12

TRADITION TRUMPS

SCRIPTURE

Some evangelical feminists put church tradition

above the Bible

Adifferent kind of rejection of the Bible’s ultimate authority is found

in the claim of Kevin Giles that theological differences cannot be settled
by appealing to the Bible, so the historical tradition of the church must
be the basis for our decisions. Giles is vicar of St. Michael’s Church
(Anglican) in North Carlton, Australia, and his writings have been pub-
lished by InterVarsity Press in the United States. In his book The Trinity
and Subordinationism,^1 Giles explicitly tells readers that he will not
argue his case from Scripture:

In seeking to make a response to my fellow evangelicals who subor-

dinate the Son to the Father, I do not appeal directly to particular

scriptural passages to establish who is right or wrong.... I seek rather

to prove that orthodoxy rejects this way of reading the Scriptures.^2

First, some background: Why does Giles write about the Trinity in
connection with the debate over men’s and women’s roles in the church?
It is because many complementarians, including myself, have claimed a

(^1) Kevin Giles, The Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporary
Gender Debate (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002). Giles is also scheduled to be
one of the main speakers at the 2007 conference of the egalitarian organization Christians for
Biblical Equality (www.cbeinternational.org, accessed 5-4-06).
(^2) Ibid., 25.