I first took serious notice of how feminism (also called egalitarianism) was invading the church in the later 1980s. For the next five years I devoted most of my research and writing to this subject. After a couple of years of concentrated research I concluded that the biggest problem in this area was in the area of hermeneutics. In a nutshell, I was convinced that feminist conclusions could be drawn from the Bible only by ignoring the basic rules of hermeneutics when interpreting the key gender passages.
In 1990 I began to write my analysis of the feminist phenomenon. My plan was to write a short introduction explaining the types of feminism existing in our culture, then to write an analysis of the key passages beginning with Genesis 1-3. The problem was that the introduction itself grew to about 350 pages, so it was published as a book, Feminism and the Bible: An Introduction to Feminism for Christians (College Press, 1992—no longer in print). In this book I explain the four main types of feminism as they relate to the Bible.
The first type is secular feminism, beginning around 1840 and continuing to the present time. Early leaders were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott. The Bible was basically dismissed as women’s enemy. In the 1890’s Stanton and others produced The Women’s Bible, which gives a feminist slant to relevant texts in the Bible. A landmark achievement was the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, which recognized the right of women to vote. When this happened secular feminism lost momentum for about 40 years, until it was revived in the early 1960s. The architects of this latter-day feminist movement were women such as Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem. In 1966 Friedan and others formed the National Organization for Women (NOW). Other feminist organizations included the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) and the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM). No joke.
The goal of this movement has been to implement a gender-free society, and its approach has become normative in our secular culture today, as enforced by political correctness.
The second type of feminism, beginning in the 1970s, accepted the goals of secular feminism but wanted to maintain some form of spirituality in its practice. Whereas secular feminism was all politics and no spirituality, this second group infused egalitarianism with spiritual power. However, its followers completely rejected traditional religions such as Judaism and Christianity, as well as any other religions that were built around “male” deities. Any genuine divine presence and influence must come from female deities. Hence this approach is called goddess feminism. Adherents embrace witchcraft and neo-paganism. They put much emphasis on extreme ecology, treating “Mother Earth” as a divine being (Gaia); they celebrate female sexuality as sacred. The movement is deliberately anti-Biblical, since the Bible is seen as the ultimate example of the hated male dominance and patriarchy.
The third major type of feminism is liberal Christian feminism, which goes back to the middle of the 20th century. Liberal feminism has the same political goals as the original secular feminism, and a spiritual side like goddess feminism. It differs from the latter, though, in wanting to maintain some connection (but not much) with the Christian Bible and with Jesus Christ. However, it rejects the divine origin and nature of the Bible. As a result liberal feminism rejects any part of the Bible that opposes feminist goals, and uses any part of it that might imply divine support for them. It unambiguously rejects the authority of the Bible, and does not accept it as any kind of norm for doctrine or practice. The only real norm for truth is something called “women’s experience,” which begins with the inward conviction of the absolute equality of all human beings (men and women) regarding both nature and roles. The Bible, God, and Jesus Christ are reinterpreted to conform to this experiential norm.
The fourth and last major type of feminism is what we can call either Biblical or Evangelical feminism. This has been present within conservative church circles since the early 1970s. It arose while the other forms of feminism were exercising a consolidated influence upon Western culture, which in turn was exerting pressure upon Bible-believers to accept feminist principles and find a way to justify them by reinterpreting key Bible texts. Thus from the mid-1970s and through the 1980s major works were published by Evangelical Christians, repudiating the traditional view of gender roles and reworking the Bible to support egalitarianism. Biblical authority was (supposedly) still accepted; the strategy was to reinterpret the relevant texts.
The major feminist writings during this period began with All We’re Meant To Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation, by Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty (1974, then later editions). This was the early “bible” of Evangelical feminism; it was called “ground-breaking” and “epoch-making.” Next was Paul King Jewett’s Man as Male and Female: A Study in Sexual Relationships from a Theological Point of View (1975). In this book Jewett declares that Paul inconsistently presents both traditional and feminist viewpoints, and that he was just wrong on the former.
Another early feminist was Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, who published Women, Men, and the Bible in 1977, along with several other later influential works. She has since become more associated with liberal and especially goddess feminism. Also in 1977 Patricia Gundry wrote Woman Be Free! The Clear Message of Scripture. She later (1980) wrote Mutual Submission in Marriage, defending what has become an almost universally-accepted (but false) view of the husband-wife relationship.
A major representative from the Restoration Movement published a couple of influential articles about this same time. This was Scott Bartchy, associated with what was then called Emmanuel School of Religion. In 1978 Standard Publishing issued Essays on New Testament Christianity, in which Bartchy wrote “Power, Submission, and Sexual Identity Among the Early Christians.” He also wrote similar articles for Christian journals in the 1980s.
Influential names from the 1980s include Philip B. Payne (who has some recent works relating to 1 Tim. 2:12); Aida Besançon Spencer (Beyond the Curse: Women Called to Ministry, 1985); Gilbert Bilezikian (Beyond Sex Roles: What the Bible Says About a Woman’s Place in Church and Family, 1985); Alvera and Berkeley Mickelsen (see Women, Authority and the Bible, 1986); Catherine Clark Kroeger (who produced numerous works and was a recognized leader); and Gretchen Gaebelein Hull (Equal To Serve: Women and Men in the Church and Home, 1987). The works of Spencer, Bilezikian, and Kroeger are some of the worst examples of exegesis (hermeneutics) I have ever seen.
In 1974 an Evangelical counterpart to NOW was formed: the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, associated with the ESA (Evangelicals for Social Action). In 1986 it split over the issue of lesbianism; and in 1987, under the leadership of C. C. Kroeger, a new group was formed: Christians for Biblical Equality, which is Evangelical, non-lesbian, and radically feminist.
These are the forces that have been at work upon and within conservative Christendom for two-score decades and more. The secular, goddess, and liberal Christian feminist movements have plowed the ground and sowed the seed of egalitarianism, making it appear to be the “normal” view and creating dissatisfaction with the traditional view. Early Evangelical feminist writers have seized the opportunity and have reinterpreted the entire Biblical canon in a way that neutralizes anything that sounds hierarchical (complementarian) and makes it teach egalitarianism throughout.
Of course, while all this was happening, many Evangelical scholars were trying to defend the traditional view of gender roles against this new movement. Some of these were George W. Knight III, Susan T. Foh, Stephen B. Clark, Douglas J. Moo, James B. Hurley, F. LaGard Smith, H. Wayne House, and especially Wayne Grudem. In 1987 several of these, and others, formed a group called Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW—see its website), for the sole purpose of defending the traditional view and exposing the fallacies of feminism. One of its first major projects was to produce a multi-author volume responding to the recent feminist revisionist teaching. Edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, it was called Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (Crossway 1991). On the one hand, I rejoiced to see this work. On the other hand, it took the wind out of my sails, since it did pretty much exactly what I had in mind for the book I was in the process of writing.
I did continue to produce the results of my own research, which ideally would involve three more volumes, in addition to my 350-page introduction. The first of these was Gender Roles and the Bible: Creation, the Fall, and Redemption: A Critique of Feminist Biblical Interpetation (College Press, 1994). I consider this to be one of my best-written and most important books. In it I show how feminists have falsely reinterpreted the Biblical teaching of creation and the fall in Genesis 1-3, how they have produced a fictional view of Jesus and the Gospels in order to make them friends of feminism, and how Galatians 3:28 has been hijacked and taken completely out of context to serve as a blueprint for egalitarianism of every stripe.
My second volume received its final form in 2008, published by College Press as Headship, Submission, and the Bible: Gender Roles in the Home. The point here is twofold: first, it shows that the concept of “mutual submission” of husband and wife is an idea created by feminists with total disregard of context and word meanings; and second, it shows that feminism’s attempt to redefine the word “head” (Greek, kephalē), i.e., as “source” rather than “leader, one in authority,” is one of the most wretched examples of counterfeit “scholarship” that I have ever seen.
My third volume would have been about gender roles in the church, but I never got around to writing it. For one thing, my other volumes were pretty much ignored on all sides, which made me feel like I would be wasting my time on it. For another thing, a book had come out in 1995 that gave an excellent explanation of 1 Timothy 2:12, namely, Women in the Church: A Fresh Analysis of 1 Timothy 2:9-15 (ed. Andreas J. Kӧstenberger, et al.).
My analysis of this whole process is this. Many conservative Christians are not themselves capable of doing the exegetical work that is required for a solid view of gender roles in the home and in the church. For centuries the scholarly (and common sense) interpretations of key gender texts saw them as teaching male headship and male leadership. Then, under the pressures of the cultural presence and dominance of feminism, some Bible scholars have created completely new interpretations of these same texts, ones that ostensibly support a genderless society, a genderless church, and genderless families. These new conclusions were a big hit with a large segment of Christendom, and were simply accepted by many without further question and without any real examination of the exegetical basis for them—or lack thereof. After all, these new feminist writers are scholars, art they not? Most have Ph.D. degrees, do they not? They know Greek, don’t they? They must know what they are talking about! End of story.
The problem is that this is NOT the end of the story. This story has three chapters, not just two. The first chapter is the centuries-old acceptance of the hierarchical (complementarian) view of gender roles. The second chapter is the feminist attempt to reinterpret Scripture in order to provide an alleged basis for the feminist view of gender roles. The third chapter is the examination (by people like me) of the various feminist attempts at exegesis, and the exposure of their results as false, phony, and fake. The problem is that many Bible-believers have digested the first two chapters and have decided they like the way it ends there. That’s where they want the story to end. Thus they have ignored the third chapter, perhaps not even being aware of it; and they have therefore bought into a fallacious and faulty worldview without realizing it.
Contributing to the ease with which feminism has deceived many are two factors. One is the common idea summarized as “the newer, the truer.” I.e., the more recent an idea is, the more likely it is to be true. And since the male leadership idea is the old one, it must be outdated and passé. The feminist approach and the feminist view of Scripture, being the more recent, must be the true view. We see this pattern emerge all the time in the scientific world; therefore it must be true for the social sciences as well!
The second fact is the often overlooked principle that in this sinful world, the will usually dominates the intellect. I.e., even if the objective evidence points another direction, we will see and accept what we WANT to accept. As Paul says in Romans 1:18, it is typical of sinners to “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” There is SO much pressure today to WANT the feminist view to be correct. This is the power of “women’s experience,” as mentioned earlier. We need to face reality here. Will women’s experience be our norm, our final authority, or will the Bible?