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Review Summary: Biblical Truth exudes such commentaries |
Date: 2007-05-30 |
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Details: John Piper, and friends, are true Godly people seeking to help us understand God's Word. This book does that and the commentary included on this book by others shows the unwillingness to submit to the authority of God's Word and His Son. God's Word, and this book, show a beautiful role of men and women that, if followed, help make for a better world. It does NOT in any way put women down. It DOES have specific roles for each, Godly roles, that have been time-test when followed. |
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Review Summary: Debunking Evangelical Feminism |
Date: 2007-05-06 |
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Details: The kind of equality that evangelical femininist teach is NOT BIBLICAL.God`s equality shows us that men and woman are equal but OUR ROLES ARE DIFFERENT.God may not see us as male and female,but he sure expects us to recognize the difference.Many in the church won`t except that but they are not seeking truth.They will actaully criticize those trying to teach the truth.John Piper doesn`t need to resort to longwinding twistings of the scriptures;HE CAN SEE HIS ARGUEMENT LAID OUT,WORD FOR WORD IN THE BIBLE.We need more books like this to combat the sad state of affairs in the Church today. |
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Review Summary: An Honest Opinion |
Date: 2006-09-12 |
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Details: Men are notoriously insensitive and frequently behave in ways demeaning to women. I know this to be true because I'm describing myself. This is why a femanist will never be convicted with such a book. By means of argument, reason, and so-called "legalism", you can't drive a woman to believe in God-endorsed gender roles when excluding love.
May the women forgive us; and may God heal the women we've hurt.
I've not read this work yet, but it sounds like a great work for men of the church to share with one another, so that they may in turn share it with their wives and their daughters. Numbers 30 was written with loving intentions (Mt 22:40). |
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Review Summary: Disappointed by the decision to reissue without rewriting |
Date: 2006-09-07 |
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Details: This 2006 reissue of an early 1990s CBMW book advocates a He Leads/She Submits model of Christian marriage. I am disappointed by the decision to reissue the book without responding to Dr. Sarah Sumner's 2003 critique of this model in her book, Men and Women in the Church. Sumner points out that a wife's submission should be understood in the context of her husband's sacrifice, not his leadership. Additionally, it is not appropriate to reduce headship to leadership. Headship is a metaphor. While leadership is an important aspect of headship, leadership does not capture other facets of the metaphor and misses the organic unity implied by the head/body pairing. He leads/She submits alters the head/body and sacrifice/submit pairings in Ephesians 5, so is a distortion of the Biblical marriage model and an inaccurate summary of the essence of Christian marriage.
Another way of making this point is the following argument: I don't submit to Christ because He is the best leader the world has ever seen. He is, but that isn't why I submit to Him. I submit to Christ because He died on the Cross for me. In a Christian marriage, the relationship between husband and wife is to parallel the relationship between Christ and the Church. The essence of that relationship is his sacrifice/her submission, NOT his leadership/her submission.
Sumner's arguments ring true to me, based both on my reading of the Biblical texts and my childhood experiences in a fundamentalist Baptist church. I am disappointed that CBMW has chosen to ignore Sumner's work, as opposed to either responding to her critique or modifying their model. |
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Review Summary: No Equality Here |
Date: 2006-08-20 |
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Details: The authors claim this book is a response to the movement of feminism, but I think it's a response to any woman who dares seek equality with a man or a place of leadership. This is the second time I've seen a male writer try to place women beneath men while at the same time claiming to believe in equality. Honestly, who do they think they're fooling? The statement that "men and women are created equally, but God made man the head and woman the helper" is one of the most self-contradicting statements I've ever seen.
However well-meaning these authors may be (I'm really not sure what their agenda is), I can't imagine what they see to be healthy or beneficial about encouraging women to never attempt to be in the position that they are. Christ is higher than all of us, but He pulled people up beside Him instead of shoving them down. He also elevated women as well as men, and yet these authors are trying to say that women were created only to be "helpers" just because we have wombs? How does that make us inferior leaders to men? If you want proof to overthrow these authors' claims, simply read the Bible! In the Bible, it was women who Christ first revealed Himself to after His resurrection and women who He entrusted with the news of His resurrection. The Apostle Paul even asked women to pray and prophesy in his church. Did I mention Deborah, who taught many men? The Bible hardly has silent women, does it?
With this knowledge, no one can accurately claim that God meant for men to be teachers and women to be silent; that idea is simply, blatantly untrue. You can NOT tell a woman she was made to submit and can never lead just because she's a woman and then attempt to label yourself a Christian. We are all servants to Christ; this is not a matter of sex. God designed men and women to co-exist and rule Eden in equality; it was not until after the Fall that man, not God, designed a flawed heirarchy of men over women.
Of course, we can't forget the women writers in this book whom Piper and Grudem graciously allowed to share their experiences in order to back up the complimentarian viewpoint. One woman's story in particular made it clear how cut and dry these people think women's roles are. This woman shared a story about a time she spent with some tribal people. She explained that it was understood among everyone there that women cooked, made bungalows, toiled, etc, and no one had a problem with this. The clincher for me, though, was when she said that, when she lifted a spear at one point and pretended to be about to throw it, the men of the tribe nearly died laughing. "Women have nothing to do with spears," she explained. "These responsibilities (men's and women's) were not up for grabs, not interchangeable, not equal." She admits that the roles of these men and women are not equal and seems to praise the fact that no one questions them! And this is the role model we, as Christians, should take? That of pagan natives, who believe that women don't question anything and who find the very idea of women fighting to be laughable?? No thanks, I prefer God's design: that of fighting women, who do know how to defend themselves and to question those who attempt to define their roles and nature to them.
A wise friend of mine on another site was speaking of the ridiculous hyper-patriarchal design and how it always attempts to influence men to be dominant and women to be passive and reactive rather than proactive. Here are her words:
"The "men don't submit" principle inherent in patriarchy is based, once again, on an immature obsession with sex differences and, perhaps, an insecurity with one's own sexual adequacy. (MY hypothesis.)
Men and women are different. (What a "duh" level concept!) So far, so good.
But in patriarchy, men being different from women must be absolute. That's why they invent long, complicated, legalistic lists of what men are like and what women are like, and why they're polar opposite lists.
So if it's a virtue for women to be submissive, then it's anathema for men to be submissive.
That's why virtually all the fruit of the Spirit wind up on the "pink" lists and why you have boorish, arrogant traits being commended for the boys. I suspect it's also why they're making such a business of accusations of "feminizing men/boys" in church, schools, society in general, etc. When reasonable people expect both boys and girls, men and women, to be courteous, humble, respectful, loving, kind, and other "feminine" things that are actually signs of civilized human beings, these wingnuts think that it's an outrageous demand, that we're "stifling" our boys and "emasculating" our men."
Please don't be misled by this book; it attempts to do something much more than provide relief from the Feminist movement. Imbalance of power in either sex is bad; radical feminism is one end of the spectrum and books like this are the other. Either way, equality and harmony are lost. The only way this book could possibly be useful in a healthy way to any person would be if it were used as either a reference to old-fashioned thinking or a guide on how NOT to treat and regard women. As a Godly woman, I have every intention of being a servant to Christ and no intention of doing so beneath men. |
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out of 41 Reviews
