Mike Winger is a fairly prolific maker of good YouTube videos covering theology and apologetics. I really like most of his stuff and I recommend his channel. In keeping with my custom, you know what’s coming next is going to be some critique, and I can’t disappoint. I recently learned he created a series on the role of women in the church and I found it more than a little underwhelming. It wasn’t all bad, but it dealt primarily with complementarianism vs egalitarianism, and it was a bit too kind to both positions.
I’m not responding to his particular statements on the subject, but I realized that the nature of the question itself needs to be addressed.
The Big Question
If a Christian asks “what is the role of women in the church”, it might seem reasonable, even Biblical, but it betrays a more fundamental problem. If we have to ask it, it means we haven’t answered a bigger, more fundamental question: What is the role of women?
What did God make women for? That leads to other, related questions. What did He make men for? What’s our purpose? How do we relate to each other? What are our strengths and weaknesses? Or are we just androgynous beings?
These are all much more fundamental questions than what role a woman can play in a church. Our answers to these questions will mean we can understand the New Testament teaching on women or we can’t. We will either see what Paul and the other Apostles said about the subject and nod in agreement or try to find complicated ways to avoid sticking to the plain teaching.
Three Views
There are three views on this subject, but really only two and a faux third. On one pole you have patriarchy, and on the other egalitarianism. Complementarianism, invented in the 1980’s, tries to have it both ways by preserving a patriarchal view by softening it up to appear more palatable to our radically egalitarian popular culture. “Popular” is doing a lot of work here; our culture is still patriarchal all the way up, it’s just harder to see.
Patriarchalism is simply “father rule”. It’s the view that men are naturally called to leadership in the home and that leadership elsewhere flows out of that.
Egalitarianism is androgyny. It’s the view that men and women are effectively interchangeable, and with increasing technological sophistication, the egalitarian hopes this can be made complete where biology puts up a fight.
Complementarianism, as I said, is like soft patriarchy. It’s patriarchy without a real foundation. It comes to patriarchal conclusions about the role of men and women in the church only, and mostly ignores the nature of men and women. It’s the view that when the New Testament speaks about church roles, it’s mostly arbitrary rulings from God that we follow out of obedience, not because it makes sense.
Consequences
Our egalitarian culture has produced:
- Same-sex “marriage”, mandated
- Mutilation of young children in hospitals to “conform their bodies to their gender”
- The destruction of our language through pronoun manipulation
- Effeminacy, a vile sin, among men in dress and behavior
- The wholesale slaughter of tens of millions of unborn children
- Miserable, lonely women who chose careers over families
- Miserable women who wish they had chosen miserable careers because they don’t know how to be homemakers
- The rainbow mafia
- BLM and other race-bait organizations
Any time you find a problem in modern culture that wouldn’t have happened if your grandpas were in charge, you find something enhanced, it not outright caused, by egalitarianism.
The consequences of this worldview are so stark and so severe, and the view itself is so obviously contradicted by Scripture (as we’ll see), that I have a hard time taking those who hold it to be faithful, obedient followers of Christ. There’s a gradient here, where some less extreme egalitarian positions might be within orthodoxy, but it’s still dangerous. Egalitarianism is really a denial of hierarchy, but since God Himself is a hierarchy, this denial comes straight into contradiction with God’s nature. Not a place I’d want to go, theologically.
The Biblical Answer
God made man, and Adam realized he was alone. So God made Eve. The names alone tell us something about both. “Adam” refers to the dirt of the Earth, from which he was made. “Eve” means mother. Names are not trivialities in the Old Testament. Here we have something profound about men and women said just from what God called them. When Eve is created, we are also told she is created from Adam to help him. Both are made in the image of God, both are loved by God, but there’s a hierarchy.
Adam and Eve sinned and there was a curse. What was it? Adam was cursed to hard labor working the earth. It would no longer be easy. Eve was cursed with far more pain during child-bearing, and she was cursed to “desire her husband”, a statement I think is most accurately translated as that she would desire to rule over her husband. So here we have in the curse a reinforcement of their roles.
As if that weren’t enough, Paul in the New Testament, when describing limits on what women can do in the church, says that the sins Adam and Eve committed were different in nature. Eve was deceived. Adam was not. He sinned willfully. He obeyed his wife, didn’t stop her, but most of all knew it was sin. The serpent did not deceive him. Paul understands this as a difference in the nature of men and women.
In the New Testament we also have the relationship between men and women elevated to be the most accurate description of Christ’s relationship with His church. He is the bridegroom and the church is the bride. Paul appeals to this when he talks about wives submitting to their husbands and husbands loving their wives. Christ doesn’t submit to the church, but He loves her even to death.
The egalitarian will point out that I missed a passage in Galatians that “there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male, nor female, but all are one in Christ”, which is actually totally unrelated to this conversation. Paul wants to make the point that, despite our differences, Christ died for all of us, loves us all, and we all need to come to repentance; in Christ’s work, there is no distinction. But that needs to be said only because outside Christ’s work, there are distinctions.
So lets consider what we have here:
| Man | Woman |
|---|---|
| Created first | Created second |
| Named Eve | Was named by Adam |
| Name means “Earth” | Name means “mother” |
| Called to work the earth to sustain life | Called to help her husband |
| Cursed to harder labor working the earth | Cursed to harder labor bearing children |
| Was not deceived | Was deceived |
| Told to love his wife | Told to submit to her husband |
Again, this is a very, very brief survey of what the text says, but we already have enough of a picture here that men and women are fundamentally different. When we ask “what role do women play in the church”, these differences all need to inform our more important understanding of the role men and women play in life generally. The failure of the complementarian position is that it mostly ignores all of these, plus natural revelation, and tries to take the New Testament teaching about church offices in isolation. Egalitarians are right to find it weak.
Antemodernist 
Reblogged this on Patriactionary and commented:
Spot on.
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Would like your comment on this article by Derek Ramsey:
https://derekramsey.com/2022/09/23/exousia-vs-authentein/
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When the smart bois get into “the Greek actually says”…especially on a word found only once in the New Testament…they are to be ignored. They say authentein is found only once in the NT, which is supposed to prove that we need them to redefine it for us. But it proves the opposite. Who will know more about classical pagan usage of Greek words? Moderners who don’t read the pagan classics, especially pastors who view them as evil and would never touch them? Or the classically educated KJV translators? And they translated it “usurp authority over”…that is all we need to know on this.
Furthermore, only stupid people think synonyms don’t exist in ancient languages. This is like the idiocy of making a big and FALSE distinction between agape and phileo. They both mean love, and the distinction between them is FAKE. An example, the story of Jesus asking Peter if he lives him, he uses both words. Dialogue of a story in one gospel will say phileo and in another agape….its the same dialogue! Greek has synonyms just like English. Power and authority for example in English:
Biden doesn’t have the authority to do this student loan forgiveness without congress.
Biden doesn’t have the power to do this student loan forgiveness without congress.
Are they different statements? Let the smart bois apply themselves to the corpus of rey jacobs and see he only used the word power once and argue this means we need them to redefine it for us.
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I’m no Greek scholar (it appears Mr. Ramsey is not either), but on my initial reading it seems he’s building substantial part of his worldview on the way Paul uses certain words instead of other words. Seems like a strange way to understand Scripture.
In particular, he thinks it’s meaningful that Paul doesn’t use a neutral word for authority, but a wholly negative one, in 1st Timothy 2:12. But if Paul thinks the very nature of the leadership abuses the roles of the sexes, would we really expect him to do anything else?
When I hear about women trying to lead their husbands, the word used is often “domineering”. Does that mean the people who use the word “domineering” endorse wives leading their husbands? Or is their very selection of that word over “lead” indicative that they don’t? Seems obviously the latter.
His bigger mistake is the more common one: he reads 1st Timothy 2:12 and not a word more. But what if he did? Would it confirm his view that Paul was just referring to a woman who was exercising the wrong kind of leadership? Lets find out:
“For I hear that among you there are certain women who abuse the authority God has granted them. Only those who have self-control can exercise leadership over others.”
Wait. Sorry. That’s not in the Bible. It’s what I’d expect if Mr. Ramsey’s thesis were correct, but there’s something different instead. It’s this:
“For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”
If I were making his case, that’s not what I’d expect to see next. But if Paul is arguing against women having authority over men, it makes total sense that he’d trace it back to the creation and fall.
Why shouldn’t women have authority over men in the church? Paul tells us. Aside from their role in marriage to men (as the church submits to Christ), they are also, well, prone to being deceived. Just take a look at the rainbow vomit that splatters the walls of denominations run by women “pastors” if you want to see a contemporary example of Eve’s weakness. Not only that, though, women are also called primarily to childbearing. Those are Paul’s words.
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I had a long argument chain with him there. What do you think of his arguments?
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Read it briefly.
I don’t have much patience for people who take a text and beat it until it says the opposite of what it clearly says.
One of the signs of someone desperate for textual support is that they’ll grab a lexicon for a language they don’t speak and explode a word to find all kinds of other meanings for it, including (as he does in the thread) antonyms. Anything at all that isn’t the word the translators selected.
As it usually turns out, the translators know what they’re doing, and the ideologue who doesn’t actually know the language does not.
One bit of desperation in particular was the claim that the head-body metaphor doesn’t imply authority or hierarchy because it is about unity. Problem is, Paul himself breaks down the metaphor and compares Christians to different body parts *excluding* the head, because that’s a much better metaphor for unity among Christians. Who is the head in that metaphor? Not another Christian, but Christ. Why? Because Christ has authority. Christ is the head of the church; it’s in part where the term “headship” comes from when we talk about marriage.
The head-body metaphor is about unity. It’s *also* about authority. It can be about both. It *is* about both.
Ultimately, I don’t think people like that are worth engaging with. They cannot be convinced by argument. If you find it useful to develop your own thoughts that’s reasonable, but when it gets frustrating you aren’t wrong to disengage.
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I brought up the argument in 1 Peter 3. And his response was this:
“What is “clear as day” is that Peter called for wives to submit to their husbands and then immediately said “in the same way” husbands should also. In other words, the grammar shows that submission goes both ways. You can expect any interpretation that deviates from this to suffer from errors in interpretation. And it does.
First, the Greek word translated “obey” here is hupakouō which is usually translated as obey, but can also mean to listen attentively, hearken to (or comply with), or to answer. This is worth keeping in mind.
Second, nowhere in Genesis does it explicitly say that Sarah obeyed Abraham. “Obedience” is an inference. However, unlike Sarah, it does say that Abraham “obeyed” Sarah. The word used in Genesis 16:2 in the Greek Septuagint is hupakouō, the exact same word Peter uses to describe Sarah “obeying” Abraham.”
“In 20 of 21 cases in the NT where the word is used, it is translated as “obey” and has the sense of following commands of a command giver. In 1 of 21 case, it applies to the duty of the gatekeeper.
When Abraham obeyed Sarah, it meant that she told him to do something (a command) and he did it. This was not advice. Hagar was Sarah’s slave, not Abraham’s, and she told Abraham to have sex with Hagar to conceive a child. He did what he was told.
When Peter talks of Sarah obeying Abraham, it is the same obedience with which Abraham obeyed Sarah. Abraham told her what to do, and she did what she was told.
Neither Paul nor Peter discuss anything about a “final say” and there is full indication that Abraham and Sarah listened to each other and did what the other told them to do.”
The question is when listening to Sarah and doing as she tells you. Was Abraham obeying Sarah?
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