In this episode, Jenna Dunn of Ezer Bible returns to the podcast to revisit her journey from complementarianism to egalitarianism, exploring key Biblical passages and challenging traditional interpretations of gender roles in the Church. This episode offers deep insights into how we read Scripture, translation issues, and the theological basis for gender equality in Christian ministry.
You can read the Bible passages we discuss here: Romans 16, Genesis 2, and Genesis 3:16, 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Corinthians 14, 1 Timothy 2:12, and 1 Timothy 3.
Here are links to where you can follow Jenna Dunn and her Ezer Bible ministry:
Jenna’s Website: Ezer Bible
Ezer Bible on Facebook
Ezer Bible on Instagram
Ezer Bible on YouTube
Please enjoy this episode of The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more!
TRANSCRIPT:
Ruth Perry (00:15)
My guest today is Jenna Dunn from Ezer Bible. You were my very first interview when I started this podcast. Even though I released our conversation as my third were my very first. When I listened to our episode back, I was like, Oh, I should have asked her so many other questions. And I just really appreciate you being my guinea pig. And I appreciate you coming back on and being gracious enough to do that again. So thank you, Jenna.
Jenna (00:38)
Thank you, Ruth. I’m really happy to be here. It’s been really amazing to get to see all the people you’ve interviewed. loved our conversation last time, but yeah, I’m excited to talk seven passages that I mentioned before.
I remember telling you the backstory about how I had these seven passages bookmarked in a Bible that I always carried with me. And I put together an online guide that’s a video, but I’m always thinking that maybe it’s better to just talk to people who want to know the Bible for themselves and they’re already curious. Maybe other women or couples who are in a complementarian church and they’re like well, I want to know how to explain what’s wrong with that position or what the Bible really says because I noticed if you try to talk directly to somebody who’s really invested in complementarianism or if you’re going to a church and that’s part of their doctrinal statement, you can’t really change people’s minds easily and maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should find a different place to fellowship.
I think for myself it was really destructive in my life to think that you can convince somebody and it’s tempting too because you’re like, well we all believe in the Bible. Just show them what it says in the Bible and that was definitely my mindset. I had these seven passages bookmarked and I’ll just show them, this is what it says. It’ll be so easy. They’ll just agree. But there’s almost like a spiritual resistance to people who are upholding that worldview, right? It’s not even just, Oh, the Bible says men need to do this and women need to do this. It’s so much beyond that. It’s their political framework. It’s how they’re interpreting scripture, it’s a whole framework that’s imposed onto the Bible. It’s how they’re doing relationships.
Ruth Perry (02:18)
I think it’s like the parable of the soils; some soil is receptive and some is really hard. And the people who are most considering that maybe complementarianism isn’t the way is the person who has had a bad experience and they’ve realized that the fruit of complementarianism isn’t good. And so they’re experiencing some cognitive dissonance. And that could have been either in their relationship at church or in the home.
Or perhaps they’ve felt a call from God. And so now they’re trying make sense of that because they’re a woman. That can’t be right. And so it seems like the people who are the receptive hearers of egalitarianism, if they’re coming from a complementarian background, they’re in a spiritual season of, that’s not working, I need to find a better way. But if it is working for them, they’re just gonna ignore you. They’re gonna cast you out as heretical. They’re gonna warn themselves about you and others.
Jenna (03:13)
Yeah, and I have to say too, when you’re in a complimentarian church and you haven’t really questioned that mindset or that framework at all, it seems like it’s not that big of a deal. So some women feel called to teach or pastor. What’s the big deal? They can teach and pastor women and children. There’s plenty of opportunities. Nobody should be feeling bad. And it really just doesn’t seem like it’s that important.
And it isn’t, you can still do a lot. I would have been perfectly happy just doing children’s ministry. I was writing Sunday school curriculum and I loved it. I never wanted to teach men. So the only reason why it was an issue is that what was being taught to everybody was not what the Bible said. So that’s the issue is that you have a framework people who are different in some way, like they’re female, they bring truth to the light. They can’t call somebody into repentance. They can’t even make positive change in their marriage, right? It’s the whole framework where only men the leadership capabilities and the ability to tell everybody this is why you need to repent. This is what the Bible actually says. So that’s the issue is that women can’t come against that framework. They can’t question that doctrine. They have to go along with it.
I remember there was another situation where I brought up to leadership that there’s not any women in positions of authority so what if I as a woman was in a dangerous situation like an abusive marriage or I had something very personal and I needed to get counseling or help or advice from a woman they were like well pastors wives, ministry wives, look at all these women and you don’t understand you can’t go to a woman who’s married to one of the leaders and say, I think that the way that Ephesians 5, the way the pastor talked about it, was really bad because there’s women in the church that are in abusive marriages. You can’t question anything, you can’t change anything, and there’s no women that have a rightful authority, right? Following their place in the pyramid structure, right? Trying to keep their position.
That’s not a healthy dynamic, although the issue is not, well, women can’t teach men, and they’re just not happy only teaching other women. It’s really that what’s being taught is not able to be questioned, and men are only called into repentance by other men. So they have a whole blind spot, you know? And they’re only interpreting scripture according to this narrow framework of what other men have said it says, and you can’t question it.
And a lot of times, a Sunday morning teaching will not even have a very healthy perspective, it’s very narrow minded. I remember one example was seeing a male pastor teach about the woman at the well. And it just drove me crazy because his bias was so visible. So there’s all these passages in the Bible that are really about women and they are the words and theology and conversations of women and the stories of women and then only men can teach it and they don’t understand, they don’t see, they don’t ask the right things.
I think it took women to start saying Bathsheba was raped. So many male pastors taught that story. And then it was women that came along and they’re like, was she able to say no? Did she have to if the king comes and says, you have to go with me? Did she have an option? Women think to ask that. And the Bible is not just this rule book and it’s not stories of only men. There’s all these really personal stories of women and it makes sense to have women help with that translation and interpretation.
So it’s not about, well, women want to be able to do all these things that men do because they’re not happy being a woman. No, men aren’t doing things good. And how is that going to get fixed? If you silence the people that are really given by God as gifts to help his body. That is what the leadership positions in the church are supposed to be, is people that are given by Jesus to his bride to teach and to lead and to preach and to evangelize. If you only have men doing those things, it’s not going to be as good as it could be.
Ruth Perry (07:17)
I also think of the value that you bring to this conversation and that I bring to this conversation is that we up complementarian. And so we’ve read the Bible through that lens, and then we’ve rediscovered the Bible through a new lens. And just having that insight of both perspectives, I think, is really valuable. And I know growing up complementarian, the way that complementarians spoke of egalitarians. I would say it was not according to the New Testament one another commands that we’re supposed to love one another and consider others better than ourselves. But rather, there was a lot of demeaning language and writing off and just assuming that egalitarians were playing fast and loose with scripture and that they weren’t taking it seriously and that they were letting their culture influence the way that they read the Bible. And as I’ve met egalitarians and read egalitarians, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Jenna (08:08)
Yeah. Yeah, who’s doing mental gymnastics? The people trying to make it fit the most common social structure we’ve had throughout the world, throughout time is patriarchy and trying to make the Bible fit that, trying to make the Bible prescribe patriarchy. I think that that’s really pandering to the culture.
Even the name complementarian, I find slightly deceptive because nobody is saying that men and women are the same. Both sides think that male and female were created by God to complement each other so it’s not even being honest about what their position is. Their position is not just that men and women are different and compliment each other, but that there must be this hierarchy between them. But if you say, well, they’re hierarchalists, they don’t love that. And if you say, you’re advocating for patriarchy, they don’t really love that either.
But being complementarian, it’s a weird thing for them to name the movement, but also just the fact that everything came out as a response, right? It was a very reactionary movement. It only makes sense in America and it only makes sense since the 70s and it only makes sense as a reaction to feminism. And so there’s these bigger issues that are hard to bring up and I think one of the strategies is to ask the right questions and to help them bigger ideas in scripture. So one of the first things that I think is really important to bring up is Romans 16.
So the seven passages are Romans 16 and then Genesis 2 and then look at Genesis 3:16 and then you get into the First Corinthians 11, First Corinthians 14 and First Timothy 2. So everybody starts the other way around with first Timothy 2, and I actually think that’s the least relevant passage But I also think it’s important to look at the whole chapter.
So, those seven chapters, I think you can give people an overview of what that passage is talking about and the big picture and it’ll all fit in. And hopefully it illuminates all of scripture and it doesn’t just feel like this disconnected framework. And I think that’s one of the things that really bothered me about complementarianism is that they will make a list of something like, nine proofs of male headship or, the true woman manifesto. There’s also the biblical manhood and womanhood. It’s kind of like a manifesto, but they’ll make 10 points, like 10 sentences, and then they’ll just be like three scriptures to support that statement.
And the scriptures are different genres of the Bible. They’re just a hodgepodge and then the scriptures don’t support the statement, or they’ll be saying something slightly different. They’ll say, well, Paul is quoting the created order. And then you go and you look at where they’re saying Paul’s saying that, but Paul’s never using the phrase created order.
I don’t see egalitarians use the Bible that way, right? There’s more respect. There’s more providing context and explaining who’s saying that and who their audience is and why they might be saying it. There’s a need for that because I think using the Bible like it’s just a rule book or a blueprint for how to have a good family or how to have a good marriage or how everybody should act according to their gender, it’s just a weird way to use scripture.
And so with those seven passages, kind of the crux of the issue is the complementarian idea of created order that they get from Genesis, right? Because the verses that they’re using from Paul, they think that he’s quoting Genesis. So looking at Romans 16 first to say, what did the early church look like? And Romans 16 not only gives you a list men and women working together, it does list one married couple in ministry, Priscilla and Aquila, but it lists a lot of women with no statement about who they’re married to or whose wife they are. It also gives women titles of respect. It shows that they’re set over others. You know, even listing churches that they are set over. You have Phoebe presiding over the Church of Centrea.
So just the amount of women and the way women are listed and then how Paul is commending them. So it doesn’t only just tell you how the church looked and what people were doing, but what Paul thought about it. And everything else that you talk about after that, every other part of the Bible that you read, would Paul really be contradicting himself if he’s commending women for leading? Is he later telling them to be silent?
If he’s calling them coworkers and partnering with them and even having women over him as a man, is he later going to say, yeah, I don’t want any women to exercise authority over men? The conversation has to start with that. You get this picture of the early church as being very diverse the women that are commended are not all somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother. It’s not like when you are at a pastor’s conference by The Resurgence or by The Gospel Coalition and the only mention of women is so-and-so’s wife. It’s a very different feel.
The early church movement had a lot of women and maybe their husbands weren’t saved. Maybe their husbands weren’t with them and maybe they weren’t married and there was a lot of householders that were women. And they impose this 1950s Leave it to Beaver family model onto the text and it’s just not in the text.
And also, a lot of these things that they think Paul is saying are much worse. He’s not just saying women ask your husbands at home and be respectful and show deference to male leadership. He’s not saying that. He’s saying the voice of a woman shameful or filthy. So you either think he’s quoting a different idea or that he believes that and that somehow makes sense when you see Romans 16 and it doesn’t make sense, right?
So I think starting with Romans 16, that’s the biggest thing. If you have two seconds to talk to a complementarian, ask them if they read Romans 16 what they think about it. If you’re reading the ESV, some of these passages are interpreted in such a way, like it’ll say, well known to the apostles, right?
Ruth Perry (14:09)
Hmm. Yeah, I was going to ask you about how can away from Junia?
Jenna (14:13)
Yeah, well, it was Junius for a while and then they realized there’s no way it was a man’s name. And so then they changed the other words in the sentence. So you see, not only is the actual scripture important to look at, but that history of how we’ve translated it. Also, it reveals that there’s been a historic bias against female leadership.
And so I think that’s important to recognize because it’s not just people being difficult or politically correct because of feminism now. It’s not just our modern culture. Women have always been discriminated against and they’ve always been trying to serve the Lord. They’ve always been full of the Holy Spirit and trying to do what they’re called to do and there’s always been a historic bias there in translation and we have a history of how it’s been translated. The end result is nobody thinks that it could possibly be Junius. Everybody knows it’s Junia.
And so that should cause you to also doubt the other things that the ESV tries to get away with in modern times. Like they still try to, say, not deacon to say servant. None of the other places where men are called deacons do they try to say servant. And you actually have the church that she’s presiding over listed. So yeah, I think that that is an obstacle, the translation issues. And unfortunately, that is one of the reasons why people continue to be complementarian is just cause they’re reading the ESV. And so they’re not seeing what scripture really says. And that’s too bad. ⁓
Ruth Perry (15:37)
It’s interesting how people say, well, there’s no women pastors in the Bible, but there’s no one in the Bible that has the title pastor. It is deacon or servant or shepherd or some other term.
Jenna (15:41)
No pastors. Yeah, and the bigger picture of that though is that there aren’t offices. There’s not these elite titles, right? The fact that Paul is like, I’m going to call the people that are in charge servants. It’s so Jesus-like. It backs up the whole ethic of Jesus, to say, don’t be like the Gentiles who lord it over one another.
Whoever is going to be the greatest among you is going to be your servant. So to not try to seek to be the greatest. I love all of the stories where the male disciples are arguing about who’s greatest among them. There’s one where they’re like outside arguing and they come into the house and Jesus knows what they were arguing about, and he’s like, what were you talking about back there? You know? I see that feeling in the whole nine proofs of male headship that they get from Genesis, right? Like the whole concept of created order. This is their whole argument in those bullet point checklists.
The man was created first, the woman sinned first. And it’s just this childish, immature framework of who did what first, who is greatest, who’s not greatest. It’s just a weird way to look at the Bible and it goes against the bigger picture of everything Jesus said. And then you see Paul really running with the exact same ethic, setting up churches and just saying, we’re gonna call everybody who leads a servant.
And even the five-fold ministry titles, those are all things you’re doing. You’re a teacher, you’re an evangelist, you’re a shepherd. It’s not about this official title.
Ruth Perry (17:24)
I think it is a little bit of projection, the way they talk about women who are trying to follow their callings in the church. They’re like, well, you just want power. But I feel that reveals what their perspective is, that those positions are power. And it’s about authority and lording over others rather than service and servanthood.
Jenna (17:37)
Yeah. Yeah, I do see the projection too. It’s really interesting being told that you just want attention when you’re a woman in the church, that was really odd for me. It’s so not my personality and I can’t think of anything I’ve done that would warrant somebody saying, well, you just want attention. Their view of womanhood and what I should want and what I should be is so narrow and small that it’s like anything outside of that is oh, you want all these things.
Yeah, it takes empathy, I think, for somebody coming from that framework to imagine what that must feel like. You get saved and you get baptized and you start learning about the Bible and then you get filled with the Holy Spirit. And for some people, they really feel called to teach or to lead or to even preach, to call people into repentance. And then if you’re a woman, you’re supposed to show this special respect. You can’t be in any sort of authority position where you’re telling a man what to do or criticize him. You can’t tell him that he’s teaching the Bible wrong or that he’s not seeing things. I’m not saying that you would ever do it in a disrespectful way, but it’s just not allowed in any way.
And so what do you do if you really want to build community and be a part of a community? There’s just not a way do it in a healthy way, I don’t think. And it also is really destructive for a lot of marriages. If you are married and you’re in leadership in that type of environment, there’s just a lot of ways that your marriage is going to be attacked because especially if you’re the woman thinking that the Bible is freeing towards women and opens the mouths of women and is empowering for women and then you’re in a complementarian culture, it’s going to be hard not only socially, it’s going to be hard to actually to be honest with people and to be in community. And then if you’re in a marriage that’s disjointed that way, it’s really hard.
I wish it was just a matter of saying, well, we all have the same Lord. We read the same Bible. We have the same Spirit. Let’s just open up the Bible and just see what it says. But unfortunately, there’s a lot more to it. But yeah, Romans 16 is good. I think the next thing to focus on is the whole creation account, mainly Genesis two, because everything in complementarian theology hinges on them establishing male headship before the fall.
Everybody agrees as soon as the fall happens and he’s gonna rule over her, that’s Bad. It’s, you know, what do you think before that, you think God instituted a form of patriarchy or a good male headship hierarchy, right? That’s the crux of the issue and I think the fact that you have new language to prove that is a good indicator that it’s not just obvious in scripture. Phrases like, God’s design, created order, order of creation.
Even male headship is kind of a questionable phrase. The Bible definitely talks about men being the head of their wife, but I see all the time people are reading a scripture and every place that says head, they say headship and sometimes they’ll even just say authority. I’m like wow, that’s a crazy metaphor, authority in a body. That’s not even a metaphor anymore, right? You’ve just completely changed a word. But yeah, people will say Paul said and then say something that’s not even in the Bible and not what he said.
And this idea equal, but different roles, even the idea of roles or gender roles, that’s all really modern stuff. It like the sixties? They started talking about gender roles. That’s a social construct. It’s a weird thing to impose onto the Bible.
Once you see how weird it is, once you start questioning it, you’re like, this is really a whole way of looking at things and actually taking a story and saying, God instituted a certain design or order and then the sin in the Garden of Eden is a reversal of that. At that point you’re redefining sin as not acting like your gender or not following your role. Try to find another story in the Bible where that’s what the sin is. Not following, not staying in your place.
That really struck me the other day, how it’s all hinging on a really modern idea. And now you’re taking a story in the Bible that is foundational to understanding the rest of scripture and you’re saying, it’s about not staying in your place. Have you seen what I’m talking about where the chain of command is supposed to be, God, Jesus, man, woman, and then the reversal is the serpent, woman, man, God, you know what I mean? But that idea is sticky.
Ruth Perry (22:05)
This is really where we read our culture into the Bible because we are conditioned in a patriarchal culture where there are roles, and we call them traditional values. So it feels old, just using that language of this is the traditional view. It feels like this is the right way to view things, but it really is the culture of the world and we’re supposed to be renewed and not conform to the culture of the world, but conform to the values of the kingdom of God, which I feel like Genesis 1 and 2 really lays out a beautiful vision of partnership between men and women in having dominion. They were both given the same job description to have dominion and care for God’s beautiful creation, and they were connected with God and they were connected with each other. And the sin creates disconnection and harm between our relationship with each other and with God.
But your ministry is called Ezer Bible. So I’m obviously wanting to hear from you about how you understand that word helpmeet because that sounds, in the King James Version that people love to read, it says that the woman is a helpmeet or in the ESV helper. And we just read that through our modern English lens as subordinate and that there’s hierarchy inherent in that. That that’s what God’s created order is. That we’re assisting the man in his calling and his dominion. So can you explain how to better understand that word helper?
Jenna (23:21)
Yeah, that was actually world-changing for me. I think that that was the thing that caused me to leave complementarian theology. And I’ve noticed that some of the different well-known complementarian bloggers or authors, they’ve changed that list. It used to be like the second point was that the woman’s called ezer was actually one of their proofs of male headship. Which is crazy because you know if it was the other way around where God created the man to rescue the woman from being alone, that God calls himself ezer. And it would be a proof of male headship.
And then, to even have it say, equal to or facing him, like on his level. So she’s a rescue, a deliverer, but on his level. I think it’s really difficult to get subservience out of that word and when I really looked up that word and I saw the other places it was used I actually felt it elevated, I mean, I know it’s equal to but I was thinking wow, that’s really an elevating title for the first woman to be called, and the fact that God’s like, I’m gonna make an ezer like this..
I think that the takeaway that complementarians get about like, he was created first, she sinned first. It’s a really weird takeaway when you see the story as it is, how everything is done in such a way that they can’t not be interdependent. She’s built from his body. So, can you say that he existed first if, the materials that she’s built with are his body? It’s done in such a way that I think what you’re supposed to take away is wow, they’re really interconnected.
That’s the idea that eventually leads to marriage is that she’s taken out of him, so then he’s going to leave his family and cleave to her because he’s seeking that wholeness. That seems like the bigger thing to take away from that story but also isn’t that story all about Jesus? There are so many things in that story that go against the natural world that we know. We all know that every human came out of the body of a woman. This is the natural order of things and this story is flipping a lot of that on its head and Paul uses all of that in the New Testament to show interdependence and connection, not to show a hierarchy.
I think that another huge thing to point out is that Paul doesn’t say that the man is created first so to stop putting words in his mouth, to stop misquoting him is huge. Because then you have to be thinking, what is Paul saying? He’s not saying that the man was created first. It literally doesn’t say that word in there. And take the phrase created order and to start imposing that onto how you’re interpreting the Bible. Paul says the man is formed first. And then you have to look at the formation going on.
That there’s a completely different word for the idea of taking something that already existed in chapter one and molding it like clay and then breathing life into it and then taking part of the bone and the flesh off and building a woman. I don’t know if you’ve heard something that was kind of new to me that I heard from Tim Mackey was that the word ezer is just one little dot different from the word city.
So like this idea of building an ezer, it’s like an architecture word. It’s like how you’d build an altar, or you’d build a house, or you’d build a city. You look in the New Testament and you have the New City that’s prepared like a bride. There’s some really interesting spiritual stuff going on in this story, right? The natural order shows us that we all got our life from a woman. And so maybe there’s some respect and honor due to women that we all are born of a woman and then this story maybe gives men this idea well everything came from a man, he was first and I think that they really glom onto that as sort of a projection of male superiority but I don’t think that that’s why God gave us that story.
And I actually think the entire creation account is about the Creator. I see Jesus in every in every part of that and Paul does too. In fact, most of what Paul is talking about whenever he’s quoting the creation account, he’s talking about that interconnection. He’s talking about two become one, a head and a body, make He’s talking about the fact that the woman is made, is built from his body and just the same thing with Jesus and his church. The church is being built from the broken body of Jesus and the church is a bride and the church is like a city.
But the big thing to make complementarians, look at it different, it’s just to make them look at what it actually says. You can see that these phrases their framework is dependent on don’t exist in Scripture. I think too it’s important to not misquote Paul. There’s a lot of things that they say Paul is saying and then you look at it and that’s not what he’s saying.
You know, like I talked about the quote, that’s called like the quote refutation view where he’s quoting, I think, the Jewish oral law. But when you look at what he’s actually quoting, if you want to try to make that his actual opinion, it’s pretty extreme. It’s actually a really mean thing to say. I actually just walked away from Christianity when I did a word search I think it’s verse 34, it says something like, the voice of a woman is shameful. And I was like, I’m sure it doesn’t say shameful. Like, I don’t recommend looking up that word, It says the voice of a woman is filthy.
It’s not just saying, women maybe aren’t educated at this time in history and they just need to hush down a little bit and just ask their husbands at home and stay in their place. It’s saying something about the quality of her voice, no matter what she’s saying.
Ruth Perry (29:08)
It’s deragatory.
Jenna (29:09)
Yeah, and to say something’s filthy or shameful is hinting at the idea which was prevalent in the first century, that the voice of a woman is sensual, which you know you still see that in other cultures today. Some of the Muslim majority countries have laws against women speaking in public, because they think it’s immodest. The idea that that’s representative of Paul, I think just doesn’t fit with the rest of his story.
It does fit with who he was before he encountered Christ on the road to Damascus. So you see him confronting his past worldview. You’ve seen Galatians 3.28, he says that there’s neither slave or free, or male or female, or Jew or Gentile. That is almost verbatim a prayer. So he’s refuting what he probably used to pray when he was a Pharisee. So you see him come against the world view that he used to hold to. I think it’s very unlikely that he’s out of nowhere just going back to being a Pharisee.
But I think that sometimes people who don’t power of the gospel, they just kind of synchronize everything in his life. They’re like, oh, well, he was a Pharisee. So he believed that. And they sync that together with who he was as a Christian in Christ. No, he did a 180. Before he was rounding up all the Jesus followers and locking them up and killing them.
You can’t synchronize that with who he is in Christ. He had a conversion experience. Whereas he used to follow those ideas, now he’s partnering with women. Now he’s learning for women. And I think the idea that he’s saying that is just, I think it’s so out of line with everything else that his ministry is about. And I think it’s perfectly in line that he would say that and refute it. There is a quote Rabbi Eliezer that says the voice of a woman is filthy nakedness, and there is also the quote that says little woman know nothing but the use of her distaff like her spitting, so there’s things that are really similar to that idea in the Talmud, but at that time they could have just been Jewish oral laws or slogans and I think it’s very likely that he’s, quoting them and saying, what? Did the Word of God come from you or did it come to you only?
I think that with that passage, just getting people to really look at what it says and to not say that it says something it doesn’t. That was the way it was presented to me. This is about headship. Same with 1st Timothy 2. It’s about headship. It’s about the created order. Paul’s quoting the created order. Well, he’s not. That phrase isn’t being used. And what he’s saying, that the voice of a woman is filthy is nothing to do with the created order. you know? And that’s actually not one of them that he’s quoting the creation account. It’s the 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul, specifically quotes the creation account.
So, you you’ve got like this circle where how they’re interpreting the creation account is influencing their view of these two verses and then how they’re interpreting those two verses is influencing their creation account idea. And so it’s like, how do you break that loop? It’s a negative feedback loop. How do you get them to see both sections correctly? You can’t just fix one, right? But the crux of the issue is they don’t see the creation account accurately. They’re convinced that it’s about something different than it’s about, they don’t read that story and think, this is about how men and women were rule together. They were created in a way that they’re interdependent on each other.
Ruth Perry (32:42)
This might be a tangent, but I also think Calvinists don’t start in Genesis 1 and 2. They like to start in Genesis 3 at the fall where we are, you know, original sin, that we are filthy and just totally unworthy of anything from God. Everything is a free gift, which Armenians would agree. Everything is a free gift from God.
But Armenians would start with Genesis 1 and 2 about common grace and the creation of God and the dignity and value of every human life, the very goodness of human beings. But there could be patriarchal Armenians too. And they might allow women to use their gifts in the church, but then they’ll still want that order in the home of male headship and women’s submission.
Jenna (33:21)
Yeah, I’ve seen that. Yeah, I’ve been really intrigued by that. I came across that pretty recently where I was listening to somebody who said, yeah, I believe in male headship in the home, but not in the church. And I had to think about that for a second because that means that you still hold to the idea of the created order in Genesis. But that means it’s only applicable to a man and a woman in marriage. I think a lot of that has to do with how you’re interpreting all the head-body metaphor.
You’re either reading the head-body metaphor as a metaphor about connection and interdependence, or you’re breaking that metaphor and replacing that word with a different word. Headship and authority, those are the same thing, but the metaphor is not a headship and a body. That’s like saying, let’s hike up this trail, meet me at the authority of the river. You’d be like, no, that doesn’t even make sense. So there’s no other place where we use words that way, you know?
And actually, the word in Greek, we have the perfect match in English, the word head in English. It has the same meanings. It can mean your literal head. It can mean authority, like a CEO. And it could mean source, like the head of a river. So it really is like the perfect English word. Usually you don’t have an exact match, it really is head is head. If I’m saying to you, take that hat off your head, I’m not saying take the hat off your authority.
I just don’t understand how people break that metaphor and then think that they’re reading the Bible correctly. I mean, I know what happens is they’re like, well, Jesus is the head of the church. And those are similar things, but can’t you see you can use the same word in different contexts. You can say that Jesus is head over the church, because that’s also true. But that doesn’t mean that men take on every single thing that’s true about Jesus. It’s only in the context of a marriage that a man is a head of a body.
You can’t have more than one of each for that metaphor to work. If you’ve ever seen the umbrellas, the umbrellas are crazy. You can have five umbrellas under one umbrella. If it’s just about authority, there’s not one of each, right? You can’t have two becomes one. It like completely breaks the metaphor.
Ruth Perry (35:14)
That’s not how umbrellas work. You only need one. Yeah.
Jenna (35:26)
Maybe that’s even just like a language issue that people don’t understand where the Bible is using a metaphor. You know, maybe people wanting to be very literal with the way they read the Bible. They’re trying to be literal with the metaphor. But yeah.
Ruth Perry (35:38)
You would also think, if Jesus is head of the church in the way that they want to be head of their church or their wife, then we wouldn’t have 40 something thousand different denominations. We would all be submitted to Christ and look the same, right?
Jenna (35:52)
Yeah, I actually think that the complementarian position’s a little bit more about the unwillingness to let something be less structured than we would like. The unwillingness to sort of hold things with an open hand and say, we are all submitted to Jesus. Jesus is the head of his church. Jesus is building his church. But instead we want to create a structure that looks like the world. We want something hierarchal so that everybody knows what they’re supposed to do. We want to be able to follow rank and have this certain structure that makes sense to us.
And I think, the Bible just doesn’t really give us that. I don’t think that what you see in Romans 16 shows that that’s what there was, at that time. the fact is not even after a lot of persecution that you get a really structured church. And even at that point, you still see women doing that complementarians say that women can’t do today. That’s another thing that’s crazy to me. Just if you look at the history of the church, women have always been trying to do stuff. So this idea that it’s just only women today because of feminism. It’s only women now that are trying to do things that they shouldn’t do. Like throughout history women have just been completely satisfied serving men.
Yeah, there’s there’s so many different aspects that go into it that show it’s not just about what does the bible say because if we could all just like read the same bible and say well you know it says this it doesn’t say this that would be simple right but yeah people are bringing a lot of baggage into the whole discussion
Ruth Perry (37:04)
Yeah. So back to your seven passages, then you move to Genesis 3:16 and you talk about the fall. What do you say about that?
Jenna (37:25)
Yeah, so I think that the major thing to take away from Genesis is just the idea of created versus formed, and to see that the phrase created order needs to be examined, to see what’s actually there. But the Genesis 3:16, it’s crazy how one verse has so much baggage.
But the quickest, easiest thing to take away from that verse without going into the whole history of how it’s been mistranslated is that Paul read it a certain way. It’s different than what you see in most translations today. For the vast majority of church history, I think like for 1500 years, it said turning. It didn’t say, it didn’t even say desire.
Ruth Perry (38:08)
This is where it says your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.
Jenna (38:12)
Yeah, and also if you look at a Septuagint it says, she will be turning towards her husband. He will rule over her. And it’s a prediction, It’s just saying this is what’s going to happen. It’s not saying that he has to rule over her. I think the 2016 ESV actually changed it to your desire will be to control your husband or something like that. And then in the more recent, I think it’s 2025 or 2026, they updated it and went back to desire.
So I think almost every translation today says your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. And I think that’s fine, but you miss out on the parallelism. if you notice, if you leave it as turning, which is how Paul read it, there’s a reciprocal thing going on where he’s returning to the ground, which is where he came from. That’s what he was formed from. And she is turning towards where she came from.
So you get this idea of repentance almost. Now that there’s sin in the world, now there’s sin and death, the temptation for men and women is to turn back to where they came from, which is turning away from God. And the idea of repentance, at least in the Old Testament, the Hebrew shove, is like you’re turning. You turn to God and you turn away from sin. So, I’m a huge advocate for the idea that that should say turning. I was really moved when I realized that that’s definitely what Paul was looking at. And for most of church history, it has said that. But even if we leave it as desire, that is a crucial verse because complementarians are using that to say that he needs to rule over her. Prescriptive, not in a descriptive way.
And so you have to point that out that God’s not prescribing men to rule over women. That’s the product of the fall. That’s a negative thing. And the other reason why that verse is really important, I have a gigantic ESV study Bible and so it has a lot more footnotes than most Bibles do. But when I was reading the whole passage in First Corinthians 14 and it says, as the law says, my footnote in my ESV had reference to Genesis 3:16. So that means they were interpreting that passage as Paul quoting Genesis 3:16 to silence women.
I don’t know how prevalent that idea is among other complementarians, but it’s something to point out. Really, you think Paul’s quoting Genesis 3:16 and telling women to be silent or to be subject to men? I don’t know. I think that’s a crazy cross-reference.
Ruth Perry (40:37)
Yeah, on this side of the resurrection, we’re supposed to be living a new life and in a new kingdom. And, all of the results of the fall have been defeated.
Jenna (40:40)
Yeah. Yeah, my feeling is that that’s not that common of a view. I think most complementarians, would say, well, there’s headship before, but now it’s a distortion. He’s ruling over her and that’s a negative thing, not a positive thing. I mean there’s so many things that the ESV translation team did that were really a stretch, but to me that, to think that Paul’s quoting that, which means you’re making Genesis 3:16 a law.
And I think it is worthwhile to start with Romans 16, to see this is a really good representation of what was happening, what women did. Like we’re going to talk about women in ministry, let’s look at the passage that has a bunch of women doing ministry and then see what Paul is saying about it and how he seems to feel about it. And then to look at some of these other verses, that are quoting the creation account where they’re getting the idea of created order. Because if you go to interpret 1st Corinthians 11 or 1st Timothy 2, but you think that there was headship before the fall, you’re not gonna see what Paul’s saying, right?
Both of those passages tend to be the only ones that people talk about when they talk about women in ministry. And so many times that you’ll have a woman teaching or preaching or a video explaining the egalitarian position and there’ll just be a comment that is, say first Timothy 2:12. It’s basically like saying, shut up, but it’s a Bible verse reference used like a slap in the face, like a weapon to silence a woman. I don’t think you can really make headway with somebody that has that mentality, but it shows how contagious that idea was, is that Paul basically said women can’t exercise authority over a man. That idea became very contagious.
So I think the most succinct thing to bring up is does that word say exercise authority? And you can actually go to some of the older translations. So the King James version says usurp authority. I think there’s a translation that says domineer. So that’s the crux of the issue is was the woman doing a positive or a negative, because exercise authority is a positive thing throughout. That’s what you’re saying is men exercise authority if they’re a pastor or a leader in the church or exercising authority over men and women. So that’s a positive, but you’re just saying a woman’s not allowed to do that.
So you’re assuming authentein is positive. It’s not used anywhere else in the Bible, first of all, but I think to think that it’s a positive word, of course the ESV needed to translate it “exercise authority” in order to uphold their position. But the fact that they are not able to uphold their position using the older Bible translations should make you wonder. You couldn’t argue for a complementarian worldview just using the King James Version, at least not with this passage, because you’re like, yeah, of course a woman can’t usurp authority. Of course a woman shouldn’t domineer. Of course, nobody should authentein anybody.
Ruth Perry (43:36)
There’s a hermeneutical rule where you don’t make a blanket rule for the church from one verse or from one word like that. You should be able to verify it through the whole testimony of scripture.
Jenna (43:44)
Right, yeah, I have a list that’s like the 10 rules of Bible interpretation and I think I can’t remember the first name, but Gundry, or, there’s a list of scholars that put together a list and that sounds like one of the main points, but yeah, basically you’re not gonna argue for something using something obscure. And so just the simple fact that that word is not used anywhere else in the Bible noteworthy. I’ve never really heard complementarians give a good response to that.
Ruth Perry (44:18)
Or they’ll turn that into a rule for all times and all places, but then say, well, we don’t have to greet each other with a kiss for all times and all places though. Yeah.
Jenna (44:24)
Right? Right, yeah, Paul is giving a lot of personal advice, like bring my cloak back and drink a little wine for your stomach. And there’s all these like personal things and we don’t make doctrine out of it. But also the bigger picture of why is Paul writing to Timothy? What’s going on in Ephesus? Why does he feel the need to make sure this young pastor what these men and women need to be doing in worship because there’s directions for men and there’s directions for women and why in the world would you need to tell women that they’re going to be safe during childbirth? Like in Ephesus in the first century what could he possibly be talking about?
I think that the complementarian position is just so unsatisfactory for interpreting the entire passage because they give you no context. You know, why does Paul feel the need to point out that Adam’s formed first and it was the woman who was deceived. Why is he pointing that out? Is he talking about some women who are deceived? Is he talking about this idea that there’s somebody who’s superior because they were first, they were born first? So it’s like, what’s going on in Ephesus in the first century?
That verse needs to be in context of the whole thing about how the women are dressing and how they’re worried about dying and childbirth. And so, yeah, I think the way complementarians pluck it out and put it in this bullet point list of the nine proofs that men are in charge and to just lump it together with their statement about Paul says that the man was created first, which is them saying that he said something he didn’t. And it is mental gymnastics. It’s also just a really disrespectful way to use scripture.
Ruth Perry (46:05)
So we’ve talked about Romans 16, Genesis 2, and 316. We’ve talked about 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Corinthians 14, 1 Timothy 2:12. That’s six passages. That’s all I wrote down. What was the seventh passage?
Jenna (46:19)
This is probably the hardest one and it’s usually the one that I would bring up last, but you have to get into the whole one woman man thing. It’s in Titus, but I just focus on 1 Timothy 3. You’re already talking about Paul giving advice to Timothy, but there’s a whole section that usually has the chapter heading qualifications for leaders or qualifications for elders or overseers.
And you got this whole list of character qualities. And you have the sentence structure saying, whosoever. And then you’ve got all these male pronouns added in. And the only reason why they add the he’s in there is because they translate the idiom “one woman man” to “husband of one wife.” And that’s a terrible translation because those are different things, right? An idiom, an expression, like a one-horse town is an idiom.
If you told me you know that such and such town is a one horse town and I went there and I came back and I said there’s no horses there. You’d be like, we’re just saying it’s a small town. It’s the same idea. A one woman man is somebody who’s faithful, it’s a character quality and it fits in with that list that’s all character qualities.
And so because they translate that to one woman man, then they start adding in the male pronouns and make that entire passage about men when it’s whosoever. If anyone desires the office of bishop, if anybody stretches out their hand be a leader, that’s a good thing to desire. That is actually the Holy Spirit in you calling you to ministry. And so that passage is for men and women. A one woman man is a woman. So there is another scripture that talks about women like widows or single women. Sometimes I think in the New Testament, widow is not literally to mean that your husband’s dead. It can just mean that you are a single woman.
But there’s a passage that talks about the women who are one men women. So that would be useful to use that phrase, that idiom, if you were only referring to a group of women. But as soon as you’re referring to a group that’s men and women, you have to say a one woman man. That includes everybody. So part of the problem with interpreting this wrong, is not only does it disqualify a lot of people in the New Testament who were not married, and it makes Paul contradict himself, right? Because he actually has a few statements where, especially for women, he’s like, it might be better for you to stay single because you can serve the Lord with your whole heart. You won’t be having to take care of your husband.
I think in some ways, Paul encourages celibacy, especially for ministry, and ministry during persecution. this to like, now you have to be married. And then the idea that people were actually practicing polygamy, you have this culture in Rome where men were having sex with a lot of different people but they only had one wife. He’s not trying to say in order to be a leader you have to not be a polygamist. He’s not saying you have to be married, he’s saying you have to be faithful. And when you look at like the modern church in America there’s a lot of men who are in ministry and, look at the scandals that are coming out weekly, right? So-and-so cheated on their wife. So-and-so was, you involved in some kind of assault situation. According to the ESV’s interpretation of this passage none of these men are one woman man, but they’re all husbands of one wife. They’re all just married to one woman. So they’re qualified for ministry. You know, they’re not.
We should, as a church, interpret this correctly and understand that there is a character that is demanded of people who say, hey, I want to be set over others. I want to be in charge. I want to lead others. Like there needs to be a certain level of character that’s proven there and it’s not about gender.
Ruth Perry (49:57)
Yeah, I mean, it’s really weird just if you think about it, it’s really weird that people would be eligible for leadership because of their body and their equipment. That’s the least of our concerns. It is character and maturity and a life that displays the fruit of the Spirit. And that can be a man or a woman. We all have the Holy Spirit. We’ve all been given gifts. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy.
So if you’re a woman who’s grown up with this complimentarian point of view, but God has called you to something different, I just encourage you to explore more and read more and start at Jenna’s ministry, Ezer Bible. What is your website, Jenna?
Jenna (50:36)
It’s ezerbible.com and there’s a bunch of video courses that I’m putting together. I’m putting together basically guides that you can just print and use on your own, but you can also come into the community and go through a video course that has worksheets and printables and different resources. And the idea is that you would learn and then talk to other people.
I really wanted to learn from other people that are called to be teachers, but also people who are prophetic or evangelists or people who are pastoring. I guess I really view the people in the church as being the gifts, and so I want to be able connected with other people and community. So yeah, I really would like people to come and either follow me on social media or sign up for the free community and just get to know me better and get to learn the Bible better.
One of the things with the New Testament that I’ve put together over the years is that there’s all these things that women are, and they’re not things that women are really told. So like women are one woman men. Women are sons in the New Testament. And this gets into translation stuff, but I actually think you should leave it as sons and not make it sons and daughters. But the idea of sonship is is a huge principle in the New Testament. But women are men of God in the New Testament too, because the word men is anthropoid, it’s human of God. Women are fishers of men. There’s all these things.
I made a list one time of all the things women are in the New Testament. And it’s unfortunate that the way Christianity is presented to so many women is leaving out all these very deep theological concepts, even just the concept of where we have brothers, like the word Adelphoi in the New Testament. There’s some translations that just translate it to brothers and then some say brothers and sisters, but that Greek basically means, from the same womb. You have Christians who are all part of the community all born-again believers, they’re all of the same Spirit, they’re all following the same God. There is this word of unity that is used and I think that that’s been the biggest thing for me as a woman is just seeing all the things that the New Testament calls me that I normally would have excluded myself from.
Ruth Perry (52:42)
That’s awesome. That’s a great place to end for today, Jenna. Thank you so much for all your hard work and sharing your wisdom and your resources with us. And God bless.
Jenna (52:52)
God bless, thank you.
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The Beautiful Kingdom Builders 