The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, by Beth Allison Barr, Brazos Press, 2021.

In chapter 7 (‘Making Biblical Womanhood Gospel Truth’), Barr argues that women have been central to the (authentic and historical) evangelical cause in ways and to degrees that few appreciate.

Focusing on the Southern Baptist denomination, she tells of a Mrs Lewis Ball who was invited to preach a series of ‘revival’ sermons First Baptist Church Elm Mott, an old Southern Baptist congregation near Waco, Texas.  No-one in the congregation thought to question the appropriateness of inviting a woman to engage in such ministry.  Barr does note, however, that, in a concession to the prevailing patriarchy, the evangelist was known by her husband’s name, and not her own.

Indeed, according to Timothy Larson, evangelicalism has a long and noble history of honouring the public ministry of women.

[Incidentally, Barr’s credentials as a historian (to which she makes repeated reference) do not prevent her (in a mis-reading of Larson’s article) from naming Selina Countess of Huntingdon, as the founder of ‘the first American Calvinist denomination to emerge from the eighteenth-century evangelical revival was founded by a woman’ (my emphasis).  In fact, ‘The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion’ was, and is, an English denomination (with a number of congregations in Sierra Leone).  The fact remains, of course, that the Countess of Huntingdon was a highly influential woman, but never dreamed of taking upon herself the kind of authoritative preaching which is at issue here.]

In celebrating the ministries of Mrs Lewis Ball (along with Margery Kempe, Katherine Sutton and others), Barr laments that

‘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.’

Two factors, then, have led to evangelicals regarding ‘biblical womanhood’ as ‘gospel truth’: they have forgotten the long history of women in public ministry, and they have redefined holiness for women as rooted in female distinctiveness and female submission.

Barr’s basic logic is quite simple: woman have, in fact, been prominent in past evangelical movements.  God has evidently blessed their ministries.  Who are we, then, to say that they have not been called by God to those ministries?  But evangelicalism is marked, not by pragmatism (it seems to work, so it must be right), but adherence to the word of God.

Inerrancy

Not surprisingly, then, Barr turns to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy as one of the ‘culprits’ in the entrenchment of modern evangelical ideas about womanhood.

She represents a commitment to inerrancy as meaning

‘Either we believe the Bible, literally and in its entirety, or we don’t.’

Belief in inerrancy was responsible for

‘transforming a literal reading of Paul’s verses about women into immutable truth.’

Barr repeatedly accuses inerrantists of peddling a ‘literal’ interpretation of the Bible (and of Pauline passages about women, especially).  But surely she knows that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy neither implies or leads to a literalist interpretation of Scripture.

Barr supposes that inerrancy became important towards the end of the 20th century precisely because it provided an way of exluding women from public ministry:

‘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. 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.’

Although a number of proponents of biblical inerrancy were, and are, complementarians, a causal connection cannot be demonstrated by a mere ‘X says so’.

Barr could have mounted a better case by showing that commitment to inerrancy is linked (in the minds of  some of its proponents) to belief in complementarianism (see here for a UK example).  But it is absurd to claim, without evidence, that she knows that belief in inerrancy is, in the SBC, motivated by the need to protect complementarianism and to ‘push women out of the pulpit’.

Arianism

The issue here is the doctrine (‘heresy’, according to Barr) of the ‘eternal subordination of the Son’.  This is a doctrine which complementarians have recruited to give theological support for the case: because the Son is subordinate to the Father, so women are, by analogy, subordinate to men.

But when Barr writes

‘As a church historian, I immediately recognized the eternal subordination of the Son as Arianism’ (p194)

Her confidence in her academic credentials is misplaced.

For her definition of the ‘eternal subordination of the Son’ Barr relies on a quote from Aimee Byrd, who

‘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.”’

Let me be quite clear: this is a doubly grotesque misprepresentation of the issue.

For one thing, both Byrd and Barr are wrong to think that proponents of the ‘eternal submission of the Son’ (ESS) teach that the Son is subordinate to the Father…in his essence.’  Wayne Grudem, for example, has repeatedly and emphatically made it clear that he believes that the Father, Son and Spirit are equal in essence.   The question is about whether the functional subordination of the Son is limited to the days of his flesh or whether it extends past eternity to future eternity.  Please see this post for more detail on this.

For another thing, Dr Barr is wrong to say that Aimee Byrd ‘describes a 2001 Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood document’ that teaches the subordination of the Son in his essence.  She does not.  Byrd’s complaint is that the document she is referring to ‘connects ESS to the complementarian position’.

To deny equality of essence would indeed be heresy.  But complementarians do not deny equality of essence, and therefore Barr’s accusation withers on the vine.

I could stop there.  But I won’t.  Reminding us once again of her credentials as a ‘church historian’, Barr ‘immediately recognized the eternal subordination of the Son as Arianism.’  She continues:

‘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.” Salvation itself was at stake.’

It is, of course, terribly simplistic to claim that ‘when everyone else in the Christian world got wind of what Arius was teaching, they reacted with horror.’  But my main point is that modern supporters of the doctrine of the ‘eternal subordination of the Son’ (and many complementarians dissent from that doctrine anyway) vigorously affirm the equality of essence (i.e. the ontological equality) of the persons of the Trinity.  It is a travesty to claim that ESS is, as Barr puts it, ‘Arianism repackaged.’

Let me return to what I suppose is the main point of this chapter.  Barr thinks that complementarians have come to regard their position as central to the gospel.  Give up complementarianism, they say, and you are on a slippery slide away from gospel truth.

Although I don’t think that Barr has argued or evidenced her point very well, nevertheless, I do think that she might be on to something.

Wayne Grudem, for example, in his 2006 book ‘Evangelical Feminism – a New Path to Liberalism‘ offers an affirmative answer to the question posed in the title.  But then again, given Barr’s disavowal of inerrancy, maybe Grudem is onto something too.  But that’s another story.