I’ve picked up on a few questions as I’ve been working through Preston Sprinkle’s book exploring egalitarianism and complementarianism. I’ve now reaches the end of the book and so am in a position of offer a review.
The aim of Sprinkle’s book is to explore the question of women in church leadership via a thorough study of the whole of Scripture. He starts with creation and asks whether there was an intended male hierarchy in original creation. He then looks at how women are portrayed in the Old Testament before taking us Jesus’ treatment of women in the New Testament. The historical survey is completed with a look at women in the early church and particularly Paul’s greetings to various women in Romans 16, hence the reference to Junia in the title. The book doesn’t stop there however but instead takes us through Paul’s teaching on marriage in Ephesians 5 and then on women speaking and teaching from 1 Corinthians 11 & 14 before finally looking at his statement that he does not “permit a woman to have authority over a man” from 1 Timothy 2.
Sprinkle explains that he sought to undertake the study and write the book before coming to a conclusion and so the book also serves as a form of autobiography, shining a light in on his own journey from a complementarian to egalitarian position. This in itself makes the book an interesting and worthwhile read, wherever you currently land on the spectrum.
The strengths of the book include that it is well written and comes across as fair and balanced in its treatment of two competing positions. Sprinkle has sought to engage with all the relevant Bible passages and in a number of cases does the heavy lifting at looking the meaning and usages of words. Whilst there have been a couple of occasions where I found his exegesis problematic (I’ve addressed these in separate articles) and I don’t always agree with his conclusions, I appreciate that he takes time to show his working out.
I think there are two main weaknesses with the book. The first is that whilst he sets out to engage exegetically with Scripture, I’m not convinced that he is successful at this. It would have been good to have been able to hear his “first take” of Bible passages, what do they say, what are they really about before engaging with different complementarian or egalitarian scholars. That would have potentially given us a fresh perspective. Instead, it feels more like an evaluation of the different scholarly positions than a deep engagement with Scripture.
Secondly, whilst Sprinkle acknowledges a diversity of complementarian positions, his arguments against complementarianism seem to assume the hard/wide complementarianism position as his primary interlocuter. The result is that whilst at times I agree with his arguments against hard complementarian teaching , I often also find myself thinking “but that doesn’t describe or engage with where I would be coming from.” This perhaps also reflects an American context with the debate taking a different shape and tone in the UK.
Overall, the book is of interest for those wanting to explore how and why brothers and sisters committed to Biblical authority have arrived at an egalitarian position. I’m not convinced though that it offers anything particularly new to the debate for the UK context.
Faithroots 