Egalitarianism treats men and women not just as equals but as persons who are equally fitfor various roles. This is a radical departure from the wisdom of our God, who made men and women different from each other and different for each other. And to speak or act in any way that ignores, diminishes, or denies God’s good design is to ignore, diminish, or deny the gender-specific blessings that God intends. 

If the state of Christianity today is disconcerting, the state of Christianity Today (CT) is more so. The magazine that was founded by Billy Graham with Carl F. H. Henry as its first editor-in-chief has  drifted from its historically evangelical roots toward theological and political progressivism. To be sure, CT isn’t alone in this regard. As one theologian lamented,
“You see the collapse of evangelicalism all around us. Pick up Christianity Today: Christianity Today is written by mainline Episcopalians. Go to Wheaton College: Wheaton College faculty is a mainline Episcopalian faculty. Look at Fuller Seminary: It is easier to find a creationist on the faculty at Berkeley than at Fuller Seminary. We [evangelicals] have turned into the culture because we want to be like them.”
Those are the words of Russell Moore in 2006. (Start at the 41:44 mark and stick around until 44:06.) It is more than a little ironic that Moore is now the editor-in-chief of CT. It would seem that not only have the times changed—his convictions have, too. Yet the Scriptures do not change. That is why I am saddened (though not surprised) to see an egalitarian view of the sexes all but cemented at CT these days.
For those who haven’t kept up with the gender debates over the last forty years: egalitarianism is the modern, mixed-up notion that because men and women are equally made in the image of God (which is true) they are therefore interchangeable in various roles within God’s world (which is false). Such an approach entails a quasi-gnostic view of gender that treats God’s design for men and women as arbitrary or superfluous. This contradicts the longstanding consensus of the church across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant lines, who, for over 1900 years, stood together in affirming that God’s differing directives to men and women in the Scriptures are rooted in God’s complementary design of men and women in creation. (This view goes by many names such as “biblical patriarchy” or “complementarianism,” a term that has picked up further qualification due to divergent trends within the movement.)
CT’s egalitarian trajectory has long been apparent to anyone who was paying attention. But over the last several years, CT has ramped up its promotion of egalitarianism in various forms. They’ve run articles decrying “toxic masculinity” (see here and here) but never toxic femininity. They have published articles discouraging men from asserting traditionally masculine traits and tendencies (see here and here). And they have interviewed Kristin Du Mez on evangelicalism’s alleged obsession with John Wayne.
CT has also run several articles exhorting us to transcend gender roles (see here, here, and here), which is a quintessentially egalitarian way of framing the discussion. Similarly, CT’s editor-in-chief (Moore) recently issued the call to rethink the evangelical “gender wars”, citing his frustration over the “ever-narrowing definition of complementarian [sic]” and his sense of the need for “rethinking who we once classified as ‘enemy’ and ‘ally.’” Meanwhile, other CT articles employ a strategy of dismissing theological discussion about God’s design for men and women as “a political battle that distracts from the gospel.”
CT has also hosted several I’m-not-that-kind-of-complementarian authors who wrote pieces like this one, which affirms the Danvers Statement while decrying attempts to faithfully apply it, or this one, which argues that those who hold to the church’s traditional view of the sexes are paternalistic. And in a move reminiscent of Screwtape’s strategy to entice Christians to bring a fire-extinguisher to a flood, CT ran an article worrying about a “narrowing” complementarianism in the SBC at a time when over a thousand SBC churches have women serving as pastors in open violation of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000.
In addition to all this, CT ran an article about using “preferred pronouns” with no substantive consideration of how lying to others is neither loving nor helpful (Eph. 4:15, 25) or interaction with Scripture’s clear “male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27; cf. Matt. 19:4). Instead, the article calls for us to “give each other grace” as people who are “figuring it out together.” (Which, in truth, is how people tend to talk when they’ve already figured out what they think and are just waiting for a sufficiently large sociological shift before announcing their stunning and brave conclusions.)
Comes now the latest barrage of egalitarian articles from CT, forming the central theme of their April 2024 issue: The Division of Labor. All the usual suspects are there: an article openly endorsing egalitarianism, an interview that calls the church to learn from the world’s diversity of viewpoints on gender roles, an article that attempts to carve a chimerical middle way between complementarianism and egalitarianism, and an article from a reluctant complementarian woman (Have men ever been permitted to write about complementarianism for CT?) who blames conservative Christians—not the gale force winds of the progressive zeitgeist—for the church’s setbacks. In addition to these cover stories, the issue also features an article on Mary Magdalene, which—following the work of Jennifer Powell McNutt, a Wheaton College professor and pastrix in the PC(USA)—equivocates the meaning of “apostle” in order to claim Mary for the egalitarian side of the debate.
Each of these articles probably deserves a rebuttal that roundly criticizes their methods and conclusions, but life is short and I’ve only got time for one. So here’s lookin’ at you, Gordon P. Hugenberger. Arguing that “the biggest New Testament passages on gender roles may have more to do with marriage than with ministry,” Hugenberger’s article is titled, “Complementarian at Home, Egalitarian at Church? Paul Would Approve.”
But actually, he wouldn’t.
Why Paul Isn’t an Egalitarian (And We Shouldn’t Be Either)
In the first place, Paul calls the church the household (oikos) of God (1 Tim. 3:15), that is, the family of God (cf. Matt. 10:6; 1 Tim. 3:4; 5:4). However, positing that God wants his children to live as complementarians in their own households but as egalitarians in God’s household (i.e., the church) would make God schizophrenic. For if men and women are differently directed in view of God’s differing design, then what is good and right in one realm would be good and right in the other.
Hugenberger seems to be unaware of the tension created by his view, as he devotes his arguments to affirming male headship in marriage (with a heavy dose of caveats and condemnations of “meanness, abuse, or even violence against women”) while denying male headship in the church. As I will show below, such a view is internally incoherent.
To advocate for egalitarianism in the church, Hugenberger marshals boilerplate egalitarian arguments, like the argument that ministry is a matter of spiritual gifts, which women possess as well as men (1 Cor. 12:7), or the argument that all Christians are called to teach and admonish one another (Col. 3:16) with “nothing in the context suggest[ing] that Paul has only men in view.” Next comes Abigail’s rebuke of David (1 Sam. 25), followed by Priscilla’s instruction of Apollos (Acts 18:26).
The next stop for Hugenberger is 1 Cor. 11:5 and 14:3, where women prophesy as well as men. This naturally leads him to highlight women like Deborah the prophetess (Judges 4 and 5), Hannah the mother of Samuel, (1 Sam. 2) and Mary, the mother of Jesus (Luke 1), all of whom “were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write various portions of Holy Scripture.” In this way, Hugenberger says, “Through their writings, these women have taught both men and women with inerrant authority down through the ages.”
There are two problems here. To begin with, Hugenberger is equivocating what it means to “teach.” The apostle Paul knows what he wrote in Col. 3:16, and he knows what he wrote in 1 Tim. 2:12. Thus, unless we were to conclude that Paul is too stupid to realize he has contradicted himself, he clearly refers to a certain kind of teaching (or perhaps to teaching in a certain context) in one verse that he does not refer to in the other. It is not difficult to make this distinction. The second issue is that Deborah’s and Hannah’s and Mary’s words—as wonderful as they are—were not actually written into Scripture by these holy women. Instead, they were incorporated into Scripture by men named Samuel and Luke. This is not a throwaway detail, for the Scriptures sometimes quote pagans (Acts 17:28) and Apocrypha (Jude 14), so the mere presence of words in holy writ does not convey special teaching status or authority on the person who first uttered them.
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I may not have visited previously but, during the shutdowns, I enjoyed the large air-conditioned sanctuary, filled with people of all ages in their Sunday clothes, singing, praying, listening, smiling, and visiting with their faces unobscured. At Easter, large groups gathered joyfully and at ease at catered potlucks when most mainstream churches required masks indoors, “distanced,” and did not share food. I am not sure how we are going to find our way from this terrible and strange period, with so much confusion and division, harm and loss, but perhaps sharing stories of our experiences may help us grow in strength and wisdom. I am grateful for the many outsiders, who have saved my heart and my health and continue to during this unprecedented time.

For most of my adult life, groups have strengthened my well-being – church services, singing groups, women’s groups, writing classes, book discussions, drum circles, support groups. When times were especially hard, I attended two religious services on Sundays – my beloved Quaker Meeting in the morning, often with my two children when they were growing up, and then an Episcopal service Sunday evenings at 5:30 PM with Holy Communion.
One could always show up at church, maybe on a Wednesday night or a Sunday morning or evening. In mid-March 2020, all that ended suddenly in total shutdowns as though a zombie apocalypse descended, as I imagined from the books my sons read in their adolescence.
I didn’t have cable TV so I did not get the constant stream of messages, but I had the Internet and Facebook and my partner, now husband, had cable, so I saw the messages occasionally. We had to stay home to prevent the spread of a deadly disease, said commentators on TV. We had to do this to keep the hospitals from being “overwhelmed.” And yet, the medium-sized ER department down the street from my house never had more than four to ten cars in the lot for two and half years. Schools were shut down, and students and teachers sent home. Something very strange was happening.
With measures so severe, I expected we would see more visible tragedy around us – for example, news of a close neighbor losing two family members to Covid, including their primary breadwinner, and they needed people to bring food, help with rides, and childcare. We may have received email messages from church pastors, saying that several church members died suddenly of Covid and needed meals and money, visits and yardwork.
I have usually been on such lists and usually signed up to help. We might have gotten calls from multiple family members or friends, across the county, reporting relatives dying from Covid. When I worked with Iraqi refugees living in the US through the International Rescue Committee (IRC), my new Iraqi friend had lost her husband and her successful business. Among Iraqis, she told me, every family she knew had lost at least one person in the war. Death was everywhere, all around them. They didn’t have to check the TV to see if it was out there.
If this crisis was “a war,” as the politicians and bureaucrats told us from their podiums, a war that necessitated shutting down our entire society, isolating terrified children in their houses and away from their schools and friends and extended families, then why were we not seeing dead bodies in the streets, red lights flashing? Why were we not hearing sirens throughout the night? Why weren’t my friends and family around the county and around the world – or my husband’s friends and family calling us about relatives dying? Asking us to help bury the dead? I have many friends and acquaintances over many years. So does my husband.
I chatted with my neighbor over our yards. She had to close down her business. I asked her if she knew of anyone who had “it.” She said she had heard of someone at the retirement community who knew someone who had “it,” and they had to “quarantine.” My mother, who now lived near me, was very involved with the local senior center, which has a large membership. I asked her if she knew people with Covid or who had died of it. No, she said, fortunately, she didn’t know anyone. Her sister in a nursing home in North Carolina had tested positive, though, and had mild or no symptoms.
I know people died of this disease, and, of course, we mourn all deaths. I simply was not seeing the “war” around me, as it was portrayed, as justification for forced government shutdowns of all human communities. I remember spring 2020 in Virginia as more glorious than most, with fresh abundance of sharper and more varied greens and lovely soft color, crisp clear skies, and practically empty streets.
I didn’t know what was happening. I missed my meetings and my churches. For addicted friends and loved ones, I knew that the fellowship of 12-step meetings was a lifeline. Groups  and churches were mine; most were not meeting.
I drove around one Sunday during the Easter season, thinking surely some churches would still be open. Maybe I could now visit some that I had wanted to but hadn’t because I didn’t want to miss my friends and the services I loved. The Methodist church? Dark with an empty parking lot. A Baptist church near my house? Empty. The old stone building of the historic Episcopal Church? Vacant.
I saw online that 12-step meetings were not meeting in person either. Only on Zoom. Usually there were several meetings a week all over town. I had attended 12-step meetings for family and friends of addicts and alcoholics at various churches over the years. For my entire adult life, in all the cities where I had lived, addicts and alcoholics, and their families, could attend a meeting every day, if they needed to, and sometimes more than once a day. All shut down. How would we get through this? When and how would it end?
In the winter of 2020, a friend told me that an AA meeting was held in a nearby park every day at noon. Craving group fellowship, I drove there for the meeting a couple of times and sat with them in the cold. Though I am not an alcoholic, I felt grateful they were there, huddled in coats with their hats and scarves.
I was not able to wear a mask for extended periods because of health challenges. All over the media and on social media, people proclaimed that there were no health conditions that made masking not possible or not healthy. What about PTSD in people who had been smothered or had had their face forcibly covered during an assault?  Or PTSD in people who had survived traumas yet built safety for themselves by being able to read faces? What about children or adults with autism whose learning and navigation of the world depends on reading faces?
What about anxiety or panic disorders that may worsen dangerously with oxygen depletion or with the inability to read facial cues? What about sensory impairments or mobility issues, exacerbated when people can’t breathe freely or when their peripheral vision may be impaired with long mask wearing? What had happened to our compassion and sensitivity to differences and to challenges?
Though most mainstream churches closed, in summer, fall, and winter of 2020 and into 2021, the outsider churches – and outsider people — sustained me. They became what we might call speakeasy churches. I searched the Internet and found a country church a short drive from my house and emailed the pastor and his wife.
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Written by Peter J. Gentry |
Thursday, July 13, 2023
Conway is right that to describe the woman as a helper does not indicate inferiority. She has strengths that match the man’s weaknesses, and vice versa. They will have to work as a team, but this does not rule out the possibility of the man having a primary responsibility or servant leadership in the relationship. We are getting a one-sided picture from Conway, even if the woman pays a higher price than the man in the task of being fruitful and multiplying.[9]

Chapter two of Discovering Biblical Equality is on “Gender in Creation and Fall” and is authored by Mary L. Conway. Much of her exegesis and interpretation represents a fair treatment of the text. Nonetheless, she summarises the teaching of Genesis 1–3 as follows:
In Genesis, before the fall, there was mutuality, equality, and harmony between men and women. Incorrect understanding and false teaching were influences contributing to the sin of Adam and Eve, although deliberate disobedience was certainly a major factor. The fall destroyed the mutuality and harmony between men and women, resulting in millennia of male domination in both the church and in marriage. In Christ, that consequence is undone, and the mutuality and harmony of marriage is potentially restored . . . if the church allows it (52).
So, neither male nor female has a leadership role in relation to the other sex or a responsibility that differs from that of the other sex in marriage. In the following essay, we shall consider features of Genesis 1–3 that suggest differences in leadership roles and responsibilities, although the term “domination,” in a negative or patriarchal sense, need not be invoked in any way.
We shall evaluate in particular Conway’s treatment of ’adam, the image of God, helper, the enticement by the serpent, and the consequences of human rebellion.
’adam
As Conway observes, the Hebrew term ’adam must be interpreted properly. She is correct to explain that “the Hebrew lexis ’adam is most often a nongendered/collective term for a specific human or humanity in general, male and/or female, unless its meaning is restricted by context” (36). In Genesis 1–5, this term shifts in usage from referring to humanity in general, to referring to the primal or archetypal man to use as a proper noun, i.e., Adam. Normally when this term has no article, it is used as a name. She does not refer to the definitive study by Hess that details this usage, which would have been helpful.[1] In 3:17 she follows a note in the apparatus of BHS to articulate the noun, although absolutely no witnesses support this in the entire textual tradition.
The Image of God
Anyone attending to the text in Genesis 1:26-27 ought to affirm as Conway does, as well as all complementarians,[2] that both male and female are made as the divine image and neither is inferior to the other — both are equal in being (ontology) and worth before God.
To explain “being made in the image of God,” Conway appeals to Middleton’s work as definitive proof that the implications of being created in Yahweh’s image are functional: “the imago dei refers to human rule, that is, the exercise of power on God’s behalf in creation” (38).[3] She rightly rejects the claim that being male and female defines the image of God. She could have strengthened her position by reference to our work in Kingdom through Covenant. Two clauses at the end of Genesis 1:27 are marked by discourse grammar signals as comments or explanatory footnotes that prepare the reader for the commands in v. 28. Also note the chiastic structure:

God created mankind in his imageaccording to his likeness:A in the image of God he created himB male and female he created them======B’ be fruitful and increase in numberand fill the earthA’  and subdue itand rule over the fish/birds/animals

Binary sexuality, i.e., duality of gender, is the basis for being fruitful, while the divine image is correlated with the command to rule as God’s viceroy. These observations from the discourse grammar of the narrative are crucial. They are decisive in showing that the divine image is not to be explained by or located in terms of duality of gender in humanity.[4]
Nonetheless, significant further light has been cast on the image of God since the work of Richard Middleton was published.[5] A merely functional interpretation is inadequate; we must view humanity in holistic terms as the divine image. The image describes not only function, but also human ontology and structure. In particular, it describes a covenant relationship between God and humanity on the one hand and humanity and creation on the other. The former portrays humanity as obedient sons and daughters while the latter depicts humanity in terms of servant kingship or leadership. Understanding the divine image as entailing a covenant relationship means that this applies not only to the human-God relationship, but also to the relationships in the human family. Not only in the Bible, but all across the ancient Near East, familial relationships were considered covenantal. This is why family language is used in international treaties (where the partners are called “father” and “son”). I have also shown from Genesis 2 that the image of God assigns the role of priest to humanity and that Adam must give leadership in this role.[6]
The image of God means that humanity is not only connected to God but must reflect him. Later revelation of the economic doctrine of the Trinity shows equality among the persons of the Godhead but also different roles in the economy of salvation. Why shouldn’t we expect this in the human family as well?
With regard to “naming” in Genesis 1–3 Conway asserts: “that the man (ha’adam) names the woman, as he previously did the animals, however, is also not a sign of the man’s superiority or dominance. Naming in the Old Testament is an act of discerning a trait or function or ability that already exists in the person being named, not a sign of authority over that person” (48). Her examples from Genesis 16:13 and Judges 8:31 are not particularly persuasive. She does not account well for the context of Genesis 1–3. In Genesis 1, God names entities and structures created on Days 1–3 while Adam names entities filling the structures created on Days 4–6.
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