Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

Author(s): Aimee Byrd
Publisher: Zondervan
Price: $3.99      

While evangelicalism dukes it out about who can be church leaders, the rest of the 98% of us need to be well equipped to see where we fit in God’s household and why that matters. Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is a resource to help church leaders improve the culture of their church and disciple men and women in their flock to read, understand, and apply Scripture to our lives in the church. Until both men and women grow in their understanding of their relationship to Scripture, there will continue to be tension between the sexes in the church. Church leaders need to be engaged in a thoughtful critique of the biblical manhood and womanhood movement and the effects it has on their congregation.

Do men and women benefit equally from God’s word? Are they equally responsible for sharpening one another in the faith and passing it down to the next generation? While radical feminists claim that the Bible is a hopelessly patriarchal construction by powerful men that oppresses women, evangelical churches simply reinforce this teaching when we constantly separate men and women, customizing women’s resources and studies according to a culturally based understanding of roles. Do we need men’s Bibles and women’s Bibles, or can the one, holy Bible guide us all? Is the Bible, God’s word, so male-centered and authored that women need to create their own resources to relate to it? No! And in it, we also learn from women. Women play an active role as witnesses to the faith, passing it on to the new generations.

This book explores the feminine voice in Scripture as synergistic with the dominant male voice. Through the women, we often get the story behind the story–take Ruth for example, or the birth of Christ through the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth in Luke. Aimee fortifies churches in a biblical understanding of brotherhood and sisterhood in God’s household and the necessity of learning from one another in studying God’s word.

The troubling teaching under the rubric of “biblical manhood and womanhood” has thrived with the help of popular Biblicist interpretive methods. And Biblicist interpretive methods ironically flourish in our individualistic culture that works against the “traditional values” of family and community that the biblical manhood and womanhood movement is trying to uphold. This book helps to correct Biblicist trends in the church today, affirming that we do not read God’s word alone, we read it within our interpretive covenant communities–our churches. Our relationship with God’s word affects our relationship with God’s people, and vice versa. The church is the school of Christ, commissioned to discipleship. The responsibility of every believer, men, and women together, is being active and equal participants in and witnesses to the faith–the tradents of faith.