INTRODUCTION TO
PART III
In addition to these fifteen ways that directly or implicitly deny the
authority of Scripture, there is another whole category of egalitarian
claims that should trouble evangelical Christians today. This category
does not concern a direct denial of the authority of the Bible, but it nul-
lifies the authority of the Bible in another way, through promoting
untruthful or unsubstantiated claims about what certain words in the
Bible “really mean,” or about some historical facts that change our
understanding of the situation to which a book of the Bible was written.
These egalitarian claims are significant because they contain several
important historical and linguistic “facts” that egalitarian writers allege
to be true, and these alleged facts change people’s understanding of what
the Bible teaches. But if those alleged facts are incorrect and people
believe them anyway, then people will think the Bible says something dif-
ferent from what it does say, and then they will no longer believe or obey
what the Bible really says. And thus, in a different way, the effective
authority of the Bible is undermined in our churches.
Here is a hypothetical example of what I am talking about, show-
ing that if you change the meaning of some key words in the Bible, you
change the Bible and take away its authority. Consider this verse:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right (Eph. 6:1;
compare Col. 3:20).Now what if I write a scholarly article and claim that the Greek
word hypakouø, translated “obey,” really means, “criticize”? Then the
verse would mean,
Children, criticize your parents in the Lord, for this is right (Eph. 6:1) (!).By changing the meaning of a word, I have changed the whole point