Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2009 Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, 29.1. It has been reposted here for convenience with slight edits. 

“Why did I spend so much time on this?”

On October 5, 1979, I was a third-year professor at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I was surprised to see that Christianity Today had come out with an article written by my neighbors just six houses down the street, Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen (Berkeley taught New Testament at Bethel Seminary and Alvera taught journalism at Bethel College). Their article was titled, “Does male dominance tarnish our translations?” They argued that the Greek word kephalē (literally, “head”) often means “source” but never “authority,” so that “the husband is the head of the wife” (Eph 5:23; cf. also 1 Cor 11:3) means “the husband is the source of the wife” and does not have authority over his wife. I thought the argument was wrong, but I didn’t have the time or material at hand to answer it. Then, a little later, Dr. George Knight came to Bethel College to lecture, and I said to him in passing, “George, you really need to write an article answering Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen’s claim that ‘head’ means ‘source.’” “No,” said George, “you need to write it.” Little did I know that that encouragement would affect the next thirty years of my life.

Six years later, in 1985, I published a twenty-one-page article in Trinity Journal, “Does kephalē Mean ‘Source’ or ‘Authority Over’? An Examination of 2,336 Examples”(2) —examples which took me some time to look up in ancient Greek literature! There were several responses from egalitarians to that twenty-one-page article. So, five years later, in 1990, I published a seventy-page article in Trinity Journal,(3) responding to other studies on the meaning of kephalē and showing that there were now over fifty examples where it meant “someone in authority,” or “a leader,” but never an instance where someone is said to be the “head” of someone else and was not in the position of authority over that person. Never.

But there were still more responses, and more people disagreeing. So eleven years after that, in 2001, I published another article, forty-one pages in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, on “The Meaning of kephalē (“Head”): An Evaluation of New Evidence, Real and Alleged.”(4) So that’s 132 pages of lexicographical research published in academic journals on one word in the Bible. And these articles spanned sixteen years of my life.

Why did I do this? Because it was a crucial word in a crucial verse in a crucial issue. Destroying the meaning “authority over” for kephalē is crucial to the egalitarian argument. If in fact the Bible says in Eph 5:23 that “the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church,” and if head means, as I am convinced it does, “person in position of authority,” then the egalitarian cause is lost. That is because that verse anchors the husband’s headship in the headship of Christ over the church, which is not something culturally variable. So the egalitarians cannot lose this argument, because if they lose on the meaning of that word, then they have lost their fundamental argument with regard to manhood and womanhood in marriage. Why did I do this? So that commentaries, Greek lexicons, and Bible translations in future generations will accurately teach and translate a crucial verse in the word of God. If head equals “authority over” as has been shown now in over sixty examples, then the ballgame is over. And even today, twenty-four years after my first article, there are still zero examples where a person is called “head” of someone else and is not in authority over that person. Zero. That kind of evidence would normally settle the debate forever in ordinary exegesis of ordinary verses. But this is not an ordinary verse. Because the evangelical feminists cannot lose this verse, they continue to ignore or deny the evidence. I think that is very significant. It now seems to me that, for some people in this dispute who have thought through the issue and are committed to the egalitarian cause and have the academic knowledge to evaluate the evidence for themselves, what the Bible says on this question is not decisive. And, sadly, InterVarsity Press (USA), in spite of being given evidence of multiple factual errors in Catherine Kroeger’s article on “head” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters,(5) still continues to refuse to make any changes to the article. That’s the history of one issue. But what about CBMW, and how did that issue affect CBMW?

CBMW: The Early History

When I published that first article on head in 1985 it led to an invitation to be a plenary session speaker in 1986 at the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) meeting in Atlanta. The theme was “Manhood and Womanhood in Biblical and Theological Perspectives.” The program chairman (Walter Dunnett) had invited six plenary session speakers. I was the complementarian—that is, the token complementarian. The other five were egalitarians (Gilbert Bilezekian, Catherine Kroeger, Walter Liefeld, Aida Spencer, and David Scholer). And the program was set up so that all of the plenary session speakers would respond to the other plenary sessions, so it was a five-to-one situation. Quite exciting!

But the imbalance in the program was certainly not representative of the membership of the ETS as a whole, and several members were troubled about it. Wayne House (then at Dallas Seminary) and I talked over the situation, and we then met secretly one evening with several others (including John Hughes, Jim Borland, and I think Ken Sarles and Sig Schatzmann) who shared our concerns. We all were saying that we had to do something because egalitarians were taking over the ETS in a way contrary to the convictions of the vast majority of the members of ETS. So I made an announcement at the end of the ETS meeting that if any others would want to join us in a new organization dedicated to upholding both equality and differences between men and women in marriage and the church, they should please talk to Wayne House or me. (Gleason Archer was still president at that last session, and he gladly let me make the announcement.)

Those events then led to a meeting a month later in Dallas with Wayne House and me, as well as John Piper, Dorothy Patterson, James Borland, Susan Foh, Ken Sarles, and perhaps some others. Wayne House chaired the meeting, and we drafted a statement on principles for manhood and womanhood. In fact, I still have the handwritten page on which I wrote some ideas for a statement while on the plane from Chicago to Dallas (echoes of the eventual Danvers Statement can be heard in these handwritten notes):

(1) Adam & Eve equally in God’s image.

(2) Adam’s headship in family & human race: established by God before the fall, not a result of sin.

(3) The fall introduced strain in relationships—sin—tendency for women to try to usurp authority over men, tendency for men to rule harshly and selfishly. And so on.

Point (4) speaks of Old Testament 14 JBMW | Spring 2009 history, (5) of redemption in Christ and the family, (6) of the New Testament church, (7) of these roles as part of the created order, and so forth. It was the bare bones of the Danvers Statement, and the group in Dallas modified and added to it (especially using substantial wording that John Piper supplied). We left Dallas encouraged that God was guiding our work.

We next met at the Sheraton Ferncroft Resort in Danvers, Massachusetts, on December 2-3, 1987, just prior to the 1987 ETS meeting at Gordon-Conwell Seminary. We finalized our statement, called it the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and voted to incorporate as the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. CBMW was off and running.

But we were still meeting secretly in 1987, not posting the meeting anywhere, not letting anyone know what we were doing. We just didn’t want to get involved in controversy and argument while we were still getting organized and deciding what exactly we would stand for.

Dr. Lane Dennis, the President of Crossway Books, was also at that meeting, and sometime that weekend, at that same hotel (the Sheraton Ferncroft in Danvers), he talked to John Piper and me about John’s idea from two years earlier, the idea of editing a book of essays on manhood and womanhood. That idea eventually became Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. (Lane Dennis had also been in on the meeting that finalized the Danvers Statement.)

We also talked during those meetings about the future of the ETS, and how important it was to show up at the ETS business meeting and vote for candidates for the nominating committee who held to our principles. So we began to show up and vote every year, and I think that has had a positive influence on the officers elected year after year to head the ETS.

(When I reflect on the fact that the incorporation of CBMW, the finalizing of the Danvers Statement, and the agreement to produce Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, all came out of that one meeting at the Sheraton Ferncroft Resort, I think it is one of the Lord’s pleasant acts of providence that twelve years later, on November 17, 1999, I had the honor of giving the ETS presidential address in that very same hotel. Those were the only two occasions in the sixty-year history of the ETS that the Sheraton Ferncroft was the primary hotel for the conference.)

Going Public with CBMW

For those first two years we were still a very secret, by-invitation-only group. But by December, 1988, at the ETS meeting at Wheaton College, we were ready to go public. We announced the formation of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) and handed out brochures. We even had a press conference (Christianity Today showed up, but nobody else). We coined the term “complementarian” as a one-word representation of our viewpoint. So we were now known to the ETS, but not yet in the general evangelical world.

However, at that same meeting, Dr. S. Lewis Johnson (who has since gone to be with the Lord) told me he thought he could come up with a gift from some people at his church in Texas who would pay for a full-page ad in Christianity Today. To this day I don’t know if Dr. Johnson paid for that personally, or somebody else. But, he came up with $5000 and we placed an order for the ad, which was two full pages.

We were thrilled when the January 13, 1989, issue of Christianity Today arrived. They had given us the two center pages, and the magazine just fell open to that spot! The ad proclaimed, “We are pleased to announce the formation of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.” It was very text-heavy and included some questions and answers, the list of Council Members and Board of Reference members, and the entire Danvers Statement! No photos at all! But there was a clip-out coupon to mail in (this was pre-e-mail days). That one ad brought over 1000 responses, which, we were told, astounded the people at Christianity Today when they heard about it—that a single ad that was so text-heavy would bring that much response. People would write us saying, “I wept when I saw your ad. I didn’t know that people held this any more.” We began to sense that this was a big issue and that JBMW | Spring 2009 15 God was surely blessing our work.

In 1991 Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, with twenty-six essays by twenty-two different authors, came out from Crossway Books. Crossway has been an ally for CBMW from day one. In 1992 we found out that Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, by a vote of readers, was chosen as Christianity Today “Book of the Year,” meaning the book that had had the most significant influence on the evangelical world in the previous year—once again, a surprising blessing from the Lord! (I heard later that there was some frustration on the part of some staff at Christianity Today as they counted the ballots that poured in by mail, because our book did not represent a viewpoint that most of them favored. I don’t know if there is a causal relationship, but it was that year that they decided to stop taking readers’ votes for “Book of the Year,” and that honor has since been decided by a committee of experts that they have selected.)

In 1994, three members of CBMW met privately with three members of Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), the egalitarian organization (at their request). Dr. Ray Ortlund (the president at that time), Mary Kassian, and I met with three of their leaders in Chicago to talk about where we could come to points of agreement.

As we talked, we overcame some misunderstandings on both sides, and the Lord gave a measure of blessing to that time. As we talked, there seemed to be agreement that one thing we could do together would be for both organizations to agree publicly that abuse within marriage is wrong. So we agreed to work on a joint statement on abuse. After the meeting, Mary Kassian drafted such a statement, and we got some feedback from the CBE people, and we were going to issue it. But, then on October 10, 1994, we received a letter from them saying that their board had considered it, and they would not join with us in the joint statement opposing abuse. I was shocked and disappointed when the letter came. I wondered then if their highest goal in this issue was to be faithful to Scripture above all and stop the horrors of abuse, or was to promote the egalitarian agenda. We ended up publishing the statement ourselves in CBMW NEWS (later renamed The Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood).

The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy

A new chapter for CBMW began in November 1996 at the ETS meeting in Jackson, Mississippi. I read a paper called “What’s Wrong With Gender Neutral Bible Translations?” I analyzed many verses in the NRSV, but I didn’t mention the NIV because there was no public information that they were planning to change the gender language in the NIV. In fact, I gave fifteen or twenty copies of my paper to Dr. Ken Barker, Secretary of the NIV’s Committee on Bible Translation, and he told me he would distribute them to the members of their committee.

But a few months later the whole issue of gender-neutral Bible translation exploded. The March 1997 issue of World magazine had an NIV Bible on the cover that was morphing into a stealth bomber, and the magazine’s cover announced that the NIV was quietly going gender-neutral. The entire gender-neutral Bible controversy resulted, and the following issue of World had an article by me analyzing several verses where I thought the British Inclusive-Language NIV (NIVI) was distorting Scripture.

Eventually Dr. James Dobson called a meeting of twelve people at Focus on the Family in late May, 1997. It included representatives from CBMW, World magazine, the NIV’s Committee on Bible Translation, Zondervan (the distributor of the NIV), and the International Bible Society (the copyright holder for the NIV), and some others. But just before the meeting began, the IBS issued a statement saying they had “abandoned all plans” for changes in gender-related language in future editions of the NIV. So we thought the controversy was done and the NIV would remain faithful in its translation of gender-related language in the Bible.

Little did we know, however, that the Committee on Bible Translation for the NIV had not “abandoned all plans”! Far from it! Unknown to anyone outside their circles, for the next four years the Committee on Bible Translation, apparently with the quiet cooperation of people at Zondervan and the International Bible Society, continued working to produce a gender-neutral NIV. They had publicly “abandoned all plans,” but privately they were going full-steam ahead. Then suddenly in 2001, they announced unilaterally they were abandoning the agreement not to publish gender-related changes in the NIV, and they published the TNIV New Testament in 2001 and the whole Bible in 2005.

To put it mildly, the TNIV has not met with large success. I see this as God’s protection on the accuracy of his Word in English, and I think it is, in large part, a legacy of CBMW’s work in the evangelical world. If we had not existed there would not have been a focal point for the opposition to the TNIV. But CBMW served as the focal point, and God gave blessing to that effort.

The long-term result of that controversy, which no one expected or foresaw at the time, was a new awareness of differences in Bible translation theory in the evangelical world. The dominance of dynamic equivalence theory has clearly been broken, and the trend now is decidedly toward essentially literal translation. CBMW played a large role in that, and I am thankful to the Lord that we were able to do that.

Other Positive Results

In 1998 we rejoiced to see that the Southern Baptist Convention added to the “Baptist Faith and Message” (the doctrinal statement of the denomination) and included some strong new statements on marriage and the church that affirm the complementarian position. This is wonderfully helpful because it sets the denomination on the right course on this issue for a generation or more to come.

In 2000, we held a conference on marriage and family in Dallas, co-sponsored by FamilyLife under the leadership of Dennis Rainey. That conference had a wonderful impact with ongoing influence in terms of books published and much networking and encouragement for others.

Personally, I think I am now coming to an end of my active advocacy of this issue. In 2004, I published with Multnomah Books a book called Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth. It started out to be a 150-page handbook and ended up to be an 856-page book. It includes everything I’ve learned on biblical manhood and womanhood for the last twenty-five years.

After that, in 2006, my book Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?(6) solidified a new viewpoint for me—the conviction that many evangelical feminists are not going to change their minds or be convinced because, it seems to me, they have repeatedly adopted principles or chosen exegetical decisions that undermine or deny the authority of Scripture. Once that abandoning of scriptural authority comes about, then a movement will not be persuaded by Scripture, and in that case, when the culture is going the other way, they will not ever be persuaded on this issue. That conclusion has affected a lot of what I think about where this controversy is going.

Accomplishment and Challenge

What has God allowed CBMW to accomplish?

(1) To define a standard—the Danvers Statement—that is faithful to the Bible, so there are not 1000 conservative views on this issue that can be attacked one-by-one but one responsible view (embodied in the Danvers Statement) that has guided the church and has been widely used around the world.

(2) To defend the statement with hundreds of articles, books, and internet publications at the highest academic level as well as at the popular level.

(3) To act as a key player in stopping what was in 1985 a flood-tide of evangelical feminism sweeping through the evangelical world almost completely unchallenged. (But even though it is no longer a flood, there is still a steady stream of egalitarianism flowing through the evangelical world, and it continues to harm marriages and the church.)

(4) CBMW has had a significant influence in the thinking of many who have gained positions of guardianship in strategic organizations in the evangelical world.

(5) CBMW has had massive downstream impact on many denominations and parachurch organizations.

But there remain some challenges, and I would encourage younger pastors and scholars who support CBMW in the following ways:

(1) Play offense and not just defense. ETS is an excellent place for many young scholars to do that, and so are denominational study groups and public presentations. More complementarians need to write clear answers, and to participate in public debates, to show the incorrectness of arguments put forth by influential egalitarians like Kevin Giles, Sarah Sumner, William Webb, and others. I want to say to younger CBMW supporters in the academic world, “We need you to publish on this issue. There is no lack of evangelical feminist material to respond to. You will always find something to write about. Continue to engage this issue and win the arguments at the highest academic levels.”

(2) Beware the opposite error of male supremacy and dominance. Whenever you fight against one error, those who hold the opposite error will cheer you on and seek to become your allies—but beware. Some will become harsh and demeaning and argumentative, and they will not truly honor women as equals in the sight of God.

(3) Try somehow to ensure that institutions and organizations have some public accountability on this issue—that their constituencies know what is going on—and that there is a price to be paid for adopting evangelical feminist policies and positions. I’m concerned about future trends where an institution can become more and more egalitarian and there is no public price to pay, no public accountability to its supporters or members.

(4) Be courageous in teaching the truth and trust God to give victory. Conclusion I am surprised that this controversy has gone on so long. In the late 80s and early 90s when we began this, I expected that this would probably be over in ten years. By force of argument, by use of facts, by careful exegesis, by the power of the clear word of God, by the truth, I expected the entire church would be persuaded, the battle for the purity of the church would be won, and egalitarian advocates would be marginalized and have no significant influence. But it has not completely happened yet! I still believe it will happen. Jesus Christ is building and purifying his church that he might present it to himself without spot or wrinkle. But on this issue Christ’s purification process is taking much longer than I expected! The issue of manhood and womanhood has become one of the focal points of a much larger controversy over whether the Bible will reign supreme over cultural pressures in the church, the home, and the academy. In fact, I think it is now the largest of several issues and it has implications for all of them. In the near future, I expect that this controversy increasingly will become the focal point of the larger realignment in the entire evangelical world between those for whom the Bible is still the ultimate authority and those for whom it is not. Finally, my testimony after nearly thirty years in this controversy is that faithfulness to the Lord always carries a price, but it’s always worth the price. Whatever you spend, God will richly repay with his presence, his favor, his blessing on you and those you love, and in the end he will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matt 25:21).

Endnotes

1. This essay has been adapted from a talk given at a CBMW luncheon, November 14, 2007, in San Diego, California.

2. Wayne Grudem, “Does kephalē Mean ‘Source’ or ‘Authority Over’? An Examination of 2,336 Examples,” Trinity Journal 6 NS (1985): 38–59.

3. Wayne Grudem, “The Meaning of Kephale (‘Head’): A Response to Recent Studies,” Trinity Journal 11 NS (1990): 3–72. Reprinted as an appendix in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem; Wheaton: Crossway, 1991), 424–76.

4. Wayne Grudem, “The Meaning of Kephale (‘Head’): An Evaluation of New Evidence, Real and Alleged,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44, no. 1 (2001): 25–65. Reprinted (with some added material interacting with Anthony Thiselton) in Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood (ed. Wayne Grudem; Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), 145–202; and also in Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth: An Analysis of More Than 100 Disputed Questions (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2004), 552–99.

5. Catherine Clark Kroeger, “Head,” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin, and Daniel G. Reid; Downers Grove, InterVarsity, 1993), 375–77.

6. Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006).