Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose
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This book dismantles every mistruth that you've heard about the role of women in the Bible, her place in the church, and the patriarchal lie of so-called “biblical manhood and womanhood.” In its place, Aimee Byrd details a truly biblical vision of women as equal partners in Christ's church and kingdom. The church is the school of Christ, commissioned to discipleship. The responsibility of every believer—men and women together—is being active and equal participants in and witnesses to the faith. And yet many women are trying to figure out what their place is in the church, fighting to have their voices heard and filled with questions: Do men and women benefit equally from God's word? Are we equally responsible in sharpening one another in the faith and passing it down to the next generation? Do we really need men's Bibles and women's Bibles, or can the one Holy Bible guide us all? The answers lie neither with radical feminists, who claim that the Bible is hopelessly patriarchal, nor with the defenders of “biblical manhood,” whose understanding of Scripture is captive to the culture they claim to distance themselves from. Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood presents a more biblical account of gender, marriage, and ministry. It explores the feminine voice in Scripture as synergistic with the dominant male voice. It fortifies churches in a biblical understanding of brotherhood and sisterhood in God's household and the necessity of learning from one another in studying God's word. Until both men and women grow in their understanding of their relationship to Scripture, there will continue to be tension between the sexes in the church. Church leaders can be engaged in thoughtful critique of the biblical manhood and womanhood movement, the effects it has on their congregation, and the homage it ironically pays to the culture of individualism that works against church, family, and a Christ-like vision of community.
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Rating: 2 stars of 5
I wanted to like Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood but I ended up having two main issues with it.
First: it reads like a book report about a bunch of other authors' books and repeats a lot of the same information found in other books in this genre. Second: whilst other authors??? ideas presented therein are well laid out and plausible, Aimee???s own thoughts and conclusions are sometimes insupportable. There are instances when she uses a certain text to try to support a claim she makes that the text doesn???t actually seem to support. The ideas presented that have the most merit are either cited or quoted as being someone else's work.
I will say that this book is well cited, which I very much appreciated. However, there is so much in this book that is not the author's work that I found myself feeling like I should just read the cited authors' works instead; their ideas made much more sense and seemed much more valid than Aimee's did.
Somewhere around the middle of the book, I stopped on a random page and counted the sentences so I could have a sample to share of just how prevalent other authors' work is in this book. On said sample page, I counted 11 sentences. Six of them were cited (i.e. not the authors' original ideas), six of them were direct quotes (again, not the author's original ideas; there was a little bit of overlap between cited and directly quoted sentences), and two of them were neither cited nor direct quotes. So two of the 11 sentences were the author's own words, and they did not add much to the conversation. This was not unusual throughout the rest of the book. It was a pretty typical sample page.
Unfortunately, I would not recommend this book as one of the better ones on this topic. So many people love it that I may come back and give it another chance in the future. However, right now, I recommend reading The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr, and perhaps Women Rising by Meghan Tschanz, instead.
If you want to skip this one and go straight to her source material, Bauckham's Gospel Women and James' The Gospel of Ruth and Finding God in the Margins were some of the oft-cited works that seemed worth reading.
