INTRODUCTION 157verses of Scripture, they effectively nullify the force of what God actu-
ally said in his Word. They take away what God said and replace it with
some other idea, something that God did not say.
I am troubled to see that several of the egalitarian claims in the fol-
lowing chapters are repeatedly promoted to unsuspecting readers as if
they were established fact, when actually no proof for them has ever
been found in established historical facts, and several of the claims are
even contradicted by the facts we have. If egalitarians regularly pre-
sented such claims as “an interesting idea that may turn out to be true
if facts can be found to support it,” this would be a different matter. But
very often these claims are presented as facts that have already been
proven, when that is far from the actual situation.
Our God is a God of truth (Prov. 30:5; Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18), and
he cares about truth (Ex. 20:16; 2 Cor. 4:2; Eph. 4:25; Col. 3:9).
Therefore it is of utmost importance that readers and authors on both
sides of this controversy never become careless with regard to truth or
fail to exercise the greatest care for accuracy regarding the historical or
linguistic data that we depend on in interpreting the Bible.
The following egalitarian claims are some examples of promoting
as true something that either is unsubstantiated by actual historical data
or must be judged untruthful in the light of the actual data we have. In
each case, I have given an abbreviated response, but fuller discussion can
be found in my book Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth.^2
(^2) Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 2004).