The Making of Biblical Womanhood

Summary: Historical exploration of the modern concept of Biblical Womanhood. 

Right off from the start, I was not planning on picking up The Making of Biblical Womanhood. I am an egalitarian concerning women in Church leadership. I am for full ordination and full participation of women in the church in all areas. I do not need to be convinced that the modern emphasis on gender roles is modern or problematic. I have read fairly widely in this area and don't need to be convinced.

But there was a sale at audible and I needed to buy one more book, so I picked up the audiobook. I was frankly surprised by how much new information I learned. I think where The Making of Biblical Womanhood is the best is when Barr is pointing out the history of women serving in roles that today some consider inappropriate for women. By pointing out how there has been a constriction of role, or in the sections on the bible and theology, how earlier generations understood the bible or theology differently, Barr is rightly making the cases that while women have not previously been equally able to teach or preach or lead, the fact that some have means that it is not a universal proscription from various roles.

At the end of the book, I think it is unsurprising that many critiques are of what the book did not do. Barr is not primarily a biblical scholar and she does not primarily make the case for women in ministry from that background. There are plenty of other books that do that. It is a bit of a catch-22 situation. Many that are opposed to women in ministry cite the history of Christianity and a flat reading of a couple of passages as all that is necessary to make the case. To counter that case, there needs to be a much more nuanced reading of the scripture (which isn't the main focus here) and a retelling of the history of Christianity to show that there has been a history of women playing a larger role in the public ministry of Christianity. Barr focuses on the latter and the critiques are often that she does not do the former. But the former has many other examples and when those authors point out alternative readings of scripture, they are met with charges that, “well that is not how the church has historically read those passages and women have never served in that way.”

I have been a bit surprised at some of the responses to the book that make it clear that many do not know the history of the ESV and many have not previously been introduced to some of the problems of translation theory. If you are new to discussions of biblical translations, and how no translation really holds completely to its guiding principles, I highly recommend One Bible, Many Versions: Are All Translations Created Equal? by Dave Brunn. I also think that hearing others telling how they were convinced to change their theology around women in ministry is helpful and so How I Changed My Mind About Women in Ministry is a helpful book.

I am fully convinced that history is an essential part of how we need to understand biblical theology. Because many Evangelicals do not have a good grounding in church history, we do not understand how history and culture impact our reading. Reading the Making of Biblical Womanhood in conversation with Jesus and John Wayne is a good idea as many have suggested. But a suggestion I do not think I have heard is to read it in conversation with Mark Noll's The Civil War as Theological Crisis and Vince Bantu's A Multitude of All People: Engaging Ancient Christianity's Global Identity. Those two books take very different tacts, but Noll's looks at the various ways that the social issue of slavery was impacted by the way that people read their bibles and the way that their biblical reading and theology were impacted by the social situation. And Bantu's book points out how Christianity has been whitewashed in a very similar way to how Barr is pointing out that women have been written out of Evangelical Christian history. The combination of these things paints a fuller picture of the ways in which our Christianity needs to be made more complicated.