Adrian Warnock – List of Complentarian and Egalitarian Texts

Adrian Warnock has produced a list of texts that speak to the complementarian/egalitarian debate. Having looked over the list I don’t think it’s all that bad. In fact, it includes a number of key texts and stories that I would have included in any such list—had I been inclined to create one.

The problem is that I don’t think this, or any issue, can be resolved by doing exegesis on a list of texts, much as I’d prefer that sort of a simple (simplistic) approach. The Bible just doesn’t seem to work that way. What generally results is a process of building one’s theology on one portion of the list and explaining the rest away. We have women speaking and not speaking. We have women leading and not leading.

What’s needed is to form a theology based on scripture (and a hermeneutic capable of arriving at such a theology), and then ask what that theology says about the place of women (and men) in the church here and now. Getting to the root of things can resolve issues of time, place and context.

There was no list of texts that made the church change its approach to gentiles in Acts 15. Oh, there were texts. But what really changed the day was God acting through the church. The scriptural fundamentalists of the day would have taken a list of texts, and said “no.”

Come to think of it, that’s precisely what they did.