March 29, 2017 Show with Andreas & Margaret Köstenberger on “God’s Design for Man & Woman: A Biblical &Theological Survey”

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now, here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 29th day of March 2017, and I'm delighted to have today as my two guests, one returning guest and one guest who is making her debut appearance on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

They are a husband and wife team. They both have their doctorates, and they are both co -authors of the book,

God's Design for Man and Woman, a Biblical Theological Survey, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for the very first time,

Dr. Andreas and Margaret Kostenberger. Great to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having us.

And Margaret, it's great to have you on the program for the first time. Yes, thank you so much. And I want to give our email address right away for anybody who would like to join us on the air with a question of your own about this very important and also very controversial issue.

It's chrisarnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. And you may remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter.

Perhaps you don't want to get your wife upset with you, so you want to remain anonymous.

Or anybody else for that matter, your own pastor. Well, we would love to hear from you.

And it's great to have in the studio once again Reverend Buzz Taylor. And it's good to see you,

Reverend Buzz. I am looking forward to this conversation. Sounds like it's going to be interesting. And by the way, if you can keep couples from getting mad at each other,

Chris, that's a good career move on your part. And once again, it's chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

Well, first of all, before we even get into the weighty matters of gender roles, I'd like to hear, since we've never had

Margaret on the program before, Margaret, if you could tell us how you and Andreas met. All right, yes.

Well, we were both in seminary actually in Columbia at Columbia International University.

At the time, it was known as Columbia Graduate School of Missions. He had come from Vienna, and I'd come from Toronto, Canada to study.

Actually, he was there first, and then I came after. Oh, well, I have a very good friend who has become a guest fairly often on Iron Trip and Zion, Dr.

Tony Costa, who's on the faculty of Toronto Baptist Seminary. Okay, okay, good. I didn't know that.

Yeah, well, I actually called the seminary before ever arriving, and Andreas answered the phone. He was working the switchboard there, so I just happened to talk to him on the phone before I ever even came there.

He gave me the first advice about the school, so that was good. And so tell us a little bit more about how you first met and how eventually he proposed to you.

I'm assuming maybe you proposed to him. I don't know. No, that didn't happen, no. Well, I got to the seminary, and eventually we were at a kind of social type situation at one of the women's homes.

There was kind of like a, you know, a game night or something. I happened to be sitting beside him. There was snow, and there was tobogganing after, or that's what we call it in Toronto, Canada.

That's where I'm from, actually. Sweating, and we just had some conversation, so that was just the beginning of several times we got together, and we're talking, and eventually he took me to Vienna, Austria, where he is from, to meet his family, and at that point he still hadn't asked me to marry him, just wanted me to meet his family.

And after we got back several months later, he did ask me to marry him.

So that's kind of just a short version. And the rest is history. And tell us something about your own upbringing religiously, if any, religious atmosphere, and how the

Lord in His sovereignty providentially drew you to Himself and saved you. Okay, yes.

Well, I grew up in a home that were with non -believing parents, and no family members at all who were believing.

I was invited by my older cousin to go on a college and career retreat with a

Baptist church in a town that was three hours away, London, Ontario. And we went on a trip to her cottage, and I was just faced with the lives of Christians, young, college -age

Christians, who were very, I thought, very interesting, very attractive, very wonderful people. I just hadn't seen people like that before.

They were discussing the Scriptures, actually discussing the end times, very impassioned discussions, but it didn't turn me off.

It actually piqued my curiosity, and so I started to study Scripture and asked them lots of questions.

So that was the beginning of my spiritual journey. And then after I got home from this retreat, they knew a church in my area in Scarborough, Ontario, Parkway Bible Church, a good youth group there.

So I started attending on Friday nights, started going to church, and learned, you know, of my need for a

Savior, and connected with the community there, and gradually got involved and accepted the

Lord as my Savior. Oh, praise God. And I know that some of the brilliant women that I have met, such as Rosaria Butterfield, who has written a wonderful commendation for your book, some of them start out as either full -blown feminists or more egalitarian in their mindset, even some after their rebirth and their early

Christian experience, and then have come to more of a conservative, complementarian understanding as time elapsed.

What was the case with you? Were you, as a Christian, already leaning in a conservative direction, a direction that would interpret the

Scriptures more literally and in a more complementarian fashion? Yeah, I guess

I was not quite aware of any kind of, you know, issue at all at the time.

I was just pursuing God and reading His Word, and I guess

I didn't have a leaning either way, except that I was what you might call an accidental feminist.

I just absorbed... Yeah, it's true. I'd absorbed the culture's, you know, kind of idea that women could kind of be whatever they want, and I still think women can, you know, be whatever they want, in the sense, under God's guidance.

But, yeah, studying the Scriptures, it was amazing to see that there was a design for me as a woman that I wanted to follow and to obey and to submit to.

So, yeah, it was a bit of a journey. I wasn't against it. I wasn't a flaming feminist.

You know, I just had absorbed what was in the culture around me. But you mentioned Accidental Feminist.

You didn't write that book, did you? There's a book out, a Christian book, called The Accidental Feminist. I did not, but I love the title.

I haven't read the book myself, but I do love the title because I think most of us women fall in that category, no matter who we are, unless we've had clear instruction and have submitted ourselves to the

Scriptures teaching. And how did you come about to eventually become the adjunct professor of Women's Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina?

Yeah, well, Andreas and I and family moved here 20 years ago to North Carolina.

And at that time, I was focusing on family, bringing up family.

And because I had a master's degree from Columbia, and I was interested in mentoring women,

I started teaching a class for women on hermeneutics and the

Scripture, and also women, you know, teaching women in the church.

So I just gradually, you know, adopted that role. Great. Now, Dr. Andreas, you have been on the program before and have already given your testimony of how the

Lord saved you. But perhaps for those of our listeners hearing you for the first time, you could give a summary of that in your own life.

Sure. Well, I grew up in Europe, and I was your typical intellectual, kind of existentialist university student.

Religion was pretty much the last place I was, you know, thinking of looking for meaning in life, and I was really into the arts.

And, you know, then basically out of the

I was thinking, well, if that's, you know, if we're all sinners, we need salvation in Christ.

And the way I heard the gospel, you know, I almost immediately knew that.

I thought I was a Christian, but I really wasn't. And neither was I, nor were my parents or my sister or pretty much my friends or anybody

I knew. And I was, at the same time, really strangely drawn to the

Word. I bought myself a Bible. I read it through twice from Genesis to Revelation in about a six -month period, just kind of hungry to know what it said.

And at the end of that, I just broke down before the Lord and acknowledged that as much as I tried to be good, the more

I realized, you know, how bad I was, and that there was nothing I could do to save myself, and I just needed for Him to save me.

And that was 30 years ago now, but my life has radically changed.

It changed immediately. Sometimes people talk about, you know, making

Jesus Savior, making Him Lord. I didn't know that there was a difference for me, you know, for Him.

If He was my Savior, He was also my Lord. And so I immediately sensed a call to the ministry and ended up liquidating some of my assets and moving over to the

States to go to seminary in Columbia, where Marnie and I met. Great.

Well, I'm going to read some very powerful endorsements for this book we are discussing, God's Design for Man and Woman, a

Biblical Theological Survey. First of all, we have an endorsement from someone who

I just mentioned earlier, Rosaria Butterfield, who's been a guest several times on Iron Trumpet's Iron.

I so much enjoyed meeting her for the first time face to face at the G3 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, back in January, where she was speaking.

So delighted to meet her and her husband, and I hope that I have many more opportunities to meet her and fellowship with her again.

But she, as I mentioned very briefly before, a lot of people listening might not realize that Rosaria Butterfield, who is now a very conservative

Bible -believing Christian and the wife of a conservative Presbyterian pastor, she was a very public lesbian, a very unashamed, unabashed lesbian.

She was a feminist. She even would describe herself in such extreme terms as a leftist.

And she had come to the saving grace of Jesus Christ and became a born -again believer and is now a prolific writer.

And I always enjoy having her on the program, a very brilliant, articulate woman and a dear sister in Christ. She says,

The eclipse of the family in human society is one of the most disastrous developments of our age.

Sadly, the eclipse of the biblical model of marriage and family has also happened within far too many evangelical churches.

Andreas and Margaret Kostenberger come to the rescue with biblical and theological insight and practical wisdom.

Oh, that was, I read the wrong endorsement. That was from Dr. Al Mohler, President and Joseph Emerson Brown Professor of Christian Theology at the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I've had Dr. Mohler on the program as well. And then we have

Rosaria Butterfield's commendation, models the best of Christian discernment about matters of gender, theology, justice, roles, and gifts.

It is faithful in its representation, both of God's character and our own propensity to sin, pastoral in its application of faithful biblical hermeneutics, insightful in its explanation of original word usages and their application, concise in its framing of hot -button issues and the hermeneutical fallacies that often fuel them, and charitable in its handling of the motives of those who disagree.

That's Rosaria Butterfield, former professor of English at Syracuse University and author of The Thoughts of an

Unlikely Convert. And then we have Wayne Grudem, who has been very much in the forefront of defending biblical gender roles in the church and in the family and home.

Wayne Grudem says, A refreshingly clear, well -informed, balanced, thorough, biblically faithful overview of the teachings of the entire

Bible about manhood and womanhood, as designed by God and intended for the joy and well -being of both women and men.

A significant achievement. And Wayne Grudem is a professor of theology and biblical studies at Phoenix Seminary.

And if you ever happen to talk to Wayne, tell him I would love to interview him on the program. He's the only one of those three that I have not had on the program yet.

But I'm going to do something right now that I normally don't do. I'm going to immediately take one of the questions that has already come in.

The reason being is I think that this listener's question will help to set the stage for the rest of the interview.

Daniel in Bakersfield, California, writes, What side do your guests fall on when it comes to the whole egalitarian versus complementarian debate?

And if your guests are complementarian, how would they defend it against people who might find it to be chauvinistic or outdated?

By the way, thanks for all you do, Chris. I've been blessed by your show. That's Daniel in Bakersfield, California.

Well, it's a great question. And the short answer is that we try to set forth what the biblical teaching on God's design for man and woman is.

So we don't really use those labels, you know, those political or ideological labels in the book as such.

Of course, readers will have no problem determining that we do believe that the roles of men and women are distinct, they are complementary, and that ultimately, there is a very strong pattern in scripture of male leadership, as well as of male -female partnership.

So in some ways, I think we once wrote a blog on the limitations of labels in the gender debate.

We feel like often, you know, they are of limited value, because in this case, egalitarians believe in complementarity, and complementarians believe in equality, right?

So labels can only go so far in describing what scripture teaches. So in the end,

I think, you know, we invite people to actually read the book, rather than just, you know, either reject it or accept it based on whatever label they might attach to it.

Well, they don't call Genesis, Genesis for nothing, because it's the beginning of a lot of what we believe, even as Christians today.

But I understand that Genesis has a lot to do with the roots of where you are focusing in this book, and how you've even come to the beliefs that you have about gender roles.

Absolutely. You know, we have a couple of chapters just on the original design in Genesis 1 and 2, and then also the corruption of that design in Genesis 3.

And Chris, as you know, Jesus and Paul both repeatedly refer back to the original design in Genesis, when they were asked questions about this topic.

And so I think it clearly is the foundation, and I think it's important to remind ourselves that our culture does not believe that God has created us as male and female with a design.

Rather, increasingly, the culture tells us that those roles are merely a matter of self -perception, or, you know, of subjective definition and redefinition.

And so even though, as Christians, we may take for granted that God ultimately is our

Creator and created us a certain way, we need to rediscover that, and we need to return to the biblical foundation, and we need to articulate as witnesses in our culture that the biblical teaching is deeply countercultural in this regard.

By the way, I forgot to tell Daniel in Bakersfield, California, you have won

God's Design for Man and Woman, a biblical theological survey by our guests, Andreas and Margaret Kostenberger.

Please make sure we have your full mailing address, and that will be shipped to you, compliments of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CV for Cumberland Valley BBS or BibleBookService .com,

CVBBS .com. That will be on the return label on your package that you receive in the mail,

God willing, within the next week or so. So thank you very much for calling, not for calling, for writing.

I'm going back to my old days when I started the show in New York. We had a call -in show, so sometimes

I'm getting confused about my own career here. But one of the things that Daniel in Bakersfield, California, had brought up or asked is when you're talking to not only secularists or secular humanists, atheists or agnostics who are liberal and have very feministic understandings of the genders, you have to deal with this issue even amongst evangelicals today, and even some that would be rather conservative, about confronting the claims or the accusations that they make that this is outdated, old -fashioned, antiquated nonsense.

It's prehistoric. We've got to get with the times. The theologians and clerics for centuries have gotten this all wrong just because they were misogynists or chauvinists and so on.

How do you overcome those kinds of accusations? Well, you know, one of my favorite

Tim Keller quotes is this. He said, if your God never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.

Wow, that's a good quote. Isn't that powerful? And so I think what he's saying is that we shouldn't be surprised if scripture, you know, critiques and confronts our culture, and as Christians we should actually embrace the difference.

And I think too often we are actually on the defensive when we talk about gender issues in the culture.

I have a very good friend and student who is a pastor and who regularly deals with transgender issues on a pastoral level, and he told me that what he has learned is to point people who are in many cases confused and broken and struggling to the beauty and the wisdom and the goodness of God's design for us as men and women rather than remain on the defensive as, you know, those kinds of questions would tend to put us on.

And Margaret, do you ever get treated by not only feminists outside of the faith but even sisters in Christ that you are somewhat of a traitor being someone who's a brilliant woman who's got a doctorate, who's working as seminary teaching, and yet you have come to embrace a more,

I mean obviously everybody uses the term biblical if they believe that the

Bible has validity and they cherish it in some way or at least profess to cherish it, but for the sake of argument the conservative view of gender roles, do you ever get that kind of backlash and like why on earth would you come to this conclusion when you obviously are more brilliant and articulate and eloquent and gifted than many men who are professors or standing behind pulpits?

Yeah, I mean it is constantly something that we face in the church and even in the seminary.

Students come to seminary and aren't even aware of the biblical teaching, young women, and become in our classes aware.

Sometimes Andreas and I have taught a class together of this teaching and like Andreas said, we do try to present things from a positive viewpoint and yes, we acknowledge the counter -cultural factor, but it's surprisingly people turn, for the most part, who are open to scripture, who are spiritually attuned and open to the leading of God in their lives, of the

Spirit, they gradually open to it. But definitely people who are not open, people who are hardened, not spiritual,

I believe are the ones who are facing, you know, those addressing us with those kind of questions.

And you know, they are legitimate in the sense of women feeling like maybe they haven't been properly or biblically treated as equals in terms of co -heirs of Christ, in terms of their salvation significance.

You know, it's true because there has been abuse in the past, so I think there needs to be kind of a little bit of a leveling of what really the

Bible does teach on some of those areas, because there are extremes out there. I am going to read a question to both of you before we go to a station break, and then you can have time to mull it over and answer it after we return from the break.

In fact, what I'm going to do, I don't know if you're in front of a computer or a laptop, but I'll email you the listener's question because it is kind of lengthy.

Sure. But we have Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire, and Jerry, I'll read the question first, and I have to enlarge

Jerry's typeface because I'm going blind and I can't read his email.

But Jerry asks, how does mankind made as male and female relate to us being an image of God?

I have heard some theologians and pastors teach that Genesis 1 .27 indicates that man and woman together make up the image of God.

Genesis 1 .27, so God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them. They teach this because the phrase male and female is parallel with image of God in the previous phrase.

What this means, they say, is that while a solitary male or female is certainly made in the image of God, it is male and female together in marriage that highlight or showcase the image of God.

Do you think this is a fair interpretation or is it reading too much into the text?

If it is so, it certainly seems to explain why the world and the devil do so much to try to defame and destroy marriage and the distinctions of manhood and womanhood through no -fault divorce, homosexuality, and so -called transgenderism.

They can't get their hands on the king.

He is out of their reach, but they can't get their hands on his image, marriage, and sexuality.

I think he meant to say, but they can get their hands on his marriage, image, marriage, and sexuality.

That's Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire. I will email you this question just so you can read it on your own.

We are going to a break right now. If anybody else would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the good old

USA. Don't go away. We will be right back after these messages, God willing, with Andreas and Margaret Kostenberger.

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Iron Sharpens today. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to A Visit to the

Pastor's Study every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm Eastern Time on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am

.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the

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Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastor's Study, because everyone needs a pastor.

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnsin, if you just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Our guests today for the full two hours with 90 minutes to go are

Dr. Andreas and Dr. Margaret Kostenberger, a husband and wife. Dr.

Andreas Kostenberger is Senior Research Professor at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and his wife

Dr. Margaret Kostenberger is Adjunct Professor of Women's Studies at the same seminary.

We are discussing their book that they co -authored together, God's Design for Man and Woman, a

Biblical and Theological Survey, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsin at gmail .com,

chrisarnsin at gmail .com, and please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence, and if you live outside the

USA, and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter. But just to repeat

Jerry's question, which you have in front of you, Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire says,

How does mankind made as male and female relate to us being the image of God?

I have heard some theologians and pastors teach that Genesis 127 indicates that man and woman together make up the image of God.

Genesis 127, So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.

They teach this because the phrase male and female is parallel with image of God and the previous phrase.

What this means they say is that while a solitary male or female is certainly made in the image of God, it is male and female together in marriage that highlight or showcase the image of God.

Do you think this is a fair interpretation or is it reading too much into the text, or in other words, eisegesis?

If it is so, it certainly seems to explain why the world and the devil do so much to try to defame and destroy marriage and the distinctions of manhood and womanhood through no default divorce, homosexuality, and so -called transgenderism.

They cannot get their hands on the king, he is out of their reach, but they can get their hands on his image, marriage, and sexuality.

If you could respond, both of you, if you could. Okay, sure. Well, in the book we talk at length about what it means to be made in God's image and it's always a good idea in our study of scripture to allow scripture to interpret itself, to explain itself, and so you already quoted

Genesis 1, 27, which says, so God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them male and female, he created them.

And then as you read, the very next verse says, God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.

And so what we see here is that God's image is identified in Genesis, in the very next verse, in terms of procreation, in terms of the man and the woman having sex, becoming one flesh, as Genesis 2, 24 says, being naked and not ashamed, and creating and procreating children who then would grow and then humanity at large multiplied in such a way would then represent

God, our creator, on this earth by ruling the earth as his representative. So yes,

I largely agree with Jerry's comment that obviously it takes a man and a woman to procreate, this is given before the fall, of course, and so then after the fall you see that humanity is falling short of all that God has intended, whether it's through divorce, adultery, homosexuality, or sterility, in all those ways, the man and the woman are no longer fulfilling

God's creation design of being created in his image and being fruitful and multiplying.

Of course, we know that the culture is rebelling against God's design, and Satan, of course, has rebelled as well, and so it's clear that the culture bears incredible signs of that rebelling against God's image in the man and the woman, and I think it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the culture is rebelling against God's design in Genesis 1, as we've said.

Do you have anything to add, Margaret? No, I agree totally.

The image of God is reflected in the man and the woman together, and I see the images being the man and the woman partnering together, multiplying, and ruling the earth together, so definitely it is something that the culture is challenging, the man and the woman together, reflecting the image for sure.

Yeah, I agree. And so there you see the wonderful partnership, and I think it's really unfortunate that the fall introduced this adversarial component that the man and the woman are now often fighting and struggling for control, and this was not

God's original plan. His original plan was for there to be, yes, male leadership, but in the context of male -female partnership.

Well, thank you, Jerry, in Charlestown, New Hampshire, and you have won a free copy of this book as well,

God's Design for Man and Woman, a biblical theological survey. Keep your eye open in the mail for a book from cvbbs .com,

that's C -V for Cumberland Valley, B -B -S for Biblebookservice .com. We'll be shipping that out to you, compliments of our friends at Crossway Books, and we also thank

Todd and Patty Jennings at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service for being such faithful supporters of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

We have, all the way in Slovenia, we have Joe in Slovenia writing, and Joe, and I have to,

I'm sorry for the time it's taking me to enlarge his font, but it's microscopic. Joe says,

Dear Brother Chris, please ask your couple to address a contention that I've had for a long time but doesn't seem to be shared by many that I know.

It seems to me scripturally and experientially that all the problems regarding gender roles in marriage, the church, and in society are generally are traceable in each case to specific sins that are outlined in scripture.

Rather than focusing on finding the specific sin and addressing it scripturally and directly, we seem to rather spend lots of fruitless time and energy on subjective feelings, preferences, likes and dislikes, emotions, hormones, and a host of other distractions.

Am I completely off track here? If not, why does the church not correct course to a more biblically faithful approach to gender and marital, hold on a second,

I just clicked out of the question here. Why does not the church correct course to a more biblically faithful approach to gender and marital issues?

Thanks for answer to my questions, and please pray for my wife. She has a challenging calling being married to me.

And he actually predicted that I was going to laugh loudly at that. But if you could respond to Joe.

Well, if I understand the question correctly, there seems to be the underlying premise that I totally agree with, that ultimately this issue, really like every issue, is ultimately an issue of biblical authority.

That in the end, if anyone is open to what scripture teaches on this subject, then they will not take issue with the fact that it is counter -cultural or in some other ways confronts our own personal lifestyle preferences and so forth.

So the question really ultimately becomes then, what is our view of scripture?

Do we look at it as authority? And you know, I actually know people who say that, well, they acknowledge the authority of scripture in other areas, maybe in every other area, except in this area, they basically reserve the right to order their relationships the way they choose to.

And so I think at that point then, it's part of a church's calling to be a faithful witness to the biblical teaching in every area, including this area.

And Margaret and I have seen churches where perhaps for fear of being unduly divisive, the pastor or the leaders are studiously avoiding teaching on this subject, and we feel like in the long run, that's a very serious mistake, because this is such an important area, and we simply need to give the people in our congregation guidance on how to be the kinds of men and women that God wants us to be.

Yeah, I definitely think it, as we've all been saying, it's counter -cultural, and people,

I think, are afraid, women leaders in the Church are afraid, pastors are concerned and afraid that they're not going to be received well.

They're going to be, you know, division created, there's going to be rejection, financial, you know, areas will be impacted.

So it really is just a matter of courage and faithful obedience, submission to God's Word, so the issue of the authority of God's Word is truly important.

And Reverend Buzz? You know, I was having a conversation recently with somebody that, we were talking about older women teaching the younger women to be, you know, love their husbands, love their children, be keepers of home and all this stuff, and being an older woman herself, you know, she said she'd like to be teaching them that, but she says overall what she's finding out is, in exasperation, is they just don't want to hear it anymore.

And are you finding, in the Church, are you finding a resistance? Yes, yes, and so just, so for the pastors and teachers are definitely facing that, and we're facing that, we see that.

It's few and far between the churches and the seminaries, even, that are committed to this, even now.

It's sort of sliding. I actually am now a part of a group called

New Shepherds Theological Seminary. They're very committed to the biblical design for man and woman, and I'm helping them develop their women's program in this area, and I'm so thankful for them, so that's a new venture for me.

But yeah, every church, I think, in this day is facing that, so people don't want to hear it anymore.

Well, I guess we just start with the few who do, and, you know, the seminary that I'm in,

I'm so thankful for, you know, that at Shepherds Theological Seminary now that I'm helping fortify.

You know, we have four children. They're all in their late teens, early twenties, two boys and two girls, and so even as parents, we really have a sense of burden to equip the younger generation with the biblical teaching on God's design for man and woman.

That's actually one major reason why we wrote the book in the first place, and so, you know,

I'm so grateful that Marnie, as she mentioned, Marge has been called to be

Director of Women's Programs and Mentoring at Shepherds Theological Seminary because it's a church -based seminary, which is a wonderful, you know, way to do theological education, and it's a way of equipping, as Marnie mentioned, those who are actually receptive and who actually strongly long for and desire godly role models to be mentored and to learn how to live out, you know, what is becoming increasingly rare, as you mentioned, in our churches today.

Unfortunately, the world is no longer outside the church. It has infiltrated the church, and so it's sometimes hard to know where the world is.

In many places, it's in our own ranks, unfortunately. You know, I get the impression, too, that this was not some tangential teaching, even in the

New Testament, because back in my pastoral days, I was preaching through Ephesians, you know, the obvious passage about it, and in context of, you know, all the relationships that are taught there.

And then I noticed, well, you know, Paul brought it up again in Colossians, and it was almost like this was like one of his traveling sermons, you know, about these issues.

And now my pastor is preaching through 1 Peter, and I just found the same pattern again. It's like this was a major emphasis that seemed to have been very needed in the first century that it was repeated so often.

Right, that's true. Yeah, and I think, you know, that is the attractive feature,

I think, of our study, Biblical Theological Survey from Genesis to Revelation, because, you know, sometimes in those debates between egalitarians and complementarians, you see people just kind of focusing on the passage here or there, whether it's 1

Timothy 2 or some other passage. And I think so what we found, so many of our students really gravitate toward is that they see that there's consistency in Scripture, and that really, you have this male pattern of leadership all the way, you know, from Adam to the patriarchs, then national deliverers like Moses or Joshua, then you have the kings, the priests.

In the New Testament, you have Jesus being incarnated as a male, you have the 12, we're all male, and then you have

Paul's teaching on elders, and even the 24 elders in the book of Revelation.

And so it becomes, I think, almost impossible for anyone to deny the fact that Scripture teaches that God appointed men to be leaders.

And at the same time, you then have also a pattern that we've already seen started in Genesis 1, where the man and the woman are to partner together as part of God's plans.

It's really both and, and I think the tragedy is that in this world after the fall, people are pushing each other to, you know, extremes, either to deny male partnership as taught in Scripture altogether, or in minimizing the very real sense in which

Scripture calls the man and the woman to partner together for the glory of God. Now, you've already said that you don't use labels in the book,

God's design for man and woman, but for the sake of our discussion, when these terms comes up, complementarian and egalitarianism, we had you,

Andreas, in the very beginning of our interview on a similar subject, we had you define those terms, just so our listeners who may, these words may be foreign to their ears, some of our listeners, just for the sake of explanation, if you could define those two terms.

Absolutely. And, you know, I think one simple way to define it is that complementarians would believe that God created the man with ultimate responsibility for both the marriage relationship and the family, and also the church, and the woman with equal worth and dignity, but as the man's helper and partner, and egalitarians believe that there's no person appointed as the leader in the relationship, that the roles are identical, and the man and the woman are simply to submit to each other in Christ, and to, so they would also affirm the quality of the man and the woman, but deny that there's any distinctions in role.

And let me go back to something that Joe in Slovenia said, just in case some of our listeners may run with something he said in a wrong direction.

I think he rightfully says that sin is at the root of the misunderstandings about general roles, but sin is basically at the root of all of our disagreements as Christians, and all of our failures, faults, and ignorance, that somehow it is all rooted to sin.

I think we have to be careful, though, of trying to pinpoint the sin in someone else that we think is at the root of them believing a certain way.

Like, for instance, although I am very opposed to the ordination of women as pastors over congregations,

I have spoken with African -American sisters in Christ who are pastors, and they will say to me things like, well, the men have abandoned this role in our community.

There are very few men who rise up to the occasion, and we have had to take the reins and so on.

Now, I'm not accepting that as an excuse, but there are certain reasons why some people are gravitated towards the egalitarian understanding, because they, growing up all their lives, they may not even recognize a male as a leader, especially a spiritual one.

And so there are other circumstances that are involved that may not, you know, be directly involving the sins that we may think.

But perhaps you could respond to what I just said when we return from the break.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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And we're going to be right back after these messages. God willing, with our guests

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Welcome back. This is Chris Zarnes, and if you just tuned us in, our guests today are Dr. Andreas and Dr.

Margaret Kostenberger. Dr. Andreas Kostenberger is Senior Research Professor of New Testament and Biblical Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and his wife,

Dr. Margaret Kostenberger, is an Adjunct Professor of Women's Studies at the same seminary.

We have been discussing Women's Design for Man and Woman, a Biblical and Theological Survey, which is one of their books published by Crossway.

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We are now back with our guests, Andreas and Margaret Kostenberger, to discuss

God's Design for Man and Woman, a Biblical and Theological Survey. Before the break, Andreas and Margaret, I posed to you the question on, or the comment, really, of my own, that the care that needs to be made when we address this issue with others, even though I believe that sin is at the root of everything that we do that is unbiblical, we have to be careful on assuming what that sin may be in someone else when they are conducting life, whether in the family or church, in a way that we do not think is biblically appropriate.

Yeah, I think we do need to understand that the world we live in is an imperfect world, and there may be situations that occur where men do not step up to the plate to do what has been designed by them to do, by God, in the church, and maybe even in the home, there's circumstances.

So what might some of those circumstances be? You mentioned some of the female pastors who stepped up to take that role because male leaders were not available or not stepping up to that role.

So we definitely want to be, you know, not excusing that or whatever, but understanding that there are imperfect situations.

That's right, and you know, I think the Bible offers a great example of that in Deborah, who lived in the days of judges when everybody did what was right in their own eyes, and she was a godly woman in a day when men, there was a male leadership vacuum, and so people came to her, and interestingly, what

Deborah did was she tried to recruit and affirm and encourage male leaders, and she tried to recruit this general

Barak to fight the enemies of Israel at the time, and he was rather reluctant to do that, and so as a result, we see that she was faithful, but the men in that day were not.

So I assume that's a bit of the underlying burden of our brother in Slovenia when he asked the question.

Well, thank you very much, Joe, in Slovenia, and keep spreading the word about Iron Trump and Zion Radio in Slovenia and beyond, and by the way, you have also won a free copy of God's Design for Man and Woman, a biblical and theological survey, and thank you for providing an

American address where your daughter lives, where that could be shipped much more affordably by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible and Book Service at cvbbs .com,

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for biblebookservice .com. Look for a package with that return address on the label, with that on the return address,

I should say. Well, we have another listener, and this is a listener who has been very kind to Iron Trump and Zion very recently because she has procured for me a ticket to the

Gospel Coalition conference after it was sold out. She lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, where the conference is being held, and she was able to hunt down somebody that had a ticket that they purchased for themselves but could not go, and that is

Nelson in Edinburgh, Indiana, is the person who had the ticket, and Aaron in Indianapolis, Indiana, is the listener who was able to get that ticket for me, and I thank

Aaron very much from the bottom of my heart for getting this ticket for me so I can attend this coming

Monday through Wednesday the Gospel Coalition conference in Indianapolis, Indiana.

And thanks again, Aaron. But Aaron has a question.

She says, our parents' generation would likely never have thought we'd ever have a need for this book.

How did the roles degenerate so rapidly? Do you think, for example, it is that Christians didn't somehow properly protect the role of the father -husband?

He became the butt of every TV comedy show, even back in the 60s and 70s.

Thanks, Aaron in Indianapolis. Yeah, well, I'll just start a little bit to answer that question, and Andres can jump in.

We wrote the book over a period of 10 years teaching the classes to seminary students, and during that period of time, we noticed that in the church communities and in the seminaries, that people had stopped really talking about this subject.

And so the reason we wrote the book was to bring this issue back to the surface, the true biblical teaching, and to make it become more central and upfront.

I think the church has neglected its teaching, as a matter of fact.

Andres? Yeah, I agree. I think that that was our burden. It seems like, as I mentioned earlier, that in many churches you just don't hear people talk much about the role of men and women, and even in the era of discipleship,

I think it's just so important for churches to think of ways, you know, to help people not just be a better Christian, just in a general sense, but to be a better husband, to be a better father, a better wife and mother.

And, you know, I just can't stress enough how vital it is for us to bear witness to this part of biblical truth.

You've heard it said that, you know, we're only one generation away from, from, you know, falling away from Christianity.

And so if we don't pass on that part of the biblical teaching as a legacy to the next generation, you know, equip the next generation, in our case our own sons and daughters, then we only have ourselves to blame if they are biblically illiterate in this vital area.

You know, we may have brought this up when you were on before, Andres, but from my understanding of history, throughout all of the centuries of Christendom, male headship in the home and church was recognized and understood as being a basic reality.

And then you had perhaps in the

Wesleyan holiness movement and the Quakers and the

Pentecostals may have been the first to have welcomed women into the roles of pastor and evangelist and so on.

And perhaps, you know, of another branch of Christendom that opened those doors to women.

But how did this, how did these lines of distinction begin to blur from all those centuries going from the

New Testament era through when there seemed to be an open door or a door that was kicked open?

Well, you know, I guess a little bit of what of my dissertation was on looking at the feminists and how they interpreted

Scripture, and particularly for me it was how they interpreted Jesus. So I think, you know, feminism was a significant factor in the demise.

That's right. You know, I already was engaged as a biblical scholar in the complementarian, egalitarian debates and then, you know, the exegesis of key biblical passages.

And then looking over Margaret's shoulder when she was working on her dissertation for the period of eight years,

I might add, because our youngest son was born right in the middle, and that added, you know, another few years to that process.

But it's fascinating to see that in many ways, egalitarians today are simply recycling and repeating the arguments that were initially advanced by feminists, you know, in the first, second, and third wave of feminism.

It started with the abolitionist movement, where some women defined women's rights along the lines of, you know, male oppression, and there was a push just for women to have some basic rights, such as being able to vote.

And so clearly, as Margaret mentioned earlier, there's a sense in which the, you know, women were not given their due in this culture.

But then you have the second wave in the 50s and 60s and 70s of, you know, 1900, 50s, 60s and 70s, where increasingly secular feminism tried to push hard, culminating in Roe v.

Wade in 1973, and in various other women's rights issues.

And I think that, again, the judgment on the Church comes from the fact that we should have been on the forefront.

And the Bible clearly teaches women's dignity and full equality to men.

And it should not have been the feminists who had to speak up for women.

And as a result, then, feminism took to an extreme.

You know, feminism is really an unbiblical ideology, because it denies what the

Bible clearly teaches, which is male leadership, just in an effort to secure basic rights for women.

And that's an extreme. I think we need to hold those two together. And that's, I think, at the heart of our book, that the

Bible teaches both male leadership and male -female partnership at the same time.

Yes, and I overlooked the Salvation Army being another group that had women, and obviously, especially decades ago, or a century ago, when we used the word feminism, we would not recognize other feminist traits in some of these groups who are very conservative and biblically sound in other aspects, pro -life and believing in the literal interpretation of the

Scriptures, and the inerrancy of the Scriptures, and so on. But that's a more subtle intrusion into the correct order of the church and home than a full -blown liberal, leftist, feminist, openly feminist congregation or denomination that you have since the 60s, 70s, and now today.

It's even, you can hardly see Christianity in some of these modern -day denominations, which actually began as Bible -believing organizations.

Right, right. Yeah, and in some cases, it may have been women who were really spiritually vibrant and who wanted to exercise their spiritual gifts, and maybe in a day when men sometimes were reluctant leaders.

And so there was this leadership vacuum, and women were beginning to fill it.

And my encouragement to women would be to affirm male leadership, and to, even if maybe temporarily, they may need to step in if men don't lead.

I think in the long run, it is best for everyone if we move closer to the biblical ideal and to the way

God created us as men and women in the first place. By the way, I don't remember whether I told

Erin in Indianapolis she won a free book, but you have won a free book,

Erin, A God's Design for Man and Woman, a Biblical Theological Survey. So keep your eye open in the mail for that book from Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for BibleBookService .com. And we also thank again, of course,

Crossway for making those books available, since they are the publishers of the book. And now we have the winner of the final book, the final book that we have available for you.

We have Chris in Runnels, Iowa, who asks a question you already addressed in part, but he goes on with a somewhat of a different direction in a similar question.

Chris in Runnels, Iowa, says, wonderful topic. Can you ask Andreas or Margaret to discuss a little bit about how the fall of man into sin contributes to the current distortion of the roles of men and women?

I believe this distortion can fall either way into feminism or into domineering and abusive forms of male headship.

Thank you for this contribution to this vital area of Biblical truth that is under much attack today. Yeah, well,

I don't think that we really addressed the other side of the coin with this as far as the domineering abusive forms of male headship.

And of course, in the church, you can have domineering and abusive forms of headship that even are of great detriment and abuse to men in addition to women.

But if you could comment on that. Absolutely. I think, you know, in Genesis three, the biblical fall narrative, we see there's plenty of blame to, you know, go around.

And you could look at it on both the woman's and the man's part. The woman acted independently, you know, without consulting with her husband, just asserting her own, you know, independence from the man, whether that was intentional or by default, you see that it's just Satan approaching the woman and the man is not even in the picture until the woman has already sinned by eating the forbidden fruit.

And the man, on the other hand, abdicated his God -given leadership by not exercising, you know, his prerogative to ultimately be in charge of the relationship.

And, you know, you see that also in the consequences that are pronounced by God after the fall occurs, where it's very clear in Genesis 3, 17,

God says to Adam, because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit.

So in other words, at the heart of Adam's sin was that he deferred to his wife and he followed her lead when

God actually had put him in charge. And so we already see at the fall very clearly what now is permanently with us, this struggle for control,

Genesis 3, 16, God saying to the woman, your desire will be for your husband.

I think it's not just sexual desire, because, you know, that's always been there, but your desire will be to control your husband, just like in Genesis 4, 7, sin is trying to master

Cain. So here the woman is no longer willing to follow her husband's lead.

She wants to be the leader herself. So there's this rebellion that originally Satan engaged in, and so now he has dragged the man and the woman into his rebellion against God's creation design.

Rev. Buzz Taylor has a comment. I'm glad you brought that up, and you know, I wish that what you have just shared would come up more often in marriage seminars, because you're going back to Genesis, you're looking at the problem, you're looking at women need to understand that this is their natural sinful tendency as fallen women, and it needs to be fought.

And of course, I've also been commenting from earlier in enough ministerial class where I can relate to what was said about a lot of men being over domineering.

Many men, I think, end up in the ministry simply because they have a chip on their shoulder, they like to yell at people, and I just pity their wives.

That was a stupid comment, Buzz. Yes, yes. Thank you, Chris, for your contribution.

By the way, Chris, I want to repeat, Chris in Reynolds, Iowa, that you have won our final copy of God's Design for Man and Woman, a biblical theological survey, compliments of Crossway, and compliments of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service who are shipping that out to you.

So keep your eye open for a package from CVBBS .com. That's CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com.

One more comment from earlier, though, before we move on. If there really is a woman pastor out there who, that is her reason,

I would gladly trade pulpits with her. You mean if her reason is that there's not enough men? If there's not enough men stepping up,

I will gladly take her pulpit. I mean, there are a lot of men being trained in seminary now.

There's a lot of available men, I guess. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think it's, again, to your point, it's so hard sometimes, isn't it, to stay in the center, as my old

Thurman Lewis teacher, Robertson McQuilkin, used to say, in the center of biblical tension, right? It's so much easier to go to extremes on one hand or the other, but I think that's what we're called to be.

And, you know, we haven't really talked in depth about Ephesians 5, but what a powerful exhortation for Christian husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the

Church, and to nurture them spiritually, and to sacrifice for them.

So I think, you know, I think often people don't understand what

Christlike leadership really looks like, and I think the role is ours to try to model that, and then to make the biblical teaching on biblical manhood and womanhood attractive in that regard.

So it's a beautiful thing. It's not something that we're trying to force on people that's unpleasant.

It may be unnatural, yes, because it's against our normal ways, but as we live it out, demonstrate it, people observe it, it actually is a very beautiful, fulfilling, wonderful thing.

You know, we say in the book at the very beginning that for both Margaret and I, we actually became

Christians in part because of the attractive relationships that we saw around us.

And so I think, again, today, you know, as Christian husbands and wives, our marriages and our families can be very powerful witnessing tools.

I've seen that in my own family as well, that increasingly people have really softened toward the

Gospel because they've seen our children, they've seen our marriage, and so I just praise the Lord for His design, you know, being attractive.

The problem is we're still, even as Christians, we're sinners, and so despite our best intentions, we sometimes still struggle to be that Christlike husband or the, you know, the godly wife that God has called us to be.

But we have always spirit, and we have Christ's example, so I think it's within our reach to increasingly live out

God's design once again as those who've been redeemed in Christ. Perhaps when we return from our final break now, you can go into further depth about that passage in Ephesians, because it really reveals how when you meddle with the

God -breathed gender roles in the Scripture, that you are really meddling even to a more serious degree on the beautiful picture of Christ and His relationship with the

Church. And perhaps we can address that in a little bit greater detail when we return.

This is our final break right now, so if you'd like to join us on the air, this will be your final opportunity to ask a question at chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Dr. Andreas and Dr. Margaret Kostenberger after these messages.

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This is Chris Arnson. If you just tuned us in, our guests for the full two hours are

Andreas and Margaret Kostenberger. They are on the faculty at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

We have been discussing and will continue discussing for the final half hour, God's Design for Man and Woman, a

Biblical and Theological Survey. If you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com if you have a question for Dr. Andreas or Dr.

Margaret about this subject. And before the break, Dr. Andreas and Dr. Margaret, I mentioned that more is done in a negative fashion when the roles that God has set forth in his inerrant word regarding gender roles, when people meddle with them and distort them and twist them or reverse them or just abandon them altogether.

The picture, the beautiful picture of Christ in relationship to his church is distorted as well, if you both could comment on that.

That's right. You know, in Ephesians 5, intriguingly,

Christ is presented as an example both for the husband and for the wife.

He's presented as an example in the way he exercises his headship over the church.

It says the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church in verse 23 of Ephesians 5.

And then a couple of verses later in verse 25, it says, husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church.

So Christ is both presented as the head of the church and also as having loved the church in this sacrificial way.

So both the husband and the wife having Christ, the perfect example of how we are to live out our roles.

And that's a good example of how, you know, the biblical teaching on what it means to be a man and a woman is not given in the vacuum.

There's, as you mentioned multiple times, Chris, there's important theological entailments that also spill over into Christology and into the

Trinity and so forth. Yes. And obviously, men who have become dictators in their own home may like to repeat the fact that the

Bible teaches that women are to submit to their husbands, but they forget about the sacrificial end, that they are to obey and follow, to love their wives as Christ loved the church, which may be, if you really examine that to its full extent, is the more difficult test.

Absolutely. And, you know, it's quite a shame that there have been, and still are, men who are tyrants in their own home.

Yeah, so we're not talking about, you know, kind of a hyper -patriarchalism here where the woman is silenced.

I think, certainly, I think of our marriage and we make our decisions together. We, you know,

I always try to listen to Margaret, and a few times I don't.

I regret it later. You know, and so certainly we're not talking about, you know, anything but wives being intelligent partners, and, you know, even though the husband, you know, needs to understand that ultimately

God will hold him accountable for the spiritual direction of the marriage and the family.

And unfortunately, all too often, by default, it's wives who tend to be more spiritual in many cases, who are the de facto spiritual leader in the home.

And so this is really a wake -up call for us husbands to take that role that God has given us seriously.

Yeah, and the women really do desire and crave a man who does take appropriate spiritual leadership in their lives.

Don't you think that, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm getting too much into psychology here, but don't you think that in their heart of hearts, even the most ardent feminist really wants a man who's a leader, if she wants a man in her life?

Yes, I think that that does come through clearly in some of the writings that you see, the backlash of feminism, you know, and those kind of things, that that is a desire in the heart of women to be properly valued and encouraged to pursue their dreams and, you know, pursuits and even professional identities as appropriate, you know, to make the home center at the time of your life when your children are there, and, you know, just throughout life in general, but of course it's time -intensive when they're very young, and the nurturing of the babies and the young children, but also just to be very much encouraged to pursue her dreams.

Yeah, also as parents, you know, I mentioned we have both, you know, two sons and two daughters, and I'm just thinking about my daughters who are both in their early 20s and, you know, one graduated from college and is working now for a publishing company, the other one is going to graduate from college very soon, and so we've encouraged them to to get an excellent education and to take their place in society and in the church, and so I don't want anybody to think, you know, who's listening that we are not doing anything to really affirm and encouraging women to live out

God's plan for their lives to the fullest extent. But to neglect the design that he has for her in the home to be central for her life, we definitely, you know, that's why we wrote the book.

We have to have the proper balance. We want to equip our daughters to be good, you know, wives one day and to be good mothers, and I think sometimes that there's not enough emphasis given in parenting, both through role modeling and also through articulating what's maybe more implicit in our lives, so time will tell how good a job we've done.

I'm sure we can, you know, always do better in the way we've equipped our sons and daughters.

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who wants to know if you could list a few of the most common objections to your view made by egalitarians and the most biblical responses to them.

Okay, so one would be that male leadership is merely a matter of default.

They would say that the pre -fall ideal was that, you know, men and women were to be equal in every respect, and I would say that, you know,

Paul disagreed with that. First, 72, 12, and 13, Paul says,

I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man, and then in the very next verses, it says, for God first created the man and then the woman, and so Paul refers to the creation, not just the fall, so that is probably the most common objection that I've heard.

Another one would be that of mutual submission, that they would say, well, certainly wives are to submit to their husbands, but also husbands have to submit to their wives based on the statement in Ephesians 5, 21, and I would say, well, yes, there may be, that may be the surface reading, but the passage continues to talk about unique ways in which wives are to submit to their husbands as the head in the way husbands are not also, you know, to reciprocate and submit to their wives.

We've seen that in Genesis 3, how God pronounced a judgment on the man for listening to the voice of his wife in the sense of following her lead when he wanted him to take the lead.

So maybe those would be, off the top of my head, the two most common objections I've heard from egalitarians and the way

I would respond to them. Well, I remember in our last conversation in your other book, you went into great detail about that a woman is not to usurp the authority of a man in leadership, and some feminists or egalitarians in the church have used that to give a license for a woman to be a pastor, but she's just not to usurp it or steal that position or something like that.

If you could comment on that. Absolutely. That would be a third one in our book, Women in the Church.

We talk about the fact that this is really not a likely understanding at all, that more likely

Paul there is simply talking about the fact that church leaders ought to be men in keeping with that broad pattern of male leadership that we've talked about quite a bit already, just because of the way

God created us. I think what Margaret and I both have firmly come to believe is that Scripture talks about us being created, male and female, in a very holistic and thoroughgoing sense.

It's not just some sort of a role that's packed onto our being on the outside.

It's who we are as human beings, and so it goes a lot deeper than just, you know, can women be pastors?

And so I think that's maybe the misrepresentation sometimes by egalitarians who make it look like, you know, men and women have identical roles, when even they would need to acknowledge that biologically, psychologically, men and women are different in many respects.

Yeah. But how about in regard to Paul in his letters to Timothy and other areas where we have the command that women are to be silent in the church, you have probably heard the same things that I have heard from egalitarians, that Paul is referring to a occurrence that was very common in his day, that women would be chatting amongst themselves during a worship service.

Yeah, well that, you know, that set of Greek words can either mean silence or quietness.

I think it typically means quietness, and so it contrasts a more submissive spirit, you know, to male authority in the church with one that is, you know, rebellious or unsubmissive.

And I understand that, you know, if I were a woman, and I would, out of context, come across a passage that says,

I want women to be, you know, silent in the church, that I would be offended.

And so I think it's important for us to help people understand that this is not really what the underlying burden of the biblical writers, especially

Paul, was, that he just wanted to ensure that there was peace and there was order in the church in keeping with God's original design, and that involved for men to be able to lead the church and for women to accept

God's pattern. And about, for one final objection that you may have from egalitarians, the fact that women prophesied in the gathered assembly during worship, and they see that as an open door or a reason why there should be permission for women to preach to a gathered, mixed group of men and women.

That's a fascinating part of Scripture. I'm so glad you raised that, because in our book, what we found is that there's a consistent pattern, both in the

Old and in the New Testament, that women were prophesying. In the Old Testament, you have Miriam, Huldah, and Deborah, those three especially identified as prophetesses.

And then, in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 talk about women prophesying, albeit with a sign of authority on their heads.

Probably don't have time to get into all the details of that cultural expression there in Corinth, but I think, so the fact is, again, this would be part of women and men partnering and exercising their spiritual gifts in the

Church for the common good of the congregation, but again, within the context of male leadership.

And so 1 Corinthians 14 verses 34 and 35 talk about that, that men ought to be ultimately the ones who assess the merits of prophecies, whether they're uttered by men or women.

We have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says, I would like Margaret to comment as to whether or not she, even though she has a very conservative and complementarian view, still nonetheless gets objections hurled at her by other conservative

Christians and other brothers in Christ who may disagree with even her level of using her gifts in the body of Christ.

And I have also been confronted by brothers in the

Church who are so extreme in their view, who carry the prohibition of women to teach men into areas outside of an office in the

Church. Like I can even remember, believe it or not, standing next to a man in a church

I was visiting when we were singing a hymn, when he recognized in the hymnal that the author of the hymn was a woman, he threw his hymnal on the floor.

But obviously, that is an extreme and really, I think, an absurd level of escalating that prohibition to an area where it doesn't belong.

But if you could. Yeah, I mean, I guess there are, we talked about the hyper -conservative understanding of these things.

Teaching, I think the prohibition for women teaching is meant in a context of worship, and it's not talking about anything that is, it's theological areas, right, within worship.

Andreas's book on 1 Timothy. Yeah, so it wouldn't pertain to women teaching women or children, or even more in an informal, you know, conversational manner.

So those would be important to keep in mind. Priscilla and Aquila, you know, with the conversational type of manner.

Well, like for instance, some might say, some man might say, well, I'm not going to read this book because Margaret is going to be teaching me something if I read this book.

Right, but that's, see, the thing is that this book and other women who have written theology are writing it outside the context of the church.

It's not something that is an ongoing, authoritative, you know, church -based, it's a contribution that I've made for the evaluation by others.

Right, and a man voluntarily picks up the book. It's not as if he's in a church where without any choice of his own, a woman is going to be teaching him because she has an office in that church where she is teaching.

Right, right, right. Or a role. Well, I really want you both to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today about this topic.

Well, I think, what can the church do to encourage us to live out what the

Bible teaches on this vital topic, and I think that the first thing would be to affirm men as spiritual leaders in their marriages and in their homes.

And secondly, in discipleship, to stretch the unique roles of men and women rather than conceiving of discipleship merely in generic terms.

I think discipleship should include mentoring in gender -specific roles.

And I think beyond merely, you know, the occasional, you know, father -daughter dance, or father -son golfing outing, to help people understand that this is part of their calling following Christ, not just as a generic human being, but specifically in their role as men and women, and in the case of our sons and daughters, you know, preparing to be husbands and wives and fathers and mothers.

Right. Yeah, I agree with Andreas on all of those things, and I do think that I would love to encourage women to actually not just try to determine where they draw the line in terms of what is okay or not okay for them, but to actually pursue the teaching of the

Scripture and to apply it, embrace it fully, to understand themselves as a woman who, created by God, with a distinct role from a man that's a beautiful role.

It's essential. It's needed. Mothers matter, and the center of the home for the woman is very, very important.

So embrace it. Don't just see how far you can go. Don't have a minimalist view of this. Now, Margaret, you said something that just triggered a memory in my head.

You said, I agree with Andreas completely on this, and it reminded me of egalitarians saying to me, there is no head of my home.

My wife and I have equal authority and equal say, and I have said in response, that is absurd.

That is an unattainable kind of relationship, because you would have to be in 100 % agreement in every issue that ever comes about in your life, and isn't this true that this is really a fallacious argument that there is no leader in the home?

Yes, I mean, that's impractical. It's counterintuitive. It is not true to life, and there has to be a leader in every realm of life, whether it's the business world or the church.

And so I think it's just more a matter of seeing how, in many cases, there's a reluctance in our culture to submit to any kind of authority, and for people who are in positions of authority even, sometimes to downplay the authority that they have.

And so to some extent, we all need to get more comfortable with the reality that we all have authorities in our lives.

We all pay taxes. We all have to submit at work to our bosses and so forth, and so authority is an inescapable part of life, just like you mentioned,

Chris. Yeah, in fact, the last time I was having a conversation like that with a brother over the email,

I said, the only reason you could possibly come to that conclusion is, A, you and your wife have a miraculous way of harmonizing every single thing that you do with being in lockstep with each other and being completely in alignment with each other on every issue, or B, you recognize that your wife has superior knowledge in many areas and you just bow to her decision, and I said, or the third option is that she's watching you send me this email.

But we have time for one more question very quickly. We have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says,

I know that some churches take a conservative stance that even prohibits women from leading music in the church.

What is your guest's view on this? Well, again, you know, we do take the principle seriously that the teaching and ruling authority in the church is to be reserved for men, and so, you know, in part it depends on how people conceive of the music and worship ministry in the church.

I tend to think that it is part of the leadership, the theological leadership, and so I would think if you apply that principle to what

Scripture teaches about men being in charge of it, then you ought to have men in charge also of the worship aspect of the church.

And we're out of time, and I know that the website for Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary is sebts .edu,

S -E for Southeastern, B -T -S for baptisttheologicalseminary .edu,

and go to cvbbs .com if you want to purchase any of the Kastenberger's books, cvbbs .com.

Thank you so much for being on the program today. I thank everybody who sent in questions today, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater