God has preserved his written word by his singular care and providence, with great accuracy and in great purity. Despite its complexities, preservation by ordinary providence in both special and general modes (though we cannot always discern the difference between these two) seems to be the best theological account of providential preservation based on the biblical data.

Christians believe that all Scripture is inspired by God (2 Tim. 3:16). But what has God done to preserve his written word? In particular, what is the relationship between God’s work of preservation and the work of sometimes sleepy scribes, whose pens might slip, and whose parchments might disintegrate? The concept of “providence” can help us here. What does it mean to say that God has preserved the text of Scripture “providentially”? And what degree of textual preservation does a biblical assessment of the work of providence give us reason to expect?
What is Providence and How Does it Work?
“Providence” is not itself a word found in the Bible. But it is a theological term that sums up Scripture’s teaching about one particular work of God. This work includes the biblical concepts of God’s purpose (prothesis, πρόθεσις), foreknowledge (prognōsis, πρόγνωσις), and predestination (proorismos, προορισμός). The word “providence” itself (which has the etymology of pre-seeing) is sometimes linked to the introduction of God as “Jehovah Jireh” or “the Lord who sees/provides” in Genesis 22:14.
The thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas defined providence as God’s ordering of all things towards their end. He further distinguished two parts to this “ordering”: (1) God’s eternal arrangement of all things, and (2) his temporal execution of that order by means of his government of the universe (Summa Theologica, I.22.1). After the Reformation, many Protestant theologians basically accepted Aquinas’s definition, commonly discerning three elements of God’s work of providence in the world: preservation, concurrence (i.e., co-operation with secondary causes), and government. It’s important to notice that providence encompasses all things: in the most basic sense, if something is (or happens), it is (or happens) providentially.
Two Methods of Providence
Can we be any more specific? Here we may introduce two useful distinctions, which are frequently misunderstood or confused. Theologians distinguish first between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” providence. This distinction is about the method of providence. “Ordinary” providence perhaps sounds boring, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate something humdrum: the term comes from the Latin ordinarius, which means “according to rule.” In this case the “rule” is God’s own, which we find established in the divinely given laws of nature. In his ordinary providence God works through and according to creaturely means. For example, your birth was hardly a boring or everyday event, but it was very much part of ordinary providence.
Extraordinary providence, on the other hand, is outside, above, or against regular, creaturely means. We see this in the biblical miracles. When Jesus walks on water, that is outside or beyond God’s normal way of ruling over the physics of water. The really key thing to remember is that, whether God’s providence is ordinary or extraordinary, it does not change the fact that God is always working, and his work is always praiseworthy. All God’s works praise him, and should lead us to bless his name (Ps. 145:10).
Two Modes of Providence
A second distinction (found, for example, in the Westminster Confession of Faith, 5:7) is sometimes made between “general” and “special” providence.
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Haddad provides little in the way of evidence for her claim that complementarians rarely discuss abuse while egalitarians make it one of their main emphases. One might rather say that egalitarians often make the accusation that complementarianism fosters abuse. Unhappily, the questions for which our own age beg for answers engender little curiosity for egalitarians like Haddad.

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future” (11). Thus, quoting George Orwell’s 1984, Mimi Haddad opens the inaugural chapter of the third edition of Discovering Biblical Equality. Women’s voices, she claims, have been silenced throughout Christian history by those “committed to male authority” (11). Their essential contributions for the advancement of the gospel have been “marginalized,” “omitted,” and “devalued,” particularly by modern-day complementarians, especially in theological institutions (11). Haddad leans on Beth Allison Barr’s analysis of courses and curricula offered by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to introduce her subject. “Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s biased curriculum,” she writes, “not only damages the credibility of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary as a center of higher education, but it reinforces the Southern Baptist Convention’s sexism” (11–12). One of this sexism’s most iconic examples is Paige Patterson, who is reported to have expressed himself happy that an abused woman returned to her abusive husband and there endured yet more abuse (11).[1]
Rereading Church History
To redress this sexism, Haddad profiles prominent women in church history. Beginning with the early Church martyr, Perpetua, she sketches the biographies of Blandina, Crispina, Syncletica, Macrina the Younger, and St. Paula. She goes on to highlight the most prominent medieval mystics — Hildegard, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Sienna — and notes the remarkable stories of Reformation heroines Argula von Grumbach, Lady Jane Gray, and Margaret of Navarre. The real substance of the chapter, however, is Haddad’s turn to the stories of evangelical Conversionism, Evagelicalism’s Golden Era, and what she calls a period of Activism. The well-known names, to me, of Lottie Moon, Sarah Grimke, Amy Carmichael, and Sojourner Truth are joined by the less well-known Mary Prince, Phoebe Palmer, and Elizabeth Heyrick, among others. In all, Haddad discusses the lives and contributions of thirty-four women, if I have counted correctly.
Haddad’s list is an engaging journey through the well-rehearsed tumults of the modern era that finally settled into the entrenched “culture wars” still going on inside American Christianity. Women, of course, played critical roles in overturning the injustice of slavery, spreading the gospel abroad, and calling nominal believers to lives of holiness. Amanda Barry Smith, for example, “was the first African American woman to receive invitations to preach internationally” (22). Phoebe Palmer ignited the Third Great Awakening, and was, amongst all her other accomplishments, “certain that God had called her to preach” (21). Catherine Booth was instrumental in founding the Salvation Army. Amy Carmichael and Lottie Moon both died of ill health in the midst of their tireless work. Every single person Haddad names devoted her life to the work of the gospel. Each felt the call of the Holy Spirit to speak and write and many to preach.
How then, asks Haddad, did the church, corporately, not step into the fullness of egalitarianism? Why aren’t the pulpits of today full of women? “Women,” she writes, “opened new global centers of Christian faith in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but as their churches and organizations became institutionalized, women were pressed out of leadership” (27). This shift, she writes, resulted from the “fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the mid-twentieth century,” during which “mission organizations, Bible institutes, and denominations moved women into support roles to distinguish themselves from a growing secularization of feminism” (27). One might ask, at this point, what it was about secularization and feminism that caused such a shift.
Rather than delving into the explanations that these mission organizations, Bible institutes, and denominations provided, and still provide, for not placing women in leadership roles, Haddad asserts that “Early evangelical biblicism, which supported abolition, suffrage, and pressing humanitarian work worldwide, gave way to an anti-intellectualism that judged social activism and women’s leadership as liberal” (28). The withdrawal of “conservative” scholarship on this subject — which, one presumes Haddad means by the failure to accept women in pastoral and preaching roles in the church — meant that evangelicals “lost respected positions in the academy and culture.” “It would take,” Haddad appeals to Charles Malik’s 1980 speech opening the Billy Graham Center, “many decades to recover the intellectual and cultural leadership surrendered by fundamentalists and evangelicals after 1950” (28).
The fundamentalist-modernist debate regarding how the church should engage with encroaching modernity and secularism has been litigated effectively elsewhere.[2] What is most interesting to me is the variety of reasons the place of women in the church and the home was so contentiously debated during this time. Haddad unwittingly hints at one major factor without acknowledging the very great weight it held, and continues to hold, for so many Christians.
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If transgenderism is related to the sin of envy, then genuine repentance can produce the virtue of contentment. Jeremiah Burroughs’ The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment helps us understand how contentment is the opposite of envy. Burroughs defines “contentment” as “the inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, freely submitting to and taking pleasure in God’s disposal in every condition.” Burroughs explains that this takes “heart work within the soul,” “a quieting of the heart,” submission, which is “sending the soul under God” and “a gracious frame.”

Transgenderism is such a new concept that the 1973 Oxford English Dictionary that sits open on my desk has no entry. According to etymonline.com, the word came into existence in 1974 as an adjective referring to “persons whose sense of personal identity does not correspond with their anatomical sex.” This word combines two older words. The first is “trans,” which is derived from part of a Latin verb that means to bring across or over, to transfer, to cause to cross, to extend across, or to convert. The second is “gender,” which derives from the French word for genre and the Latin word for genus, meaning kind, sort, or class. “Transgendered” became “transgender” after 2015 to indicate the new idea: that transgenderism is ontological, or something that is true of a person’s very essence. Today, the psychological condition where a person feels like their personal identity does not match their anatomical sex is called gender dysphoria. And there is a strong push in our culture to agree with the transgendered movement that when one’s gender, defined as their feelings of being male or female, conflicts with the biological markers of maleness or femaleness, the feelings are determinative.
Throughout most of human history, however, gender meant being male or female. There was no distinction made between one’s biological sex and one’s gender. It wasn’t until 1963 that gender began to refer to social attributes that differed from biological sex. This new definition was used by Second Wave Feminists, such as Kate Millet and Simone de Beauvoir, to miscategorize gender as the cultural manifestation of biology. Second-wave feminists argued that patriarchal society contrived gender roles merely to degrade women, thereby rejecting the biblical understanding that God created man and woman from a godly pattern for a creational purpose. Transgenderism emerged from this feminist political rejection of the creation ordinance that says God made human beings male and female, so their biological sex and not their internal feelings determines their maleness or femaleness. Transgenderism, instead, argues that our internal sense of self is what makes us men or women.
Ultimately, that feeling of disconnect between one’s body and one’s sense of gender are a consequence of the fall and its effect on our hearts, minds, and bodies. In some cases, the feeling is driven chiefly by a biological problem related to genetics or hormones. From a biblical perspective, someone with a severe hormonal imbalance or chromosomal abnormality has a physical health problem, not an identity problem. Godly help for the gender dysphoric person includes biblical counseling and potentially medical treatments that restore normative hormonal balance. Godly support for the gender dysphoric individual understands medical problems as part of the fall of man. Such trials can be serious, difficult, and lifelong.
Not all who claim to be transgendered, however, are suffering from a biological defect, and even some who are cannot reduce their feelings to a biological cause. Personal sin is still a reality. How does that come into play? Transgenderism, from the perspective of Scripture, is related to the sin of envy.
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