1. James Dobson, Love for a Lifetime: Building a Marriage That Will Go the Distance (1987; repr., Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 1998), 63. See also Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), 83.
2. Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman: Notes to My Daughter on the Meaning of Womanhood (1976; repr., Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2013), 50.
3. Ben Witherington stated this in a lecture he delivered at Baylor University during a symposium I helped organize with the Institute for the Study of Religion (ISR) in September 2013. It stuck with me. The symposium was titled “Women and the Bible,” and it also featured Kristin Kobes Du Mez. Witherington has made this statement several times, including on his blog: Ben Witherington, “The Eternal Subordination of Christ and of Women,” Ben Witherington (blog), March 22, 2006, http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2006/03/eternal-subordination-of-christ-and-of.html.
4. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Southern Baptist Leader Paige Patterson Encouraged a Woman Not to Report Alleged Rape to Police and Told Her to Forgive Assailant, She Says,” Washington Post, May 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/05/22/southern-baptist-leader-encouraged-a-woman-not-to-report-alleged-rape-to-police-and-told-her-to-forgive-assailant-she-says. Ken Camp, “Southern Baptists Deal with Fallout over Paige Patterson,” Baptist Standard, May 25, 2018, https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/baptists/southern-baptists-deal-fallout-paige-patterson.
5. “Read Rachael Denhollander’s Full Victim Impact Statement about Larry Nassar,” CNN.com, January 30, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/24/us/rachael-denhollander-full-statement/index.html. See also Morgan Lee’s interview with Denhollander: “My Larry Nassar Testimony Went Viral. But There’s More to the Gospel Than Forgiveness,” Christianity Today, January 31, 2018, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/january-web-only/rachael-denhollander-larry-nassar-forgiveness-gospel.html.
6. Ed Stetzer, “Andy Savage’s Standing Ovation Was Heard Round the World. Because It Was Wrong,” Christianity Today, January 11, 2018, https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2018/january/andy-savages-standing-ovation-was-heard-round-world-because.html.
7. Ruth Graham, “How a Megachurch Melts Down,” The Atlantic, November 7, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/houston-mark-driscoll-megachurch-meltdown/382487.
8. Jen Pollock Michel, “God’s Message to #MeToo Victims and Perpetrators,” Christianity Today, January 18, 2018, https://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2018/january/gods-message-to-metoo-victims-and-perpe
trators.html.
9. Evangelical is a contested term. While I would like to argue that evangelical refers primarily to shared theological beliefs—our focus on the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus as well as our emphasis on conversion and evangelism—I can’t. Evangelical has become an identity (and mostly a white conservative identity), not just a shared set of theological beliefs. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes, “For conservative white evangelicals, the ‘good news’ of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.” Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 7. See also Thomas S. Kidd, Who Is An Evangelical? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Chapter 1 The Beginning of Patriarchy
1. Owen Strachan, “Divine Order in a Chaotic Age: On Women Preaching,” Thought Life (blog), May 7, 2019, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thoughtlife/2019/05/divine-order-in-a-chaotic-age-on-women-preaching. The translation of Genesis 1:1 is Strachan’s.
2. Russell Moore, “Feminism in Your Church and Home with Russell Moore, Randy Stinson, and C. J. Mahaney,” interview by Mark Dever, 9Marks Leadership Interviews, April 30, 2007, audio, 01:05:01, quote at 30:07, https://www.9marks.org/interview/feminism-your-church-and-home-russell-moore-randy-stinson-and-cj-mahaney.
3. Russell Moore, “After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians Are Winning the Gender Debate,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49, no. 3 (September 2006): 574, https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/49/49-3/JETS_49-3_569-576_Moore.pdf.
4. Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood (Nashville: Nelson, 2012). I am grateful to Evans. Her voice, through her blogs and her books, was one of the first I heard that shared my growing concerns about biblical womanhood. She passed away unexpectedly and tragically in 2019 at the age of 37.
5. Rachel Held Evans, “It’s Not Complementarianism; it’s Patriarchy,” Rachel Held Evans (blog), May 3, 2012, https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/complementarians-patriarchy.
6. Owen Strachan, “Of ‘Dad Moms’ and ‘Man Fails’: An Essay on Men and Awesomeness,” Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 17, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 25, https://cbmw.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/JBMW-Spring-12-Complete.pdf.
7. Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 55. See her full discussion of patriarchy on pp. 55–60.
8. “What Americans Think about Women in Power,” Barna Group, March 8, 2017, https://www.barna.com/research/americans-think-women-power. The Barna researchers also describe “nine specific theological criteria” they used to classify respondents as evangelical.
9. Katelyn Beaty addresses how evangelical ideas about gender roles impact women’s work in A Woman’s Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World (New York: Howard, 2016). For example, she relates how Karen Dabaghian, a computer software professional in San Francisco experiences disconnect between her work and her church: “In high-tech, nobody cares [about your gender]. . . . Then I go into this broader Christian environment, and all of a sudden, I feel gendered, in a way that is not something I am excited about” (236).
10. “Waco, TX,” Data USA, accessed February 18, 2020, https://datausa.io/profile/geo/waco-tx-metro-area#economy.
11. Moore, “After Patriarchy, What?,” 576; Russell Moore, “Women, Stop Submitting to Men,” Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 17, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 9, https://cbmw.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/JBMW-Spring-12-Complete.pdf.
12. Russell Moore, “Is Your Marriage Baal Worship?,” RussellMoore.com, September 26, 2018, https://www.russellmoore.com/2018/09/26/is-your-marriage-baal-worship. See also Russell Moore, The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home (Nashville: B&H, 2018), 82–90.
13. Moore, “Women, Stop Submitting to Men,” 8–9.
14. Moore, Storm-Tossed Family, 84–89.
15. See Sarah Pulliam Bailey’s article about Russell Moore’s perspective on Beth Moore teaching and preaching: “Russell Moore, the president of the SBC’s policy arm (and no relation to Beth Moore), called the recent debate over the popular Bible teacher’s speaking a ‘social media dustup,’ not reflected in churches on Sunday mornings. He and Mohler do not advocate for women preaching in front of men, but they say there is room for disagreement among churches.” Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Southern Baptists Are Supposed to Talk about Sexual Abuse. But Right Now They’re Discussing Whether One Woman Can Preach,” Washington Post, June 9, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/06/09/southern-baptists-are-supposed-talk-about-sex-abuse-right-now-theyre-discussing-whether-one-woman-can-preach.
16. You can find the entire 1998 addition here: “Report of Committee on Baptist Faith and Message,” Utm.edu, https://www.utm.edu/staff/caldwell/bfm/1963-1998/report1998.html. See also “Baptist Faith and Message 2000,” Southern Baptist Convention, June 14, 2000, http://www.sbc.net/bfm2000/bfm2000.asp, under the heading “XVIII. The Family.”
17. Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 214–15.
18. Bennett, History Matters, 82–107.
19. Danny P. Jackson, introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Danny P. Jackson, 2nd ed. (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1997), xi–xii.
20. Jackson, introduction to Epic of Gilgamesh, xii–xvi.
21. Jackson, Epic of Gilgamesh, 53–54.
22. Jackson, Epic of Gilgamesh, 17.
23. Rivkah Harris, “Images of Women in the Gilgamesh Epic,” in Lingering over Words: Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Literature in Honor of William L. Moran, ed. Tzvi Abusch, John Huehnergard, and Piotr Steinkeller (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 219–30.
24. Harris, “Images of Women in the Gilgamesh Epic,” 220.
25. Jackson, Epic of Gilgamesh, 68.
26. Albert Mohler, “A Call for Courage on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood,” Albert Mohler (blog), June 19, 2006, https://albertmohler.com/2006/06/19/a-call-for-courage-on-biblical-manhood-and-womanhood.
27. Denny Burk (@DennyBurk), “I’ve noticed that in Star Wars,” Twitter, December 30, 2017, 11:39 a.m., https://twitter.com/DennyBurk/status/947145180913729537.
28. Marten Stol, Women in the Ancient Near East, trans. Helen Richardson and Mervyn Richardson (Boston: de Gruyter, 2016), 691.
29. “The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last modified June 19, 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nisvs/index.html.
30. Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon, 213–15, 225. See also “Baptist Faith and Message 2000,” under the heading “XVIII. The Family.”
31. Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon, 215–16.
32. Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition (London: Routledge, 2016), 51–77.
33. Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition. The Douay-Rheims is an English translation of the Latin Vulgate, first produced in 1582.
34. Alice Mathews, Gender Roles and the People of God: Rethinking What We Were Taught about Men and Women in the Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 43–47.
35. Stanley Gundry, “From Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers to Woman Be Free: My Story,” in How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals, ed. Alan F. Johnson (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 102.
36. Quoted in Kristin Kobes Du Mez, A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 120–22.
37. Du Mez, New Gospel for Women, 120–22.
38. Hedy Red Dexter and J. M. Lagrander, “Bible Devotionals Justify Traditional Gender Roles: A Political Agenda That Affects Social Policy,” Social Justice 26, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 99–114.
39. James Dobson, “A New Look at Masculinity and Femininity” (brochure published by Focus on the Family, 1994), quoted in Dexter and Lagrander, “Bible Devotionals Justify Traditional Gender Roles,” 107.
40. James Dobson, Love Must Be Tough (Waco: Word, 1983), 148. This woman wrote to Dobson for advice. A description of the woman’s letter and Dobson’s response is also found in the 1999 and 2007 editions of his book: Love Must Be Tough (Dallas: Word, 1999), 160–62; and Love Must Be Tough (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2007), 160–62. Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes that Dobson “recommended a healthy skepticism toward certain allegations of domestic violence.” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), 144.
41. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 167.
42. John Piper and Wayne Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991; repr., Wheaton: Crossway, 2006), 409–10. See also Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 167.
43. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 464.
44. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, a psychology and philosophy professor, provides an insightful overview of the “complementarity anxiety” of both complementarians and egalitarians in A Sword between the Sexes? C. S. Lewis and the Gender Debates (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010), 168–70.
45. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 228–29.
46. Clarice J. Martin, “Womanist Interpretations of the New Testament: The Quest for Holistic and Inclusive Translation and Interpretation,” in I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi J. Smith (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 32.
47. Clarice J. Martin, “The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in Afro-American Biblical Interpretation: ‘Free Slaves’ and ‘Subordinate Women,’” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 226.
48. Martin, “Haustafeln (Household Codes),” in Felder, Stony the Road We Trod, 228.
49. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 18.
50. Mathews, Gender Roles and the People of God, 33.
51. Febbie C. Dickerson, “Acts 9:36–43: The Many Faces of Tabitha, a Womanist Reading,” in Smith, I Found God in Me, 302.
52. Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM), “What I plead for,” Twitter, May 11, 2019, 9:44 a.m., https://twitter.com/bethmoorelpm/status/1127207937909325824; Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM), “Is to grapple with the entire text,” Twitter, May 11, 2019, 9:51 a.m., https://twitter.com/bethmoorelpm/status/1127209694500671489.
53. John Piper, “Headship and Harmony,” Desiring God, May 1, 1984, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/headship-and-harmony.
54. Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women (New York: Howard, 2013), 14.
Chapter 2 What If Biblical Womanhood Doesn’t Come from Paul?
1. “What Americans Think about Women in Power,” Barna Group, March 8, 2017, https://www.barna.com/research/americans-think-women-power.
2. Beth Allison Barr, “No Room in Wayne Grudem’s World for a Female President,” The Anxious Bench (blog), July 31, 2016, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2016/07/wayne-grudem-donald-trump-and-the-female-elephant-in-the-room.
3. “What Americans Think about Women in Power.”
4. Bruce Ware, “Summaries of the Egalitarian and Complementarian Positions,” The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, June 26, 2007, https://cbmw.org/2007/06/26/summaries-of-the-egalitarian-and-complementarian-positions.
5. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Gendered Bodies and the Body of Christ,” in Practicing with Paul: Reflections on Paul and the Practices of Ministry in Honor of Susan G. Eastman, ed. Presian R. Burroughs (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 55.
6. Boykin Sanders, “1 Corinthians,” in True to Our Native Land: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Brian K. Blount (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 296.
7. I adapted this phrase from a line from Dorothy L. Sayers, who writes that “surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.” Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of the Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Nelson, 2004), 20.
8. For more about Festial, see Beth Allison Barr, The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2008); and Beth Allison Barr and Lynneth J. Miller, “John Mirk,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396584/obo-9780195396584-0259.xml. I also discuss this sermon in Beth Allison Barr, “Paul, Medieval Women, and Fifty Years of the CFH: New Perspectives,” Fides et Historia 51, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2019): 1–17.
9. All references are taken from BL MS Cotton Claudius A II. For printed editions, see John Mirk, John Mirk’s “Festial,” ed. Susan Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:252–56.
10. Mirk, John Mirk’s “Festial,” 2:253–54.
11. “Baptist Faith and Message 2000,” Southern Baptist Convention, June 14, 2000, http://www.sbc.net/bfm2000/bfm2000.asp, under the heading “XVIII. The Family.”
12. Christine Peters, “Gender, Sacrament and Ritual: The Making and Meaning of Marriage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England,” Past & Present 169 (November 2000): 78.
13. The marriage ceremony dictates that the groom should say, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, with this ring I thee wed,” indicating the emphasis on God first. Perhaps it is not surprising that medieval women often left their wedding rings to churches at their deaths. See Sue Niebrzydowski, Bonoure and Buxum: A Study of Wives in Late Medieval English Literature, vol. 2 of Somerset Medieval Wills, Transcripts of Sussex Wills (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 87.
14. Barr, “Paul, Medieval Women,” 1–17.
15. Daniel Mark Cere, “Marriage, Subordination and the Development of Christian Doctrine,” in Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? The Equal-Regard Marriage and Its Critics, ed. David Blankenhorn, Don Browning, and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 110.
16. Alcuin Blamires, “Paradox in the Medieval Gender Doctrine of Head and Body,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 1997), 29.
17. Blamires, “Paradox in the Medieval Gender Doctrine of Head and Body,” 22–23.
18. Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, 24, quoted in Cere, “Marriage, Subordination and the Development of Christian Doctrine,” 110.
19. Phyllis Trible coined the phrase “texts of terror.” See Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984).
20. For more in general about women in the Greco-Roman world, I recommend Sarah B. Pomeroy’s books Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (1975; repr., New York: Schocken, 1995) and The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Additionally, Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York: Liveright, 2016) provides an engaging introduction to Roman history.
21. Rachel Held Evans, “Aristotle vs. Jesus: What Makes the New Testament Household Codes Different,” Rachel Held Evans (blog), August 28, 2013, https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/aristotle-vs-jesus-what-makes-the-new-testament-household-codes-different.
22. Carolyn Osiek and Margaret MacDonald, A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 122–23. Osiek and MacDonald locate women’s “leadership roles in early church groups” as part of a growing cultural pattern in which women were gaining more social freedoms and visibility (249).
23. Shi-Min Lu, “Woman’s Role in New Testament Household Codes: Transforming First-Century Roman Culture,” Priscilla Papers 30, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 11, https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/article/priscilla-papers-academic-journal/womans-role-new-testament-household-codes.
24. Aristotle, Politics, 1259a37, in Women’s Life in Greece and Rome, ed. Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, 4th ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 64.
25. Lucy Peppiatt, Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 92.
26. Scot McKnight, The Letter to the Colossians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 346.
27. Beverly Roberts Gaventa makes the same observation in her discussion of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12:17–21. Gaventa, “Gendered Bodies,” in Burroughs, Practicing with Paul, 53–54.
28. Osiek and MacDonald, Woman’s Place, 122.
29. Ian Morris, “Remaining Invisible: The Archeology of the Excluded in Classical Athens,” in Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture, ed. Sandra R. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan (London: Routledge, 1998), 217–20.
30. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 737a, 775a, in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 40–41.
31. Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body II.299, in Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, 41–42.
32. John Piper, “‘The Frank and Manly Mr. Ryle’—The Value of a Masculine Ministry” (lecture, Desiring God 2012 Conference for Pastors). The entire presentation can be accessed at https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-frank-and-manly-mr-ryle-the-value-of-a-masculine-ministry.
33. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 7.
34. Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul, 13–14.
35. Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul, 14.
36. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 112–13.
37. Quoted in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 113–14.
38. Pliny, “Pliny and Trajan: Correspondence, c. 112 CE,” Ancient History Sourcebook, last modified January 21, 2020, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/pliny-trajan1.asp.
39. Osiek and MacDonald, Woman’s Place, 135.
40. John Piper and Wayne Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991; repr., Wheaton: Crossway, 2006), xv.
41. Peppiatt, Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women, 93.
42. Gaventa, “Gendered Bodies,” in Burroughs, Practicing with Paul, 48.
43. Titus Livy, History of Rome, book 34, quoted in Charles H. Talbert, “Biblical Criticism’s Role: The Pauline View of Women as a Case in Point,” in The Unfettered Word, ed. Robinson B. James (Waco: Word, 1987), 66.
44. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, 177–80.
45. Livy, History of Rome, in Lefkowitz and Fant, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome, 171.
46. Juvenal, Satires 6, quoted in Talbert, “Biblical Criticism’s Role,” in James, Unfettered Word, 66. This is just one of many examples.
47. Carolyn Osiek and David L. Balch, Families in the New Testament World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 103–55. See also Margaret Y. MacDonald, “Reading 1 Corinthians 7 through the Eyes of Families,” in Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World: A Festschrift in Honor of David Lee Balch, ed. Aliou Niang and Carolyn Osiek, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 176 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 38–52.
48. Osiek and Balch, Families in the New Testament World, 112.
49. Lucy Peppiatt, Women and Worship at Corinth: Paul’s Rhetorical Arguments in 1 Corinthians (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 4, 67–68.
50. Peppiatt, Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women, 142.
51. D. W. Odell-Scott, “Let the Women Speak in Church: An Egalitarian Interpretation of 1 Cor 14:33b–36,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 13 (August 1, 1983): 90–93; Talbert, “Biblical Criticism’s Role,” in James, Unfettered Word, 62–71; see also Linda Belleville, “Women in Ministry,” in Two Views on Women in Ministry, ed. James R. Beck and Craig L. Blomberg (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 77–154. A plethora of scholars have supported this theory, primarily because Paul’s words are so similar to Roman sources and because they do not fit with his other teachings. Other scholars point out that there is no clear indication in the text that this is a Corinthian quotation.
52. Marg Mowczko provides an accessible and well-cited scholarly overview on 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. See her blog post and bibliography: Marg Mowczko, “Interpretations and Applications of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35,” Marg Mowczko (blog), July 9, 2011, https://margmowczko.com/interpretations-applications-1-cor-14_34-35.
53. Scholarship outside of complementarian circles overwhelmingly agrees that Paul is not telling all women to be silent; he is only addressing a particular problem. See Craig S. Keener, “Learning in the Assemblies: 1 Corinthians 14:34–35,” in Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity without Hierarchy, ed. Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothius (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 161–71; Ben Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); see also Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016).
54. Gaventa, “Gendered Bodies,” in Burroughs, Practicing with Paul, 54.
55. “The good news is we can ditch Aristotle and keep Jesus,” Evans wrote in her August 28, 2013, blog post, “Aristotle vs. Jesus.”
56. Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek, eds., Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 13–19.
57. The Ryrie Study Bible (Chicago: Moody, 1986), 1564.
58. Eldon Jay Epp, Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 60–65.
59. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, foreword to Epp, Junia, xi–xii.
60. Origen, “Commentary on Romans 10.17 on Romans 16:1–2,” in Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church, 14.
61. John Chrysostom, “Homily 30 on Romans 16:1–2,” in Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church, 14–15.
62. John Chrysostom, “Homily 11 on 1 Timothy 3:11,” in Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church, 19.
63. Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church, 19.
64. Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church, 205.
Chapter 3 Our Selective Medieval Memory
1. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. B. A. Windeatt (New York: Penguin, 1985), 163. I discuss this incident briefly in Beth Allison Barr, “‘She Hungered Right So after God’s Word’: Female Piety and the Legacy of the Pastoral Program in the Late Medieval English Sermons of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 1 (March 2015): 31–50.
2. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, 163.
3. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, 164 (italics added).
4. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, 164.
5. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, 164.
6. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, 167.
7. For more about the conjugal debt, see James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 198.
8. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, 58.
9. Isabel Davis, “Men and Margery: Negotiating Medieval Patriarchy,” in A Companion to “The Book of Margery Kempe,” ed. John Arnold and Katherine Lewis (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), 52.
10. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, 86–87.
11. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982), 27.
12. In their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazos Karras write that there was “far more flexibility and space for women within medieval Christianity than historians once imagined. In this research area, perhaps more than any other, feminist histories today speak more of opportunity and less of constraint” (13). I recommend this book in its entirety for those interested in medieval women’s history.
13. Jacobus de Voragine, “The Life of Saint Paula,” quoted in Larissa Tracy, Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints Lives (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 47.
14. John Mirk, John Mirk’s “Festial,” ed. Susan Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:181–83. Margaret’s story is also told in Tracy, Women of the Gilte Legende, 40–44.
15. Mirk, John Mirk’s “Festial,” 2:181–83.
16. Mirk, John Mirk’s “Festial,” 2:182. I have modernized the text from the Middle English.
17. Mirk, John Mirk’s “Festial,” 2:181–83.
18. Katie M. Reid, Made Like Martha: Good News for the Woman Who Gets Things Done (New York: WaterBrook, 2018), 5.
19. Sarah Mae, Having a Martha Home the Mary Way: 31 Days to a Clean House and a Satisfied Soul (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2016), 12.
20. Pope Gregory the Great preached a sermon on September 21, 591, conflating Mary Magdalene as the woman in Luke 7:36–50, John 11:1–45, and Mark 16:9. Katherine Ludwig Jansen, “Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola,” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 60.
21. Jansen, “Maria Magdalena,” in Kienzle and Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets, 66.
22. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 409–11.
23. Tracy, Women of the Gilte Legende, 102.
24. Carolyn A. Muessig, “Prophecy and Song: Teaching and Preaching by Medieval Women,” in Kienzle and Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets, 146–47.
25. Muessig, “Prophecy and Song,” in Kienzle and Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets, 146.
26. Ben Witherington III, “Why Arguments against Women in Ministry Aren’t Biblical,” The Bible & Culture (blog), June 2, 2015, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2015/06/02/why-arguments-against-women-in-ministry-arent-biblical.
27. Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 186.
28. Lisa M. Bitel, Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 71.
29. Bitel, Landscape with Two Saints, 184.
30. Bitel, Landscape with Two Saints, 184.
31. Barbara Newman, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 20–21. Medieval clergy did invoke Paul’s prohibitions, but they do not do so in the late medieval English sermons I study. Mostly, Pauline prohibitions appear in discussions of canon law and among theologians. See Jansen, “Maria Magdalena,” in Kienzle and Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets, 67–69.
32. Elaine J. Lawless, “Introduction: The Issue of Blood—Reinstating Women into the Tradition,” in Kienzle and Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets, 2.
33. Jacqueline Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?,” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 40.
34. Jerome, “Commentarius in Epistolam ad Ephesios 3.5,” quoted in Dyan Elliott, “Gender and the Christian Traditions,” in Bennett and Karras, Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender, 24.
35. The best book on this topic is Jennifer Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066–1300 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
36. Thibodeaux, Manly Priest, 39.
37. Quoted in Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 93–95. See also Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx, eds., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 232–35.
38. Ian Forrest, “Continuity and Change in the Institutional Church,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. John H. Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 192.
39. Women were not allowed to enter the cathedral or the cemetery at Durham. Dominic Marner, St. Cuthbert: His Life and Cult in Medieval Durham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 33.
40. Simeon of Durham, “A History of the Church of Durham,” quoted in Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook, ed. Emilie Amt, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 191.
41. Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, “Gender, Celibacy, and Proscriptions of Sacred Space: Symbol and Practice,” in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (New York: SUNY Press, 2005), 189.
42. Simeon of Durham, “History of the Church of Durham,” quoted in Amt, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe, 191.
43. De Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, 219.
44. De Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, 252.
45. Timothy Paul Jones, Christian History Made Easy (Torrance, CA: Rose, 2009), 61, 85.
46. Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010), 4.
47. González, Story of Christianity, 1:328.
48. Carolyn Muessig, introduction to A Companion to Catherine of Siena, ed. George Ferzoco, Beverly Kienzle, and Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 18.
49. González, Story of Christianity, 1:399.
50. Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2013), 535–38.
Chapter 4 The Cost of the Reformation for Evangelical Women
1. Elizabeth H. Flowers, Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 130.
2. Flowers, Into the Pulpit, 131.
3. Quoted in Flowers, Into the Pulpit, 132.
4. Flowers, Into the Pulpit, 132–33.
5. Flowers, Into the Pulpit, 133.
6. Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions (London: Routledge, 1999), 5.
7. I recommend Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
8. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1–2.
9. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 123–24.
10. Katherine L. French and Allyson M. Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 1:219.
11. Susan C. Karant-Nunn and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Luther on Women: A Sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 177.
12. Kirsi Stjerna, Women and the Reformation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), 51–70.
13. Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 146.
14. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England, 149.
15. Wayne Watson, “Somewhere in the World,” Spotify, track 6 on Giants in the Land, World Entertainment, 1985.
16. Yusufu Turaki, “Marriage and Sexual Morality,” ESV.org, https://www.esv.org/resources/esv-global-study-bible/marriage-and-sexual-morality.
17. Katelyn Beaty, A Woman’s Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World (New York: Howard, 2016), 109.
18. Andrea L. Turpin, “All the Single Ladies in the Church,” The Anxious Bench (blog), January 8, 2020, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2020/01/all-the-single-ladies-in-the-church.
19. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929).
20. Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 88–89.
21. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 216.
22. Argula von Grumbach, A Woman’s Voice in the Reformation, ed. Peter Matheson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 90.
23. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 216.
24. Writings of Edward the Sixth: William Hugh, Queen Catherine Parr, Anne Askew, Lady Zane Grey, Hamilton, and Balnaves (London: Religions Tract Society, 1836), 12.
25. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 217.
26. Quoted in Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 281.
27. Nicole Beriou, “The Right of Women to Give Religious Instruction in the Thirteenth Century,” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 138–39.
28. R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 304.
29. I expand on this argument here: Beth Allison Barr, “Paul, Medieval Women, and Fifty Years of the CFH: New Perspectives,” Fides et Historia 51, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2019): 1–17.
30. Lancelot Andrewes, Apospasmatia Sacra; or, A Collection of Posthumous and Orphan Lectures Delivered at St. Paul’s and St. Giles His Church by the Right Honourable Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes (London: R. Hodgkinsonne, 1657), 235 (italics added).
31. Isaac Marlow, A Brief Discourse concerning Singing in the Public Worship of God in the Gospel-Church (London: n.p., 1690), 21, quoted in Beth Allison Barr, “Women in Early Baptist Sermons: A Late Medieval Perspective,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 41, no. 1 (2014), 13–29. I expand on my Pauline argument in this article too.
32. Benjamin Keach, An Answer to Mr. Marlow’s Appendix (London: n.p., 1691), 34–35. Fellow minister Hanserd Knollys also rejected Marlow’s interpretation. As Knollys responded, “Women have the Essence of Singing (as well as Men) both in their Souls, and with their Voices; and are allowed to speak by all the Churches of Saints.” Hanserd Knollys, An Answer to a Brief Discourse concerning Singing in the Publick Worship of God in the Gospel-Church by I. M. 1690 (London: n.p., 1691), 11–12.
33. Quoted in Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 281.
34. Beth Allison Barr, “‘She Hungered Right So after God’s Word’: Female Piety and the Legacy of the Pastoral Program in the Late Medieval English Sermons of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54,” Journal of Religious History 39, no 1 (March 2015): 31–50.
35. Roper, Holy Household, 2.
36. Ann Eljenholm Nichols, Seeable Signs: The Iconography of the Seven Sacraments, 1350–1544 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 1997).
37. Groups existed for all women, not just wives, though wives are the subject of French’s observation here. Katherine L. French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 156.
38. French, Good Women of the Parish, 221.
39. Beth Allison Barr, “‘He Is Bothyn Modyr, Broþyr, & Syster vn-to Me’: Women and the Bible in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Sermons,” Church History and Religious Culture 94, no 3 (Summer 2014): 297–315.
40. French, Good Women of the Parish, 226–27, 230.
41. French, Good Women of the Parish, 230.
Chapter 5 Writing Women Out of the English Bible
1. Aimee Byrd has an excellent chapter discussing the impact of gendering Bible translations in her book Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2020), 31–48.
2. Susan Olasky, “Femme Fatale: The Feminist Seduction of the Evangelical Church,” World 12, no. 2 (March 29, 1997): 12–15, https://world.wng.org/1997/03/femme_fatale.
3. Susan Olasky, “The Battle for the Bible,” World 12, no. 5 (April 19, 1997): 14–18, https://world.wng.org/1997/04/the_battle_for_the_bible.
4. Wayne Grudem, “What’s Wrong with ‘Gender-Neutral’ Bible Translations?” (pamphlet, The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Libertyville, IL, 1997), 27, http://www.waynegrudem.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/What-s-Wrong-with-Gender-Neutral-Bible-Translations.pdf.
5. “Colorado Springs Guidelines for Translation of Gender-Related Language in Scripture,” Bible Research, September 9, 1997, http://www.bible-researcher.com/csguidelines.html.
6. “Resolution on Bible Translation,” Southern Baptist Convention, Dallas, TX, 1997, http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/284/resolution-on-bible-translation.
7. Wayne Grudem, “The ‘Gender-Neutral’ NIV: What Is the Controversy About?,” Journal of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 7, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 37.
8. Art Toalston, “James Dobson Joins Critics of Gender-Neutral NIV Revision,” Baptist Press, February 6, 2002, http://www.bpnews.net/12684/james-dobson-joins-critics-of-genderneutral-niv-revision.
9. David Bayly, “Decline of the NIV?,” World 14, no. 22 (June 5, 1999), https://world.wng.org/1999/06/decline_of_the_niv.
10. The ESV website gives a sampling of these endorsements, including from John Piper, R. C. Sproul, Joni Eareckson Tada, and Steve Green. See “Endorsements,” ESV.org, https://www.esv.org/translation/endorsements.
11. Taken directly from the inscription inside the church of St. Magnus the Martyr.
12. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (1964; repr., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), xxvii.
13. Frans van Liere, An Introduction to the Medieval Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 189.
14. Henry Ansgar Kelly, The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 67.
15. Kelly, Middle English Bible, 130.
16. Stephen Morrison, ed., A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1:xxi–liii.
17. Kelly, Middle English Bible, 63.
18. James H. Morey, Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Champaign: University of Illinois Press), 2000.
19. “Class 5: The High Middle Ages,” Capitol Hill Baptist Church, June 24, 2016, https://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/sermon/class-5-the-high-middle
-ages.
20. See Class 6 and Class 7, which focus on Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli, https://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/resources/core-seminars/series/church-history.
21. Van Liere, Introduction to the Medieval Bible, 178.
22. Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4; Beverly Kienzle, The Sermon (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), 143.
23. Beth Allison Barr, “Medieval Sermons and Audience Appeal after the Black Death,” History Compass 16, no 9 (2018): 2–3, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12478.
24. Grudem, “‘Gender-Neutral’ NIV,” 37.
25. Vern S. Poythress, “Small Changes in Meaning Can Matter: The Unacceptability of the TNIV,” Journal of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 10, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 28–34.
26. Poythress, “Small Changes in Meaning Can Matter,” 28.
27. Richard S. Hess, “Splitting the Adam: The Usage of ’adam in Genesis i-v,” in Studies in the Pentateuch, ed. J. A. Emerton (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 1–15. Beth Allison Barr, “Words That Matter: The Significance of ‘Good Men and Women,’” in The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2008), 36–42.
28. Salisbury Cathedral MS 3, folio 54v.
29. Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54, folio 35v. See further discussion and examples in Beth Allison Barr, “‘He Is Bothyn Modyr, Broþyr, & Syster vn-to Me’: Women and the Bible in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Sermons,” Church History and Religious Culture 94, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 306.
30. Morrison, Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, 1:348–54. Barr, “‘He Is Bothyn Modyr, Broþyr, & Syster vn-to Me,’” 306–7.
31. Bart Ehrman, Whose Word Is It? The Story behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why (New York: Continuum), 55.
32. Linda Woodbridge quotes this gloss in her English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 149.
33. Maurice S. Betteridge, “The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 41–62.
34. Femke Molekamp, “Genevan Legacies: The Making of the English Geneva Bible,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, 1350–1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 52.
35. For more on this topic, see my annotated bibliography on KJV scholarship: Beth Allison Barr, “The Word That Endureth Forever: A Century of Scholarship on the King James Version,” in The King James Bible and the World It Made, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011), 149–76.
36. David Crystal, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 110–11, 237, 32, 86, 258 (page numbers refer to each quotation respectively).
37. Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible, and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society (1971; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 53–54.
38. Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640–1832 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 198–200.
39. William Gouge, “VIII. Duties of Masters,” in Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises (1622; repr., Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership, 2011), A2r–A5r, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A68107.0001.001. He explains his choice at the end of the introduction. I discuss Gouge in my article “‘He Is Bothyn Modyr, Broþyr, & Syster vn-to Me,’” 307–8.
40. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, A2r–A5r.
41. Lucy Peppiatt, Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 132–34.
42. Peppiatt, Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women, 139.
43. Rodney Stark, “Reconstructing the Rise of Christianity: The Role of Women,” Sociology of Religion 56, no. 3 (1995): 238, quoted in Peppiatt, Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women, 134.
44. Naomi Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58–67. I also discuss this in my 2014 article “‘He Is Bothyn Modyr, Broþyr, & Syster vn-to Me,’” 304, 313.
45. Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, 67.
46. Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, 67–68.
47. Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, 58–59.
Chapter 6 Sanctifying Subordination
1. Speculum Sacerdotale: Edited from British Museum MS. Additional 36791, ed. E. H. Weatherly (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 128.
2. James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 198, 241–42.
3. Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions (New York: Routledge, 1999), 131–33.
4. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 4–5.
5. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 123.
6. Lynn Abrams, The Making of Modern Woman: Europe, 1789–1918 (New York: Longman, 2002), 43.
7. Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 69.
8. Abrams, Making of Modern Woman, 157.
9. Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 153.
10. Abrams, Making of Modern Woman, 48.
11. Abrams, Making of Modern Woman, 48.
12. John MacArthur said this to Beth Moore when speaking at a Truth Matters conference in 2019. The podcast highlighting this can be found here: “John MacArthur’s Truth Matters Conference: SBC Meltdown,” October 20, 2019, in The Reformed Rant podcast, Stitcher, 51:08, https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-reformed-rant/e/64717094?autoplay=true.
13. Katherine L. French and Allyson M. Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 2:262.
14. French and Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past, 2:263.
15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (London: Dent, 1948), 349. See also Abrams, Making of Modern Woman, 45–46.
16. Quoted in French and Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past, 2:314. See also 262–63.
17. French and Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past, 2:297.
18. Quoted in Joyce Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 134.
19. Quoted in French and Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past, 2:309–10.
20. Quoted in Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74.
21. French and Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past, 2:313–14.
22. Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 54.
23. Kate Bowler, The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 172–73.
24. Bowler, Preacher’s Wife, 14.
25. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims, 152.
26. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims, 341.
27. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims, 340.
28. Randall Balmer, “American Fundamentalism: The Ideal of Femininity,” in Fundamentalism and Gender, ed. John Stratton Hawley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 55.
29. P. J. Tibayan, “Seeing Jesus on the Stage of Marriage,” in Happily Ever After: Finding Grace in the Messes of Marriage (Minneapolis: Cruciform, 2016), 5.
30. Quoted in Abrams, Making of Modern Woman, 29.
31. Shari Puterman, “Meet the Transformed Wife, Whose ‘Working Mom’ Chart Rocked the World,” Daily Advertiser, December 23, 2018, https://www
.theadvertiser.com/story/life/allthemoms/2018/12/17/story-behind-transformed-wifes-working-moms-chart/2317019002. See also The Transformed Wife blog at https://thetransformedwife.com.
32. “What Americans Think about Women in Power,” Barna Group, March 8, 2017, https://www.barna.com/research/americans-think-women-power.
Chapter 7 Making Biblical Womanhood Gospel Truth
1. Russell D. Moore, “After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians Are Winning the Gender Debate,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49, no. 3 (September 2006): 572, https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/49/49-3/JETS_49-3_569-576_Moore.pdf.
2. Moore, “After Patriarchy, What?,” 571.
3. Moore, “After Patriarchy, What?,” 569, 576.
4. The collection for First Baptist Church Elm Mott is still unprocessed, but the documents can be found in the Texas Collection Archives at Baylor University. Some of the historical notes of the church have been preserved in Hay Battaile’s “A History of First Baptist Church of Elm Mott, Elm Mott, Texas, 1879–1979,” 1979, Elm Mott First Baptist Church Records, The Texas Collection, Baylor University. The records pertaining to Mrs. Lewis Ball can be found on pages 10–11, although the handwritten secretary notes contain much more detail. The following quotations are from these records.
5. Elm Mott First Baptist Church Records, The Texas Collection, Baylor University.
6. Carol Ann Vaughn, “Baptist Women: Ordination within the Historical SBC,” God, Faith, Media, September 12, 2000, https://goodfaithmedia.org/baptist-women-ordination-within-the-historical-sbc-cms-414; Harry N. Hollis Jr., Christian Freedom for Women and Other Human Beings (Nashville: Broadman, 1974).
7. Charles Deweese, Women Deacons and Deaconesses: 400 Years of Baptist Service (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005), 11.
8. The Broadman Bible Commentary, vol. 10, Acts–1 Corinthians (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1971). See the discussion of Romans 16.
9. Timothy Larsen, “Evangelicalism’s Strong History of Women in Ministry,” Reformed Journal 5, no. 32 (September/October 2017), https://reformedjournal.com/evangelicalisms-strong-history-women-ministry.
10. Larsen, “Evangelicalism’s Strong History.”
11. Larsen, “Evangelicalism’s Strong History.”
12. Wayne Grudem, “Women Pastors: Not the ‘Path to Blessing,’” interview by Laura Sheahen, Beliefnet, October 2006, https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/christianity/2006/10/women-pastors-not-the-path-to-blessing.aspx.
13. Grudem, “Women Pastors.”
14. Larsen, “Evangelicalism’s Strong History.”
15. Bettye Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850–1979 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).
16. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 91.
17. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 153–54.
18. Florence Spearing Randolph, “If I Were White,” in Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 128–29; John Piper, “Can a Woman Preach if Elders Affirm It?,” February 6, 2015, in Ask Pastor John podcast, Desiring God, https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/can-a-woman-preach-if-elders-affirm-it; Mary A. Kassian, “Women Teaching Men—How Far Is Too Far?,” Desiring God, May 21, 2016, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/women-teaching-men-how-far-is-too-far.
19. Quoted in Curtis Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-Century England (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011), 608, 610.
20. Hanserd Knollys, introduction to A Christian Woman’s Experiences of the Glorious Working of God’s Free Grace, by Katherine Sutton (Rotterdam: Henry Goddæus, 1663; Rochester, NY: American Baptist Historical Society, 1981), quoted in Freeman, Company of Women Preachers, 592. I also discuss Sutton in my article “Women in Early Baptist Sermons: A Late Medieval Perspective,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 41, no. 1 (2014): 13–29.
21. Jacqueline Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?,” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 49.
22. Kathleen Blumreich, ed., The Middle English “Mirror”: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library MS Holkham Misc. 40 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 86 (see also 82–87). I have modernized the Middle English in this and following quotations.
23. Kathleen Blumreich, “‘I Ne Sey Noght Is in Despyt of Women’”: Antifeminism in Robert de Gretham’s Mirror,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 38, no. 1 (2004): 42.
24. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 262–69.
25. Karen Winstead, Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). As she writes, “Some readers may be offended at the glib tone and coarse language that characterize so many of the texts; few will expect saints—especially female saints—to swear like sailors. One of the principal lessons that those who consider the sacred and the profane dichotomous can learn from these stories is how integral the profane was to medieval sacred culture” (5).
26. Blumreich, Middle English “Mirror,” 87.
27. Winstead, Chaste Passions, 53–54.
28. Winstead, Chaste Passions, 49–60.
29. Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions (New York: Routledge, 1999), 180.
30. Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2019), 19.
31. Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (London: Cassell & Company, 1887). The phrase “angel in the house” describes the ideal Victorian woman: a loving (and submissive) wife and mother who was dedicated to her home.
32. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Are Women Human?,” in Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible, and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society (1971; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 49.
33. See Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), and George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
34. Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 33.
35. Inerrancy is not quite this simple. There are different types of inerrantists, as Barry Hankins explains in Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 4–5. But in my Southern Baptist world, inerrancy was a zero-sum game. Hankins writes, “Used in populist fashion, as it was during the SBC controversy, it simply means that the Bible is without error in all matters on which it touches, including science and history” (4).
36. Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon, 5.
37. Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 36.
38. See, for example, John R. Rice, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers: Significant Questions for Honest Christian Women Settled by the Word of God (Murfreesboro, TN: Sword of the Lord, 1941), 14–15. For more on the connection between inerrancy and gender, see Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 34–36, and Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), 108–9.
39. Quoted in Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 36.
40. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 108–9.
41. As Kevin Giles writes, “This is the center of Athanasius’s argument in the opening chapter in Four Orations Against the Arians.” Kevin Giles, The Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporary Gender Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002), 41n37.
42. Katherine L. French and Allyson M. Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 2:519.
43. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, A Sword between the Sexes? C. S. Lewis and the Gender Debates (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010), 70–87.
44. Giles, Trinity and Subordinationism, 21–28.
45. Bruce Ware, Big Truths for Young Hearts: Teaching and Learning the Greatness of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 55–56.
46. Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2020), 100.
47. Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, 101.
48. Phillip Cary, “The New Evangelical Subordinationism: Reading Inequality into the Trinity,” in The New Evangelical Subordinationism? Perspectives on the Equality of God the Father and God the Son, ed. Dennis W. Jowers and H. Wayne House (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 1, quoted in Van Leeuwen, Sword between the Sexes?, 80.
49. Giles, Trinity and Subordinationism, 41.
50. Giles, Trinity and Subordinationism, 43–52.
51. Giles, Trinity and Subordinationism, 15.
52. Giles, Trinity and Subordinationism, 109–12. Giles contends that evangelicals have done exactly what Karl Barth argued is the most common cause of theological error—moved analogically from “fallen human relations to divine relations” instead of the other way around (110).
53. Judith M. Bennett and Sandy Bardsley, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 12th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 47.
54. R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381 (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 122.
55. Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, 101.
56. Lynne Hybels, Nice Girls Don’t Change the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 24.
57. “Baptist Faith and Message 2000,” Southern Baptist Convention, June 14, 2000, http://www.sbc.net/bfm2000/bfm2000.asp, under the heading “XVIII. The Family.”
58. “Foundational Documents: Confessional Statement,” The Gospel Coalition, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/about/foundation-documents/#confessional-statement.
59. Denny Burk, “How Complementarianism Is a Gospel Issue,” Denny Burk (blog), August 16, 2012, https://www.dennyburk.com/why-complementarianism-is-a-gospel-issue.
Chapter 8 Isn’t It Time to Set Women Free?
1. Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano), “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted,” Twitter, October 15, 2017, 4:21 p.m., https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/919659438700670976.
2. Beth Allison Barr (@bethallisonbarr), “#Me Too: Thanks @kkdumez,” Twitter, October 19, 2017, 10:04 a.m., https://twitter.com/bethallisonbarr/status/921014090197291008.
3. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), 76. Du Mez explains the rise of Bill Gothard, including the early scandals in his ministry, on pp. 74–78.
4. Kate Bowler, The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), ix.
5. Matt Mencarini, “The Sacrifice,” Courier Journal, September 4, 2019, https://www.courier-journal.com/in-depth/news/2019/09/04/rachael-denhollander-sacrifice-continues-after-accusing-usa-gymnastics-larry-nassar/1919109001.
6. Bob Newhart, “Stop It!,” Mad TV, season 6, episode 24, aired May 12, 2001, YouTube video, 6:04 at 3:07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BjKS1-vjPs.
7. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 292–94.
8. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 282–83.
9. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 279–80.
10. Robert Downen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco, “Abuse of Faith,” Houston Chronicle, February 10, 2019, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptist-sexual-abuse-spreads-as-leaders-13588038.php.
11. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 294.
12. Downen, Olsen, and Tedesco, “Abuse of Faith.”
13. Ed Stetzer, “Complementarians in Closed Rooms,” The Exchange, Christianity Today, June 19, 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020/june/complementarians-closed-rooms-aimee-byrd-beth-moore.html.
14. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 229.
15. Kevin Giles, “Complementarian Theology in Crisis,” in Eyes to See and Ears to Hear Women: Sexual Assault as a Crisis of Evangelical Theology, ed. Tim Krueger (Minneapolis: CBE International, 2018), 60, https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/article/complementarian-theology-crisis.
16. Katie Geneva Cannon, “Slave Ideology and Biblical Interpretation,” in Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 1995), 41.
17. Mitzi J. Smith, “‘This Little Light of Mine’: The Womanist Biblical Scholar as Prophetess, Iconoclast, and Activist,” in I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi J. Smith (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 111.
18. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, A Sword between the Sexes? C. S. Lewis and the Gender Debates (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010), 80–81.
19. Van Leeuwen, Sword between the Sexes?, 80–81.
20. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982), 3–5. See also Roberta Krueger, “Towards Feminism: Christine de Pizan, Female Advocacy, and Women’s Textual Communities in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond,” in Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazos Karras, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 590–606.
21. Krueger, “Towards Feminism,” in Bennett and Karras, Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender, 598–601.
22. Quoted in Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 130.
23. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 289–90. See also Jesse Carey, “Paige Patterson Made Some Really Creepy Comments about a 16-Year-Old Girl When He Was President of the SBC,” Relevant Magazine, May 2, 2018, https://relevantmagazine.com/god/church/paige-patterson-made-really-creepy-comments-16-year-old-girl-president-sbc.
24. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker, eds., Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xiv.
25. Darleen Pryds, “Proclaiming Sanctity through Proscribed Acts: The Case of Rose of Viterbo,” in Kienzle and Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets, 166.
26. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905–1910 (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1911), 209. See also Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also the Royal Albert Hall website: https://www.royalalberthall.com.
27. For more about suffrage and race in Britain, see Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Philippa Levine, eds., Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race (New York: Routledge, 2000).
28. Timothy Larsen reminds us that “the provisions of the bill deliberately made the qualifications for women more restrictive than those for men to ensure that women did not become the majority of voters.” Timothy Larsen, Christabel Pankhurst: Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2002), 9n20.
29. “Her Majesty and the Women’s National Service Movement,” The Illustrated London News, March 24, 1917, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101059281764&view=1up&seq=359.
30. Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon, eds., Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s: Portrayal of the East (New York: Routledge, 2016), 99–100. “Jerusalem” is still sung the last night of the Proms at Royal Albert Hall.
31. William Blake, “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time,” in English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996), 22.
32. Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM), “Is to grapple with the entire text,” Twitter, May 11, 2019, 9:51 a.m., https://twitter.com/bethmoorelpm/status
/1127209694500671489; Beth Moore (@bethmoorelpm), “Above all else,” Twitter, May 11, 2019, 9:57 a.m., https://twitter.com/bethmoorelpm/status/1127211070811197440.
33. Van Leeuwen, Sword between the Sexes?, 80.