My official assignment is to respond to two chapters in the third edition of Discovering Biblical Equality: Biblical, Theological, Cultural, and Practical Perspectives: Mimi Haddad’s “Helping the Church Understand Biblical Equality” and Kylie Maddox Pidgeon’s “Complementarianism and Domestic Abuse: A Social-Scientific Perspective on Whether ‘Equal but Different’ Is Really Equal at All.” Haddad’s chapter possesses...

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future” (11). Thus, quoting George Orwell’s 1984, Mimi Haddad opens the inaugural chapter of the third edition of Discovering Biblical Equality. Women’s voices, she claims, have been silenced throughout Christian history by those “committed to male authority” (11). Their essential...

Summary The thirtieth chapter of Discovering Biblical Equality opens with the statement, “The face of poverty, illiteracy, disease, starvation, and abuse is predominantly female” (620). Mimi Haddad then comments on gender-based violence and asserts that “patriarchy is increasingly viewed as one of the most malicious and debilitating forces in history” (621). She offers a selection...

Summary Lynn Cohick’s chapter replaces I. Howard Marshall’s in the previous edition of Discovering Biblical Equality, and the editors have chosen well. Cohick has not only done careful work on cultural backgrounds throughout her career, but she has recently written commentaries on both Colossians and Ephesians. For those reasons and more, it is a pleasure...

Editor’s note: The following essay appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Eikon. Feminist theologians have long wrestled with the question of God’s gender. In particular, they have chafed against naming God as “Father” and even against Jesus’ incarnation in a male body. As Mary Daly famously wrote, “If God is male, then the male...

Editor’s note: The following essay appears in the Fall 2022 issue of Eikon. Words not only bear distinct meanings, but the way they are employed reflects back on the cultures that coin them. So, forexample, one evidence of the hyper-sexualized culture in which we live is the way the term “sexy” — which used to have...