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Review of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr

Guest Post by Dcs. Ellie Corrow and Dr. Bethany Kilcrease

Part III: The Second Part of Our Epic Critique

Making of Biblical Womanhood presents several convincing historical arguments that deconstruct the assumed uniformity of biblical womanhood throughout the church’s history, but Barr falters when attempting to address modern controversies of the twentieth century.  Barr’s conclusion that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy “became important because it provided a way to push women out of the pulpit” may well be true.1  Barr does show evidence of correlation.  But she did not present enough evidence to convince us that this was in fact a case of causation, that inerrancy became important primarily because it served as a helpful item in the patriarchal toolkit and not merely that promotion of inerrancy and the solidification of “biblical womanhood” among evangelicals happened to occur around the same time.  We suspect Barr is correct, but we would have liked to have seen more evidence.

Additionally, Barr’s argument regarding inerrancy is built around an insufficiently nuanced doctrine of inerrancy.  One way to think about the doctrine of inerrancy is to make it the foundation of one’s belief system.  This is common among both fundamentalists and evangelicals.  According to this line of thinking, Christians believe in the Bible because it is inerrant.  Since the Bible is inerrant, Christians believe everything it says about Jesus and can trust Him.  Therefore, if inerrancy is undermined, by, for example, questioning Paul’s directives regarding women, all of Christianity comes crashing down.  A better, and we would argue more biblical, approach is to begin with Christ.  We believe in Christ’s resurrection from the dead.  His divine authority then leads us to trust His authorized Scriptures completely.2  In this way, inerrancy flows from belief in Christ, rather than belief in Christ resting precariously on inerrancy.

I think we know someone who recently published the definitive confessional Lutheran dogmatic work on this topic….

Unfortunately, this dismissal of inerrancy as a tool of the patriarchy leaves Barr vulnerable to the argument that she rejects complementarianism because she rejects the authority of Scripture, which would be an unfair characterization of her work.  In an earlier chapter, for example, she invites the reader to reexamine Paul’s writing on women by way of cultural and historical context, whereas someone less committed to the veracity of Scripture might either argue for non-Pauline authorship or blatant rejection of difficult passages.  However, despite her problematic approach to inerrancy, Barr’s broader point that inerrancy has been weaponized against women has validity. Indeed, literalist readings of 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14 are often used a litmus test for biblical faithfulness, whereas other Pauline texts that are not directed specifically at women rarely receive the same sort of rigid application.

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Review of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr

Guest Post by Dcs. Ellie Corrow and Dr. Bethany Kilcrease

Part II: The First Part of Our Epic Critique

Barr’s real contribution in The Making of Biblical Womanhood is to finally make scholarship detailing the historical development of the threads constituting biblical womanhood accessible to the public.  Her main argument that biblical womanhood, which tells women they must be domestic, housebound, and married mothers at the expense of other vocations is important and prophetic.  As such, her book deserves to be widely read throughout the Church.  She demonstrates that the way we often read even the Bible through a patriarchal lens has led the Church to discount the significance of named women in the Bible, including Mary Magdalene, Phoebe, and Junia.  Moreover, the chapters on the history of women in the Church during the Middle Ages and Reformation period are alone worth the cost of admission.  Her chapter on the Reformation, for example, helps explain why Katharina von Bora Luther died impoverished.  Her tragedy extended beyond an individual failure on the part of the Church.  Rather, it was a product of a newly constructed economic system that limited women’s opportunities outside the home.

People! Go read this book!

The Making of Biblical Womanhood is a tour de force, but there are also spots where Barr could strengthen her historical arguments and where we, as confessional Lutherans, disagree with her theological conclusions.  Again, historically speaking, Barr’s argument that “biblical womanhood” is essentially an evangelical version of the patriarchal cult of domesticity is accurate.  There is nothing in the Bible that confines women to the domestic sphere and subordinates them to all men in all contexts.  As the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR) noted in 2009:1

"The Bible’s clear direction regarding responsible male leadership in the home and male ordination to pastoral ministry may not be assumed to mean that only men can exercise any kind of leadership or authority in home, church, or society. Some view this as an inconsistency, but it is not. In Baptism every believer is called to service in his or her vocations within the various spheres of life. The body of Christ requires that its individual members exercise the wide variety of their gifts, whether that individual is male or female (1 Cor 12:7).... Such leadership of women is not inconsistent with Scriptural teaching. On the contrary, it exists in the very context of our church’s life and teaching which upholds and promulgates the divinely ordered responsibility of pastors and husbands. When women serve in this way they are enhancing the work of the priesthood of all believers, serving as members of the body of Christ, and not usurping pastoral authority or violating the 'order of creation.' Scripture provides numerous examples of such service, for instance Priscilla’s instruction of Apollos (Acts 18:26) or the teaching Timothy received from his mother and grandmother (2 Tim 1:5)."2

However, this is not to say that we support approach Barr’s exegesis uncritically.  She does not adequately address the distinction between biblical texts dealing with the vertical relationship between humans and God and those addressing the horizontal relationships between humans and other humans.3  For example, Galatians 3:26-29 relates to the vertical relationship between believers and God in Christ. But the other passages, such as those in 1 Corinthians 14, deal with horizontal relations within the Church or between spouses.  Others, such as Ephesians 5, may address both.

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Review of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr

Guest Post by Dcs. Ellie Corrow and Dr. Bethany Kilcrease

Part I: Here’s What’s In This Book

Beth Allison Barr’s book is one of a bevy of new books attempting to deconstruct (white) patriarchy in American evangelicalism hot on the heels of the #metoo movement and anti-racism protests of 2020.  As an evangelical Baptist with a high view of Scripture, Barr grew up in the world of biblical womanhood.  In contrast, neither of us grew up with complementarianism, although as adults we have become more conscious of the gendered ideals of “biblical womanhood” promoted within our own corner of Christianity.

The categories of complementarian and egalitarian are often assumed to be the only two interpretive lenses available when considering of the role of women in the church: denominations that ordain women are “egalitarian” and those that do not are “complementarian.” However, these categories do not simply address whether or not women may be pastors, or if men and women are interchangeable.  Complementarianism packages the distinctions between men and women into a broader cultural and social hierarchy—biblical man/womanhood—governing gendered roles in church, family, and society.  Barr’s experiences with complementarianism, including biblical womanhood, clashed with her scholarly training, causing her to wonder, is biblical womanhood actually biblical?  Did God ordain patriarchy?  Does Jesus want women to live in “complementary” marriages under male headship?  Eventually, the “evidence” showed her “how Christian patriarchy was built, stone by stone, throughout the centuries, [and as a result] arguments for women’s subordination reflect historical circumstances more than the face of God.”1  As an historian and a youth pastor’s wife, Barr is now on a mission to get the word out that biblical womanhood is far from biblical.2

Image from “Is Biblical Womanhood Really Biblical? Historian Beth Allision Barr Joins the Discussion”
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Check Out This Webinar For My Wife’s New Book

My wife’s new book, Fallacy and Falsehood: How to Think, Read, and Write in the Twenty-First Century just came out with University of Toronto Press. If anyone is interested, she will host a thirty minute webinar on Zoom on Wednesday, April 28 at noon. Participants will receive a discount code if they want to buy the book.

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The Marriage Debate: Why Christians Lost the Argument Before it Began

https://spiritualdirection.com/2014/02/17/must-catholics-marry-in-catholic-ceremonies

Throwback Post:

I think the question of the continuing deification of the state in modern life is an interesting one.  Ultimately, winning the argument about traditional marriage (by which I mean both the belief in man-woman marriage and also the indissoluble nature of marriage- i.e., no divorces aside from Jesus’ single exception) is a daunting task for modern Christians.  It is a daunting task because even before the debate begins, Christians are faced with the fact that nearly everyone (including Christians themselves) already have a distorted understanding of marriage.

Prior to the modern era, the basic conception of marriage in Judeo-Christian culture was as an Order of Creation and an economic relationship.  Since all property was tied up in land, and land was owned by families, marriage was a way of ensuring intelligent and rational means of wealth transference and (depending on the status of the family) political alliances.  Theologically speaking as well, love was secondary in the definition of marriage.  In Luther’s commentary on Genesis and in the Catechisms, he understands marriage as an Order of Creation established by God that defines the human self in this age.  Here Luther echoed Jesus in Matthew.   

Luther writes that God designed the world to function according to three estates after the Fall: marriage / family (including economic or civil life), the Church, and the government to curb evil.  Everyone has vocations within these estates.

Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church understands marriage as both an something rooted in creation, and elevated by the order of grace.  Though I may disagree with the Roman Catholic definition theologically, the commonality between it and the Lutheran one is clear: marriage is a reality rooted in legal, creational, and economic relationships.  It isn’t about the subjective feelings or personal preferences of the participants.  People in the pre-modern world, of course, did experience romance and love (it’s a universal human phenomenon), but such realities had only an incidental relationship to marriage.  For perspective on this, read some of the medieval chivalric romances: the authors actually assume that love and romance are only incidental to marriage, or in very extreme versions, very nearly impossible within marriage.   

Things changed in the 19th century.  Since capitalism made wealth transference and generation possible without handing it down through kinship, western European and American society developed a new rationale for marriage.  This rationale was companionship and romance, and marriage was therefore redefined as a public ratification of one’s subjective romantic feelings.  After this, divorce became more common. Why?  Because if one no longer experiences affectionate companionship with one’s spouse then the whole relationship ceases to serve its function.  Hence, why not just move on?  Of course there were still legal barriers to divorce, but after the 1960s and the advent of no-fault divorce, rates of divorce went off the charts.  Moreover,  the theory of companionship marriage also made same-sex marriage and other martial arrangements thinkable in new ways.  If companionship and romance are the rationale for marriage, then why shouldn’t individuals of the same sex get married since they can obviously experience love and companionship as well as an opposite-sex couple?

This is why the same-sex marriage argument is so powerful in our context, even though at best it’s an exercise in the logical fallacy of “begging the question.”  In other words, what advocates for same-sex marriage already assume is that same-sex relationships are the equivalent to heterosexual relationships. Consequently, denying gay men and lesbians the ability to marry is an act of discrimination.  Same-sex marriage is a a matter of “marriage equality.”  Nevertheless, the question remains: why can the advocates of same-sex marriage assume that there is an equivalency and appeal to this equivalency with such success?  Because most assume that marriage is a public ratification of subjective feelings about another person- i.e., companionship marriage.  Since most heterosexual individuals in our society already assume this, such an appeal works.  If one, for example, believes that marriage is an Order of Creation and tied to specific heterosexual activities, then the argument doesn’t work.  Also, if one assumes that marriage ordains certain goods that are tied to the sexual diversity of the persons involved and that these goods remain good irrespective of the subjective feeling of the partners, then the argument also falls apart. 

But almost no one still sees marriage as an Order of Creation, and that’s why the same-sex marriage debate is not winnable for Christians in this society: we abandoned the correct understanding of marriage a long time ago. As a result, we can’t appeal to a model of marriage that even conservative Christians unconsciously don’t ascribe to. 

This is a revised version of thoughts first posted May 14, 2013.

Image of Luther and the Three Estates from Bryan Wolfmueller, “Thinking Like a Lutheran: The Three Estates (Quotation Collection Post),” World Wide Wolfmueller, July 30, 2016, https://wolfmueller.co/threeestates/.