Theopedia

Feminism

Definition

Feminism names the conviction that women have long suffered unjust treatment in patriarchal societies, and the broader family of movements built on that conviction to secure women’s equal social, legal, and, within the church, ecclesial standing.1 Its Christian reception splits into two distinct currents. Feminist theology treats the Bible’s patriarchal language as itself a product of its ancient culture, relativizing Scripture’s authority on questions of sex and gender. Evangelical feminism, usually called egalitarianism, instead affirms Scripture’s full authority but reads its instructions on manhood and womanhood as addressed to first-century circumstances rather than a permanent creation design.

Historical Origin

Secular origins and the “waves” of feminism

The movement’s own accounts of its history are often narrated in four loosely successive “waves,” tracking from eighteenth-century efforts to secure women’s rights on the ground of a shared humanity to a late twentieth-century dissolution of sex difference itself.2 Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790) did not deny that men and women differ so much as argue that women’s rights were human rights, grounded in the rationality and virtue both sexes share.3 Writing in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir pressed further, proclaiming that “one is not born a woman but becomes one,” locating sex difference in social conditioning rather than nature.4 Radical feminists drew out the conclusion explicitly: Shulamith Firestone wrote that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.”5 A different strand pushed back against erasing difference. Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) argued for a distinct, equally valid feminine mode of moral reasoning rather than women’s assimilation to a supposedly neutral, in practice masculine, standard.6 By the turn of the twenty-first century the postmodern strand associated with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) had gone further still, treating even the sexed body as a construct rather than a given.7

Early Christian reception

Nineteenth-century Reformed theologians met the movement’s earliest form without sympathy. Robert Dabney, who taught at Union Seminary in Virginia, opposed feminism as part of a single patriarchal political theology that also opposed abolition and public education, treating all three as the same democratic shift away from established authority.8 His contemporary at Princeton, Charles Hodge, held a comparatively more moderate position on women’s rights, though historian Isaac Tuttle notes that both men’s conclusions bore the marks of their nineteenth-century American context rather than exegesis alone.9

Evangelical feminism and the modern debate

A biblically-argued version of feminism took organized shape within American evangelicalism in the twentieth century, under the name egalitarianism. By 1991 the position was established enough that John Piper and Wayne Grudem organized a multi-author volume answering it, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, defending the opposing complementarian reading of the same texts.10

Within Christianity

Feminist theology

A more radical, non-evangelical current, often called feminist theology or liberal theology, undertakes what its own literature describes as a reconstruction of Christian doctrine and origins from a feminist standpoint, treating the Bible’s patriarchal language as inseparable from the biases of its human authors rather than as binding divine revelation on questions of sex. The titles of two of its best-known works state the project directly: Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (1983) and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her: A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983).1112 Theopedia’s own confessional commitments stand outside this current: the Second London Baptist Confession calls Scripture “the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving Knowledge, Faith and Obedience,”13 a ground feminist theology’s reconstructive project does not share.

Evangelical feminism

Evangelical feminism, unlike feminist theology, affirms Scripture’s full authority throughout. Alexander Strauch, defending an all-male eldership, locates its distinguishing error not in denying Scripture but in its handling of specific texts: evangelical feminists, he argues, treat the passages on headship and submission as “obscure,” “isolated,” “problematic,” or “culturally limited,” reinterpreting them “in light of Galatians 3:28,” which they take as the clearer, controlling text.14 The full case for this position, and the Reformed confessional response to it, is carried at egalitarianism and complementarianism.

Confessional Response

Reformed Baptist confessional Christianity holds the complementarian position: that men and women, equal as God’s image-bearers, are created for distinct, complementary roles in marriage and the church.15 Assessing the wider evangelical debate against the feminist movement’s own trajectory, theologian Mark Saucy judges that egalitarianism, in its effort to rule out any hierarchy between the sexes, ends up echoing the movement’s own turn toward mere similarity, offering “at best silent” or “complicit” ground against a culture now dissolving sex difference altogether, while complementarianism, properly examined for its own cultural blind spots, is “better situated to leverage the entirety of the biblical witness to gender difference.”16

Objections and Responses

Paul’s restriction on women teaching (1 Tim. 2:11-15) answered a local, first-century controversy in Ephesus and does not bind the church today. Richard and Catherine Kroeger argued that Paul was countering a specific gnostic teaching, tied to the cult of Artemis at Ephesus, that made Eve the enlightener of Adam, so that his prohibition addressed only that local error rather than stating a permanent rule.17 Sandra Glahn extended the argument, proposing that Paul’s promise that a woman “will be saved through childbearing” (1 Tim. 2:15) alludes to a local saying about Artemis as a midwife who delivers women safely through labor.18 G. K. Beale responds that the claim doesn’t survive contact with the primary sources: of the roughly eighty ancient inscriptions and literary texts Glahn herself cites for Artemis, only about five mention her aiding childbirth at all, just one calls her a midwife outright, and none contains the specific Greek wording, “saved through childbearing,” that her theory requires.19 Steven Baugh’s independent review of the Kroegers’ underlying claim, that first-century Ephesus was marked by religious matriarchy, reached the same conclusion: “The Ephesian religious and cultural situation was not, in fact, marked by matriarchy of any sort.”20 Absent that background, Beale concludes, 1 Timothy 2:11-15 retains its ordinary, permanent force for the church today.21

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Beatriz Vollmer Coles, “New Feminism: A Sex-Gender Reunion,” in Women in Christ: Toward a New Feminism, ed. Michele M. Schumacher (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 54, citing Guy Bouchard, “L’hétéropolitique féministe,” Laval théologique et philosophique 45 (1989): 95-120, quoted in Mark Saucy, “The Future of Difference: Evangelicals and Gender Essentialism,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 14n4. ↩

  2. Saucy, “The Future of Difference,” 15n5, citing Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2022), 53-83; Sharon James, God’s Design for Women in an Age of Gender Confusion (Darlington, UK: EP, 2019), 31-50; and Michelle Lee-Barnewall, Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 15-68. ↩

  3. Saucy, “The Future of Difference,” 15, discussing Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790). ↩

  4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Cape, 1953), 267, quoted in Saucy, “The Future of Difference,” 13. ↩

  5. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970), 22, quoted in Saucy, “The Future of Difference,” 15-16. ↩

  6. Carol Gilligan, “In a Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of Self and of Morality,” in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 316, quoted in Saucy, “The Future of Difference,” 16. ↩

  7. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), xii, xix, discussed in Saucy, “The Future of Difference,” 17. ↩

  8. Isaac Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres: Robert Dabney and Charles Hodge on the Submission of Wives and Enslaved People,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 113. ↩

  9. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 113-14. ↩

  10. 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. ↩

  11. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1993). ↩

  12. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983). ↩

  13. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  14. Strauch, Biblical Eldership, chap. 5, “Male Leadership,” 76. ↩

  15. Strauch, Biblical Eldership, chap. 5, 69, 73. ↩

  16. Saucy, “The Future of Difference,” 25-27. ↩

  17. Richard C. Kroeger and Katherine C. Kroeger, I Suffer Not a Woman: Rethinking 1 Timothy 2:11-15 in Light of Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), 103, 119-20, discussed in G. K. Beale, “Contextualizing the Controversial Instructions in 1 Timothy 2:11-15: A Response to Sandra L. Glahn, Nobody’s Mother,” Themelios 50, no. 2 (2025): 261-62. ↩

  18. Sandra L. Glahn, Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2023), 150, 155, 157, discussed in Beale, “Contextualizing the Controversial Instructions,” 263-65. ↩

  19. Beale, “Contextualizing the Controversial Instructions,” 267-68. ↩

  20. Steven M. Baugh, “The Apostle Among the Amazons,” WTJ 56 (1994): 170, quoted in Beale, “Contextualizing the Controversial Instructions,” 263. ↩

  21. Beale, “Contextualizing the Controversial Instructions,” 269. ↩