In a recent email, I promised a review of the book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood.  This review has been a challenge.  The book is, in my opinion, not organized very well.  The three section titles (Recovering the Way We Read Scripture, Recovering Our Mission, and Recovering the Responsibility of Every Believer) make sense and seem cohesive, but the chapters don’t all clearly and effectively reflect their titles, producing a book that’s a bit disjointed and seems unclear in its purpose.

There is some good stuff here — almost entire chapters, even.  Unfortunately, it’s so overshadowed by the negatives that it gets lost in the shuffle.  I wish Aimee Byrd had refrained from the complementarian-bashing and simply written a book about the purpose of the Church and the value Scripture displays for Women, because most of the good things to be gleaned from this have little or nothing to do with the title concept.  (There are also a few legitimate concerns raised but, again, they get lost in the shuffle.)

The best way I know to tackle this is to talk about four overarching issues I see here, and then walk through chapter by chapter making a few additional incidental observations.  So let’s start with what is (besides the overall disorganization) the first of four pervasive, overarching problems: misrepresentation.

Pervasive Problem #1: Misrepresentation of Biblical Manhood & Womanhood

The title of the book is a clear reference to an earlier work, Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood.  This is a collection of essays from the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (CBMW), edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, intended primarily to elucidate and expound on the Danvers Statement, which is intended (among other things) to “set forth the Biblical view of the relationship between men and women, especially in the home and in the church.”

I read that book in preparation for reading this one, so I could be sure to have the proper context and, while it’s certainly not perfect — and some authors were better than others — I was, overall, thoroughly impressed by how balanced it was.  Byrd complains that the proponents of biblical manhood and womanhood have “flattened” the concepts they’re teaching, but I found the opposite to be true.

What I was most struck by when I read Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, especially in the foundational chapters, was how much nuance was present/accounted for, and how un-formulaic it was.  Byrd, on the other hand, has grossly flattened the teaching, and everything she has to say about it reveals that filter so that, while she never (to my knowledge) technically misquotes the authors, she frequently represents their words with so much missing context that at times her conclusions are virtually opposite of the original intent.

She’s even glossed over nuance of language in parts of what she actively quoted, so as to attribute teaching to them that has not been present in any complementarian writings I’ve personally ever seen.  Let me offer a couple specific examples on a single point.

“At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships.”  (from the Danvers Statement, emphasis added)

“Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:3 simply sets up three distinct relationships: the headship of God the Father in the Trinity, the headship of Christ over every man, and the headship of a man over a woman…”  (Grudem, emphasis added)

Byrd’s response to these quotes is to retort, “Nowhere does Scripture state that all women submit to all men.”  (p. 105, 22, and others) Which is true…but neither do these men state that all women submit to all men.  There is, in fact, careful language here, which Byrd has conveniently glossed over, which suggests this very limitation.  A disposition to affirm, receive and nurture strength and leadership from men in relationally appropriate ways is not equivalent to a command to affirm, receive and nurture strength and leadership from all men in all relationships.  This type of perversion of their teaching pops up repeatedly.

It’s also concerning, and worthy of note, that never once does she put “biblical manhood and womanhood” in quotes, or use any other device to imply “biblical manhood and womanhood, so-called.” Every textual indication is that it is actually the biblical she believes we need to “recover from.”

Pervasive Problem #2: Failure to Properly Understand Purpose

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is not a church — a point which Byrd herself acknowledges late in the book.  It’s an organization founded for the sole purpose of “set[ting] forth the teachings of the Bible about the complementary differences between men and women, created equally in the image of God,” to stand in the cultural gap where feminism seeks to encroach.  Yet Byrd seems offended that their focus is on these very matters, rather than on the broader teachings of Scripture or the gospel specifically.  “[N]otice how The Danvers Statement is the unifying authoritative teaching for CBMW.” (p. 121)

I’m not even sure what to say about that; I kind of feel like it speaks for itself and just needs to be allowed to sink in!  There’s an unfair implication threaded through the book that these men’s overall lives and teachings must be focused primarily on the distinctness of men and women, because their focus for this organization is.

That’s a little like complaining that your math teacher doesn’t think reading is important, because she never teaches reading.  Of course she doesn’t; that’s not her function!  It has nothing to do with what she does or doesn’t view as important in the bigger picture of life.  Likewise, when someone is writing about complementarianism, one would expect — or at least ought to expect — that the immediate focus is on complementarianism, not on complementarianism and everything else in life.

Pervasive Problem #3: Internal Inconsistency

There’s a lot of waffling here.  In chapter one, she laments the perceived need for “different Bibles.” It isn’t actually different Bibles, exactly.  That is, the text of Scripture is the same.  What she’s talking about is men’s and women’s study Bibles, illustrated by one particular example of five essays each in the ESV Men’s and Women’s Devotional Bibles that aren’t the same.

Apparently this is absolutely an egregious offense, because we all read the same Bible and it isn’t gendered.  “Is the Bible, God’s Word, so male-centered and authored that women need to create our own resources to help us relate to it?” (p. 37)  “Offering two versions of Scripture” [which it isn’t] “separates and isolates our devotion time, ignores our likenesses, and misses all the important nuances in our distinctions.” (p. 41)

The fact that there are different themes to the commentary apparently offends her delicate sensibilities.

And yet we also see comments like, “there is, of course, nothing wrong with reading the androcentric perspective, but there were” [in historical Christian publications] “barely any female voices to reciprocate male authorship when it came to religious books.” (p. 34)  She’s offended by an older woman (who she thought she could look up to, prior to this awful revelation) who said she didn’t think women’s studies were necessary at all (p. 37) because she “see[s] a benefit in exclusive studies for men and women, as we have shared experiences and responsibilities within our own sex…” (p. 114)

Which is it?  Teaching geared toward one sex or the other is valuable?  Or it’s toxic?  (I’m also curious what she’d say about the fact that Scripture itself has passages that are targeted specifically to men or to women.  Is that bad, too?)

She says, “women don’t want to be constantly assessed by our femaleness; our contributions and even our presence as females offer a multifaceted, asymmetrical balance when centered on truth.” (p. 92, emphasis added)

Which is it?  Do we, or do we not, want to be acknowledged for our uniquely female offerings?

She takes issue with CBMW’s description of masculinity as “a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships.” (p. 104 — by the way, notice again that phrase “in ways appropriate to…differing relationships”)

But then she says:

“…Adam was called to a special submission in three areas.  Before the fall, Adam and Eve served in a holy temple-garden.  Adam bore a priestly responsibility of the vocation to guard or protect, which is the meaning of the word keep in this text: ‘Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it’ (Gen. 2:15 NASB).  Adam was called to submit, or sacrifice himself, in this way.  Second, Adam had to sacrifice a piece of his own body for the creation of Eve (Gen. 2:21-22).  And third, even in describing the union of marriage, we see that unlike the surrounding ancient patriarchal culture of the time when Moses wrote Genesis, in which the women left her family and was then under the authority of her husband’s family, the man was to leave his family and cleave to his wife (Gen. 2:24).”

There’s some warped theology in that very last line, but we’ll leave that, for now.  What she’s just described is responsibility to lead, provide for and protect!  She just doesn’t like words like “lead” or “patriarchy,” and wants to emphasize “submission” for men — which Scripture does talk about, but does not particularly emphasize.

I can only conclude that she’s so thoroughly steeped herself in feminist (and metaphysical, which we see elsewhere) writings that she’s “renewed” her mind to feminist (and metaphysical) ways of speaking, thinking, and filtering things.

That “patriarchal culture” she describes is not a manmade alternative to God’s ordained order; it is God’s ordained order.  Which brings us to point #4…

Pervasive Problem #4: Missing the Big Picture

Byrd has fallen prey to the classic blunder: getting caught up in practice and missing the underlying principle altogether.  We see it both in what she speaks against and what she speaks for.  When she’s tearing apart CBMW writings, in almost all cases she’s nitpicking sections where they’ve sought to clarify what a given principle might look like in action (even where they’ve plainly acknowledged that it’s not black-and-white and they’re just offering guidance, not requirements), and she’s completely disregarded the principles they’re operating from.

When she’s recognizing true problems in the church, she’s largely seeing problems with practice and suggesting alternate practice…without ever backing up to the principles that led to the bad practice or that should direct us in finding sounder practice.  Consequently, most of her “solutions”  (in my opinion) miss the mark.

Ironically, from my perspective, most of the problems she sees in the church are caused by the refusal to acknowledge the big picture that CBMW is trying to restore, which Byrd repeatedly repudiates.  Do they — do we — fall short of putting those principles into practice well?  Sure.  But the solution is not to discard sound principles; rather it’s to seek to more effectively apply them.

See, Byrd is very sure that “Scripture…isn’t a patriarchal construction.”  (p. 42)  It isn’t entirely clear what she means by that, but if she means that it isn’t patriarchal in nature, she’s mistaken.  And patriarchy isn’t a dirty word.  The entire universe is a patriarchy — we’re all ruled by one Father — and human relationships are so ordained as to reflect God and His relationship with us to the world.  (See Ephesians 3:14-15; 5:21-33; 1 Corinthians 11:2-12)

If your conception of patriarchy doesn’t reflect the character of God, it isn’t actually biblical patriarchy, and it’s a perversion of the image of God.  Likewise, if we reject the order God has laid out for us in Scripture, that’s a perversion of the image of God.  As always, biblical balance is the key here.  But Byrd seems to want to continually pit biblical ideas against biblical ideas, as if they’re in conflict when, in fact, they are not.

Chapter by Chapter: the Introduction

I know this is getting long, and I’ll try not to get too fussy over the details of every chapter.  But just for the sake of catching those “scattered” issues, I want to go chapter by chapter — and the introduction is especially heavy on problems.

This “introduction that you may not skip!” (yes, that’s actually the title, complete with exclamation point) opens the book by poisoning the well.  It tells the story of — and the story behind — the (feminist) novella, The Yellow Wallpaper.  This yellow wallpaper is representative of oppressive patriarchal culture that’s so pervasive as to go unrecognized…and, of course, being intentionally applied to the church in general and, in particular, to biblical manhood and womanhood.  (It’s also representative of Byrd’s feminist influences.)

The general concept of having adopted traditions or conventions without really thinking about them is an important one.  But contextually, this starts us off by using the secular medical community of the 1800s as our reference point for the state of the Christian church today.  This is…not a good starting point, to say the least.

Chapter One: Why Men & Women Don’t Read Separate Bibles

This chapter raises some valid concerns here and there: like what are we communicating by what we target to men and what we target to women?  Is it or is it not what we should be communicating?  But overall, it reads like much ado about nothing, and it’s rife with logical fallacies.

On one page, for instance, Byrd expresses dismay for how many more women than men post about their quiet time on social media.  What we’re supposed to take away from this, apparently, is that women are shallow and more concerned about the aesthetics than the content.  But she seems to think that men don’t post pictures from their quiet time (they do; maybe she’s just not friends with the right men on social media), that a general feminine proclivity to care about aesthetics couldn’t possibly lead more women to post on social media and also take their reading seriously, and even misses that sheer numbers could have something to do with it.  Ironic, since she goes on to say, “[s]ixty percent of Christian women affirm that Scripture is the inspired Word of God and read it four or more times a week, compared to 40 percent of Christian men.”  (p. 33, citing a 2017 Barna Research study)

These seem like petty things, but this is the kind of argument she builds her case on throughout the text.  She’s making a whole point here on the basis of women’s posting pretty pictures on social media, without having accounted for the variables that might contribute to this.  Or, for that matter, even checking the facts.

There are other odd appeals here, too, like the one that opens the chapter. “It’s funny, the Bible is the most popular book ever, but you rarely see someone reading it in public.” (p. 31)  She goes on to talk about people being embarrassed to be seen with one.  Well, I don’t know about you, but I rarely see someone reading in public.  At all.  With millions of books on the market, is it any wonder that when we’re rarely seeing someone reading, we’re rarely seeing someone reading that one book?

She introduces us in this chapter to the term “gynocentric interruptions,” a term originally coined by Richard Bauckham in Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels to describe portions of Scripture where the story is told from a woman’s perspective, “interrupting” the otherwise-androcentric text.  (This seems more divisive an approach to me than anything, but what do I know?)  This concept will carry through much of the rest of the book.

Chapter Two: Why Not the Book of Boaz?

The first of these “gynocentric interruptions” takes up the entire next chapter, which delves into the book of Ruth.  Overall, this was one of the most valuable chapters in the book, with a few unnecessary and unhelpful anti-patriarchy/anti-biblical manhood & womanhood interjections thrown in.  There are a lot of fascinating insights into the text of Scripture here, and this is one of the sections that I wish had been written as part of a book that stands alone without the “men ruin everything” vibe.

Chapter Three: Girls Interrupted

“Let’s look at some more gynocentric interruptions, where Scripture takes us behind the scenes and gives us a story behind the story through the female voice, as well as implementing women as tradents of the faith.”  (p. 73)  This pretty well summarizes chapter three.

By this point in the book, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with this term “gynocentric interruption,” not only for the way it seems to pit the masculine voice against the feminine as though they didn’t both comprise an integral body of Scripture, but because Scripture is God-centric.  Neither man nor woman is really at the center of the story; He is.

We read snapshots of several women here, including Achsah (Caleb’s daughter), Deborah, Jael, Jephthah’s daughter, Rahab, the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15, Elizabeth, Mary, Hannah, and Mary Magdalene & the other women with Jesus.  Again, much of this is good to delve into.

(Although the quote there about Jephthah raises some serious concerns for me about the CSB, which Byrd quotes from.  It cites Jephthah as saying that the person who comes out his door to greet him will be offered as a burnt sacrifice, a significant departure in meaning from the way any other major translation translates this.)

Chapter Four: Why Our Aim is Not Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

This chapter is where we particularly see the disconnect between the purpose of CBMW and Byrd’s expectations.  Of course our primary aim is not biblical manhood and womanhood (per se)!  On the other hand, “manhood” or “womanhood” is an integral part of each of our identities, so there’s a sense in which “biblical manhood” or “biblical womanhood” is exactly the aim for each one of us.

Obviously, though, manhood and womanhood are merely one small part (two small parts?) of the whole that is Scripture and Christian living.  I don’t think the men at CBMW would disagree with that; they would just tell you their function at CBMW is narrow in scope.

This whole chapter is a bit messy — and I could write a lot about it if I wanted to.  (I have a lot of notes in my margins!)  But the overall issue here is that this is where she primarily delves into attacking CBMW and biblical manhood and womanhood as a concept.  She says that she does “want to note that there are plenty of helpful teachings in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood…It’s because they have offered so many good contributions to the church that we need to be all the more discerning of their influence on us.” (p. 100)  Yet the book is so negative and so undermines the foundations, that the reader is left wondering what, exactly, she admits are “helpful teachings.”

Much of what she has to say here is the same type of misrepresentation I pointed out earlier.  But I do want to point out, in particular, the concern with Eternal Subordination of the Son (ESS).  ESS is a doctrine which is “criticized…for projecting the subordination of the Son to the Father within the work of redemption (the economic Trinity) back into the inner life of God (the immanent Trinity).”  I suspect there are multiple layers of disagreement within this debate, not excluding confusion over different uses of language, but I don’t want to enter into the debate itself here.

What I do want to point out is that:

a) Yes, some complementarians/CBMW folks agree with ESS.  Not all of them do, and it’s not a hingepin of complementarianism, which is ultimately rooted in creation.

b) ESS seems to frequently, in these discussions, (as it does in parts of this chapter) get conflated with the biblically-inescapable concept that in some portion of time and space, there is a hierarchy within the Trinity.  The Bible teaches that this is so, and the Bible links this to the headship and submission of a man and a woman.  If we want to be people of the Word, we have to address this — and these pseudo-feminist Christian women’s writings consistently skip over that passage.

“But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” (1 Cor. 11:3)

“And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” (Ph’p. 2:8)

(Byrd did quote Grudem on the matter, as noted above, but she didn’t interact with the Scriptural text.)

Byrd herself cites a number of Scriptures and makes a number of statements in a later chapter that highlight this relationship of Sonship & Fatherhood.  We can’t lose sight of this because we’re quibbling over whether this was an eternal state or whether it came into being via the incarnation and who thinks which one is right.

There are also several statements within this chapter that indicate Byrd grasps the significance of human relationships for portraying God’s relationship — and yet she doesn’t seem to understand that by undermining some of the key biblical concepts defining what these relationships should look like, we’re encouraging a fuzzy picture.

Chapter Five: What Church is For

Much of this chapter is also very solid, at least in the beginning.  Interestingly, there’s a lot of “headship” language here.

“God the Father promised to give the Son a bride…” (p. 137)

“‘Father…those you have given me…'” (p. 137)

“…the great mystery of husband and wife becoming one flesh, picturing Christ and his church…” (p. 137)

“He went to heaven to prepare a place for his own…” (p. 137)

“Jesus, the head…” (p. 138)

“Christ, our head…unity and harmony in God’s household…” (p. 139)

“…Jesus Christ is restoring God’s household to order, even after the chaos of the fall.  Notice the household language in Ephesians…” (p. 140)

All of this is language revealing the righteous, loving patriarchy of the world.

The latter part of the chapter gets a bit sketchy, though.  First there’s a presentation of how “pastors tend to be preaching more to the men,” (p. 143), based on some research by Dr. Valerie Hobbs, which seems questionable, at least as presented here.  The conclusions are drawn from data points like “references to named men (excluding Jesus) far outnumbered references to named women: 5,164 to 635”  and “there is also evidence that even supposedly gender-neutral pronouns (you, anyone, everyone, whoever, etc.) refer to men.”

On the first point, I have to wonder how that compares to the ratio in Scripture.  I’m pretty sure references to named men far outnumber references to named women in Scripture, which means that’s exactly what we’d expect to see if pastors are preaching the whole counsel of God.  On the second, I have to wonder how they concluded that.

This section is followed by a dubious five-page discussion of Phoebe, which goes well beyond what can be determined from the text, to build an entire not-insignificant point on a single verse that’s almost a passing reference.

Chapter Six: The Great Divorce that You Didn’t See Coming

Chapter six is about the relationship between parachurch organizations and the church, and between individuals and the church.  There’s some good stuff here, too.  In particular, there are some very important questions raised, that the church would do well to confront.  But this is one of those areas where the absence of key principles means she almost got it right.

It’s true that parachurch organizations are not the church…and it’s also not true.  We have to be able to hold this both/and in tension.  The parachurch organization is not the local church.  Its purpose is not to accomplish everything the church is meant to do.  It doesn’t have, in itself, the same authority structure, etc.  But Christian parachurch organizations — as well as Christian individuals — also are the church, in that the church is comprised of people.

The local church is important, and meeting with the church serves important functions, but we can often be guilty of so prioritizing those four walls that we lose sight of the fact that the real church, the Body of Christ, is “a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues.” (Rev. 7:9)  If people in the church are doing something, then there’s a very real sense in which the church is doing it.

At the same time, though, Byrd is absolutely right that we need to be very mindful of the relationships between those organizations (and/or ourselves as individuals) and the local churches, so that we’re functioning properly and in order.  Which, incidentally, is all about whether the household of God is operating in proper subjection to our spiritual “fathers.” (1 Tim. 3:5)

It also raises the important question of whether local congregations are meeting people’s needs for true fellowship.

“While the gospel is faithfully preached in her church, there isn’t much life flowing from the church. The leaders have their meetings and serve the needs that arise, but the members don’t really function as brothers and sisters with a household obligation.  They greet one another on Sunday morning, chat a little after the service, and are on their way back to real life.” (p. 156-57)

This describes all too many churches in my experience.  And the reality is, if this is all the local meeting is, it isn’t offering anything you can’t get from a distance — which is not the way it’s meant to be.

Unfortunately, too much of this chapter is made to be all about women, and that’s not really the problem at hand.  This issue of parachurch organizations taking over where the church is falling short is bigger than that.

Chapter Seven: Is This the Way it Was Supposed to Be?

This is…a little weird.  It opens with a transformed-to-the-21st-century view of the account of Mary and Martha.  (Where we’re told that if Jesus were coming to dinner, we wouldn’t serve the store-brand spaghetti sauce.  Except, if that’s what I usually cooked, I actually would.)  Then there’s kind of this whole thing where we’re told that the Jewish view of women was pretty limited and demeaning…except that we’re told that it actually wasn’t.  Yes, I know; that’s confusing.  The book is confusing on this point.

The general takeaway is that at least some men historically thought poorly of women (not news to any of us, I’m sure), and that women are actually necessary to the church (hopefully also not news).  The quality of exposition here is mixed, with references to a handful of women in the New Testament, some of which seem pretty sound, some of which are thought-provoking and I’m not sure about without further study, and some of which are just generally questionable.

She does dig into 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and, while I’m not sure I agree entirely with her conclusions, her approach to this is reasonably defensible.  (Although I’d like to have seen her broaden the discussion more to speak more in-depth about the surrounding context if she’s going to finally delve into a relevant passage like this.)

There are a few more oddities scattered throughout this chapter, though, like anachronistic attributions to Eve and to Noah.

Chapter Eight: When Paul Passes Phoebe the Baton

In this final chapter, we return to Phoebe.  Where she got roughly five pages before, she now gets seven more — with equally questionable exegesis.  Starting from an illustration about her son and an unfortunate shopping incident, she makes an argument about Paul’s “commendation” of Phoebe that relies on equivocation and once again reads more into the text than can reasonably be determined from it.

There’s then a section about Macrina, older sister of Gregory of Nyssa, and yet one more about Junia-possibly-Joanna, which involves still more speculation.  The overall point here is that women can be useful in the church.  Certainly a point I would agree with, but it’s concerning to me that she feels the need to go to such weird lengths to try to make it.

Finally, she points out that both men and women need to learn submission — something I agree often gets lost in the shuffle.  Even as a husband is the head of his wife, he himself is subject to Christ; and men and women alike are subject to a variety of authorities in the church and in the  community.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I wish Aimee Byrd had written a different book.  I’d like to see some of these ideas focused on and fleshed out without the distracting trappings of “patriarchy is bad,” “complementarianism is bad,” “biblical manhood and womanhood is bad,” “authority is bad,” etc.  Even the parts that are otherwise very good seem to be seasoned with bitterness, rather than coming across as for love and edification.  Which is unfortunate, because they have a lot of potential for edification.

But, honestly, this requires so much “seed-spitting” I wouldn’t recommend it.  It’s simply not a good return on the investment of time.