Tag: Christians for Biblical Equality

Ever since 2007, an award-winning journalist and radio producer named Deborah Jian Lee has been researching contemporary evangelicalism. She has been impressed by a change occurring among evangelicals—a movement that “ditches the Religious Right,” supports working toward social justice rather than political theorizing, and calls itself “progressive evangelicalism.”

Though the biblical basis for women’s equality has been accepted in many churches in the US, there are still denominations that teach gender hierarchy and oppose women pastors, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and the Roman Catholic Church.

The academic study of EEWC helps to make certain that the story of biblical feminism will be included in the larger narrative of multivocal feminism in the United States. Each book and each dissertation, however, offers only one version of how to tell the story of biblical feminism.

The answer given to women at this seminary is that “God expects wives to graciously submit to their husbands’ leadership,” and doing so involves “learning how to set tables, sew buttons and sustain lively dinnertime conversation.” Students in class mention cross-stitching, “freezer pleaser” meatloaf, and using the Internet to track grocery coupons.

One of the biggest impediments to applying biblical passages to sub-topics on abuse is that there really are not many passages that focus on women in general, much less women suffering at the hands of husbands or boyfriends in one-to-one relationships. In fact, many of the biblical reflection passages used in this book have male subjects.