As I mentioned earlier this week, some churches are appointing female “shepherds” in an effort to get around the biblical prohibition on female “pastors.” On this episode of The CBMW Podcast, we discuss what the Bible says about gender, the office of pastor, and why it matters. [Watch below on YouTube, or listen below on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.]
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Why I Do Not Favor the Moniker “Biblical Patriarchy”
Complementarian doctrine doesn’t require adherents to adopt a certain label for their view. It’s far more important for people to accept and affirm the Bible’s teaching on manhood and womanhood than for them to embrace any specific moniker for it. Having said that, there is great value in being precise and clear when thinking about and communicating Christian doctrine. For that reason, I still prefer and recommend the use of the term “complementarianism” to label our position over “biblical patriarchy.” I have made a positive case for “complementarianism” elsewhere. In this essay, I want to respond to some of the critiques in Doug Ponder’s thoughtful essay weighing the relative merits…
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The Innermost Meaning of the Cross is Penal Substitution
“Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him… But the LORD was pleased To crush Him, putting Him to grief; If He would render Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will…
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How Should Preachers Deal with the Story of the Woman Caught in the Act of Adultery?
I have been preaching through the Gospel of John at my church, and on Sunday I reached John 7:53-8:11–the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery. Without question, this is one of the most beloved passages in all of Scripture, but it is also one of the most poorly attested in the Greek New Testament. No version of the story appears in any copy of John’s Gospel until the 5th century–about 400 years after the Gospel was written. Also the language and style of the Greek stands apart from the rest of the Gospel. Linguistically, it’s like a whole different world than the rest of John’s account.…
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Is Marriage a “Submission Competition”?
Andy Stanley posted on X about what the New Testament requires of husbands and wives. He writes: New Testament Marriage is a submission competition. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Eph 5:21) “Walk in the way of love, JUST AS Christ loved us and gave himself up for us…” (Eph. 5:2) The only problem with this argument is that neither this text nor any other in the New Testament tells husbands to submit to their wives. Thus, egalitarians are mistaken to interpret “one another” to require mutual submission. The Greek term for “one another” does not always denote strict reciprocity. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.…
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Did Aristotle Really Say that Women Are Deformed?
Aristotle has regularly been pilloried by modern writers (and especially feminists) for saying that “The female is as it were a deformed male.”1 New feminist Prudence Allen, for example, argues that this statement from Aristotle among many others renders him morally retrograde in his views on women.2 It may be the case that he is guilty as charged. I do not intend to adjudicate that point. I do wonder, however, if his statement about women being “deformed” has been rightly understood on its own terms. The Greek term translated as “deformed” is peperomenon, and it literally means maimed or mutilated. Figuratively, it denotes something like incapacitated.3 But Aristotle’s usage of…
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How Rejecting Gender Essentialism Can Lead to Transgenderism
On this week’s CBMW podcast, we discuss how egalitarian error can lead to transgender error. In Christa McKirland’s chapter in Discovering Biblical Equality (3rd ed.), she argues that some transgender people need to discern whether sex-change surgeries or hormone therapies “can be done in submission to the Spirit and in order to become more like Christ.” It is astonishing that this perspective appears in what purports to be an evangelical work on gender. That is what we discuss below. How Rejecting Gender Essentialism Gets You Transgenderism – On this episode, @DennyBurk, @colinsmo, and Jon discuss a chapter from the egalitarian book Discovering Biblical Equality called “Image of God and Divine Presence:…
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Was the woman at the well married to any of the five men?
I’ve been preaching through the Gospel of John and have recently begun chapter 4. There is one detail in Jesus’ interaction with the woman at the well that caught my attention this time because I think it may be rendered incorrectly in most English translations. The Greek word often rendered as “husband” in John 4:16-18 is the Greek term aner. While “husband” is a possible interpretation and appears in most English translations, the underlying Greek expression isn’t clearly about husbands at all. The reason for the disconnect consists in the difference between the way Greek and English convey the concepts of “man” and “husband.” English distinguishes “man” from “husband” by…
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My Thoughts on the Recommendations from the SBC Coop Group
Last year, James Merritt moved that the President of the SBC appoint a task force to study Article 3 of the SBC Constitution and how the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M) figures into our cooperative efforts. President Barber appointed the task force last year, and they became known as the “Cooperation Group.” They have been working since last year and released their recommendations earlier today. I am grateful for the hard work of the committee and for their service to the convention. I’m also grateful that they were able to come up with a set of proposals that they unanimously approved. That is really impressive given current divisions within the…
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Can Complementarianism include female associate pastors?
Someone recently asked me a question about complementarianism, and I thought it might be useful to share with readers more broadly the answer that I gave privately–especially in light of recent controversies in the Southern Baptist Convention concerning women serving as pastors. Here’s the question followed by my lightly edited answer. Do you think complementarianism is a big enough tent to include those who restrict the office of elder/senior pastor to men but still allow women to serve in associate pastors roles? From a normative perspective, I think the answer is clearly no. If we take The Danvers Statement as baseline complementarianism, it says that some governing and teaching roles…
