I’ve read where Elliot has said that. And she has repeated it in public, so it seems to be a pretty firm belief of hers at one time. She may have changed her stance on it since though.

When I was in a patriarchal Christian commune some 34-35 years ago, women were told that because they were prone to error they must look to men to interpret Scripture. Basically, we had to get our beliefs approved by the men before we could be free to talk about them.

In a recent book by DeMoss, titled “Lies Women Believe”, she makes the suggestion that women “may” be inclined to error. In fact her whole book was about how easily women are deceived. Any woman that buys that stuff is likely going to be fearful of studying lest they misread and end up believing wrong. It encourages women to repeat what others say instead of searching to discover for themselves. And most of the comp books to women are NOT an educated, solidly biblical challenge to the readers.

The thing I’ve noticed about DeMoss is that she starts outside the Scripture from a premise. One should not START from any approach, but should seek to extract the points from the Scriptures without adding into Scripture. Teaching from preconceived premises is what I experienced in my years in fundamentalist churches, of the way that most comp women are taught. First they are given the “party line”, and then Scriptures are found to support it. Because that is what they are accustomed to hearing, then that is what they repeat to others. Few women convinced of hierarchical teaching know what it means to study Scripture.

Sad picture. And the question still is, how do we encourage them to study and search the Scriptures for themselves?

I think they will wince as they consider evangelical theologians holding to a subordinationist view of the Trinity and receiving a broad complementarian audience. I think they will further wince as they think of process theologians, in the name of evangelicalism, telling us that God does not absolutely know the future. I think they will wince as they consider our waffling on life issues such as abortion, on sexual moral/ethical issues such as homosexual ordination. I actually believe there will be more wincing than this.

I’ve been lamenting these things myself wondering where the purity of Christian thought on life with God has gone. How did we come to these things? Has there been too much thinking on these issues without an equal amount of searching the Scriptures? Do these problems parallel the general lack of real Bible Study among many Christians? I see a lot of helicopter theology with verses plucked out of context and used creatively but not accurately.

It seems that the average Christian today is not interested in learning how to accurately study the Bible. They would rather be told what the correct doctrine is without checking it out for themselves like the Bereans that Paul praised. Is this a result of our being in the era of fast-everything from food, to shopping by phone, to internet information? And how do we encourage them to come back and enjoy the process as much as the end result?

However, overall the British church is egalitarian. Most of the local preachers, at least in our district, are women. I’ve only personally heard one person speak against the idea. Complementarians are in the minority here, not the other way around.