Feminist Bible Quotes

I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even—or maybe especially—the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough.

Rest in your God-breathed worth. Stop holding your breath, hiding your gifts, ducking your head, dulling your roar, distracting your soul, stilling your hands, quieting your voice, and satiating your hunger with the lesser things of this world.

The lack of women among the twelve disciples isn't prescriptive or a precedent for exclusion of women any more than the choice of twelve Jewish men excludes Gentile men from leadership.

Miracles sometimes look like a kapow! lightning-strike revelation; and sometimes miracles look like showing up for your counseling appointments.

Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.

Let’s sit here in hard truth and easy beauty, in the tensions of the Now and the Not Yet of the Kingdom of God, and let us discover how we can disagree beautifully.

Women have more to offer the church than mad decorating skills or craft nights.

Sometimes miracles look like instant healing; and other times, miracles look like medication and patience and discipline.

Patriarchy is not God's dream for humanity.

I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as Deborah, instead of silenced as Jezebel.

God has a global dream for his daughters and his sons, and it is bigger than our narrow interpretations or small box constructions of “biblical manhood and womanhood” or feminism;

You learn how to love by being loved.

Trigger warnings aren't meant for those of us who don't believe in them, just like the Bible wasn't written for atheists. Trigger warnings are designed for the people who need and believe in that safety. Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from.

I won't desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won't confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath. I will breathe fresh air while I learn, all over again, grace freely given and wisdom honored; and when my fingers fumble, whenI sound flat or sharp, I will simply try again.

People want black-and-white answers, but Scripture is rainbow arch across a stormy sky. Our sacred book is not an indexed answer book or life manual; it is also a grand story, mystery, invitation, truth and wisdom, and a passionate love letter.

It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.

To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.

Many of the seminal social issues of our time - poverty, lack of education, human trafficking, war and torture, domestic abuse - can track their way to our theology of, or beliefs about, women, which has its roots in what we believe about the nature, purposes, and character of God.

One of my friends has a saying: “If it’s not true in Darfur, it’s not true here.” He means if we can’t preach it in every context, for every person, it’s not really for everyone, and so then we should probably ask whether or not what we are preaching is actually the gospel.

Nothing changes in a true, God-lasting way when we use people or push agendas or make finger-pointing arguments or accusations of heresy.

For instance, some evangelicals have turned Proverbs 31 into a woman’s job description instead of what it actually is: the blessing and affirmation of valor for the lives of women, memorized by Jewish husbands for the purpose of honoring their wives at the family table. It is meant as a celebration for the everyday moments of valor for everyday women, not as an impossible exhausting standard.

He called her''daughter of Abraham,' which likely sent a shock wave through the room; it was the first time the phrase had ever been spoken. People had only ever heard 'sons of Abraham'--never daughters. But at the sound of Jesus' words daughter of Abraham, he gave her a place to stand alongside the sons, especially the ones snarling with their sense of ownership and exclusivity over it all, watching.

It's a scary thing, a life-changing, paradigm-shifting thing, to honestly ask yourself this question: Am I moving with God to rescue, restore, and redeem humanity? Or am I clinging fast, eyeteeth clenched, to an imperfect world's habits and cultural customs, in full knowledge of injustice or imperfections, living at odds with God's dream for his daughters and sons?

So may there be grace and kindness, gentleness and love in our hearts, especially for the ones who we believe are profoundly wrong. The Good News is proclaimed when we love each other. I pray for unity beyond conformity, because loving-kindness preaches the gospel more beautifully and truthfully than any satirical blog post or point-by-point dismantling of another disciple's reputation and teaching.

It’s dangerous to cherry-pick a few stand-alone verses, particularly when they are used as a weapon to silence and intimidate, effectively benching half the church5 in the midst of holy harvest season when the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few.

We reject the lies of inequality, we affirm the Spirit, we forgive radically, we advocate for love and demonstrate it by folding laundry, and we live these Kingdom ways of shalom prophetically in the world.

who wants to live in an ivory tower when there is fresh air to breathe anyway? I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even—or maybe especially—the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough.

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature. Dorothy Day, Catholic social activist and journalist

One needn't identify as a feminist to participate in the redemptive movement of God for women in the world, The gospel is more than enough. Of course it is! But as long as I know how important maternal health is to Haiti's future, and as long as I know that women are being abused and raped, as long as I know girls are being denied life itself through selective abortion, abandonment, and abuse, as long as brave little girls in Afghanistan are attacked with acid for the crime of going to school, and until being a Christian is synonymous with doing something about these things, you can also call me a feminist.

If we minimize our gifts, hush our voice, and stay small in a misguided attempt to fit a weak and culturally conditioned standard of femininity, we cannot give our brothers the partner they require in God’s mission for the world.

I loosened my grip on my opinions. I entered recovery for being such a know-it-all. I stopped expecting everyone to experience God or church or life like I thought it should be done. In fact, I stopped using the word should about God altogether, I sought God, and he was faithful to answer me.

Think of the inconvenience of vanishing as it were from your friends and, correspondents three times in one's natural life.

I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath.

Stop waiting for someone else to say that you count, that you matter, that you have worth, that you have a voice, a place, that you are called. Don't you know, darling? The One who knit you together in your mother's womb is the one singing these words over you, you are chosen.

God’s vision is a call to move forward into the future in the full operation of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, with a fearlessness that could only come from him.

Often when a woman exhibits leadership, she’s accused of having that Jezebel spirit. I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel.

the Chinese proverb says, when sleeping women wake, mountains move.

When women are restricted from the service of God in any capacity, the Church is mistakenly allowing an imperfect male-dominated ancient culture to drive our understanding and practice of Christ’s redeeming work, instead of Jesus Christ and the whole of the Scriptures.

in Christ, and because of Christ, we are invited to participate in the Kingdom of God through redemptive movement—for both men and women—toward equality and freedom.

There is no more hateful person than a Christian who thinks you’ve got your theology wrong.

Really, theology is simply what we think about God and then living that truth out in our right-now life.

I’m pretty sure my purpose here on earth isn’t to win arguments or perform hermeneutical gymnastics to impress the wealthiest 2 percent of the world. I don’t think God is glorified by tightly crafted arguments wielded as weaponry.

Fighting the forces of evil – whether Black, gay, feminist, or fabulous – would take drastic measures, the hate-mongers told their followers. Books would need to be banned and laws broken. Some parts of the Constitution might no longer apply to everyone. And there were sections of the Bible they'd have to ignore, starting with love thy neighbor.

It seems that a whole lot of people, both Christians and non-Christians, are under the impression that you can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat, you can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution, you can’t be a Christian and be gay, you can’t be a Christian and have questions about the Bible, you can’t be a Christian and be tolerant of other religions, you can’t be a Christian and be a feminist, you can’t be a Christian and drink or smoke, you can’t be a Christian and read the New York Times, you can’t be a Christian and support gay rights, you can’t be a Christian and get depressed, you can’t be a Christian and doubt. In fact, I am convinced that what drives most people away from Christianity is not the cost of discipleship but rather the cost of false fundamentals. False fundamentals make it impossible for faith to adapt to change. The longer the list of requirements and contingencies and prerequisites, the more vulnerable faith becomes to shifting environments and the more likely it is to fade slowly into extinction. When the gospel gets all entangled with extras, dangerous ultimatums threaten to take it down with them. The yoke gets too heavy and we stumble beneath it.

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther's Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn't the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now—that is the point.

The curse that was laid upon Eve—her desire would be for her husband, and her pain in childbirth would be greatly multiplied—even shows us how patriarchy, subordination, and pain are part of the Fall. They were never God's original intent; they are a consequence of sin.

...I still don't know how to live my life except on my haunches at the feet of Jesus, eyes fixed on his face. Nothing else "works." No formula, no method makes me feel so fully human and alive as the radical act of living loved.

We can choose to move with God, further into justice and wholeness, or we can choose to prop up the world’s dead systems, baptizing injustice and power in sacred language.

At the core, feminism simply consists of the radical notion that women are people, too.

Even if we change practices or behaviors, we are seeking transformed hearts.

God may call you to lead the charge, or he may call you to a quiet life of profound consequence.

Live counterculturally when the culture, baptized or secular, does not affirm truth, love, faith, mercy, and justice.

You cannot be full to the brim with Christ's love and peace without spilling over into the lives of others. You learn how to love by being loved. You yearn to heal once you are healed. We receive goodness and bread, and then, of course, of course, we want to point every other hungry beggar on the road to the source.

And this is where I learned that sometimes our most holy mountain-moving faith looks more like spending our whole lives making that mountain move, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, unsexy day after daily day, casting the mountain to the sea stone by stone rather than watching a mountain suddenly rise up and cast itself.

Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing...

Perhaps, just perhaps, we can’t read singular verses or chapters in a vacuum; perhaps we can’t read letters written to specific people with specific situations in mind in a specific context and then apply them, broad-brush, to the whole of humanity or the church or even our own small selves. Perhaps we need wisdom, insight. We need the Holy Spirit. Perhaps we need Jesus as our best and clearest lens; we need all of Scripture, too. After all, Jesus is the Word of God incarnate.

Living loved, we relax our expectations, our efforts, our strivings, our rules, our spine, our breath, our plans, our job descriptions and checklists; we step off the treadmill of the world and the treadmill of religious performance. We are not the authors of our redemption.

As we follow Christ in the counsel of the Holy Spirit, resting in the love of our Abba, we no longer fear—for there is no fear in love. We do not fear slippery slopes, we do not fear each other, we do not fear change, and we do not fear our own selves or what other people can do to us.

It's the treasure in the empty field; it's worth selling everything to own--your entertainment, your 401(k) or your registered retirement savings plan, your home, your comfort, the sand where you stick your head, your last word, your right answers, your safe and predictable nice little life centered on avoiding heartbreak or inconvenience to your schedule.

I think it's misguided, and probably profane, to look at a diverse collection of books written over thousands of years—history, poetry, law, Gospel accounts, proverbs, correspondence, and other writings—as absolute literal instructions without context, as we understand them, in all cases.

Feminism only means we champion the dignity, rights, responsibilities, and glories of women as equal in importance—not greater than, but certainly not less than—to those of men, and we refuse discrimination against women.

I see hope creeping in, destabilizing old power structures. I feel it in the ground under my feet. I hear it in the stories of the people of God living right now. We’re whispering to each other, eyes alight, “Aslan is on the move.” Can’t you feel that? The kingdom is breathing among us already.

If a woman is held back, minimized, pushed down, or downplayed, she is not walking in the fullness God intended for her as his image bearer, as his ezer warrior. If we minimize our gifts, hush our voice, and stay small in a misguided attempt to fit a weak and culturally conditioned standard of femininity, we cannot give our brothers the partner they require in God’s mission for the world.

Women have more to offer the church than mad decorating skills or craft nights. I look around: I see women who can offer strategic leadership, wisdom, counsel, and teaching.

In a time when women were almost silent or invisible in literature, Scripture affirms and celebrates women.

I want you to wrestle with the Bible. Do it. Wrestle until, Jacob-like, you walk with a limp ever after, and you receive the blessing of the Lord.

Can’t you see? It’s all an act of protest, a snatching back from the darkness, a proclamation of freedom, a revolution of love. And isn’t that a miracle?

Feminists who accept the claim made in The Book of Genesis, and, that God is a he, need to make their minds up.

We indulge in semantics and slippery-slope rhetoric to excuse injustice. We read a few verses about women in a vacuum of literalism and prideful laziness.

Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic—work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don’t let the lies fence you in or hold you back.

Here is something I've learned about miracles: Miracles sometimes look like a kapow! lightning-strike revelation; and sometimes miracles look like showing up for your counseling appointments. Sometimes miracles look like medication and patience and discipline. Sometimes it's the daily unsexy work of loving people and choosing justice, even if no one ever notices.

The message sent by this policy is that if women are to be accepted into the exclusive ranks of men, then they have to look like men: buttoned up, stuffy, and no-nonsense. As if to show a little cleavage, to highlight a curvaceous figure, or to in any way appear feminine would discount, discredit, and disqualify them. I strongly disagree with this idea. I feel that women should wear clothes that suit their bodies rather than forcing themselves into unflattering men's suits and that it is feminist to make a wide range of women's clothes acceptable business attire.

I want to practice faithfulness and kindness; I am learning to fill my ears with the repetitions of wide eyes and open hands and innocent fun, holy laughter. I want to practice with intention, joy. I want to tell the truth, but first, I want to live the Truth. I won't desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won't confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath.

I’m a Christian. And until the day when the world automatically understands that to mean that I believe in the full humanity and personhood of both men and women, you can also call me a feminist.

One soul is as important as ninety-nine, worth leaving everything behind to rescue. If there is one soul in your care, one face in your loving gaze, one hand in yours, then you are loving the world.

when theologians read the Bible through the lens of the Exodus narrative, they are called “liberation theologians,” but their counterparts who read it through the Greco-Roman narrative are never labeled “domination theologians” or “colonization theologians.” Similarly, we have “black theology” and “feminist theology,” but Greco-Roman orthodoxy is never called “white theology” or “male theology.

The Kingdom of God works into us like yeast, and it grows like a seed in good soil. It enters quietly, holistically, radically, joyfully subversive, right into the core of our humanity, unfurling, renewing, and giving work to our hands. It shows up when we live loved and where we love each other well. And the Kingdom of God lasts.

I don't worry about the Table much anymore. Let's pray for them, forgive them where they have hurt us, and pray for those wounded in our collective cross fire. Let's be gentle in our dealings with them, but then let's get on with it.

When Jesus finished teaching in a synagogue one day, a woman called out from the audience, 'God bless your mother—the womb from which you came, and the breasts that nursed you!' Yet Jesus replied to this common blessing with 'But even more blessed are all who hear the word of God and put it into practice.' Women aren't simply or only blessed by giving birth to greatness; no, we are all blessed when we hear the Word of God—Jesus—and put it into practice. We don't rely on secondhand blessings in Jesus.

But I do want to take my life's work right now, today—whether it's a book I'm writing or a phone call I'm making or a meal I'm cooking—and I want to hold it all in my open hand with a Spirit-breathed prayer and intention. I want to be filled with the knowing that we are all a fragile universe needing love in this moment before I lay my gift on the altar and ask for holy fire to descend.

Even if we change practices or behaviors, we are seeking transformed hearts. We must know in our bones God's heart for equality and wholeness in the Body of Christ then live our lives out of that truth, with invitation and joy, as living prophets of God's way of life.

But a flawed and erroneous Bible is no longer the authoritative Word of God. And that low view of Scripture has successively given license to liberal theologians, militant feminists, homosexuals, and many others intent on assaulting the authority and relevance of God’s Word.

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther’s Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn’t the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now—that is the point.

Whether we admit it or not, as people of faith, we sift our theology through Scripture, Church history and tradition, our reason, and our own experience. Most Christians, even the most committed of the sola scriptura crowd, use these four pillars—at varying degrees of importance and strength—to figure out the ways of God in our world and what it means here and now for our walking-around lives. And taking this a bit further into postmodern territory, we can also admit that we are relying on our own imperfect and subjective interpretations of those pillars, too.

The problem with the Bible, the Qur'an, the Torah - or any sacred text - as an authority is that so much depends on how the text is read and the interests of the reader. The Bible has been used to justify slavery, apartheid, the suppression of women, the 'evils' of sexuality, the 'evils' of homosexuality, a male-only priesthood, the denial of any priests at all, the supremacy of the Pope, the irrelevance of the Pope, the authority of the Church, a denial of the authority of the Church, a feminist agenda, war, pacifism and almost every other position that people may wish to hold.

He loves us. On our own terms. He treats us as equals to the men around him; he listens; he does not belittle; he honors us; he challenges us; he teaches us; he includes us—calls us all beloved. Gloriously, this flies in the face of the cultural expectations of his time—and even our own time.

When our hearts, minds, and souls are deep within the reality of living loved, we discover that most of those "rules" from Sunday school are simply our new characteristics and our family traits. They are the fruit born of a meaningful, life-changing relationship—they are the flowers of life in the Vine.

Meanwhile, modern feminists heap scorn on women who want family and household to be their first priorities--disparaging the role of motherhood, the one calling that is most uniquely and exclusively feminine. The whole message of feminist egalitarianism is that there is really nothing extraordinary about women.

For me as a black feminist and womanist descended from enslaved Africans in the Americas, biblical slavery is a particularly pernicious and personal issue. Slavery in the Bible represents more than the ubiquity of slavery in the ancient world; it represents the theological bulwark on which the Atlantic slave trade rested.

We’re finding each other out here, and it’s beautiful and crazy and churchy and holy. We are simply getting on with it, with the work of justice and mercy, the glorious labor of reconciliation and redemption, the mess of friendship and community, the guts of walking on the water, and the big-sky dreaming of the Kingdom of God.

Throughout the records of the Gospels, I saw how Jesus didn’t treat women any differently than men, and I liked that.

Hey, we don’t have all the time in the world here to play safe little church club for ladies; we have a lot of loving to do right now, so let’s get on that.” It

We’ll stand before the piles of stones that used to be weapons, and we’ll build an altar.

mission is what “God is doing in the world through the church, and even without the church, to bring his creation to its consummation: unity and fullness in Jesus Christ.

I’m pretty sure that there aren’t actually any big things for God. There are only small things being done over and over with great love, as Mother Teresa said.

Me? I want to move with my not-safe-but-good God.

There is no more hateful person than a Christian who thinks you've got your theology wrong.

It’s a scary thing, a life-changing, paradigm-shifting thing, to honestly ask yourself this question: Am I moving with God to rescue, restore, and redeem humanity? Or am I clinging fast, eyeteeth clenched, to an imperfect world’s habits and cultural customs, in full knowledge of injustice or imperfections, living at odds with God’s dream for his daughters and sons?

I learned that faith, can in fact, move mountains. And this is where I learned that sometimes our most holy mountain-moving faith looks more like spending our whole lives making that mountain move, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, unsexy day after daily day, casting the mountain to the sea stone by stone rather than watching a mountain suddenly rise up and cast itself.

American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards aptly said, “The task of every generation is to discover in which direction the Sovereign Redeemer is moving, then move in that direction.

Jesus is building his Church, not only by constitutions and codes, but by shaping hearts and minds to his way of life. We are a family, not a firm, scattered and yet gathered. Biblical equality is not the endgame; it is one of the means to God’s big ending: all things redeemed, all things restored. Jesus feminism is only one thread in God’s beautiful woven story of redemption. Begin here: right at the feet of Jesus. Look to Love, and yes, our Jesus—he will guide you in your steps, one after another, in these small ways until you come at last to love the whole world.

When I tried to meet some impossible standard for motherhood, tried to earn my way to a weird sort of Proverbs 31 Woman Club, I collapsed in exhaustion and simmering anger, sadness, and failure. This was not life in the Vine, this exhausting job description; this was not the Kingdom of God, let alone a redeemed woman living full. This was the shell of someone trying to measure up, trying to earn through her mothering what God had already freely given. This was someone feeling the weight of unmet expectations from the Church and her own self and the world all at once.

For the sake of the gospel, women must speak—and teach and minister and prophesy, too. For the sake of the gospel, a woman must be free to walk in her God-breathed self as the ezer kenegdo in whatever vocation and season and place of her life. And she does all of this alongside her brothers, as the ezer warrior of Creation’s intent, to see God’s Kingdom come and his expressed will done.

I won’t desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won’t confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath. I will breathe fresh air while I learn, all over again, grace freely given and wisdom honored; and when my fingers fumble, when I sound flat or sharp, I will simply try again.

Christian feminists can celebrate any sort of feminism that brings more justice and human flourishing to the world, no matter who is bringing it, since we recognize the hand of God in all that is good.

Sometimes, by celebrating the evangelical heroes of the faith, we have inadvertently communicated something false: if it's not big and audacious and officially sanctioned, it's not good enough for God.

I was reading voraciously about global issues such as clean water, community development, war, human trafficking, economics, disaster relief, the AIDS crisis, unjust systemic evil. Meanwhile, church budgets made room for a brand-new light show and a kickin' sound system or a trip to Disneyland or a video venue in a saturated upscale neighborhood—all in an effort to practice creative-experience marketing.

Feminism gained popularity as a result of 'secular' work and scholarship, but the line between sacred and secular is man-made. Because God is the source of truth, Christians can still give thanks to God for the good works associated with feminism, such as the gaining of status for women as 'persons' under the law, voting, owning property, and defending themselves in a court of law against domestic violence and rape.

So here is what I see when we reclaim the church ladies: a woman loved and free is beautiful. She is laughing with her sisters, and together they are telling their stories, revealing their scars and their wounds, the places where they don't have it figured out. They are nurturers, creating a haven where the young, the broken, the tenderhearted, and the at-risk can flourish. These women are dancing and worshiping, hands high, faces tipped toward heaven, tears streaming. They are celebrating all shapes and sizes, talking frankly and respectfully about sexuality and body image, promising to stop calling themselves fat. They are saving babies tossed in rubbish heaps, rescuing child soldiers, supporting mamas trying to make ends meet halfway around the world, thinking of justice when they buy their daily coffee. They are fighting sex trafficking. They are pastoring and counseling. They are choosing life consistently, building hope, doing the hard work of transformation in themselves. They are shaking off the silence of shame and throwing open the prison doors of physical and sexual abuse, addictions, eating disorders, and suicidal depression. Poverty and despair are being unlocked - these women know there are many hands helping turn that key. There isn't much complaining about husbands and chores, cattiness, or jealousy when a woman knows she is loved for her true self. She is lit up with something bigger than what the world offers, refusing to be intimidated into silence or despair.

I won’t desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won’t confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath.

...here is, very simply, what I learned about Jesus and the ladies: he loves us. He loves us. On our own terms. He treats us as equals to the men around him; he listens; he does not belittle; he honors us; he challenges us; he teaches us; he includes us..

Our big and good God is at work in the world, and we have been invited to participate fully-however God has gifted and equipped and called each of us. One needn't identify as a feminist to participate in the redemptive movement of God for women in the world. The gospel is more than enough. Of course it is! But as long as I know how important maternal health is to Haiti's future, and as long as I know that women are being abused and raped, as long as I know girls are being denied life itself through selective abortion, abandonment, and abuse, as long as brave little girls in Afghanistan are being attacked with acid for the crime of going to school, and until being a Christian is synonymous with doing something about these things, you can also call me a feminist.

the multiple angry assaults on the “traditional family” are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the “covenantal family” of the Bible into the hated “hierarchical family” of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others. Still

And now for me, faith is less of a brick edifice of belief and doctrine and right answers than it is a wide-open sky ringed with pine trees black against a cold sunset, an altar, a welcome, bread and wine, an unfathomably ferocious love, and a profound sense of my belovedness.

So may there be grace and kindness, gentleness and love in our hearts, especially for the ones who we believe are profoundly wrong. The Good News is proclaimed when we love each other. I pray for unity beyond conformity, because loving-kindness preaches the gospel more beautifully and truthfully than any satirical blog post or point-by-point dismantling of another disciple’s reputation and teaching.

But again, this is not a list of rules; we are not reading an impossible standard—no. This describes our Jesus. This! This is our Abba. This is our Holy Spirit. He never gives up, and he takes pleasure in the flowering of truth. And when we are following in the ways of Jesus, when we are abiding in the Vine, these become our characteristics, and we become signposts, tastes, movements of the Kingdom to the North, a glimpse of true Love.

More than ever, it has become de rigueur to portray Jesus according to one’s own ideological perspectives. And so we have scholars (not to mention preachers) who celebrate the Capitalist Jesus, the Marxist Jesus, the Feminist Jesus, the Countercultural Jesus, and the Political Revolutionary Jesus. The Nazis had an Aryan Jesus. Among us still today there is a White Nationalist Jesus. Name your ideological preference and write your book.

And so of course we won't define 'biblical womanhood' well using a list of chores or a job description, a schedule or income level. After all, healthy God-glorifying homes look as different as the image bearers that entered into the covenant, biblical doesn't mean a baptized version of any culture, ancient or modern. No, I am a biblical woman because I live and move and have my being in the daily reality of being a follower of Jesus, living in the reality of being loved, in full trust of my Abba. I am a biblical woman because I follow in the footsteps of all the biblical women who cam before me. Biblical womanhood isn't so different from biblical personhood. Biblical personhood becomes a dead list of rules when it becomes a law to keep. If we have a long list of rules—Put others first! Be generous! Give money! Believe this! Do that!— it's a dead religion from a glorified rule book.

I think you have a great women's ministry when the women of your community fall wildly in love with Jesus. Church ladies like this are the overflow of women who are empowered to lead, to challenge, to seek justice and love mercy, to follow Jesus to the ends of the earth like our church mothers and fathers of the past. You have a great women's ministry when there is room for everyone. You have a great women's ministry when you have detoxed from the world's views and unattainable standards for women and begun to celebrate the everyday women of valor, sitting next to you, and when you encourage, affirm, and welcome the diversity of women—their lives, their voices, their experiences—to the community. You have a great women's ministry when your women are ministering—to the world, to the church, to one another—pouring out freely the grace they have received, however God has gifted them, including cooking and crafts, strategy and leadership.

We first take our everyday, ordinary life—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for us is the best thing we can do for him. When we fix our attention on God, we’ll be changed from the inside out. We’ll readily recognize what he wants from us and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around us, always dragging us down to its level of immaturity, God brings out the best in us, develops well-formed maturity.”3

The late Francis Schaeffer, one of the wisest and most influential Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, warned of this exact trend just a few months before his death in 1984. In his book The Great Evangelical Disaster he included a section called “The Feminist Subversion,” in which he wrote: There is one final area that I would mention where evangelicals have, with tragic results, accommodated to the world spirit of this age. This has to do with the whole area of marriage, family, sexual morality, feminism, homosexuality, and divorce. . . . The key to understanding extreme feminism centers around the idea of total equality, or more properly the idea of equality without distinction. . . . the world spirit in our day would have us aspire to autonomous absolute freedom in the area of male and female relationships—to throw off all form and boundaries in these relationships and especially those boundaries taught in the Scriptures. . . . Some evangelical leaders, in fact, have changed their views about inerrancy as a direct consequence of trying to come to terms with feminism. There is no other word for this than accommodation. It is a direct and deliberate bending of the Bible to conform to the world spirit of our age at the point where the modern spirit conflicts with what the Bible teaches.2 My argument in the following pages demonstrates that what Schaeffer predicted so clearly twenty-two years ago is increasingly coming true in evangelicalism today. It is a deeply troubling trend.

Millett was the author of Sexual Politics, her dissertation at the communist hotbed Columbia University. It became a cultural juggernaut when published in 1970. There, she decried the “patriarchy” of the monogamous nuclear family. The book landed Kate on the cover of Time magazine on August 31, 1970, which dubbed her the “high priestess” and “Mao Tse-tung of the Women’s Movement.” Her angry book served as the bible, the feminist-Marxist manifesto, of women’s lib.645 The New York Times referred to Sexual Politics as “the Bible of Women’s Liberation.”646

The Bible boils it down for us. It says that if we listen to God, we will go wise. But if we don’t listen to Him, we will go wild. And the consequence of increased wildness is increased pain and dysfunction. You only have to look at the history of feminism to see that this is the case. Many feminists had the best of intentions. At the core, they desired to find a solution to the age-old problem of sin and the pain of womanhood. But when they moved away from God’s design instead of moving toward it, they exacerbated the very problem they were trying to solve.

In some circles, using the word feminist is the equivalent of an f-bomb dropped in church—outrageous, offensive. It’s likely some people saw this book sitting on the shelf and figured they knew what sort of author was behind the words written here: a bitter man-hater arguing that men and women had no discernable differences, a ferocious and humorless woman, perhaps, and so it’s no wonder they reacted at the sight of Jesus alongside feminist like someone had raked long fingernails across a chalkboard. Who could blame them with the lines we’ve been fed about feminists for so long?

People want black-and-white answers, but Scripture is rainbow arch across a stormy sky. Our sacred book is not an indexed answer book or life manual; it is also a grand story, mystery, invitation, truth and wisdom, and a passionate love letter. I’ve abandoned the idea that my job is to get the absolute, 100 percent right answers on everything. And my task here, in this book, isn’t to silence all discussion or find the magic key that unlocks a “This is the answer! Case closed! Court dismissed!” answer for you. I want you to wrestle with the Bible. Do it. Wrestle until, Jacob-like, you walk with a limp ever after, and you receive the blessing of the Lord.

Over the years, “black theology” has brought profound new insights about race to our understanding of the biblical texts. “Feminist theology” opened our eyes to the prominent role of women in the Bible. “Liberation theology” focused our attention on the Bible’s liberating gospel for the poor and oppressed. Today, “queer theology” is illuminating our understanding of the role of sexual minorities in the biblical text. In each case, the theological insights of formerly marginalized groups have enriched the whole church’s understanding of Scripture. In the process, these liberating theologies have helped to bring many Christians into a closer relationship with God.

Some evangelical feminists say our ultimate authority is found not in what is written in Scripture but in developments that came after the Bible Another step on the path toward liberalism is found in a process of interpreting the Bible that is called “trajectory hermeneutics.” The word “hermeneutics” just means “a method of interpreting the Bible” (from the Greek word hermƒ°neuo, “to interpret, explain”). The phrase “trajectory hermeneutics” means a method of interpreting the Bible in which our final authority is not found in what is written in the Bible itself, but is found later, at the end of a “trajectory” along which the New Testament was progressing at the time it was being written.

This is the mark of a soul in pursuit of Jesus: we recognize him. He’s there in the stuff of the soul, the tendrils of the spirit. We’re like those who dream of home, but, like Anna, we know—the truth is there in our hearts the whole time. We see glimpses of him, and we have a holy hunch. He drifts like smoke or storms in like flashes of lightning insight or takes our breath when he appears even as a tiny baby in our own temples. We have these moments of transcendence, as if the thin veil between heaven and earth is fluttering in the most normal and ordinary moments of our lives, and then we can’t breathe for the loveliness of the world and each other, and just like that, our souls remember something; we recognize him here.

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature. Dorothy Sayers, Are Women Human

As I look hard at the Bible, however, and at the two thousand years of church history since the Bible's completion, it seems evident that God has accommodated himself over and over to the weakness and even the sin of human beings. He also has called his faithful ones to a similar accommodation. The 'already but not yet' tension is clear not only with the coming of Christ but also throughout the Old Testament story of redemption. God chooses a people as a vehicle for global salvation and then works with them in a convoluted trajectory of obedience and blessing, disobedience and punishment, first this way and then that way. God puts up with a compromised plan for the conquest of Canaan, blesses a monarchy he did not want, forestalls the prophesied judgment on both northern and southern kingdoms for generations, and even then preserves a remnant and reestablishes it in Jerusalem. God works not only through Israel but also through the empires of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Rome. God works not only through prophets and saints but also through Joseph's brothers, Balaam and his donkey, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, Caiaphas and Pilate.

The God of Exodus and the prophets is a warrior God. My rejection of this God as a liberating image for feminist theology is based on my understanding of the symbolic function of a warrior God in cultures where warfare is glorified as a symbol of manhood and power. My primary concern here is with the function of symbolism, not with the historical truth of the Exodus stories, with questions of how many slaves may or may not have been freed, nor by what means, nor with questions of the different traditions that may have been woven together to shape the biblical stories. Since liberation theology is fundamentally concerned with the use of biblical symbolism in shaping contemporary reality and the understanding of the divine ground, this method is appropriate here. In a world threatened by total nuclear annihilation, we cannot afford a warlike image of God. The image of Yahweh as liberator of the oppressed in the exodus and as concerned for social justice in the prophets cannot be extricated from the image of Yahweh as warrior. In Exodus Yahweh is imaged as concerned for the oppressed Israelites. Exodus 3:7-8 is a good example. ‘Then Yahweh said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters: I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.’ People in oppressed circumstances and liberation theologians find passages like this inspiring. I too have been profoundly moved by the image of a God who takes compassion on suffering, but this passage has a conclusion I cannot accept. The passage continues ‘and to bring them up out of the land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.’ Here Yahweh promises ‘his people’ a land that is inhabited by other peoples. In order to justify this action by Yahweh, the inhabitants of the land are portrayed in other parts of the Bible as evil or idolators (a term that itself bears further examination). More recently liberation theologians have portrayed these other peoples as ruling-class opponents of the poor peasant and working-class Hebrews. However that may be, the clear implication of the passage is that Yahweh intends to dispose the peoples from the lands they inhabit.

In the suspicious atmosphere of the contemporary Christian church, it is good to know one’s ground. When others label me and try to exclude me, as too conservative or too liberal, as too feminist or not feminist enough, as too intellectual or not intellectually rigorous, as too Catholic to be a Presbyterian or too Presbyterian to be a Catholic, I refuse to be shaken from the fold. It’s my God, too, my Bible, my church, my faith; it chose me. But it does not make me “chosen” in a way that would exclude others. I hope it makes me eager to recognize the good, and the holy, wherever I encounter it.

Like many other feminists, I used to carry around Audre Lorde’s book Sister Outsider like it was the feminist bible.

There are striking examples of the same thing in our own day. For example, the multiple angry assaults on the “traditional family” are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the “covenantal family” of the Bible into the hated “hierarchical family” of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others.

I don’t think this charmingly literal Feminist myth will catch on, because of Abendsen’s point two (the homosexual rituals of the Priory) which will annoy Gay men — and I use the word “annoy” as ironic understatement. The Rad/Fem crowd have an alliance with Gay Lib and will not endorse a book that makes it sound as if all wars and serial killings derive from a homo-conspiratorial early Old Testament cult. Now, if Abendsen had said a hetero-conspiratorial Old Testament cult, the book could easily become the Bible of Radical Feminism . . .

Let us be women who Love. Let us be women willing to lay down our sword words, our sharp looks, our ignorant silence and towering stance and fill the earth now with extravagant Love. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who make room. Let us be women who open our arms and invite others into an honest, spacious, glorious embrace. Let us be women who carry each other. Let us be women who give from what we have. Let us be women who leap to do the difficult things, the unexpected things and the necessary things. Let us be women who live for Peace. Let us be women who breathe Hope. Let us be women who create beauty. Let us be women who Love. Let us be a sanctuary where God may dwell. Let us be a garden for tender souls. Let us be a table where others may feast on the goodness of God. Let us be a womb for Life to grow. Let us be women who Love. Let us rise to the questions of our time. Let us speak to the injustices in our world. Let us move the mountains of fear and intimidation. Let us shout down the walls that separate and divide. Let us fill the earth with the fragrance of Love. Let us be women who Love. Let us listen for those who have been silenced. Let us honour those who have been devalued. Let us say, Enough! with abuse, abandonment, diminishing and hiding. Let us not rest until every person is free and equal. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who are savvy, smart, and wise. Let us be women who shine with the light of God in us. Let us be women who take courage and sing the song in our hearts. Let us be women who say, Yes to the beautiful, unique purpose seeded in our souls. Let us be women who call out the song in another’s heart. Let us be women who teach our children to do the same. Let us be women who Love. Let us be women who Love, in spite of fear. Let us be women who Love, in spite of our stories. Let us be women who Love loudly, beautifully, Divinely. Let us be women who Love.

in that one divine connection, God tuned the frequency of my heart to a new wavelength—to his heartbeat.

PATRIARCHY IS NOT God’s dream for humanity.

The curse that was laid upon Eve—her desire would be for her husband, and her pain in childbirth would be greatly multiplied—even shows us how patriarchy, subordination, and pain are part of the Fall. They were never God’s original intent; they are a consequence of sin.2

When Paul referenced that Adam was created first, then Eve, in 1 Timothy 2:13, he wasn’t assigning superiority to Adam based on birth order (if that were the case, animals win). No, he’s pointing out Adam was there first, so he had something to teach Eve. She needed to learn. She wasn’t inferior; she was ignorant, lacking in knowledge.

In general, according to theologian Carolyn Custis James, egalitarians “believe that leadership is not determined by gender but by the gifting and calling of the Holy Spirit, and that God calls all believers to submit to one another.” In contrast, complementarians “believe the Bible establishes male authority over women, making male leadership the biblical standard.”5 Both sides can treat the Bible like a weapon. On both sides, there are extremists and dogmatists. We attempt to outdo each other with proof texts and apologetics, and I’ve heard it said that there is no more hateful person than a Christian who thinks you’ve got your theology wrong. In our hunger to be right, we memorize arguments, ready to spit them out at a moment’s notice. Sadly, we reduce each other, brothers and sisters, to straw men arguments, and brand each other “enemies of the gospel.

Meantime, other “feminist bibles”had appeared, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex being the best. Which brings me to something no one believes. When I wrote The Golden Notebook it never occurred to me I was writing “a feminist bible.”The sixties feminists were not the first in the arena. “The Woman Question”dated from the fifteenth century. In communist circles in the forties and fifties feminist issues were much discussed. But the second sentence of The Golden Notebook is: “‘The point is,’said Anna, ‘as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’“This is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about, as its “structure”said. Everything was cracking up, and by now it is easily seen that we live in a fast-fragmenting culture. So I became “a feminist icon.”But what had I said in The Golden Notebook? That any kind of singlemindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness. (This may be observed most easily in religion and politics.)

Reformers preached the Bible, translated it into the vernacular, encouraged everyone to read it, wrote commentaries on it, and generally revered and loved it and taught others to do the same. All over Europe, people began turning away from the Catholic Church and toward Scripture. People had become desperate for the Word of God. They clamored for the written Word translated into the vernacular and for the Word preached

I learned that faith can, in fact, move mountains. And this is where I learned that sometimes our most holy mountain-moving faith looks more like spending our whole lives making that mountain move, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, unsexy day after daily day, casting the mountain to the sea stone by stone rather than watching a mountain suddenly rise up and cast itself.

The line between sacred and secular is man-made.

Our big and good God is at work in the world, and we have been invited to participate fully—however God has gifted and equipped and called each of us. One needn’t identify as a feminist to participate in the redemptive movement of God for women in the world. The gospel is more than enough. Of course it is! But as long as I know how important maternal health is to Haiti’s future, and as long as I know that women are being abused and raped, as long as I know girls are being denied life itself through selective abortion, abandonment, and abuse, as long as brave little girls in Afghanistan are attacked with acid for the crime of going to school, and until being a Christian is synonymous with doing something about these things, you can also call me a feminist.23

CALLING” TRUMPS SCRIPTURE Some evangelical feminists put a subjective sense of “calling” above the Bible Another liberal tendency to reject the authority of Scripture is seen when egalitarians claim that, if a woman has a genuine call from God for pastoral ministry, we have no right to oppose that call, and that call takes priority over any opposing argument that people might raise from Scripture. This argument is often made by women who believe that God has called them to become pastors.

Apart from a few sectarian movements, the entire Christian church from the first century until the 1850s agreed that only men could be pastors and elders, and the vast majority agreed that only men could do public Bible teaching of both men and women.20 From the 1850s until the 1950s in the United States, women pastors were a tiny minority, but over 98 percent of evangelical churches (over 99 percent of the broader Christian church if Roman Catholic and Orthodox groups are included) had only men as pastors.21 Allowing women to be ordained in significant numbers began with some liberal Protestant denominations in the 1950s and spread to a number of evangelical groups under the influence of evangelical feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Before the advent of evangelical feminist writings in the 1970s, today’s “disputed passages” on women in ministry were not thought to be unclear. Therefore this matter is much different from disputes over the end times or baptism or Calvinism and Arminianism.

D. CONCLUSION: SILENCING THE MOST RELEVANT VERSES BY SAYING THEY ARE DISPUTED IS ANOTHER STEP TOWARD LIBERALISM I realize that the evangelical feminist authors who say the verses on women in the church are “too hard to decide” do not think they are moving their churches toward liberalism. They may just be overwhelmed with all the literature written on these topics and so they conclude, “I can’t decide this.” But then they do decide it. They decide to adopt an evangelical feminist view, contrary to the sense of those passages that has been plain to millions of readers for centuries. In doing so, they take their churches toward liberalism. The position that says, “We can’t decide these disputed passages, so we will make decisions based on factors other than these passages,” is guaranteed to silence the most important and most relevant passages of Scripture on roles for men and women. When evangelical feminists claim, “Nobody knows what these passages mean,” no further reasoning or argument from these verses can influence their decisions. Their position is: “The verses are too hard to decide. They are confusing. We can’t figure them out. Therefore we won’t consider these verses anymore. They cannot speak to us on this issue.” But to say this on an issue where God has given direct instruction, and where churches have to make decisions every day, and where the whole Christian church has had widespread agreement until the advent of modern feminism, results in silencing the most relevant verses, and thus it is ultimately another way to undermine the authority of the Bible. Saying that such passages are too hard to decide is another dangerous step on the path to liberalism.

Some evangelical feminists claim that the Greek word authenteÔ (“exercise authority”) could mean “murder,” or “commit violence,” or “proclaim oneself author of a man,” or could even have a vulgar sexual meaning This chapter discusses yet another attempt by evangelical feminists to switch the meaning of an essential verse in the Bible, this time 1 Timothy 2:12, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” Some evangelical feminists give a different meaning for “exercise authority” (Greek authenteÔ), but in so doing they once again chip away at God’s Word, removing what God actually said from verse after verse of the Bible.

Calling God “Mother” is changing God’s own description of himself in the Bible. It is calling God by a name that he has not taken for himself. Therefore it is changing the way the Bible teaches us to think of God. It is thus changing our doctrine of God. Calling God “Mother” is the next step on the path to liberalism, and Christians for Biblical Equality and several evangelical feminist leaders are now promoting that step toward liberalism. Liberal Protestants have traveled this route before, during the 1970s. Mary Kassian, in her book The Feminist Mistake,16 points out how the three stages on the road traveled by secular feminists were (1) renaming themselves, (2) renaming the world, and (3) renaming God. The last stage includes “The Feminization of God,” and that took place in liberal Protestant thinking and writing in the 1970s.17

SOME COMPLEMENTARIANS HELP EVANGELICAL FEMINISTS BY BEING COWARDLY OR SILENT Another ally of egalitarianism is a large group of Christian leaders who believe that the Bible teaches a complementarian position but who lack courage to teach about it or take a stand in favor of it. They are silent, “passive complementarians” who, in the face of relentless egalitarian pressure to change their organizations, simply give in more and more to appease a viewpoint they privately believe the Bible does not teach. This is similar to the situation conservatives in liberal denominations face regarding homosexuality, where too many people who think it is wrong will not take a stand. As mentioned above, Robert Benne, member of the task force on homosexuality in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America said, the presence of open homosexuals at every discussion makes it difficult for folks who are uncertain or just plain nice to voice objections or even reservations about the revisionist agenda. Most church people like to be polite and accepting, so they often accept that agenda out of the desire to “keep the peace in love.”1 One of the leaders who helped conservatives retake control of the Southern Baptist Convention after a struggle of many years told me privately, “Our biggest problem in this struggle was not the ‘moderates’ who opposed us. Our biggest problem was conservatives who agreed with us and refused to say anything or take a stand to support us.

Among colleges, the evangelical feminist position is the dominant position at Wheaton College, Azusa Pacific University, and several other Christian colleges. Among seminaries, evangelical feminism is the only position allowed at Fuller Seminary, and it is strongly represented on the faculty at Denver Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Bethel Seminary, Asbury Seminary, and Regent College–Vancouver. Even among seminaries that are committed to a complementarian position, some have begun hiring women to teach Bible and theology classes to men, arguing that “we are not a church” (see discussion in chapter 11 above).2 But it seems to me that having a woman teach the Bible to men is doing just what Paul said not to do in 1 Timothy 2:12. And I don’t think such a position will remain stable for very long, but will lead to further movement in an egalitarian direction.

One needn’t identify as a feminist to participate in the redemptive movement of God for women in the world. The gospel is more than enough. Of course it is! But as long as I know how important maternal health is to Haiti’s future, and as long as I know that women are being abused and raped, as long as I know girls are being denied life itself through selective abortion, abandonment, and abuse, as long as brave little girls in Afghanistan are attacked with acid for the crime of going to school, and until being a Christian is synonymous with doing something about these things, you can also call me a feminist.

To acknowledge that there are such fundamental differences between the genders, and that men an women were designed for different roles, many not correspond with modern feminist sensibilities, but this is after all, what God's own Word says. God created men and women differently with a purpose, and His plan for them reflects their differences. Scripture is clear in teaching that wives should be subject to the authority of their husbands in marriage and that women are to be under the authority and instruction of men in the church.

I learned the difference between critical thinking and being just plain critical.

It’s a scary thing, a life-changing, paradigm-shifting thing, to honestly ask yourself this question: Am I moving with God to rescue, restore, and redeem humanity? Or am I clinging fast, eyeteeth clenched, to an imperfect world’s habits and cultural customs, in full knowledge of injustice or imperfections, living at odds with God’s dream for his daughters and sons? He calls his people farther and farther out into the fresh air for the wild and holy work of restoration, renewal, and redemption.

Feminism only means we champion the dignity, rights, responsibilities, and glories of women as equal in importance—not greater than, but certainly not less than—to those of men,

I call myself a Jesus feminist because to me, the qualifier means I am a feminist precisely because of my lifelong commitment to Jesus and his Way.

Jesus engaged her in serious theological discussion; in fact, hers is the longest personal conversation with Jesus ever recorded in Scripture. It was also the first time that the words "I am the Messiah" were spoken from his lips, and she became an evangelist. (about John 4)

The lack of women among the twelve disciples isn't prescriptive or a precedent for exclusion of women any more than the choice of twelve Jewish men excludes Gentile men from leadership.

Even though the word of a woman was not considered sufficient proof in court, Mary Magdalene was the first witness of the resurrected Christ and the first preacher of the Resurrection

The word that accompanies ezer is kenegdo, typically translated as "suitable" or "helpmeet" I'm sure we've all heard a teaching or two on the word helpmeet, focused on woman as a man's assistant as wife, mother, and homemaker. But as Carolyn Custis James insightfully points out (...) <>

There is something godly in the waiting, in the mystery, in the fact that we are a part of it - a partner with it but not the authors of it.

For many enslaved Africans, the Bible only became an avenue of resistance because it was one of the few books available to Black folks in a white, Christian-dominated society that prohibited Black literacy. Reading the Bible and applying its lessons of redemptive suffering, salvation, and struggle aided African Americans in their revolutionary fight against the “contradictions” of chattel slavery in a so-called democratic nation.

We cannot pretend the Bible is secretly a feminist document. The women who show up in Scripture as strong and independent often do so in spite of the religion that would otherwise hold them down, not because of it. We have to own this harrowing part of our narrative, our history, our legacy, or we simply cannot heal. That which remains suppressed and obscured can never be tended, amended, or transformed.

Trigger warnings aren’t meant for those of us who don’t believe in them, just like the Bible wasn’t written for atheists. Trigger warnings are designed for the people who need and believe in that safety. Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from.

understanding of his purpose? Chapter Three: Tangled-Up Roots • How did your parents’ stories or family history impact your understanding of God and your place

I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel.

She is loved. She is rising. She is awake at last, and as the Chinese proverb says, when sleeping women wake, mountains move. She is secure in the love and freedom of her God; she knows the voice of Jesus down in her bones. And therefore, she loves.

Should we be the least bit surprised when we, along with some biblical writers, find ourselves wandering beyond the words in the Bible as we think about what God is like, sensing that the God we see there made sense for that time but not necessarily for ours, and that the God we were introduced to in the Bible is not in every way the God we believe in here and now? My answer to that rather convoluted question is, “No, we should not be surprised.” God is relentlessly reimagined all around us. American Christians have reimagined God as feminist, environmentalist, capitalist, refugee, soldier, Republican, Democrat, socialist, and on and on. Some portraits of God I agree with more than others (and let the debates begin), but the act of reimagining God in ways that reflect our time and place is self-evident, unavoidable, and necessary.

Olympia offered wise advice to her friends, exhorting them to read the Bible, “Therefore seek Christ. Have no doubt: you will find Him in the books of the Old and New Testament, nor can he be found anywhere else. Pray to Him. Your labor will not be in vain.

abandoned our plans to church plant in this context, at least in the way we had been taught to do it in America. Instead, we embraced a new understanding of church and community, of vocation and ministry, of organic faith and missional living. We were lonely. And then we began to heal, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

After studying our Reformed forefathers on the family and male rule, Christians must consider whether the modern church’s departure from the teaching of these men has been more faithful to the Bible and has produced a more orderly society.

In 1993, Farrell published The Myth of Male Power, a book that has become known as the “bible” of the MRM. In it, he raises issues such as the male suicide rate, the draft, male life expectancy, male-specific cancers, and other topics that have gone on to become mainstays of the MRM. But while these are, of course, very real issues (the UK suicide rate is three times higher for men than for women; male combat veterans continue to face poverty and mental trauma; male cancers are devastating for those affected), the movement distorted and exploited them, weaponizing them against women and feminist causes, instead of working to support the real victims affected by them.

the King James Bible translated