150 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
These methods of undermining the authority of Scripture indicate
a deeply troubling trend toward theological liberalism.
But are these representative of the mainstream evangelical feminist
movement? Yes, clearly they are. The claims that I have mentioned are
promoted by prominent egalitarian writers and published by leading
evangelical publishers such as (most often) Baker Book House and
InterVarsity Press. And Christians for Biblical Equality, the flagship egal-
itarian organization, promotes on their website many of the evangelical
books I have criticized in the previous section.^1
Where are the voices challenging these approaches? Although there
have been a few notable exceptions,^2 in general there is widespread
silence from other egalitarian authors, who do not deny the authority
of Scripture in these ways but who refrain from making any public crit-
icism of those who do.
And what will happen to churches and organizations who allow
these approaches to stand as acceptable options? As evangelicals accept
the validity of these claims one after the other, and as evangelical pas-
tors preach sermons adopting the methods found in these claims, evan-
gelicals are quietly and unsuspectingly being trained to reject this verse
of Scripture and that command of Scripture, and this passage, and that
teaching, here and there throughout the Bible. As this procedure goes
on, we will begin to have whole churches who no longer “tremble” at
the Word of God (Isa. 66:2), and who no longer live by “every word that
comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4), but who pick and choose
the things they like and the things they don’t like in the Bible, using the
very same methods they have been taught by these egalitarian writers.
The church will thus be led step by step, often without knowing what is
happening, to a new liberalism for the twenty-first century.
And in this way the authority of God’s Word, and the ultimate
authority of God himself over our lives, will be diminished and increas-
ingly rejected.
(^1) See http://www.cbeinternational.org.
(^2) For example, Anthony Thiselton has criticized Gordon Fee’s claim that Paul did not write
1 Corinthians 14:34-35, as I noted in chapter 5, above.