Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 36:2 (Spring 2022)
Article: Review Article "How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy" Cape Town, South Africa: Spiritual Bakery Publications, 2022 by Terran Williams
Author: Kevin Giles

PP 36:2 (Spring 2022) p. 3

Review Article
How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy
Cape Town, South Africa: Spiritual Bakery Publications, 2022 by Terran Williams

Kevin Giles

Kevin Giles is an Australian Anglican minister who was in parish ministry for over forty years. He holds a doctorate in New Testament and has authored numerous articles and books. Kevin lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife, Lynley, a social worker and marriage counsellor. They have been partners with CBE International since its inception.

Terran Williams asked if I would review his book, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy. I feel honoured to be asked because I consider it a first-rate book, a superb piece of work that should be widely read among evangelicals. However, for me to simply outline the contents of his book and comment on what he says is not adequate. I must first set his book in its historical context.

Historical Context

What Has Taken Place Since The Late 1960s

From the late 1960s, the call to recognize women’s equality in every sphere of life grew in strength and gained wide acceptance. At first, most evangelical Christians stood in opposition. They insisted that God had given men headship and to deny this was to directly contradict the Bible. In support of the traditional view that God had appointed men to lead, a number of well-known evangelical theologians put their minds to reformulating the historic position that gave precedence to men, called patriarchy, so that it sounded acceptable to modern ears. They rejected the historic position that spoke with one voice of the “superiority” of men and the “inferiority” of women, speaking instead of men and women as “equal” (a new idea for many) yet “role differentiated.” Uncoded, this meant that men and women are spiritually equal, of the same value and dignity in God’s sight, but also that some things are the domain of men and some of women—specifically, that leadership is the domain of men.

To make their case, they mined the Scriptures to find every text that could be read to say that God had appointed men to lead and women to be subordinate. The impact of their “biblical case” for this view, which became known from 1991 as “the complementarian position,” it must be acknowledged, is impressive. It convinced most evangelicals that this was “what the Bible clearly taught.” Thus, to argue for the unqualified equality of the sexes was to deny biblical authority.

From the 1970s onward, the few evangelicals bold enough to argue that the Bible made the substantial equality of the two bodily differentiated sexes the God-given ideal were denigrated as deniers of biblical authority. In hotbeds of complementarianism such as the Southern Ba...