44 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
was published earlier, they actually depended on Jewett’s class notes
from Fuller Seminary for their key argument that Paul was wrong on this
issue.^3 Jewett therefore may be considered the intellectual father of the
modern evangelical feminist movement.
In Man as Male and Female Jewett claims that Paul was wrong in
his teaching in 1 Timothy 2:
The apostle Paul was the heir of this contrast between the old and the
new.... He was both a Jew and a Christian.... And his thinking
about women... reflects both his Jewish and his Christian experi-
ence.... So far as he thought in terms of his Jewish background, he
thought of the woman as subordinate to the man for whose sake she
was created (1 Cor. 11:9). But so far as he thought in terms of the
new insight he had gained through the revelation of God in Christ,
he thought of the woman as equal to the man in all things.... Because
these two perspectives—the Jewish and the Christian—are incom-
patible, there is no satisfying way to harmonize the Pauline
argument. ...
Paul... is assuming the traditional rabbinic understanding [of
Gen. 2:18-23].... Is this rabbinic understanding of Genesis 2:18f
correct? We do not think that it is....
The difficulty is that Paul, who was an inspired apostle, appears
to teach such female subordination in certain passages.... To resolve
this difficulty, one must recognize the human as well as the divine
quality of Scripture.^4Clarence Boomsma, a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church and
four-time president of synod for that denomination (and thus the former
presiding officer of the denominational assembly of all of North
America), holds a similar position: he says that Paul’s use of Genesis 2–3
is an incorrect reading of Genesis, but it was the view common in Paul’s
day so he used it anyway for his audience. Both Thomas Schreiner and
(^3) Scanzoni and Hardesty say, “The second creation narrative does say that woman was made
from man, but the theological leap from this to woman’s subordination is a traditional rab-
binic... understanding that is not supported by the text” (Scanzoni and Hardesty, All We’re
Meant to Be, 28). The footnote to this sentence includes a lengthy quote from Paul Jewett’s
class syllabus at Fuller Seminary in 1973 in which Jewett claims that “there is no satisfying way
to harmonize the Pauline argument for female subordination with the larger Christian vision
of which the great apostle to the Gentiles is the primary New Testament architect” (212-213).
(^4) Jewett, Man as Male and Female, 112-113, 119, 134, italics added.