4

SAYING THAT PAUL

WAS WRONG

Some evangelical feminists say that

Paul was wrong

Aliberal tendency to reject the authority of Scripture is also seen in the

writings of Paul King Jewett, formerly a professor at Fuller Seminary in
Pasadena, California; Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, freelance
writers who published an influential evangelical feminist book; Clarence
Boomsma, a Christian Reformed pastor and denominational leader; and
David Thompson, professor of biblical studies (with a specialty in Old
Testament) at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.
While egalitarian positions had been advocated since the 1950s by
theologically liberal Protestant writers, no evangelical books took such
a position until 1974. In that year freelance writers Letha Scanzoni and
Nancy Hardesty published their groundbreaking book All We’re Meant
to Be.^1 The following year, Paul Jewett, then a professor at Fuller
Seminary, published Man as Male and Female.^2 Both books claimed that
the apostle Paul’s advocacy of female subordination in marriage and the
church was a remnant of his rabbinic training that he had not fully
resolved when he wrote his epistles, and that this particular rabbinic ele-
ment was inconsistent with Paul’s other emphasis on total equality for
men and women in Christ. In fact, though Scanzoni and Hardesty’s book

(^1) Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to
Women’s Liberation (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1974).
(^2) Paul King Jewett, Man as Male and Female (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1975).