Early this month a 92-year-old Turkish scholar, Muazzez Ilmiye Cig, an expert on Sumerian civilization, was acquitted by an Istanbul court of criticizing the head scarf as a poor symbol of women’s morality and religious devotion, since 5000 years ago it was used by temple prostitutes to distinguish themselves while having ritual sex with young […]
Much has been written recently about a Watertown, New York, elderly woman who was fired after teaching Sunday School for 54 years for simply being a woman. See the Associated Press story, Ben’s blog post and Dan’s as well. It turns out that the story is more complicated than that — that the […]
Reviews are coming out now on the two big recent 2005 books in the evangelical feminism and biblical manhood and womanhood shootout. Evangelical Quarterly [78.1 (2006), 65-84] has an article, “Biblical truth and biblical equality: a review article on two recent books from IVP on evangelical feminism and biblical manhood and womanhood,” reviewed by […]
Hierarchicalists charge that egalitarians are wrong when they deny the principle that there is no necessary connection between women’s roles and their worth. This is a false charge because we do not believe there is a necessary link. School principals certainly do not have more human worth than teachers, and the idea that […]
I Timothy 5:3-16 has practical advice on how to care for widows, young and old. Few if any churches these days follow this advice because they know that the advice was for that time and place. And yet the practical advice in I Timothy 2:11-12 (women should keep quiet in church, probably because […]
Quite a large percentage of Christian churches are not very open to winning the lost to Christ. They set up all sorts of barriers that put seekers off, including weird sub-cultural behaviors and even stranger theological interpretations based on non-understanding of ancient cultures, or worse, on just their own sub-cultures and ways of understanding […]
Andy Rowell has posted a couple of excellent bibliographies regarding women in ministry on his blog:
Bibliography of Books - Egalitarian and Complementarian
Bibliography of Commentaries on the Problem Passages
Jesus seems like a pretty out-front guy, not particularly enamored with the status quo or afraid to do something new and shocking. Why didn’t he choose a woman to be among his twelve?
This is a fair question because Jesus related to women as equals and women were certainly among his most devoted disciples and […]
I Timothy 3:1-4: “Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer [elder], he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not […]
The Danvers Statement states that “both Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, equal before God as persons and and distinct in their manhood and womanhood.” Note that this heirarchical/complementarian basic statement of belief does not say that men and women were equally created in the image of God, but are only equal […]