The apostle Paul would roll over in his grave if he knew that Christians were treating his commandments like rabbinic case law and were compiling huge lists of things women can and cannot do, according to Michael Bird in his book Bourgeois Babes, Bossy Wives, and Bobby Haircuts: A Case for Gender Equality in Ministry. The author argues that women should be allowed to preach and lead, but he ultimately expresses reservations about women occupying senior leadership roles in the church, on cultural rather than theological grounds.
After pointing out that there are numerous different viewpoints on gender roles, and numerous different shades of “egalitarian” and “complementarian”, the author discusses examples of women from the New Testament who did hold significant leadership positions, and contrasts passages which appear to support the egalitarian position with those which support the complementarian position.
One key passage is 1 Timothy 2:11-15 (“I do not permit a woman to teach…”) Paul justifies this by reference to the order of creation (“Adam was formed first then Eve.”) However, Paul uses the same reasoning in 1 Corinthians 11 to explain why women should wear head coverings. The author makes an elaborate and unconvincing argument about a particular heresy which might have existed in Ephesus that prompted the tone of his injunction to Timothy. He seems to have overlooked the more obvious point that the enormous cultural differences that exist today in Israel, Syria, Turkey and Italy were almost certainly far greater two thousand years ago.
The author insists three times that there is a real prohibition in the 1 Timothy passage, even when contextualised, that needs to be taken seriously, but he never quite gets round to explaining what it is. It seems to me that either the passage means what it says and has absolute application, or it applied only to the circumstances in which Timothy found himself. As a matter of logic I find it difficult to see how the passage could contain a “real prohibition” which is something other than what it actually says.
Notwithstanding these minor quibbles and my suspicion that the author wants to keep his options open for future employment in the Good Old Boys club, I enjoyed reading the book, which is well-written and thought provoking.