Thanks. I just got it on Audible. I look forward to it. I am interested that an OPC wrote a book with that title.
Wow–“The Yellow Wallpaper,” which it alludes to, is frightening.
The Yellow Wallpaper - Wikipedia
It certainly is Randy! What part of Gilead are you in?!
I have no idea what you are alluding to 
Having grown up in a Christian minority in a conservative yet friendly Muslim country, and now living in a small town America with a sizeable Mennonite/Amish/Brethren minority, I am still rather frightened by that. A half hour ago, my 7 year old daughter told us she wants to be a doctor that delivers babies–given that she’s too nice to be President, I think that’s a great idea!
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A fundamentalist fragment of the former USA in Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
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Ah, yes. Classic feminist short story. 
All the “biblical manhood and womanhood” allusions are to John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s organization/publisher/conference organizer, the Council For Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which has frankly produced a lot of oppressive patriarchical nonsense and called it “what the Bible teaches.” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was their landmark compendium of complementarian scholarship. So Aimee is Recovering FROM that book.
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So, coming from a third culture and seeing my daughter grow up in an evangelical, YEC church, I am afraid of what she might absorb from that worldview. I have only started this book, but found the descriptions of this Piper/Grudem plan so disturbing and ridiculous that I could not listen to it while working at home. I have to listen when I have more time. I am hoping that it will help me be a better dad and Christian; and help me protect her from that sort of thing. I think I’ll buy a hard copy to give to my associates at that church.
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I read many, but not all, of the comments. Glad to see how much energy this topic created here. Up front, I am firmly in the egalitarian camp. One helpful resource for those within the Evangelical frame is Christians for Biblical Equality, an organization with a sterling credibility and some deeply rooted theologians both female and male on staff (www.cbeinternational.org). I’ve been honored to write and speak for them in the past, alongside my wife Carol Durkin Trott.
I suppose one might say evolution isn’t particularly informing on issues regarding “dominance” - depending on whether the species being considered is wolves or bonobo monkeys. Where humans are concerned, evolution takes us so far but (as far as this layman can see) no farther. It is as Walker Percy (in his ‘Message in the Bottle’) puts it. Evolution takes us up to a point where something mysterious happens - some combination of genetics and spirit that allows language to bloom, thought to be constructed, moral frameworks to come into existence. The monkeyboy becomes a true self, self reflecting and self-questioning and self-justifying (sometimes at the same time). Percy suggests, as does Genesis, that some sort of catastrophe occurs between humans and maker, throwing us all back onto our lonely selves, ghosts in the modern age where all is given except the one answer to who we, as individuals, are.
So how does that impact a discussion on “roles” gender-wise? My own very non-expert (except as far as prayerful experience takes finite me) belief is that a woman in Christ can do whatever she is gifted and willing to do. That includes teaching, leading, working on a construction crew, sewing baby clothes, being relationally in every single way equal to her mate in marriage. I embrace evolution because it is science. I embrace my wife as my equal, sometimes my leader and mentor, always my sister as well as lover. I cannot view other women as being in any way subservient (needing to as the SBC rather ungracefully puts it “submit herself graciously” to her husband or to any other male authority on the basis of his maleness).
I am hopeful we see more and more biblically rooted Christians walk away from this allegedly “Complementarian” viewpoint to embrace an Agape valuation where there is “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free , nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
That second book looks very good!
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I think it will be. I’ve been seeing a bunch of snippets posted because I’m friends with some of the people on the launch team.
I would beg being very slow and cautious in leveling the charge if “hypocracy”, especially as you rightly notice that the primary motivation seems to be one of following Scripture.
For instance, even in this case, I often notice that the men and women who embrace different gender roles for leadership and public teaching offices, as based on the explicit instructions of a scripture, also try to follow Scripture’s guidance in encouraging women to teach even ordained men in certain contexts, and in mission work, and they use the references to Priscilla’s (private) instruction to Apollos and the fact that Priscilla accompanied Paul on his missionary journey, and is described by Paul (the same one saying women should be silent) as a “fellow worker”.
Generosity and charity would suggest that we recognize that these brothers and sisters are trying to follow scriptures guidance and example in balance… following Scripture in having women deeply and actively involved in the mission field, in small group teaching, in training indigenous pastors, and the like, outside of a formal congregation, while simultaneously trying to follow Scriptures’s multiple explicit commands about women speaking or having authority in the public congregation, in the formal office of elder, etc.
Otherwise, it may start to sound like your charge of “hypocrisy” must really be leveled at Paul himself… bringing Priscilla on the mission field and allowing her to do great teaching and work and calling her a “fellow worker”, while simultaneously maintaining his stance of women being silent in the congregation and limiting the ordained office of elder/overseer to men.
I’m glad that people are motivated to follow scripture. But so often the “biblical view of women” is reduced to a few prooftexts from Paul’s letters which give us only one side of the conversation and lack much for detail on what actual problems Paul is addressing. I try to look at the bigger picture too. Anyway, all I was saying is that yes, I notice that many women missionaries, especially single women, end up teaching and serving in other positions that any church I’ve ever attended would probably not have allowed. Perhaps your observations have been different, but that is what I see, as one who has been very much affected by ideas about what women are “allowed” to do within church walls.
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I hope this thread is ok to post this in. I am happy to move it if not. Thanks.
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