RBMW: Question and Answer Time
This post is part of a larger series of posts by Dwayne Forehand and Mark Tubbs on the book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (RBMW). The entire book is available online for free here or buy it on Amazon. For a complete list of posts in this series Click here for the series index.
The second chapter of RBMW is in a question and answer format covering the most common objections of the complementarian position. The danger of a Q&A section such as this one is that the answerer is also playing the role of questioner, which can of course lead to the most diffcult questions being made, shall we say, easier, or for that matter left out completely. I am happy to report that in my opinion the authors of this section, John Piper and Wayne Grudem, pose all of the toughest questions, sharp edges intact, and provide serious, though concise, responses to them.
This chapter was also published as a seperate booklet titled 50 Crucial Questions About Manhood and Womanhood by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. If you have not already done so, check out Mark Tubbs’ review of this chapter which also doubled as his review for the booklet at Discerning Reader.
The topics covered are all treated in greater depth in the following chapters, but the framework of their exegetical arguments is first presented here. I want to quickly reference some answers that I found compelling, then zoom in on two that really captured me. Finally, I will open it up for discussion on any of the questions and answers from this chapter that you may wish to discuss.
Stand Out Questions and Answers
- #10 is a response to a question about why the command to “Submit one to another” doesn’t negate wives submitting to their husbands.
- #12 is a brief but helpful definition of leadership, namely servanthood, with the aim of combating abusive headship.
- #28 is an answer to the question Do you think women are more gullible than men? Like I said, they weren’t afraid to include the hard questions!
- #33 answers the question of how a church prevent women from becoming elders in a local church yet send them out as missionaries to foreign lands. In this response, as elsewhere in the chapter, Piper and Grudem acknowledge that their are ambiguities in applying Paul’s instructions.
I wish I could discuss all of the questions, but if I did this series would be over and this post would be 100 pages long! Now onto the two questions and answers that struck me the most:
Question 49
Since many leading evangelical scholars disagree on the questions of manhood and womanhood, how can any lay person even hope to come to a clear conviction on these questions?
My experience in the Church (limited as it is) is that many, many Christians fall into two bad categories when it comes to doctrine. Those two categories are the “doctrine divides/isn’t spiritual/isn’t important group,” and the “doctrine is for pastors/I’m not gift enough to understand it/who can understand it after all?” group. Piper and Grudem’s response answers both of these groups well.
Their response begins with a quote from the Danvers Statement about two concerns that led to the creation of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: 1) “the increasing prevalence and acceptance of hermeneutical oddities devised to reinterpret apparently plain meanings of Biblical texts;” and 2) “the consequent threat to Biblical authority as the clarity of Scripture is jeopardized and the accessibility of its meaning to ordinary people is withdrawn into the restricted realm of technical ingenuity.”
You’ll have to read the rest of the response to hear them really flesh that out, but their admonishment to “lay people” is 1) not to believe the lie that understanding the Bible is beyond them and 2) to see the good and right place that controversies serve within the body of Christ.
Question 40
Isn’t it true that the reason Paul did not permit women to teach was that women were not well-educated in the first century? But that reason does not apply today. In fact, since women are as well-educated as men today, shouldn’t we allow both women and men to be pastors?
Their provided answer is three-pronged. The first is that the “objection doesn’t match the data in the Biblical text” and then secondly that “formal training in Scripture was not required for leadership in the New Testament church-even several of the apostles did not have formal Biblical training (Acts 4:13).”
It was the third and last prong of their answer that was so radical to me. Here they reconnect Paul’s charge to Timothy to “not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man” back into the narrative of Acts with a special focus on the character Priscilla. I not only found the argument persuasive, but also beautiful. I often see the epistles as disconnected documents of theological truth, but to see them in the context of the story of Acts really made it come alive.
A Closing Thought
The vision presented in chapter 1 promised to be one that, while applicable to marriage and eldership, went deeper than that, into the core of masculinity and femininity. Given that, I can’t help but find it odd that virtually all of these questions and answers were dealing directly with marriage and church leadership. As much as I agreed with most of the answers given, I look forward to hearing the biblical arguments that support the vision presented.
With that, I open it up to you guys…
