Men, Women, and Biblical Equality

Men, Women, and Biblical Equality is a doctrinal statement adopted in 1989 by Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), setting out an egalitarian reading of Scripture’s teaching on the sexes across creation, the Fall, redemption, and the life of the church and home.¹ It denies that Scripture assigns any leadership role to men as such, reading passages that seem to restrict women’s ministry as addressing local, first-century circumstances rather than a permanent creation pattern.

Content of the Statement

The statement opens with a rule for reading Scripture: it is to be interpreted “holistically and thematically,” with inspiration (God’s own authorship of the text) kept distinct from interpretation (the human task of understanding it under the Spirit’s guidance).¹ From that premise it argues its case in four parts.

Creation

Man and woman, it affirms, were both made in God’s image, given a shared call to fill and rule the earth, and formed for “full and equal partnership” (Gen. 1:26-28; 2:18, 20-23). On this reading, the Hebrew word for “helper” applied to the woman in Genesis 2:18 (ezer) carries no sense of subordination, since the same word elsewhere describes God himself, and the term for “suitable” in verses 18 and 20 (ezer kenegdo) denotes equality rather than inferiority. Genesis 3:16, on this same reading, predicts the Fall’s effects rather than prescribing God’s original design: Adam’s rule over Eve is a consequence of sin, not part of the created order, and Adam was no less culpable than Eve for the Fall itself (Gen. 3:6; Rom. 5:12-21).¹

Redemption and the church

In Christ, the statement continues, women and men alike become children of God and heirs of salvation “without reference to racial, social, or gender distinctives” (John 1:12-13; Gal. 3:26-28), and at Pentecost the Spirit fell on men and women without distinction, distributing gifts without regard to sex (Acts 2:1-21; 1 Cor. 12:7, 11). Texts that appear to restrict women’s ministry (1 Cor. 11:2-16; 14:33-36; 1 Tim. 2:9-15) should not, on this reading, be interpreted in isolation from the rest of Scripture’s wider witness to women exercising prophetic, priestly, and royal functions (Acts 2:17-18; 1 Peter 2:9-10). Leadership itself, the statement adds, is defined by Christ as the empowerment of others for service rather than the exercise of power over them (Matt. 20:25-28; Mark 10:42-45).¹

The family

Husbands and wives, the statement’s final section holds, are “heirs together of the grace of life,” bound by mutual submission and responsibility (1 Cor. 7:3-5; Eph. 5:21; 1 Peter 3:1-7). It reads the husband’s headship (Greek kephalē) in Ephesians 5 as self-giving love and service rather than authority, and calls both mothers and fathers, not fathers alone, to share the work of raising children (Eph. 6:1-4; Col. 3:20).¹

Confessional and Theological Response

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter naming this statement or the modern egalitarian/complementarian debate it belongs to, but its chapter on the church assumes, as unbroken Christian practice, that the office of elder is filled by men,² a practice complementarian scholarship grounds in Scripture’s own account of creation rather than in later church custom.

Andreas Köstenberger, developing Geerhardus Vos’s biblical-theological method, reads Genesis 2 as already establishing headship before any sin enters the narrative: God’s creation of the woman “from the man, as his suitable helper or counterpart” issues in “a harmonious picture of the man and the woman partnering in ruling the earth as God’s representatives, with the man serving as the God-appointed head.”³ On this reading, the Fall does not introduce headship but corrupts a design already in place: sin struck the man and woman “each in their respective primary domains,” turning the woman’s relation to the man into “relational tension and a struggle for control” rather than creating that relation from nothing.⁴ Herman Bavinck reads Genesis 3:16 the same way, as the Fall’s own penalty striking the woman specifically, “suffering and pain in bringing forth children, desire for and submission to her husband.”⁵ Both readings run counter to the statement’s claim that Adam’s rule over Eve began at the Fall rather than at creation.

On mutual submission, Mark Saucy grants the premise the statement’s Family section builds on and still finds it insufficient to establish the statement’s conclusion: “Even within the mutual submission Christians owe one another (Eph 5:21) or the different meanings proposed for ‘head’ (kephalē, source/origin, chief/preeminent), a husband is never called to order himself under his wife the way she is exhorted to do so to him. Neither is she, also, ever called his ‘head.’”⁶ The question of how far Ephesians 5:21’s call to mutual submission extends into the household instructions that follow is itself an old one in the tradition rather than a novelty of the modern debate; Isaac Tuttle notes that commentators still “debate whether Ephesians 5:21 should be considered the end of a preceding section or the beginning of the following.”⁷ Ken Magnuson, reading the same passage, finds its emphasis falling on Christ’s self-giving love for the church as the pattern for a husband’s headship rather than on submission as such, cautioning that “the main thrust of the passage is to persuade husbands and wives in marriages to behave rightly towards one another.”⁸

Reception

The statement is CBE’s own founding manifesto for the egalitarian position within evangelicalism. Its complementarian counterpart is the Danvers Statement, issued by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, whose own drafting began in December 1987 and which was first published in November 1988.⁹ The two statements, produced within two years of each other by organizations on opposite sides of the same debate, affirm directly opposed readings of the same texts: where this statement locates Adam’s rule over Eve entirely in the Fall, the Danvers Statement affirms that “Adam’s headship in marriage was established by God before the Fall, and was not a result of sin.”⁹

Related Doctrines

References

Christians for Biblical Equality, “Men, Women, and Biblical Equality” (St. Paul, MN: CBE International, 1989). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” paras. 8-9. ↩
Andreas J. Köstenberger, “Geerhardus Vos: His Biblical-Theological Method and a Biblical Theology of Gender,” Themelios 48, no. 3 (2023): 518. ↩
Köstenberger, “Geerhardus Vos,” 518. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩
Mark Saucy, “The Future of Difference: Evangelicals and Gender Essentialism,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): n. 43. ↩
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): 123. ↩
Ken Magnuson, “7. Marriage and Sexuality,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩
“The Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” (Wheaton, IL: Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, 1988), affirmation 3. ↩ ↩²