Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism, within evangelical Christianity, is the position that Scripture assigns no ministry role or church office on the basis of sex, grounded chiefly in Paul’s declaration that “there is neither… male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Its adherents affirm Scripture’s full authority but read the New Testament’s household and office instructions as addressed to first-century circumstances rather than a timeless creation pattern. The opposing position, complementarianism, holds that Scripture assigns each sex distinct, complementary roles.

Historical Origin

Egalitarianism’s biblical case predates its label: the texts it appeals to are the New Testament’s own, but its organized shape as a named, minority position within American evangelicalism is comparatively recent. Writing in a 1975 magazine article, Bobbie Lee Holley argued that the Bible’s restrictive instructions concerning women reflect “rabbinical trappings, the innate prejudices of a patriarchal social structure, physiological ignorance, and obsolete cultural patterns,” rather than a permanent creation design.¹ By 1991 the position, by then commonly labeled “evangelical feminism,” was established enough within evangelicalism that John Piper and Wayne Grudem organized a multi-author volume responding to it, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism.²

Core Tenets

No role distinction based on sex

What distinguishes egalitarianism is not the claim that men and women are equally made in God’s image and equally redeemed in Christ, something complementarianism affirms as well, but the further claim that Scripture assigns no ministry role or church office differently by sex. Egalitarians read Paul’s declaration to the Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28), as the controlling text for how every other role-related passage in the New Testament should be understood, eliminating not only ethnic and social distinctions but functional ones between men and women as well.³

A first-century pattern, not a permanent one

On the same premise, egalitarians read the Greek verb behind “exercise authority” in 1 Timothy 2:12, αὐθεντέω (authenteō), as a domineering misuse of authority rather than the ordinary exercise of teaching or ruling office, so that Paul is understood to prohibit a specific abuse rather than bar women from the office itself.⁴

Precedent in Scripture

Egalitarians also point to women exercising significant ministry in Scripture as evidence against a blanket restriction. Deborah judged Israel as a prophetess (Judg. 4:4); Phoebe carried Paul’s letter to Rome bearing the title diakonos, “servant” or “deacon,” of the church at Cenchreae (Rom. 16:1); Andronicus and Junia are named “well known to the apostles” (Rom. 16:7); and women prayed and prophesied in the gathered assembly (1 Cor. 11:5; Acts 21:9).

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

The Second London Baptist Confession’s chapter on the church assumes rather than argues a male eldership and diaconate:

“The way appointed by Christ for the calling of any person, fitted and gifted by the Holy Spirit, unto the office of bishop or elder in a church, is, that he be chosen thereunto by the common suffrage of the church itself… and of a deacon that he be chosen by the like suffrage…”⁵

The chapter never engages Galatians 3:28 or otherwise adjudicates the modern debate by name; it simply assumes, as the church’s unbroken practice, that the office is male.

On Romans 16:7, the wider Reformed tradition’s own reading runs the other way from the egalitarian one. Calvin comments that Paul gives “the same name” to Andronicus and Junia that he gives to the Twelve, but “when he would speak properly, he confines the term to that primary order,” so that Scripture’s precise use of “apostle,” on his reading, does not place Junia in the office egalitarians sometimes infer from the title.⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Bobbie Lee Holley, “God’s Design: Woman’s Dignity,” Mission (March 1975), 9, quoted in Strauch, Biblical Eldership, “Endnotes,” chap. 5, n. 3. ↩
John Piper and Wayne Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1991), as cited in Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), “Endnotes,” chap. 5, n. 1. ↩
Strauch, Biblical Eldership, chap. 5, “Male Leadership,” 76. ↩
Strauch, Biblical Eldership, chap. 5, 72. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” paras. 8-9. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 3, 315-326. ↩