What About Head Coverings in 1 Corinthians11? — The New Testament’s Weirdest Passage?

A summer blog series….

If you had to take a vote, what would you say is the weirdest passage in the New Testament? Some might raise their hand and immediately say “The Book of Revelation.” Ok, that is a whole book, so how about something shorter?

What about Paul’s teaching on “baptism for the dead” in 1 Corinthians 15:29? Ok, that’s pretty weird, and yes, Veracity covered that about year ago. How about Jesus and that thing with the fig tree in Mark 11:12-21? Yes, that is a bit weird, too. But if I had my pick, it would be Paul’s teaching about head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16.

I mean, when I first tried to read the entire New Testament cover-to-cover back in high school, this one just jumped out at me: What in the world is Paul talking about? Here is the whole disputed passage from the English Standard Version:

2 Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you. 3 But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. 4 Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, 5 but every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven. 6 For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head. 7 For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. 8 For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. 9 Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. 10 That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. 11 Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; 12 for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God. 13 Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a wife to pray to God with her head uncovered? 14 Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, 15 but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. 16 If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God.

Some of the things that Paul says sound fairly straightforward, but certainly not all of it. Frankly, if you are like most Christians I know, you probably just gloss over this passage and move onto something else. Better to pretend that something this weird in the Bible did not exist, right?

Everything about head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11 (….. well, maybe not “everything,” but we try to hit the highlights here at Veracity)

 

Well, we probably know that if you really believe the New Testament to be God’s Word, then it might be important to try to make some attempt to understand this chunk of Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church. God’s self-disclosure in Holy Scripture is not just some random exercise where we can pick things we like and toss out the rest. For that would dishonor the Lord Jesus. Plus, every book of the Bible is its own literary unit. Simply picking out parts of the Bible and forgetting the rest is not a good recipe for really understanding the Bible. However, if most American Christians are honest, we would prefer to ignore this passage, and if you were even to ask Bible scholars about it, they might agree with you as to how difficult this passage is. It is one of the most hotly debated passages in New Testament scholarship.

In this series of blog posts, Veracity will attempt to make some sense about this passage. The significance of this passage is that it plays a vital role in the on-going debates regarding how men and women are to relate to one another in the church; in what sense are husbands to be “head” of the home, should women serve as elders in a local church, etc. This is part of the rather controversial discussion between so-called “complementarians” and “egalitarians” that has continued to divide believers from one another, resulting in church and denominational splits, particularly within the last sixty years, and more intensely within the last couple of decades. I have written about this debate at length on Veracity, in another blog series, but because 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 is just so weird, it really deserves special treatment all on its own.

This passage brings up a number of questions. Here is a sample:

  • What does “head” mean in this passage?
  • Is this passage about a physical head covering, or is it about the length of hair, comparing a man and a woman?
  • Is the teaching merely cultural, applicable only to Paul’s first century context, or does it have relevance to 21st century Christians?
  • Why does Paul bring up the topic of creation here?
  • Why does Paul talk about God’s relationship to Christ?
  • What does Paul mean by “image”, “glory,” and “nature” in this passage?
  • Does this passage contradict with what Paul says just a few chapters ahead, in 1 Corinthians 14, about women speaking (or not speaking) in church?
  • What is Paul’s mention about “no such practice” in verse 16 referring to?
  • Does this passage even belong in the Bible?
  • Is Paul refuting, instead of teaching, much of what we read here?
  • What is this whole thing about “because of the angels” in verse 10?
  • How do we apply this passage to us today?

As we head into the summer, over the next group of blog posts, I will write about different views that various scholars take regarding this passage, one by one. My wife often tells me that I typically just lay out different views about difficult parts of the Bible and I do not really land anywhere, and it frustrates her to no end! So, to try to make her a little happier, I will summarize each viewpoint in the successive blog posts, and then you can figure out where I might land in the final analysis. We can discuss different interpretations of the Bible, but in the end, there is a right and wrong way of understanding the text:

  • The Traditional View (well, at least it summarizes some of the main points that many Christians have agreed with for centuries).
  • The Hyper-Conservative View (otherwise known as the “John MacArthur” view)
  • The Symbol of Protection View (challenges the idea that head coverings signify something about authority)
  • The Hairstyle View (in other words, this is not about head coverings per se, but rather about male vs. female hairstyles)
  • The Quotation/Refutation View (Paul is refuting a Corinthian false teaching)
  • The Interpolation View (Someone stuck this passage in the Bible later on, or Paul himself put it in there, and then just ran away….. yeah, seriously)
  • The Supernatural Sexual Modesty View (otherwise known as the “PG-13” view…. that is, keep this away from young children)
  • Applying 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 Today (what do we do with all of this?)

It will take nearly the whole summer of 2023 to get through this, so I will try to make it more digestible in bite-size pieces. I will probably take a few breaks along the way, to spice things up.

I am not trying to say that I have the infallible perspective, but I do think that at least one viewpoint is far superior than others. If you do not want to read anything further in this series, and just want to watch a video, I would highly recommend the work of Christian apologist Mike Winger. Mike has done an excellent, thorough YouTube study of all of the relevant passages regarding the complementarian/egalitarian controversy, even if you do not find all of his arguments convincing. I have previously linked to most of his prior videos on this topic in my review of Kevin DeYoung’s book on this topic, from 2022. While Winger is not a Biblical scholar by trade, he has done quite a bit of homework, and his YouTube talks are high in quality.

However, his longest video is on this particular passage, 1 Corinthians 11:2-16. It comes in at a whopping 6 hours and 46 minutes. WOW!! I can not endorse everything Mike says in nearly 7 hours, but he is thorough. See the video below.

So, if you just want to read a much shorter summary of what Mike Winger says, in Veracity style, stick around for the following blog series. I land at a different place from Mike, but I do appreciate his work. Please feel free to follow on Veracity by clicking one of the “Follow” buttons on the right and/or enter your email address, then click “Follow.” Feel free to comment along the way, too.

Oh….and one more thing…. the reason why I am doing this series…. : About four years ago, my local church held a discussion about the complementarian/egalitarian controversy. The overall presentation was well done, but the discussion stirred up a lot of emotions that rippled through the entire church body, generating a lot of confusion and even frustration.

This particular passage on head coverings was mentioned in a period of just five minutes. Five minutes. That’s all.

I left the discussion having more questions than answers. Since then, not a single sermon, Bible study group, question and answer session, or anything else in our church has attempted to address this passage in a meaningful way. In defense of our church leaders, our church was not obligated to uncover every stone on this. But it still bothered me to have these questions and very few answers. So, since our church leadership decided to bypass this passage, I felt that I had no choice but to dig into this myself, if I was going to understand what Paul was teaching.

As an evangelical Christian, I believe that I have the opportunity and the obligation to share with others the Good News as presented in the Bible. But it is pretty difficult to share my confidence in what the Bible teaches to others who need to hear the Gospel when we effectively gloss over, or even skip, certain weird parts of the Bible, especially a passage that is partly responsible for dividing many, many churches and denominations in our current day. Here, I offer to you, my research into this vexing passage…. a passage that most Christians would rather ignore than talk about.

Veracity is different. Here at Veracity, we want to talk about it. We want to dig into the Scriptures. Why? So we can better handle God’s Word.

So stay tuned!!


For Your Summer Listening Pleasure (in 2023)…..

As we head into the summer of 2023, I wanted to list out some of best video/audio that I have dabbled in so far this year. Most of these talks and videos I have only started, only wanting come back to them later. It seems like everybody has a podcast or YouTube channel theses days, but I mainly want to highlight some of the best stuff out there…. and there is some really good stuff!

So far in 2023, we have lost a number of Christian leaders who have had a worldwide impact. The most recent being Tim Keller. This reflective article by Collin Hansen about Tim Keller at Christianity Today is one of the best remembrances of Tim Keller. But I would also recommend Russell Moore’s survey of Tim Keller’s contribution to evangelicalism in the YouTube video/podcast below, highlighting Keller’s gentle yet firm approach to evangelism, and especially Keller’s Christ-honoring posture when faced by critics on the theological left and the theological right. As Molly Worthen (see below) writes in her article in The Atlantic, more progressive leaning Christians rejected Keller’s view of marriage as being only between a man and a woman, as well as his view that the Bible does not permit women to serve as elders in a local church, while more conservative leaning Christians rejected Keller’s “third way” approach to cultural disintegration as “compromising” with the world, calling for a more aggressive stance against secularism in the political sphere, as opposed to Keller’s more irenic, conversational approach.

These deaths fall on the heals of a few notable deaths in late 2022, including Gordon Fee and E. P. Sanders. Gordon Fee was one of the most well-regarded evangelical New Testament scholars of that last quarter century, a curious mix of a keen intellect that produced some of the most outstanding commentaries of various New Testament books that thousands of pastors weekly consult for their sermons, and controversially having a strongly charismatic, Pentecostal background, with egalitarian convictions regarding women in ministry. Here is an 8-minute interview with Dr. Fee a few years before he died:

Yet Fee’s great impact was eclipsed by E. P Sanders, who was widely regarded as the most influential New Testament scholar in the last quarter of the 20th century. Most conservative evangelical Christians have never heard of E. P. Sanders, as he tended to move around in more progressive circles, but his impact on how all scholars, theologically conservative and progressive, think about the New Testament is undeniable. Just as the German Rudolph Bultmann towered above everyone else in the mid-20th century, so did the American E.P. Sanders since the 1970s, following his landmark work Paul and Palestinian Judaism. E.P. Sanders, who in the late 1970s or early 1980s was once a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, where I work on staff, will forever be connected with the so-called “New Perspective on Paul,” which has revolutionized New Testament understandings of the Apostle Paul. While the “New Perspective on Paul” is widely misunderstood, and even outright rejected by some, serious scholarship today can not afford to ignore the ideas articulated by E.P. Sanders. Sanders scholarship has permeated just about every study of Paul, notably through the popular New Testament British evangelical scholar, N.T. Wright.

The death of Jack Hayford, the well-known Pentecostal preacher and leader of the Foursquare Church, started off the year 2023. Hayford built bridges between Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals, a major force in the Promise Keepers men’s ministry in the 1990s, and wrote the popular worship song, “Majesty.” In college, I served as worship leader at a Foursquare Church, using a number of Hayford’s songs.

Then there is the death of George Verwer. After committing his life to Christ at a Billy Graham crusade in 1953 at Madison Square Garden, New York City, Verwer went onto being not only an evangelist himself, but one of the most outspoken promoters of global missions. Known for wearing his jacket with a map of the world printed on it, whenever he spoke at churches, Verwer founded Operation Mobilization, one of the most innovative and radical missionary agencies started in the 1960s, and going strong today. Here is a 5-minute video about George Verwer:

I have noted the death of Old Testament scholar Michael S. Heiser earlier this year, perhaps my favorite Old Testament teacher around. My upcoming blog post series this summer on “head coverings” is really inspired a lot by listening to and reading his teachings.

Yet I was also struck by the death of Atlanta Baptist pastor Charles Stanley. My first encounter with Charles Stanley’s ministry some 25 years ago was unfortunately not very positive (sorry Charles Stanley fans, but that is the truth). I had never heard of Charles Stanley before, and I was taken aback when one of Charles Stanley’s fans got really annoyed in one of my church history classes that I was teaching at my church. This woman rebuked me in front of the whole class, and sent me a stack of Charles Stanley tapes the next week, hoping that by listening to them they would straighten me out. She had somehow gotten the odd impression that I believed that the study of church history was more important than studying the Bible. The teaching on the tapes was actually pretty good. But I was still so bothered as to why this woman in my class felt that I needed to listen to Stanley, that I became pretty suspicious of him. Fast forward to about ten years later, I gained a more favorable appreciation of Charles Stanley when I went to hear him preach at the First Baptist Church of Atlanta.

After his recent death, I learned more about Charles Stanley’s life story, learning that he had a very difficult childhood, growing up for time with a single mom, and then enduring abuse from a step-father. I had no idea that his early life was so difficult, and how his relationship with Christ got him through very troubling times. His life story is worth listening to:

After the death of Queen Elizabeth, we now have a new King of England. Charles III was recently coronated as King of the United Kingdom. The ever delightful, contrarian, and indeed quirky atheist historian David Starkey remarks that the UK coronation ceremony is deeply rooted in Christian ritual. Starkey has a couple of videos that tell the history about the coronation down through the centuries, if you like that kind of stuff:

Probably some of the best listens I have had so far this year come from the Rest is History podcast. Everyone has probably heard about Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code, which became a Ron Howard movie starring Tom Hanks in 2006. In 2023, we stand at the 20th anniversary of when The Da Vinci Code was first written and took the world by storm. Brown’s book popularized a conspiracy theory that began in certain academic circles in the late 1970s, suggesting that Jesus Christ never went to the Cross, contrary to what you hear week after week in most church services across the globe. Instead, Jesus and Mary Magdalene got married, scuttled off to the other side of the Roman Empire, and their progeny had been living in Southern France for centuries, much to the consternation of the Roman Catholic Church who wanted to supposedly suppress the “truth.” If you could possibly pinpoint a date where “fake news” really began to take off in the 21st century, this might be the best candidate.

The Rest is History podcast creators, historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, tell the story behind The Da Vinci Code, in Episode 301. But the tale is actually much bigger and more interesting than the narrative which filled Dan Brown’s pockets with a lot of money.

The story goes back to the Mystery of the Cathars, the mysterious group of heretics in the 12th to 14th century Southern France. In Episode 302, Holland and Sandbrook tell the background story of how the Cathars originated, and the controversy among historians still today who are trying to figure out what really happened, and how this heretical group might or might not be connected back to the Gnostic Christian heresy of the 2nd century. It is a mystery about mysteries, as spellbinding as any Agatha Christie novel.

The tragedy of the Cathars led to the Bloodiest Crusade in the Christian history, told in Episode 303, where Christians were pitted against other supposedly heretical Christians, the beginnings of the infamous Inquisition, which later became such a controversial part of Roman Catholic Church history. The surprise ending, best listened to those three episodes played back to back, will tell you a lot about why the current culture wars we are living through during the 2020s is so crazy….. and think this is all began with The DaVinci Code.

YouTube apologist Gavin Ortlund has some absolutely fantastic content that I need to listen to over again, just because it so rich. Ortlund has an interview with author Christopher Watkin, about his book Biblical Critical Theory, which is probably one of the most talked about books in the past year in evangelical circles.  Watkin offers a biblical critique of the so-called “critical race theory.” I already have too many books on my “to be read” list, but this interview with Watkins sure entices my interest:

The Pints with Aquinas channel has great debate featuring Gavin Ortlund defending the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura with Roman Catholic apologist Trent Horn criticizing sola scriptura. This is an excellent example of how charitable debates should be held with believers who strongly disagree with one another.

Baptist preacher and YouTuber Matt Whitman has an informative video interviewing Ligonier Ministries’ Dr. Stephen Nichols about “What Was the Great Schism and Why Did It Happen?,” talking about when Western and Eastern Christianity parted ways with one another about 1,000 years ago:

Christianity is growing globally, where about 1/3 of the world’s population profess to be Christian, which is great news. But the story is not so rosy in the United States. According to the latest Pew research, by 2070 the number of professing Christians in America will drop to less than half of the country’s population. Professing Christians make up 64% of the population currently, but by 2070, according to current trends, this percentage will drop to around 46%. Christianity is on a decline in America, with more and more deconstructing and deconverting, just in case you never heard about this. Some of this decline is really about younger people getting disillusioned with large denominational institutions, like the Southern Baptists. But the shift away from Christianity in general is hard to ignore. In the last 30 years alone, 40 million Americans have “de-churched” making this one of the largest sociological shifts in American history. A Gospel Coalition podcast gives us a discussion with Ryan Burge, a political scientist, to talk about who are leaving evangelical churches and why:

Along those same lines about “deconstruction,” Lutheran YouTuber Dr. Jordan B. Cooper, host of the Just and Sinner podcast, has a talk about Jacques Derrida, one of the foundational thinkers of postmodernism. Derrida popularized the terminology of “deconstruction”:

A lot of great documentaries/films are showing up on YouTube now, that once belonged behind a paywall. One of them is Fragments of Truth, where New Testament scholar Dr. Craig Evan’s talks about the discoveries of the New Testament documents we have found over the past few centuries which bolster our confidence in the historical reliability of the Christian faith. This gives Christians good answers to those who have read Bart Ehrman’s New York Times bestseller Misquoting Jesus:

A book by Collin Hansen is out now discussing the life and thought of the late Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation, interviewed by Gavin Ortlund:

Next before last, there is the remarkable conversion story of historian Molly Worthen. Dr. Worthen wrote an historian analysis of the “crisis of authority” within American evangelicalism, a subject of a Veracity blog post from 2014. Since then, and particularly over the past year, Molly Worthen has moved from a position of skepticism about Christianity that she had held for decades to become a follower of Christ.  A most inspiring story, showing that even really, really smart people can have their lives transformed by the love of Jesus Christ!

…and FINALLY….. something a little fun, in honor of the late Tim Keller. How about “Carpool Karaoke with Tim Keller!”

ONE QUICK ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE: WordPress is no longer distributing blog post announcements via Twitter, so be sure to sign up via email by clicking the black “Follow” button on the right hand side of the Veracity page, if you want to receive announcements of new blog posts from Veracity, and stop using the “Follow” button for Twitter, which no longer works.


Sicily: From the Greek Classical World to Christendom

One final blog post about our trip to Europe last year, 2022. The adventure to Europe ended with an exciting finish: It was a whirlwind trip. Just three nights in Sicily, to visit with friends, and tour the best of Sicily. I even got to travel up a good part of Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes (but visibility was poor due to rain that day).

Sicily has an incredibly grand and ancient history. Coming from my hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia, which prides itself in its rich colonial history going back 400 years, Williamsburg does not even begin to compare with a recorded history going back to the Sicilian and Punic wars.

I had started to listen to Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian, while visiting Sicily. Fox’s immense survey of the history of the Greco-Roman world, finishing up with the reign of Emperor Hadrian, just as Christianity was emerging as a world changing movement in the early second century, clocks in at just under 24 hours as an audiobook. Though he is a secular British historian, whose rather aloof interest in the Christian faith is apparent, Fox is nevertheless a captivating story-teller, though the decadence and violence of the classical world that he chronicles made me yearn for more of the Christian story (I have Fox’s book on Saint Augustine queued up on my “to-be-read” list, but that is a long ways off from now!)

Having a book by a world-class historian at the ready makes for a more enjoyable visit to faraway places. The names of great places in Sicily were sprinkled throughout The Classical World, and I got a chance to see the highlights, and envision a bit of that remarkable ancient world. Take Agrigento for example. In southwest Sicily, the old city of Agrigento sits above an expansive historical park, the Valley of the Temples. On one end of the park stands the Temple of the Discouri.

Temple of the Dioscuri. Valley of the Temples Archaeological Park. Agrigento, Sicily, Italy. The city of Agrigento itself is up the hill in the background.

In the middle of the park stands the Temple of Concordia. These were the great houses of worship to the “gods,” much of this dating back half a millennium before Jesus (around 500 BCE), and established mostly by the Greeks. By the time Christianity spread and conquered the Roman Empire nearly a millennium later, these great buildings were converted to use as churches. A photographic history of “Early Christian Agrigento” is a good resource on the web, showing where and how Christians in the early history of the church buried their dead.

The transformation of the Greco-Roman world into a Christian society, less than 500 years after the birth of Jesus, is simply a fascinating thing to consider. In many ways, contemporary secular culture is drifting back to the advocated virtues and religious pluralism of the Greco-Roman classical world. It makes me wonder: How was it that a movement of ragtag Jewish peasants, following a singular figure, whom his followers believed had been risen from the dead, end up completely overcoming such a rich classical culture, with a new story that has since spread far and wide across planet earth, the world’s largest spiritual movement of all time, representing some one-third of the 21st century world population?

It is an astounding thought to ponder.

Temple of Concordia. Valley of the Temples. Agrigento, Sicily, Italy.

Another highlight for me was the city of Syracuse, specifically the island of Ortigia, one of the most incredibly beautiful places I saw while in Europe. While much of the classical ruins still lie beneath the city, awaiting archaeological investigation, the Baroque architecture of much of the town is impressive, even when walking around at night! …. Plus, the food was simply fantastic!!

Cathedral of Syracuse, on the island of Ortigia. One of Sicily’s many gorgeous churches.

 

These are last of my photos I plan on posting on Veracity about the trip my wife and I took to Europe in 2022…. while I was in Sicily towards the end of the adventure, she was off in Venice with a friend…where unfortunately, the food was NOT as good!…. Oh, and about Mount Etna….. While in Sicily, I never got to see the top of the volcano, due to the rain and cloud cover. But on the flight out, I managed to be sitting on left side of the plane, which gave me a breathtaking view of the legendary volcano, at its very top. Enjoy!

 

APPENDIX:

Found a fun link here on Twitter. A museum in Hamburg animates Caesar Augustus singing “California Dreaming.” Augustus visited Sicily in 22 BCE.

Nachts im Museum: der römische Kaiser Augustus in der Ausstellung im Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg.


R.I.P. – Tim Keller

It grieves me to know that Tim Keller, former pastor of Redeemer Church in New York City, died today, at age 72, after a three year struggle with pancreatic cancer.

I never knew Tim Keller personally, but I have friends who knew him when he pastored a small P.C.A. church in Hopewell, Virginia, less than an hour’s drive from where I grew up and still live. In those days, the 1970s, Hopewell was going through a rough time. As a kid I would love to swim in the James River, but then the ecological disaster of the toxic Kepone leak at the Allied Chemical plant shut down the river, and much of nearby economy with it.

Tim Keller, former pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, in New York City, and co-founder of the Gospel Coalition.

Tim Keller made a lot of mistakes as a young pastor, in an economically depressed town. But in those years he cultivated a love for reading which would set him on a path of being one of most influential evangelical intellectual Christian leaders in the first quarter of the 21st century. Years before, when Keller was in college at Bucknell University, he met the Lord through the ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. After leaving Hopewell, to go teach at Westminster Theological Seminary, Tim Keller and his wife Kathy eventually surprised everyone to go plant a church in the heart of urban New York City, where Redeemer Presbyterian Church eventually became one of the fastest growing churches in New York City in the 1990s and early 2000s.

My small group read his 2009 book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, which convinced me that Tim Keller was the new “C.S. Lewis” for the early 21st century. He had co-founded The Gospel Coalition, an alliance of churches and church leaders committed to a renewed vision for evangelism and church unity, with a broadly Reformed theological orientation. My wife and I both agree that The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities with the Wisdom of God, written together by Tim and Kathy Keller is the best book on having a Christian marriage in print today.

Alas, being a prominent Christian leader is bound to bring out the critics, from within the church. When Keller published his 2010 book Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just, his critics accused him of being “woke”, a closet-Marxist in Christian clothing. Perhaps the criticism is due to the fact that Keller proposed a winsome approach to winning the culture over to Christ, whereas other Christians were becoming convinced that a more combative approach was needed in the face of more opposition to Gospel values. While I do reject the “woke” movement, I will take the more winsome approach over the combative approach any day of the week.

In my mind, Tim Keller’s voice represented perhaps the best intellectual and spiritual mind that evangelical Christianity has had to offer to our 21st century world, a heart for spiritual renewal within the church and a passion to reach a lost world with the Gospel. He will be sorely missed.


Men and Women in Christ, by Andrew Bartlett. An Extended Review.

Engaging in an online discussion can lead to some interesting outcomes.

In early 2022, I corresponded with a Christian author from the U.K., Andrew Bartlett, about the complementarian/egalitarian debate. Earlier I had heard of a book written in 2019, Men and Women in Christ: Fresh Light from the Biblical Texts. Little did I know that my online interlocutor had written this thorough examination of the Bible’s teaching regarding men and women in the family and the church.1

I promised Andrew that I would read his book, only to discover that while 100 pages into his 648 page book (according to Kindle), that this really is a big book!  Andrew is a lawyer and arbitrator, with a background in theology, so it really should not have been a surprise. I had to put the book down and try to come back to it, every now and then, over the past year and a half. Then an email from Andrew a few months ago convinced me that I should finish the book and offer a review. By the time I finished, I ended up with the following article that best summarizes my reflection on the men/women debate in the church to date, after four years of research and blogging. So, you might want to go grab a beverage, a nice chair to sit in, and perhaps even a Bible before I go on…

The length of the Men and Women in Christ: Fresh Light from the Biblical Texts will be a drawback to some readers, who simply will not have the patience to wade through many pages of detailed analysis and argumentation. This is unfortunate since there are many, many rewards the book has for the reader, filled with insights, and being exceptionally thorough, without getting overly technical.  In other words, mere human beings without a PhD can read this book, and walk away with an understanding why this issue is so complex. Men and Women in Christ: Fresh Light from the Biblical Texts interacts with a vast array of literature on the topic, published over the last several decades, which makes it essential reading for anyone desiring to dig deep into the debate. Regardless of what one ultimately thinks of Andrew Bartlett’s thesis, Andrew is a great dialogue partner, and he has done the Christian church an invaluable service with his thorough and careful analysis. So, thank you, Andrew (assuming you read this)!!

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