Baker publishes second edition of Women in the Church

Baker Books has issued a second edition of a major complementarian work: Women in the Church: An Analysis and Application of 1 Timothy 2:9-15, edited by New Testament scholars Andreas J. Köstenberger and Thomas R. Schreiner.

Ask any evangelical scholar to identify the most heated textual battleground for gender roles in the church and most will not hesitate to answer “1 Timothy 2:9-15.”

The passage has been debated for decades and Baker Books has issued a second edition of one of the major complementarian works on this passage: Women in the Church: An Analysis and Application of 1 Timothy 2:9-15, edited by New Testament scholars Andreas J. Köstenberger and Thomas R. Schreiner.

First published in 1995, the new edition contains most of the original work of a number of New Testament scholars but each essay has been updated. In their preface, the editors point out that the complementarian interpretation of the text has stood up well over the past decade despite unyielding attacks upon it by egalitarians.

“To be sure, the tempter will continue to whisper into women’s ears, ‘Has God really said…?’” the editors write in the book’s preface. “But contrary to the devil’s charge, the boundaries set by God are good, intending to enhance, rather than harm, women’s fulfillment as they live out their God-given roles.

“It would clearly be unrealistic to expect a world that misconstrues equality as sameness and that seeks to erode any meaningful distinction between male and female (witness the push toward gay marriage) to embrace the biblical counsel on male-female roles and relationships.”

The book includes essays by Westminster Seminary California professor S. M. Baugh, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professors Henry Scott Baldwin and Robert W. Yarbrough, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Dorothy Kelley Pattesron, along with Köstenberger and Schreiner.

Köstenberger is professor of New Testament at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Schreiner is professor of New Testament at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

In the opening chapter, Baugh takes a look at first-century Ephesus, the cultural setting for the apostle Paul’s first letter to Timothy. Over against egalitarian arguments, Baugh demonstrates that Ephesus was not a feminist society.

Baldwin and Köstenberger examine the meaning of the Greek verb authenteo—usually translated as “to exercise authority over”—that is pivotal to understanding the text properly.

The second half of the book is devoted to a thorough verse-by-verse commentary on the passage, and the authors provide principles that must guide the interpretation of the passage.

Patterson adds a new chapter on the application of Paul’s central teaching in the passage, commenting on the implications for women’s roles in the church. Patterson exhorts women to exercise their God-endowed spiritual gifts within biblical parameters in obedience to God. Patterson is a council member for The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW).

Women in the Church is available through the CBMW webstore at https://www.cbmw.org/cgi-bin/store?show|560|Gender_Issues.