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Let's begin with the abusive sexism that has unfortunately characterized our world. "For more cultures through most of history, the most serious deviation from biblical standards regarding men and women has not been feminism, but harsh and oppressive male chauvinism," writes complementarian Wayne Grudem.

Church history, of course, is littered with such evidence. We can think of Tertullian's notorious statement that every woman is an Eve, the Devil's gateway, the unsealer of the forbidden tree whose sin destroyed God's image, man. Or recall Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, who defined woman as a "misshapen man." Such views, invariably supported by an appeal to Scripture, have led to a pattern of male dominance that continued to the detriment of women in the new American Republic. Even the enlightened Thomas Jefferson held that girls were unfit in brains and character for serious study, forbidding them entry into his University of Virginia.

As historians have shown, women have hardly been inadequate to the mission of evangelicals. Both men and women, often motivated by spiritual awakenings and revival movements, have led the way in bringing about moral reform of society through abolition, temperance, suffrage, and the like. Within conservative churches, however, chauvinistic and traditionalist views of women continued to prevail.

One example is a 1941 book by Baptist evangelist John R. Rice, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers. Bobbed hair invariably led to bobbed character in women, Rice said. He argued that wives should strictly obey their husbands "in everything," as the Bible literally says. Women are not so much created in the image of God, Rice declared, but in the image of their husbands. Women should not even go to church if forbidden by their husbands. "But what if my husband instructs me to do something sinful like visiting the tavern, going to the picture show, or even having my hair bobbed?" Don't be concerned with such "imaginary cases," Rice advised. If you demonstrate a meek, submissive spirit, your husband will not think of making such outrageous demands but instead, as 1 Peter says, will be won over by the example of your witness.

Rice based his views on 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Corinthians 14, and Ephesians 5, texts that still undergird complementarian views of headship today, though I know of no complementarians in the current discussion who would draw the same conclusions from these passages that Rice did.

The gender issue is also framed by abusive sexism's polar opposite, the ugly face of radical feminism. Feminism covers a wide variety of viewpoints, including those of liberation theologians, mystics, eco-feminists, goddess feminists, women-identified feminists, post-Christian feminists, and some multiethnic feminists who virulently criticize other feminists as white, middle-class American or Western co-conspirators in the oppression of their sisters. What all of these views share, in addition to a severe critique of male domination, is the rejection of the authority and truthfulness of Holy Scripture.

The rise of contemporary feminist hermeneutics can be traced back to The Woman's Bible, a revisionist rendering of the Scriptures edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and published in the 1890s. The purpose of this project was to turn the Bible into a weapon in the struggle for women's liberation. Thus, Stanton boasted that The Woman's Bible would reveal to the modern woman that "the good Lord did not write the book, that the garden scene is a fable, (and) that she is in no way responsible for the laws of the universe … Take the snake, the fruit tree, and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, no frowning Judge, no inferno, no everlasting punishment—hence no need of a Savior. Thus the bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology."

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November 2005, Vol. 49, No. 11