Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 11:2 (Fall 2006)
Article: When You Don’t Have a Better Half: Encouraging Biblical Roles as a Single Woman
Author: Carolyn McCulley

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JBMW 11:2 (Fall 2006) p. 69

When You Don’t Have a Better Half:
Encouraging Biblical Roles as a Single Woman

Carolyn McCulley

Author, Speaker;
Church and Ministry Relations, Sovereign Grace Ministries
Gaithersburg, Maryland

As a college-age feminist, I was taught that men were the problem. The perils of patriarchy were the reason for all the conflict and unresolved desires between men and women. Many of the students in the women’s studies department of my university effectively solved this problem by circumventing men in every possible way, the final step being to embrace lesbianism.

But I had a problem with that, you see. I liked men. And I found it very hard to be a boy-crazy feminist in a “womyn’s” world.

As a result, I skirted the edges of political activism and instead embraced a watered-down “you go, girl!” form of feminism displayed on the pages of women’s magazines everywhere. Though I liked men, I believed the premise that there was not anything different between us, except for the obvious. We were, therefore, to embrace a cultural androgyny, albeit one equipped with different restrooms.

Then one day I heard the gospel and God turned my world upside down, shaking out all my prior beliefs like so much loose change from my pockets. Nearly a decade out of college, I found myself in church, with a Bible of my own. I was a regenerated Christian in the midst of culture shock.

In God’s timing (which I believe includes his divine sense of humor), I started attending a church just as it began an in-depth study of the book of Ephesians. The encouraging words found there about laying aside the old self, building up the body of Christ, and walking in a manner worthy of the gospel came to a shrieking halt by verses 22–24 of chapter 5: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.”1

Right. Surely these people didn’t think those verses applied to today?! Shock of shocks, they did. But they

JBMW 11:2 (Fall 2006) p. 70

didn’t stop there. They also believed verses 25–33 are applicable for today and they held men to this standard:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might...

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