Excerpts From "The Feminist Bogeywoman" -- By: Rebecca Merrill Groothuis
Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 31:4 (Autumn 2017)
Article: Excerpts From "The Feminist Bogeywoman"
Author: Rebecca Merrill Groothuis
PP 31:4 (Autumn 2017) p. 33
Excerpts From The Feminist Bogeywoman
Rebecca Merrill Groothuis is author of Good News for Women: A Biblical Picture of Gender Equality (Baker, 1996), Women Caught in the Conflict: The Culture War between Traditionalism and Feminism (Baker and Wipf and Stock, 1997), and co-editor of Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity without Hierarchy (InterVarsity, 2004, 2005).
Editor’s note: Below are excerpts from the booklet, The Feminist Bogeywoman, written by Rebecca Merrill Groothuis and published in 1995 by Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group. It is used here by permission. Please note that it is not the same as ch. 8 of Groothuis’s 1997 book Women Caught in the Conflict: The Culture War between Traditionalism and Feminism (Baker, Wipf and Stock), which bears the same title. For more about the author, see Douglas Groothuis, “Rebecca Merrill Groothuis’s Contribution to Biblical Equality: A Personal Testimony and Lament,” Priscilla Papers 29, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 3-6.
Rebecca’s husband Doug, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary, offers the following introduction: “Rebecca Merrill Groothuis was one of the most articulate and ardent defenders of biblical equality from 1994 until dementia ended her writing about ten years ago. The Feminist Bogeywoman is written in a question- answer format. I offer excerpts from this taut and shrewd booklet for a new generation of those who believe that women and men are equally called by God for all aspects of Christian service and cultural involvement. The same issues swirl about today as when she wrote it nearly a quarter century ago.”
Q: Isn’t Evangelical Feminism Simply The Product Of An Antibiblical, Contemporary Ideology That Has Infiltrated The Church?
A: This question has become a central point of contention in the evangelical debate over woman’s “place” in the home and the church. Although traditionalists focus primarily on certain biblical prooftexts to make their case for unequal gender roles, their argument really begins with a set of assumptions about feminism and modern culture. The prooftexts are then interpreted and applied in light of these assumptions. The traditionalist argument goes like this: Any deviation from “traditional” gender roles is “feminist,” and anything feminist is entirely a product of modern culture. Because modern culture stands in total opposition to biblical values, any interpretation of the Bible that questions the “traditional” roles could only arise, not out of a genuine respect for the authority of Scripture, but out of a desire to use the Bible to justify an agenda that the church has imported from modern culture.
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