Position · 1987

Egalitarianism

The view that women and men share equally in leadership and authority in the church and in marriage, so every ministry, including pastor and bishop, is open to women.

History

Roots

For most of church history the question barely arose. The Early Church had women patrons, deacons and martyrs, and some early readers took Paul at face value when he greeted Junia as “outstanding among the apostles” (Romans 16:7). John Chrysostom, preaching on that verse around 390, exclaimed: “How great is the devotion of this woman, that she should be even counted worthy of the appellation of apostle!” (Homily 31 on Romans). But the settled practice of East and West reserved the priesthood and the bishop’s office to men, and the Reformation left that practice in place.

The first sustained case for women preaching came from the radical edge of Protestantism. The Quaker Margaret Fell’s Womens Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (1666, EEBO-TCP text) argued that the Spirit poured out at Pentecost fell on daughters as well as sons (Acts 2:17–18). That text, from Joel 2, became the backbone of every later revivalist argument.

Causes

The modern movement grew out of revival. John Wesley did not believe women should normally preach, but in 1771 he told Mary Bosanquet that “the strength of the cause rests there on your having an extraordinary call,” the same kind of call he claimed for his lay preachers (letter of 13 June 1771). Early Methodist women preached under that exception.

In the nineteenth-century holiness movement the exception became a principle. Phoebe Palmer’s Promise of the Father (1859, transcription) argued from Pentecost that Spirit-filled women are obliged to speak. Catherine Booth defended Palmer the same year in Female Ministry; or, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel (1859, original pamphlet; edited text), and the Salvation Army she co-founded gave women officers the same rank as men. Holiness denominations and, after the Azusa Street Revival (1906), many Pentecostal bodies licensed women as evangelists and pastors on the ground that the Spirit’s gifting settles the matter.

A second strand was exegetical. Katharine Bushnell, a medical missionary, argued in God’s Word to Women (book edition 1921; CBE, secondary) that translators had read male bias into the texts on women. Her book was largely forgotten for half a century and then rediscovered by evangelical feminists in the 1970s.

Influence

Mainline Protestant churches moved first, often for reasons of justice as much as exegesis. The (American) Methodist Church granted women full clergy rights in 1956, and Maud Keister Jensen became the first woman admitted under the new rule (GCAH biography). Presbyterian and Lutheran bodies followed over the next two decades.

Inside conservative evangelicalism the position needed a defence that kept inerrancy. Gilbert Bilezikian’s Beyond Sex Roles (1985) supplied one. In 1987 a group of scholars gathered around the new journal Priscilla Papers, and on 2 January 1988 they established Christians for Biblical Equality, with Catherine Clark Kroeger as first president (CBE history). The Danvers Statement, drafted by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in December 1987, was written partly against this movement and gave the opposing view its name, Complementarianism. CBE answered with Men, Women and Biblical Equality in 1989 (statement; Christianity Today report, secondary).

In the Anglican world the decisive step came when the General Synod voted in 1992 to ordain women priests and the first were ordained in 1994 (Church of England Ordains Women). Women bishops followed after a July 2014 Synod vote; Libby Lane was consecrated Bishop of Stockport in January 2015 (summary, secondary). The Roman Catholic response was Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994), in which John Paul II declared that the Church “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women” (Vatican text), a question the egalitarian argument has not moved in Rome or in Eastern Orthodox churches.

Key ideas and contributors

Equal in creation. Both sexes bear God’s image and receive the mandate to rule the earth together (Genesis 1:26–28). Egalitarians read the woman in Genesis 2 as a partner corresponding to the man; the word ezer (“helper”) is used elsewhere of God himself. Male rule first appears as a result of the fall (Genesis 3:16), so redemption works to undo it.

Equal in redemption. CBE’s statement opens: “The Bible teaches the full equality of men and women in Creation and in Redemption.” Its central text is Galatians 3:28, “there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” which egalitarians treat as a governing principle with consequences for church order, as the same verse had for Jew and Gentile.

Gifts, not gender. Ministry follows the Spirit’s gifting. CBE affirms that “both men and women are divinely gifted and empowered to minister to the whole Body of Christ.” Egalitarians point to the women who led in Scripture: Deborah the judge (Judges 4:4–5), Huldah the prophet, Priscilla teaching Apollos (Acts 18:26), Phoebe the deacon and patron, and Junia the apostle (Romans 16:1–7).

Mutual submission in marriage. Paul’s household code begins with “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). Egalitarians read the call for wives to submit as Paul working within, and quietly subverting, a Roman household structure, much as he did with slavery.

The restrictive texts are local. The silence of women in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 cannot be absolute, since three chapters earlier Paul assumes women pray and prophesy aloud (1 Corinthians 11:5). The ban in 1 Timothy 2:11–15 addressed false teaching in Ephesus. Richard and Catherine Kroeger argued in I Suffer Not a Woman (Baker, 1992) that the rare verb authentein named a domineering or usurping act tied to a local heresy, not ordinary teaching authority.

Other contributors: Gordon Fee and the essays in Discovering Biblical Equality (ed. Ronald Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, IVP, 2004; 3rd ed. 2021); Philip Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ (Zondervan, 2009), the most detailed exegetical case; Eldon Epp, Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Fortress, 2005), on how Junia became the masculine “Junias” in later manuscripts and translations; and the historian Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood (Brazos, 2021; summary, secondary), who argues that male headship owes more to medieval and modern culture than to Scripture.

Key controversies

Creation order. This is the main complementarian objection. Paul grounds his rule in 1 Timothy 2:13 on the fact that “Adam was formed first, then Eve,” and that argument reaches back before the fall and outside Ephesus. The Danvers Statement holds that “some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men” and that male headship in marriage “was not a result of sin” (text). Egalitarians answer that Paul is using the creation story to correct a specific error, not stating a timeless rule.

Two Greek words. Much depends on kephalē (“head”) in 1 Corinthians 11:3 and Ephesians 5:23. Egalitarians, following Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen, argued that it often means “source”; Wayne Grudem surveyed thousands of Greek uses and concluded it means “authority over” (Trinity Journal 6.1, Spring 1985; Galaxie listing). The meaning of authentein in 1 Timothy 2:12 is fought over just as hard; Andreas Köstenberger’s study of the verse’s grammar (in Women in the Church, 1995) argued that it pairs with teaching as something positive, which undercuts the “domineering” reading.

Junia. Was Junia a woman, and was she an apostle? Most scholars now accept that the name is feminine, a point Epp’s book settled for many readers. Michael Burer and Daniel Wallace argued in New Testament Studies (2001) that the Greek means “well known to the apostles,” the reading the ESV adopted. Egalitarians reply that early Greek readers such as Chrysostom took it the other way.

The slippery slope. Grudem’s Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (Multnomah, 2004) answered more than a hundred egalitarian arguments and claimed that their method tends to erode the authority of Scripture. Critics went further and warned that the same moves lead to Affirming Theology on sexuality. Egalitarians reject the link, noting that many of them hold a traditional sexual ethic and that the same “trajectory” argument once divided Christians over slavery.

The Trinity. Some complementarians grounded wives’ submission in an eternal submission of the Son to the Father. Kevin Giles’ The Trinity and Subordinationism (2002) charged that this revives a form of subordinationism condemned in the Arian controversy. In 2016 the dispute broke open among complementarians themselves when Liam Goligher and Carl Trueman accused Grudem and Bruce Ware of departing from Nicene orthodoxy (Christianity Today; Reformation21 survey, secondary). Egalitarians read the episode as confirmation that hierarchy had been read back into God.

Church practice. The Baptist Faith and Message (2000) states that “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” and in 2023 the Southern Baptist Convention upheld its expulsion of Saddleback Church for having women pastors. Egalitarians and complementarians now often sit in different denominations, and the divide runs through Evangelical, Reformed and Pentecostal families rather than between them.

What remains unresolved

The argument turns on a handful of verses and a question of method. Both sides claim to read Scripture as authoritative; they differ on whether Galatians 3:28 or 1 Timothy 2 sets the frame for the other. Egalitarians must show that the restrictive texts are local without making every hard text local. Complementarians must explain why the women who led in Scripture were exceptions. The historic churches of East and West, which rest the question on tradition and the nature of the priesthood (Male Priesthood), sit outside this Protestant debate altogether.