My Christians for Biblical Equality Keynote Lecture
About a week ago (late July, 2024), I presented via pre-recorded video at the annual Christians for Biblical Equality Conference. CBE posted the lecture on Youtube for public viewing and I am re-posting for my Substack community.
Below, I am offering the written manuscript of the same paper for paid subscribers, so they can look at the material and capture some of the details I mentioned.
Read the Written Version:
Her Story Alone: Female Identity without Contingency
[Disclaimer: This is advance material that will be expanded into my next book with IVP, and I am offering it here for learning, but please do not copy and redistribute. Thanks!]
In my book Tell Her Story, I focused in large part on the way the Bible has always cast a vision for woman and man together, side-by-side and shoulder-to-shoulder, working out their calling of wise stewardship and holy cultivation in God’s world: whether demonstrated in Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Priscilla and Aquila, or Andronicus and Junia.
After publishing Tell Her Story, I had a strong desire to write another book on the subject of women in Scripture. While the stories of what women were doing in the Bible are very important, there was a theological question that stayed mostly in the background of my book, that I felt like was never tackled head-on: what does it mean to be a woman? Not necessarily psychologically, or biologically, or even spiritually. But moreso: What does it mean to be a woman without being connected directly to a man? While Genesis 1-2 clearly tell us that Adam was incomplete without Eve, it’s not always the case that a man is always with a woman or that a woman is always with a man.
A few months after Tell Her Story came out, I published a Christianity Today article about Junia (Rom 16:7). I casually mentioned in the article that Junia was married to Andronicus. Shortly after that article was published, a woman emailed me with a complaint: I had simply stated that Junia was married to Andronicus, even though the text doesn’t state that explicitly. (She was right, by the way.) Her concern was that I was indirectly saying that her apostleship was only valid because she was married to an apostle named Andronicus. This reader felt that I had robbed Junia of her independent ministry vocation apart from Andronicus. I tried to clarify in my email reply that that was not my intention, but that exchange stuck in my mind for a while.
As I continued to ponder what the sequel to Tell Her Story might focus on, I kept going back to this question: what does it mean to be a woman not associated with a man? While one storyline in Scripture imagines men and women together in ministry, two pieces fitting together like puzzle parts; there is another strand within Scripture where we see women called, empowered, and contributing without a man. These moments are crucial, because they address the sociological issue of contingency; her calling and identity is not contingent upon the presence or role of a man. She has inherent dignitas and vocatio all by herself. Put another way, it is not “good” for woman to be alone, in the same way it is not “good” for man to be alone, but God can still do all that he wants and needs to do through her alone. That is how powerful God is—and that is how powerful he has made woman and man on their own.