"Biblical womanhood" isn't biblical

Photo courtesy of Dallas News

This op-ed by Beth Allison Barr stopped me in my tracks as I started reading. 

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/01/17/the-women-in-the-bible-do-not-match-the-evangelical-vision-of-biblical-womanhood/

"The deliberations of the elder board were short, too. My husband was to be fired as youth pastor," writes Dr. Barr, a history professor at Baylor University in Texas.

She and her husband had reached "the point at which my husband and I were willing to risk our ministry by challenging pastoral authority, especially over the unequal treatment of women in our church."

I was trying to review email and tweets efficiently before going to bed, but I had to stop and cry.

Dr. Barr is on a campaign to get evangelical churches back on track with what the Bible really says about women.

Other Southern Baptist women are also reconsidering the "women obey your husbands" and "women may not preach" theology.  Here's an Associated Press report.

For example, the well-known Bible study media figure Beth Moore recently left the Southern Baptist Church over its relegation of women to second-class status.  Because she is a popular Bible teacher, her exit in March is still making a lot of waves.

Many churches have book clubs, and women especially are reading and changing their minds on these once-standard maxims of church teaching: "Women must submit to their husbands" and "Women must not preach."

Start using this hashtag in your social media posts and tweets: #endchristianpatriarchy

You can get the sticker by pre-ordering Dr. Barr's forth-coming book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.

Gimmicks for God

Valerie Prado, a student in my class this fall (RS 304 Women & the Bible), sent me the link to an NPR report last September about a woman's experiment with trying to live strictly by the various statements about women in the Bible.

I'd heard the report then but let the woman's antics slip by without any comment.  They do, however, deserve a rebuttal because she is turning them into a book that claims to be about "biblical womanhood."

Taking statements out of context without any consideration of the purpose for which each one was written, Rachel Held Evans lived for a year by passages ranging from Proverbs 31 to Ephesians 5:22.

Because Proverbs 31:23 says, "Her husband is known in the city gates," she stood at the "Welcome to Dayton" (Ohio) sign and held a poster saying "Dan is awesome."


Doing that and other things like letting her husband choose which Netflix movie they would watch clearly had nothing to do with what God wants from us humans. It was just a publicity stunt for her book. 

Rachel chose to ignore Ephesians 5:20, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ," so she could act out the next verse, "wives to your husbands as to the Lord."  She also chose to ignore the last 37 years of biblical scholarship by women who care about this issue, starting with All We're Meant To Be by Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty in 1974. 

But hey, maybe her gimmicks and her book will cause people to think about what "biblical womanhood" really is... to move beyond the simple imitation of various random references to good/bad women and reflect on how the genders should relate and what it means to be a person who serves and praises God. 

Micah 6:8 clearly answers the second question for both genders:
"What does YHWH require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"


http://www.npr.org/2011/09/25/140761994/biblical-womanhood-a-year-of-living-by-the-book