When you come to Jesus “caught in the act,” you expect the full weight of the law to crash into you. It’s what you deserve. But with Jesus, you get what you don’t deserve. You are guilty but not condemned because he was condemned for you. All you have to do to receive that is receive that. Just open your empty hands of faith and accept his cleansing blood. That’s the scandalous grace of the gospel.

In John 8:1-11, we find the story of the woman caught in adultery. After her accusers drug her before Jesus in the temple, and after Jesus confronted them with their own guilt of sin, they turned and walked away. In verses 10 and 11, Jesus spoke to the woman for the first time, comforting her. It’s worth looking at their interaction because, at some point in our lives, we might find ourselves in need of comfort amid accusations, and John 8:1-11 shows us the kind of Defender we have in Christ.
In John 8:10, Jesus stood, looked at the woman, and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
Commentator Colin Kruse points out that this is the first time in the whole episode that anyone addressed the woman. They dragged her in, accused her of adultery, and demanded her death, but until then, no one spoke anything to her.
Jesus did not start with her sin. He started with her accusers. Isn’t that interesting—and just like him? When she answered that none of them condemned her, Jesus said something amazing in response. “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”
How can Jesus say this? Well, in a way, he could say it because now that everyone is gone, there is no real case against her. The charges are dropped, as it were. But there’s a more puzzling question. The scribes and Pharisees weren’t totally wrong. If the law is violated, doesn’t that demand punishment? Shouldn’t Jesus act justly? Is he ignoring the law?
Well, notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “You aren’t guilty.” The last thing he tells her is to sin no more. He’s not saying she’s innocent. But he doesn’t condemn her. Isn’t that interesting? Jesus is the most holy person that exists. He can’t overlook sin because if God overlooks sin, that is a real problem. How can there be any justice in the world if God overlooks sin?
Here’s where we get straight to the very heart of Christianity. Christianity says that we are guilty, but we aren’t condemned. How can that be? If we are guilty, we must be condemned. Justice demands it. If we are truly guilty, there is no way around it. Try telling parents whose child is murdered that there is no condemnation for the murderer. They would be outraged, and rightly so. So, how can Jesus say this? How can we be guilty but not condemned?
Perhaps the most amazing verse in the Bible, Romans 8:1, says, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Here’s how we can be guilty but not condemned. Only if we’re in Christ. It can only be true if Jesus takes our guilt for us. It only works if 2 Corinthians 5:21 is true. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Only if Jesus takes our guilt and our sin and pays the price for us can we not be condemned. It’s only true if Jesus is condemned for us. The guilt and sin don’t just disappear. The penalty must be paid. Someone must pay it.
We can only be guilty but not condemned by the law if Jesus upholds the law for us. Jesus can only not condemn this woman now if he’s going to be condemned for her later, and that’s exactly what he will do. Jesus knows she should be stoned. He wrote that law! As God, he does demand perfect holiness from his people. But as Savior, he knows that cannot come apart from himself. Instead of throwing the first stone, he will let stones be thrown at him. Instead of her being crushed beneath the weight of their blows, he will suffocate upon the cross under God’s wrath for her sin. Jesus didn’t condemn her then because he would be condemned for her later. That’s why Paul says in Romans 3:26 that God is both just and the justifier—he is just, and no sin will go unpunished, but for his people, he is also the justifier, the one who sets things right on the cross. That’s the only way this works. He can only forgive because he will pay the penalty himself. That’s the heart of Christianity.
Left before Jesus, the only one who really could condemn her, she finds a rock she didn’t expect to receive—the rock that will be struck for her, the cornerstone that becomes a new foundation for her life. If she found that, you can too. This is not a one-off story. One of the things that makes this so powerful is that this is the normative way Jesus works. We don’t see this only here in John 8. We see it throughout his interactions in the Bible.
Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus moving toward sinners and sufferers in ways that shock and surprise us. Jesus shows us that God’s heart isn’t trigger-happy to condemn. In Luke 7, When the woman of the city (likely a prostitute) poured ointment on Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair, and kissed them, the Pharisees were repulsed, but Jesus welcomed and forgave her for her many sins. In Luke 19, Jesus ate with Zacchaeus the tax collector. When the friends of the paralytic brought their suffering friend to Jesus in Matthew 9, Jesus didn’t even wait for them to speak. When he “saw” their faith, he told the paralytic, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven,” and the paralytic got up and walked out. As Jesus traveled and saw the crowds, he had compassion on them. He taught them from God’s law but bent down and healed their diseases (Matt. 9).
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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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When a woman’s case is twice as likely to be blocked on procedural grounds, it is difficult indeed to perceive “that our system is just.” Based on the data alone, it looks quite unjust. And the men who made that statement were aware that “perception [of justice in the PCA system] is essential to the moral and spiritual force we trust our discipline will have for the good of the church.” Can there be any “moral and spiritual force” for disciplinary processes that appear unjust?

Did you know that PCA church courts are more likely to block complaints from women than those from men? I suspected that to be the case, but didn’t have the data to prove it until digging through the past 49 years of PCA judicial proceedings.[1] I was curious if there is objective support for concerns raised by others in the PCA about how the church courts are serving its members, especially the vulnerable. For example, the PCA magazine byFaith did a write up when the Ad Interim Study Committee on Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault[2] published their report[3] earlier this year. One of the committee members interviewed for that article expressed concerns in particular about help for female church members:
“Women in the PCA must recognize there is more work to be done (a lot of educating to be done!) before they can have assurance their case will be shepherded well.”[4]
That comment raises a question: why would women want or need “assurance [that] their case will be shepherded well”? We could easily answer that question through personal testimony, but in my experience, the testimony of women carries much less weight than men. So consider with me some objective data to see if it answers why women need assurance their cases will be shepherded well.
In the last 50 years the highest court of the Presbyterian Church in America, the General Assembly and its Standing Judicial Committee (SJC), has heard 429 cases.[5] Of those 429 cases, 138 were ruled “out of order” on either administrative or judicial grounds. These out of order (OOO) rulings are based on the requirements of the PCA constitution, the Book of Church Order (BCO). The BCO provides detailed and often complex rules to which a case must conform in order to be adjudicated, including time frames for filing complaints, questions of jurisdiction and which church court is responsible, and who has the right to seek assistance from PCA courts. Once a case is ruled OOO, the church court is essentially done with the matter unless the member objects to the ruling and seek assistance from the next higher court.
So 138 out of 429 cases were determined to be OOO. That is a high percentage (32%), nearly 1/3 of all cases.[6] There has also been an increase over the last 40 years, starting in 1992, in the rate of OOO rulings. If we take the last 10 years since 2011, the average number of OOO rulings is 47.25%.[7] That’s quite a big jump from the overall rate of 32%. With that average and overall increase, one wonders if members of the PCA should expect future cases to have a 50/50 chance of being heard.
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[1] See Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, https://pcahistory.org/pca/ga/index.html. Data from 2022 is not available yet, I plan to update and revise my findings once the 2022 GA Minutes are published.
[2] https://dasacommittee.org
[3] https://dasacommittee.org/committee-report
[4] https://byfaithonline.com/pca-abuse-study-committee-releases-its-report/
[5] Calculating total number of cases is not straightforward. For these statistics I omitted cases that were either abandoned or withdrawn. Additionally, there are often multiple “cases,” “complaints” and “appeals” each year that relate to the same substantial matter. As much as possible, I counted the number of cases in accord with how the SJC reported them, e.g., if they grouped multiple cases together and ruled them as one, it only counted for one case.
[6] This is in the ballpark of a calculation from ruling elder and SJC member Howie Donahoe in a dissenting opinion from 2018: “In the 18 years between June 1997 and June 2015, the SJC rendered out-of-order rulings in 94 cases, i.e., in 36% of the 257 cases it received” (https://pcahistory.org/pca/ga/46th_pcaga_2018.pdf, p. 579).
[7] 2019 and 2021 are anomalous, with 100% and 0% out-of-order rulings respectively. If 2022 likewise had zero cases ruled OOO there might be cause to rethink the overall trend.
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