Men's & women's roles is biblical 'battle'



By Sharayah Colter & Tammi Ledbetter - Posted at Baptist Press:
"Though the concept of male-female complementarity can be seen from Genesis through Revelation, the label 'complementarian' has only been in use for about 25 years," Kassian wrote. "The need for such a label arose in response to the proposition that equality means role-interchangeability (egalitarianism) -- a concept first forwarded and popularized in evangelical circles in the 1970s and 1980s by 'Biblical Feminists.'"
GRAPEVINE, Texas (BP) -- While previous generations battled over the inerrancy of God's Word, a current debate among Southern Baptists deals with the sufficiency of Scripture to define the distinct roles of women and men.

"The big battleground today is not that the Scripture is inerrant and absolutely true -- though that's still a battle ongoing -- but among evangelicals and among Baptists the real battle today is whether Scripture is sufficient," Dorothy Patterson, a theology professor in women's studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a founding member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, noted to the Southern Baptist TEXAN, news journal of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention.

Patterson boiled the debate down to a simple question: "Did God mean what He said [about gender roles], and if He did, did He give any way that we can live that way when it's obviously not popular [and] it doesn't seem workable because of the circumstances?"

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