conservative evangelicals’ abandonment of the Great Tradition of the Trinity.”48 Trinitarian teachings are central to orthodox Christianity; and complementarians—in their blind pursuit to maintain control over women—have exchanged the truth of God for a gender hierarchy of human origin.
As a church historian, I immediately recognized the eternal subordination of the Son as Arianism. In the fourth century, a priest in Alexandria, Egypt, began to preach that the Son was of a different substance from God the Father, which meant the Son had a subordinate role to God the Father. God the Father gave the instructions; God the Son obeyed the instructions. When everyone else in the Christian world got wind of what Arius was teaching, they reacted with horror. If Jesus isn’t of the same substance as God the Father, then his death on the cross couldn’t cover sin. Only God could save, and if Jesus wasn’t fully God, what did that mean for his death and resurrection? As Kevin Giles writes, “By arguing that the Son is different in being from the Father, [Arians] impugned the full divinity of the Son of God, the veracity of the revelation of God in Christ and the possibility of salvation for men and women.”49 Salvation itself was at stake.
So early Christians convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 to confront the teachings of Arius. They unilaterally rejected Arianism as heresy. They declared, as the Nicene Creed would proclaim, that Jesus is of the same substance as God the Father—“light from light.” The Trinity is Three in One, not One followed by Two and Three. Indeed, so horrific were the implications of Arianism that the Nicene Council “intentionally excluded all expressions of subordinationism.” This affirmation of the absence of hierarchy within the Triune God was reaffirmed by the Council of Constantinople in 381 and reiterated by the Athanasian Creed in 500: “We worship One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance,” which means that “none is greater, or less than another. But the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.”50
What early Christians were so adamant about teaching, that no hierarchy existed within the Triune God, modern evangelicals seem adamant about forgetting. Giles writes that Christians were much more attuned to the Trinity and the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity before the modern world. Even Calvin opposed the subordination of the Son. The Reformation accepted and promoted the trinitarian teachings of Athanasius. Unfortunately, after the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics became laxer about teaching the importance of the Trinity and often taught it in ways that were incorrect. Giles writes, “In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, conservative evangelicals were among those with a very weak and sometimes erroneous grasp of the historically developed doctrine of the Trinity.”51 It shouldn’t surprise us that these conservative evangelicals (with a “weak” and “erroneous” understanding of the Trinity) resurrected Arianism once again. Instead of striving to become more like God, these evangelicals fought to make God look more like us.52
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.
Except it is still heresy. Arianism repackaged.
It is true that teachings about the subordinate status of Christ persisted—sometimes even flourished—from the fourth through the ninth centuries. Arianism had spread too quickly to be quickly contained. In 325, the Council of Nicaea “anathematized” those who rejected the co-eternity of Jesus and the teaching that Jesus was of the same substance as the Father. But since the Visigoth king Reccared (who ruled an early medieval kingdom in Iberia) did not convert from Arianism until 587, the road to broad acceptance of Nicene Christianity was clearly slow.53
Yet is also true that Arianism has always been deemed heretical. As R. P. C. Hanson writes in The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381, Arianism taught “two unequal gods, a High God incapable of human experiences, and a lesser God who, so to speak, did his dirty work for him.”54 It was condemned by early Christians just as it has continued to be condemned by many modern evangelicals today. Byrd tells the story of how she helped draw attention to the heretical revival of Arianism among complementarian leaders. The result was a conference in 2016 that upheld Nicene Christianity and condemned eternal subordination of the Son.55
I fear, though, that the damage has already been done. Conservative evangelical leaders, yearning to maintain traditional family values and fend off feminism, turned to an old heresy. They poured their ideas about submission and authority, embedded in the very nature of God, into the teachings imbibed by their congregations—the same evangelicals who already believe that inerrancy is bound up in female submission. Evangelicals believe that biblical womanhood is the only option because we have been taught that it is tied to our trust in the reliability of God’s Word as well as embedded in the Godhead itself: women are subordinate because Jesus is subordinate. Gospel truth indeed.
The Problem of Biblical Womanhood
The soft blue and green lighting shifted on the mostly naked walls. I still remember it reflecting on the speaker’s face, framing her body in the colors of stained glass. She was so small in the center of that large stage. Her voice was small too, tentative as she read from her book, Nice Girls Don’t Change the World. She was Lynne Hybels, and in 2007 everyone loved her husband, the founding pastor of Willow Creek Community Church.
Yet on that November day, most people weren’t listening to her. It was almost lunchtime at the National Youth Worker’s Convention, meeting that year in St. Louis. Everyone was hungry. The whole row in front of me got up, not very quietly, and left. So did almost everyone in the section next to me. Soon most people were leaving, embracing rudeness at the siren call of lunch specials.
I didn’t move.
Lynne Hybels had me absolutely transfixed. She was speaking words shockingly reminiscent, at least to my historian’s mind, of Betty Friedan. But instead of describing a problem for American housewives that had no name, as Friedan famously did in her 1963 The Feminine Mystique, Hybels was describing a problem for Christian women that had a name: the problem of biblical womanhood.
Reading excerpts from her book, Lynne Hybels—wife of one of the most powerful and admired pastors in American Christianity—confessed to being a fraud. As a woman who had grown up in American evangelicalism, she had done everything right. She professed the right beliefs; she made the right choices; she even married a pastor and became a good Christian wife and mother. Yet at the age of thirty-nine, she found herself seriously depressed. As she told her counselor, “I’ve been working so hard to keep everybody else happy, but I’m so miserable I want to die.”56
Almost forty years into her life, Hybels realized she had been living a script of what she had been taught Christian girls were supposed to be, instead of becoming the woman that God had called her to be. The script taught that a woman’s highest calling was to enhance the life of her husband and children. The script taught that women should practice selflessness and obedience. The script taught that women should stifle personal desires and dreams for the sake of their families. By following this script, Hybels had become a living Facebook feed—her outward perfection hiding a mess inside.
As I listened, riveted to my seat, pieces of my life clicked together. As a historian, I knew that biblical womanhood looked a whole lot like the rest of human history: women defined as less than men, oppressed, abused. But I also still believed that women and men were called to divinely ordained gender roles. So I figured the problem had to be with me—my own prideful unwillingness to submit. At least that was what I thought before I heard Lynne Hybels.
You see, Lynne Hybels had the same problem I did. As women who grew up in the late twentieth century—women who knew little about the long history of Christian women as leaders and teachers and preachers, who believed that becoming a wife and mother was part of our Christian calling, who lived in the aftermath of the emergence of both inerrancy and renewed teaching about the eternal subordination of the Son—we believed that biblical womanhood was biblical. Even a woman like Lynne Hybels, who attended a church that supported women in ministry, still seemed trapped by evangelical teachings about biblical womanhood. As I listened to her, I realized that biblical womanhood had become more than a clause in the “Baptist Faith and Message 2000.”57 It had become more than a return to traditional family values. It had become a gospel issue—intertwined with the very nature of God. It had become God’s timeless truth, defended by those who remain the most faithful.
Take, for example, the Gospel Coalition. Did you know that it includes biblical womanhood in its statement of faith? “God ordains that [women and men] assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord.”58 While John Piper and Tim Keller agree that complementarianism is not necessary for salvation, they argue that it is a very important aspect of the gospel and is necessary to protect a proper understanding of the gospel. As Keller says, “It indirectly affects the way we understand the Scripture which affects the way we understand the gospel. Many people in order to make room for an egalitarian position have to do something with the way we read Scripture. It loosens our understanding of Scripture.”59 Only those who agree with biblical womanhood, Keller suggests, have a right understanding of the gospel.
Biblical womanhood as we know it today had thus become fully formed: Not only does history show that women have always been subordinate to men (patriarchy), not only does the New Testament confirm that women should be subordinate to men (Paul), not only did the Reformation restore the importance and dignity of the role of wife and mother, but now we can state with assurance that female subordination is gospel truth. Women are created as distinct from men and, by the design of our female bodies, intended for domesticity and subordination. Women’s subordination even reflects the design of the Godhead itself. Just as Jesus is subordinate to God the Father, wives should be subordinate to their husbands. The Bible clearly preaches female submission, and if we disbelieve the Bible on this account, then we call into question the entire veracity of the Bible.
The definition of heresy had shifted.
The heretics were now those who resisted the gospel truth of women’s subordination to men. The heretics were me and my husband, as we dared ask permission for a woman to teach a high school Sunday school class. We had become the slippery slope. No wonder we were fired. We were dangerous to the gospel of Christ.