Personal Reflections On The History Of CBMW And The State Of The Gender Debate -- By: Wayne Grudem

Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 14:1 (Spring 2009)
Article: Personal Reflections On The History Of CBMW And The State Of The Gender Debate
Author: Wayne Grudem


Personal Reflections On The History Of CBMW And The State Of The Gender Debate1

Wayne Grudem

Research Professor of Theology and Bible

Phoenix Seminary

Scottsdale, Arizona

“Why Did I Spend So Much Time On This?”

On October 5, 1979, I was a third-year professor at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I was surprised to see that Christianity Today had come out with an article written by my neighbors just six houses down the street, Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen (Berkeley taught New Testament at Bethel Seminary and Alvera taught journalism at Bethel College). Their article was titled, “Does male dominance tarnish our translations?” They argued that the Greek word kephalē (literally, “head”) often means “source” but never “authority,” so that “the husband is the head of the wife” (Eph 5:23; cf. also 1 Cor 11:3) means “the husband is the source of the wife” and does not have authority over his wife. I thought the argument was wrong, but I didn’t have the time or material at hand to answer it. Then, a little later, Dr. George Knight came to Bethel College to lecture, and I said to him in passing, “George, you really need to write an article answering Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen’s claim that ‘head’ means ‘source.’” “No,” said George, “you need to write it.” Little did I know that that encouragement would affect the next thirty years of my life.

Six years later, in 1985, I published a twenty-one-page article in Trinity Journal, “Does kephalē Mean ‘Source’ or ‘Authority Over’? An Examination of 2,336 Examples”2—examples which took me some time to look up in ancient Greek literature!

There were several responses from egalitarians to that twenty-one-page article. So, five years later, in 1990, I published a seventy-page article in Trinity Journal,3 responding to other studies on the meaning of kephalē and showing that there were now over fifty examples where it meant “someone in authority,” or “a leader,” but never an instance where someone is said to be the “head” of someone else and was not in the position of authority over that person. Never.

But there were still more responses, and more people disagreeing. So eleven years after that, in 2001, I published another article, forty-one pages in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, on “The Meaning of kephalē<...

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