Associated Baptist Press
Women's Bible commentary promotes 'complementarian' roles for sexes
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By Bob Allen Thursday, January
05, 2012
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) – A Bible commentary by women and for women is now
out in Old and New Testament volumes that seek to counter a prevailing view
of women’s equality in the church and home.
The two-volume Women's Evangelical Commentary, published by LifeWay
Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, starts with the
premise
that most modern Bible translations and commentaries are distorted by “21st
century social agendas,” particularly feminism.
Rhonda Kelley
“God has created men and women equal in worth and value but very different
in our role and function,” managing editor Rhonda Kelley said in an
_interview_
(http://richardlandlive.com/episode/special-guests-rhonda-harrington-kelley-and-dorothy-kelley-patterson/)
promoting the newly released Old
Testament volume Dec. 31 on the radio program Richard Land Live. “Rather than
fighting that as Christian women, we need to understand that God created us
to be women for a very special purpose.”
A _product description_
(http://www.lifeway.com/Product/womens-evangelical-commentary-new-testament-P005401610)
says that other women’s commentaries
advocate an “egalitarian” theology of the sexes -- that men and women are
created equal in every way. The Women’s Evangelical Commentary counters
with a “complementarian” view of gender -- women and men are equal before God
but in the home and church husbands are to lead and wives submit.
Kelley, wife of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary President Chuck
Kelley and daughter of the famed “chaplain of Bourbon Street” evangelist
_Bob Harrington_ (http://www.thechaplain.com/prodigal_father.htm) , said the
intent is to instruct modern women in “what biblical womanhood is all about,
not just what the world says about women.”
Kelley said many females arriving to study at Southern Baptist seminaries
today have no biblical framework to prepare them for what they will learn
there about women’s roles.
“Not only do they not have a framework, but in many situations our women
students have been raised by mothers who were a product of the feminist
movement,” Kelley said. “And so even their Christian mothers didn’t fully
understand what it meant to be biblical women and they were rebelling with the
world, with the culture, against a role that they thought women were being
forced into.”
Kelley said when confronted with the contrast between “what the Bible
teaches about us as women” and “what the world’s perspective has been,”
students often “are just “stunned” by the difference. “Really, feminism has
crept within our churches and even into our seminary homes,” she said. “And
so many times there is great freedom as they discover who really God
created us to be.”
Along with learning aids for use either in individual devotion or group
Bible study, the women-to-women commentary gives attention to passages that
general commentaries would consider obscure.
For example, the Women's Evangelical Commentary: Old Testament treats
passages in the Old Testament that forbid boiling a young goat in its mother’s
milk. “There are not many people who even care about that, but it does have
to do with maternity,” said co-editor Dorothy Patterson, wife of
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson.
Patterson, professor of theology in women's studies at the seminary in
Fort Worth, Texas, said another example is a women’s reading of the Book of
Esther. On the one hand, she said, there is “a section on beauty treatments
and what Esther went through and the archeological evidence that shows
exactly what that is.” Then turn the page, “and you find our first excursus on
submission.”
“Most people don’t think about submission as being a topic in the book of
Esther, but it is clearly in the text,” Patterson said. “I think our
readers will find it interesting to see how you take the Old Testament roots
for something that is very heavily discussed in the New Testament.”
--
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