Rachel Elizabeth Asproth – Things Christian Women Hear about Women

Rachel Elizabeth Asproth

April 19, 2017

Last night, Sarah Bessey (we’re fans!) began a conversation about the strange, sexist, abusive, and toxic things Christian women are told on a regular basis. We’ve been leaning into the conversation and doing our best to keep a record of the profound and heartbreaking stories women and male allies are sharing. We’ve collected some of the most powerful tweets so far in a list, and we’re inviting our audience to follow the ongoing conversation happening on Twitter under #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear.

If you have a relevant story or experience, please join the conversation yourself or share in the comments below.

1. “You can teach the women and children, you just can’t teach the men.” –Charlie Grantham

2. “You are an amazing leader! You’d make an excellent pastor’s wife someday!” –Sarah Bessey

3. “Women are too emotional to be leaders and pastors. It would never work.” –Jesse Harp

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Kevin Giles Responds at ETS to the heretical Views on the Trinity of Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware

Kevin Giles, Australian author and Anglican priest

The paper below was given by Kevin Giles at the plenary forum on the Trinity at the Evangelical Theological Society annual conference, 15^th November, 2016 at San Antonia. The other speakers were Dr Bruce Ware, Dr Millard Erickson and Dr Wayne Grudem; Dr Sam Storms presided.

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Thank you, Dr Storms, for your welcome. It is a huge honor to be invited to give the introductory address at this ETS plenary forum on the Trinity.

In putting my case this afternoon I am going to speak very forthrightly and unambiguously, as from past experience I am sure Dr Grudem and Dr Ware will do.[1] Dr Erickson who stands with me in opposing Dr Grudem and Dr Ware’s teaching on the Trinity I am sure will be the clearest in what he says and the most gracious. I speak bluntly because the issues we are discussing are of monumental importance for the evangelical community. I believe what Dr Grudem and Dr Ware teach on the Trinity, and now very large numbers of evangelicals believe, contradicts what the Nicene creed, the Reformation and post-Reformation Protestant confessions and the ETS doctrinal statement teach.

To begin my presentation, I make three matters perfectly clear. First, I have no distinctive doctrine of the Trinity. My exposition of the Trinity which follows is simply an outline of what I consider to be the historic, orthodox doctrine of the Trinity as spelt out in the Nicene Creed. I know absolutely nothing about a so-called “evangelical egalitarian doctrine of the Trinity”

What this means is that I have basically the same understanding of the Trinity as the many complementarian confessional Reformed theologians who have “come out” in opposition to Dr Grudem and Dr Ware’s teaching on the Trinity.[2] What this immediately reveals is that the divide on the Trinity is not between evangelical egalitarians and complementarians but between creedal and confessional evangelicals and non-creedal and confessional evangelicals.

Finding My Place in The Gospel Coalition | Her.meneutics | Christianitytoday.com

Finding My Place in The Gospel Coalition | Her.meneutics | Christianitytoday.com.

Jen Pollock Michel discusses in this article about the (unconfortable) place of women in the neo-reformed Gospel Coalition.

Slanderous Accusations against Egalitarians

Slanderous Accusations against Egalitarians.

Are you a complementarian or an egalitarian? It really depends on what you mean by those terms.

It was interesting for me to ind out that ‘the earliest so-called “egalitarians” were calling themselves “complementarians” (without hierarchy) before complementarians grabbed the term as their own and then turned to call their brothers and sisters who believed in shared and mutual authority in the church and home “egalitarians.” (Which gained traction in a day when the “equal rights amendment” was disputed by some who are now called “complementarians.”)’

John Frye – My Conversion to Egalitarianism

Note: This text was published on Scot McKnight’s blog on Patheos. I personally did not have the special experience Frye describes here. My ‘conversion’ away from the hierarchical view of gender roles came progressively, mostly because of a hermeneutical shift in my thinking. The greatest obstacle for me was the lack of historical precedents of ordained leadership in the Bible – then I found lady Junia, the Apostle, and the lack of historical precedents in church history – then I realised how history is manipulated by power and misogyny, especially after Augustine. So, I changed. Because of my Marxist past I do not feel comfortable with calling my new position ‘egalitarian’, although I can accept it, if by it we mean equal dignity, and I also believe that ‘complementarity’ is a pretty good way of describing gender roles, if tehse are not rigidly defined and if hierarchy and patriarchy is excluded. It’s complicated, I know. But it is supposed to be so. 🙂

Read below Frye’s testimony.

* * *

This is the story of my conversion from the hierarchical view of the role of women in home and church to the egalitarian view.

My seminary training landed me exegetically and theologically in the hierarchical camp. I use hierarchical, not complementarian because the nub of the issue is a functional hierarchy. While competing views of the crux interpretum (1 Timothy 2:12 in context) were acknowledged in seminary, a lot of attention was paid to the pronouns in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 with the multiple use of “he.” It was pointed out, of course, that Paul writes “husband of one wife/ one woman man,” so elders [expanded to mean ordained leaders] clearly had to be men.

Mimi Haddad – The Bait and Switch of Complementarians

Mimi Haddad is the president of Christians for Biblical Equality. She holds a PhD in historical theology from the University of Durham, England and an Honorary Doctorate of Divinity from Palmer Theological Seminary.

In a recent text published on the CBE blog, Mimi Haddad is commenting on another post on the same blog, ‘commending John Piper’s advocacy for the education and the safe return of 276 Nigerian females’. Yet, she argues that Piper, and other so-called complementarians, like him, do not go far enough in their support of women.

Here is the beginning of her article.

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These 276 girls (not to mention the 200 million females missing globally) are never helped by religious teachings (Christian, Muslim, or any other tradition) that devalues females and excludes them from leadership roles over men, whether in the church, the home, or society—because of gender. Ideas have consequences. Though Piper endorses female education, he denies them equal authority because they are female and this places them at great risk, in any corner of the world! To be equal in education but unequal in service is a bait and switch which egalitarians reject as unbiblical.

Happy as I am that complementarians endorse female education, even so, the teachings of complementa

Wayne Grudem Continues His (pseudo)Theological Crusade

Wayne Grudem is one of the favourite authors of those evangelicals inclined towards fundamentalism. His extremely simplistic Systematic Theology (see for instance his absolutely pathetic treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity|) has been translated into many languages, including Romanian, creating confusion in the minds of many candidates o ecclesial ministry.

Among other subjects, it seems that Grudem has acquired a real obsession with evangelicals sympathetic to the egalitarian position  on gender roles (or what he calls ‘evangelical feminism’). He has published already three books on this topic (see HERE, HERE and HERE).

Recently, David C Cramer, from the Council for Biblical Equality, in his article ‘Assessing Hierarchist Logic: Is Egalitarianism Really on a Slippery Slope?‘ has taken Grudem to charge on his claims that what he calls ‘evangelical feminism’ is leading people on the slippery slope towards liberalism, showing the logical fallacies on which Grudem builds his argument.

Complementarian vs Egalitarian

The last book of Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, continues to make waves among evangelicals.

One expression of this is an indirect dialogue between Rachel and Jen Pollock Michel, a ‘complementarian’ lady writing for the Her.meneutics blog of Christianity Today.

Those who read my blog know already a number of things about me:

1. I consider myself a feminist theologian. I believe the church looses a lot when she reads the Bible and interprets church history and Christian thought exclusively through the eyes of men, as was the case for most of its existance.

2. I refuse to be catalogued as an egalitarian, and even less so a complementarian (as much as I refuse to choose between the Calvinist and the Arminian ideologiei); I am convinced that these labels are misguided and deceptive. In fact, most so-called ‘complementarians’ are in fact hierarchialists, while egalitarians, when they don;t buy into the Marxist rubbish that informs some extreme versions of feminism, refuse to obliterate all differences between men and women (some of them, thank goodness, are in fact impossible to obliterate, to our delight 🙂 ).

On Complementarianism, i.e. Patriarchalism

Rachel Held Evans

Scot McKnight introduces in the paragraph below a very good text written by Rachel Held Evans on complementarianism. I quote, approvingly (I add this in the spirit of full disclosure 🙂 ):

For a long time I have said a number of times that I don’t like either “complementarian” or “egalitarian,” since the former is not really what is meant and the latter is too tied into modernity. I only begrudgingly accept egalitarian and prefer the term “mutuality.” So, what Rachel Held Evans said recently is precisely how I see things: complementarianism, at the bottom, is patriarchy. It is hierarchicalism.

Rachel starts from her own family experience, as one who grew up in a complementarian culture. In spite of this, she and her husband ended up like this:

We make decisions together. (No one holds a trump card.) 

We share household chores. (No one gets out of doing the laundry or helping with the yard work based on gender.)