I’m going to do something a little different today and link to several articles that come from the same blog. I love Practical Theology for Women, and I look forward to every single post from Wendy. She’s not thin, brothy Campbell’s soup. She’s homemade, thick, chunky soup that sticks to your ribs.

She gets me thinking.

In light of the fact that October is Domestic Violence Awareness month, I’ve decided to focus on her posts that deal with feminism and complementarianism because I sometime wonder if twisted views of submission and headship are responsible for ongoing abuse in the Church.

If you like these articles, I encourage you to subscribe to her blog, and by all means, put her books on your wish list. I’ve read The Gospel-Centered Woman and By His Wounds You Are Healed (a Bible study on the book of Ephesians)—and loved them both. (If you interact with me on Facebook at all, you might have noticed all the quotes I was posting a couple of months ago.)

One of the things I appreciate about her is the fact that she interacts on tough issues like this in a mature, adult way. She doesn’t have a bias and then stomp her feet and shrilly react when someone disagrees with her. She is willing to think through things thoroughly and do her own studying rather than just buying whatever those around her are selling.

I think the ongoing discussion over there is an important one to have, so here’s a sampling of what she has on the subject of feminism and complementarianism:

Where do I find my identity as a woman? It’s not the Proverbs 31 woman or Ruth—it’s God Himself. I was created in HIS image (Gen. 1:26-27) and am being conformed back to Christ’s (Romans 8:28-30). In Scripture, the defining characteristics of the first woman—those things that make her utterly unique to her male counterpart—are inextricably tied to the character of her Creator. Knowing Him precedes knowing ourselves. If we want to understand our identity as women, we must first understand His identity as God.

Read the rest of Keep Calm and Carry On: Being a Strong Helper After God’s Own Heart.

When conservatives make feminism itself the big bad enemy and write off all the good that’s been accomplished under its name, we defeat ourselves. Instead, those who love the Bible will be well served to stop worrying about the term feminism. The term is not the issue, and God’s kingdom is ill-served when we make the movement for equal human rights for women our target instead of the true sins the movement rose up to address. The issue is the range of sins against women (and children) that cultures have accepted over the years. We who love the Bible can engage on those topics. That is good and right. And if we stay in the conversation, we have a voice of influence when some choose coping mechanisms that actually hurt humanity rather than help.

Read the rest of Feminism: Neither the Problem Nor the Solution.

I have long experience with churches and groups that take a good, true Bible teaching and manage to pervert it by sloppily adding to it their own extra-Biblical notions, subtly influenced by a personal agenda they may not even recognize. If anyone really wants to think of themselves as having a “Biblical” position, they need to CONSTANTLY reevaluate themselves against the Word, because we all, me included, can be easily deceived into not recognizing the ways we warp away from the Word left to ourselves.

Read the rest of Things That Undermine the Complementarian Position.

Most important in my view, the interpretation of Gen. 3:16 by some complementarians that the woman will desire against her husband to dominate him is a very recent development in church history. I am certainly open to correction on this, but as best as I can tell, Susan Foh in 1975 was the first to formalize the idea in the Westminster Theological Journal in a response to, you guessed it, feminism.

Read the rest of A (Somewhat) Scholarly Analysis of Genesis 3:16

The bottom line is that our husbands need our respect every bit as much as we need their love. Respect is my husband’s love language. But how can we respect someone if we have deemed them unworthy of our respect? This leads back to our earlier question. Which comes first—respect or respectability? We must remember that this is God’s command to wives, and God has already well earned our obedience. God has earned our respect. So we treat our husbands with deference, honoring the position in the home to which God has called them out of our respect for God.

Read the rest of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.