Dr. Beth Allison Barr’s 2021 book The Making of Biblical Womanhood details the complicated history of how women in non-traditional roles like spiritual leadership have been seen in the Western church, raising a challenge against complementarian arguments that the practice of placing women in positions of church authority originates in 20th century feminist philosophy.
She’s largely successful in that. She doesn’t deny patriarchy as the norm in medieval Christianity. Instead, she highlights important exceptions that she thinks push back on two ideas: that women shouldn’t lead in ministry and that the proper place for a woman is in the home.
I found her historical argument to be fairly persuasive. I was surprised, however, by her weaker treatment of the biblical data. The people she’s seeking to persuade are evangelical Christians — a group which, as a rule, is more interested in living their lives by the Bible than by medieval Catholic history. No matter how fascinating her historical research may be, or how compellingly she can show women took part in church leadership at the time, these just aren’t the kinds of arguments that will change an evangelical’s opinion about women in ministry.
She gives surprisingly little consideration to this point. She even claims the reason evangelicals like John Piper take the complementarian view so seriously is because they lack historical insight. It’s as if she thinks John Piper should — or even would — read the Bible through the lens of medieval history! Barr argues further that Christian patriarchy is rooted in the belief in the inerrancy of Scripture. Here she gives up the game completely. If she herself believes that her views are opposed to the Bible, how does she expect to convince her conservative critics to join her cause? Christians who want to be faithful to Scripture will simply turn away: there is nothing for them in her arguments.
She will succeed in persuading the NPR tote-bag-carrying ex-vangelicals. But they already agree with her, so that’s no great feat. Still, they will nod solemnly as she cites disputed data about gender pay gaps and makes the unsupported claim that patriarchy cannot be disentangled from racism. They know full well (she does, too) that patriarchy pre-dates modern racism by millenia. They also know it is still practiced by non-white people and cultures. They will nod solemnly all the same.
It’s not that she ignores the Bible completely. For instance, she closely examines the context of “household code” passages that encourage women to be respectful in church and to their husbands. She argues that the equality that men and women are offered in Christ (see Galatians 3:28) was scandalous in a patriarchal society, so Paul gave guidance to contain that scandal by encouraging orderly and polite behavior. Here she has a stronger case.
In fact, the apostle makes similar arguments to slaves and those who suffered under oppressive governments. Obviously this was a strategy he applied in many circumstances. From this, Barr argues that Paul’s recommendations were culturally situated. Their purpose was to avoid scandalizing the gospel and drawing dangerous negative attention; but they are not universal and not permanent, and they do not undermine the fundamental equality between the sexes.
The most frustrating element of the book is Barr’s own either/or absolutizing which mirrors the mentality of the extreme complementarians she’s critiquing. Examples of this mindset include:
1. Treating complementarianism as synonymous with patriarchy. Many complementarians take much more moderate or even progressive views about women’s roles in society than run-of-the-mill chauvinists do.
2. Asserting that complementarianism and sexual abuse are causally linked. She conveniently ignores evidence to the contrary even when praising the egalitarian wife of an egalitarian pastor who had his own sex abuse scandals which broke two years before this book was published. Since the publication of her book, charges of sexual abuse have also come out against the “hippie” pastor of an egalitarian denomination.
3. Extreme complementarians want women to find fulfillment in domestic life, but Barr seems to center fulfillment through modern work. This is a contemporary white feminist attitude much more deeply rooted in Betty Friedan (whom she mentions approvingly) than in Scripture. She chastises the “cult of domesticity” as a modern phenomenon despite Paul’s own encouragement to young women “to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God” (Titus 2:4-5). While this command is at least partly rooted in concerns for respectability, Paul does seem to see domesticity as a worthy calling for women. Of course, as Barr points out, it is not the only calling for women. Paul himself praises women who reject domestic life to dedicate themselves to God (see 1 Corinthians 7), and seemed to take no issue with women in business (like Lydia) and at least some forms of ministry (Phoebe, Junia, Priscilla, etc.).
4. Barr dishonestly calls the common complementarian view that the Son obeyed the Father from eternity the Arian heresy. Arius’ heresy was not that He believed the Son obeyed the Father, but that the Son was created by the Father and thus not fully divine in the same way that the Father is. Barr and other egalitarians claim that a difference in roles requires a difference in natures, but that is precisely the question under dispute! Complementarians believe that two distinct groups of people can, in some cases at least, be equal in nature but serve different functions.
Reading Barr’s book as someone who is largely egalitarian but also has some complementarian sympathies, I found some of her points to be very persuasive and others not so much.
On the one hand, I support along with her a strong political egalitarianism where women may choose to work, marry, or not marry as they please. I also agree with her that the absolutism of extreme complementarians isn’t faithful to the biblical witness to women who prophesy during communal worship, plant new churches, lead in various capacities, work outside the home, and reject marriage so they may commit fully to serving God. There is indeed a kind of “cult of domesticity” which treats family life as the primary mode of Christian existence, and this cult has only gotten more exaggerated in neo-Christian Nationalist and “trad” sub-cultures. This not only contradicts the words of Jesus and Paul, but their own lives as single persons committed to God! Many women have pursued professional life to the benefit of others and with a sense of personal fulfillment. This is a good thing!
On the other hand, might there also be real differences between men and women? And might those differences show up organically in our social arrangements? Barr agrees with complementarian Albert Mohler that patriarchy is the default for human society. She just argues that this is purely and simply the result of human sin. But maybe patriarchy’s near universality is a form of sinful excess (as Barr states) that’s rooted in something more real (as Mohler claims)–biological differences between men and women. These differences may have stood out more prominently in pre-modern societies where men and women tended to play more distinct roles in the survival of the community; but in modern western society, sex distinctions can seem old-fashioned and largely irrelevant. Childcare options are plentiful, most kinds of work are not gendered, pregnancy has less impact on a woman’s ability to have a career, and birth control/abortion exist to minimize the differences between men and women. But the fact that sex differences aren’t as important in our modern society doesn’t make them non-existent.
In privileging the cult of professionalism over the cult of domesticity, Barr is likely to incur pushback from complementarian men and women who see something sacred in motherhood that they believe is under attack in egalitarianism’s push to get women to “fulfill [their] profession” instead of “[staying] home and [baking] cookies,” as Hillary Clinton once quipped.
Is it telling that some of Barr’s examples of medieval egalitarian heroines are women who abandoned their families to pursue what they perceived as a greater fulfillment in a higher spiritual calling? Isn’t this one of the chief complementarian fears: that families will be destroyed in the wake of mothers trailblazing their own paths outside of the home? Concerns about kids growing up in daycare like some Huxleyan dystopia while their parents pursue other kinds of self-fulfillment aren’t just thinly veiled misogyny or even hysterics–they are rooted in observations about real social changes that are not all necessarily good.
Women who want to reject marriage and motherhood, either because they feel called by God to some other vocation or because they would prefer (for whatever reason, whether pragmatic or even self-indulgent) to join the workforce, should of course be welcome to do so. But they also shouldn’t look down on women who find real value and meaning in God-designed functions like motherhood that are distinctly female. While Barr doesn’t go “full Hillary,” it’s hard not to read in her words a rejection of one kind of cult and a subtle promotion of another.
In short, Barr’s book is not all bad. For instance, the historical data she covers is fascinating and points to a more complicated historical narrative about women’s spirituality and work. The real shortcoming of her work is that she often substitutes her own simplistic view as a replacement for the one offered by extreme complementarians.