The Making of Biblical Womanhood

I read The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr

I think one of the things I’m called to is to examine and explore where I’ve been silent or still in the past. I am grateful for my Christian education (homeschool through 12th grade + 8 years of higher education), and I know I would not be who I am today without that. I was taught a lot about complementarianism, about purity, about my place in this world. I could and will write whole posts about the purity culture and how that has dramatically and drastically shifted the whole trajectory of the American church.

with this book, Barr specifically calls out the patriarchy of the Western evangelical church, which I was very deeply steeped in. it’s really all I knew, through college, and even into grad school: I liked to joke in grad school that church history started at the Wittenberg church steps in 1517. we passed over the bulk of the history of the Catholic church and the medieval church, sweeping it aside with “well they weren’t educated and they didn’t know better, until Luther and the Reformation opened their eyes.” I am deeply and forever grateful for the good and necessary, salvation bringing, gospel speaking, work of the Reformation.

but I also think that the evangelical church, particularly in the west, has very much missed the mark on womanhood — and manhood, too.
Beth Allison Barr brings her considerable experience and expertise as an historian to thorough, complete, and respectful look at the many factors that combined to today’s “biblical womanhood.” I really challenge you to explore this, and I recommend Barr’s research to you as well

“As Christians we are called to be different from the world. Yet in our treatment of women, we often look just like everyone else. Ironically, complementarian theology claims it is defending a plain and natural interpretation of the Bible while really defending an interpretation that has been corrupted by our sinful human drive to dominate others and build hierarchies of power and oppression.”

“By allowing a woman to anoint him with oil, Jesus overturns male headship—allowing a woman to do what only men had been able to do until that moment: anoint the king.”

“Mary Magdalene carried the news of the gospel to the disbelieving disciples. In a world that didn’t accept the word of a woman as a valid witness, Jesus chose women as witnesses for his resurrection. In a world that gave husbands power over the very lives of their wives, Paul told husbands to do the opposite—to give up their lives for their wives. In a world that saw women as biologically deformed men, monstrous even, Paul declared that men were just like women in Christ.”