Editor’s note: In 2016 the US Congress appointed a National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service to investigate the question of expanding Selective Service registration to all Americans, which would subject women to potential military conscription, and to report back to the President and Congress in March 2020. The following statement was submitted to...

In the last few years, the #MeToo movement, revelations of sexual abuse and cover-up within the Southern Baptist Convention, and controversy surrounding the appropriateness of women preaching in Lord’s Day worship have reopened discussions of gender within evangelicalism. While there has been little development within the evangelical church in the underlying theological and exegetical arguments...

I. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton first published The Woman’s Bible in 1895, she attempted to remedy what she perceived to be a religiously justified inequity: the inferior role of women. The first-wave feminist matriarch lamented that, despite woman’s equal position and glory in Genesis 1, she was a mere “afterthought” in Genesis 2.[1] Stanton pronounced...

Jesus’ call to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19) necessarily involves taking the good news to those who identify as transgender. Because the gospel is God’s power to save, we have every reason to expect that some of those to whom we witness will put their trust in Christ and set foot on the...

World-renowned historian William Manchester could write in 1993 that “the erasure of the distinctions between the sexes is not only the most striking issue of our time, it may be the most profound the race has ever confronted.”[1] Twenty-six years later, it is difficult to overstate just how prescient Manchester’s statement was. The attempt to...

I have noticed of late a growing chorus of what we might call “ex-complementarians” entering the fray of the evangelical gender debate. These folks are not identifying as egalitarians, but neither are they identifying as complementarians. They wish to embrace the Bible’s teaching about eldership being available only to qualified men, and some even wish...